Bach: Music in the Castle of Heaven

by Gardiner, John Eliot

  Several years before, he had embarked on an intensive period of study of stile antico techniques that in his view were indispensable for use in a Mass setting. The first fruits of it are to be found in the organ works of Clavier-Übung III, published in 1739: three austere and densely textured organ chorales representing the Kyrie and a six-part de profundis, Aus tiefer Not. In the sharpest of contrasts (reminiscent of his Missa of 1733), a Gloria was set as a brilliant, nonchalant-sounding Italian trio. Now on his desk lay a selection of settings for these later portions of the Mass. Pride of place was given to Palestrina, whose Missa sine nomine he had transcribed and performed in 1742. But there were other models by more recent composers, his immediate predecessors – Caldara, Durante, Lotti, Kerll and at least two by Zelenka.t All these composers had been attracted to Palestrina’s polyphony in one way or another, and had found ways of integrating elements of it into their own style. There was also Pergolesi’s exquisite Stabat Mater, which, with infinite patience and manifest effort, Bach was to re-work with a German text, BWV 1083, Tilge, Höchster, meine Sünden, in 1746–7. These served as his guides and as points of departure for his increasing interest in setting the Credo polyphonically. In particular six Mass-settings (encompassing a Kyrie/Gloria/Credo/Sanctus sequence) by Giovanni Battista Bassani attracted his attention. He transcribed all of them, and into each of Bassani’s Credo sections (which begin Patrem omnipotentem) Bach inserted the first line, Credo in unum Deum, a sign that he may have performed it sometime between 1747 and 1748. Bach composed a new sixteen-bar intonation to the Credo of the fifth of Bassani’s Masses (BWV 1081) – with an ostinato bass line in apparent anticipation of his own opening Credo. Closer still there is also an intriguing version – perhaps a dummy run – for his own Symbolum Nicenumu but a tone lower in G, which survives in the hand of his pupil Johann Friedrich Agricola.

  The next stage was to refer back to his earlier compositions, both sacred and secular. It is extraordinary how unerringly Bach’s memory store seems to have guided him to the perfect choice from pre-existing movements. It is as though all the possibilities latent in the musical material suddenly flashed on to the screen of his mind, only reaching their full potential through the process of selection. In their effort to trace a stem-like genealogy for the B minor Mass, scholars show signs of uneasiness with Bach’s way of assembling it.v While they readily accept that his tidy mind favoured cyclical structures, and that from about 1730 onwards there was a gradual shift in his output from German-texted cantatas to Latin works, it was the recycling of perhaps as many as twenty movements in the Mass which bothered them, the way that he resorted so readily – beginning with the Christmas Oratorio and culminating now in this of all works – to ‘parody’ technique. But why should not the eclectic, slow-burning origins of the Mass, instead of making it suspect from an academic viewpoint, be precisely one clue to its greatness? After all, Bach was not a compulsive borrower, like Handel, who famously needed the spark of another composer’s idea in order to fire up his imagination. Plagiarism may have been widely considered an acceptable literary and musical convention in the eighteenth century, but Bach, unlike Handel, did not need to turn other men’s rough pebbles into diamonds.w As we have seen, Bach’s was the classic method. First you study your models – transcribe them, add layers of preface or commentary to them, and then assimilate them so fully into your creative processes that, at a stroke, you have a vocabulary with a multiplicity of techniques and styles at your fingertips, all in the cause of being as comprehensive and all-encompassing as you possibly can. The extraordinary stylistic reach and wide range of Bach’s sources in no way diminishes his achievement in having synthesised his models into such a unified whole.

  The most striking aspect of the opening of his Symbolum Nicenum is its great hieratic force of delivery. In performance from the moment that the tenors launch into the Gregorian intonation we should be pinned back in our seats. Bach has chosen the local Saxon version of the chant (as published by Vopelius in 1682) and articulates it in long notes intoned over an active walking bass: an unequivocal affirmation of faith and a very modern, tonal underpinning to the most ancient formulation of Christian belief available to him.x Bach ends his first section with a dazzling treatment of the chant, whereby he rapidly piles no fewer than seven of them on top of one another, each beginning on a different beat of the bar and all within the time it takes for the vocal bass to deliver a complete statement of the theme.

  The formal design of his Symbolum Nicenum is still more tautly structured than the preceding Gloria that it needs to complement in both scale and content. The two outermost choruses are couched in a hybrid style, half stile antico, half Baroque, in the way that they are harmonically conceived and supported by their independent bass line. Two separate but interlocking patterns give it structure. The first scheme, organised on the basis of chiastic symmetry, matches that of the preceding Gloria and is underpinned by tonality. In this way the Crucifixus stands at the apex of an equilateral triangle which has at its base the twinned choruses: Credo/Patrem omnipotentem at the outset, and the Confiteor/Et expecto pairing at its conclusion. Christ’s Crucifixion, according to Luther’s theologia crucis (‘theology of the Cross’), is the event to which the belief of the true Christian is orientated, the means by which he can perceive God as a result of Christ’s sacrifice and suffering. But this is not reflected in Bach’s first plan for the Symbolum: initially he absorbed the words of the Et incarnatus into the soprano/alto duet Et in unum. This, in turn, shifted the pivotal emphasis on to the Et resurrexit in line with Catholic practice. The autograph score reveals that sometime after completing the Crucifixus, Bach changed his mind. To rectify the emphasis on Catholicism in the structural alignment, he was even willing to jettison the expressive word-setting of ‘and was made man’ and to re-apportion the text to bring it into line with Lutheran orthodoxy. His purpose was to create a balanced and unified work, one with fluent transitions and deliberate contrasts between the arias and add a still greater weight to the choral movements.

  But there is an alternative way to interpret the design of the Symbolum, one in which it falls into three segments, each culminating in a brilliant D major chorus featuring trumpets and drums. These segments coincide with Luther’s three articles of belief: that of ‘Creation’ (the Credo/Patrem omnipotentem pairing), that of ‘Redemption’ (the Et in unum/Et incarnatus/Crucifixus/Et resurrexit sequence) and that of ‘Sanctification’ (the Et in spiritum extending as far as the Et expecto).12 The new division overrides, but does not contradict, the chiastic structure. Luther’s first article ‘becomes flesh’ in the second (in other words, in Christ’s death and resurrection), and the eschatological events of the second article are re-enacted symbolically through baptism in the third. This may sound unduly complicated, and of course through Bach’s treatment it is characteristically ingenious. But the listener, carried along by the natural flow of Bach’s chain of narrative movements – those great successive choruses in triple time (Et incarnatus, Crucifixus and Et resurrexit) – will not necessarily be aware of the huge stylistic shifts that are taking place from one movement to the next, nor of their unusual provenance. For example, the middle movement, the Crucifixus, with its extreme anguish, has its origins in the earliest music of Bach’s to be absorbed into the Mass – his Weimar cantata BWV 12, Weinen, Klagen, Sorgen, Zagen, composed thirty-five years earlier, in 1714. Bach’s re-working of this powerful passacaglia is outwardly minimal, but extraordinarily apposite: he adds a four-bar instrumental prelude, and two flutes to vary the texture and to give a pendulum swing to the rhythms of the mournful sarabande; strings are reduced from five to four parts; the ground bass is now pulsated by means of bow vibrato (six crotchets per bar, in place of the three minims per bar); and the passacaglia cycles are grouped in subtly changed ways, creating tension at different points in the ostinato progression.y Whether by substituting and repeating Crucifixus for the fourfold Weinen, Klagen, Sorgen, Zagen (the opening sectio
n of the cantata) he improved the underlay is a matter of taste.z Indisputably compelling, on the other hand, is the conclusion’s five modulatory bars (which seem to symbolise the lowering of Christ’s body into the tomb) in which the choir is left descending quietly to its lowest tessitura, accompanied only by the continuo. In this, its thirteenth repetition of the ostinato pattern, the bass line swerves off unpredictably and with a surge in dramatic intensity.

  It has been suggested that the Et resurrexit began life as a lost secular ode (BWV Anh. I 9), which originally started with the words Augustus [lebet] and was performed alfresco in front of the Rathaus in Leipzig to mark the birthday of the Elector Friedrich August 1 on 12 May 1727. This would account for the courtly elegance that marks it out from all the other triple-metre choruses in the Mass – the rising opening motif and the circular triplet figure (associated with the word Sterne / ‘stars’) which stand metaphorically for the rise of August the Strong (‘Disperse, you fair stars! The reigning sun is rising before us’).13 From the way the voices immediately proclaim and lead off in this stately polonaise with its throbbing dance pulse, one would not necessarily guess what a prominent role would be given to the orchestra. Bach assigns no fewer than five ritornelli to his orchestra, with witty and delicate exchanges between the instruments. Yet, paradoxically, the most virtuosic and essentially instrumental figuration is reserved for the voices: in the fiery coloratura melismas of Et resurrexit and cujus regni, and a devilish and acrobatic Et iterum for the bass. In performance the presence of conjunct semiquavers strongly suggests inégale treatment – that characteristically French way of gracing a line with a rhythmic swing, a feature which would have appealed to August the Strong as a devotee of French Baroque style, though perhaps less to his son, who much preferred Italian music.aa

  By far the newest and most progressive music here is that for the Et incarnatus; yet, remarkably, it was a last-minute addition. In Christoph Wolff’s view it could be the final completed musical movement that Bach composed.14 Nothing, not even the sublime Qui tollis that in some ways it resembles, can compare with it for simplicity of design allied to such profundity of expression. The idea for the chain of figuration in the unison violins (a detached quaver followed by two pairs of upward-resolving appoggiaturas) may have come to Bach in 1744–6 while transcribing Pergolesi’s Stabat Mater (the ‘Quis est homo, qui non fleret’ section), where it is repeated nine times in seven successive bars of music linked to the theme of self-questioning.bb But before meekly ticking the box of an external prompt (as might be in the case of a Handel) we should remember a similar procedure in the opening chorus of his cantata BWV 101, Nimm von uns, Herr (see this page), where a persistent three-note ‘sighing’ figure is tossed between upper strings and oboes in the context of a sombre contemplation of humanity’s need for redemption for its ‘countless sins’. There appears to be a direct interweaving of the themes of divine incarnation and the paramount need for redemption made explicit in Bach’s self-referral, one that exposes the ambiguities of meaning in the art of music itself. For the contemplative stitches that Mary seems to be sewing in her tapestry can also be interpreted as emblems of sorrows to come. Bach might want us to reflect that, in the very act of becoming incarnate, Christ took on ‘the grave punishment and grave distress’ cited in the text of BWV 101/i. The Alpha and Omega of his life on earth is here inscribed.

  Nothing to do with Pergolesi, however, and entirely Bach’s own invention, is the movement’s conclusion, in which, after forty-four bars, the hypnotic symmetry of the Credo is fractured. For the first time the bass line takes up the ‘weeping’ violin motif and develops a mini three-part canon with the two violins as they drift downwards. Simultaneously and moving upwards, a second three-part canon is formed among the three highest voices to signal ‘and was made man’: et homo fac … (before settling back again on) … tus est. It is not simply that, as Wilfrid Mellers noticed, the equilibrium between negative and positive tones, in these concluding bars, is wonderfully subtle.15 Nor is it that the announcement of Christ’s Incarnation and his gentle placement on this earth acquires a sudden radiance via the tierce de Picardie (in B major). It is that the ensuing silence encapsulates the supreme mystery of Bach’s music – pregnant with a sense both of anticipation and of lost innocence, like a childhood faculty miraculously restored. To me it is on a par with the startling midpoint silence in his early Actus tragicus (see this page).

  The text of the Ordinary of the Mass is not every composer’s idea of a perfect libretto, least of all the section following all this vivid narrative drama. Tovey described it as ‘the most unmusical part of the Nicene Creed’. As he says, ‘after we have been stirred to the depths by those miracles of Christianity which all can recognise though none can pretend to understand, we are now asked to find music for the controversial points that were settled at Nicaea by the theologians.’16 He goes on wittily to compare composers’ different solutions to ‘this really appalling problem’: setting everything to equally attractive music (Palestrina); blatantly resorting to the clichés of opera buffa (Mozart); or ducking the issue altogether (Beethoven) by introducing enthusiastic shouts of Credo!, which almost manage to obliterate the gabbled delivery of the text with all its thorny theological complexities. Bach, on the other hand, seems to be not in the least fazed by Tovey’s (‘really appalling’) problem. When a catalogue of doctrinal beliefs is itemised for congregational assent (and could all too easily degenerate into hectoring theology), he hits on solutions that ensure the momentum never sags. Bach had already exploited the tension between Gregorian chant-derived objectivity and contemporary dance-driven Baroque form in his two opening movements to brilliant effect. Now, faced with the words Confiteor unum baptisma (‘I acknowledge one baptism’), he sets them in motet-like polyphony, but suddenly cuts into it sharply with a version of the chant given out in long notes and in strict canon by the basses and altos. At its completion the tenors initiate a half-speed version of the same theme, still more stentorian in the way it obtrudes from the texture like an exposed beam or structural girder. Then, without any warning, the forward momentum is halted and the counterpoint dissolves: the throbbing vigour has dropped to a barely perceptible pulse. The vocal lines are collapsed into a slow stretch of probing and unstable bars and a series of murky modulations, pausing on the word peccatorum. This is a maze from which there seems to be no egress.

  At this point, one feels, the music could go in any direction and seems passive, waiting for a fresh impulse. Even with the help of C. P. E. Bach’s annotations in his father’s full score it is hard to decipher exactly what Bach intended here. Doubt has suddenly been cast over the very possibility of our sins being remitted. The words change to ‘and I hope for the resurrection of the dead’, but the music seems anything but optimistic. With the apparent crumbling of the whole doctrinal edifice, we have arrived at a most precarious stage in Bach’s Mass. A shadow passes over this illuminated missal, a disintegration and collapse of momentum, a place where expertise in learned counterpoint counts for little. The harmony veers off course, first to B minor before plummeting towards the remote key of E minor (regarded as the key of ‘deepest distress, of brooding despair, of blackest depression, of the most gloomy condition of the soul’,17 and rarely used in Bach’s day because it clashed horribly with the way keyboard instruments were tuned).

  Here is also one of those rare instances when his defences seem to be down and we are privy to his vulnerability and doubts – as to the likelihood of this momentous transformation. Can he look forward to the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come, or was the exemplary advocacy of the ars moriendi we encountered in the cantatas just a brave front? There is so much at stake here: the horrors of man’s transgressions and the need of redemption to lift us out of our fallen state. This could be one of the few times Bach felt Luther’s terror of death and found a way, perhaps even a need, to express it in music. How he deals with it will be critical to the success of the
work and perhaps to his own future. It is painfully clear from the autograph score that Bach had a gigantic tussle with this pivotal moment. The page is besmirched with emphatic crossings-out and revisions to the inner parts. The bass descends chromatically, but at the last moment swerves away from E minor and comes to a halt on the dominant of D (bar 137). The sopranos inch their way forward to a tentative C. This is mysteriously – and enharmonically – transformed into a B, an example of that place where in an instant one passes from one realm of existence to another.cc

  Experience of performing the church cantatas reveals how brilliantly, even on a regular basis, Bach was able to interpret these dark moments, and how resourceful he could be at guiding the listener back to the path of faith and light – never more so than here, the eschatological crossroads of the entire Mass. Struggling to find the most appropriate chordal sequence (which anticipates some of Beethoven’s more probing harmonic expressions) Bach seizes this moment to convey, in Wilfrid Mellers’s phrase, that ‘tremor of fear and dubiety’ which any of us, himself included, might be feeling at this point. Those confident affirmations of Credo which prefaced nine tenths of the articles of the Nicene Creed have given way to progressively weaker verbs – to Confiteor (‘I acknowledge’) and now to et expecto (‘and I look for’). Bach may have set Confiteor on a par with Credo for sureness in affirmation, but not when it comes to et expecto. This is the only time in his Mass where he provides two completely opposed settings of the same phrase of the text. First he conveys the shock and horror of realisation: the full extent of man’s transgressions that have necessitated the Incarnation and the atonement by means of Christ’s Crucifixion. Next he evokes the moment of death in sleep (as in Der Tod ist mein Schlaf … that we encountered in cantatas BWV 95 and 125); then the first tentative ‘hope in’ (by no means yet ‘belief in’) the resurrection of the dead. This is the stage at which we might discern a parallel with St Paul’s mysterious moment when ‘we shall all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye’ (I Corinthians 15:51–2). This then leads to the conviction – his conviction – that ‘the dead shall be raised incorruptible’. At this point – ‘at the last trump’ – the dam finally breaks: et expecto now becomes credo resur-rectionem mortuorum.