Bach: Music in the Castle of Heaven

by Gardiner, John Eliot

  The danger with Bach was always one of overload: he simply had too much to say – too much, at any rate, for the comfort of the waiting preacher – and too many different ways of saying it, supported by skills and techniques that were much greater than those of the majority of his peers. One suspects that this is what lay behind the strictures of less successful composers who had turned themselves into pundits, men such as Johann Adolph Scheibe and Johann Mattheson. Bach was one to push boundaries – boundaries of accepted taste, of what music could do to expand its formal and expressive vocabulary, of how it can convey human emotions, praise God and edify his neighbour, in excess of anything he himself had previously accomplished. Despite his limited geographical travels, like Shakespeare reaching out far beyond the borders of his own native experience, Bach transports us to places scarcely mapped and to regions far beyond the intellectual reach of his critics. Attacking him anonymously, Scheibe deplored Bach’s habit of ‘taking away the natural element in his pieces by giving them a bombastic and confused style’, darkening their beauty with what he called ‘an excess of art’. Furthermore, he took him to task for expecting ‘that singers and instrumentalists should be able to do with their throats and instruments whatever he can play on the clavier’. To this Bach (via his spokesman Abraham Birnbaum) countered, ‘It is true that there are difficulties, but that does not mean that they are insurmountable’: you just have to find solutions – so that singers and instrumentalists engaging in harmonious dialogue can give added significance to a simple reading of a text, and can ‘work wonderfully in and about one another, but without the slightest confusion’.7

  Bach, then, was up against not just the complacency of the style police of the day, but a fundamental misreading of his intentions and practice: his moving towards a radical re-working of the materials of music, his exploration of new ways for music and text to complement but also to rub up against each other, his fostering of an unprecedented interaction between his different singers and players, and finally his probing of the effects all this could have on the listener.8 Naturally he would have resisted the kind of school-masterly approach epitomised by Mattheson’s insistence that when ‘instruments and voices collaborate, the instruments must not predominate’. Bach was unwilling to have his orchestra reduced to the role of a docile accompanist simply laying down material in an opening ritornello that the singer would later develop and embellish. On the contrary, for him the opening instrumental strains of a cantata are a bidding to enter an ordered world of rhythm and sounds separate from quotidian noise or daily life and thence to mesh with the singer in fruitful dialogue.

  Mattheson would have none of this. ‘Many a beautiful painting is obscured in this way when fitted with a gold carved frame which alone diverts the eye and detracts from the painting. Any connoisseur of painting will prefer to choose a dark over a bright frame. The same thing applies to instruments, which provide no more than a frame for the words set to music.’9 Mattheson seems to hanker for a musician to be compliant in the same way that a painter gathers what he wishes to portray into a rectangle, frames it and brings it indoors, thereby domesticating the seeing eye so that the distance between the actual landscape and the viewer is widened. Strict obedience to the ‘frame’ in his cantata arias and choruses would have stemmed that flood of invention that brims over in Bach’s music. With far greater ambition than that of any of his contemporaries, he binds a vast quantity of material together in ways that require – insist upon – our active attention and engagement. That does not turn him into a musical van Gogh or Howard Hodgkin, artists who paint right over the frame of their pictures; for, although he shrugged off concerns of propriety and public approbation, he is of course ultimately compliant to the strictures of form.c

  We saw in Chapter 5 how in his very first church cantatas, BWV 4, 131 and 106, Bach was staking out new territory for music, using it both as a point from which to view the universe and as a kind of critical megaphone. By examining the music we can discern the delicate path he treads between a theologically dutiful underpinning of texts and an individual glossing of them – and a whole range of ambivalent gradations in between. We know that Bach’s music does not fuse smoothly with language to create an integrated dramatic form such as we find in, say, the operas of Monteverdi or, much later, of Mozart. Instead, time after time, we encounter the peculiar dialectical relationship Bach seems to forge between his church music and the word – in particular the vernacular word, which since Luther’s day had become so dominant in the German consciousness.d Bach has the knack of being able to vivify a doctrinal message and, when appropriate, of delivering it with a hard dramatic kick – and the next moment balancing this with music of an exceptional tenderness. He can both soften and humanise the frequent severity of the words while in no way diminishing their impact. He refuses to be cowed by the solemnity of the liturgy, willing to look behind the curtain of religion and, like any practised man of the theatre (which by any conventional definition of course he wasn’t), ready to use wit and even satire if it helps to open his listeners to the realities of life, to the world and its ways.

  ‘Meta-language’ is the term sometimes used to describe language describing itself. Between the area I call ‘collusion’, where Bach’s music is in effect compliant with the text, and ‘collision’, where it clashes with it directly, there is a middle state akin to what Walter Benjamin in a parallel context calls a ‘dichotomy of sound and script’:) 10 here it can comment on, expand on, speculate about, agree or disagree with the text from a position of equality. That is what Bach sometimes does, and that is what interests me here.

  The typical libretto of a Bach cantata has a moral that is fleshed out in a variety of forms. Take BWV 169, Gott soll allein mein Herze haben, composed in October 1726, the last and most consistently beautiful of his cantatas for alto solo. Here we find Bach approaching a text in his most collusive manner, formulating a rondo motif to match the motto-like phrase extrapolated from the Sunday Gospel (Matthew 22:34–46): ‘God alone shall have my heart.’ This simple idea (the propositio in rhetorical terms) provides the basis for an overarching unity, while permitting an implied dialogue between this figure – the repeated self-offering to the love of God – and the gloss (confirmatio) given to it by poet and composer. This is about as close as Bach ever came to a straightforward ‘setting’ of words, with music that matches every gesture and inflection of the text in front of him. Its mood of gently insistent piety, based on observing Christ’s twin commandments – to love God and your neighbour – is in extreme contrast with his stern laying down of these laws in BWV 77 (see below, this page). Almost as compliant is the hauntingly beautiful Christmas cantata BWV 151, Süßer Trost, mein Jesus kömmt. To match the solace of the words (‘Sweet comfort: my Jesus comes, Jesus is now born’), Bach constructs the opening aria as a G major siciliano in marked molt’ adagio for soprano, obbligato flute and strings, with an oboe d’amore doubling the first violins. His only gloss here is to imply by association and by means of this berceuse that it is the Virgin Mother herself singing a lullaby to her newborn child. Ineffably peaceful in mood, it contains musical anticipations of both Gluck and Brahms, while the arabesques of the solo flute suggest something folklike – perhaps Levantine or even Basque in origin. Any passing association with the musing Madonna is, however, quickly dispatched the moment the vivace B section bursts out in an ecstatic alla breve dance of joy, part gavotte, part gigue – ‘Heart and soul rejoice.’ Flute, soprano and the first violins (momentarily) exult in elegant triplet fioriture – similar in style and mood to the kind of secular music Handel wrote as a young man when he first encountered the works of Scarlatti and Steffani in Italy – before the opening cradle song returns. There is of course no reason why the Blessed Virgin should not have responded in this spontaneous girlish way, but it is not part of the biblical account of how ‘Mary kept all these things, and pondered them in her heart’ (Luke 2:19). Bach can hardly be faulted for making this passing link i
n the listener’s mind, and indeed a strict, straight text-setting in this instance might have been as unenlightening – charming but trite – as the pastoral Christmas concertos of Italian composers of the time – Corelli, Manfredini and others – a miniature genre which Bach himself adopted and transformed in the introduction to Part II of his Christmas Oratorio.

  Earlier, in his Weimar years, Bach had composed the first of several outstanding cantatas for a solo singer, BWV 199, Mein Herze schwimmt im Blut, a work that exhibits enough operatic know-how and sensibility to suggest that he may have had a particular opera singer in mind, one of a kind unknown in Weimar (where only falsettists were employed) – perhaps a diva such as Christine Pauline Kellner, who regularly trod the operatic stage in nearby Weissenfels as well as in Hamburg and Wolfenbüttel. What Bach gives us here is not so much a sermon as a portrayal of the complex psychological and emotional transformation of the conscience-struck individual. The underlying theological message based on the parable of the Pharisee and the publican (Luke 18:9–14) is still present but now couched in personal terms. A Christian consumed by self-horror and knowing that her sins have turned her ‘into a monster in God’s eyes’ is racked by grief (opening accompanied recitative). Agony turns her dumb (A section of first aria); tears testify to her remorse (B section); a momentary flash of self-observation (extremely unusual C section interpolation in secco recitative) leads to a rhetorical outburst and a return to ‘silent sighing’ (A repeated). More self-immolation follows (accompagnato), culminating with the repentant cry of the publican in the parable: ‘God have mercy upon me!’ Next, without a break, comes an aria of deep humility and contrition (A), the confession of guilt (B) culminating in a plea for patience (tempo slowed to adagio) prior to a renewed expression of repentance (A repeated). This is the turning-point (a two-bar recitative). Now the sinner makes a further act of contrition, casting her sins into Christ’s wounds (chorale). Henceforth this will be her resting place (accompagnato) whence she can sing an ode to joyful reconciliation (A), blessing (B) and renewed joy (A repeated).

  What Bach is striving for here is a lucid presentation of the text, or rather of the ideas that lie behind it, offered to the listener from several vantage points and in a highly individual style of his own devising. Not for him the mechanical patter of contemporary operatic recitative; instead, he develops a musical declamation flexible enough to burgeon into arioso at moments of heightened significance and adjusted to the rise and fall of the verbal imagery. Every recitative acts as the springboard to the following aria and thus to each change and expression of mood. Bach weaves such an amazingly vivid atmospheric web for each aria that words – even such overtly emotional ones as those written by Georg Christian Lehms – are not really needed to convey the specific Affekt. You could almost remove them and remain confident that the inflections and emotional contours would still be understood – which is almost what Bach himself does in the first aria, ‘Stumme Seufzer’.

  Faced with a text that postulates the limitations of verbal expression (‘my mouth is closed’), Bach shifts the expressive burden on to the instruments, so that the oboe expresses the turmoil of the sighing soul through its poignant cantilena as eloquently as the voice, perhaps even more so. The emotional charge is then redoubled when the voice returns later to incorporate fresh material into the oboe ritornello, a technique known as Vokaleinbau. Again, Bach may have been subverting conventional operatic practice where the singer is the primary focus: the very fact that she is musically contextualised might have provoked religious criticism to such a secular convention. Similarly you do not need to know that the second aria begins ‘Bent low and full of remorse I lie’ when the melodic arch of the strings of this spacious sarabande suggests prostration so graphically and the stretching of its phrases across the bar-line conveys the gestures of supplication. The success of this strategy depends a great deal, of course, on the oratorical skill and empathy of the individual singer – the ability to touch and literally ‘affect’ the listener, and not by vocal pyrotechnics alone.

  Bach’s implanting of words and vocal material into an existing structure often results in a collusion of sensibility and emotional expression, but nowhere does he do it more impressively than in two contrasted works, one for Christmas, one for Jubilate (Easter + 3). The most festive and brilliant of Bach’s Christmas Day cantatas is his third, BWV 110, Unser Mund sei voll Lachens, composed in 1725. Its opening movement is identical to that of the overture to the Fourth Orchestral Suite in D, BWV 1069, with the addition of a pair of flutes to the first oboe line. Here he takes its French overture structure (slow – quick – slow) and uses the ceremonial outer sections to frame the fast fugal segment, but with a four-part chorus newly worked into the instrumental fabric. As a paraphrase of Psalm 126 the piece emerges new-minted, alive with unexpected sonorities and a marvellous rendition of laughter-in-music, so different from the stiff, earnest way it is often played as orchestral music. When they are suddenly doubled, as here, by voices singing of laughter, instrumentalists have to re-think familiar lines and phrasing. Reciprocally, the singers need to adjust to the instrumental conventions of a French overture. To an existing structure with an already implied antiphony between separate instrumental groups Bach was later keen to add differentiated concertante effects. For one of the cantata’s revivals (in either 1728 or 1731) he wrote out new ripieno parts for the upper three lines (the bass part is lost) so as to reinforce the contrast between solo and tutti sections. The whole piece has irresistible swagger, saved from degenerating into a peasant stomp by its elegance and lightness of touch.

  This effect of illuminating a familiar original through engrafting was achieved still more impressively six months later. What started out as a violin concerto (now lost) and later took shape as the famous Concerto in D minor for clavier (BWV 1052) re-surfaces in the opening two movements of BWV 146, Wir müssen durch viel Trübsal, first performed at Jubilate in 1726. The first is an imposing introductory sinfonia (though it is not entirely obvious what such a vigorous and gritty concerto movement is doing here announcing the Gospel text ‘We must through much tribulation enter the Kingdom of God’), and the second is a fully formed choral setting of those words superimposed on existing material, with both featuring the organist as soloist. In performance enormous restraint and control are required by both singers and players to sustain the hushed, otherworldly atmosphere of the latter movement over eighty-seven slow bars. This would be impressive enough as a piece of exceptionally clever implanting, if that is what it was, for we may never know for certain whether Bach had foreseen this particular solution at the outset, or whether, with the text in front of him, the possibility of a twin layering suddenly occurred to him, allowing him to anticipate many possible permutations of future moves.e As Glenn Gould said, ‘The prerequisite of contrapuntal art, more conspicuous in the work of Bach than in that of any other composer, is an ability to conceive a priori of melodic identities which, when transposed, inverted, made retrograde, or transformed rhythmically, will yet exhibit, in conjunction with the original subject matter, some entirely new but completely harmonious profile.’11

  We now turn to instances in Bach’s multilayered approach in which music and text end up pointing in different directions, when instead of thoughts driving moods and emotions, moods and emotions suggested by music start driving thoughts, and as a result alter the way set ideas wear grooves in the mind. Bach’s individual ‘take’ on the Gospel text, while it was intended to announce and bolster the sermon that it preceded, on occasion gave that sermon an alternative, unexpected slant. We have seen how rarely the musical setting of a cantata movement is driven exclusively by the semantic sense of the words. Instead, Bach often surrounds them with his own private code of emphasis, of matching Affekts. From a handful of cantatas that give the strongest sense of his music charting its own course at an oblique angle to that of the text, BWV 103, Ihr werdet weinen und heulen, stands out. We saw in Chapter 9 (this page) how its mi
sleadingly festive opening is an example of a Bachian instrumental ritornello clashing with the sense of the text that follows, and how it can throw the listener off balance. A more conventional approach might have been to leave the antithesis of the two opening clauses intact with, say, a gloom-laden slow movement (as in BWV 12 and 146 for the same feast-day), followed by some form of chuckling scherzo. What Bach actually does is altogether astonishing. Anticipating by a century the ‘Heiliger Dankgesang’ of Beethoven’s A minor string quartet, Op. 132, his strategy is to combine these opposite moods, binding them in mutual contingency while emphasising that it is the same God who both dispenses and then ameliorates these states of mind. Slowing abruptly to adagio e piano the bass soloist intones Ihr aber werdet traurig sein (‘And ye shall be sorrowful’) with sustained and tortured harmonies. Then, just when joy seems most distant, it comes bounding back with the return of the fugal subject, the earlier mock-festive theme now transformed into genuine delight – not just extraordinarily clever, but enlightening into the bargain.

  There are numerous occasions when Bach’s music provides a variety of interpretative twists that would not emerge from a simple reading of the text alone. In Chapter 9 (this page) we came across two bass cantata arias whose words imply a silver lining to the harshness of life, but where Bach’s music nonetheless seems entirely sombre, impregnated with pain and an inconsolable sadness. Exactly three years from the start of his cantorship and for the important first Sunday after Trinity that marked the beginning of his first two Leipzig cycles, we find ourselves pitched into a world of natural disasters and charitable appeals: BWV 39, Brich dem Hungrigen dein Brot, was Bach’s second use of a text from the court of Meiningen, where his cousin Johann Ludwig was employed. The Meiningen pattern entailed the quotation of two biblical texts: from the Old Testament for the opening movement, ‘Deal [or break] thy bread to the hungry’ (Isaiah 58:7–8), and from the New Testament, ‘But to do good and to communicate forget not’ (Hebrews 13:16), the common thread being an injunction to help the poor.