Bach: Music in the Castle of Heaven

by Gardiner, John Eliot

  aa There is a clear explanation for this: ‘since St John’s Gospel is known as the Book of Signs, and since the tonal plan of Bach’s St John Passion appears to have been conceived as a form of play on the three musical signs (i.e., sharp, flat and natural key areas), this important detail in the plan of Aus tiefer Not perhaps possesses a wider significance, relating it to Bach’s tonal-allegorical procedures in general’ (Eric Chafe, Tonal Allegory in the Vocal Music of J. S. Bach (1991), p. 320).

  bb To English ears the main melody has more than a passing similarity to the nursery rhyme ‘Lavender’s blue, dilly, dilly’, while the fervent concluding chorale (Verse 10 of Paul Gerhardt’s ‘Ich hab in Gottes Herz und Sinn’), set to a secular French sixteenth-century melody, is familiar as the hymn ‘O God, Our Help in Ages Past’.

  cc The Society’s grand, well-intentioned project came to a close in 1900, by which time all the available cantatas, both sacred and secular, including some that were not by Bach at all, had been published – an invitation to performance that was taken up only selectively and then with drastic re-orchestration, thick wads of organ accompaniment and what seems to have been a characteristically lugubrious delivery. There has been another whole century of trial and error, fierce debate over the ways to resuscitate them (in or out of the liturgy), historical research, critical appraisal of the source material, variably successful attempts to fill the gaps in the threadbare sources, heated arguments over Bach’s original performing forces and practice – and still the cantatas remain on the fringes of many Bach lovers’ knowledge of his œuvre.

  dd Philipp Nicolai’s hymn is known to English churchgoers as ‘How brightly shines the morning star’. When we performed Bach’s elaboration of it in Walpole St Peter’s on Palm Sunday 2000, there seemed to be enough audience familiarity with the tune to elicit that ‘invisible circle of human effort’, as Yo-Yo Ma describes it, when performers and listeners alike are engaged in a collective or communal act. It was a feeling that returned twenty-four hours later during a rock concert in the Royal Albert Hall in which Sting exchanged snatches of familiar songs with his adoring audience in a kind of spontaneous litany. It is in moments like this, when there is a particularly strong bond between musicians and listeners, that one gets a sense of how these cantatas might have been received in Leipzig at the time of their creation – or at least of how Bach would have hoped they might be received.

  ee Dürr noticed that the last of the five newly composed works in Bach’s first cycle, BWV 44, Sie werden euch in den Bann tun (his first version of a cantata of this title), shares with three other post-Easter cantatas from the following year’s cycle (BWV 6, 42 and 85) a similarity in overall design (biblical Spruch – aria – chorale – recitative – aria – chorale) and in the emphasis placed on Christian suffering in the world. This leads to the conclusion that Bach originally intended those three cantatas to be incorporated into his First Leipzig Cycle along with BWV 44 (see Plates 15 and 16), but they had not been set to music until now – casualties of the fallout from the John Passion in 1724 (Dürr, op. cit., p. 33).

  ff A later instance – far too good not to mention – is an aria for solo oboe, strings and bass soloist from BWV 159, Sehet, wir gehn hinauf, from the so-called ‘Picander’ cycle of 1729, which opens with the same words as the celebrated ‘Es ist vollbracht’ from the John Passion. That Bach should have set these words twice, both so memorably and each time with such overwhelming but distinctive pathos, is something to marvel at. In this cantata version in B, time seems almost to stand still – even when the singer’s words are ‘Now shall I hasten’ – radiating a solemn peace achieved through Christ’s resignation to his fate. This may be partly a function of the exceptional richness of Bach’s harmonic language – a frequent stressing of the subdominant key, even the subdominant of the subdominant.

  gg As with his other collaborations with Ziegler there is evidence of a productive dialogue between them (often sadly lacking when he was confronted with a set text), although there are signs that from time to time he may have changed Ziegler’s text without consulting her, for, as we saw in Chapter 7, p. 218, her printed versions differed sometimes quite strikingly from those that Bach actually set to music.

  hh This again is a tangential reference to His Dark Materials, by Philip Pullman, who may have had this image in mind when he formulated his concept of Dust. Bach’s music reminds us of a need to re-embrace Christian orthodoxy (quite the opposite of Pullman’s view, therefore), but more than this, it points to a godhead beyond petty human self-representations.

  10

  First Passion

  What passion cannot Music raise and quell?

  – John Dryden, ‘A Song for St Cecilia’s Day’ (1687)

  The house lights are dimmed, the conductor enters the pit, the orchestra is poised to begin. There is that unique mood of expectancy you find only in a darkened theatre at the beginning of an opera before the music starts to weave its particular magic and the drama to unfold. No opera overture of the first half of the eighteenth century that I know comes closer to anticipating the moods of those to Idomeneo or Don Giovanni than the opening of Bach’s John Passion; nor is there a better direct ancestor to Beethoven’s three preludes to Leonore. For pictorial vividness and tragic vision, the turbulent orchestral introduction is without parallel. Like a true overture, it beckons us into the drama – not in a theatre, but in a church or, nowadays, often in a concert hall. The tonality – G minor – is one that from Purcell to Mozart usually implies lamentation. The relentless tremulant pulsation generated by the reiterated bass line, the persistent sighing figure in the violas and the swirling motion in the violins so suggestive of turmoil, even of the physical surging of a crowd – all contribute to its unique pathos. Over this ferment, pairs of oboes and flutes locked in lyrical dialogue but with anguished dissonances enact a very different kind of physicality, one that can create a harrowing portrayal of nails being driven into bare flesh.

  So far one could interpret this as a highly charged representation of the Crucifixion, one in which each of these motivic elements seems to call attention both to itself and to the way it impinges on all the others. But then the bass line, static for its first nine bars, begins to move downwards chromatically, and the music starts to well up and intensify. (Three years later Handel will do something similar, though to vastly different expressive ends, for the coronation of George II – in the monumental build-up to the first choral entry of ‘Zadok the Priest’.) With the entry of the chorus something of unprecedented, shocking power occurs: in place of words of lamentation Bach introduces a song of praise to the universal reign of Christ, ‘O Lord, our Lord, how excellent is thy name in all the earth’ (Psalm 8),aa unique occurrence in Passion settings of the time.1 The voices enter together in three isolated stabs: Herr! … Herr! … Herr! The impression of a dual Affekt could hardly be clearer: an evocation and portrayal of Christ in majesty like some colossal Byzantine mosaic, but one who is looking down on the maelstrom of distressed unregenerate humanity below. Bach has found a way of matching the stark duality of ideas so often cultivated by John: light versus darkness, good against evil, spirit and flesh, truth and falsehood. In the course of this movement we soon realise that the duality takes the form of a vertical section – between the Godlike Christ ‘lifted up’ on the Cross and drawing all men to him – and his abasement, ‘brought low’ for the sake of humankind. Jesus’ majesty is thus proclaimed, as one Pietist contemporary of Bach’s put it, ‘behind the curtain of his sufferings’.2

  There was a time, not far distant, when public familiarity with Bach’s church music was confined to the canon of his three most substantial chorale works: the B minor Mass, the Christmas Oratorio and the Matthew Passion. Bolder choral societies might tackle his Latin Magnificat now and again (in spite of being chorally one of the most technically demanding of all Bach’s works), yet strangely would pass over the John Passion, perhaps assuming it to be little more than a rough draft for Ba
ch’s ‘Great’ Passion. Ever since Mendelssohn’s hugely acclaimed restitution of the Matthew Passion in 1829, that became the work, practically definitive of Bach’s genius, to command universal respect bordering on awe. Next to it the shorter John Passion, though also revived by Mendelssohn in 1833, tended for long to be regarded as its poor relation – cruder, less finely honed and essentially ‘far inferior to the St Matthew’, according to Philipp Spitta, the first in a line of Bach specialists who considered that ‘as a whole it displays a certain murky monotony and vague mistiness’.3 Not to Robert Schumann, however. After conducting the John Passion in Düsseldorf in 1851, Schumann found it ‘in many ways more daring, forceful and poetic’ than the Matthew: ‘How compact and genial throughout, especially in the choruses,’ he exclaimed, ‘and of what art!’4 It would take until the second half of the twentieth century before Schumann’s enthusiasm for the earlier work –’one of the most profound and perfected works of Bach’ – began to prevail and some sort of parity between the two Passion settings started to emerge.b

  I am convinced that Schumann was right. Far from being dwarfed by its epic companion piece, the John Passion is the more radical of Bach’s surviving Passion settings. Indeed, it packs a more powerful dramatic punch than any Passion setting before or since, an impression strengthened by its greater popularity and frequency of performance in the late twentieth century. Given a storyline so intrinsically strong and so familiar, Bach may instinctively have gauged that his listeners would be susceptible to the proven devices of fiction. He uses suspense and the satisfying arc of traditional narrative, including conflict, crisis and resolution, and sustains it at a pitch of musico-theatrical intensity beyond that of any opera score of the period. To make his narrative as vivid as possible, Bach is perfectly happy to rifle through the conventions of representation that opera had been developing for the past century, and now formalised in his day. The cast-list includes clear-cut villains, a hero-cum-martyr, and secondary characters either likeable but flawed (such as Simon Peter) or merely flawed (Pontius Pilate); and yet, emphatically, it is not an opera. Its conventions and its purposes are not those of the opera house, nor did Bach ever imagine for a second that it could be performed with theatrical apparatus and accoutrements. It is as bold and complex an amalgam of story-telling and meditation, religion and politics, music and theology, as there has ever been, and a climactic manifestation of that ‘spirit of music-drama’ whose emergence we traced in Chapter 4. And since he is not catering for a ‘passive’ opera-theatre audience but rather a Lutheran congregation eager for spiritual nourishment, Bach can count on a degree of active participation from his listeners as they find themselves inexorably drawn into the fabric of the drama. This allows him to set tough questions for them.

  Avoiding any glib ‘operatic’ characterisation of his biblical cast, Bach instead encourages individual singers and players of his ensemble to step forward at given points – to voice their thoughts, prayers and emotions as contemporary witnesses to the re-telling of Christ’s Passion (and in his own performances even to swap roles). This was an experimental way of creating a fresh experience for his listeners, one outwardly geared to their spiritual edification but unprecedented in its dramatic intensity. What must have been so shocking to Bach’s first listeners was that all this was heard and being played out in church. It is entirely possible that such a unique fusion of music, exegesis and drama might have perplexed its original biblically saturated listeners, just as much as it seems guaranteed to pass over the heads of an often biblically disabled modern audience, who do, nonetheless, still find it so gripping. We need to find reasons why a music so theologically impregnated and so fixed in what looks like a parochial version of Lutheran Christianity seems to ‘slip its historical moorings’5 to reach out and enthral audiences in so many different parts of the world almost 300 years after its inception. This, in turn, is the place to look for the renewal and expansion of the principles that inspired the founding fathers of opera, Monteverdi principal among them, whose central objective was to harness music’s powers to move the passions of their listeners.

  We saw how, from the outset of his cantorate in Leipzig, Bach had set himself the herculean task of composing (as far as conditions and time allowed) new music each week for all the festivals in the church year, his initial target (most likely) a minimum of three annual cantata cycles, each with a Passion setting as its climax. Accordingly, the John Passion was to become his first major ‘planet’ encircled by its co-orbital ‘moons’ – the cantatas he had fashioned so far in his first season. To re-approach it through familiarity with the cantatas that surround it, even nearly three centuries after its creation, changes and enriches our experience of it as performers or as listeners: it emerges as a work in which Bach crystallised ideas and techniques he had systematically been developing over the preceding year – different ways of combining choruses, chorales, recitatives and arias, of alternating the action of the narrative with the contemplative, and balancing vivid, dramatic scene-setting with stretches of the most beautiful and persuasive exposition of its meaning for the listener. Judging by the regularity with which he revived it in later years in the face of what seems to have been adverse criticism by the consistory and attendant pressure to alter its tone and theological slant, Bach must have attached a high value to it. It was his largest-scale work to date, one comprising forty separate movements and lasting over one hundred minutes, greatly exceeding any liturgical needs or directives, and one of a small selection of works that would occupy his thoughts at intervals for the rest of his career. It is significant that for two last performances in the year of his death and one the year before, he reverted in all essentials to its original state.6 Perhaps this was his way of seeing that justice was done to the exceptional artistic effort he had expended in planning and shaping one of the most elaborate designs of any of his major works.

  We referred in Chapter 9 to the unstoppable creative flow of his first year in Leipzig, the subtle and resourceful means he found to reflect and adumbrate the theological themes particular to each church feast, the cantatas thematically linked by twos and threes (and in once case six) to provide continuity and coherence from week to week. We saw him give an unseasonal theological twist to two successive Christmas-time cantatas (BWV 40 and 64), in which he played down the Nativity story and instead gave a persuasively Johannine view of the Incarnation as God’s descent in human form to save man and to bring joy through his defeat of the Devil – in clear anticipation of the message of the John Passion. To the same end, in his choice of cantata texts and in his selection of chorales in the period leading up to Lent, Bach carefully prepared his listeners for the communal response which the chorales were soon to fulfil in his first Passion setting. He had even given them a foretaste of what type of music they could expect of him when faced with an extended passage of Scripture and with his imagination fired by a particularly dramatic incident such as Matthew’s description of Jesus’ calming a violent storm on the sea of Galilee (BWV 81), as we saw in the previous chapter.

  As they assembled in the Nikolaikirche on that Good Friday afternoon, the congregation must therefore have had a pretty good idea about the kind of music that was in store. They had had almost a year in which to become accustomed to a style of music which Bach himself later freely admitted to the authorities was ‘incomparably harder and more intricate’ than any other music performed at the time. Now, for the first time in his cantorate, and with the spoken elements of the liturgy shrunk to a minimum in the Good Friday service, his music could legitimately occupy the centre-stage and constitute what Telemann once described (of his own cantata cycles) as a veritable ‘harmonious divine service’ in itself. Here was his opportunity to show on a large canvas what sort of input modern music – his music – could have in defining and strengthening Christian belief. None of his peers, and certainly none of his predecessors, had ambitions for exegetical music of an equivalent complexity or scale. None could match the de
pth of his elaborately patterned music – his meshing of narrative and reflection, of scriptural chronicles and theologically shaped poetic texts. In a university city famed for its theological faculty, it was a courageous – some might have called it a brazen – statement, coming as it did from someone who was not a theologian and who did not even have a university degree.

  Fifty and more years ago it was the custom for the organ to remain silent in church on Palm Sunday, and on that day, because it was the beginning of Holy Week, there was no music. But gradually the Passion story, which had formerly been sung in simple plainchant, humbly and reverently, began to be sung with many kinds of instruments in the most elaborate fashion, occasionally mixing in a little setting and singing of a Passion chorale in which the whole congregation joined. And then the mass of instruments fell to again. When this Passion music was performed for the first time – with twelve stringed instruments, many oboes, bassoons and other instruments – many people were shocked and did not know what to make of it. In the pew of a noble family in church, many ministers and noble ladies were present, singing the first Passion chorale out of their books with great devotion. But when this theatrical music began, all these people were thrown into the greatest bewilderment, looked at one another and said, ‘What will come of this?’ An old widow of the nobility said, ‘God save us my children! It’s just as if one were present at an Opera comedy.’ But everyone was genuinely displeased by it and voiced many just complaints against it. There are, it is true, some people who take pleasure in such idle things, especially if they are of sanguine temperament and inclined to sensual pleasure. Such persons defend large-scale church compositions as best they may, and hold others to be crotchety and of melancholy temperament – as if they alone possessed the Wisdom of Solomon and others had no understanding.7