Bach: Music in the Castle of Heaven

by Gardiner, John Eliot

  Let us take stock. We have identified several starting-points and perhaps as many as four punctuation points marking the development and composition of the B minor Mass. Starting with the Dresden Missa of 1733, there is the ‘war trauma’ hypothesis that brought the Gloria and Sanctus movements together at Christmas-time in 1745. This is followed by Emanuel’s last visits to his father and the (rather remote) possibility of partial performances in Leipzig in 1749–50. None of these wayside markers is in itself definitive proof of the precise moment when Bach decided to complete his Mass. While it is possible that the project took root in his mind very early on and that before completing it he felt he needed to re-educate himself in stile antico techniques before committing himself to paper, it is also conceivable that he needed a specific occasion to focus his mind and to move on to the final stage in the process of composition and assimilation.

  The final piece in the puzzle takes us back to Dresden. It has been suggested that he may have seen a possible opening for his Mass in the anticipated celebrations for the inauguration of the new Hofkirche in Dresden.24 The cornerstone had been laid in 1739; and, judging from a landscape view of Dresden by Bernardo Bellotto (known as Canaletto the Younger) painted in 1748, the Hofkirche was nearing completion, its bell tower still encased with scaffolding. Was this the occasion that Bach was looking for? If so, it is supported by the feverish haste evident in the clumsy, effortful handwriting of the last section of the Mass. But if his idea was to present it for performance as part of the dedication celebrations, this was not to be. For, besides his failing eyesight and the two cataract operations carried out by the English oculist Sir John Taylor in March/April 1750, it has been suggested that Bach was suffering from untreated diabetes. Though he rallied for a while, he suffered a stroke on 20 July and eight days later he died.

  The Hofkirche meanwhile was not finally completed until the following year. Not without a certain irony, it was his old friend Hasse whose much shorter Mass in D was performed at the time of its inauguration. We saw that Bach’s Symbolum might have owed something to Zelenka’s Masses. This is as nothing compared to the close dependence of Hasse on Bach – particularly in the opening of the Credo and in the Et incarnatus of his Mass in D. Forkel tells us that ‘Hasse and his wife, the celebrated Faustina … also [came] several times to Leipzig and admired [Bach’s] great talents.’25 Perhaps Hasse had after all clapped eyes on the early sections of the Missa back in 1733 at the time of its presentation. In his later visits to Bach in Leipzig, Hasse would have been able to examine, or conceivably hear, the later portions of Bach’s B minor Mass. As an astute professional, Hasse was ideally placed to appreciate that at the moment of its completion Bach had succeeded in formulating a comprehensive survey and a unique synthesis of all that he considered to be the best in his own church music, as well as that of his predecessors and contemporaries; in short, that it was unsurpassed and unsurpassable. At the same time he would have seen Bach’s Mass as a practical working score eminently suited to performance. The only thing lacking was a complete set of parts. But it was not Hasse’s style to pass over a prestigious opportunity to air music of his own. Were his references to it in his Mass in D, and in a subsequent Requiem Mass he wrote at the time of the death of his patron Friedrich August II in 1763, conscious gestures of homage and debt to Bach?

  None of this rules out the possibility that had Bach lived long enough to direct or witness a complete performance of his Mass, say in Dresden in 1751, he would have continued to revise and make changes to it. For, unlike a scientist who repeats his experiments to make his work unassailable – and with the aim of getting the exact same results each time – Bach did not get the chance to submit his Mass to equivalent tests. To view it therefore as a static object, a summary and repository for one man’s human thoughts and actions, even as an absolute statement of his faith comparable to that in his two Passions, is but one way. Another is to see it as part of a seamless process of self-correction and self-definition that never reached – perhaps never could reach – a state of finality. It is only in performance that the essential mobility of meaning contained within its music can be released and savoured. And yet Bach’s Mass can and certainly does stand up to repeated ‘testing’ in performance. He assembled it over time, absorbed into it some of his earliest musical ideas, and then concluded it in such an ineffable way – demonstrating his ‘habit of perfection’ – that this could have been his way of saying, ‘I’m off now from this planet; my work is done. I leave you here with a pure and beautiful idea, and the expression of that idea is my gift to the world, and my ancestors are part of it, too’ – a kind of Nunc dimittis, in other words.

  But we can see from the reactions of his son Emanuel, and of his pupils Agricola and Kirnberger, that their admiration for the master’s ‘Great Mass’ was more technical and theoretical than aesthetic or philosophical. The truth is that the cultural milieu which Bach was leaving behind at his death was not yet ready for the degree of independence of thought and conception that he manifested here. We are his successors and the beneficiaries of his vision. Every time we perform it marks just the latest point in the work’s continuing and continuous unfolding.

  Performance is a creative physical enactment, one that achieves the provisional completion and realisation of a musical work only as a result of its being ‘re-composed’ or ‘re-painted’ in that particular instant. Part of our role as interpreters is to beckon to the listener, drawing him into a responsive environment so that he becomes privy to the construction and unwrapping of the creative act in which we are engaged. And here it is important to distinguish between the materials of performance – the instruments, be they ‘modern’, ‘conventional’ or ‘period’ – and the people who play them. Of course those of us who have learnt to play or direct period instruments and listened to what they can tell us feel that we stand a rather better chance of re-entering and inhabiting Bach’s sound world than was possible when we set out thirty-five or so years ago. An ensemble of period instruments played by expert virtuosi – a whole orchestra, no less, accompanying equally accomplished solo singers stepping out from a choir – carries with it a colossal element of excitement and zing. The performance then becomes a communal rite, one built on complicity and trust; a willingness to adjust and blend on the part of all the participants must be present for it to succeed and for the shared vision to be realised.

  The primary role of the conductor is to identify and transmit that vision to all those involved. At every instant he needs to know where the music is headed; and he has to be able to convey to each musician how individual lines fit into the overall pattern. He has to ensure that everyone’s antennae are operational and capable of responding to any new impulse at any given moment, while at the same time encouraging the freedom necessary for everyone, but particularly for the solo players and singers, to contribute to the performance. The skill lies in keeping the music’s glue, and in making every note urgent and fresh. Achieving the sense of being caught up in a shared experience is crucial to the potency and impact of this re-creative process.

  Sometimes this falls short, and a precious opportunity is missed; as musicians we then fail to engage the audience or to draw them in as participants, not just hearing, but ‘receiving’ and responding. But when we succeed – when technical skill adequate to meet even the stiffest of Bach’s challenges is no longer an issue, when the calibration of vocal and instrumental forces is optimal, when a coordination of style, a matching of timbres and a mutual understanding of everyone’s role is achieved – that is the point when interpretation can really begin.

  Bach, in the breadth of his vision, grasped and then revealed to us his conception of the universe as a harmonious whole; yet he was composing at a time when the breakdown of social unity was well advanced and the old structures of religion were fast being eroded by Enlightenment thinkers. Revealing as the work of recent musicologists has proved to be in tracing the varied provenance of the Mass and in uncov
ering more and more signs of its having been recycled from earlier compositions, it carries a certain danger: it could diminish Bach’s music to a bundle of influences, to a collection of parts that are less than the whole; whereas it is precisely his ability to transform material and weld it into new patterns, and his willingness and courage to strike out on his own, regardless of fashion, which is so inspiring about the B minor Mass. Without this realisation we run the risk of missing the driving force behind it: Bach’s resolve not merely to mime the gestures of belief, nor to interpret doctrine via music of his own invention, but to extend the very range of music’s possibilities and through such exploration to make sense of the world in which he lived and whatever lay beyond it.

  Even to sceptical and agnostic minds, Bach’s B minor Mass radiates a recognisable and powerful spirituality, one that does not rely on cre-dal orthodoxy, odd though that might appear. His art celebrates the fundamental sanctity of life, an awareness of the divine and a transcendent dimension as a fact of human existence. Interpreting it is all about the drama of discovering the revelation inscribed in each movement, and is indissolubly fused to his personal style – the inner poet hiding in the recesses of his counterpoint. Above all, as musicians you can never afford to be earthbound – to plod, in other words: it has to dance. Ultimately his style is also vision. Misjudge the style and you miss the vision.

  To conduct his Mass is to be filled with a tremendous sense of anticipation: you know as you embark on a journey with and through his music that you are going to be exposed to a heightened sense of consciousness – of the role of music, of its capacity to affect and change people’s lives, of its power to reflect and even to mitigate the way people respond to contemporary events. Then, as you approach the final straight of this great adventure and the trumpets soar one last time to announce the homecoming, you realise that Bach’s final prayer for peace, Dona nobis pacem, is both an invocation and a resounding confirmation of its immanence.

  * * *

  a Only a few years later Caspar Rüetz, the cantor in Lübeck, complained that a huge pile of church music that he had inherited from his predecessors had been reduced by half by these methods: ‘who will give anything for it, other than someone who needs scrap paper, for nothing is more useless than old music’ (Kerala J. Snyder, Dieterich Buxtehude: Organist in Lübeck (2007), p. 318).

  b The Saxon Court is said to have had one of the best-trained orchestras in Europe in the first part of the century, a reputation which drew musicians like magnets to serve under the Elector August the Strong and his son Friedrich August II. When Bach visited in 1717 the Capelle consisted of approximately 33 instrumentalists, not including composers, trumpeters or the Capellmeister. With the accession of Friedrich August II the number increased to around 42, with a regular string strength of 6 to 8 first violins, 6 to 8 second violins, 3 to 4 violas, 2 to 4 cellos, 2 double basses and harpsichord, together with whatever other continuo and wind instruments a particular score required (Ortrun Landmann, ‘The Dresden Hofkapelle during the Lifetime of Johann Sebastian Bach’, Early Music, Vol. 17, No. 1 (Feb. 1989), pp. 17–30).

  c The organ part is in Kammerton, contrary to his usual Leipzig practice. A prominent feature of Bach’s scoring was the use in the Kyrie of two oboes d’amore, instruments which, as Janice Stockigt has pointed out, were very much in use in Leipzig in Bach’s time, but seem to have become obsolete in Dresden after Heinichen’s death in 1729, when they were replaced by the chalumeau (Stockigt, ‘Consideration of Bach’s Kyrie e Gloria BWV 2321 within the Context of Dresden Catholic Mass Settings 1729–1733’ in University of Belfast International Symposium, Discussion Book (2007), Vol. 1, pp. 52–92).

  d Christoph Wolff suggests that a performance took place here (the church generally frequented by the Lutheran court officials) on 26 July, the eighth Sunday after Trinity, ‘probably as a special afternoon concert comparable to the organ recitals Bach had given there before’ with Bach and members of the family participating (Johann Sebastian Bach: The Learned Musician (2000), p. 370).

  e Stockigt has analysed the ranges and vocal profiles of the Dresden castrati – Rochetti, Bindi, Annibali and Campioli – from the oratorio and Mass repertoire they undertook in the early 1730s and compared these to the vocal ranges of the two soprano and alto parts in Bach’s Missa, revealing a close, plausible correspondence (op. cit.).

  f It was, however, a flexible body, varying in numbers (see footnote). On one occasion in 1739 Zelenka directed an ensemble of five singers, four violins, two violas, pairs of flutes and oboes, trumpets and drums, and a continuo section of four players in a work to mark the birth of Prince Clemens Wenceslaus of Saxony, which was celebrated in the small chapel of the Hubertusburg Palace. A striking combination of individual technical skill and panache within the orchestra, and of its discipline under Johann Georg Pisendel’s direction, seems to have been achieved only after a long-drawn-out period of in-fighting between the older French-style musicians favoured by August the Strong and the ardent advocates of Italian music patronised by his son Friedrich August II. This and the fact that each player was allowed and even encouraged to specialise (not like the usual jack-of-all-trades) impressed Bach enough to refer to it in his ‘Entwurff’ (BD I, No. 22/ NBR, p. 150).

  g Actually Bach already had an honorific title, one that bound him for the past four years to the lesser court of Duke Christian of Saxe-Weissenfels, though in Bach’s eyes it did not carry anything approaching the prestige or bargaining power of the Dresden title.

  h If it had, the performing material would have been housed in the cupboard behind the choir gallery of the Hofkirche and entered into its library catalogue (1765). Instead, it was preserved on the shelves of the Saxon royal library (see Stockigt, op. cit.).

  i This was, of course, one of Scheibe’s criticisms – that Bach demanded ‘that singers and instrumentalists should be able to do with their throats and instruments whatever he can play on the clavier’ (BD II, No. 400/NBR, p. 338). He had a point – but that is exactly why Bach’s works are so challenging (and rewarding) to the performer.

  j Donald Tovey observes admiringly that now ‘the real business begins when no less than thirteen entries of the first subject, all on tonic and dominant, are piled up without intermission, the trumpets providing the 8th and 9th entries in extra parts. This I believe to be Bach’s record in such edifices’ (Essays in Musical Analysis (1937), Vol. 5, p. 31). On the differences between word-setting in German – full of meaning, theological purpose and stress-awareness – and in time-hallowed Latin, I am grateful to David Watkin (admirable continuo and solo cellist and now also a conductor) for his suggestion that one should not try to apply the same interpretative scanning mechanisms to both, Latin being more instrumentally and plainly conceived than vernacular German.

  k It is amazing how the dry, literalist mind-set of successive editors of Bach’s great Mass can ignore evidence that did not appear to fit with their preconceived notions of how his music ought to sound. Julius Reitz, in preparing the Bach-Gesamtausgabe in 1856, found the Lombard rhythms indicated only in the flute’s first bar (and not in the parallel violin 1 part). He considered them therefore to be an aberration, so he omitted them. One hundred years later, the Lutheran editor of the NBA, Friedrich Smend, intent on expunging any signs of Catholic orientation by Bach, gave no credence whatsoever to the Dresden parts. So he, too, omitted the adjusted rhythms. Both editors thus succeeded in eliminating one of the few riveting signs of Bach’s own performance that have come down to us and in ignoring the type of spontaneous idiomatic adjustment good musicians make as a matter of course: the flute plays the melodic arc with back-dotted rhythms, the violins, automatically and as a matter of etiquette and courtesy, follow suit.

  l Stockigt (op. cit., p. 21) points to a feature of Bach’s setting that would have clashed with the local Dresden practice of the time – of slowing the tempo down still further, dropping in dynamic and introducing a string tremulo in support of the voices.r />
  m This is related to the celebrated penitential text O vos omnes qui transitis, set so darkly by the Renaissance composers Victoria and Gesualdo, and much later by Pablo Casals, and in English by Handel in Messiah – ‘Behold and see if there be any sorrow like unto his sorrow.’

  n The polonaise was apparently perceived at the time as ‘a majestic, processional, ceremonial and chivalric dance … [with] its proper, slower tempo, since it was usually danced in tall boots, often with a sabre at the side, at times also with torches’ (Szymon Paczkowski, ‘On the Role and Meaning of the Polonaise in the Mass in B minor’ in University of Belfast International Symposium, Discussion Book (2007), Vol. 1, pp. 43–51). Dresden composers such as Zelenka, Heinichen, Hasse, Schuster and Naumann habitually turned to music à la polonaise for the Quoniam and the Et resurrexit sections of the Mass, so Bach was following a local tradition here and, according to Paczkowski, achieving a double aim: ‘he expressed the sense of the liturgical text in the best possible way and, at the same time, he paid homage to his ruler, to whom the Missa was dedicated. Thus the polonaise in the aria Quoniam tu solus sanctus should be interpreted in association with the customs of the Polish–Saxon court, as a “royal dance” usable, in both a secular and a religious context, as a symbol of a monarch’s power.’ Mellers’s view is that in Bach’s treatment, ‘the God of Power seems larger than life and too big for his boots, as did the absolute monarchs who tried to emulate him in mundane terms’ (Bach and the Dance of God (1980), p. 205).