Bach: Music in the Castle of Heaven

by Gardiner, John Eliot

  After the sermon the action and the tonal shifts speed up, reinforcing the authority of the first-person voices. Once again, as in Part I, Bach shows a similar approach to that of Francke’s Passion lectures, although here the symmetrical design of his ‘symbolic trial’ does not coincide quite so neatly with Francke’s boundaries.25 Chorales frame the sermon like bookends, an impression scarcely diluted by the liturgical requirement of a ‘pulpit Lied’ and organ chorales at this point. But the first chorale in Part II actually carries the narration forwards: vicariously we experience the way Jesus was ‘seized like a thief in the night … taken before unbelievers, falsely accused, derided, spat upon and vilely mocked’. In constructing music for this central scene of Jesus before Pilate – the Roman trial – Bach traces the outline of John’s Gospel very closely. The sheer theatrical dynamism is here unprecedented. Not even the lake-storm in his cantata BWV 81, Jesus schläft, can match this for sustained dramatic momentum. Crucial to its effectiveness, again, is the physical deployment on an imaginary stage set: Christ as prisoner, immobile (perhaps immobilised) in the judgement hall, the crowd holding back in the outer court, ‘lest they should be defiled’, Pontius Pilate the go-between.u

  The contrast between the uneasy public confrontation of the Roman governor with the mob and their spokesmen on one side, and Pilate’s attempts at man-to-man dialogue with Jesus on the other, is immensely strong. Even the subject matter is different: arguments about law, custom and political authority in the outer court, questions of a more philosophical nature (including the nature of truth itself) bandied between the two men in the judgement hall. Underlying both is the question of identity: who exactly is Jesus? The whole Passion narrative revolves around this issue. Resolving it one way or another will determine whether Pilate will bow to mob pressure and pass the death sentence on Jesus; it will also point to the wider ramifications this has for humankind. Two opposed concepts of kingship are being debated here: the spiritual, revealed when Jesus tells Pilate that his kingdom is not of this world, and the secular, culminating with the crowd’s rebuttal – ‘We have no king but Caesar.’ Once that option has been twisted and construed as opposition to the colonial power, Rome, releasing Jesus proves to be impossible. Reading and re-reading John’s account of the trial scene (Chapters 18 and 19), and then living on the inside of Bach’s musical exegesis over many years and performances, I cannot avoid sensing that the faith which undoubtedly supports both accounts, whether read, spoken or sung, has less to do with dogma and far more with a quest to lay bare the human condition and to find ultimate meaning in life.

  In each situation Bach seems to find a vivid response and an appropriate tone – for every charge and counter-charge, accusation and riposte – and to keep a tight control of the overall pacing. Though concerned to maintain the momentum and to preserve the remorseless uncoiling of events and arguments, especially in the central trial scene, again he shows an unerring sense of when to freeze the frame, when to interpose moments for reflection and commentary and when to sum up, thereby creating space for the story to register with the listener. His aim being to extrapolate and clarify the meaning of the events of the Passion for the listener (in ways that are out of reach for the preacher), he establishes a whole network of lines, constantly checked, to connect each point in the unfolding of the dramatic action with the basic biblical data that account for it. Thus time is always moving on two planes, the present implying (as well as reacting to) the past and the past conditioning the present. Once more it is the judicious choice and placement of chorales that provide the essential scaffolding and punctuation of the narrative and that simultaneously articulate the underlying theological themes. You could of course remove them (together with the meditative arias) and the piece would still make sense at one level; but to do so would break the circuit – obliterating the connections to Bach’s time and to ours. What was left would be equivalent to a Greek tragedy without the chorus.v

  Recent commentators, lulled by the ease with which it is possible to identify the way-markers Bach leaves along his trail – the plethora of thematic links and recurrences, the progressions, cross-references and self-quotations – claim to have detected purposeful symmetrical designs underpinning Bach’s musical structure. At first their findings look promising but soon run into problems. In the first place they cannot always agree exactly where these symmetries occur in the work, and, as one might expect, Bach himself has nothing to say on this subject. Then, the singling out of one or two discernible structural patterns runs the risk of giving each a disproportionate significance – as though it was the most important aspect of the music.w It seems to me far more likely that Bach, in arriving at his overall design for the work, employed several organising principles at once. To pick on just one as holding the key to our understanding is to devalue the way his creative process may have operated at different levels simultaneously. Any single pattern, whether rudimentary or complex, is likely to provide a distorted and reductive view of a piece whose deeper significance is embedded in its very specificity – of text, style, grammar and, above all, of concept and intent. Indeed, Bach seems regularly to be drawing our attention away from the overall, or ‘macro’, structure and towards the highly specific, and to the particular details of text and Affekt. A common feature distinguishing all his major church compositions is the way they drew from him the full resources of his craft, something he valued as a sacred trust. It was his skill in identifying musical means to mirror mathematical images of God or Nature that gave Bach’s music its extraordinary force, and as a result these patterns and images are registered on our unconscious listening habits in multiple ways. But the question remains, does our awareness of them actually enrich our experience of the John Passion in performance?

  For me their significance registers more on the retina than on the ear, more on paper than in performance.x This is distinct from, but perhaps parallel to, the clearly audible modulatory patterns which Eric Chafe has identified as dividing the work by tonal ‘ambitus’ – in nine differentiated key regions (see figure below). These he traces back to Johann David Heinichen’s concept of a Musicalischer Circul (1711), or circle of keys,26 which ‘served as the new paradigm of tonal relationships’ just before the hugely significant emergence of twenty-four major and minor keys in Bach’s time and the well-tempered tuning ‘that made their use possible’. Chafe argues most persuasively that the successive use of the ‘ambitus’ is a deliberate device by Bach to control and organise the music of the John Passion on such a large canvas. Furthermore, he suggests, Bach employs it to underscore the fundamental oppositions within John’s theology; so that, for example, Jesus’ sufferings are associated with flat keys, their benefits for humankind with sharp keys:27

  (illustration credit 50)

  The listener’s ability to ‘clock’ all these modulatory excursions as they progress – and as Bach would have assumed – can enrich the experience, but is not essential. Similarly, while recognising that this is what is happening in the music, we can ‘enjoy’ the Passion without becoming embroiled in all the paraphernalia of contemporary Lutheran theology and the way it interconnects with the formal patterns and gestures of Bach’s music – or is, at times, even at odds with it. My feeling is that there is so much intrinsic human as well as musical substance here that, although Bach’s incidental exegetical purpose was undoubtedly to vivify and augment his first listeners’ meditation on the implications of the Gospel story, it is his music – and the inexplicable but nonetheless powerful effect it can have on us – which is always the dominant force. So replete in its unique sense of order, coherence and lyrical persuasiveness, it has proved that it can survive the passage of time and cross all boundaries, denominations or absences of belief. But, at the same time – and central to this book’s argument – is the conviction that, in order to discover more about the man (as well as to deepen our understanding of the Passion itself), we need to explore beneath the surface of his music: to try to unearth
the roots of its inspiration.y

  Here we find, as so often in his church music, Bach is Janus-faced: glancing back as he draws inspiration and stimulus from the music he had learnt as a treble, from a time when German music was still in the first flush of excitement, playing at matching vernacular words to Italian-liberated recitative and continuo-based harmony, a time when ‘Lutheran music followed the very grain of the text’;28 and also forward-looking in the new complexity and inventiveness of his art. Even if we accept that he took as his starting-point the groundplan of any of the Passion Histories of the previous century – by Selle, Flor, Sebastiani, Theile or Meder, or even the great Schütz (see footnote on this page) – these are not necessarily the most significant models in terms of musical materials and language that he was intent on re-working and perfecting.

  For a single example one need only point to the way Bach takes over Monteverdi’s stile concitato (his codification of ways that music can imitate the ‘warlike’ emotions) and uses it with devastating impact both for the belligerent clamour of the turba and for the celebration of Christ’s immanent victory over death and the Devil in the middle section of ‘Es ist vollbracht’ (No. 30). Already in Part I we have observed his habit of constructing an opening movement of symphonic proportions that looks forward to the age of Sturm und Drang, that of his sons’ generation. We had a foretaste of his newly developed recitative style in the way it both reflects the most minuscule inflections of the Gospel text and creates significant frictions with it, and how the harmonic motion ‘carries the countless melodic events on its shoulders, so to speak’ while allowing Bach opportunities ‘to unpack the astonishing array of text-musical correspondences we find [here and] in virtually every work’.29 We also experienced the strategic placement of the chorales.

  Now, in Part II, the pace, tone and structure shift on to the bigger screen, with Jesus face to face with Pilate, who alone has the power to determine the final outcome. In this work, much more so than in the Matthew Passion, Pilate emerges as an intriguing and not wholly unsympathetic figure – a beleaguered provincial governor cowed by the mob, yet still demanding better evidence for the charges of sedition against Jesus. In today’s performances, especially when Pilate is well characterised, one senses that listeners are drawn to his equivocation and to the dilemma he faced, shuttling to and fro between Jesus, whom he clearly sees as innocent, and the crowd.z

  Two features of the trenchant crowd choruses immediately stand out: the rising chromaticism of the four voice lines in canonic imitation, and a manic whirling figure – usually in the flutes, once in the first violins, several times in both – that attached itself to the ‘mob’ ever since they first sent a search party out to arrest Jesus in Part I. Readily identifiable, too, is an incipient dactylic figure (long-short-short) first associated with the ‘delivering up’ of Jesus to Pilate but soon to be used with obsessive insistence – first by the Evangelist to convey (harshly) the whip-lashing ordered by Pilate and then (tenderly) in the long tenor aria meditation on that scourging. This figure will soon become the motto of the two fanatical Kreuzige choruses; but in those its remorseless bellicosity is welded to grinding dissonance, the product of fugal entries that have sprung out of the original oboe/flute collisions we noted in the opening chorus. The ferocity and sheer nastiness of these outbursts is chilling, especially as it reflects on us all (not just on the Jews and Romans): in Luther and Bach’s view we are all simul iustus et peccator, both sinless and sinning, and therefore inescapably implicated in the mob frenzy and mindless brutality that saw an innocent man condemned to be crucified.

  Bach finds two very different but equally compelling strategies to round out this portrayal: a sarcastic triple rhythm piece for the Roman guard ordered to stage Jesus’ mock coronation (with another of those twirling-whirling figures in the woodwind suggestive of a grotesque game of Blind Man’s Buff); and a pompous swaggering fugue-subject – of the kind that Handel was soon to use in his English oratorios to characterise his Old Testament baddies. Bach uses it to capture the self-righteous laying down of the secular law by the High Priest and his cronies – a clear trap for Pilate. Painters from Giotto to Hans Fries and Pieter Bruegel the Elder had found ways of bringing a vernacular realism to biblical scenes and to faces contorted by hatred. But no composer had previously come near to Bach in rendering the subtleties of irony and sarcasm with such penetrative insight. It would require a Hector Berlioz – and a hundred years of musical history – to patent a more garish portrayal of mockery and grotesquerie in music.

  In all, there are eight choruses for the Jews and one for the Roman guard distributed across the trial scene, to which Bach added a tenth (‘Sei gegrüßet’), perhaps to make a symbolic connection between the secular law and the Ten Commandments. There are variants, cross-references and repetitions aplenty. These are easy to identify and can be shaped into synoptic or symmetrical chiastic patterns almost at will. There is also an immensely significant cranking up of tonality in the course of the scene. So, for example, the flute figure identified with the pair of ‘Jesus of Nazareth’ choruses heard in Part I reappears on five more occasions during the trial scene, travelling upwards from G minor in Part I to a screeching B minor (the flute at the very top of its range) at its last appearance – in the chorus ‘We have no king but Caesar’ (No. 23f). Such is the intrusive dominance of the crowd’s presence throughout this scene – peering into the judgement hall from the outside and, in effect, pulling Pilate’s strings – that we may not be conscious of what else might be going on here.

  Among contemporary Bach scholars, only Chafe to my knowledge has detected the way Bach has introduced a palliative element embedded within these turbae. He argues that, through the association of ‘Jesus of Nazareth’ with the easily identifiable whirling flute motif, Bach is constantly inscribing Jesus’ name ‘in situations where the identity of the King of the Jews is called into question’ and attaching it to texts ‘all associated with the denial of Jesus’ Messianic identity by the crowd’. Next he points to the way each of the five turbae encompasses the full span of chords associated with the ‘ambit’ of each particular key in which they are set and finds here ‘a striking resemblance to the ancient idea of Christ as Creator-Logos binding all things together into a cosmic system, or systema’ (see this page). In other words Bach has hit upon a miniature harmonic formula which stands for John’s image of the incarnate Word, which he uses to reinforce the structural devices in his portrayal of Jesus of Nazareth that are hidden beneath the surface of the music. It culminates with the ironic inscription Pilate orders to be affixed to the Cross, proclaiming Jesus as King of the Jews in several languages. Finally Chafe identifies Bach’s way of threading the message of this inscription all through the central portion of the Passion by establishing a pattern of transposition with alternate rises of a fourth and falls of a third: G minor, C minor, A minor, D minor, B minor. ‘While the physical events of the narrative tend downward leading towards the death of Jesus … the ultimate direction is upward, suggesting John’s perception of the Crucifixion as a lifting up.’ Thus ‘the overarching allegory in the “Jesus of Nazareth” choruses is unquestionably the ability of faith to see the truth through appearances’: ‘Jesus’ divine identity is veiled beneath its opposite.’

  What we have then is, simultaneously (1) Jesus’ true identity being insistently re-emphasised by thematic association in the memory of the listener; (2) a harmonic formula which stands for Jesus in the closed, circular ‘ambit’ inscribed within each of the successive turbae; and (3) what Chafe refers to as a ‘tonal allegory’ of Christ’s journey on earth, which ends with his being hoisted up on the Cross, his victory emblazoned by the royal inscription. It is as though Bach, faithful to John’s habitual use of irony in making a true statement under the guise of its opposite, is intent on subverting the negative connotations of the mob’s denunciations by implanting simultaneous formulae to the contrary. For, while the words in their mouths may be derisory and
antagonistic – matched by Bach with appropriately violent rhythm and dissonance – in the very act of singing them they are also, consciously or not, giving vent to their opposite meaning through their insistent affirmation of ‘Jesus of Nazareth’, of the Word and of its triumphant progress. Thus the more virulently they denounce him, the more credence his detractors give to his authority and true identity. How could anyone other than a religiously attuned and probing ‘listener’ like Bach have conceived such an ingenious and comprehensive strategy of code and symbol? Should we conclude that it was anathema to leave any foul-mouthed vilification of his God unchallenged? And did any among his first listeners spot the subtext? And, finally, when – and if – he was challenged and asked to explain his choice of texts and chosen style of composition, did Bach even try to elucidate his aims and strategy to the Leipzig clergy? Or did he just walk away, shrugging off their objections with incomprehension, fulminating against their obtuseness?