Bach: Music in the Castle of Heaven

by Gardiner, John Eliot

  Bach’s depiction of hell is far richer and more polychromatic than that of any other composer before Mozart and Berlioz. So much of his richness comes from the dissonance that runs from the smallest to the largest levels. v The reprieve he allows us, however, is only temporary (after all, would we really want to achieve a serene eternity characterised by ducks?). The sequel he has planned is a strange aria for alto and strings – ‘O mankind, save your soul, flee from Satan’s slavery’ – presented with extravagant rhythmic dislocation, regular bars alternating with single or double hemiolas in as metaphors for Satan’s slavery. Stranger still is the way that he repeats the singer’s second phrase with orchestra alone – in a reflective coda which takes up exactly half of the whole aria’s duration.

  The sermon was designed to follow at this point, ushered in by a pessimistic, even nihilistic, hymn stanza – ‘Torment shall never cease: men shall be plagued, by heat and cold, fear, hunger, terror, fire and lightning … This pain will end when God is no longer eternal’, thus effectively undoing the repair work achieved earlier by the bass soloist. What words coming from a preacher’s mouth could now add anything meaningful to this musical bombardment? A logical choice for his theme would have been the call to the lost sheep to wake up and throw off the sleep of sin (Ephesians 5:14), the subject of the electrifying bass aria with trumpet and strings which opens Part 2 – Bach’s answer, as it were, to Handel’s ‘The trumpet shall sound’ from Messiah – a taxing piece for both singer and trumpeter, requiring dramatic delivery and technical control. As if that were not enough, the alto soloist now blasts off in a tirade against the carnal world, much along the lines of an Oxford Street sandwich-board-wearer: ‘Repent before it’s too late: the end is nigh.’w And with this message comes a twist calculated to bring the listener up short: ‘Consider … it could be this very night that the coffin is brought to your door!’ It is not very often that Bach resorts to lurid pictorialism of the Hieronymus Bosch kind; yet, in the ensuing duet delivered to the errant pilgrim as though by Bunyanesque angels (alto and tenor), he treats us to a ghoulish cameo of ‘howling and chattering teeth’, of the ominous approach of the hand-drawn hearse as it clatters across the cobbled street. Successions of first inversion chords over a disjointed bass line in quavers with parallel thirds and sixths in the voice parts give way first to imitative and answering phrases, then to an anguished chromaticism evoking the bubbling stream and the drop of water denied to the parched rich man. The voices join for a final flourish. We hear the gurgling of the forbidden water and the continuo playing a last furtive snatch of the ritornello. Then, dissolve … fade out … silence. Extraordinary.

  Only in the final chorale of this gripping work does Bach revert to being the congregation’s spokesman, this time voicing their plea to be spared life’s torments and temptations and the hideous spectre of eternal damnation. A small ray of light is offered at the conclusion of this lurid tableau, one in which what Laurence Dreyfus calls Bach’s ‘subversive pleasures’ can be experienced.x Were they relished or wasted on Bach’s first listeners? One somehow doubts if they left church whistling the hymn tune or any of Bach’s melodies. Were we ever to recover even snippets of testimony as to how his cantatas were received at the time, it would help us gauge how, if at all, the reactions of his congregations affected the way he approached his weekly task. Was public opinion in any sense a spur or encouragement to his trying out different approaches, or did he just decide such strategies on his own and stick to them determinedly – this week a modern Italian concerto movement or a prelude and fugue, next week a polyphonic motet or a medieval cantus firmus, the following week elements of a modern French dance suite? Did he adjust to public reaction in the way, for example, that Dickens did when writing his novels in serial instalments? Might one or two adverse, even waspish, comments overheard from the congregation as it filed out of church on that Sunday morning on 11 June 1724 goad him towards his own brand of dare-devilry and to still bolder experiments? We simply have no idea. But one thing we can say for certain – a paradox, in fact: that what Bach undertook from duty (though in excess of his contract) stirs our emotions as strongly as anything prompted by his artistic desire to create. As Jack Westrup writes, ‘In fulfilling a duty which must often have been tedious, and sometimes intolerable, Bach not only satisfied the demands of his own age: he enriched ours.’14

  Bach’s decision to ground his Second Leipzig Cycle on Lutheran chorales was by no means arbitrary: it was a key difference between this and the first cycle, in which a scriptural dictum (or Spruch) had provided the opening to most of his pieces. All through year one Bach had adjusted both to a new congregation and to a strong local liturgical tradition, while putting a new group of performers to the test. To an extent he had needed to live hand to mouth. For someone of his ordered and systematic way of thinking that cannot have been what he meant by a ‘well-regulated church music’. As a corrective, and ever conscious of past precedent, he may have decided to give a new twist to a practice going back to Ludwig Senfl in the fifteenth century of setting chorales (and sometimes chorale variations per omnes versus) as a musical framework for what were known as ‘chorale sermons’ (Liederpredigten). This would also reinforce a more recent tradition: in 1714, unusually for a pastor of the Thomaskirche, Johann Benedikt Carpzov III had given a sermon extolling the virtues of concerted music. When he had finished expounding ‘a good, fine old Protestant and Lutheran hymn’, it was then sung by the congregation. Carpzov told them that what they had heard earlier was the result of the Cantor Johann Schelle having ‘undertaken willingly to set each hymn in a charming piece of music, and let it be heard before the sermon’. It could have been the bicentenary of Luther’s three hymnals in 1724 which prompted Bach and Salomon Deyling (who, as superintendent of the Nikolaikirche, was responsible for overseeing Bach’s duties as Director Chori Musices) to put their heads together in a similar harmonious collaboration and to revive Schelle’s practice of writing a complete chorale-based cycle.y At all events, to plan a full cycle grounded on hallowed and iconic Lutheran hymns was one of Bach’s most courageous decisions as a composer – one that he sustained for the next nine and a half months with extraordinary consistency. His commitment to using them as the structural thread for substantial compositions lasting between twenty and thirty minutes each meant that, were inspiration to flag, he could no longer rely on his own earlier pieces to plug the gaps – or on anyone else’s come to that – so distinctive and specific was his chosen genre. The varied fare of Christmas the previous year, when cantatas had rubbed shoulders with Latin canticles and Mass movements, was no longer possible. Previously there had been a strong presence of chorales in all the cantatas, serving as a perpetual confirmation of his self-set challenges, and perhaps even affirming his self-definition as a composer, performer and teacher, in terms of the skill he showed in combining melody, harmony and instrumentation more inventively than anyone had before. Now, at the beginning of the Trinity season in 1724, for the first time the chorales move centre-stage. For the next year Bach stuck limpet-like to these hymns: a total of fifty-two new cantatas used them as their starting-point and, once elaborated, gave them fresh currency. From here onwards they stand out with the glint and regularity of brass studs on a leather-upholstered chair.

  The sheer intellectual and experiential brio of these early second cycle cantatas leaps off the pages of their scores with a palpable sense of physicality. Rehearsal time with his trebles could be cut to a minimum if all that they had to do was to sing a familiar tune (often doubled by a horn, a cornett or a slide trumpet) within an otherwise elaborate opening chorus. Meanwhile choral fantasias, recitatives and arias, all extending Bach’s demands and expectations of the human voice and of his chosen obbligato instruments, develop afresh as he strikes out in new directions.

  As in the previous year the first four in this crop of early Trinity season cantatas constitute a mini-portfolio of discrete works, differing in their treatment but connected b
y doctrinal twine (not unlike the six component parts of the later Christmas Oratorio, with its ‘unity in variety’). Each work opens with an elaborate setting of the unaltered first strophe of the hymn on which the whole cantata is built. The following movements – recitatives, arias and duets – are textual paraphrases of the inner verses of the hymn, before the cantata concludes with a four-part harmonisation of the final strophe. Each of the four has a striking hymn tune emblazoned in its opening movement, its cantus firmus migrating each week to a different voice: soprano (BWV 20), alto (BWV 2), tenor (BWV 7) and bass (BWV 135). Each is couched in a distinct stylistic idiom: that of a French overture (BWV 20), an archaic motet without independent obbligato instrumental lines (BWV 2), an Italianate concertante movement featuring a solo violin (BWV 7) or a chorale fantasia (BWV 135). In all except the second of these, the principal test for Bach lay in combining a chorale melody with an instrumental concerto or ritornello form. He had previous practice of embedding chorales within a ritornello structure (as we saw in the conclusions to both parts of BWV 74 and 75) but on a far smaller scale than these imposing introductory movements. The corrections we find in Bach’s surviving autograph scores reveal the colliding priorities of two unconnected structures and of his solutions in reconciling them – all under the pressure of time. This was a poser of far greater complexity than the Rubik’s Cubes of the previous year. Here we see a great composer at the height of his powers meeting the challenges of a self-imposed regimen week by week and adjusting his choice of form, his approach and his tone of voice to each underlying theme, each symbol and each metaphor arising from the texts laid out in front of him. There can be no doubt as to the magnitude of the task or the rapidity with which his skill developed as he did so.

  One disadvantage to exploring even such a coherent cycle as Bach’s second Jahrgang in linear sequence (just as his Leipzig audience experienced them) is that it can insulate one from the equally striking connections from year to year. Just as ‘vertical’ and ‘horizontal’ tastings of fine wines and whiskies have their respective value, so a ‘slice-wise’ comparison of one cycle to another, and of the different approaches Bach adopted to the same occasion and the same lectionary prompting, can bring insights into his creative personality – as it did for those of us who took part in the Bach Cantata Pilgrimage in 2000. Suddenly he ceases to be a fixed Godlike figure located outside time and emerges as someone flexible and prone to widely differing responses from one year to the next. We saw how the Gospel account of Jesus weeping over the fate of Jerusalem dominated BWV 46, Bach’s first cantata for Trinity + 10 (see this page), yet it barely gets a mention the following year in BWV 101, Nimm von uns, Herr, du treuer Gott. This is because as a chorale cantata it is based squarely on the primary hymn for this Sunday, written during a time of plague and sung to the melody of Luther’s German version of the Lord’s Prayer. The relentlessness of Luther’s Vater unser, and the way the chorale is a strong, audible presence in all but one of the movements, including the recitatives, is matched in the opening movement by Bach’s use of yet another of Luther’s hymns as the thematic basis of a chorale fantasia, one associated in the congregation’s mind with the Ten Commandments (Dies sind die heil’gen zehn Gebot). The wages of sin, the overwhelming power of retribution visited upon those tempted to stray from the Lord’s path, prompted Bach to subject his first listeners to a twin-barrelled doctrinal salvo and to compose what the pianist and scholar Robert Levin described to me as ‘the most crushing work of Bach’s career’.

  It starts out ruminatively with an independent continuo line supporting a trio of oboes exchanging the ‘Ten Commandments’ theme with the upper strings. But before long sharply accentuated dissonances over a dominant pedal are introduced, the first in a succession of hammer blows to convey the schwere Straf und große Not (‘grave punishment and great distress’) of the hymn text.z These contribute to the unsettling mood of this remarkable tone poem, sounding at once so archaic in the doubling of the voice parts by old-fashioned cornetto and trombones (as though Bach were intent on reconnecting to Luther’s time) and yet so modern in the way, for example, wrenching harmonies only begin to make sense as passing events in contrapuntal terms at a specific tempo. (This is just one of its interpretative challenges.) Bach elaborates a seven-part orchestral texture and then proceeds to expand it to eleven real parts. If that were not extraordinary enough, there is no thematic correspondence with the chorale tune: the orchestra functions independently of the choir throughout, as though fixated on this war-scarred landscape. In fact, the influence inverts the usual practice – with the lower voices occasionally borrowing instrumental themes in preparation for the re-entry of the hymn tune. A persistent feature is a three-note ‘sighing’ figure tossed between the instruments, appoggiaturas that resolve normally but are approached from above and below by a variety of initial preparatory intervals that appear to grow wider and wider to convey the inescapability of punishment, the fate that we ‘with countless sins have truly merited’ (indeed, the word allzumal – ‘ineluctably’ – comes in for vehement reiterated protestations by the three lower voices). Over the final tonic pedal Bach engineers a disturbing intensification of harmony and vocal expression for the words für Seuchen, Feur und großem Leid (‘contagion, fire and grievous pain’). Here we sense Bach working his chosen motifs as hard as he possibly can, a trait we associate more readily with Beethoven and Brahms.

  The antithesis between God’s anger and mercy is clearest in the fourth movement, where Bach sets himself the challenge of interpolating a ‘rage’ aria for bass within each line of the chorale, now sung, now played and at three different speeds: vivace – andante – adagio. He has three oboes to help him – three angry ducks on this occasion, transformed into a kind of latter-day saxophone trio. There is a single moment midway, enough to strike horror in the listener, when Bach makes an abrupt Mahlerian swerve from E minor to C minor on the word Warum [willst du so zornig sein?]. Not even Purcell, with his penchant for a calculated spot-lit dissonance, was capable of matching this when setting the same words in his anthem ‘Lord, how long wilt Thou be angry?’ Sudden juxtapositions of sacred text and personal commentary are a potent new dialectical weapon in Bach’s expressive arsenal.

  With its imploring gestures in siciliano rhythm, a flute now acts in counterpoint to the chorale tune first assigned to, and then exchanged with, the oboe da caccia. One wonders whether it was this particularly affecting combination of obbligato instruments and its association with the Saviour’s love and compassion shown to the sinner at the moment of ‘Jesus’ bitter death’ that planted the seed in Bach’s mind for ‘Aus Liebe’, the great soprano aria from the Matthew Passion. If so, this duet served as a preliminary sketch for the Passion, which, I suggest, was still very much alive as the culmination of his second Jahrgang, planned for Good Friday 1725. (See below, this page.)

  At all events, BWV 101 was a cantata that Bach rated very highly. Reviving it a last time in 1748 (or possibly 1749), he intervened in the part-copying process with thick pen-strokes that by their pressure reveal his urgent intent as much as they do his failing eyesight. It had taken him three or four previous attempts to arrive at his ideal in terms of textual underlay, and at this point he drastically reduced the number of word repetitions. A whole fresh layer of minutely differentiated articulation and dynamic markings now appeared to enable him and future musicians to realise the precise nuances present in his imagination. Deciding to write out a new flute part for the musical highpoint of the cantata, the soprano-alto duet, and as economical as ever with manuscript paper, he wrote it on the back of the cornet part – a sign that for this final revival he intended to dispense altogether with the old-fashioned cornett/trombone colla parte choir – while adding far stronger contrasts of legato and staccato phrasing. Elsewhere mutes are introduced, pizzicato marks added in the bass line (technical matters that could have been indicated by a simple gesture in earlier performances), even cautionary tacet (bars’ rest
) marks are revised. Nothing is to be left to chance. The impact of these detailed instructions goes beyond mere adjustment to the more delicate (empfindsam) stylistic taste of the 1740s. It is a vital testimony to Bach’s quest for perfection, for completion, and a paradigm of the style of performance he continued to strive for during the last years of his life.

  The theme of the hidden granting of faith returns later in the season in BWV 38, Aus tiefer Not schrei ich zu dir, for Trinity +21, based on Luther’s paraphrase of Psalm 130: he describes the cry of a ‘truly penitent heart that is most deeply moved in its distress … We are all in deep and great misery, but we do not feel our condition. Crying is nothing but a strong and earnest longing for God’s grace, which does not arise in a person unless he sees in what depth he is lying.’15 Bach would have known that Luther’s hymn was linked to a time-honoured Phrygian tune, one so perfectly suited to archaic treatment in motet-style that it is hard to imagine him setting it in any other way. In an opening chorus in severe stile antico he etches each line of the melody in long notes sung by the sopranos and anticipated imitatively by the lower three voices, just as he was to do in his later six-part organ setting of the same chorale in Clavier-Übung III (BWV 686). Once again he doubles each of the four voices with a trombone – a technique one might associate more readily with Schütz or even with Bruckner than with Bach. Besides their unique burnished sonority, these noble instruments bring a sense of ritual and solemnity to the overall mood. Bach seems intent on pushing the frontiers of this movement almost out of stylistic reach through the abrupt chromatic twists he gives to its modal tune. By reordering the vocal entries at each juncture he creates a powerful evocation of this Lutheran De profundis in the clamour of imploring voices.