The emotional temperature now has to come down. The coda of the Passion remains elegiac but devoid of sentimentality. The final utterances of the Evangelist are the two longest in the work. (This encourages the tendency by some modern evangelists to sing them as though they were the final words of Schubert’s Winterreise, forgetting in the process that they are primarily story-tellers responsible for getting things going and keeping them moving, and not part of the story itself.) In the first of them John is at pains to explain those Jewish customs and traditions which by the time he was writing had become unfamiliar to his widely flung readership. The most physical moment in the John Passion is when ‘one of the soldiers with a spear pierced his side, and forthwith came there out blood and water’ (John 19:34). One senses that Bach wants his Evangelist to grasp the attention of his listeners at this moment – to reinforce John’s insistence that he was a witness to this action, and that what he is saying is the truth.jj The fervour of their assent can then find its voice in the chorale ‘O hilf, Christe, Gottes Sohn’ (No. 37), though it rather drains away in the modally ambiguous final cadence; is this F major or the (implied) dominant of B? The very last recitative recounts the deposition and burial. Its harmonies are just as explorative as before, but now they extend the Evangelist’s lower range: suddenly there are five bottom Cs for him to negotiate, when there have been only two others elsewhere in the entire Passion. They are there for a purpose and show once more Bach’s skill in establishing mood and specific colour in his setting of individual words. There is a new tenderness in his description of the binding of Jesus’ body in linen clothes appropriate to the way it reminds us of the swaddling clothes of Jesus’ infancy. That tenderness remains right to the end.
Coming to the John Passion by way of the cantatas that precede it, one might expect a final chorale at this point – and of course it will end this way, but not before Bach has balanced his monumental opening chorus with another of matching spaciousness. ‘Ruht wohl’ (No. 39) may owe something to the Hamburg Passion oratorios, which often ended with a choral lullaby, but if there is any closer model for this choral rondo – at least in the melodic shape and rhythmic ambiguity of its opening – it is a rondeau, the second movement from his B minor flute suite, BWV 1067, the ‘Ouvertüre’ No. 2. That piece surely gives us an idea of what Bach intended here – a chorus that is simultaneously song and dance, with its individual lines woven together to imply a gentle choreography. kk One has to turn to Brahms for an equivalent meshing of textures and rhythmic lilt. The expressive tone manages to be collective yet intensely personal, the lines lyrical and more singer-friendly here than practically anywhere else in Bach’s writing for chorus. Significantly this is one of only two occasions (the other being the last in each set of Wohins in No. 24) where Bach calls for an unaccompanied chorus – or at least one undoubled by instruments. A sense of ritual – of the deposition and of a reverential lowering of the body into the grave – permeates the chorus. ‘Be fully at peace’ is the invocation, deliberately repeated again and again, always in the same key, with a soothing poignancy; but the way the final C minor cadence is approached (by means of a high A in the sopranos) undermines and belies that peace.
Bach’s decision to follow ‘Ruht wohl’ with a chorale (No. 40) has come in for criticism; but the truth is that in performance it works, returning us to the here and now – in this church and on this day – removing the last vestiges of grief and reminding us of a future of uncertainty. This is but the latest example of the immense care Bach lavished on the chorale harmonisations of his John Passion. Its first half focuses on the grave’s repose and is suitably understated, but at the mention of the ‘final day’, the resurrection of the body and the life of the world to come, Bach increases the tension. Spaces between the four voices begin to open up, and he hits his most magisterial stride. Six of the next seven cadences are ‘perfect’ and in the major, imbuing the music with colossal strength. The single exception in the minor is reserved for the repeated plea erhöre mich … erhöre mich … erhöre mich (‘hear me … hear me … hear me’). Easter is still two days away, but the affirmation here is nonetheless conclusive.
That conclusive cadence may have been Bach’s final grievous error in the eyes of the Leipzig clergy: for to anticipate the Resurrection, or the ‘final day’, in this chorale and elsewhere in the course of the John Passion was to jar with the prevalently sombre mood of long-established Good Friday commemorations in Leipzig. Bach could have countered that he had allowed for the traditional singing by the choir of the funerary motet Ecce quomodo moritur iustus by Jacob Gallus and the congregational hymn ‘Nun danket alle Gott’, in line with liturgical practice since 1721, when, according to the sexton of the Thomaskirche, the Passion was performed for the first time in concerted style (see note on this page).32 By this means he brought his listeners back to the contemplation of the events of Good Friday and created a final symmetry with his closing chorus, ‘Ruht wohl’.33 The thing is, we cannot be certain that Bach had cleared the text of his John Passion with the clergy in advance. On this occasion he could have slipped his Passion text under the radar of consistorial scrutiny; but in the process he may inadvertently have put the churchmen on their guard. Even before they had heard a note of his music, just reading the printed libretto might have been enough to antagonise them. Then hearing and experiencing Bach’s Passion music for the first time, they could have been disturbed by the eruptive force with which it expresses religious sentiments (the charge of blasphemy always seems to come from orthodox guardians of faith whenever spiritual or emotional power takes them by surprise). The sensuality and eroticism of the central aria, ‘Erwäge’, could have exposed Bach to the charge of irreverence (though the clergy were apparently happy to swallow eroticism in the sermon poetry of the day).
More likely to offend, perhaps, was the Passion’s weak overall emphasis on penitence, its close resemblance to Francke’s Pietist sermons, the failure of its interpolated movements (except for ‘Erwäge’) to interpret the Passion as God’s act of atonement for man’s fallen state and, above all, the ‘sheer intensity of the Johannine world view’ that Bach portrays.34 In contrast to the image we gain from Matthew and the other synoptic Gospel writers, who give repeated emphasis to Christ’s humanity and his suffering, John portrays Jesus as someone with preternatural powers of insight: serene and magisterially in control of his destiny – and, ultimately, a victor.35 In this, Bach is utterly faithful to John, showing Jesus to be seemingly unaffected by the vicissitudes of his trial, carrying out the mysterious will of the Father in full knowledge of what awaits him. His very dominance and confidence stands out above the typically human squabbling that surrounds him, a contrast that makes Bach’s setting so extraordinarily dramatic. Such an approach reveals a perfectly respectable pedigree, which theologians have traced back to the early Greek fathers’ view of the atonement, and one endorsed by Luther himself, who claimed that ‘the gospel of John is unique in loveliness … the one fine, true and chief gospel … far, far to be preferred over the other three and placed high above them.’ In it one finds a ‘masterly account of how faith in Christ conquers sin, death, and hell; and gives life, righteousness and salvation’.36
Why, then, might this have been a controversial approach in Leipzig in 1724? According to the Swedish theologian Gustaf Aulén,37 Luther was often misunderstood in this regard by his contemporaries and by later theologians, who saw in his teachings an unequivocal preference for the ‘satisfaction’ theory of the atonement – the one articulated for example by Matthew and given further emphasis in Paul’s epistles – whereby Jesus offers himself for punishment and sacrifice on behalf of sinful humanity and to win freedom from God’s wrath, as opposed to from the power of evil. ll The view probably prevalent among the Orthodox Leipzig clergy of Bach’s day, and passed on by them to their congregation, was that only the ‘satisfaction’ theory was legitimate. Bach, on the other hand, judging from the contents of his library (which, besides t
wo editions of Luther’s works, included a three-volume Bible with extensive theological commentary, and all the basic texts of both Pietism and Orthodoxy), seems to have understood and accepted the legitimacy of both views on the theory of atonement and their coexistence in Luther’s work. His intention was evidently to give a balanced expression to each of these competing views in successive works – first in his John Passion and later in the Matthew. In constructing two such comprehensive but contrasted musico-theological statements – something not attempted by any contemporary composer –mm Bach was behaving less like a musician and more like a painter, showing the same subject from two different angles, each with validity and conviction.38 Was this just bravado on his part? Was he intentionally defying local susceptibilities? From our later perspective we see that the two Passions were designed to fit into – and indeed encapsulate – his two complementary cantata cycles adjusted to the Leipzig liturgy of the day. But to the consistory it may have looked like a deliberate flouting of their authority, made worse by his refusal to explain his aims in language that they could understand.
There is no direct testimony for any of this. But some kind of negative reaction seems to have been the precursor of further, more heated and, for the most part, undocumented disputes surrounding his John Passion over the next fifteen years, causing Bach to revise it no less than four times: twice with major readjustments to its contents and doctrinal slant; once, in 1739, to abandon the work altogether for ten years; and then, in one last hurrah, to revive it a final time restored more or less to its original state. We can come close to gauging the clergy’s reaction to Bach’s first version of the John Passion by observing the drastic revisions he made to it exactly a year after its première. Out went the epic opening chorus (‘Herr, unser Herrscher’) and the offending closing chorale (‘Ach Herr, lass dein lieb Engelein’), to be replaced by the chorale fantasia ‘O Mensch bewein dein Sünde groß’, planned and later used by Bach to conclude Part I of his Matthew, and a more elaborate concluding chorale, ‘Christe, du Lamm Gottes’, the final movement of the cantata he had presented at his Leipzig audition (BWV 23). Not without a certain creaking of its joints, the John Passion was adjusted to its new position as the climax of the chorale cantata cycle. Gone, too, was the tenor aria ‘Ach, mein Sinn’, to be replaced by ‘Zerschmettert mich’ and a bass dialogue with soprano chorale ‘Himmel reiße, Welt erbebe’. Perhaps the most draconian substitution of all was a new tenor aria, ‘Ach, windet euch nicht so’, in place of the magical ‘Betrachte/Erwäge’ pairing, the keystone of Bach’s original design for Part II. By any purely musical criteria, while the overall quality of the new numbers is consistently high, it would be hard to argue that these were ‘improvements’. Taken as a whole, the effect was to dismember the initial patterning and structure of the original, as well as to alter its theological tone by giving greater prominence to the Pauline theology of justification by faith.
Only a strong consistorial rebuke can explain why Bach agreed to unpick key elements of his initial design and to jettison the consistent Johannine view of Jesus’ atonement for humanity, and the far weightier importance he gave in each of the substituted movements to the acknowledgement of human guilt. If the consistory insisted that the Passion oratorio should give greater emphasis to the Orthodox ‘satisfaction’ theory (see this page), so be it: he would comply by introducing new music to match the sin-drenched imagery and the emphasis on God as ‘strict judge’. One of the effects – but surely not the motivation – of the 1725 revisions to the John Passion was to bring it into line with the tone of the chorale cantata cycle that he had been presenting for the past ten months (as we saw in Chapter 9). A more drastic result was to destroy what seems to have been his plan, stretched over two years, to make the two Gospel accounts and the two theories of atonement the pinnacles of his cantata cycles through successive and contrasted expression. By failing to complete the Matthew on time for Good Friday, Bach found himself boxed into a corner. Version 2 of the John Passion was a pis aller. By the time he next came to perform it, some five years later, all the interlopers had gone and the opening chorus was back in place, as was the ‘Betrachte/Erwäge’ pairing. But now strangely excised were the insertions from Matthew and the final chorale. An aria no longer extant replaced ‘Ach, mein Sinn’ and an instrumental sinfonia took the place of movements 33 to 35 (the veil of the Temple recitative, the tenor arioso ‘Mein Herz’ and the soprano aria ‘Zerfließe’).
Perhaps the conflict never really died down. We know for example that in March 1739 an emissary from the town clerk came to tell Bach that ‘the music he was planning to perform on the following Good Friday was not to be played until he had received due permission to do so, whereupon the latter replied that it had always been done so, it was of no particular interest to him, for he got nothing out of it anyway, and it was only a burden. He would notify the Superintendent that he had been forbidden to perform it. If there were objections to the text, why, it had already been performed several times before.’39 What pain and hurt and simulated indifference lie behind those words in that civil service reported speech! It took him a further ten years to cease to smart over the injustice; and it was only when he had two years left to live that he brought the John Passion back with the original 1724 version restored in all its essentials.
If ever there was proof of the importance Bach attached to the work and, significantly, to its initial conception and design, it is the recently discovered evidence of consecutive performances in the last two years of his life: that on 4 April 1749 was perhaps the very last performance conducted by him. An autograph testimonial for Johann Nathanael Bammler (a former Thomaner prefect who helped Bach with the copying and textual revisions to the final version of the John Passion) dates from 12 April 1749, a week later; Bach’s hand there40 is noticeably steadier and more fluent than in the late entries in the performing parts for the Passion, which previously had been thought to be his last. The sudden, temporary collapse in his health seems to have occurred in the second half of April; but by June, though clearly weakened, he was back at work – on the B minor Mass and on the first set of proofs for The Art of Fugue. Based on the evidence of his handwriting, the last autograph entries in the performing material of the John Passion could not have been made before the spring of 1750. That performance took place on 27 March, perhaps under the direction of the senior prefect, one day before Dr Taylor operated on Bach’s eyes, the Saturday before Easter.41 Had he at last reached some sort of accommodation with the consistory or was this a final act of defiance, a flouting of a consistorial decree, and an insistence that he had been ‘right’ all along? At all events he prepared a fresh score of the Passion in which he himself wrote out the first eighteen folios before turning the remainder over to a copyist. By endorsing the original version, this last version brings ‘Fassung Erster’ and ‘Letzter Hand’ into alignment.
There may have been other factors besides those of theological difference behind the enforced revisions of 1725 and 1729 that might help to explain Bach’s ultimate return to his initial version of the work – perhaps more fundamental reservations about the music itself, a sensitive nerve touched in the ongoing debate about the very nature of music’s role in worship. For, whereas the Leipzig clergy might have found it hard to find anything deliberately subversive in Bach’s creative endeavour (it is surely beyond reproach in its fidelity to John’s Gospel), it certainly reveals what they might have recognised as a dangerous strain of artistic autonomy. It points up the essential differences between the Logos as spoken word and as set to – and transmogrified by – music.nn Quite apart from whether they were interested in, or even capable of discerning, the veiled patterns Bach constructed behind the obvious foreground ones (such as his juxtaposing worldly and spiritual perspectives on Jesus’ identity, etc.) – the very qualities which set his John Passion apart from those of his contemporaries – they could hardly have failed to notice the compelling emotive power unleashed in his music. Tac
tlessly, perhaps, Bach was doing the preacher’s job more effectively than it could possibly be done by words alone. We might speculate whether the dialogues between Pilate and the crowd, Pilate and Jesus, things we find particularly poignant today, were perhaps uncomfortably theatrical – just too ‘operatic’ for what in their view was suitable as church music (though it is interesting that they never succeeded in getting him to tone this aspect down in subsequent revisions). By returning to the work in the last two years of his life and by restoring his initial conception of it, Bach was powerfully reasserting his position on the role the music of his John Passion could play in directing people’s thoughts to the meaning of Christ’s Passion in their lives.
Let us return one last time to view the work from our own standpoint. There has to be an explanation why, in our secular age, listening to the John Passion seems to provide so uplifting an experience for so many people. I would suggest that the multilayered structure underpinning Bach’s Passion can be ‘felt’, if not immediately seen or heard, by the listener, in the same way that flying buttresses, invisible to the visitor when entering a Gothic church, are essential to the illusion of lightness, weightlessness and the impression of height. In fact, the longer you study them the more numerous seem to be the geometric patterns of repetition, symmetry and cross-referring, varying in the sharpness or thinness of their outlines. To change the analogy, it is akin to the experience one gets when looking down on to the gravelly bed of a shallow stream through the filmy refractive prism of water constantly but subtly shifting these outline definitions. Only by looking beneath the surface do the patterns become clear, and at that point the inherently unstable relationship between words and music, and the dialectical one between voice and instrument, singer and player, can come into focus. Potentially every performance moves through this process of deciphering and clarification towards an unknown goal. Any fragmentary contextual knowledge we can piece together will not – cannot – recapture the experience of listeners at its first performance, though it might serve to sharpen our response each time we encounter the music now. Although its original habitation is irretrievably lost, the work carries with it a potential novelty for those who themselves are open to novelty; for ‘this is a music that seems supremely wedded to a world of certainty and interconnectedness, yet its results, for many listeners at least, seem to be utterly unexpected and transformative.’42 Musicians (who of course have a vested interest here) tend to believe that what Bach expressed in his first Passion – and indeed the manner of its expression – has a perennial validity and therefore merits re-application in every new performance. While we might aim to produce something that is close to Bach’s performance, it will inevitably manifest itself differently on every occasion and in each new context. There is a sense that the musical material he has left us is both complete and unfinished, and in thinking about the meaning of our performances we should recall the emphasis T. S. Eliot placed on ‘a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence’.43 It is by anchoring it in our time that we re-connect with the timeless fertility of Bach’s imagination.
Bach: Music in the Castle of Heaven Page 52
