Passages such as these remind us that Bach’s is a Baroque version of medieval ‘danced religion’. Just as many African languages lack distinct words for music and dance, so these two were once considered inseparable in Christian worship, their pagan, Dionysian fusion legitimised by the early church Fathers. To invoke ‘zest and delight of the spirit’, according to Clement of Alexandria (150–216), Christians were to ‘raise our heads and our hands to heaven and move our feet just at the end of the prayer – pedes excitamus’.30 He also instructed the faithful to ‘dance in a ring, together with the angels, around Him who is without beginning or end’ – an idea that, despite successive attempts of the church from the fourth to the sixteenth centuries to crack down on religious dancing in church, still held currency for Renaissance painters such as Botticelli and Filippino Lippi – and, I suggest, Bach, too, particularly in his Christmas music. At least Bach could claim the guarded backing of Luther, who, in accepting the legitimacy of ‘country customs’, said ‘so long as it’s done decently, I respect the rites and customs of weddings – and I dance anyway!’31 This is not very far from Émile Durkheim’s notion of ‘collective effervescence’ – the ritually induced passion or ecstasy that cements social bonds and which, he proposed, forms the ultimate basis of religion.v32 Suddenly we have a window on to those regular get-togethers of the Bach family – how their pious chorale-singing at the start of the day slipped into bibulous quodlibets at nightfall. Bach shared with his relatives a hedonistic vision of community based on the conviviality of human intercourse, one that in no sense clashed with his view of the seriousness of his calling as a musician or the funnelling of his creative talents to the greater glory of God. When Bach is in this mood, you sense that, for all its elegance, its dexterity and its complexity, his music has primitive, pagan roots. This is music to celebrate a festival, the turning-point of the year – life itself.
Other qualities Mozart might have admired in Singet are its architectural planning, and the way expressive rhetoric is reconciled with long-range continuity. This goes beyond the superficial resemblance of the sequence of its three movements to that of an Italian instrumental concerto (fast – tlow – fast): both of the two outer movements are loosely paired on the prelude-and-fugue model. Once the ‘First Prelude’ has peaked with the ‘collective effervescence’ of Israel’s rejoicing, Bach clears the way for Miriam and her maidens to step forward and lead the fugal dance ‘Die Kinder Zion’.
He brilliantly chooses to persist with the Singet motto that accompanied the imitative effusion of his initial prelude now as a funky, offbeat commentary to his four-part fugue. This pays high dividends in the build-up of this long movement, as one by one the voices of both choirs re-enter emphatically, this time in reverse order (B-T-A-S), while the rich ‘accompaniment’ is re-distributed among the fugally unoccupied voices. In his second pairing, the finale of the motet, Bach achieves a different type of transition from prelude to fugue by narrowing the focus: suddenly and without a break, eight voices converge and become four. Out of the hurly-burly the united basses of both choirs step forward in a passepied set to the words ‘Let everything that hath breath praise the Lord.’ This might sound straightforward enough, but in practice it is a challenge to achieve a seamless and fluent transition at this point of liftoff. It needs a readjustment of the singers’ ‘radar’ to pass from a full, dense eight-part polyphony in common time to fusion as a single line, one-in-a-bar, with spatially distanced voices now airborne, insubstantial and still dancing. Several episodes follow in quick succession – exposition, stretto, sequence, re-appearance of the subject in the super-tonic, sequence, stretto – each with expectations of an imminent conclusion. But Bach’s high-wire act still has 113 bars to run, and what promised to be a sprint to the line turns out to be a 1,500-metre race. As the singers move into the final straight, you sense the crowd’s excitement. Suddenly it’s no longer a flat race – there’s a big hurdle ahead, one to take the sopranos up to a top B before they can breast the finishing tape, using up the last Odem (‘breath’) of which they are capable.
If the finale is a middle-distance track event, the central movement is more like an aeronautical display. While Choir 2 glides past in stately homophonic formation with a four-part chorale harmonisation, Choir 1 flies in, inscribing independent yet interlocking flight-paths responsive to thermal currents and the lines of its free poetic text. The antiphony between two parallel texts, one measured and formal as befits a chorale, the other lyrical, even rhapsodical, is unprecedented (Bach’s appellation of ‘aria’ here carrying metaphoric as well as stylistic connotations). His cantatas and Passions are littered with fruitful juxtapositions of personal and collective responses between solo arias and chorales, but this type of choral litany, in which the roles of the two choirs are reversed for the second verse, is another radical departure from contemporary notions of how motets were supposed to function. Bach’s motets contain unique bursts of festive and reflective creativity at the very margins of what the Lutheran clergy of his day would have found acceptable.
Their popularity in our time goes a little way towards reversing the process of desocialisation that chased the choral dance first out of church and then from communal recreation of the kind we are told that the Bach family practised.33 (This was also a feature of my childhood, thanks to my parents’ no doubt unconscious re-creation of this pattern – intense sessions of a cappella singing, followed by physically liberating sessions of English country dancing based on John Playford’s The English Dancing Master (1651)). Through their extraordinary compression and complexity, Bach’s motets make colossal demands of performers, requiring exceptional virtuosity, stamina, and sensitivity to the abrupt changes of mood and texture as well as to the exact meaning of each word. Towards the end of his more than thirty years as music director of Berlin’s Singakademie in 1827, Carl Friedrich Zelter wrote to his friend Goethe, ‘Could I let you hear some happy day one of Sebastian Bach’s motets, you would feel yourself at the centre of the world, as a man like you ought to be. I hear the works for the many hundredth time, and am not finished with them yet, and never will be.’34 After knowing them for more than sixty years I feel exactly the same. The glorious freedom that Bach exhibits in his motets, his balletic joy in the praise of his maker and his total certitude in the contemplation of death – this, surely, is the best imaginable response to our mortal entrapment.
Tying together these threads of Bach’s vocal music allows us to appreciate his extraordinary achievement in expressing the essence of Lutheran eschatology – ideas about eternity that can never satisfactorily be put into words. Part of this music’s appeal to us today may lie in the affirmation it makes which many of us no longer find in conventional religion or politics (although this may also have been true of earlier responses to Bach, as when Mendelssohn revived the Matthew Passion in 1829). In the very special quality of consolation his music conveys, we have a sense of the past and the present being bound together. This is a central tenet of the ‘eternal future’ envisioned by the seventeenth-century Lutheran theologians represented in Bach’s library, such as Heinrich Müller, who saw participation in ‘most blessed music’ as an evocation of heaven and a powerful incentive for embracing death (see illustration, this page).35 This music – playing it, participating in it, listening to it – conveys a strong sense of being in the present and screens out all else. The very act of performing such a Bach piece produces a type of realised eschatology, one which implies that ‘end times’ are in a sense already here.
We have seen how Bach’s music regularly goes beyond a straightforward affirmation of its texts and how on occasion it subverts them in ways he may not have foreseen when he began setting them. The problem for the Leipzig clergy may have been to admit, without feeling antagonised or threatened, that, for all his curmudgeonly behaviour, this cantor was an exceptional asset to the church. He could turn people’s heads and even make them listen (though how much, of course, we can only imagine).
His motets and cantatas provided an alternative route to Christian edification and contemplation, asserting the bleak truths of their texts as well as providing palliatives that the texts often deny. We today can certainly hear them in this way if we choose. In some respects approaches to his church music have become more straightforward: as in the first two decades of the nineteenth century, when men and women started to look to art and music for the inspiration, hope and consolation they were no longer finding in religion; and as in our own day, when religion is simultaneously in the ascendant in some parts of the world and increasingly absent from many people’s lives in others. But at this distance it is easier for us to recognise the potency of his music and its ability simultaneously to reveal, even to insist upon, the unvarnished truth about human weakness – man’s thin and easily broken attachment to moral good – and to chart the redemptive way back to decency, compassion and what he called ‘good neighbourliness’.
By now we have seen that one of Bach’s monumental achievements was to show that music and language together can do things which neither can do separately. But he also proves that music sometimes surpasses language, whether written or spoken, in its capacity to penetrate to the innermost recesses of consciousness and to chip away at people’s prejudices and our sometimes toxic patterns of thinking. We can still turn to his cantatas and motets for enlightenment (with a small e) about sin, redemption, evil or repentance, with no more difficulty than we can to, say, a widely read nineteenth-century writer like Dostoevsky – someone who ‘found in the Christian religion the only solution to the riddle of existence’ and who ‘uncovered a volcanic crater in every human being’.36 Bach in fact makes it a great deal easier for us to focus on the injunction to love one’s neighbour than on all the filth and horror of the world. We emerge from performing or listening to a Bach motet chastened, maybe, but more often elated, such is the cleansing power of the music. There is not a whiff here of those ‘foul fumes of religious fervour’ that Richard Eyre sees today ‘spreading sanctimoniousness and intolerance throughout the globe, while those far-from-exclusivly Christian virtues – love, mercy, pity, peace – are choked.’37
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a Valéry saw music as constituting the ideal of poetry because of the way we experience musical works. In hearing music, he wrote, ‘I am made to generate movements, I am made to develop the space of the third or fourth dimension, I have been communicated quasi-abstract impressions of balance, of moving of balance’ (Paul Valéry, Œuvres (1960), Vol. 2, p. 704).
b It is as though on occasion he is tacitly agreeing with Beaumarchais’s disreputable quip ‘If a thing isn’t worth saying, you sing it.’ Beaumarchais was passionately fond of music and even ended his play Le Marriage de Figaro with the line tout finit par des chansons. Mozart took note. Rossini went even further. A composer, he said, ‘should not bother about the words, except to see to it that the music suits them without, however, deviating from its general character. He will operate in such a way that the words are subordinate to the music rather than the music to the words … If the composer sets out to follow the meaning of the words with equal steps, he will write music that is not expressive by itself, but is poor, vulgar, mosaic-like, and incongruous or ridiculous.’ Italian music had travelled a great distance away from Monteverdi and the old ideal of prima la parola, dopo la musica (see Chapter 4, pp. 104–5).
c In comparing the dynamics of painting and music, there is another aspect that immediately stands out. With painting the viewer is always free to pick out and scan features at will and not in some time-oriented fashion. Music, on the other hand, carries with it an innate obligation on the part of the listener to follow in real time (unless of course you are silently following it in the score): it does not permit the promiscuous dipping in and out that visual art does. Just as paintings offer us glimpses for their own purely visual sake, so music is available for listening as pure sound. But there is a difference: music creates an appetite for a resolution of a kind – that it can and will itself provide – something it shares with literature but not with painting. Without simplistic representation music presupposes an ability and willingness on the part of the listener to string together a succession of related events not dictated by the material world, nor in Bach’s case by an artificial division of it between raw nature and total artifice (see John Butt, ‘Do Musical Works Contain an Implied Listener?’, JRMA, Vol. 135, Special Issue 1 (2010)).
d Dreyfus makes the pertinent observation: how ‘music could be coaxed into a genuinely new form of commentary’ – even a critique of his age and the music of the early Enlightenment in its ‘facile hedonism’ and the rejection (as well as cooption) of music as a branch of metaphysics (Laurence Dreyfus, Bach and the Patterns of Invention (1996), pp. 242–4).
e By this I mean the way, for example, the four vocal lines were liable to intersect with one another at certain moments, and at the same time collide with the right-hand embellishments of the organ solo in the concerto’s adagio movement. Admittedly, Bach gave himself a wonderfully solid basis for the twin processes of invention and elaboration by means of an ostinato bass line heard six times in the course of the movement.
f They base their interpretation on a literal interpretation of the first word, brich, from the German verb brechen, meaning to break, as opposed to ‘deal’, or the more metaphorically implied ‘share’ in English (or partager in French). The New English Bible (1970) gives the verse as ‘Is it not sharing [my italics] your food with the hungry, taking the homeless poor into your house, clothing the naked when you meet them, and never evading a duty to your kinsfolk?’
g This interpretation does not automatically turn this into Bach’s ‘Refugee Cantata’ as some have maintained by linking it to a service to mark a cause célèbre – the banishing of around 22,000 Protestants from Salzburg by its archbishop in 1732 and their move to Prussia as part of King Frederick William I’s Peuplierungspolitik (see Tim Blanning, The Pursuit of Glory: Europe 1648–1815 (2007), p. 88). The cantata was first performed six years earlier, in June 1726, though it is conceivable, as Dürr makes clear, that this cantata could have ‘found a new purpose … anticipated by neither librettist nor composer’ when it was revived in 1732 (Dürr, The Cantatas of J. S. Bach (2005), p. 394).
h The tune itself, at least thirteenth century in origin, began as a pilgrimage hymn to the words In Gottes Namen fahren wir, chosen by Luther, or those close to him, as an appeal to God for protection, particularly at the start of a sea voyage in which Christ was the chosen captain or pilot. Other than BWV 80, Ein feste Burg, no other canonic treatment of a cantus firmus in a Bach cantata has quite the same air of monumentality or hieratic authority as this.
i According to the seventeenth-century German theorist Andreas Werckmeister, whose works were known to Bach, there was a crucial theological distinction between the pure diatonic scale of the clarino octave (composed of harmonic numbers and musical consonances), which he interpreted as ‘a mirror and prefiguration of eternal life’, and those chromatic departures from it which reflect, allegorically, man’s fallen state. In other words what we loosely refer to as ‘Baroque’ music, from the moment it set out to affect and stir the emotions (Gemütsbewegung), had, in Werckmeister’s theologically coloured view, imperfection embedded in it in terms of ‘tempered’ intervals. One has only to think of the bass aria ‘The trumpet shall sound’ from Messiah to appreciate how Handel, too, used the natural, God-designed properties of the trumpet and the prevalence of octaves and fifths to express the final stage in human redemption through Christ (see Ruth Tatlow, ‘Recapturing the Complexity of Historical Music Theories’, Eastman Theory Colloquium, 28 Sept. 2012).
j By no means confined to Bach; musicians of the time used this phrase quite widely to round off their church compositions; according to Heinrich Bokemeyer (1679–1751), ‘in their hearts they think Soli Musico Gloria, which in reality means soli carni, mundi & diabolo victoria’ (reported in Mattheson, Critica musica (1722), Part
4, Section 26, p. 344).
k Where the author and poet Blake Morrison uses these and other, similar words to describe the effect of poetry on the reader, others might make equivalent claims for the novel. Mikhail Bakhtin, for instance, in his essay ‘Discourse in the Novel’ (1934–5), suggests that, unlike all other genres which are in some way fixed and completed, the novel always brings with it the sense of a new era and comprises a living utterance which ‘cannot fail to brush up against thousands of living dialogic threads’ in any particular present (The Dialogic Imagination (1975), p. 276). Most tellingly, John Butt relates these observations to the church music of Bach, proposing that as listeners we experience a cantata or Passion ‘more like a novel in sound than a straightforward theatrical representation’. Bach ‘managed to combine traditional operatic practice with the type of active participation he would have presumed of a Lutheran congregation, thus engineering the experience as a way of cultivating faith’ (Bach’s Dialogue with Modernity (2010), p. 189).
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