This aria has none of the sensuality or the consoling chemistry of BWV 82, or even of his very first funerary work, the Actus tragicus, in which, as we saw in Chapter 5 (this page), like Montaigne, Bach sought to deprive death of its powers to terrify. Montaigne was concerned to establish links between physical activities and ‘learning to die’. ‘Knowing how to die frees us from all subjection and constraint,’ he wrote in his essay ‘Que philosopher, c’est apprendre à mourir’.23 ‘There is nothing evil in life for the man who has thoroughly grasped the fact that to be deprived of life is not an evil.’ It is a ‘true and sovereign liberty’, enabling us ‘to thumb our noses at force and injustice and to laugh at prisons and chains’. Knowing about the shortness and unpredictability of life, and therefore ‘always booted and ready to go’, Montaigne wants death to find him at work with his daily business but unconcerned with the fruits of his labour: ‘I want death to find me planting my cabbages, but careless of death, and still more of my unfinished garden.’ Bach could have found recovery from the traumatic shock of losing both parents so young through his deep connection with music. Suddenly needing to face up to his own mortality, music may have been his path to unlocking that part of himself that led him to a very personal perception of the divine, something he shared with other exceptionally creative people and mystics such as Jakob Boehme, who wrote that ‘We are all strings in the concert of [God’s] joy.’24 By this interpretation music could have been his means to express his inner turmoil: it is conceivable that he used that pain to unlock a stream of inspirational energy.
Life as both a pilgrimage and a sea voyage is the underlying metaphor of BWV 56, Ich will den Kreuzstab gerne tragen, a cantata for solo bass that is the equal of BWV 82 in the way its ingenious structure is so well worked out. What makes it especially appealing is Bach’s seemingly Romantic approach to text-setting – a sophisticated instance of collusion. He adjusts his melodic line to accommodate successive changes in mood – moving from a succinct initial upward climb, a harrowing arpeggio to a sharpened seventh (of the sort Hugo Wolf might later use) as a musical pun on the word Kreuzstab (‘cross-staff’), and thence to six and a half bars of pained descent to signify the ongoing burden of the Cross and the solace that ‘comes from God’s beloved hand’. Bach reserves the biggest change for the B section, switching to triplet rhythm in the voice part in a kind of arioso as the pilgrim lowers all his grief into his own grave: ‘Then shall my Saviour wipe the tears from my eyes.’ He fashions an arioso with cello arpeggiation to depict the lapping waves, while the voice line describes how ‘the sorrow, affliction and distress engulf me.’ Where the first movement was forward-looking, this arioso seems to hark back to the music he learnt as a child, that of his forebears. One can pick up hints of an early reliance on God’s protection in the whispered comfort of Ich bin bei dir (‘I am with you’).
As we have seen, with the death of both of his parents when he was only nine years old there was no human substitute on whom he could wholly depend. As the waves die down and the cello comes to rest on a bottom D, the voice of the pilgrim continues in secco recitative with the Bunyan-like words, ‘So I step from my ship into my own city, which is the kingdom of heaven, where I with all the righteous shall enter out of so great tribulation.’ A further metaphor – of the obbligato oboe as guardian angel of the now jubilant pilgrim – is developed in the extended da capo aria ‘Endlich wird mein Joch’ (‘At last, my yoke shall fall from me again’). Bach reserves the biggest surprise for the moment when the pilgrim’s desire to fly up like an eagle can hold no bounds: ‘Let it happen today!’ he exclaims, the emphasis shifting from O! to gescheh to heute and finally to noch. These are the moments when one senses Bach bridging the gap between living and dying with total clarity and utter fearlessness. Mozart could be speaking for Bach when he wrote, Montaigne-like, to his father in April 1787: ‘As death, when we come to consider it closely, is the true goal of our existence, I have formed during the last few years such close relations with this best and truest friend of mankind, that his image is not only no longer terrifying to me, but is indeed very soothing and consoling!’25
We have been attempting to explore the border of contact between music and language. In his church cantatas Bach’s music goes to work on the language of his mother tongue, a process that sometimes leads to collusion and at others ends in collision or displacement. Often, as I have tried to show, the results reach right to the heart of the human condition. When it comes to his motets (which date from the whole of his middle years, but of which only a handful have survived), the relationship between music and language is not quite the same, since they entail no collaborative negotiation with a poet or librettist as the cantatas do. Instead they draw on compact and aphoristic biblical passages combined with chorales – selected and arranged by the composer and (as far as we know) no other – allowing him to develop satisfying harmonious unities, which were so much harder to achieve in the church cantatas with their heterogeneous texts and slightly lopsided form. As predominantly funerary pieces, the motets epitomise the Lutheran longing for completion and union with God and that deeply implanted idea of heavenly love which gave justification to the lives of its adherents. They speak to us very directly, because, like several of the cantatas that take the ars moriendi as their subject matter, they address something we all share with Bach – our mortality.
This is essentially music for unaccompanied voices, made so gripping by Bach’s skill in converting a range of instrumentally conceived figures into vocally expressive phrases through their fusion with words.r This makes them hugely challenging to perform, so that it is little wonder that Bach, it seems, insisted that all fifty-four of the boarding Thomaner were in theory available to perform what was called ‘the Cantor’s music’, whether divided up into separate eight-voiced Kantoreien (of which there were four, each with two boys per part) or in multiples thereof.26 Like Mozart after him, with Bach there is no rigid dividing line between his instrumental melodies and sung arias or phrases – so that when some of his best singers were suddenly forced to serve as instrumentalists for a particular service, there was no drastic change of style. Take the middle section of his five-part motet BWV 227, Jesu, meine Freude, the subtle vocal fugue ‘Ihr aber seid nicht fleischlich, sondern geistlich’ (‘But ye are not in the flesh, but in the Spirit’): the way that Bach plans the stepwise approach to the word fleischlich in the main theme, stretches it languidly over the bar-line and then contrasts it with a long enigmatic melisma on geistlich is sufficient proof that even when thinking fugally he could make room for expressive vocal inflection to bring life and particular emphasis to the words he was setting.s
Another matchless example of this fluidity occurs in the long middle section of one of his earliest motets, BWV 228, Fürchte dich nicht, this time set as a double fugue in which the three lower voices exchange subjects that are free inversions of each other. If you are told at the outset that the ascending subject derives from the opening motif of the chorale that will soon appear as the soprano cantus firmus, it might strike you as just another example of Bach’s unlimited cleverness. But when this motif appears for the third time, now sung by the altos in the key of the chorale (D major), the link is made instantly audible (as well as clever) – not least by the succession of words, the biblical ich habe dich bei deinem Namen gerufen (‘I have called thee by name’) leading climactically to the hymn-line ich bin dein, weil du dein Leben [gegeben] (‘I am thine, for thou hast given thy life’). Bach learnt from his great predecessor Johann Christoph, who also made a motet from a version of these words from Isaiah, how to contrast, overlap and fuse similar words or ideas for expressive, exegetical purposes – and always with musical naturalness and charm. What could be simpler yet more eloquent than the little detached phrase du bist mein he interposes as a downward fifth in between the colliding fugal subjects?
At any given point in these motets Bach shows that he is aware of everything that can fruitfully happen to a tun
e or be extracted from it. With Jesu, meine Freude one cannot fail to be impressed by the exceptionally thorough symmetry and cross-referencing that Bach has engineered to provide an unobtrusive scaffolding for his word-setting (see diagram). This allowed him to juxtapose such outwardly ill-matched literary companions – Johann Franck’s sugary hymn stanzas and stern verses from the eighth chapter of St Paul’s Epistle to the Romans – with apparent ease and, as it turns out, in fruitful dramatic alternation. One does not generally encounter this degree of symmetrical bracing of movements in the church cantatas except in the early BWV 4, Christ lag in Todesbanden.
(illustration credit 53)
Nor is Bach shy of pinching an actor’s cloak from time to time – to seize on the spoken force and rhythm of a single word like trotz! and fling it to the four corners of a church. Grammatically the word here is a preposition meaning ‘in spite of’, but in the context of Franck’s hymn and Bach’s setting it has resonances of the noun Trotz, which denotes defiance and cussedness – a gauntlet thrown down to the ‘old dragon’ conjured up before our eyes with the graphic vividness of a Cranach or a Grünewald. Then he opposes it with the equally powerful image of a Martin Luther, fearless in his isolated rebellion (ich steh hier und singe) and, like the archangel Michael himself, brave and unmovable in his defiance (in gar sichrer Ruh), or like Archimedes: ‘Give me a place to stand and I will move the earth.’ So close is Bach’s identification with Luther at this juncture that we sense how he too ‘stands here and sings in such certain peace’, urging us to do the same with equal vehemence. If one wanted to pick a single example of how Bach harnessed his compositional prowess and capacity for invention as a means of articulating his zeal and faith, this motet would be it.
Equal fervour, but of a less militant, more sensuous kind, is to be found in the most intimate and touching of his double-choir motets, BWV 229, Komm, Jesu, komm. Bach’s explorations of the dialectical possibilities of eight voices deployed as two antiphonal choirs here, and in his Matthew Passion (see this page), goes many steps beyond the manipulation of spatially separate blocks of sound pioneered by the Venetian polychoralists and the rhetorically conceived dialogues of Gabrieli’s star pupil, Heinrich Schütz. Having clearly learnt the expressive force of word repetitions and exchanges from Schütz, Bach finds ways of weaving all eight lines into a rich contrapuntal tapestry, with extended cadences and dragging appoggiaturas on the words müde (‘weary’), sehne (‘yearn’) and Frieden (‘freedom’) that anticipate the world-weariness and nostalgia one finds a century and a half later in the double-choir motets of Brahms.
The opening invocations to Christ – single-word entreaties by both choirs, first alternately and then conjointly – are couched in the expressive and physically explicit language of a love-song. Bach finds a distinctive musical character appropriate to each line of the rhymed metrical text of this funerary hymn. For the melodic outline of die Kraft verschwindt (‘strength disappears’) he inscribes an arc that hints at life’s downward journey, beginning energetically in crotchets before the sands of life run out – je mehr und mehr (‘more and more’) – then regaining temporary impetus as one choir interrupts only to augment the expressive eloquence of the other. Again it is the basses who lead the evocation of der saure Weg (‘life’s bitter path’) with the anguished falling interval of a diminished seventh given in slow minims and in canon.t By the time it has passed through all eight voices and interleaved in a dense contrapuntal web, Bach has achieved an overwhelming depiction of personal and collective distress: ‘the shame of motives late revealed, and the awareness of things ill done and done to others’ harm’.27 But Bach is not done yet. With two choirs in play he can give one the fragmented text and have the other interject with just two poignant words, zu schwer! (‘too heavy’) – life’s bitter path being too much for anyone to have to bear. Then he rounds off this section with a little more than three bars of D pedal with passing harmonies of ravishing pathos.
Release of some sort is needed at this point, and it comes in the unexpected form of a fresh fugal exposition starting in the altos, Komm, komm, ich will mich dir ergeben (‘Come, come, I will yield myself to thee’), more madrigal than churchy, to which the second choir provides a syllabic commentary – chirpy and eager in the way that the opening repetitions of Komm, komm were languid and pleading. Now he switches metre to , passing two-bar segments of a French minuet from one choir to the other for the words du bist der rechte Weg, die Wahrheit und das Leben.
Anyone else hitting on the idea of a dance movement at this point might have been happy to let it run its course and move on swiftly to the second stanza of Paul Thymich’s hymn. Bach, on the other hand, has barely begun. For the next eighty-eight bars he elaborates one glorious extended sequence after another, first for one choir, then the other, so that the music appears never to stop while conveying the balm and reassurance of Christ’s words ‘I am the way, the truth and the life’ (John 14:6). Lyricism and ecstasy of this degree can be found in several arias in his cantatas but seldom in their choruses. Here in Komm, Jesu, komm Bach breaks with the tradition of the Baroque motet as he had inherited it, seizing on the presence of his two four-part choirs to write for them with bold, unprecedented contrapuntal fantasy. The conclusion – two bars of antiphonal exchange, followed by eight more of eight-part imitative counterpoint – is then repeated as an echo, a fitting envoi, one that stretches the technical control of his (and every subsequent) choir to the utmost degree. The final stanza is set for the now united four-voiced choir he calls aria – but that need not confuse us, as it has past commentators, since clearly this is not a chorale, has no cantus firmus and conforms perfectly to Mattheson’s definition of a choral aria for voices: ‘moving in equal steps with no voice attempting what the other voices cannot to a certain extent equal’.28 That description, however, does scant justice to Bach’s soaring vocal lines as they emerge from an admirably supple arrangement of the words (in bars alternating with others in an implied ) in a lyrical prayer of submission to Jesus’ lead and protection here at life’s end.
‘Hardly had the choir sung a few bars when Mozart sat up startled; a few measures more and he called out: “What is this?” And now his whole soul seemed to be in his ears. When the singing was finished he cried out, full of joy: “Now there is something one can learn from!” ’29 And why not? BWV 225, Singet dem Herrn, is by far the meatiest and most technically demanding of Bach’s double-choir motets, but that is not what dazzled Mozart in the Thomaskirche in Leipzig in April 1789, leading him to call for the parts, which he then ‘spread all around him – in both hands, on his knees, and on the chairs next to him – and, forgetting everything, did not get up again until he had looked through everything of Sebastian Bach’s that was there’. Nothing in Mozart’s previous experience of church music had prepared him for this – some of the most exhilarating dance-impregnated vocal music Bach ever wrote. No instruments are actually required beyond the standard continuo (colla parte doubling is generally agreed to be permissible but not obligatory here); yet even without his cantata orchestra to draw on, this is the most orchestrally conceived of all Bach’s motets, evoking not just the drums and harps called for by the psalmist in praise of God’s name, but a myriad of other instruments and percussive effects as well.
At the outset Bach assigns chains of instrumental figura corta to one of his choirs, while from the way he sets the single word Singet! in Choir 2 he shows that he is out to extract the maximum percussive edge and frisson from the German text, beyond its function of providing the continuo and giving harmonic backing to Choir 1. His method of celebrating, first the community of saints, then Israel ‘rejoic[ing] in him that made him’, is to exploit the shock waves of strategically placed glottal stops and the syncopated force of plosive and fricative consonants. If the vowels and even the notes were removed, we would still get the exuberant mood of the text just from the collision of these animated consonants.
By the time Bach reaches the fi
nal section, ‘Lobet dem Herrn in seinen Taten’, it feels as though he has dragooned all the Temple instruments of the Old Testament – the harps, psalteries and cymbals – into the service of praising the Lord, like some latter-day cuadro flamenco or Big Band leader. King David reputedly had nearly 300 musicians in his employ; Bach in Leipzig had barely thirty, but that was no bar to his inclusion in the hallowed lineage of church musicians appointed to form choirs responsible for songs of thanksgiving since biblical times. Bach wrote in the margin of his personal copy of Abraham Calov’s Bible commentary, ‘music … was especially ordered by God’s spirit through David.’ On another page, in response to the passage (Exodus 15:20) describing how ‘all the women went out after [Miriam] with timbrels and dancing’, we find Calov speculating on what ‘a mighty melody and a tremendous resonance and reverberation there must have been between these two choruses [Moses and the men of Israel, Miriam with the Israelite women]’ on the occasion when ‘David the king and prophet danced publicly before the ark of the covenant’ – to which Bach adds in the margin, ‘NB. First prelude, for two choirs to be performed for the glory of God.’ And what does Miriam sing? ‘Sing ye to the Lord, for he hath triumphed gloriously!’u The ‘first prelude’ eventually leads to a fugue for the children of Zion to dance to. Only in the Cum sancto spiritu from the B minor Mass (which it resembles) did Bach ever write a more joyous, fleet-footed fugal subject.
Bach: Music in the Castle of Heaven Page 63
