Bach: Music in the Castle of Heaven

by Gardiner, John Eliot

  Having established this web of interconnections and theological subtexts – clear to Bach, if not to everyone – and having presented his intensely vivid setting of John’s account, he might have considered that he had done enough to draw in his listeners and to stress the contemporary significance of these events to the faithful of Leipzig. For in his eyes his music was incomplete unless it constantly posed questions that drew an engaged response from his public. This, surely, was what lay behind his decision to interrupt the flow at three points: once in response to Jesus’ definition of his kingship by means of a chorale re-affirming the believer’s allegiance (‘Ach großer König’, No. 17); once in response to Pilate’s giving the order to scourge Jesus; and once at the point just before the crowd’s final baying for blood when Pilate ‘sought to release him’.

  It is the last of these – the insertion of the pseudo-chorale ‘Durch dein Gefängnis’ (No. 22) – which has attracted the most scholarly comment ever since Friedrich Smend identified it as the centrepiece of the trial scene.30 Smend drew attention to the presence of several symmetrical patterns underlying Bach’s structure at key points, by far the most significant being a chiasmus (derived from the Greek letter X, the ‘sign of the cross’) centred on this intersection: not just the midpoint in the trial scene, but the ‘inner heart’ (or Herzstück) of the whole Passion. Bach placed this chorale here to enable the congregation to latch on to the central theological message, the paradox whereby ‘freedom has come to us’ as a result of Christ’s capture and self-sacrifice.aa It is located between two flanking turbae (‘Wir haben ein Gesetz’ and ‘Lässest du diesen los’) set to the same music but with each in a different key (Nos. 21f & 23b). He turns the first of these into a chorus of strutting arrogance – ‘We have a law, and by our law he ought to die’ – a whopping send-up of ecclesiastical pomposity, satirical to the point of being comical. Then, by modulating to sharp keys for the second, he winds up the tension as the Jews seek to drive a wedge between Pilate and Caesar – ‘If thou let this man go, thou art not Caesar’s friend.’

  These choruses, in turn, are framed by further pairings of turbae, and, moving outwards in both directions, by arias, and, at the extremities, by two chorales (‘Ach großer König’ and ‘In meines Herzens Grunde’). The second of these has a particular magic – not least on account of its luminescent E major tonality and the intensely individual way Bach has harmonised it. Beyond that it occupies a pivotal position in Bach’s deliberate tonal shift from flat to sharp keys. Yet, as the centre of an overarching symmetrical structure, it is more readily appreciated on the page than in performance. The comparison frequently made between architecture and symmetrical design in Bach’s music is misleading. The unfolding of music in time creates a foreshortened perspective very different from the panoramic impression of symmetry registered by the eye, say, by a Baroque palace. My experience is that in performance this chorale, despite the ravishing cadence that precedes it, as though to herald a reflection of great importance – of fate having been ordained – does not register either as the axis of the trial scene or as the hub of the entire Passion.

  That prerogative goes to the immensely impressive tenor aria ‘Erwäge’ (No. 20) – a meditation on Christ’s self-sacrifice in which, after the escalating savagery of the turbae, we are offered the metaphor of ‘the most beautiful rainbow’ reflecting the blood and water on Jesus’ flailed back as a reminder of the ancient covenant between God and Noah after the flood.bb Significantly Bach has placed it precisely to straddle the chapter division in John’s Gospel: immediately after the mob’s insistence on Barabbas as the prisoner to be released and culminating in the scourging of Jesus, one of two exceptional moments when Bach lays aside the Evangelist’s narration and gives theatrical specificity and horror to the gruesome reality of Jesus’ flogging by the Roman soldiers. This is one of the most shocking juxtapositions in the whole work: the Evangelist’s outraged and outrageous burst of loud melismatic ‘rage’, followed immediately by the dulcet tonality of the ensuing arioso (‘Betrachte, meine Seel’, No. 19). One moment we see Jesus’ back torn and blood-streaked by flogging, and the next we are encouraged to see it as something beautiful – as the sky in which the rainbow appears as a sign of divine grace – close to what J. G. Ballard had in mind, perhaps, when he refers to the ‘mysterious eroticism of wounds’.31 That Bach attached exceptional importance to this arioso and its succeeding aria is manifest both from their length (with the full da capo of the aria, the scene runs to more than eleven minutes) and its highly unusual scoring – for two violas d’amore and a continuo of (implied) lute, gamba and organ.cc Outwardly this looks like a high-risk strategy: to halt the gripping dramatic forward momentum of the Roman trial scene with its layers of political posturing, collusion and refutation. Yet Bach’s instinct was sound. This, the nadir of Jesus’ physical degradation, was precisely the moment to halt the motion and to reflect and meditate on its consequences for mankind – to balance an arioso and aria of moving subjectivity in response to the overall objectivity of John’s account. The listener is led by means of suggestive (and theologically loaded) metaphors – and still more by beguiling musical textures – to contemplate the lacerated body of Jesus, rather as Grünewald does in his Isenheim Altarpiece and Hans Holbein does in his Dead Christ in the Tomb, with ängstlichen Vergnügen (‘anxious pleasure’) in so far as it leads to a pained, uneasy gratitude.dd The eruptive force, sensuality and eroticism in Bach’s expression of religious sentiment in this central aria may have been another moment to unsettle the Orthodox clergy of Leipzig and turn them against him. In the arioso that follows we are presented with the equivalent of Dürer’s Passiontide woodcuts in which flowers, in this case Himmelschlüsselblumen (primroses or cowslips), bloom from the crown of thorns. Bach is ultra-precise in his choice of instruments here: a pair of violas d’amore, the most tender, consoling instruments in his locker, with their ‘sympathetic’ strings, contrasted with the lute (or, in a later version, harpsichord) to suggest the pricking of the thorns, and serving to point up the contrast by very obvious tonal means – a tritone leap in the voice from C to F on Schmerzen to instigate sharpened harmonies whose raised pitches and upward tritone give instantly recognisable musical equivalence to the forms, with the ensuing celestial relaxation going to the flat keys (G minor) for the blooming of the ‘key-to-heaven-flower’. The impression is made all the stronger by manifest visual imagery: one need only glance at the even curve of the bridgeee of the six– (or sometimes seven-) stringed viola d’amore (with a further and highly symbolic row of six or seven ‘sympathetic’ strings) to muse whether it was this gentle ellipse which put the idea into Bach’s head for using a pair of these rare stringed instruments as the means to evoke the rainbow – or was it its iridescent tonal colour or a combination of both? Then a glance at the score reveals that the lined pattern of the opening phrase of the aria – three notes up and three down above and across the stave – suggests to both eye and ear the arc of the rainbow (See Plate 20.). On top of this, Bach furnishes other ascending and descending figures that mirror the shape of the firmament – and conceivably of Jesus’ trial – all contributing to the image of his humiliations as signs of God’s grace emanating from above.

  To this one could add its exceptional difficulty for the singer – never (as we have seen on a number of previous occasions) a matter of oversight let alone wilfulness on Bach’s part, but intrinsic to his philosophical purpose. The stupendous technical effort required by the tenor – with virtually no time to breathe – to emulate the mellifluous and weightless fluency of the superhuman violas demands that we ponder human fallibility. The dactylic motif sung by the Evangelist when describing Jesus’ scourging returns and permeates the entire aria – insistent enough to remind us that it is the weals on Jesus’ back that are here being evoked, but now softened and curved in such a way as to suggest the promised rainbow. Then, early in the B section, after the tenor sings the scourging rhythm for the first tim
e and the instruments strain to delineate the ‘flood-waves of our sins’ deluge’, Bach parts the clouds and suddenly the rainbow miraculously appears. To bring this off in performance requires, besides stamina, imagination and a rock-solid technique, a combination of tensile strength and lyricism never easily achieved.

  John’s way of introducing the final section of his Passion account is surprisingly succinct: no sooner has Pilate issued the death warrant than Jesus is bound and ‘led away … bearing his Cross’ (19:16–17) to Golgotha. With few words to work with, Bach elongates the narration by a series of drastic modulations – from B minor (using sharps for the last of the turbae) through a symbolic and tortuous shift back to flatsff and eventually to G minor, the key in which the Passion started, in the process pushing the tonal system of his day beyond its normally accepted boundaries. During a break in the narrative the faithful are now urged to seek solace in Jesus’ Crucifixion and to hurry to Golgotha, where his pilgrimage will be fulfilled. For this new tableau, Bach, or his unknown librettist, adjusts Brockes’s text – with its unsavoury injunction to the Jews to leave their ‘dens of murder’ – to make it clear that it is our ‘besieged souls’ which are here being called on – to hurry to ‘embrace the wings of faith’ at the foot of the Cross. He substantiates this shift in emphasis by allowing the timorous souls to break into the aria (No. 24) with their repeated Wohin? … Wohin? … Wohin? to express their yearning for redemption. (Perhaps we are meant to recall the tenor’s – Peter’s – despairing exclamatio, Wohin? in ‘Ach, mein Sinn’ at the end of Part I.) He will use the same rhetorical figure (a detached series of rising fifths and sixths) again for O Trost in ‘Es ist vollbracht’. Once more Bach uses a theatrical device – protagonist and chorus, foreground and background – to help us to experience simultaneously the evolving historical action and the sense that it is also happening now. He takes only what he needs from Brockes’s paraphrased text, modifies, edits it and re-tells the story from a contemporary perspective. These vignettes – a lone soloist with a choral interjection behind – are all the more potent for their rarity.

  This last section of Bach’s John Passion is stamped by its rapid juxtapositions of mood. First we are presented with the narration of Christ’s Crucifixion and Pilate’s insistence on the royal inscription being translated into several languages. Then the crowd, in a final puff of self-importance, appropriates the music which Bach had given earlier to the Roman soldiers when they staged Jesus’ mock coronation. This time it is to dispute Jesus’ right to the title of ‘King of the Jews’, Pilate’s sole gesture of mitigation and one that he now refuses to withdraw. The scene closes with the chorale ‘In meines Herzens Grunde’ (No. 26): a radiant affirmation of the fusion of Jesus’ ‘name and Cross’, it marks the arrival of the faithful at Golgotha (in response to the bass’s earlier exhortation).

  From here there is a momentary descent into levity, given a decidedly sinister twist, as the Roman soldiers squabble over the division of Jesus’ clothes. Like the gravediggers’ scene in Hamlet, this is little more than a sideshow; but, by injecting a dose of ordinary life at this point, it somehow carries over into the more essential components of the concluding drama that are happening centre-stage. In Bach’s overall tonal planning it has a significant part to play: being set in neutral C major means that it marks the boundary between the ‘ambit’ of flat keys used by Bach in the Crucifixion and for the royal inscription, and the sharp keys he will then turn to for Jesus’ last words and death. This in itself could be a clue to its disproportionate length, for it needs to balance the equivalent ‘ambit’ in C (and its closely related keys) used at the beginning of the trial scene. As the only ‘ambit’ to stay firmly within a single key, it gives an ironic twist to the soldiers’ words ‘Let us not divide’. Purely as a composition it is an intriguing piece, one which makes virtuoso demands of the chorus. Rhythmic elasticity, agile coloratura and gleeful syncopations are all called on to illustrate the argument over who will have the right to make off with Jesus’ cloak, like scurrying rats. At the same time the singers must ensure that their lines synchronise with the Alberti bass line, itself a depiction of the dice being shaken. It is all highly effective: parodistic, naturalistic and theatrical at the same time, but also grotesque, like a scene from Hogarth, culminating in the sopranos’ leap up the octave to a top A in the penultimate bar as a ghoulish shriek. Bach’s use of an infectious, toe-tapping rhythm in such debased surroundings suggests to me that, in his view, this is rock-bottom human behaviour, lower even than the politics of hate.gg

  Symbolically we have been shown a world divided between ‘goats’ and ‘sheep’ – the squabbling soldiers and the faithful standing at the foot of the Cross. From the crowd now emerge the three Marys and the narrator, the disciple ‘whom Jesus loved’. Bach rises to new heights in the sensitivity of his word-setting and the way his recitative flows in and out of lyrical arioso, yet quite free of histrionics. For the second time in the Passion he turns to Vulpius’ memorable tune, here to acknowledge Jesus as the faithful son who makes provision for his mother’s care.

  Most poignant of all is the way his last words – Es ist vollbracht – are carried through, imitated and transposed by the viola da gamba in the celebrated alto aria (No. 30). The use of this already old-fashioned instrument, with its highly individual and plangent sonority, an etiolated reflection of the human voice, is a calculated device – one that he had used only once previously, in his first cantata cycle (BWV 76) and was to use again in the Matthew Passion. Again, as in ‘Ach, mein Sinn’, Bach adopts the majestic gestural language of the High French style, but here with the opposite effect: where in Peter’s aria it was speeded up to convey extreme agitation, here it is dirge-like to explore the borderline between life and death.hh In the B section the gamba’s tone and melody disappear completely in the wild arpeggiation of the string band – a cameo image of Christ as the hero of Judah. The clarion call of open strings, the adoption of Monteverdi’s martial style, the D major tonality – it is hard to imagine a more dramatic articulation of John’s view of the Crucifixion as the supreme victory. Yet, with the abrupt cadence on a diminished seventh, Bach draws a halt to this outburst, and suddenly a question mark is attached to the words und schließt den Kampf (‘and ends his victorious fight’). The return to the ornate and elegiac gamba melody, to Jesus’ last words (‘It is finished’) matched in their melodic outline by the singer and then, in a total break with conventional practice, repeated one last time over the gamba’s dying cadence, is a clear sign that no empty triumphalism is intended here. This aria is Bach’s strongest yet most balanced way of interpreting John’s account – as both a meditation on Christ’s suffering and as the victorious affirmation of his identity, the hidden God revealed through faith on the Cross. It is also a way of insisting that comfort and consolation (Trost) are available for those ‘besieged’ (angefochtnen) or ‘afflicted’ (gekränkten) souls who have been addressed in these last two arias.

  A mere two bars – to describe the death of Jesus – separate this aria and the next. Bach’s gently falling melodic line is the perfect match for John’s words (Und neiget das Haupt und verschied/’and he bowed his head, and gave up the ghost’). Now comes the second of Bach’s dialogues for bass and chorus (No. 32), and it arrives at a terrible moment. At first it seems perplexing that he should open with such a bold swinging melody in D major for the solo cello after the ethereal timbre of the gamba. The heroic lion of Judah now seems to prance and paw the air, where in the middle of the previous aria he roared his way to victory; but as soon as the voice enters it is clear from the angularity of the main theme, and attempts by the singer to counter its falling sixths and sevenths with upward leaps, that this is a feint to disguise a profound unease. A succession of questions are addressed to the teurer Heiland (‘precious Saviour’) voicing the fears and doubts of the whole community of the newly bereaved. What does it signify? Was it all worth it? Has death been overcome? What will be the ups
hot for humanity? Amid these concerns the four-voiced choir murmur a deathbed chorale to the same Vulpius tune-setting, but now a fifth lower than just a few minutes earlier. The interleaving of two poetic texts, one rhetorical and the other an answering chorale, is a dialogic device we have already come across in the cantatas, and one that Bach will expand still further in the Matthew Passion: words and music juxtaposed in two different timescales – the cultural or actual ‘present’ of a communal act of hymn-singing slowed down to synchronise with the ‘subjective’ time of the individual reflecting on these perplexing issues.

  Now for the second time Bach interrupts John’s account with an interpolation from Matthew – again for a specific purpose. Earlier it was to describe Peter’s tears and to reinforce the way he stands for the individual suffering a crisis of belief. Here it is to rectify or preserve the balance he has tried to maintain from the outset – between the suffering and eventual triumph of Christ. He follows Matthew’s description of the earthquake, and the veil of the Temple being ‘rent in twain from the top to the bottom’ (27:51–2) with a dramatic arioso for tenor which, while staying within the expressive gamut of the Evangelist’s style, expands on this vision of apocalyptic disturbance. This leads without a break into the soprano threnody ‘Zerfließe, mein Herze’ (No. 35). At first the elegiac tone and human pathos of this aria seem out of place in this Passion-setting so strong in its emphasis on Christ’s kingship; but soon we realise that it is the perfect foil for the earlier soprano aria, the carefree ‘Ich folge dir’ (No. 9) of Part I, marking the distance that the journey has taken us in the interim. For a final time Bach hits on a startlingly original selection of instrumentsii ideally adjusted to the mood – one of deepest sorrow and grief. He combines a transverse flute and a tenor oboe – the oboe da caccia, so called because of its open hornlike bell made of brass – with the soprano over a throbbing basso continuo, and weaves them together in a four-part linear discourse. Again, for this final arioso/aria pairing he has turned to Brockes’s text, but purges it of some of its worst excesses. By now one is so used to the myriad ways Bach finds for easing grief and soothing the battered heart, it comes as a shock when he paints a tableau of unalloyed mourning. This is keening with an incomparable depth of feeling, and the overall effect is achingly beautiful.