Bach: Music in the Castle of Heaven

by Gardiner, John Eliot

  For this most crucial day in the liturgical year, then, Bach evolves a structure with a subtle balance between the narrative and the contemplative, which only one composer seems previously to have attempted. Long attributed to Reinhard Keiser, this Mark Passion (1707) was the Passion oratorio Bach knew best, and so exceptionally ‘modern’ that he and an assistant copied and performed it in Weimar in 1712.m Following its lead, Bach establishes a triple alternation of utterance between Evangelist, Jesus, the minor characters and the crowd. The sheer pace and intensity of Bach’s narration, which of course telescopes the actual timeframe of its historical occurrence, seems fast at times, but never breathless, let alone perfunctory. Prompted by the almost spoken, declamatory style of Keiser, Bach’s is always poised to rise to moments of a far more persuasive lyricism.n Though his listeners would by now have been familiar with Bach’s recitative style from hearing his cantatas over the past nine months, here the narrative fluency and dramatic vehemence of the Evangelist’s line, tied to the fluctuating, harmonic tension between voice line and supporting continuo (and so different, too, from the ‘holy’ spoken tones habitually adopted by preachers), would have come as a surprise. Kuhnau’s Passion cannot have been anything like this. Bach was not merely filling Kuhnau’s shoes, or even those of the fashionable Telemann: his style of story-telling in music was immeasurably stronger and musically richer than theirs.

  For years I was struck by the way Bach seems to show an instinctive feel for knowing exactly when to interrupt the narrative and slow the pace down, when to intercalate solo arias in order to attach personal relevance to the unravelling of events, and when to insert ‘public’ chorales in which his listeners could voice (or hear voiced) their collective response. There were sound theological precedents for his scheme in the way Lutherans were instructed first to read their Bible, then to meditate on its meaning, and finally to pray – in that order.19 But it now seems that Bach had a useful guide close to hand, a commentary on John’s Passion account in the form of ten lectures given by the Pietist theologian August Hermann Francke (1663–1727) and published in 1716.20 Francke’s commentary reveals unmistakable co-occurrences: in the structural paragraphing, and in the placing and thematic content of Bach’s meditative insertions. So, for example, in Bach’s Part I, we can see how

  • The first theme of Francke’s opening lecture is the same Herrlichkeit – Jesus’ divinity – we have already noted in Bach’s opening chorus.

  • This, in turn, derives from his love for the Father and for mankind in general, mirrored in Bach’s placement of his first chorale, ‘O große Lieb’ / ‘O great love’ (No. 3).

  • Francke points to the moment that Jesus, when offered the chance to avert the course of the Passion, rebukes Peter for using his sword and accepts his ‘cup’ of suffering; Bach responds with his second chorale, ‘Dein Will gescheh’ / ‘Thy will be done’ (No. 5).

  • Francke chooses to round out his first lecture at the point where Caiaphas advised the Jews that it would be good that one man should be put to death for the people, stressing the benefits of Christ’s voluntary self-sacrifice for humanity: not in a literal but in a spiritual sense, to accentuate the opposition between Caiaphas’s evil intent and God’s goodness. Bach inserts his first and very personal aria, ‘Von den Stricken’ (No. 7), at this juncture – a description of Jesus being bound ‘with the ropes of my sin’ in order to ‘unbind me’ and ‘to heal me fully’.

  • Francke urges the believer to emulate Peter in his eagerness to follow the master; Bach adopts the same very positive tone in his first major key movement, the soprano aria ‘Ich folge dir gleichfalls’ (No. 9).

  • In the scene where Jesus is dishonoured in the High Priest’s courtroom, Francke insists on his innocence and exhorts the listener to reflect on his own guilt. In perfect synchronism Bach places the chorale ‘Wer hat dich so geschlagen’ (No. 11) here to voice in successive verses, first, the believer’s bewilderment at Jesus’ mistreatment and then his or her implication in the process: ‘I, I and my sins, which are as the grains of sand on the seashore, they have caused you the sorrow that strikes you and the grievous host of pain.’

  • With Peter’s denial and tortured self-reproach, Francke urges the need for individual penitence, a theme poignantly and vehemently expressed in Bach’s explosive aria ‘Ach, mein Sinn’ (No. 13).

  What is so striking is that Bach, in assimilating many of the themes outlined by this Pietist theologian, took such great care in structuring his first Passion, rooting it in the strong dramatic opposition between the vengeful mob and the serenity of the prisoner Jesus, whose eventual triumph is manifest in the lifting up of the Cross on to which he was nailed. The interpenetration and sheer depth of Bach’s fusion of theology and music is there for all to see and hear. Indeed, one explanation for the overwhelming impression that Bach’s music can make on the listener is, paradoxically, due to the unemotional, ‘pure’ theology of John’s narrative account. Today, from our less theologically nuanced perspective, it seems incomprehensible that there should have been any qualms about the theological complexion of Bach’s John Passion. More troubling in our post-Holocaust world is the demonising of the Jews in both Passions that is sometimes laid at Bach’s door. Yet traces of anti-Semitism, utterly deplorable per se, are an integral part of the Gospel accounts: they are not attributable to Bach, and his Passion is noticeably free of the egregiously anti-Jewish reflections to be found in Brockes’s text as set by other leading German composers of the time.21 As in all heroic myth the presence of evil malefactors is a dramatic device, providing the essential background to justify (or at least facilitate) the emergence of the hero, or, in the case of the Passion story, the Saviour of humankind. Bach was setting to music a version of events intrinsic to the Lutheran tradition – certainly not to be condoned, but no different in essence from the demonising of the Egyptians in the Book of Exodus, as portrayed by Handel in his oratorio Israel in Egypt (or of the Babylonians as portrayed by Verdi in Nabucco). One could object even more strongly to the targeting of the Papists and Turks in Bach’s settings of Luther’s litany, as in BWV 18, since they were not part of hallowed Scripture, but gratuitous topical demons – the sworn enemies of Luther’s Reformation – whom Bach chose to treat with a degree of humour, almost as pantomime villains.

  This leaves us with the question, how could Bach’s graphic characterisation of a bloodthirsty mob in the Gospel account, lumped together as die Jüden, coexist in his Passions with heartfelt expressions of Lutheran piety? The answer lies in the explicit admission of collective guilt in the contrite response of Christians in the chorales, symbolised by Bach’s requiring identical singers to double as the frenzied mob and the community of the faithful. That the very persecutors of Christ from whom we recoil with outrage and disgust are us makes the experience of his Passions all the more emotionally harrowing. For this very reason, when I conduct these choruses, while respecting Bach’s stylised forms (fugue, sequence and the use of imitation and figura corta, etc.), I do not hold back in drawing out expressions of the utmost self-importance, legalistic point-scoring and sheer blood-thirstiness from the turbae; nor in bringing to the surface the overwhelming sense of remorse and self-incrimination in the following chorales. Heard in close succession, they mirror both reprehensible human patterns of behaviour and our horror-struck response to them, which, as Bach so poignantly reveals, often go hand in hand – one generation of out-and-out victims becoming, with tragic irony, the next generation’s perpetrators of similar atrocities.

  So, after the action-filled narration and, in particular, the unremitting interventions of a deranged mob, the chorales stand out as islands of musical sanity – and indeed that may have been the way Bach himself viewed them. As everyone familiar with either of Bach’s surviving Passions knows, participating either from the outside as a listener or from the inside as a performer, the placement of the chorales is central to the overall experience – pulling the action into the here a
nd now, confirming, responding to or repudiating what has just happened in the narrative, and obliging one to consider its significance. Even if the consensus among today’s scholars is that they were not intended to be sung congregationally, the chorales certainly provided a cultural framework and moments for the contemporary listener to make instantaneous connections between the unfurling of biblical events and the reassuring recognition of familiar verses and melodies which were accepted as the most direct forms of address between the believer and his God. Their tunes are solidly crafted and peculiarly satisfying in their regular paragraphing. Marvellously lucid, Bach’s harmonisation lifts the often humdrum words of the hymn-writer on to a higher level, giving equal emphasis to depth of feeling and humanity. It is fruitless trying to separate out their harmonic richness from the exquisite shaping of all three lower lines, each one a credible melody in its own right.o The intersection of these vertical and horizontal planes is crucial – in the earliest etymological sense of the word – to one’s experience of them.

  Equally important to the articulation of John’s Passion account is Bach’s strategic placing of his arias. At key moments they draw together the threads of the underlying doctrinal significance, establishing an active engagement with the listener yet without diminishing the inexorable unfolding of the drama. Bach has sometimes been criticised by twentieth-century commentators for placing the first two arias of Part I cheek by jowl (with only three bars of recitative between them); but this is to misunderstand his purpose. Here is one of several occasions when we sense his creative impulses, in this case producing a contrasting diptych taking its lead from Francke’s reflections and working to convey successive images: in the alto aria, Jesus, newly fettered and manacled, his bonds serving to ‘unbind’ and free man from the ‘bonds of sin’; and in the soprano aria, the contrite believer hurrying to follow him – to the ends of the world if necessary, or at least as far as the High Priest’s courtroom. In the first case he seizes on the punning references to bondage – ‘to free me from the bond of my sin, my Saviour is bound’ – and in this opening ritornello motif he devises a subtle braiding of the two oboe lines to symbolise the ‘bonds’ in what Germans call the gebundener, or ‘bound’, style: a falling, perfect fifth (second oboe) answered in canon by a diminished, or ‘diabolical’, fifth (first oboe), Christ’s ‘bond’ – willingly endured for man’s ‘bonds of sin’ and – piling on the symbolism – ‘tied’ over the bar-lines. Bach’s instruments in the second aria are a pair of transverse flutes, who engage in canonic exchanges with the soprano.p A single flute might have given a breathless credibility to the love-chase, but with two players sharing the same part and thus able to alternate, or ‘stagger’, their breathing to ensure an unbroken line, the impression of a spinning– (perhaps prayer-) wheel is more pronounced. The effect is strengthened by Bach’s use of a palpitating melismatic descent for the word ziehen (a reference to the Crucifixion – ‘when I am lifted up I will draw all men to me’). At all events the success of this entrancing piece – a passepied in B major – is to convey the eager innocence of willing participation and companionship. It makes the ensuing account of Peter’s fall all the more poignant. ‘Ich folge dir’ is very much in a Bachian genre of naive, faithful, trusting, even blissful soprano arias, often the last number of a cantata before the final chorale.

  John’s eyewitness account of Jesus’ appearance before the High Priest Caiaphas has the flavour of a tense courtroom drama (the more significant Roman trial follows in Part II). Aggression and suspicion are in the air – the prisoner in the dock, the self-possession and reason of his answers enough to infuriate his accusers. That this is a kangaroo court is clear from the gratuitous blow to Jesus’ face by the High Priest’s servant: as John Drury observes, it is ‘all he can do by way of reaction to him’. The narrative never slackens its pace, though the recitation moves in and out of third-person reportage and emotionally charged lyricism. The drama of a sideshow at the back of the courtroom is equally gripping: Peter ushered in by John, the narrator – a case of discreet string-pulling – is recognised and identified as an accessory after the fact. As the accusations grow nastier, Peter’s laconic denials become progressively more emphatic.q

  Bach brings things to a head by means of a gossipy fugal chorus – in his world, it seems, even busybodies conversed in fugues – ending with a shouted homophonic taunt. We can almost see their gargoyle-like profiles inches away from Peter’s face, akin to those Flemish and German paintings of the Renaissance, especially by Matthias Grünewald. Inevitably we suffer with Peter; but the uncomfortable question Bach asks us to consider is, would any of us have emerged from his ordeal with greater credit? The tension in the courtroom mounts with the glance that Jesus gives Peter at the moment when the cock crows.r And then, by inserting Matthew’s account of Peter’s weeping at this point, Bach’s narration abandons all objectivity with a momentary shift in both the perspective and the identity of its narrator. For Peter, the pain of betrayal and the reminder that he is not the ‘special loved one’ are excruciating. Bach constructs a melisma that changes key every two beats and never seems to stabilise, so that the distress is self-perpetuating. This is the prelude to an aria that encapsulates Peter’s pain and that experienced on his behalf by John and all subsequent witnesses, even if it is not explicitly assigned to him. Up to this point Peter has been sung by a bass. When in performance the tenor soloist who sings the Evangelist also sings the ensuing aria (which may have been Bach’s intention anyway); the sense of dual identity – Peter and the Christian onlooker (us in other words) – is thereby intensified, especially when he refers to die Schmerzen meiner Missetat, ‘the agonies of my misdeed’.

  For those who detect only a cool cerebral control in Bach’s music, this aria (No. 13, ‘Ach, mein Sinn’) is the perfect riposte. Bach summons all his available instruments to participate in this finale to Part I of his Passion – full of tortured self-reproach, but widened to convey Peter’s lesson to all humankind and to induce in the listener ‘a state of violent shock’.22 What is most unusual for this expression of remorse is his choice of the French heroic style – normally associated with pomp and circumstance – and the way he fuses it with Italianate structural techniques, whereby every single bar excepting the three-bar epilogue is derived from the opening ritornello.23 Three features contribute to the effect: the choice of key – F minor, known to the French as ‘the key of the goat’; the construction of a descending chromatic bass line over which grating dissonant harmonies are elaborated; and the decision to set it as a fast chaconne. One bonus of using a French-style dance as the basis of this aria was the licence it gave Bach to vary the internal shaping of the dotted rhythms – here smoothly ‘swung’ in conjunct motion for lyrical passages (as in Blues singing), there sharply over-dotted for outbursts of fiery arpeggios (wo willt du endlich hin), the vocal phrases constantly varied in consequence, now reinforcing the characteristic second beat of the chaconne, now contradicting it by means of hemiolas bestriding the bar-line. Here, then, he has assembled all the ingredients to make an impassioned statement. s The energy and emotional temperature are high and the vocal compass is stretched to the limit: in its frenzy and self-reproach it looks forward to Beethoven’s Florestan (and there is indeed proto-Romantic extravagance of imagery embedded in the text, with its references to Christ’s prophesy of the day when the faithful ‘shall say to the mountains, Fall on us; and to the hills, Cover us’). Implicit beneath the turbulent surface of the music Bach has devised to convey Peter’s horror at the realisation of his betrayal is the need for forgiveness. That Bach understood this perfectly is clear from the underlinings he makes at this point in his copy of Calov’s Bible commentary. Calov writes, ‘The highest and finest apostle, Peter, falls more shamefully than the other apostles, and yet recovers. If I were able to describe or depict Peter I would write over every hair on his head “forgiveness of sins”, because he is an example of this article of faith – forgiveness of sins. Thi
s is how the Evangelists portray him, for no section of the entire Passion story is described in so many words as the fall of Peter.’24

  Was coming across this in Calov the impetus for Bach to make the inspired switch from John to Matthew at this point?t The effect is not (as in so many arias in a Passion oratorio of the period and indeed in many of Bach’s Passion arias) to take us reflectively out of ‘real-time’ – witness the way he manipulates the ritornelli to confuse our expectations of the aria’s structure, where a more ‘rounded’ design might have seemed more settled within itself and consequently less ‘implanted’ in the action.

  As the final bars of the tenor aria fade away – appropriately with a speeded-up recall of Peter’s weeping theme and the recurrent motif used to convey his shivering at the back of the courtroom – Bach brings us gently back to earth, to our present. His choice of chorale to draw the lessons from Peter’s story is both strategic and tactful: Paul Stockmann’s ‘Jesu, Leiden, Pein und Tod’, one of the hymns most often sung by the Leipzig faithful on Good Friday, its stately melody by Vulpius marvellously soothing at this juncture (No. 14). The words refer us again to Jesus’ ‘serious’ glance and the forgiveness of sins it offers to the contrite. With the sermon due to follow at this point, it is hard to believe that not much more than a half an hour has gone by – less than the time needed for one of Bach’s double-decker cantatas, yet with so much action compressed within its timespan and music of such blistering intensity. According to Leipzig custom, the Good Friday Vespers sermon drew on the Old Testament texts that presage the Crucifixion (Isaiah 53 and Psalm 22 in alternate years). But, unless the role of the sermon was reduced to something equivalent to a ‘translation’ or the provision of subtitles, what, we might ask, was Superintendent Deyling to preach that had not already been said for him already by his cantor in music of such impassioned eloquence and persuasiveness?