Bach: Music in the Castle of Heaven

by Gardiner, John Eliot

  One clue to Bach’s structure lies in the effectiveness of its pacing, which is comparatively more stately and measured than that of the John Passion, and the success of any interpretation hinges on the degree to which it connects to – and replicates – that pacing in performance without loss of dramatic momentum. Individual performers, being wholly caught up in the interpretative challenges of successive movements – those spokes fanning out from the compositional hub – can easily lose sight of the work’s overall shape. But if the pacing is right, the listener is helped to take each of the twenty-eight scenes (see below this page) as it comes, and to re-live and relish the re-telling of it. So, instead of waiting impatiently for an aria to end and the story to resume, we begin to value the voice urging us to identify with the remorse, the outrage and the outpouring of grief articulated by individual spokesmen and women in the course of the drama, and by the entire community voicing its contrition in the chorales. Once as a listener you have adjusted to its structural rhythm and sheer length, Bach’s Matthew Passion can in some ways be an easier ride than the John. There, as we saw, everything is breathlessly dramatic, but also so unremittingly Johannine in its theology: you feel you are being taken by the scruff of the neck (as indeed one is by John’s Gospel) and required to confront big issues – the nature of kingship, of identity, or of what happens when truth faces falsehood.

  Here in the Matthew Passion Bach adopts a less polemical tack, dictated in part by Matthew’s approach, and is set on making much more room for the listener to process the drama, giving him time to reflect and to digest. Whereas in the John Passion the arias are distributed unevenly – two short ones in rapid succession near the start, a third to provide a shattering conclusion to Part I, the lone peak of ‘Erwäge’ at the midway point (where time seems to stop before a fast resumption of the drama), and four more clustered towards the end – here he ensures a greater overall sense of regularity and stability. He agrees with (or even instructs) Picander at the outset that most arias should be preceded by an arioso – to form an intermediate stage, as if to prepare the listener for the contemplative space which the aria will occupy. Now there is enough time to savour the prodigious beauty of each one in turn, the subtle colouring of the obbligato accompaniments, and the expanded range of emotional and meditative response that they encompass. Any diminution of the vivid scene-painting and the inexorable dramatic thrust we relish in the John Passion is compensated for in the Matthew by Bach’s cunning way of personifying these various ‘voices’ – the allegorical ones who sing arias as well as those caught up in the drama itself (these he often locks in dialogue) – and the way he maintains all these consecutive, almost simultaneous time-shifts in a state of productive tension. The unity of its pacing is one of the Matthew Passion’s greatest achievements: Bach knows exactly when and how to modify da capo form, when to elide and override the natural breaks in the text by ensuring that there are no false stops, no unnecessary cadential breaks, so that the forward momentum is maintained. Unlike Telemann, who fills in the da capo form compliantly and is not particularly concerned about building climaxes, Bach’s repeated reinventions of da capo form resemble Mozart’s and Beethoven’s endlessly creative re-casting of sonata form.

  It is Bach’s capacity to see all the possibilities of the material simultaneously and to clasp so many threads together at any one time which is so impressive in the Matthew Passion – his ability to combine judgements of a practical kind with considerations of structure, theological exegesis and narrative pacing, even down to the particular tone of voice he chooses to adopt when addressing his specific congregation of listeners on this crucial day in the church’s calendar. With the liturgy pared down to just a few prayers and hymns to open and close proceedings, and the sermon, for all its considerable length, coming at the midway point, this was the ultimate test for him to justify Luther’s great claim for music – that its notes ‘make the text come alive’.3 This was his opportunity to show, as the poet Hunold (his former colleague in Cöthen) put it, how ‘beautiful music can implant a better impression in people’s hearts.’4

  Inevitably this takes us back to the question of how effective Bach was in holding his listeners’ attention: of course they heard everything, but did they take the trouble to listen? How much did they absorb and how much did they assent to his approach, and how would any of this have differed from the way their contemporaries reacted to other Passion music elsewhere in Germany or in the Catholic south? Naturally, we have no exact way of knowing. We saw earlier how Leipzigers clung to their old Good Friday rituals – those plainchant meditations and the prolonged strophic hymn-singing – and resisted the fashionable tide of concerted Passion oratorios until late in Kuhnau’s cantorship. Within a year of Bach’s arrival the Good Friday Vespers service had suddenly turned into the musical high point of the year. Bach’s Matthew Passion was in essence one long concert spirituel.a

  In the previous chapter we contrasted the situation in Leipzig with the phenomenal popularity of Brockes’s Passion libretto elsewhere in Germany, particularly in the more cosmopolitan ducal courts and mercantile seaports such as Hamburg. We saw how there was no literary device or explicit poetic image that Brockes missed in his graphically realistic evocation of Jesus’ pain, nor a rhetorical trick he avoided if it could serve to intensify the listener’s response. Yet, even though Bach chose to paraphrase and incorporate some of Brockes’s verses in his John Passion, his approach was fundamentally different to that of, say, Telemann or Stölzel – not because of any diminution in rhetoric, but because of a greater concentration of musical substance, as exemplified by his Matthew Passion. But then his listeners in Leipzig’s two main churches were probably of another breed from those who thronged Hamburg’s famous Drill Hall, eager to sample the contrasting ways four rival composers had set Brockes’s libretto to music. Without even the semblance of liturgical function, there was an element of spectator sport to these successive evenings of ‘spiritual’ entertainment. In any case, who were these Stadtbürger of Hamburg? It is claimed that they were cultivated, literate and discriminating, ‘aware of the Protestant tradition [yet] no longer satisfied by its traditional ecclesiastical form … no longer blindly accept[ing] religious truths [but] needing to regain them through emotional experience’.5 With his urbane Hamburgers, Brockes felt that he was free to play on a phenomenon that would soon characterise much of Enlightenment Europe, fanning the embers of faltering faith through his unabashed emphasis on the physical aspects of the suffering of Jesus, which he describes in lurid detail. The typical Stadtbürger of Leipzig in Bach’s day was, by contrast, a more conservative and straightforwardly pious individual, one who had no need for a high dosage of such psychedelic stimulants. He was dependably to be found in his assigned pew, a member of a self-consciously stratified and provincial urban society. No doubt familiar with all the biblical words and scriptural allusions, and most if not all the chorales that were included in Bach’s figural music, in his hands were the Texts to the Passion Music according to the Evangelist Matthew at the Good Friday Vespers in the Church of St Thomas by the poet Christian Friedrich Henrici, alias Picander, Bach’s most regular literary collaborator.b

  The question, then, is whether our Stadtbürger was willing to accept and embrace Bach’s Passion music in its successive formulations and capable of the prolonged concentration required to come to terms with its complexities. In his autobiography, Pastor Adam Bernd wrote, ‘It is said that people are hindered in their devotions by thoughts of wishing to be elsewhere because they didn’t know the hymn and couldn’t sing along … Isn’t this just a gripe against new-fangled hymns, a citizen once asked on his way home?’6 Should we take this at face value or ask whether a feeling of partial exclusion may have been at the root of it? Certainly a work as extended and challenging as either of Bach’s two great Passion settings was a feat of endurance for any listener sitting passively on hard wooden benches in an unheated church in late March. Knowing all eight of the
different chorale tunes Bach wove into it may have been reassuring, but in any case as a member of the congregation you were not expected to sing along as in the old days (and if you did, you would probably have been a little confused by the strange keys, the sometimes unfamiliar yoking of verse to melody, or by the sheer complexity of Bach’s harmonisations).

  Without any concession to theatrical gimmickry Bach provides his audience with a magnificent display of dramatic re-enaction. Building on the techniques he used in the John Passion and the more dramatic of his church cantatas, Bach approaches his task with the flair of the born dramatist. The Ancient Greeks watched their theatrical rituals from stone theatre benches; Bach’s eighteenth-century Saxons sat for almost three hours in their wooden pews while his musical missiles rained down on them. Just as educated Greeks, intimately familiar with the tragedy of Oedipus – its goriness, its moral outrage and the degree of its hero’s affliction and degradationccould still be gripped by the slow, controlled progression of Sophocles’ account as though experiencing it for the first time, so Bach’s Leipzig listeners, who knew every inch of the road to Calvary, could still be intensely moved by it. The foundations of the city are laid bare, whether it is Athens in the fifth century BC or Leipzig in the 1720s, in the same ritual acknowledgement of fault, re-told and stabilised through its performance and transformation into art. In the same way that we buy tickets for King Lear and come away chastened, sobered and put in our place, so Leipzigers (with their opera house closed for the past six years) flocked to the Thomaskirche on a Good Friday, hoping that the excitement and harrowing uncoiling of the human drama would still hold them in thrall, knowing full well that they would be distressed (and perhaps disappointed if they found they weren’t).

  A reconstruction of the north-west section of the Thomaskirche in Bach’s time shows one of the two facing balustraded galleries for the instrumentalists and, to the right, private box pews reserved for the councillors. (illustration credit 51)

  The question was, could Bach’s Passion music re-animate the conventions of the Easter story and, by extension, of tragic myth, and re-kindle those ‘habits of imagination and symbolic recognition’ which are essential to the way music-drama functions?7 Performing from the organ gallery at the west end of the church, he and his musicians were only partially in view of the congregation, the singers in the middle divided antiphonally by choir, the winds in a raised gallery to the north, the strings in the equivalent to the south, responding and listening to each other, and locked in dialectic exchange. The Thomaner were not a troupe of actors, not a circus act, nor of course did they wear masks or theatrical costumes. Yet neither the absence of a stage nor the peculiar architectural configuration of his performing space could disguise the fact that Bach’s was essentially dramatic music: music intended to appeal to – even occasionally assault – the senses of his listeners.

  From the very beginning Bach had been warned off from writing operatic music,d yet his purpose was unimpeachable: to re-enact the Passion story within his listeners’ minds, to affirm its pertinence to the men and women of his day, addressing their concerns and fears and directing them towards the solace and inspiration to be found within the Passion narrative. As a Lutheran he knew that it was not by acts of contrition, nor by ‘good works’ nor even by means of the Mass (which Luther described as a ‘dragon’s tail’ – a challenge would have to wait for another day) that the believer could approach or celebrate Christ’s sacrifice on his behalf at Calvary; it was by re-living the painful events on each and every anniversary of that sacrifice, something that his music was unsurpassed at helping his listeners to achieve.e It was a sentiment captured by the chorus in Bach’s setting of the words Drum muss uns sein verdienstlich Leiden / Recht bitter und doch süße sein (‘Thus for us his most worthy passions / must be most bitter and yet sweet’ – No. 20). For Bach’s Matthew Passion moves beyond dogma and far beyond sectarian doctrine, towering above the liturgy that first legitimised its existence.

  As with the John Passion, primacy is given to the biblical words. Bach balanced the central thread, Matthew’s re-telling of the Passion story, with instant reactions and more measured reflections by concerned onlookers, so as to bring it into the present. Like any good story-teller, Bach knew exactly how to play on his listeners’ expectations – how to hold them in suspense, how to tell and then re-tell the story from different angles. Like novelists from Flaubert to Arundhati Roy, Bach provides a succession of subjectivities to help the reader / listener to experience the drama from shifting perspectives. In the earlier Passion it was John’s special eyewitness account that gave the work its authenticity and edge, while the irregular placement of arias and chorales reinforced this suspense. With Matthew’s version comes a larger cast and the added human pathos of Jesus presented as ‘a man of sorrows’. It would be hard to better it as an essentially human drama – one involving immense struggle and challenge, betrayal and forgiveness, love and sacrifice, compassion and pity – the raw material with which most people can instantly identify. At times Bach’s music suggests an almost physical engagement with the bones and blood of the story that gives life both to Matthew’s account and to the horrified response of its imagined commentators, so that ‘we tremble, we grow cold, we shed tears, our hearts race, we can barely breathe.’f

  What could Bach possibly now produce in his opening movement to match the powerful vision of Christ-in-majesty of his John Passion? His vision this time was of a different order, an allegorical one of the faithful climbing Mount Zion on their way to the holy city of Jerusalem. As with so many of the cantatas from his Second Leipzig Cycle, Bach constructs it as a chorale fantasia, but with a throbbing pedal in the style of a French tombeau.8 One can view it as an exordium, a metaphorical ‘lifting up’ in anticipation of the way Christ will soon be hoisted up on the Cross, an appeal to the devout listener to ‘open up’ and, as in Homer, an invocation to the poetic muses. One senses Bach’s wealth of experience in cantata composition that had been crammed into two or three frenetic years, but also his striving to surpass everything that he had previously written. This powerful and evocative lament, reminiscent in its grandiloquent musical gestures of BWV 198, the Trauer-Ode (see this page), turns out to be a microcosm of the new Passion, encompassing both its particular theological slant and the musical structure that Bach gives each of the ensuing movements. We cannot tell if it was his or Picander’s idea to link the traditional interpretation of Christ as the allegorical bridegroom (Song of Songs) with that of his identity as the sacrificial lamb – ‘He is brought as a lamb to the slaughter … so he openeth not his mouth’ (Isaiah 53:7). What we do know is that Bach’s starting-point – one that he must have discussed and agreed with Picander at the outset – is the concept of dialogue, a device he had already tried out fruitfully in two movements of his John Passion (between his bass soloist and the remaining singers (see above, this page), and now developed to the point where it led logically to an eventual division into two choirs, each with its own supporting instrumental ensemble.

  Once again, the obvious literary model for this was Brockes’s Passion libretto of 1711, which calls for exchanges between ‘the Believers’ and ‘the Daughter of Zion’; yet, interestingly, none of the composers who had set Brockes’s text (Keiser, Handel, Telemann, Mattheson or Stölzel) picked up on this opportunity to compose for antiphonal choirs. What is intriguing here is the way Picander, while manifestly influenced by Brockes, switches the pronouns: in place of Brockes’s ‘Believers’ he places ‘the [individual] Soul’ – to whom he assigns an ‘aria’ – in an exchange with the ‘Daughters of Zion’. Evidently Bach sensed a need to turn this prologue into a communal lament – for plural forces, in other words. However it was originally or eventually constituted, Bach intends that his first choir should speak for the whole community of believers – to voice a self-accusation by humanity at large – as well as for the individual soul and for the bride of the Song of Songs, who must forfeit her bridegroo
m on her wedding day. Meanwhile, the ‘Daughters of Zion’, sung by his second choir, also appear in his musical treatment to stand for that ‘great company of people, and of women, which also bewailed and lamented him’ – those who followed Jesus all the way to Golgotha (Luke 23:27). Implied, but not set to music by Bach, are Jesus’ words, ‘Weep not for me, but for yourselves and your children.’g