Bach: Music in the Castle of Heaven

by Gardiner, John Eliot

  What seems to have happened is this. Bach, as head of the family, having directed his eldest son towards securing the organist post at the Sophienkirche, now saw a clear opening for himself in the professional employ of the Dresden Court. To this end the composition of a new Mass tailored to the talents of the court Capelle and conforming to the idioms of Mass-settings then current seemed an obvious tactic, a tactful adjunct to his request for a court title. Bach doubtless exhorted his family to make a heroic joint effort in support of his scheme. Once having completed both Kyrie and Gloria, he set them to work copying the parts directly from his autograph score. They had to be flawless, as this was to be a presentation set to be offered to the Elector. For the grand title page, the wrapper and his florid petition he thought it advisable to enlist the help of the official copyist for the council commission in Dresden, Gottfried Rausch. At the back of his mind was the hope that this would clear a way for him to make an honourable exit from the drudgery of Leipzig, or at the very least to obtain a court title to act as a hedge against further affronts by the Leipzig councilmen.

  It is only by making a careful comparison of the parts and the score that we can begin to unlock their secrets. Emanuel, his second son, then a nineteen-year-old law student at Leipzig University (though still living with his parents), was entrusted with copying out the two soprano parts. Admonished to make no error, we can follow his way of discreetly entering marker dots in his father’s autograph so as to keep his place every time he starts a new page. Then he makes a slip: midway through the Christe he arrives at a bar ending with a tied B. Both the next two lines of the autograph begin with a tied B, as it happens. Inadvertently he skips a line and is obliged to enter the missing line at the foot of the page. This was an easy mistake to make – unimportant in itself – but it could have arisen only if he were copying directly from the autograph score and not from a pre-existing set of (Leipzig) parts. It confirms therefore (besides other supporting evidence) that the Missa, if not conceived there, was carried out in Dresden and for Dresden.c

  The obvious and desirable outcome should have been a performance of this short, two-movement Mass, or Missa corta – ideally in the presence of its dedicatee, the Elector. It would have been entirely in character if Bach had prepared the ground for this by enlisting the support of his more influential colleagues and friends within the Dresden Court Capelle. But we cannot be sure that it ever materialised, or, if so, where it took place. It was liturgically appropriate for either the Sophienkirche, where son Friedemann was now ensconced,d or the Catholic Hofkirche, where the court Capelle regularly performed on solemn feast-days, complete with its troupe of operatic solo singers. There are enough features of Bach’s score and the way it resembles the large Neapolitan-style Mass-settings that were just coming into fashion in Dresden to suggest that it had been crafted with this particular ensemble in view – arias for the individual vocal soloists newly recruited from Italy in 1730 and for the several virtuoso instrumentalists within the Capelle. He himself had heard four out of five of the new castrati taking the leads in Johann Adolph Hasse’s opera Cleofide in 1731, and was thus well placed to adjust his solo music to their capabilities and vocal ranges when composing his Missa.e

  In the same way, his orchestral writing gave plenty of opportunities for displaying the stylistic versatility and the virtuosity that he admired in the court orchestra and singled out for praise in his ‘Entwurff’ (see this page). Bach would have been made aware by his friends that there had been a major shake-up of the musical Capelle since the time of his first visit in 1717, both in personnel and stylistic orientation. Not only had the entire French comedy and dance company who had served August the Strong been dismissed, but there had been a reduction in the number of instrumentalists, and only six boy choristers remained. The musical side of the liturgy was now in the hands of the court orchestra, the Musici regii operating under new regulations. With Capellmeister Hasse abroad, it was directed by Bach’s Bohemian friend, Jan Dismas Zelenka. At full strength the Dresden Hofcapelle could muster twenty-six string players to perform both operas and, on solemn occasions, music in church. This was in addition to the multiple woodwind and horns and the separate (and greatly privileged) ensemble of twelve court trumpeters (Hoftrompeter) and two timpanists. It could claim to be one of Europe’s top-ranking orchestras, but perhaps not at this particular juncture, when its members, jittery because of the recent dismissals, were submitting a flood of petitions relating to back pay and promotions to the Elector’s chancellery.f

  Tempting as it is to envisage Bach supervising a star-studded première of his embryonic B minor Mass in the congenial and well-rehearsed company of his Dresden friends, we lack all proof. It is just as likely that he was, at most, a mere spectator, and that if a Dresden performance did in fact take place, it was either Friedemann, encouraged by his father (and naturally keen to show his own credentials so soon after his appointment), who was in sole charge, or Zelenka. This notion is supported by the evidence of the continuo part, which is unusually explicit, not just in terms of figured bass, but also in providing cues for the separate voice entries – valuable, indispensable even, as a mnemonic for a continuo-director to keep a track of the performance, but totally superfluous had Bach as composer been in charge.

  Performance or no performance, there was no immediate response from the Elector. Preoccupied with issues of international diplomacy, in 1734 he moved his court to Warsaw for the next two years. Bach would just have to bide his time along with other petitioners such as Zelenka, who in any case might have felt that, having served as the acting head of the church ensemble since the 1720s, he had a prior claim. Bach nevertheless kept up the pressure by producing no fewer than eight secular cantatas in the Elector’s honour or that of his family – a none too subtle means of jogging his memory.g It took a further three years, a second letter of application and intercession by the Russian diplomat Count Keyserlingk before Bach finally received his coveted court appointment in Dresden – and even then it brought with it no financial reward sufficient to justify a move from Leipzig. His name finally appeared alongside Zelenka’s in the list of composers of church music at the Saxon and Polish courts in the Hof- und Staats-Calender of 1738. Meanwhile the combined incomes of Capellmeister Hasse and his diva wife – who for long stretches of time were absent from Dresden – amounted to sixteen times that of Bach’s Leipzig salary.

  There is an alternative scenario – plausible, too – in which the Missa did make its mark and on the very musicians with whom Bach so hoped to be associated, those of the Dresden Hofcapelle – Zelenka, Pisendel, Buffardin and others. All except Zelenka (who was then in Vienna) would have remembered Bach’s walkover victory in the rather contrived contest with Louis Marchand, the French virtuoso keyboard player, back in 1717. More recently, he had given organ recitals in 1725 and 1731 ‘in the presence of all the Court musicians and virtuosos in a fashion that compelled the admiration of everyone’.4 So they already had ample proof of his all-round talents. Regardless of whether they took part in a performance of his Mass or not, in 1733, the manuscript parts would have passed from hand to hand for scrutiny and evaluation. Normally it would have been Hasse as Capellmeister who would have been first to pass judgement on a new score; next in line came Zelenka, for some time past the most active musical director in Dresden during the declining years of Hasse’s predecessor, Johann David Heinichen. So far it has not proved possible to unravel the chain of influences in the ZelenkalBach relationship, but it looks very much as though it were two-way traffic: Zelenka impressing Bach with his performances of large-scale Neapolitan Masses by Sarro and Mancini and of his own works in a similar style; Bach returning the compliment in the way he styled his own Missa along Dresden lines; Zelenka then reciprocating with his own tribute, the Missa Sanctissima Trinitatis of 1736, which manifestly owed a great deal to Bach’s Kyrie I.

  Even the most sceptical of the Dresden Court musicians could have seen that here in Bach’s Mass w
as a work well attuned to their own house style (and even to the individual talents of their ensemble). Many of the Mass-settings they regularly performed by composers such as Lotti, Caldara, Sarro, Mancini and others, for all their opulence and grandeur, lacked musical substance. Bach’s setting extended well beyond these counterparts, and by any objective standards his Missa was on a totally different level of invention and complexity. Even in this two-movement form, it already constituted a major work in its own right, testimony to Bach’s habit of surpassing all the models he assimilated. This could be the main reason why it does not seem to have formed part of the repertoire of the court chapel.h Probably no one at that stage foresaw that it was to be just the starting-point for a Missa tota, and one of the most substantial and indeed epic of all Bach’s works. That lay some way in the future – and, arguably, the best of it was still to come.

  The first thing that would have struck the Dresden musicians was the immense seriousness and grandeur of the opening exordium of the Kyrie. They would have sensed its emergence as an impassioned de profundis – the sinner’s cry of help to a forgiving God. Choral writing on this scale was unprecedented, even in Dresden. The principal theme of Bach’s opening Kyrie begins with a graceful gesture in dotted rhythm and then promptly divides: an ascending, aspiring delineation of prayer, balanced by a responding sigh, more instrumental – like one of his two-part Inventions – than vocal. Ask any singer: it is not easy to keep alive the sense of uplift in the prayer motif while preparing for the appoggiated sigh without chopping the upper line short. The way that the solemn yet lilting fugue stretches out so naturally and coherently in a single panoramic sweep suggests that the momentum needs to be maintained, the pacing deliberate but not comatose, dignified but never plodding. For all its twists and turns of harmonic tension, the fugue subject itself stays constant throughout. Only its tailpiece gets altered, first flattened, then raised. These modifications serve as ‘episodes’ between the fugal expositions – moments for the listener to step aside and reflect before the procession moves on again. Once re-absorbed within the fugue’s development these same intervallic tags are stretched wider and wider. Like a painter allowing the brush in his hand to take temporary charge in shaping a design, one senses Bach, the born improviser, taking momentary control here: the tension is ratcheted upwards – once (bars 92–4), then a second time (99–101) even more emphatically – thrilling in performance. One’s attention is drawn to the second soprano line: they seem to be the ones generating all this collective energy. In the process it is easy to miss the fact that it is precisely their fugal entry (in the subdominant) that paves the way for the first sopranos to re-enter (on the tonic) and so to instigate the smoothly effected recapitulation. Bach has whipped up a storm. Yet he has carried all his participants safely through the start of the journey, and at the movement’s satisfying conclusion he leaves them chastened but not browbeaten.

  Next he enjoins his performers and listeners to follow that epic and polyphonic plea to the Lord with a matching – but far warmer and personal – appeal to the Son. The Christe eleison is expressed in the intimate language of a Neapolitan love-duet for two sopranos – home territory to the Dresden Court musicians – in which the singers glide over their parallel thirds and sixths in perfect euphony. No sooner is it over than the appeal to the Lord is resumed, this time with still greater urgency. The stern granite-like outlines of this Kyrie II are sculpted in a deliberately archaic style, an impression mitigated by the rhythmic drive and rich harmonic density of a four-part choral fugue. One wonders whether the Dresden professors spotted Bach’s own signature spelt out – albeit in inverted form – in its fugal subject. His own plea for forgiveness is woven into the fabric of his music, just as Rembrandt’s features peer out at us from his The Stoning of St Stephen, ‘claiming no halo of special piety’, as Nigel Spivey observes; ‘he is simply there.’5 So, in this moment, is Bach.

  No sooner has the curtain come down on this sombre penitential scene than it is raised again. We might expect the new tableau to depict the heavenly host of angels appearing to the shepherds. This, of course, is the way Handel paints it in Messiah: in ‘Glory to God’ a distant angelic battalion approaches, delivers its message and then retreats into the heavens – naive, theatrical and highly effective. But that is not Bach’s way. In his Christmas Oratorio his angelic choir will appear to consist entirely of expert contrapuntists. Here, on the contrary, he startles us with his announcement of the Gloria as a decidedly earthly dance. There is no upbeat: the music just explodes into action. With its alternation of strong and weak bars in triple time, this is clearly a celebration that is taking place not up in the skies but down here. It is more peasant stomp than dainty celestial waftings, more Bruegel than Botticelli.

  Making their first festive appearance in the Mass, the three trumpets and drums galvanise the whole ensemble. It is they who instigate – but do not efface – the exuberant swirling figuration within the rest of the band. Leading off in the ‘royal’ key of D major with trumpets was standard fare in the Saxon capital, but the writing there seldom reached this degree of sophistication, with the players swapping parts and vying with each other for stratospheric supremacy. The style Bach used to propel the choral voices into action in imitation of the trumpet theme, their ends of phrases cascading like fireworks, had no equivalent in the sort of music customarily heard in the Dresden churches. Bach, as ever, makes not the slightest concession towards vocal, as opposed to instrumental, style. He fully expects the human larynx to be able to function with exactly the same agility as lips pressed to brass tubing or fingers slammed down on wooden fingerboards.i The interjection of an occasional bar’s rest is less to give the singers a chance to breathe than for rhetorical effect: to isolate and punctuate their shouts of Gloria! A fine web of intricate contrapuntal detail is spun from the eighteen separate vocal and instrumental lines, here compressed into a mere hundred bars of vivace triple rhythm. Culminating in the swagger of a collective hemiola – a clear indication of the new unit beat – this great dance flows seamlessly into the proclamation of ‘peace on earth’.

  There are signs that Bach might once again be having mild fun at the expense of the theologians. First he invites us to celebrate the night Christ was born on earth with a festive jamboree (not, like Handel, with the angels in excelsis). Then, switching to common time, he introduces the calm prayer for peace as though led by the angels – et in terra pax. It has the hallmark of an operatic scène du sommeil in Lully’s mould: caressing and soothing in its initial syncopated outline, as phrases are exchanged between choir, upper strings and upper woodwind. It also reads beautifully as ‘eye’ music: in the autograph score the instruments seem to drift upwards away from the fixed bass pedal, like prayers floating heavenwards. We might have guessed that all this is just preparation for a grand vocal fugue, its gentle theme aspiring and its counter-subject made up of the roulades of the earlier Gloria dance – now blues-like in the way they seem to vault over the regular bar-lines and the gentle beat-to-beat punctuation of the instruments. The magic of this fugal prayer now begins to take effect. The voices conjoin to proclaim ‘good will to all men’ (bonae voluntatis) and the instruments immediately answer in assent. Even the trumpets are propelled back into action, as though to confirm the imminence of God’s gift of peace on earth.

  We or the Dresden musicians – it matters not which – have been shown how an essential part of Bach’s overall design for his Gloria is to vary the texture by exchanging public (choral) with private (solo) utterance. There are no recitatives in the Ordinary of the Mass to break these satisfying alternations of movement and scale, and Bach is very particular in the way that he indicates the intended flow and pacing of successive movements by means of pauses, double bars, the absence of both, the merging of one section into the next, or the simple injunction sequitur. For the ensuing Laudamus, despite its plural pronoun (‘we praise thee, we bless thee’, etc.), he narrows the focus here to a single singer,
an obbligato violin and the string ensemble in support. The challenge for both performer and listener is not to be flummoxed by all the ornamentation – the plethora of trills he scatters along its path. To know that he could count on the combined technical virtuosity of a violinist like Johann Georg Pisendel, the Dresden Concertmeister, and an accomplished soprano such as Faustina Bordoni (if it was indeed she who first sang the Laudamus and not one of the castrati) must have been reassuring for Bach. It was Faustina, according to Charles Burney, who ‘in a manner invented a new kind of singing, by running divisions with a neatness and velocity which astonished all who heard her’.6 Essentially the Laudamus is a simple binary folk-melody which he has decorated with garlands of improvisatory ornaments – fioretti, or ‘little flowers’, as his cousin J. G. Walther called them – meat and drink to an Italian opera-trained diva or a castrato. Success in this movement depends on the two solo performers keeping the essential ‘bones’ of the folk-melody always to the fore, on making adequate provision for breath between the phrases and on gliding effortlessly through Bach’s thicket of embellishments. In particular the solo violin needs space and time to hover high above the voice line, like Vaughan Williams’s Lark Ascending, while supported by the thermal currents – the accompanying figures of the lower strings.

  Even before this free spirit has landed, in the ensuing silence a monkish sound of men’s voices intoning Gratias agimus tibi is heard in a version of the Gregorian chant Non nobis Domine, one of the oldest canons in all Western music. Here he is re-working and transcribing the opening chorus of a cantata (BWV 29) for the Leipzig municipal elections of 1731. We can watch him adjusting a German-texted theme, eliminating its strong tonic accents (wir danken) by widening the bars into ‘breve’ units (despite the confusing and corrupt alla breve appellation) to make room for the new Latin words (Gratias agimus tibi). With the second clause – propter magnam gloriam – we are propelled forwards again into the world of Baroque figural music, now firmly locked into diatonic harmony and defined by articulate rhythms. j The whole chronological carpet of diatonic harmony – nearly 200 years of it – is being unrolled before us. The sense of arrival is complete only at that magical moment when the kettledrums thwack out dominant and tonic – always accompanied by their accomplice, the third trumpet – to underpin the bass canonic entry (bars 35–7). Bach’s three trumpets seem to be leading off into the thin ozone layer, in the same way that the limbs or gestures of Baroque painters occasionally fly off the canvas as though the frame were too small to contain the full extent of their expression.