Bach: Music in the Castle of Heaven

by Gardiner, John Eliot

  g As Eric Chafe writes, ‘Luther referred to this passage often – twice in the Passion sermon – to point out that the Passion was intended to awaken consciousness of sin in the believer, not mere lamentation over Jesus’ sufferings or outcry over the treachery of Judas’ (Tonal Allegory in the Vocal Music of J. S. Bach (1991) p. 364).

  h Robert Levin observes that ‘Bach’s decision to combine the G major chorale with the E minor principal material will engender a deliberate wrenching effect as the tonal exigencies of these discrete components of the piece pull in opposite directions.’ He shows convincingly that Bach is ‘striving not for circularity [the thesis of Karol Berger’s Bach’s Cycle, Mozart’s Arrow (2007), pp. 45–59] but continuity, in which the sense of both timing and time itself seems caught up in a drama of relentless forward motion’ (JAMS, Vol. 63, No. 3 (1 Dec. 2010), p. 665). ‘As to [Berger’s] notion that the work as a whole suspends time by folding past, present, and future into a single level of Now, is this not ultimately true of every performance, whether a play, an opera, a ballet, or a piece of instrumental music, and regardless of style?’ (p. 666).

  i Picander’s libretto – which was available on sale to the congregation – was published as the second volume of his Ernst-Scherzhaffte und Satyrische Gedichte (Leipzig, 1729). It contains his own madrigalian verses, but none of the biblical texts and only two chorales; yet, in the captions to his aria texts, he refers to events that have just happened in the Gospel narrative (for example, ‘after the woman had anointed Jesus’ and ‘after Jesus’ capture’), thus indicating his ideas for the structural scaffolding of the Passion. There are a few gaps and miscalculations, such as at the end of Part I, where by placing the ‘Sind Blitze, sind Donner’ as its climax – a thrilling idea in itself – Picander shows he had forgotten that there is an extended speech for Jesus (Matthew 26:52–4) to fit in at this point (see p. 416; and see Ulrich Leisinger, ‘Forms and Functions of the Choral Movements in J. S. Bach’s St Matthew Passion’ in Bach Studies, Daniel R. Melamed (ed.) (1995), Vol. 2, pp. 76–7).

  j Indeed it may well have been the clergy who decided precisely where to break the musical narration for the sermon. It could so easily have come at the end of the Matthew’s Chapter 26 – with Peter’s denial and remorse – just as it did in the John Passion; but here (see the schema above) it results in a more equal length between parts I and II.

  k This may just be a consequence of Bach’s plan to concentrate and unify his antiphonal ensembles at this juncture into a single orchestra and choir. Even the soprano in ripieno (assuming that the line was allocated to a group of trebles) are drawn in and welded to those in Choirs 1 and 2. Did they physically move from the ‘swallows’ nest’ to the west gallery, or did a sub-conductor – a Thomaner prefect – relay Bach’s beat to them there, as was the practice in St Mark’s Venice under the Gabrielis and Salzburg Cathedral during Biber’s time? Either way, any physical separation of forces in this movement – particularly of the flutes, oboes and continuo, who have most of the semiquaver passagework – can be troublesome in performance and requires special vigilance. But there could be another explanation for its slight awkwardness – its early provenance. Arthur Mendel was the first Bach scholar to propose an original of Weimar provenance (c. 1714–16) for this movement (‘Traces of the Pre-History of Bach’s St John and St Matthew Passions’ in Festschrift Otto Erich Deutsch zum 80. Geburtstag, Walter Gerstenberg, et al. (eds) (1963), pp. 32–5) and expressed his surprise at finding that ‘what seems like a mature masterpiece should have been written so early’. I suggest that it could have originated earlier still – perhaps by as much as a decade – in that period when Bach was first flexing his creative wings as a composer of figural music and producing seminal works such as BWV 106, the Actus tragicus. I have no formal proof of this – just a strong sense that it belongs stylistically to the earlier period marked by Bach’s first concerted setting of words by Martin Luther (BWV 4), at the time he was employed in Arnstadt and headed for Mühlhausen (1707).

  l The madrigalian style Bach adopts for the second chorus here shows sufficient affinity with that of Heinrich Schütz in his biblical dialogue swv 339, Ich beschwöre euch – a miniature scenic masterpiece – to make one wonder whether Bach had come across it and took it as a point of departure, or, was it the nuptial dialogue of his cousin Johann Christoph Bach, Meine Freundin, du bist schön (see Chapter 3, p. 74) lodged in his memory which inspired his setting of these words? He himself had already prepared his Leipzig audience for the close association between the Daughter of Zion with the King’s daughter or bride by reviving his Weimar cantata BWV 162, Ach, ich sehe, itzt, da ich zur Hochzeit gehe, in his First Leipzig Cycle, and in his Annunciation cantata BWV i, Wie schön leuchtet der Morgenstern, first given on 25 Mar. 1725, which also refers to ‘my king and my bridegroom’ and was the last music to be heard in Leipzig before Good Friday. However, as we saw in Chapter 9, it was BWV 127, Herr Jesu Christ, wahr’ Mensch und Gott, that formed a bridge over the Lenten period and may well have been intended by Bach as a deliberate ‘flyer’ to announce his Matthew Passion, which in the end had to be held back for another two years (see p. 330).

  m The great conductor Bruno Walter, who revered the Matthew Passion and performed it every year during a ten-year period in Munich, wrote with great insight about the work. He saw this aria as an intimation of the Resurrection, allowing us ‘to partake in the vision of a soul that directs the glances of its fellows to where its own are aiming: to the resurrected One’. But this does not mean, I feel, that in doing so Bach ‘stepped outside the work that he had laid down in collaboration with Picander’ (On Music and Music-Making (1961), p. 189).

  n ‘The rhetorical force of someone singing about henceforth containing Jesus, when he has just indeed been acting through the last moments of his saviour’s life, is undoubtedly very strong’ (Butt, Bach’s Dialogue with Modernity: Perspectives on the Passions (2010), p. 207).

  o Bruno Walter, who conducted performances of the Matthew Passion in Munich every year at Easter-time between 1913 and 1922, claimed that: ‘we hear [Bach’s] own voice and perceive his own heart in the singing of those pious, compassionate figures of the work’s second dimension…[by] singers [who] are nameless – and yet Bach’s faithful heart has filled these supra-mundane figures with the pure, warm life-blood of his music, thus personifying them on their own, lofty plane’ (op. cit., pp. 175–6).

  p Daniel R. Melamed (Hearing Bach’s Passions (2005), p. 135) provides a table showing the liturgy of the Good Friday Vespers (starting at 1.45 p.m.) in Leipzig’s principal churches in Bach’s time:

  Hymn: ‘Da Jesus an dem Kreuze stund’

  Passion (Part I)

  Hymn: ‘Herr Jesu Christ, dich zu uns wend’

  Sermon

  Passion (Part II)

  Motet: Ecce, quomodo moritur iustus [Gallus]

  Collect prayer

  Biblical verse: ‘Die Strafe liegt auf ihm’ (Isaiah 53:5)

  Hymn: ‘Nun danket alle Gott’

  12

  Collision and Collusion

  Blest pair of sirens, pledges of Heav’n’s joy,

  Sphear-born harmonious Sisters, Voice, and Vers,

  Wed your divine sounds, and mixt power employ

  Dead things with inbreath’d sense able to pierce,

  And to our high-rais’d phantasie present,

  That undisturbèd Song of pure concent …

  – John Milton, At a Solemn Musick

  ‘People often complain that music is too ambiguous,’ wrote Mendelssohn in 1842. Everyone understands words, of course, but listeners do not know what they should think when they hear music. ‘With me,’ he said, ‘it is exactly the opposite, and not only with regard to an entire speech but also with individual words. These, too, seem to me so ambiguous, so vague, so easily misunderstood in comparison to genuine music, which fills the soul with a thousand things better than words. The thoughts which are expressed to me by music that I love
are not too indefinite to be put into words, but on the contrary, too definite’1 It is a startling statement, one many musicians would subscribe to but the very opposite of what some others would expect. The relation of music to language is as complex as that of language to thought. Language can elucidate, but it can also throttle sensibility in the process of its transmission (see footnote on this page). Music, on the other hand, when it is performed, allows that channel of transmitted thought and sensibility to flow with total freedom: it might not be very good at expressing our everyday mundane transactions, but the thoughts it does express are conveyed more clearly and fully than they would be by words. So what happens when you put the two together – as has happened from the beginning of time until the latest pop song? Any opera or cantata by necessity places text and its musical voicing in a symbiotic relationship, one that creates both opportunities and constraints for the composer.

  It is, I hope, obvious from the previous three chapters that in Bach we are dealing with a composer who was never satisfied just to ‘set’ religious texts, whether cantatas, motets or Passions. Emanuel Bach told Forkel that his father ‘worked diligently, governing himself by the content of the text, without any strange misplacing of the words, and without elaborating on individual words at the expense of the sense of the whole, as a result of which ridiculous thoughts often appear, such as sometimes arouse the admiration of people who claim to be connoisseurs and are not’.2 That may well have been the impression Emanuel wanted to give – that his father did not normally flout eighteenth-century conventions of text-setting. But the truth is that Bach’s texted music is far from compliant: it opens the door to all-encompassing moods, which he evokes far more powerfully and eloquently than words could alone, particularly as his textures are so often multilayered and thus able to convey parallel, complementary and even contradictory Affekts. Poring over the texts that he set to music gives us the liturgical context but in itself tells us nothing reliable about the music or of course how it came to be formed in his imagination. With him we soon find music is far from being a neutral outer shell for the words it encases. Bach dealt with textual specificity – sometimes by reinforcing it with music of a parallel definiteness, sometimes by countering it with music of a competing and, in Mendelssohn’s sense, superior definiteness. The words impart an extra dimension to the music and vice versa, so that their conjunction is greater than the sum of the individual parts; but even when music surrounds the text with a code of emphasis or matching mood it does not always fuse with language to achieve a perfect synergy. The process is either of collusion at one extreme or collision at another, or some combination of the two. There are of course many gradations in between, including a halfway house (perhaps the most interesting stage) where music seems to absorb a meta-textual component. This chapter highlights some of the more striking examples of Bach’s wide-ranging practice in his cantatas and motets – instances where his approach was markedly different to that of his contemporaries, even laying him open to the charge of inappropriateness.

  Though he never admitted as much, Bach might have recognised that he was somehow swimming against the tide of current fashions in church music, and that he was aiming at something way beyond that of other composers of his day. This is immediately clear if we compare his results to Telemann’s when both are faced with setting an identical text, dating from a time (1708–12) during which the two were in regular contact: Bach in Weimar, Telemann – who gave his middle name to his godson C. P. E. Bach – in Eisenach. The comparison shows how radically their paths had already diverged. As one of the pioneers of the new cantata style founded by Erdmann Neumeister, Telemann was widely admired for his skill in grafting the techniques of contemporary opera on to the old cantata rootstock. The libretto of Gleichwie der Regen was even written specially for him by Neumeister in 1711, and his cantata based on it was performed in Eisenach shortly afterwards, and perhaps also in Weimar, where Telemann was held in high esteem by Bach’s employer Duke Ernst August.

  From the opening solo, in which Isaiah compares the seed (55:4–15), and the impact of the weather on its germination and growth, to the Holy Word, it is obvious that Bach’s setting of 1713 (BWV 18) is going to be the more adventurous – and more excitable, too, at moments when he disregards the ‘correct’ declamation of the words. Where in the second movement the poet combines warnings of the dangers to God’s Word in the style of a sermon with four lines of prayer from a litany by Luther, Telemann strives to blur the distinction between psalmody and speech-like recitative and to avoid extremes of expressivity, his music operating modestly as the mere handmaiden of the words. Bach does the exact opposite: relishing the contrast between archaic psalm tone (initiated by the soprano but completed by the full ensemble) and modern operatic recitative style (of which he shows total mastery, even though this is the first time he uses it), he sets his tenor and bass free to voice their personal pleas for faith and resolve in the face of ‘devilish guile’, with virtuosic displays of coloratura, ever-wider modulations and vivid word-painting on berauben (‘to rob’) and irregehen (‘to wander off course’), while reserving the most extravagant fifty-five-note run for the word Verfolgung (‘persecution’). In fact he turns this movement into the centrepiece of his work – a through-composed tapestry made up of four stretches of accompanied recitative, unique in his cantatas.

  Where Telemann’s instrumentation is the standard one of four-part strings, Bach’s is improbable and strikingly original – four violas and basso continuo including a bassoon, bringing a magically dark-hued sonority to the overture and to later movements. The quick responsiveness of his music to the changing sentiments of the text allows him to describe, first, those who renounce the Word and ‘fall away like rotting fruit’ (in a decorated instrumental phrase, fluttering down) and, a moment later, how ‘another man may only tend his belly’. All contribute to a lively Bruegel-like portrayal of rural society at work – the sower, the glutton, the lurking Devil, and some pantomime villains in the form of Turks and Papists. Typical of litanies, the linking passages are unvaried musically (might they contain a whiff of satirical fun-poking at the monotonous intoning of the clergy?), except for the continuo part, which goes ballistic at mention of the Turks and Papists ‘blaspheming and raging’. With Telemann, on the other hand, we miss a sense of engagement with the text or of his using the full resources of music, as Bach does so masterfully, to lift it and its underlying message into his listener’s consciousness with a huge increase in musical substance, subtlety and interest.

  From his Weimar years onwards Bach’s procedure in setting poetic commentary rarely fits into a conventional expository mode. His arias, for example, are seldom presented as a sermon of the time would have been, as ordered exegesis, and in shaping them to fit their particular context he takes liberties, following his own private logic. As Laurence Dreyfus has shown, ‘he develops selective ideas from his texts that spark a dominating instrumental melody, but he also attaches signs, genres and styles foreign to the text that impose, by way of a kind of performance or execution of the text, an obscuring palimpsest on the poetry.’3 Take the Easter cantata BWV 31, Der Himmel lacht, first performed in Weimar on 21 April 1715. Faced with a verse of undiluted dogma, beginning ‘Adam must decay in us, if the new man shall recover’, with no discernible emotion and no opportunity for word-painting, Bach sets in motion a pulsating full-blooded string texture suggestive more of rites of spring than of man’s resolve to turn over a new leaf. This disregard for the rules of musical propriety would have been enough to make a pernickety theorist like Johann Mattheson wince – for, strictly speaking, the music is not the direct outcome of the text and it is certainly not set in sober syllabic style. It is an early instance of the collision that so often characterises Bach’s response to the genre, and which gives the emerging music such lasting vitality. The way he addresses a given text or doctrinal theme and the personal, very human gloss he puts on it tell us a lot more about his character than the se
lf-depreciating words about being ‘obliged to be industrious’ that he used to describe the permissive basis of his approach to composition. This simply cannot constitute the full story of someone of his stature. At the outset of this book I hinted that viewing Bach as some kind of subversive might provide a point of entry to an understanding of his achievement, which, in common with other great artists, was ‘attuned to the most subtle manipulations and recasting of human experience’.4 Here we are coming across instances that seem to substantiate that claim.

  Abstract music provides us with emotions purified of prescribed narratives and untethered from any pressing reality. We get the sadness of loss without loss itself, the sensation of terror without any object of terror to which we have to respond, the luminescence of joy that melts away as we perceive it.5 Something quite different occurs once music is conjoined with poetry, even poetry of low intrinsic value. At this point there is a delicate balance between sound and sense: the music now becomes the loss and the terror just as much as the words do. Paul Valéry called poetry ‘a language within a language’ – but isn’t that also an accurate description of the way music and poetry negotiate with each other? The effect of music on verse goes beyond just adding a layer of impasto, thickening the physical presence of the words that convey meaning. It is the equivalent of metaphor: it puts a brake on the flow of speech and recited verse and sets it into a differently structured rhythm and tempo, one that if successful allows the listener to engage with the composer’s own reading of the words.a

  Theology is traditionally expressed through words, while music, Bach’s habitual form of expression, obeys rules that override word-driven considerations – in procedures that Dreyfus shows to be quite anti-literary at times.6 In the interplay – even friction – between words and music in his church cantatas, a strong sense emerges of Bach reaching for the definitive, summative formulation of meaning.b In the process he seems constantly to be challenging his listeners to consider what it means to be a Christian (freighted with obligations as well as joys). He uses music both to draw new meanings out of the Gospel texts and to hint at others that occur to him, perhaps subconsciously, in the process of composing and performing.