While some scholars have suggested that this account by the Lutheran theologian Christian Gerber referred to an event in Dresden rather than Leipzig, it nonetheless voices what may have been a typical reaction to Bach’s presentation of his John Passion in the Nikolaikirche on Good Friday 1724. Leipzig, in the early decades of the eighteenth century, was a conservative environment where political and religious life was conditioned by tradition and precedent. Its citizens might have grown accustomed to having their own opera house – and for the city fathers this was living proof of their cultural open-mindedness at the three annual trade fairs. But ‘operatic’ Passion music in church was quite another matter. Merely by setting it as concerted or figural music, Bach was straying into a potential minefield. In the absence of any direct testimony, Gerber’s is the best account we have to help us gauge the public response to Bach’s first Passion – or at least that of his more vigilant and pious listeners. The presiding clergy, too, may have been disconcerted, ever alert to the danger of music stealing their thunder, disturbing their congregation’s Good Friday meditations and threatening to swamp the liturgy altogether. In the relations between church authorities and musicians there was (and usually still is) always an element of suspicion.c As the musical climax of his first year in Leipzig, the Passion carried with it the certainty of impact and the likelihood of a drastic ruffling of feathers.
How could it have been otherwise? While there were identifiable local traditions and preferences for marking the anniversary of Christ’s Passion in different communities throughout the German-speaking world, and even from one part of a town to another, ultimately this was a personal matter in which one man’s meat was another’s poison – though some kind of meditation on the Passion was essential for the devout Lutheran.d In Leipzig a rich theological symbolism operated within the liturgy of its two main churches, which in turn had an impact on the choice of texts and on the way music for Good Friday was assembled, presented and received. The sermon and the musical Passion-setting, whether monophonic or figural, were different but complementary means of fixing people’s attention on particular moments in the unfolding of the story – an aural Lutheran equivalent to the Catholic Stations of the Cross. For some, the very act of congregational hymn-singing was cathartic and sufficient to guide their thoughts, while others may have welcomed the experience of a vivid musical re-enactment of the Passion story to put them in the appropriate devotional frame of mind (not least, perhaps, because the hallowed tradition of the medieval Mystery Play, though rejected by Luther, still cast a long shadow). No doubt there was considerable variety between these two extremes, even before taking into account the style and complexity of the musical realisation.
Opinions about the role of music in church had probably been divided for at least a generation before Bach’s arrival in Leipzig, a factor guaranteed to stoke any resistance to the novelty of his musical and religious thought. Georg Philipp Telemann had a lot to answer for in this regard. We have already traced his mirific musical activities as a student and noted how during his four years in the city (1701–5) he refused to let them be curbed by the town’s arbitrary divisions and structures. This legacy continued to disturb the tranquil surface of the town’s musical life long after he had left – his innovations deplored by some and welcomed as overdue by others. Leipzig’s pretensions to elevated cultural status as a university city could not disguise its innate conservatism and provinciality. It seems, for example, to have been largely impervious to the vigorous attempts by north German composers over the past hundred years to transplant Italian recitative style – and all that went with it in terms of boldness of harmony and a vivid delivery of the text, as we saw in Chapter 2 – into German soil. The systems that Telemann had put in place at the Neukirche continued to siphon off the best students and freelance musicians in town years after his departure in 1705.e The church also acted as a magnet to the more progressively minded communicants, causing ripples of disapproval and envy among those who continued to worship in one of the two main city churches. Here was exactly the type of competition to put the ageing and defensive-minded Thomaskantor, Bach’s predecessor Johann Kuhnau, on his mettle.
Meanwhile, the new figurative style of Passion music was being ushered in, not in Leipzig, but in Hamburg in Holy Week 1712, when Barthold Heinrich Brockes invited 500 guests to his large town house for a performance of his own poetic Passion meditation, Der für die Sünde der Welt gemarterte und sterbende Jesus (Jesus, martyred and dying for the sins of the world) – set to music by the city’s opera director, Reinhold Kaiser. Simultaneously Telemann, by now director of church music in Frankfurt, performed his own musical version of Brockes’s text in the Barfüsserkirche, attended by ‘several of the most famous foreign musicians [in town]’. At a further performance of this Passion setting, Telemann claimed in his autobiography, ‘the church doors had to be manned by guards not to let anyone in who didn’t have a printed copy of the Passion [libretto].’8 Brockes’s text ran to more than thirty editions between 1712 and 1722; at the height of its fame Johann Mattheson arranged for four consecutive performances in Hamburg during Holy Week 1719 in settings by Kaiser, Handel, Telemann and himself. Ostensibly this was for the edification of the city’s pious intelligentsia, but in reality it was an excuse for a public contest in concert form between these rival composers – the kind of spectator sport eighteenth-century Germans could not resist. Brockes’s particular brand of mawkish religiosity was just what many of its citizens wanted for their spiritual nourishment. By providing a series of pre-set reactions and responses to the story, he took away the effort of having to imagine or reconstruct the events of Christ’s Passion in the mind’s eye. Yet the cloying imagery of its verses was all that it took to whip up a gushing response.f Again, the court preacher at Gotha helps us to understand the attraction: ‘The Passion, movingly presented and sung on Good Friday, a day worthy of every devotion, takes us every year into the open court rooms in which the just God pronounces the blood-judgement on his beloved and obedient Son, for our sins, and lets it be executed, which Mary and John, standing contritely and faithfully at the accursed wood [i.e., Cross] … never could bear to hear. The same, then, also without doubt, will be done this year, on this day, by those who love God.’9
Could the Leipzig pastors have written in this vein? It seems unlikely. If we were to take an overview of what was on offer at Passiontide, say, in 1717, we would find that at the Thomaskirche, the age-old rituals still prevail, deemed adequate to the needs of the more traditionally minded parishioners. Here, in time-honoured fashion at the morning service, the Thomaner are quietly delivering the responsorial setting of the John Passion traditionally attributed to Luther’s musical adviser, Johann Walter.g The congregation, we note, remain standing all through the performance and are ready to return to church a second time for afternoon Vespers: with astonishing stamina and piety, they sing all twenty-three stanzas of Sebald Heyden’s Passiontide hymn ‘O Mensch, bewein dein Sünde groß’ or the twenty-four verses of Paul Stockmann’s hymn ‘Jesu, Leiden, Pein und Tod’. On the other side of town, at the Neukirche, a figural Passion oratorio with instrumental accompaniment is being performed for the first time in the city’s history: Telemann’s setting of Brockes’s Passion. Telemann’s enduring reputation and the lure of highly approachable music may account for the exceptionally large congregation, for ‘the people would surely not have arrived at church so early and in such numbers for the sake of the preacher’, according to the young theology student Gottfried Ephraim Scheibel: ‘I was amazed at how attentively people listened and how devoutly they sang along. The moving music contributed most to this. Although the service lasted over four hours, everyone stayed until it was finished.’10
Meanwhile, several miles to the west of Leipzig, in the castle church at Gotha, none other than J. S. Bach himself, travelling from Weimar to deputise for the indisposed resident court composer, is leading a performance of up-to-the-minute Passion music. Neither t
he music nor the text has been recovered; but other Passion settings from the next few years provide us with a clue to the tastes then prevalent at the court of the Duke of Saxe-Gotha and at similar courts throughout Germany.h In 1719 a versified meditation on the Passion said to be by Reinhard Keiser to a libretto by Christian Hunold was performed at Gotha, and in 1725 the new Capellmeister, Gottfried Heinrich Stölzel, presented his setting of a Passion oratorio, again in Brockes’s version. Hunold and Brockes share a similar linguistic style – physically explicit, garish and saccharine by turns – corresponding to a type of non-liturgical devotional literature in vogue at ducal courts and in cosmopolitan cities such as Hamburg. Through their drastically realistic descriptions of Christ’s torture, and passages of calm exposition alternating with bursts of outrage by the disciples, they aimed to enlist the deepest sympathies of the listener.11 How far Bach went down this road in his Gotha Passion of 1717 (if such a work ever existed) is hard to say, though some scholars think that movements from it were recycled in his second version of the John Passion in 1725 (see below).
It was not until 1721 that Bach’s future patron, Burgomaster Gottfried Lange, having taken stock of the popularity of the Telemann/Brockes Passion oratorio and the way this resulted in lower attendances at the Thomaskirche and the Nikolaikirche, finally succeeded in persuading the consistory to give in and to authorise the performance of figural music there at Good Friday Vespers, though they still insisted that the morning service stayed as it had always been. The Thomascantor, Johann Kuhnau, now frail, held out against the new fashion almost to the end, though he then allegedly ‘very much wanted to perform the Passion story in figural style’.12 Only a fragment of his Mark Passion has survivedi – not enough to judge whether it was a genuine endeavour to regain the initiative or merely bowing to pressure and fashion. Its disappearance also deprives us of an immediate comparison with which to gauge the degree of continuity or novelty represented by the first appearance of Bach’s John Passion in Leipzig three years later. Still, Kuhnau provided Bach with a precedent for a Leipzig Passion that relied on unadulterated biblical narrative as its core, and, apparently, punctuated by 200-year-old chorales, several turbae and arias set to new texts of lyrical commentary.j
What is clear from this brief survey is that all across the German Lutheran world an appetite had grown for Passion meditations in music in a variety of forms during the early decades of the eighteenth century. For sections of the clergy, the musical innovations in Holy Week were cautiously welcomed in so far that ‘devotion … must always be renewed, animated, and as it were, fanned, otherwise sleep will be the sequel.’13 Introducing Stölzel’s setting of Brockes’s Passion in 1725, the court preacher in Gotha wrote, ‘This story is so diligently presented, that Christ seems to be portrayed before its hearers’ very eyes and crucified again now among them.’14 And that was surely the point: new music was now being attached to texts in which the Passion story was paraphrased and retold in lurid terms, with periodic eruptions of communal outrage and protest – a kind of heckling by the contemporary witnesses – built into the narration. Against this was a whole swathe of conservative opinion opposed to the theatricality of the Passion oratorio and to attempts to draw the listener in as a fictional witness to Jesus’ suffering and passion. ‘There is no edification to be hoped for here,’ complained Georg Bronner, ‘other than that the ears are somewhat tickled by the music.’15
Even in the early stages of the Aufklärung, Lutheran Christianity was very much alive, informing and influencing the patterns of thought of the overwhelming majority of German citizens of Bach’s day, as we saw in Chapter 2. It is a measure of an era inching its way towards modernity that, despite the shattering scientific discoveries of the previous century, faith was solid and moving in parallel – at least during Bach’s lifetime. Clearly there were good opportunities for composers to meet this demand, just as in the previous century there had been for painters positioned either side of the denominational divide. The key figures then, of course, were Rubens and Rembrandt, similar in the way that each took advantage of the continuing preoccupation with faith in their choice of subject matter, yet separated by an aesthetic and denominational divide. Futhermore, whereas Rubens’s preoccupations were centred on the human body – its sensual physical musculature and tactility, Rembrandt was intent on exploring the inner emotional and spiritual temperature and the essential humanity of his subjects. To press the analogy with German theological scripts of the early eighteenth century may be going a step too far – not least because Brockes’s audience were solid Lutherans, not Counter-Reformation zealots. One cannot overlook the fact that musicians as much as painters were held in contempt by the more conservative wings of religious opinion – and here the distaste shown by Lutherans of Pietist bent to music linked to Brockes’s inflammatory imagery is strikingly similar to the Dutch Calvinists’ disgust at the opulent fleshiness and gratuitous physicality of Rubens and his school. It was not the gushing texts alone that were offensive to the Pietists – how could it be since they themselves were lampooned by the Orthodox for their mawkish religiosity? – but rather their combination with musical settings featuring elaborate instrumentation. In an earlier age Erasmus had urged, ‘let us give up this business of wailing … unless we do it on account of our sins, not His wounds. We should rather be joyfully proclaiming His triumph’ – but not everyone paid attention to him.16k
It is obvious that, like so much of the greatest Western painting and music of the last millennium, Bach’s John Passion was conceived not just as a work of religious art but as an act of worship in itself. How else are we to explain the extraordinary seriousness and devout sense of purpose that it exudes? The sheer conviction of Bach’s vision, its vivid particularity, inspired by John’s eyewitness account of the Passion story, is thus apparent from the very beginning in the choral prologue, ‘Herr, unser Herrscher’, which seems to sweep all before it. Even approaching it from the vantage point of the preceding church cantatas with their astonishing array of distinctive opening movements, each of which seems to portend the essence of the ensuing work, this grand tableau is unprecedented both in scale and in Affekt. In common with the prologues to two later works, the Matthew Passion and the B minor Mass, the opening bars carry within them the seeds of the entire work. As a conductor, one senses that the inexorable unfolding of the successive narrative and contemplative movements of the work is predicated upon – or at least implicit in – that initial downbeat. The way one gives it can determine much more than just the pacing of the movement: it can affect the tone and mood of the entire work and the degree of success it may have in pulling the listener into active participation in the performance and widening the terms of reference beyond the pre-existing meanings and connotations that Bach may have intended for it. The da capo structure that Bach adopts is no mere formality or structured conceit, as so often in contemporary opera: it is a metaphor for the entire Passion story in miniature. In the A section we are shown Christ glorified as part of the Godhead (‘Glorify thou me with thine own self with the glory which I had with thee before the world was’, John 17:5). The B section then refers to his abasement and anticipates the way he is destined to lay down his life for mankind. Finally, the reprise of the A section serves to mark Christ’s return to his Father in glory and majesty (Jesus prayed earlier that his disciples ‘may behold my glory, which thou hast given me’, John 17:24).l
This is just the first in a series of structural devices Bach puts in place to articulate and complement the structure of John’s account. Theologians have drawn attention to John’s way of inscribing a pendulum-like curve for Christ’s presence here ‘below’ in the world. Beginning at the point of its downward swing with his Incarnation, it reaches its nadir with the Crucifixion, which is itself the start of the final upswing to his Ascension and return to the world ‘above’. Bach is at pains to replicate this pendular swing in the tonal planning of his Passion – and also to go beyond it. As we shall see
, at the midpoint Bach places his longest aria, ‘Erwäge’ (No. 20), which evokes the rainbow, the symbol of the ancient covenant between God and Noah after the flood. In so doing, he inscribes a symmetrical arc to match the pendulum swing of Christ’s presence on earth to form an ellipse (see Plate 20).
In Chapter 14 of his Gospel, John makes it clear that consolation (Trost) and joy (Freude) are the eventual outcome of Jesus’ victory over death. Bach’s plan is to chart the course of this hard-won victory through a re-telling of John’s eyewitness account of Christ’s Passion, staying utterly faithful to the New Testament – not paraphrased, as with Brockes or Hunold – inserting only two short passages from Matthew’s Gospel account, and then punctuating the narration with spiritual commentary by means of ariosos, arias and chorales, the last serving as a vehicle for moments for collective contemplation.
John’s account is stretched over three ‘acts’. Act I (John 18:1–27) opens with the arrest and interrogation of Jesus at dead of night in the Sanhedrin court and comes to a head with Peter’s denial. Act II (18: 28–40 to 19: 1–16) then deals with the Roman trial in seven scenes on a split stage: the Jewish clergy and the mob outside the Praetorium, Jesus within and Pilate hovering from one to the other. It culminates with the passing of the death sentence. In Act III (19:17–42) the action shifts to Golgotha for Jesus’ Crucifixion, death and burial. With a sermon to accommodate at some point, it looks at first glance as though Bach intends to replicate John’s tripartite structure by placing it at the end of John’s Act I – his Part I, closing with the crowing of the cock in a verse from Matthew (26:75) which he interpolates to voice Peter’s remorse and bitter weeping. Thereafter, as we shall see, the act or scene divisions are far less clear, and the structural complications begin to pile up – hotly debated between theologians and musicologists. This is the result of Bach’s design for Part II of his Passion operating on two levels simultaneously: on a literal or historical level, which obliges him to replicate John’s physical narration; and on a spiritual or metaphysical level, which allows him the scope for a more abstract design in which to draw theological meaning from the events.17 While there are no rigid divisions demarking either level, there are numerous correspondences between movements that suggest geometric patterns encasing a symmetrically arranged core. The musical ordering of what has been described as Bach’s ‘symbolic’ trial18 is slightly out of sync with the narrative divisions and changes of locale, and favours the spiritual dimension that Bach, in following John, seeks to extrapolate for the attentive listener.
Bach: Music in the Castle of Heaven Page 48
