The opening chorus is multisectional and immense: at 218 bars it occupies more than a third of the whole cantata’s length. Bach sets out almost tentatively in an introductory sinfonia with repeated quavers tossed from paired recorders to paired oboes to the strings and back over stiffly disjointed quavers in the continuo. German scholars from Spitta to Schering and Dürr claim that it ‘unmistakably depicts the gesture of breaking bread’.f12 Schweitzer rightly counters by saying that ‘no one who listens to the music can take it to be a picture of the breaking of bread … it depicts the wretched ones who are being supported and led into the house.’13g That is certainly the image that comes to mind at the point when the choir enters after thirteen bars and from the way Bach pairs off his singers with broken phrases in thirds. Theirs are imploring gestures, emotionally choked, their pleas breaking and stuttering. This leads to sustained chromatic phrases – und die, so im Elend sind (‘and those that are in misery’), then a semiquaver passage in thirds for führe in’s Haus (‘bring [in]to thy house’) with weaving melismas. Just where you might expect an Oxfam appeal, you get the begging bowl itself. Bach writes his chorus not from the position of the Appeals Director but from that of the famine victim, in other words he is engineering a movable role for his choir – trom members of a cast (here aligned in a famine queue) to biblical instructors laying down rules for appropriate, charitable behaviour.
The tenors now embark on a new condensed fugal theme with prominent A flats and D flats that has a pathos all of its own, especially when for eight bars it is joined in imitation by the altos. After ninety-three bars the time signature changes to common time. The basses begin unaccompanied with the words ‘When thou seest the naked, cover him; and hide not thyself from thine own flesh’ and are then answered by all voices and instruments very much in the old style of Bach’s Weimar cantatas, with a florid counter-subject to suggest the ‘clothing’ of the naked. Clearly there has been a shift in the voices we are hearing: now no longer the hungry suffering, but the charity spokesmen. Bach is back to colluding again with the text. At bar 106 the time changes once more, this time to (again a Weimar feature) as the tenors lead off in the first of two fugal expositions separated by an interlude with a coda. The sense of relief after the stifling pathos of the opening sections is palpable and comes to a sizzling homophonic conclusion with und deine Besserung wird schnell wachsen (‘and thy health shall spring forth speedily’). The basses now instigate a second fugal exposition, and, after so much pathos, the final coda led by the sopranos, und die Herrlichkeit des Herrn wird dich zu sich nehmen (‘and the glory of the Lord shall be thy reward’), releases the pent-up energy in an explosion of joy.
Coming as the climax of a series-within-a-cycle in his first Jahrgang, BWV 77, Du sollt Gott, deinen Herren, lieben, was an opportunity for Bach to give resounding, conclusive expression to the core doctrines of faith already adumbrated in the first four Sundays of the Trinity season. His aim is to demonstrate by means of every musical device available to him the centrality of the two ‘great’ commandments of the New Testament and how ‘on these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets’. This leads him to construct a huge chorale fantasia in which the chorus, preceded by the upper three string lines in imitation, spells out the New Testament statement. At this point he decides to encase the sung New Testament Commandments with a wordless presentation of the Lutheran chorale melody ‘Dies sind die heilgen zehn Gebot’ (‘These are the holy Ten Commandments’) to demonstrate how the entire Law is contained within the commandment to love. Calculating that he can count on his listeners to make the link between tune and text, he introduces it in canon, a potent symbol of the Law, between the tromba da tirarsi (slide trumpet) at the top of his ensemble and the continuo at its base – a graphic device to demonstrate that the Old Testament serves as the bedrock of the New, or rather that the entire Law is understood to frame, and be inseparable from, Jesus’ injunction to love God and one’s neighbour.
That is just the start. Bach then proceeds to extrapolate the vocal lines from the chorale theme so that they emerge audibly in what is a retrograde inversion of the chorale tune in diminution. One way to grasp his procedure is to imagine it as a giant Caucasian kilim, with the geometric design and decorative patterning all of a piece. Your eye is drawn first to the elegant weave of the choral lines, but you then begin to discern a broader outline – the same basic design, but on a far bigger scale, bordering the whole and with its pattern developing in the opposite direction. That is the equivalent of the canon in augmentation, the bass line proceeding at the lower fifth at half-speed (in minims), symbol of the fundamental Law. Bach’s construct allows the trumpet (in crotchets) to deliver nine individual phrases of the chorale and symbolically, in a tenth, to repeat the entire tune for good measure, so that at the climax of the movement the ‘old’ and the ‘new’ are unambiguously fused in the listener’s mind.h
The strange thing is that whenever the chorale tune stops (in fact even before it gets going) the music reveals a searching, almost fragile quality – a quiet innocent introit without the usual eight-foot bass. Then comes a loud stentorian entry of the commandment theme (guaranteed to grab the attention of his congregation, you would think) and the choral voices thunder out ‘Thou shalt love the Lord thy God’ like so many evangelising sculptors chiselling the words out of the musical rock face. Suddenly a huge chasm in pitch, structure and dynamics opens up between the gentle interweaving of the imitative contrapuntal lines and the full, impressive weight of the double canon. Some find it helpful to hear this emphatic representation of height and depth as a spatial metaphor for the divine and human spheres – distant, yet interconnected. Beyond the obvious meshing of Old and New Testament commandments, the former strict in its canonic treatment, the latter freer and more ‘human’ in the working through of its vocal lines, is the symbolic separation of God’s control of the spheres of ‘above’ and ‘below’ (five statements of each, making ten in all). The music at this point is stupendous, the voices first in downward pursuit, then in upward, under the canopy of the trumpet’s final blast of the chorale tune. This is one of those breathtaking, monumental cantata openings that defies rational explanation. The end result is a potent mixture of modal and diatonic harmonies which leaves an unforgettable impression and propels one forwards to the world of Brahms’s German Requiem and beyond, to Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time – both overpowering works in which their very different music takes on Bach’s mantle of extending the biblical message through music to answer to the ultimate questions of fear and faith. What follows is a meditation on how ineffectual the believer’s will proves to be when attempting obedience to God’s commandments, and a foretaste of eternal life. Deceptive in its apparent simplicity and intimacy, an aria for alto is couched in the form of a sarabande, its weak phrase-beginnings and feminine cadences holding up a mirror to man’s proneness to fall short. As a foil to the singer, Bach decides at this point to recall his principal trumpet – so assured and majestic in the opening chorus, but now single and unsupported except by continuo alone. His role here is to convey human imperfection (Unvollkommenheit) in the baldest terms. If he had set out to write an obbligato melody for the natural (or valveless) trumpet, Bach could hardly have devised more awkward intervals and more wildly unstable notes – recurrent C sharps and B flats, and occasional G sharps and E flats, which either do not exist on the instrument or else emerge painfully out of tune. In other words Bach is putting on display the shortcomings and frailty of mankind for all to hear and perhaps even to wince at.
To be the agent for illustrating the distinction between God (perfect) and man (flawed and fallible) is a tough ordeal for any musician unless you are a sad, white-faced clown, accustomed to playing your trumpet (badly) at the circus. But before jumping to the conclusion that Bach is being sadistic here, we should look beyond the surface of the music. Richard Taruskin claims that on occasion he ‘seems deliberately to engineer a bad-sounding performance
by putting the apparent demands of the music beyond the reach of his performers and their equipment’.14 For that to be true, Bach would have had to allow for no remedial action to be available to his trumpeter using his large mouthpiece to ‘bend’ or ‘lip down’ (or ‘up’) the non-harmonic tones so as to make them slightly more acceptable, or to ask him to play the part on a tromba da tirarsi such as he often calls for in other contexts. The point is the effort Bach is concerned to illustrate as part of the music,15 and then, in blatant contrast, the ease with which, in the B section of the aria, he coasts through a ten-bar solo of ineffable beauty made up entirely of the diatonic tones of the natural trumpet without a single accidental: like some gleaming aircraft he emerges from a cloud bank into pure sunlight. Suddenly we are permitted a glorious glimpse of God’s realm, an augury of eternal life, in poignant juxtaposition to the believer’s sense of difficulty, incapacity, even, in executing God’s commandments unaided.i The device might be a bit drastic, but it is brilliantly effective. It requires the in-built unevenness of the natural trumpet to make its impact, which is simply lost when played on a modern chromatic valved trumpet. This is just a single example of the advantages historical instruments can bring to Bach performances. The techniques he uses in this cantata are extreme in their sophistication – in the first chorus by laying down the Law and in this aria by presenting the harsh dichotomy between God’s perfection and man’s efforts to imitate it. We are left wondering how an over-worked church musician, locked into numbing routines, could have come up with anything so inventive – and not as an isolated work but, as we saw in Chapter 9, as part of a coherent and highly impressive cantata cycle.
What can have spurred Bach to invent music of such density, vehemence and highly charged originality that it holds us spellbound? It is a question that has exercised scholars from the very beginning. Was it genuine religious fervour and the kind of single-minded dedication he exhibits on his title pages and in signing off each cantata with ‘SDG’ (‘To God alone the Glory’), or rather his innate sense of drama and an imagination instantly fired by strong verbal imagery?j You feel you know the answer – that it was sometimes one and sometimes the other – then along come the latter-day theologians sure of identifying an encoded doctrinal message embedded in the cantatas, and close on their heels the sceptics who insist that we forget all about religion when we interpret Bach, or literal-minded musicians who insist on keeping their music and Scripture separate. But even if we assume that Bach’s Lutheran zeal was sincere (and there are no grounds to believe that it wasn’t), does that automatically turn him into a theologian or mean that these cantatas must be interpreted in predominantly theological terms? Surely not: as we have already seen, theology is expressed primarily through words, while Bach’s natural form of expression and his musical procedures have their own logic, one that overrides word-driven considerations. Yet Gottfried Ephraim Scheibel, for example, insisted that ‘anyone who wants to compose sacred poetic texts must be a good theologian and moralist. For it does not just depend on one’s notions; they must also be in accord with Scripture. Otherwise our music in church will consist of empty words that, like empty shells, have no kernel, and it will be mere noise in which God takes no pleasure. A spirit-filled text and a moving composition must be combined.’16
However, we should not condone the tendency of theologically motivated commentators to treat the cantatas as doctrinal dissertations, as opposed to discrete musical compositions, any more than accept the glee with which aggressive atheists try to debunk any theological basis for Bach’s musical exegesis. In the final analysis nothing can gainsay or diminish the overwhelming transformative force of Bach’s music, the very quality that makes his cantatas so appealing to Christians and non-believers alike. When we are presented with thoughts and feelings in music, with far more candour, clarity and depth than we would otherwise be capable of, this can bring a huge sense of relief. We might at first feel preached at or lectured, and resist. But you realise that you can let go – you are not being obliged to subscribe to a doctrine, for Bach’s approach, even at his most vehement, is not a moral fitness programme imposed on us de haut en bas. Instead, the defining quality lies in how he conveys his understanding of exactly what it is to be human – with all our faults, fears and blind spots – interpreting the word to us like a great novelist, capturing the sense of life itself.k
There are times, however, when Bach’s musical treatment is so compliant and so close to collusion it feels as though he has decided to follow for a change the admonitions of contemporary music theorists – to ‘grasp the sense of the text’ (M. J. Vogt, 1719), with the goal of ‘refined and text-related musical expression [being] the true purpose of music’ (J. D. Heinichen, 1711). But, just when you sense their vote of approval, Bach takes the law into his own hands and creates extreme contrasts of Affekt in successive movements of a single cantata, guaranteed to startle and perhaps sow confusion in the minds of his listeners.
BWV 78, Jesu, der du meine Seele, opens with an immense choral lament in G minor, a musical frieze on a par with the exordia of both his Passions for scale, intensity and power of expression. Bach casts it as a passacaglia on a chromatically descending ostinato with the ‘ground’ acting as a counter-balance to a hymn tune, and weaves all manner of contrapuntal lines around it. Where you might expect the three lower voices to provide a respectful accompaniment to the cantus firmus, Bach gives them unusual prominence, mediating between passacaglia and chorale, anticipating and interpreting the chorale text just as the preacher of a sermon might do. Indeed, such is the power of exegesis here, one questions whether Bach was once again inadvertently stealing the preacher’s thunder by the eloquence of his musical oratory. It is one of those opening cantata movements in which you hang on every beat of every bar in a concentrated, almost desperate attempt to dig out every last morsel of musical value from the notes as they come within earshot.
Not in one’s wildest dreams, then, could one envisage a more abrupt sequel to this noble opening chorus than the delicious, almost frivolous duet that follows – ‘Wir eilen mit schwachen, doch emsigen Schritten’ (‘We hasten with weak but diligent steps’). Any straightforward reading of the text itself would not suggest a piece of such irreverence and frippery: you expect something dutiful, and instead you get a playful romp. With its moto perpetuo cello obbligato there are echoes of Purcell (‘Hark the echoing air’) and anticipations of Rossini. Bach’s wizardry encourages you to smile, tap your foot or nod in assent to the plea ‘May thy gracious countenance smile upon us.’
The reprieve is only temporary, however. With the tenor’s recitative, unusually marked to begin piano, we are back to the Miltonian concept of ‘leprous sin’, which Bach expounded in several other post-Trinitarian cantatas. The vocal line is angular, the expression pained and the word-setting exemplary: almost an extension of Peter’s remorse in the John Passion, which he had introduced to his audience six months earlier. Redemption lies through the shedding of Christ’s blood, and, in the aria with flute obbligato (No. 4), the tenor claims confidently that, though ‘all hell should call me to the fight, Jesus will stand beside me that I may take heart and win the day.’ We might expect a trumpet, or at the very least the full string band, to evoke this battle with the forces of evil, but Bach is more subtle. What interests him more is the capacity of the flute’s graceful figuration to erase or ‘strike through’ man’s guilt, and, by adopting a catchy dance-like tune, to paint the way faith can cleanse the soul and make ‘the heart feel light again’. For the vivace section of an accompagnato (‘When a terrible judge lays a curse upon the damned’), Bach instructs his bass to sing con ardore – ‘with passion’. For this is passion music with both a small and a capital P, strikingly similar in technique, mood and expressivity to the John Passion and to that other inimitable setting of the words in ‘Es ist vollbracht’ from BWV 159 (see this page fn.). Passion in a Bach performance is a rare commodity in today’s climate of antiquarian purity a
nd musicological correctness, but its absence jars with the miracle of Bach’s technical expertise, his mastery of structure, harmony and counterpoint, and his having imbued them with such vehemence, meaning and – exactly that – passion.
Though we are accustomed by now to Bach’s original, dramatic and sometimes wayward settings of words to music, we occasionally stumble across a movement that seems misconceived or indicative of a rare lapse of concentration. Take the melody of the soprano aria ‘Lebens Sonne, Licht der Sinnen’ from BWV 180, Schmücke dich, o liebe Seele, for instance. It starts out attractively, but after nineteen consecutive bars in which the singer continues to repeat the same words over and over again (‘Sun of life, light of the mind’), it risks becoming unbearable. The aria ‘Ich bin herrlich, ich bin schön’ from BWV 49, Ich geh und suche mit Verlangen, is not much better. It feels like an early draft of ‘I feel pretty, oh, so pretty’ from West Side Story; but, unlike Bernstein’s (and unlike, say, ‘Nur ein Wink’ from the Christmas Oratorio, where one welcomes each repetition), Bach’s tune does not have enough intrinsic interest beyond a certain surface attraction to warrant so many repetitions of the same words. In BWV 134, Ein Herz, das seinen Jesum lebend weiß, faced with the task of ‘parodying’ one of the most joyous of his Cöthen cantatas, Bach first had the vocal parts of the original copied out without text; then he wrote in the new ‘sacred’ words himself, note for note, making a few adjustments to the music as he went along. Obviously rushed or distracted, the recitatives (normally exemplary in their word-setting) suffered the most; indeed they give the impression of having been completed in his sleep. It was not until seven years later that he sat down to repair the damage, composing entirely new recitatives for three numbers and covering over the old incriminating pages.
Bach: Music in the Castle of Heaven Page 61
