With the action now shifted to the Sanhedrin court, Bach can no longer rely on John’s eyewitness account, but succeeds nonetheless in bringing the trial and its blatant miscarriage of justice vividly into the present via the tenor arioso ‘Mein Jesus schweigt’ (No. 34) and its sequel, the aria ‘Geduld!’ (No. 35). Jesus’ silence in answer to his accusers is reflected in the thirty-nine ominous detached beats of the oboes, which allude to the second line of Psalm 39 – ‘I will keep a muzzle on my mouth, so long as wicked men confront me’ – after which they too fall silent. With just continuo for support, the focus shifts to an individual bystander (the tenor Concertist) in his battle for self-control. Denied the calm needle-stitch of the cello’s opening bar for his own melody, he begins with self-admonishment – with a vocal phrase that sounds more like an anguished outcry than the start of an aria. ‘Patience!’ he tells himself with his very first word (Geduld!), only to lose it the very next moment as ‘false tongues sting me.’ The melodic line lurches in and out of a recitative-like naturalism with moments of passing lyricism, wholly independent from – yet reactive to – the cello pursuing its own private tussle between forbearance (steady quaver pairings) and protest (jagged dotted rhythms). The energy of Bach’s invention leaps off the page in every single phrase and varied sub-phrase of the voice line – something that in performance a smoothed-out or anodyne delivery by the singer can quickly snuff out. Bach allows us to experience and identify with this struggle between moral outrage and the tactical imperative to remain silent as it continues to churn within the tenor’s mind – even in the vocal rests and particularly in the premature return of his opening plea, Geduld! (bars 39–43), and the way his final outburst seems to subside resignedly. This dual portrayal of Jesus’ stoicism and the bystander’s struggle with himself to emulate it seems psychologically astute and extraordinarily modern. It has a resonance for beleaguered humanity at all times and in all places – from instances of false accusation in private or domestic life to the outrages under regimes of torture – and perhaps goes some way to explain the symbolic importance attached to the Matthew Passion in the German-speaking world throughout the twentieth century.
But, aside from this, there seems to be a special edge to this particular aria that goes beyond the formally illustrative or exegetical. In his copy of the Calov Bible, Bach singles out two verses from Matthew (5:25–6) to underline: ‘Make friends quickly with your accuser, while you are going with him to court, lest your accuser hand you over to the judge and the judge to the guard, and you be put in prison; truly, I say to you, you will never get out till you have paid the last penny.’ Bach, as we have seen, had direct experience of imprisonment, and by the time he had finished writing out the score of the Matthew Passion in 1736, he was battle-scarred from successive professional disputes with the Leipzig authorities. Extraordinarily pertinent here are the words and passages he picked out from Calov on Matthew’s verses on the distinction between anger on your own behalf and anger in defence of your office (see this page). They are a sign of those tussles of conscience which this aria exemplifies so poignantly: anger suppressed but always close to the surface, bursting out in the cello’s dotted figure, the singer’s plea for Geduld uttered through gritted teeth. The underlinings confirm what we hear in the music: taken together they provide us with rare insights into Bach’s private struggles and leave us clues to his temperament.
Coming at the climax of what we have designated ‘The High Priests’ Act’, the next pair of arias (Nos. 39 and 42) gives expression to the essential difference between Christian repentance and remorse: in the first, extreme contrition is sung as though from a kneeling position, and in the second it is delivered with vehement hand-wringing. While they are closely associated with the two disciples Peter and Judas, who, in their separate ways, have both denied Jesus, the singers assigned by Bach to these roles in the narrative do not actually perform ‘their’ arias and are absent from the High Priest’s courtyard. Peter, for example, is a bass, but his guilt is transferred to another singer – an alto – for ‘his’ aria, as though to underscore the Lutheran idea that as individuals we are all culpable and fallible. Although Judas and the singer who sings ‘his’ aria are both basses, the aria occurs after Judas’s suicide. Bach was very particular about this, even writing Judas’s direct speech into a separate part-book for a singer who stands aside from the rest and never appears in any of the arias or choruses. The bass singer of the aria acts as an intermediary – binding the listener into the story’s progress urging him to identify with the issues of loyalty and betrayal and to extrapolate subjectively their meaning for himself.13
Bach makes much of the polarity between the two arias, even as regards the style and tonality of these concerto-like movements and the way they are placed within the narrative. Emerging out of the Evangelist’s poignant melisma that re-creates Peter’s weeping in the audience’s present time, the solo violin enters with the eight-bar introduction to ‘Erbarme dich’ (No. 39) and wordlessly extends the identification with Peter’s state, exposing the nerve-endings of grief, sorrow and repentance with ineffable tenderness. In a lilting siciliano rhythm, the violin floats above the sustained cantabile of the middle strings and over a pulsating bass line (organ continuo with pizzicato cello and bass), but with passing appoggiaturas that grind against the unornamented versions of the same note in the vocal line. The only times we hear this haunting melody actually complete are when it is played by the solo violin; we expect the singer to follow suit, but, having essayed the opening gesture, the voice line heads off in another direction, returning with a simplified echo – a mere shadow of the decorously embellished violin tune. Bach has found an audible symbol of human frailty – a falling short, just as Peter, when accused, has just fallen at the first hurdle. As Naomi Cumming explains, ‘Language is not essential to this moment, or even adequate to it. A verbal penitence is expressed by the alto voice, but the violin articulates a more universal distress.’14 It is this raw expression of human failings that makes ‘Erbarme dich’ so compelling, so heartbreaking – those brave attempts in which an alto voice (speaking in the first person without revealing who he or she is, but with whom we can identify) seeks to emulate the violin and join its line, yet manages just segments of the melody (for it lies outside the alto’s vocal compass). The emotional tug of Bach’s music on the listener springs from a recognition of those dashed dreams and failed endeavours to live up to a Godlike ideal.
In the starkest of contrasts ‘Gebt mir meinen Jesum wieder’ (No. 42) is an outburst of Christian remorse to match that of Judas: a peremptory demand for the release of the captive Saviour by the very man who betrayed him. A robust Italianate concerto movement in G major, it, too, is highly charged emotionally, but in a more pictorial way. The violin bariolage seems to trace the motion of Judas’ wrist as in self-disgust he flings down on the Temple floor coins that have been devalued – thirty notes for thirty pieces of silver. For once in the Passion the singer behaves conventionally at first, entering with the same melody as the violin ritornello, but is soon launched into Picander’s second phrase, Seht, das Geld, den Mörderlohn (‘See the price, the murder’s wage’). This properly belongs to the B section of this, the most succinct aria of the Passion, though we are still in the A section (so that technically this becomes a ‘through-composed’ aria). We can dismiss this as yet another instance of Bach finding his own reasons to play fast and loose with the accepted symmetry of the da capo form, until we realise that this particular brand of subversion aptly expresses the disorientation that underlies Judas’s – and our – distress at the consequences of blood money.
We cannot fail to be struck by the juxtaposition of unpalatable hectoring and violence, first in the two almost adjacent mocking choruses (Nos. 36b and d) and then in the ensuing chorale (No. 37), where Bach finds the means to take the sting out of the aggression by interjecting great tenderness and quiet outrage at the maltreatment of a blameless prisoner. Later, after the chilli
ng shout of Barrabam! and the first of the blood-lust choruses, ‘Lass ihn kreuzigen!’ (No. 45b), he requires his singers to switch – with only a minim’s rest – from acting as a vindictive hysterical mob to voicing the anguished bemusement of the faithful community of believers (No. 46). One could interpret this as just a filling out of the established structure, or one could see it as Bach’s resolve to keep something much darker at bay – to prevent the level of blood lust from welling up beyond the point of endurance. Bach finds the ideal way to lance the boil – by a heartfelt expression of contrition voiced in a chorale (No. 46) by the united chorus on the listener’s behalf and as an admission of complicity in the crime: ‘How awe-inspiring is indeed this punishment … The master pays the debts his servants owe him, and they betray him!’
Occupying a central place akin to that of the ‘rainbow’ aria (‘Erwäge’) in the John Passion, is the soprano aria ‘Aus Liebe will mein Heiland sterben’ (No. 49). It provides a phenomenally poignant and meditative contrast to the coiled-up tension of the Roman trial, which has now arrived at its turning-point. Cowed by the mob’s insistence that he release Barabbas and crucify Jesus, Pilate has been alerted to the dangers of becoming embroiled in Jesus’ trial by his wife’s presentiments, and lamely asks, ‘Why, what evil hath he done?’ The silence lasts a mere crotchet’s rest, but in that time (and before the crowd can find the voice to renew its blood-lust) the soprano steps forward and in measured recitation insists that ‘He has done good to us all’ (No. 48). An air of timeless healing and benediction emanates from the music of this most sublime of arias and acts as an oasis of temporary sanity in a deranged world. Bach’s acute sense of instrumental colour guides him towards an unusual choice of instruments – using twin oboes da caccia to underpin the plangent exchanges between voice and flute. Their weightless pulse allows the ethereal grace of the flute arabesques to fly free and simultaneously to cushion the pure timbre and fragility of the soprano. These tenor-ranged oboes featured first in the accompagnato (No. 19) describing Jesus’ tortured soul in Gethsemane, when they were doubled by recorders, before yielding to the soprano-ranged oboe with its more forthright sonority appropriate for the watchman’s call (No. 20). By giving increased prominence to these ‘hunting oboes’ as the Passion advances, Bach creates an association in the listener’s mind with the dual ideas of suffering and love – not love in the abstract, but as here in ‘Aus Liebe’, the supreme protective love of Jesus that shields the believer from the wages of sin; the power of evil cannot touch those who repent even in the last moments before death, when passing from searing pain to serenity. In the absence of the habitual basso continuo, the hypnotic throbbing of the da caccias serves to isolate Jesus’ message from the baying of his persecutors. These vital components can be overwhelming in performance – the sense of love being present yet also vulnerable, especially at the point where the mob bursts in again with redoubled brutality – ‘surely one of the most disturbing moments in the history of western music’.15
The next interpolated pairs provide emotional responses to Jesus’ degradation – his scourging (Nos. 51 and 52) and the carrying of his Cross (Nos. 56 and 57), each seen from a fresh angle. Both feature pervasive dotted rhythms but in patterns so different that any underlying similarity is obscured: harsh whiplashes in the recitative (No. 51) (not dissimilar to Handel’s ‘He gave his back to the smiters’, the B section of ‘He was despised’ from Messiah) that melt into convulsive sobs in its sequel, the alto aria ‘Können Tränen’ (No. 52). Then the full range of the seven-stringed viola da gamba encompasses the depth of human sorrow and the tottering gait of Jesus burdened by the weight of the Cross. Even if many of the original audience could not actually see the physical appearance of the gambist’s extravagant, effortful string crossings, they could have heard them in the sound, with all the struggling arpeggiations, the many cross figures keeping the listener’s mind focused on the symbol of the Cross and on the figure of Simon of Cyrene. Once again, the preparatory ariosi in each pairing provide invitations to us – via individual singers who speak for us – to intervene, even to protest, in an attempt to bring events to a standstill so as to spare Jesus from so much suffering, whereas in the arias the singer seems to take a step backwards and contemplate the events from a more oblique perspective.
This is a major departure from Bach’s normal practice in his cantatas, a proto-cinematic technique in which he engineers an abrupt shift of focus from the narrative to the commentator elbowing his way into the frame, then softening and widening as the arioso dissolves into the ensuing aria. In the case of ‘Erbarm es Gott!’ (No. 51) it is not just the hard edge to the rhythms which softens the bridge to the aria ‘Können Tränen’, but the extreme instability of the underlying harmony, made up of chains of seventh chords, which veers from sharps to flats, back to sharps and (just when you expect a final cadence in F minor) makes a last-minute enharmonic swerve to flats – to G minor. Picander’s arioso text refers to a ‘vision of such pain’ (der Anblick solchen Jammers). The visual impact of violin and viola bows lashing the strings adds greatly to Bach’s evocative portrayal of Jesus’ scourging, putting one in mind of Caravaggio’s Flagellation of Christ (Naples, 1607), in which the soldiers’ muscles are tense with the effort of strapping him to a column.
As the Passion moves towards its climax, Bach’s strategy of pulling us into the action (in ariosi), and then arranging the angles from which we can contemplate its application to ourselves (in the arias and chorales), becomes ever clearer. By settling on a specific voice and selecting a specific obbligato timbre for each aria – whether solo violin, flute, oboe or viola da gamba – he determines the most appropriate accompaniment: this might be for the full string ensemble from either left or right, or subtle combinations of sonorities, as we saw when the oboes da caccia struck up such a fruitful and intriguing partnership with both soprano and flute in ‘Aus Liebe’. In the preceding arioso the two oboes da caccia were centre-stage and then moved into a more subservient role once the aria began. With these arioso/aria pairings, for all their apparent oppositions of mood, the chosen instrumental timbre is the common denominator: a linking of voice and narrative thread. The kaleidoscopic permutations of instrumental colour that Bach finds seem to be boundless. So, for example, although the flutes occupy the foreground in ‘Ja freilich’ (No. 56), the viola da gamba – which will be the solo obbligato instrument in ‘Komm, süßes Kreuz’ (No. 57) – is already present, discreetly arpeggiating in the background. It is also intriguing in theatrical terms to observe how Bach has evolved a fluid movement of instrumental dramatis personae jockeying for position, ready to advance or retreat, or simply awaiting their turn. The moment a ‘bit part’ player steps forwards he or she suddenly assumes an enhanced significance as the context shifts. Then, when a dialogue is struck up with another player or singer, we, as listeners, gain a vivid sense of separate human subjectivities locked in animated dialogue just as we might encounter on the pages of a novel.
Now, with the crisis of the Crucifixion – which really is a crisis here, not the triumphant ‘raising up’ we witness in Bach’s setting of John’s Gospel – the oboes da caccia rise to a position of prominence in the pairing ‘Ach Golgotha’ (No. 59) and ‘Sehet, Jesus hat die Hand’ (No. 60). Their initial impact as they imitate the sombre tolling of funerary bells – not the light, high-pitched variety, the Leichenglocken we will encounter in the mourning cantatas (see Chapter 12), but dark sonorous ones in a jangled peal – is the first Christian response of protest to the Crucifixion and the curse (Fluch) of Jesus’ imminent death. The twisted harmonic convolutions of this extraordinary recitative, part of the awkward modulatory shift from E minor (Ich bin Gottes Sohn) to E major (Sehet), press home the Lutheran message of human guilt being the root cause whereby the ‘guiltless have to die guilty’.
With the start of the aria now in the serenity of E major, the mood shifts from the horror of Golgotha to one of pastoral benediction, turning the earlier ‘cur
se’ into a blessing. It is hard to say quite how the ominous bell-tolling sonority of the da caccias has suddenly become congenial, even radiant. Now for the first time they are displayed in their full glory as melody instruments – the epitome of the love emanating from the Cross and from Jesus’ outstretched arms that offer a haven to the sinner, gathering in the faithful like ‘lost chicks’ (ihr verlass’nen Küchlein).m Here the exoticism of the da caccia timbre lies not in the long stretches of euphony in which they glide together over a staccato bass line, but in the bars (2–4) in which they launch into trill-decorated ascents and quirky syncopations – perhaps in anticipation of those abandoned chicks soon to be enfolded, but also redolent of Near Eastern instruments that exploit the cavity resonance of their flared brass bells (see this page and Plate 21). The transformation in sonority from arioso to aria is of course not haphazard but reflects the change from guilt to love in which Bach, following Luther, draws out the principal benefits of faith to the believer. This is to underscore that ‘comfort to the conscience’ (Tröstung des Gewissens) in the Passion story which the Daughter of Zion points out to the community (Chorus 2): in Jesu Armen sucht Erlösung, nehmt Erbarmen, Suchet! (‘Seek redemption in Jesus’ arms, receive mercy, seek!’).
Bach: Music in the Castle of Heaven Page 57
