Bach: Music in the Castle of Heaven
Page 69
The new movement, marked Vivace e Allegro,dd propels us forwards, time for only one beat per bar in the basso continuo – but enough for the dead to ‘leap from their graves in sprightly almost frisky arpeggios’.ee ‘Open wide the mind’s cage-door!’ enjoined Keats18 – and Bach does just that, leading the way in widening our understanding the mystery of the Resurrection. Coming after that searching enharmonic change, the explosive vivace return to life in the Et expecto generates colossal energy in the emphatic re-sur-rec-ti-o-nem reiterations in four-square rhythms. This is the second jubilant chorus of the Symbolum Nicenum, the fourth in the whole Mass till now, each one utterly distinctive and germane to its context.
With any other composer of his generation it might have sounded trite or, at the very least, anti-climactic, but something in his subconscious seems to have flashed a memory of earlier music perfectly suited to the mood – the second line of a chorus, ‘Steiget bis zum Himmel nauf’ (‘Soar right up to heaven’), in the second movement of BWV 120, Gott, man lobet dich in der Stille, a cantata for the inauguration of the Leipzig Town Council of 1728 or 1729. . This is no straightforward ‘parody’ but it aptly conveys the revitalisation and resurrection of souls ‘at the last trump’. Bach rifles through the material of this chorus – a four-square da capo movement – unsparingly. His task was to find a suitable sequel to the Confiteor, one proportionate to those twenty-five mysterious linking bars of adagio; but he also needs to balance that other pillar of the Symbolum which matches the opening Credo/Patrem pairing. So he pares away anything that gets in the way of this inexorable release of energy. Out go the staid formality, the chiastic scaffolding, the closing ritornello; in come eight bars of fresh material (twice), the opening ritornello now shortened and overlaid with voices, a fifth voice not merely appended but extrapolated from the constituent fabric, and 105 bars of irresistible, unrestrainable vigour. Nothing, not even the way that each choral section is enriched by the cumulative addition of instruments, is allowed to get in the way of this jubilant collective sprint to the finishing line.ff
Emanuel Bach at this point comes back into the story. Now principal harpsichordist of the Prussian Court Capelle in Berlin, he had just completed a new Magnificat setting (Wq. 215) in Potsdam in August 1749. He appears to have brought it to Leipzig, perhaps to show to his ailing father, and at least one witness claims to have heard it performed in the Thomaskirche during a Marian feast, perhaps on 2 February or 25 March 1750. Was this Emanuel’s bid (perhaps with parental prompting) to be considered his father’s successor as Thomascantor? Emanuel’s Magnificat reflects so much of his father’s influence, with its striking allusions to the latter’s Gratias and to the Et expecto conclusion of the Symbolum Nicenum. The links between his own work and his father’s Symbolum were so close that years later when he was in Hamburg he performed the two works in the same programme. The benefit concert given in aid of Hamburg’s Medical Institute for the Poor in the spring of 1786 contained, besides the works already mentioned, the aria ‘I know that my Redeemer liveth’ and the ‘Hallelujah’ chorus from Handel’s Messiah. While he would have remembered the Gratias from the time when he helped copy out the parts in Dresden in 1733, he could only have become acquainted with the Symbolum much later on and probably just prior to the composition of his own Magnificat. This opens up the possibility that he witnessed a performance of the Symbolum in Leipzig during his father’s last years. Clearly, the date of 25 August 1749 on the autograph score of Emanuel’s Magnificat provides us with a terminus ante quem for at least this portion of his father’s Mass. Also, given that he and his elder brother were apparently allowed to perform in both churches during his father’s final illness, and knowing the work so well, one cannot rule out the possibility that one of them directed sections of the B minor Mass in Leipzig.
This is all highly speculative. Beyond doubt is Emanuel’s close connection with his father’s Mass at separate stages in its assembly. He was the son who would inherit his father’s autograph score and, indeed, his fingerprints are all over it – from the innocent marker dots intended to ease his early task of copying, to the helpful bass figuring in the Credo that he added much later in life. Beyond this there are far more radical interventions: the addition of a newly composed 28-bar prelude; and changes of underlay and instrumentation, including the replacement of the (then redundant) oboes d’amore with normal oboes and with violins in the Et in spiritum.
Evidently the Symbolum Nicenum was the single segment of Bach’s Missa tota to make the greatest impression on the next generation, not just on Emanuel, but on others within Bach’s close circle of pupils, such as J. F. Agricola and J. P. Kirnberger. Emanuel Bach’s Hamburg performance in 1786 seems to have led indirectly to copies being made and circulated far and wide. One found its way to England and ended up in the hands of Charles Burney, and from him it somehow passed to Samuel Wesley, whose enthusiasm resulted in an abortive project of publishing it as a demonstration of Bach’s skill in vocal composition. Agricola, who had already copied out an early version of the opening movement (see above), referred to the alla breve notation of the Credo ‘from a great Mass by the late J. S. Bach with eight obbligato voices, namely five vocal parts, two violins, and general bass’.19 Kirnberger (who had been lent the autograph score posted to him by Emanuel Bach in 1769 with permission to copy it before returning it by prepaid post) seems to have been especially drawn to the Crucifixus and its passacaglia ground bass. He described it as a ‘ten-voice example … from a Mass by J. S. Bach, full of invention, imitation, canon, counterpoint and beautiful melody’.20 This puts one in mind of Claude Lévi-Strauss’s dictum: ‘music itself [is] the supreme mystery of the science of man’21 – a fitting epitaph for Bach’s astonishing Symbolum Nicenum.
When it comes to the final part of the Mass, opinions divide. Some scholars have cast aspersions on the way Bach assembled it, and suggest a marked diminution in its creative originality.gg But how can this be? True, there are tell-tale signs clearly visible in the autograph of effort and precipitation, of notes doggedly pressed on to the page, and at movements’ end of a certain shakiness or indecision as to what movement came next. One could account for this in a number of ways: Bach’s unfamiliarity with this closing section of the Catholic liturgy; his failing eyesight; or his determination to complete it, maintaining all the while his high ideals for it as a statement in music of the universal church. But nothing, least of all the recycling process extending to all its component movements, betrays a diminution in quality or intensity, as we shall soon see. Bach was working in a void: there were no Lutheran models for these last segments of the Mass to guide him. From his own library shelves he could have referred to Bassani’s Masses, which end with the Osanna (as sequel to the Sanctus); or to Palestrina’s, which did indeed reach the end, completing the Ordinary in unruffled a cappella polyphony. In a sense, Bach was a victim of his own success. Having set himself standards of scale, proportion and duration in his original Missa, which he then complemented so majestically with the Symbolum, he now had the task of sustaining the dramatic momentum and epic proportions, while putting together a final sequence of movements, unified and smoothly interlocked. In this he succeeds triumphantly.
The idea of opening the last part of the Mass with his great Sanctus of 1724 – one of the most flamboyant of all his D major choruses and an angelic clanging of church bells in celebration of the final victory over death – came to him, as suggest above (this page) with the peace celebrations at Christmas 1745. Judging by the quantity of Bach’s own revivals of it over the years, he valued it highly. In its new position, coming hard on the heels of the immense Symbolum, there is not the slightest risk of bathos, as every musician and listener can attest. If we might have questioned the function of the individual arpeggiated upward riffs at the conclusion of the Et expecto, the way they contrasted with the long-noted imitative exchanges of the vocal lines and then fused in the final section as everyone lunged to burst the finishing tape, the
answer is surely to be found in this sequel – the Sanctus, with its angelic clanging of church bells in celebration of the final victory over death. Its very scoring entails an augmentation and expansion of forces used hitherto: trinities of trumpets, oboes (a third oboe joining in for the first time) and upper strings are now joined by a double trinity of voice lines (despite Bach’s new way of grouping them in pairs). Memory of the sixfold wings of the seraphim in Isaiah (6:2–3) may have suggested to him this new sixfold scoring: ‘with twain he covered his face, with twain he covered his feet, and with twain he did fly’.hh
Whatever the source of his inspiration, Bach provides us with the most monumental music we have heard so far to convey the majesty of God, and he does so with a kind of Byzantine or Venetian splendour. Bach evidently intended his Sanctus to be sung and played by angelic forces divided among five different groupings, and, in the case of the vocal basses, iron-lunged heroes capable of imitating a gigantic peal of bells or an organ diapason. With the sequel Pleni sunt coeli, however, he brings us back on to terra firma. This is not the same world of peasant round dances of his Gloria; instead it is as though a group of tenors have been thrown into the ring to celebrate the glory of God’s creation by dancing a vigorous passepied. The regular one-in-a-bar swing of the rhythms is varied by hemiolas, and the melismatic runs for the voice lines hint at the possibility of ticklish groupings (of three times three) starting on a syncopation and crossing the bar-line before ‘righting’ themselves with a huge single arc and flourish.
One has to admit that Bach’s division of this final section of his Mass is slightly peculiar. Yet, even in this last phase of his creative life, when he was much concerned with completing cyclical and ‘speculative’ works, he never conceived of his vocal and texted compositions as standing outside the possibilities of performance, though this may have meant restricting them to shorter coherent units. A glance at his autograph score reveals that he subdivided his Mass into a fourfold physical structure: Missa (in other words the Kyrie/Gloria pairing), Credo, Sanctus and Osanna/Benedictus/Agnus Dei – one that conforms neither to the Catholic five-fold Ordinary nor to common Lutheran usage. As Robin A. Leaver explains, within the Lutheran liturgy the first three segments could be performed independently, while parts of the fourth could not.22 The Agnus Dei could be performed as an independent movement (and even sung along with the Sanctus during the distribution of the sacrament), but the Osanna and Benedictus were not separable from the Sanctus.
Obviously when the Mass is performed in its entirety, Bach’s fourfold division disappears automatically. But, in the event that the work is performed sectionally, the Sanctus, with its glittering conclusion of Pleni sunt coeli, can stand magnificently alone (just as it did originally in 1724 and in some subsequent revivals), while the final five-movement sequence also makes for a satisfactory unit, its Benedictus – enclosed in a chamber-like intimacy by the Osanna choruses – comprising the centre of a double-choir sandwich. Isolating the Sanctus in this way for purely functional purposes did not disassociate it from the final sequence, to which it is artistically and structurally bound and thematically linked. Leaver confirms that the only reason the last two sections of the manuscript score exist in this shape is because of the pre-existence of the separate Sanctus, and that conceptually they should be seen as one complete section – Sanctus/Osanna/Benedictus/Agnus Dei – forming a symmetrical pattern similar to those of the first two segments:
Sanctus
Osanna
Benedictus
Osanna
Agnus Dei
Lutherans with their respect for the musical traditions of Catholicism could condone the reference in the Credo to unam sanctam catholicam et apostolicam ecclesiam – so long as, in the words of the theologian Johann Benedikt Carpzov, the ‘ecclesiam catholicam is not to be understood as the Roman-papist church … but as the universal community of saints [or believers]’.23ii
Either on its own or, better still, in context, this final sequence is riveting and suitably conclusive. The technique that Bach adopts in all four sections of the Mass – that of contrasting choruses and arias, movements in stile antico with others in a more contemporary style, emphasising, indeed polarising, both ‘public’ and ‘private’ aspects of the Eucharist celebration – is never more in evidence than here. The very principle of contrast – of sense as much as of style – that has characterised the Mass-setting to this point is now pushed to greater extremes: moving from unbridled joy (Osanna), to a wistful quest for serenity (Benedictus), and to the heartfelt plea (Agnus). The two arias – Benedictus and Agnus – are still more intimate and chamber-like than their predecessors in the earlier movements, and the flanking choruses if anything still more opulent (the Osanna, now for double choir, in eight parts and the orchestra neatly divided into twelve real parts) and uplifting (the final Dona nobis pacem).
Each of the final arias is compelling. By showing the pilgrim’s endeavour to pursue and complete his life’s journey, the Benedictus postulates the type of dualism we have encountered before in the cantatas. In the serene (and almost disembodied) voice of the tenor, Bach evokes the ‘blessed’-ness of he ‘who cometh in the name of the Lord’; and, simultaneously, in the angularities of the flute melody he insists that the path of life is never smooth (one is reminded of der saure Weg wird mir zu schwer, which he set so expressively in his motet BWV 229, Komm, Jesu, komm). There are of course moments when this is eased and the flute takes on a consoling role: like Virgil guiding and protecting Dante on his journey through Hell and Purgatory in Botticelli’s second parchment drawings for the Divine Comedy, his melody seems to embrace his travelling companion.jj In contrast to the Benedictus, the interweaving between voice and unison violins in the Agnus Dei is inextricable. Given the trouble it cost him – in one of his very last vocal compositions – to reduce an eight-line-stanza aria-setting to one of merely eight words, Bach must have prized the nostalgic alto aria ‘Ach, bleibe doch’, from his Ascension Oratorio (BWV 11), very highly, although it is likely that both versions go back to a lost original. He discards slightly more than half the cantata material, but adds four new bars for the first vocal entry (in canon with the violins) and eight for the second, ending on a dramatic fermata. Here we find him returning to the sighing figure – slurred pairs of conjunct notes – which we first heard in Kyrie I and which recurred to enrich the expression of the Qui tollis, the Et incarnatus and the Crucifixus, superimposed over a similar regular, punctuated rhythm in the bass. His mechanism for binding this heart-stopping music into the overall scheme is an extreme, angular re-shaping of the final instrumental ritornello, the violins landing on an open-string bottom G. It provides the perfect link to the ensuing Dona nobis pacem, which, in strict liturgical practice, belongs to the text of the aria; but, by detaching it in this way, Bach seems to imply a change in the Godhead being addressed.
Even this, the final Dona nobis, has come in for musicological shouts of foul play just because it repeats note for note the earlier Gratias. There are no grounds for this. It was a long-standing Lutheran custom to end the main service with ‘Verleih uns Frieden gnädiglich’, Luther’s version of the antiphon Da pacem, Domine. In re-using the music of the Gratias as the summation of the entire Mass, Bach was connecting with the Leipzig tradition of ending the Eucharist with a collect of thanksgiving – ‘Wir danken dir’ – taken from Luther’s Deutsche Messe, published in 1526. A hymn of thanks is thus converted into a universal plea for peace, followed by a prayer of thanksgiving. Bach’s decision conformed to precedent in Catholic Dresden as well and justifies its place with convincing naturalness – at least in performance. Whereas in the Mass Ordinary the Dona nobis text belongs to the Agnus Dei (coming at the end of the third phrase), it was common in Dresden to set this text to a closing chorus with music derived from either the Kyrie or Gloria. This served as a recapitulating and unifying device – Dresden Mass composers such as Caldara and Durante, whom Bach had studied, made a practice of repeat
ing the music of an earlier movement in the Dona nobis. What also seems to bother the purists is what they regard as slovenly text adaptation: whereas the two clauses of the Gratias are perfectly adjusted to Bach’s contrasted fugue subjects – (1) Gratias agimus tibi (‘We give thanks to Thee … ’) and (2) propter magnam gloriam tuam (‘ … for Thy great glory’) (a perfect transposition from the original cantata composition which served as its model, BWV 29, Wir danken dir, Gott) – here there is only a single clause, Dona nobis pacem, to be split between the two subjects, an infelicitous grammatical error. Or is it?
Bach cuts the ground from under his critics’ feet by creating a new dualism: Dona nobis pacem, followed by a re-ordering of the words, pacem dona nobis. The appropriateness of this solution is immediately apparent in performance – nothing, simply nothing but the Gratias music can follow at this point – provided of course that due adjustment is made to the style and mood of delivery of the second phrase. For where the earlier propter magnam was vigorous and assertive, the pacem dona nobis is lyrical and gentle, suggesting a dignified restraint in its vocal delivery. As befitting a universal plea for peace, its melismas are equally suited to dona (‘give’) and to pacem (ipeace’). The solid rock-like steps of the initial fugue subject, which have an exorable forward momentum in the Gratias – a foretaste of the finale to Mozart’s ‘Jupiter’ symphony – are softened and their edges rounded off in the Dona nobis. In both versions, Bach holds back the entrance of the trumpets and drums – which represent the final battalion recruited to acknowledge God’s glory (Gratias) and the most imposing and eloquent petitioners of peace (Dona nobis). It is an inspired decision.