Bach: Music in the Castle of Heaven

by Gardiner, John Eliot

  o There is absolutely no way that the absence of a double bar or a metre sign here could indicate that the ‘neutral allegro’ of the Quoniam is to be continued in the Cum sancto (George B. Stauffer, Bach: The Mass in B minor (1997), p. 238). Vivace certainly implies liveliness of articulation, but it also inescapably influences the tempo of the movement.

  p It is impossible to disagree with Mellers’s detecting ‘an element of danger in this music’s power and glory’. This he contrasts with ‘Handel’s Augustan assurance’ (op. cit., p. 208).

  q Zelenka’s own compositions sometimes contain traces of Czech folk-music. Though generally admired for his skill in counterpoint, it is in his instrumental capricci and his seven-part Hipocondrie that he shows his originality in matters of experimental tonal colouring, rhythmic groupings and dynamics.

  r In the course of 2012 Michael Maul unearthed new evidence relating to the existence from the seventeenth century to the early nineteenth century of an elite octet of singers (two per part) from among the boarders of the Thomasschule, those who, in the estimation of the cantor, ‘outperform all the others’ (Schulordungen, 1634 and 1723; see H.-J. Schulze, ‘Bachs Aufführungsapparat’ in Christoph Wolff (ed.), Die Welt der Bach-Kantaten, Vol. 3 (1998)). This is the one constant factor in the organisation of the school choir lasting from J. H. Schein’s cantorate up to that of J. A. Hiller. This elite octet constituted the cantor’s first Kantorei, had their own regulations, music lessons and rehearsals, and in comparison with the other boarders were exceptionally well paid (mostly from performing at weddings and other private events), even after the cantor’s and other teachers’ shares of their earnings had been deducted. Under normal circumstances they would have been the ones to perform the Haupt-Musik (the cantata, in other words) at Sunday services, but could be supplemented at the cantor’s discretion by other Alumnen when extra singers were needed to perform his more elaborate and festive music – a practice well documented for the late seventeenth century, which may well have extended into Kuhnau and Bach’s time. These new findings need to be set against all the other fragmentary evidence pointing to the constraints and difficulties both these Thomascantors experienced in fielding an ensemble adequate to meeting the increasing demands of their church music. It goes to show how the realities of performance practice in their time were in a state of continual flux, warning us not to rely exclusively on the same old source material which has proved to be susceptible to widely different interpretations (see Maul, ‘Dero berühmbter Chor’: Die Leipziger Thomasschule und ihre Kantoren 1212–1804 (2012), and an article in BJb in preparation for 2013).

  s Wolfgang Horn (Die Dresdner Hofkirchenmusik 1720–1745 (1987), p. 192) shows that, at 770 bars, Bach’s Gloria was in the top 6 or 7 per cent of stand-alone Gloria settings in the Dresden repertoire of the time. Interestingly, the ones that are actually longer than his (by Mancini, Zelenka and Sarro) are a great deal longer.

  t It could have been Zelenka’s Missa votiva of 1739, with its chant-like melody given out in long notes within his polyphonic setting of the opening Credo, which encouraged Bach to use plainchant so prominently in his setting. It could also have been Zelenka’s Missa Circumcisionis of 1728 which gave Bach the idea of how to approach the Et in unum, as well as the chromatic bridge-passage at the end of the Confiteor, when the instruments drop out at mention of mortuorum (‘the dead’). But, as we saw (p. 488), it looks very much as though Zelenka had learnt from Bach’s example (Kyrie I) when he came to determine the chromatic and rhythmic outline of his Kyrie II in the Missa Sanctissima Trinitatis of 1736.

  u Originally symbolum meant a token or badge of membership, but by Bach’s time it had come to signify an expression of divine meaning contained in Scripture. The Christian ‘creeds’ were devised to summarise the essential articles of belief. The most controversial of those articles were settled by theologians at Nicaea (hence Nicenum).

  v Malcolm Boyd, for example, refers to the ‘curiously haphazard way of composing a major work’. Yet he concedes that ‘at the highest level Bach’s process of parody, adaptation and compilation must be accepted as a creative act almost on a par with what we normally think of as “original composition”.’ He is surely right, too, that the technique works in the case of the B minor Mass more successfully because the text has more subdivisions than the short Masses, therefore enabling him ‘to match music and words more carefully’ (Bach (1983), pp. 187–91).

  w This formulation of Handel’s method was made by a contemporary, possibly his first biographer, John Mainwaring. It satisfies the criterion of Handel’s friend Johann Mattheson when he states that ‘borrowing is a permissible thing; but one must return the borrowed with interest, that is, one must arrange the borrowed material in such a fashion that it acquires a better aspect than the setting from which it has been lifted’ (Der vollkommene Capellmeister (1739)). But I have so far found no evidence in support of Joshua Rifkin’s claim that Bach ‘lifted’ another composer’s work when he composed the Et incarnatus.

  x By this means he is drawing on the musical-rhetorical figure of anaphora. J. G. Walther describes this as occurring ‘when a phrase or even a single word is frequently repeated in a composition for the sake of greater emphasis’ (Musicalisches-Lexicon (1732), p. 34).

  y These changes are further analysed in René Pérez Torres, ‘Bach’s Mass in B minor: An Analytical Study of Parody Movements and Their Function in the Large-Scale Architectural Design of the Mass’, University of North Texas master’s thesis (Dec. 2005), pp. 64–5.

  z I for one cannot rid from my mind the poignantly stuttered mouthing of Angst … und … Not … Angst … und … Not, where later he substitutes the smoother passus et sepultus est. On the other hand the alteration of the melodic intervals to create augmented seconds in the soprano and alto lines in bars 13 and 14 gives an enhanced grief-laden tang to the Cru-ci-fi-xus.

  aa This has a bearing on the tempo of the movement, which needs to be a shade slower than that of the Cum sancto for example. You know you are ‘in the groove’ when everyone can swing the adjacent inégale semiquavers in a deliciously blues-y lilt without any sense of underlying pressure. Yet at the same time the coloratura melismas need to fizz and sparkle like the ‘tongues of fire’ in the Whitsun cantata BWV 34, O ewiges Feuer.

  bb This has been pointed out by Christoph Wolff (‘Bach und die Folgen’, Offizieller Alma-nach, Bachwoche Ansbach (1989), pp. 23–34) and by Reinhard Strohm, who suggests that the recourse to Pergolesi’s rhetorical figure ‘seems to bring into the Mass the meaning that the incarnation is a “question” ’ (‘Transgression, Transcendence and Metaphor: The “Other Meanings” of the B-Minor Mass’ in Understanding Bach, Bach Network UK (2006), Vol. 1, p. 65).

  cc Observing Bach manipulate and adjust the harmony at this point, we can see how Andreas Werckmeister could define an enharmonic change as ‘a mirror and image of our mortality and the incompleteness of this life’ (Ruth Tatlow, ‘Recapturing the Complexity of Historical Music Theories; or, What Werckmeister’s Doctrine and Mattheson’s Invective Can Tell Us about Bach’s Compositional Motivation’, Eastman Theory Colloquium, 28 Sept. 2012).

  dd This is a most unusual marking reserved for movements in which there is only one beat per bar. It simply cannot signal ‘a neutral, tempo-ordinario allegro’ or even ‘a return to the brisk allabreve tempo of the Confiteor’ (Stauffer, op. cit., p. 240). The downward scale in the continuo and its arrival on a bottom D is like the starting pistol which fires off a German galop of the sort that became so popular in Vienna in the 1820s, starting with Schubert, Lanner, Johann Strauss, and even Rossini (as in the end of his Guillaume Tell overture).

  ee As Mellers aptly comments: ‘The introversion of the previous section is replaced by an extraversion as naive as that depicted in the resurrection paintings of Stanley Spencer, or of the medieval painters who were his model’ (op. cit., p. 230).

  ff As John Butt observes, Bach’s tendency here to prune away everything that m
ight inhibit his intended momentum contributes ‘to the impression of a work which seems to contain twice the amount of music that its duration would normally allow’ (Bach: Mass in B minor (1991), pp. 56–7).

  gg Philipp Spitta, critical of Bach’s heavy dependence on parody in these last movements, which he felt was due to the fact that the music would have been performed sub communione (that is, during the distribution of the bread and wine), suggested that Bach assembled it ‘with no great effort’. He found it ‘unsatisfactory, not only as regards each of these numbers separately, but as to their connection and their position as finishing the whole mass’ (The Life of Bach, Clara Bell and J. A. Fuller Maitland (trs.) (1873; 1899 edn), Vol. 3, p. 61). Later Friedrich Smend referred to ‘the decline of artistic quality in the last part’, finding the music following the Sanctus ‘distinctly inferior to what comes before’ (NBA II/1, KB, pp. 178–87).

  hh Alternatively, according to Mellers, it was the vision of St John Chrysostom which may have inspired him – those ‘thousands of Archangels … that are six-winged, full of eyes, and soar aloft on their wings, singing, crying, shouting, and saying Agios! Agios! Agios! Kyrie Sabaoth! Holy, Holy, Holy, Lord God of Hosts! Heaven and Earth are full of Thy Glory! Hosanna in the Highest!’ (op. cit., p. 232). Tovey, on the other hand, sees the Sanctus as ‘almost drastically Protestant … Bach is himself beating time to the angels swinging their censers before the Throne, and has entirely forgotten the awe-struck mortals kneeling in silence before the miracle which gives them immortality’ (op. cit., p. 23).

  ii This implies that the appellation ‘Die große catholische Messe’ (as catalogued in C. P. E Bach’s estate, 1790) denotes ‘the universality of the Ordinary of the Mass, shared by both Catholics and Lutherans alike’ (Robin A. Leaver, ‘How “Catholic” is Bach’s “Lutheran” Mass?’ in University of Belfast International Symposium, Discussion Book (2007), Vol. 1, pp. 177–206).

  jj This is an almost exact reflection of the flute/voice dialectic in Bach’s Epiphany cantata (BWV 123), where in the aria ‘Lass, o Welt, mich aus Verachtung’ the flute acts as a consoling angel or companion to the bass singer, bleak in his isolation, and infects him with new purpose and resolve.

  14

  ‘Old Bach’

  Since music is a language with some meaning, at least for the immense majority of mankind, although only a tiny minority of people are capable of formulating a meaning in it, and since it is the only language with the contradictory attributes of being at once intelligible and untranslatable, the musical creator is a being comparable to the gods, and music itself the supreme mystery of the science of man, a mystery that all the various disciplines come up against and which holds the key to their progress.

  – Claude Lévi-Strauss1

  Bach, the epitome of a musician who strove all life long and finally acquired the ‘Habit of Perfection’, was a thoroughly imperfect human being – something we don’t usually tolerate in one of our heroes. The hagiolatry that has followed him for the past 200 years reveals a widespread reluctance to come to terms with the complexity and contradictions within the artistic temperament and has been shown to blind people to Bach’s true character – his everyday self, the self that lived beside, beneath and within the narrative of his most un-ordinary music-making. It has been a constant throughout this book to suggest ways in which his personality and creative mind interacted and how perfection and imperfection thus coexisted in Bach’s life, no matter how much he strove to achieve a matching godliness and virtue as a human being to the harmonic perfection of his music.a We continue to notice signs of the disorder within his professional life and of his conflicted attitude towards authority, but also of his convivial and generous-spirited relationship with his pupils and fellow musicians. Most importantly, we have music that brims over with ‘ingenious and unusual ideas’ (as the Nekrolog tells us) while always staying rooted in given order and true proportion. You come away from hearing or performing it dazzled by how so much self-imposed restraint can be combined with a tingling, edge-of-your-seat vivacity.

  This applies as much to the music of his last decade, which saw the completion of the B minor Mass, the Musical Offering and the near-completion of The Art of Fugue, as to his Weimar years (1708–17), which witnessed his seminal encounter with Vivaldi’s music and the inception of the Orgel-Büchlein project. Yet, looking back when at the end of his life, Bach might have identified the decade 1723–33 – the one framed by his accession to the Thomas cantorate and his submission to the Saxon Elector of his Missa – as his most challenging and productive. It saw him making a supreme effort to realise his Endzweck, hurling himself at his target of composing complete church cantata cycles for the first three (or at most four) years, then in 1729, bruised and exhausted, retreating to the comfort and independence of the coffee-house. We saw that for him this was much more than just a change of location for making, appreciating and listening to music: it coincided with a significant social change – from the quasi-feudal atmosphere of the Lutheran church, with its hierarchical seating arrangements, to a place where social distinctions played a lesser role and where the city’s middle-class intelligentsia could meet and converse with less formality. This was a critical turning-point in the cultural and intellectual life of a central German city like Leipzig.

  When we consider how during the first three years of his cantorate Bach poured all his energies into the service of the Leipzig churches, what makes his achievement so impressive is his utter singleness of purpose. Despite all the constraints and difficulties that lay in his way, the opposition, the criticism and the public apathy he encountered, nothing was too difficult, no price too high, when it came to realising that ultimate goal. There can be only one conclusion: that the creation of that corpus of church music, unique in the history of music, could have happened only at this time, in this place and under these circumstances. It should hardly surprise us, then, to find that such a striking individual, having reached maturity, saw the possibilities not just in new contrapuntal combinations, but also in the precise historical moment when they were to be delivered, and actively set about their realisation.

  Earlier in his career, he clearly did not possess the range, the experience, the structural and stylistic framework, or the opportunity to carry it through to fulfilment. Had he stayed in Cöthen (a Calvinist court) the project would have never got off the ground. Had he taken up the Halle offer in 1713, he might well have suffered the same fate as his eldest son, Wilhelm Friedemann, and become enmeshed in sectarian controversy there. In worldly Hamburg his energies, like those of his second son Emanuel later on, might gradually have been sapped by administrative duties and by the need to spread his music around the city’s churches even more thinly than in Leipzig. There, too, he would have become easy prey to the sardonic mockery of Johann Mattheson and other fashion-conscious advocates of the modern galant style. In beguiling, Catholic Dresden, with its richly endowed Capelle, he would not have been free to create and perform the succession of Lutheran church cantatas that he carried through in Leipzig. No, it had to be in that provincial and rather mean-spirited city, inordinately proud of its pure Lutheran Orthodoxy, its distinguished succession of cantors and its sporadic moments of cosmopolitan glory. All this was done despite the semi-dysfunctional allocation of powers (imperial, civic and clerical), despite Leipzig’s fossilised social stratification – perhaps no worse than elsewhere in Germany but rather better documented – and, as we now know, despite a practically unworkable situation within the power structure of the Thomasschule.2

  This was also the last possible moment, north of the Alps, for a comprehensive mirroring in church music of the cycle of the seasons, with their still visible reminders of an agrarian year and its festivals, time- and weather-specific activities and pre-Christian rituals. It was the last time Luther could speak – vicariously but authoritatively – to his flock without widespread dissent. It had to be then, in that decade. Any later and the percolation of enlightene
d thought into middle Germany might have taken the edge off Bach’s creative zeal as the doors of fashion began to shut him out.

  What is so moving about Bach’s realisation of his Endzweck in the mid to late 1720s is his capacity to produce works of luminous intelligence, more profound and far more complex than any contract required of him and sometimes at great personal cost. In this he was casting before the citizens of Leipzig music of a quality and consistency that they scarcely deserved. Of course he could have made a very comfortable living had he chosen, like Telemann, to devote himself to opera and to writing agreeable but undemanding musique de table and fugues légères. Instead, in what Alex Ross describes as a kind of creative rage,3 Bach experimented with every aspect of the cantata form, creating in his second cycle a benchmark of how music can serve as an eloquent meditation on the day’s Gospel reading, and refusing to take the easy option of re-working older pieces, whether his own or those of others. In the music of this decade he was constantly engaged in the task of making explicit his sense of the world and of his fellow humans: it amounted to an extraordinary fusion of scriptural exegesis and social commentary. An immense work of religious music-drama like the Matthew Passion, whose beauty may have been considered at the time to be ‘darkened by an excess of art’,4 can act as a prism, allowing us to see the entire rainbow of life that Bach makes available to us. Viewed in this way, it seems to say, ‘This is how the world might be experienced: now go forth and experience it thus.’