Bach: Music in the Castle of Heaven

by Gardiner, John Eliot

  After the anguish of the Crucifixion these floating exhortations of both singer and da caccias exude warmth and balm. But the ultimate validation of these rather magical instruments and the special role that Bach assigns to them in the Passion comes in the final aria, ‘Mache dich, mein Herze, rein’ (No. 65), when they are re-absorbed into the orchestra, adding a burnished gentle colouring to the halo of string sound associated hitherto with Jesus and now with this aria (in Bach’s performances the singers of both were one and the same).n The voice line is all of a piece both with the instrumental material presented at the outset and with its texture – Christ’s death, having brought atonement, is now entombed in the believer’s heart. The aria is in itself a celebration of the transforming potency of music as a means to reflect on, and draw lessons from, the re-telling of the Passion story. As the only conventionally functioning da capo aria in the Matthew Passion, it is both exuberant and calming by turn, spacious yet onward flowing, and is one of the most inherently satisfying and consoling arias in all Bach’s works. There is one remarkable skittish bar (52) – the bridge back to the A section – which seems to sum up the preceding message, ‘World, begone, let Jesus in’, in a moment of unalloyed joy.

  Though the story of Christ’s entombment and the imposing double chorus for a deputation of High Priests and Pharisees sent to lobby Pilate is still to come, this magnificent bass aria marks the beginning of the end. The last notes are performed in an accompanied recitative for four solo voices perhaps representing the four Gospel-writers searching for an elegiac summing-up of their personal testimony, like family mourners. The second choir’s response is folk-like in its simple valediction in preparation for the sacral dance of the epilogue. Where in the John Passion, Bach ended with a choral rondo (‘Ruht wohl’) as a reverential accompaniment to the laying of the Saviour’s body in the grave – and therefore suggestive of a full stop of a sort – here, to conclude the Matthew, he chooses a sarabande similar in motivic gesture and key to the one in BWV 997, the Suite in C minor. The sensation is one of continuous movement, as though the entire ritual of the Passion story has now been heard in the listener’s conscience and will need to be re-lived every Good Friday hereafter. A final reminder of this comes in the unexpected and almost excruciating dissonance Bach inserts over the very last chord: the melody instruments insist on B – the jarring leading tone – before eventually melting in a C minor cadence.

  Looking back at the conclusion of the Matthew Passion, one is struck by how the character of Jesus – a much more human figure than the one portrayed in the John Passion – is delineated powerfully and subtly, even when reduced, as in the whole of Part II, to three lapidary utterances: his final Eli, Eli, lama asabthani? (‘My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?’) and prior to that Du sagest’s (‘Thou hast said’) – once to Caiaphas, once to Pilate. Other than that, Matthew tells us, ‘he answered him nothing.’ Yet there isn’t a single moment when we are unaware of his presence. How can this be? Bach gives such a strong imprint to his interventions – always (apart from that very last cry from the Cross) with their distinctive nimbus of string sounds – that from early on (the instigation of the Eucharist during the Last Supper and the Agony in the Garden in Part I) his presence never ceases to loom over the narration; indeed, it is constantly insisted upon by references to him in reported speech and still more by the way the arioso/aria singers invoke it. We see him reflected in the eyes and voices of others, most of all in the moving summation ‘Truly this was the Son of God’ (63 b). As always, the music is the place to find Bach himself too. Much as his whole endeavour is to give a voice to others – the protagonists, the crowd, the Gospel writer – his own is always present in the story. We hear it in his fervour, in his empathy with the suffering of the innocent Christ, in his sense of propriety, in his choices and juxtapositions of narrative and commentary, and most of all in the abrupt way he stems the tide of vengeful hysteria, cutting into Matthew’s narration and interrupting it with a chorale expressive of profound contrition and outrage. o

  There is not a single opera seria of the period that I have studied or conducted to compare with Bach’s two Passions, in terms of the intense human drama and moral dilemma that he expresses in such a persuasive and deeply poignant way. No other German Passion oratorio or a single opera that has come down to us from these years can compare with them as sustained music-drama. Of that brilliant Class of ’85, only Handel, vastly experienced composer of operas that he was, showed in the glorious succession of biblically inspired dramas he composed in the ‘Oratorio Way’ for London audiences between 1737 and 1752 that he was capable of producing persuasive dramatic masterpieces away from the stage and in a theatre of his own imagination. Bach knew perfectly well what opera was and seems to have decided quite early in life that it wasn’t for him. What most distinguishes his Passions from operas of the time is the way he does away with the convention of a fixed point of reference for the audience, rejecting the idea of a listener who surveys the development of the dramatic narrative more like a consumer – entertained, perhaps moved, ingesting spoon-fed images, but never a part of the action. Bach took his cue from Luther, who, knowing from direct experience what it was like to be persecuted, insisted that Christ’s Passion ‘should not be acted out in words or appearances, but in one’s own life’.16 That is exactly what Bach does – by addressing us directly and very personally, by finding new ways to draw us in and towards acting it out in our own lives: we become participants in the re-enactment of a story which, however familiar, is told in ways calculated to bring us up short, to jolt us out of our complacency, while throwing us a lifeline of remorse, faith and, ultimately, a path to salvation. Even when pinching some of the clothes of opera in the process, Bach always avoids anything that smacks of theatrical representation. On the occasions when we can identify discrete ‘scenes’ in both Passions – semi-realistic ones in the case of those when Jesus is on trial before Pilate or the High Priest – even in these he breaks up the narrative and interpolates moments of reflection or reaction.

  So where do they belong? In his book The Death of Tragedy, George Steiner maintains

  there has been no specifically Christian mode of tragic drama even in the noontime of the faith. Christianity is an anti-tragic vision of the world … The Passion of Christ is an event of unutterable grief, but it is also a cipher through which is revealed the love of God for man … Being a threshold to the eternal, the death of a Christian hero can be an occasion for sorrow but not for tragedy … Real tragedy can occur only where the tormented soul believes that there is no time left for God’s forgiveness. ‘And now ’tis too late,’ says Faustus in the one play that comes nearest to resolving the inherent contradiction of Christian tragedy. But he is in error. It is never too late to repent, and Romantic melodrama is sound theology when it shows the soul being snatched back from the very verge of damnation.17

  This, of course, is the crux of Byron’s portrayal of his hero Manfred in his dying moments:

  ABBOT: … Give thy prayers to Heaven –

  Pray – albeit but in thought, – but die not thus.

  MANFRED: Old man! ’tis not so difficult to die. [MANFRED expires]

  When he came to compose his sublime incidental music to Byron’s ‘dramatic poem’ some thirty years after it was written, in 1848, Robert Schumann followed these spoken words with a short but poignant choral requiem and so the work ends. Schumann had been present at Mendelssohn’s celebrated revival of the Matthew Passion in Berlin in 1829, and it is possible that he recognised and learnt from the latent melodramatic features of Bach’s score – the sense of going straight for the emotional jugular with its ‘man of sorrows’ approach.

  Significantly, Steiner makes no passing reference to the Passions of Bach, perhaps because he considers they do not qualify as true tragedies, since ‘the Christian view knows only partial or episodic tragedy. Within its essential optimism there are moments of despair; cruel setbacks can occur during the
ascent toward grace.’ True, it is impossible for the Christian story to follow the trajectory of a classical tragedy, since Jesus is both the chief protagonist and to a degree the author of his Passion. Of the two accounts Matthew’s comes the closest, in that he borrows certain tragic conventions and gives a highly emotive account of the unjust treatment of the wholly good Jesus by wicked men, whereas in John’s Gospel the quasi-tragic figure appears to be in control of and compliant with his fate. My contention, however, is that in both of his Passions Bach proves that music really can ‘animate the conventions of tragic myth and tragic conduct which had lapsed from the theatre after the seventeenth century’, an achievement which Steiner attributes in the first place to Mozart, with his ‘total command of the dramatic resources of music’, and then to Wagner, with his ‘genius for posing decisive questions: could music-drama restore to life those habits of imagination and symbolic recognition which are essential to a tragic theatre but which rationalism and the era of prose had banished from Western consciousness?’18 While in no way diminishing Mozart’s role in this (Wagner’s is in any case self-inflated and can comfortably survive a prior claim), I see it as one of Bach’s great achievements. Building on the non-operatic foundations of music-drama (see Chapter 4) as it had evolved during the past century outside the theatre, and often in church – between, say, the publication of Monteverdi’s Vespers of the Blessed Virgin (1610) and the first airing of the John Passion (1724) – Bach set in motion a new burgeoning of the genre, leading his listeners to confront their mortality and compelling them to witness things from which they would normally avert their eyes. Perhaps Steiner might concede that, in this regard, such is the mythic charge to Bach’s two great Passions, they could be considered the natural sequel to the spoken dramas of Racine and the English early-seventeenth-century writers, in so far as their themes resonate far beyond their temporal and liturgical borders, demonstrating that ‘context of belief and convention which the artist shares with his audience’.

  While there is enough documentary evidence to make it possible to reconstruct the original liturgical setting of Bach’s Passions,p we cannot of course recover the way people experienced them at the time. Since they have proved that they can survive treatments as different as the old massed-choir Victorian rituals (with their strong whiff of sanctimoniousness) and, at the other extreme, the minimalist nostrums of historically informed practice (HIP) – and still move people – we can be certain there is no one definitive way of interpreting them, whether in church, in concert halls or within the secular embrace of the theatre. The search for the most effective ways to present these hugely demanding works – when, where and how, and to whom – has led, in many instances but by no means universally, to a timely abandonment of the starchy reverential rituals of oratorio performance, where once befrocked singers sat in a row at the front of a concert platform rising only to perform their solo numbers. One can understand why stage directors have wanted to deconstruct Bach’s Passions and to explore different ways of experiencing these powerful music-dramas with their deep human undercurrents. That Bach chose to deploy not one but two orchestras and (momentarily) three choirs in his Matthew Passion is indicative of drama being intrinsic to the work. Yet to build on this and to treat either of his Passions as unfulfilled operas concerned with ‘representation’ of one sort or another runs up against many obstacles, such as trying to accommodate the mercurial switches of time and multiple characterisations that are implicit in their unusual structure. Such approaches are likely to give an enhanced sense of the singers’ individual identities as biblical characters, whereas Bach’s concern was to do the exact opposite, taking pains to transfer their emotional reaction to non-specific singers (who, let us remember, were out of sight to all except the richer pew-holders in the side galleries of the original venues) as they voice their grief, remorse or outrage while speaking on their own and our behalf. Similarly, the chorus – however skilfully they manage the rapid switches between their allotted roles as disciples, bystanders, soldiers or the baying mob and become meditative commentators in a trice – are liable to be seen in a dramatised treatment as belonging to a world separate from that of the audience.

  The besetting danger here is the creation of a distraction from the mechanics and inexplicable force of the music, something Jonathan Miller managed to avoid in his revelatory ‘activation’ of the Matthew Passion (first given in London in 1993 and in many parts of the world since), doing just enough by spatial juxtaposition and separation (singers moving among and around the instrumentalists) to suggest different gradations of dialogue – now confrontational (as between separate choirs of believers and mobsters), now intimate, as when the singer of an aria and the obbligato player were placed in close proximity unencumbered by scores and music stands. My own approach is based on the conviction that a similar negotiation between action and meditation can be achieved equally well through a considered deployment of the musical forces in a church or on a conventional concert platform, without replacing one set of rituals with another. While many of us might rejoice at the passing of the old oratorio rituals as the cracking of a great ice floe of misplaced reverence, I see no overwhelming advantage – nor any inherent need – to define and localise the dramatic essence of Bach’s Passions by staging them as proxy operas. On the contrary, the moment the drama is freighted with extraneous aesthetic baggage, it risks being flattened out and the music ends up diminished as a result. It is the intense concentration of drama within the music and the colossal imaginative force that Bach brings to bear in his Passions that make them the equal of the greatest staged dramas: their power lies in what they leave unspoken. We ignore that at our peril.

  * * *

  a There is a parallel to be drawn here with listeners today, some of whom look for immersion in a single cultural unfolding, such as the Matthew Passion certainly provides – one that creates space and time away from the fidget of perpetual sound bites and being constantly bombarded by noise coming in short sharp stabs.

  b This was included on pp. 101–112 in Vol. 2 of his Ernst-Scherzhaffte und Satyrische Gedichte, first published in 1729 – a date used by earlier Bach scholars as evidence of the first performance of Bach’s Matthew Passion, whereas this ‘well-established’ date ‘rests on nothing more than an unverifiable guess’, as Joshua Rifkin maintained in 1975: ‘the work could just as well have originated in 1727 as in 1729’, he concluded (‘The Chronology of Bach’s Saint Matthew Passion’, MQ, Vol. 61, No. 3 (July 1975)) – or, as I have suggested above, as early as 1725, but not completed on schedule.

  c This is a feature that Stravinsky, hyper-aware of the banality lurking in so much nineteenth-century opera, captured in his superb two-act ‘opera-oratorio’ Oedipus Rex (1927), a work which reveals his affinity to the spirit of music-drama outlined in Chapter 4 – a ‘concept of theatre, and beyond that of music itself, as ritual – something, that is, which is re-enacted rather than simply enacted … the feeling that the characters are in the grip of inexorable forces’ (Stephen Walsh, Stravinsky: Oedipus Rex (1993), pp. 36, 48). This sentiment is reinforced by the choral writing, which at times resembles the formalised barbarity of Bach’s turbae, and at others the sense of emotionally choked valediction we hear in the Pietistic final choruses to both the Passions.

  d The proceedings of the Leipzig Council for 22 Apr. 1723 are worded in such a way as to make it absolutely clear that a condition of Councillor Steger voting for Bach as cantor was that ‘he should make compositions that were not too theatrical’ (BD II, No. 129/NBR p. 103). We have repeatedly seen in earlier chapters how Bach in his cantatas and Passions comprehensively flouted this injunction.

  e Bach’s occasional librettist, the Pastor Erdmann Neumeister, maintained that ‘what we read about the suffering and death of Christ in the Passion story, and what we hear about this in sermons during this Lenten season – that we must all take as having happened for us and as having been done as an act of satisfaction’ (preface to Soli
d Proof that Christ Jesus has Rendered Satisfaction for Us and Our Sins, quoted in Jaroslav Pelikan, Bach among the Theologians (1986), pp. 94–5).

  f This comes from the article ‘As Flowers in Sunlight’ (Guardian, 23 July 2005) in which Philip Pullman made an impassioned plea for theatre for children and the art of adapting stories for the stage. Only in the theatre, he maintains, can you find ‘strong stories with vivid characters and existing events’ which ‘will always find an audience whether young or old’; so that directors are ‘quite right to ransack the whole of literature in search of them’. ‘The importance of cherishing and preserving and physical, sensuous connection with things was something I laid great stress on in His Dark Materials, and I meant it. Such experiences are profoundly important to our full development as human beings.’