Bach: Music in the Castle of Heaven

by Gardiner, John Eliot

  l Michael the archangel (the name means ‘who is like God’) is one of the few figures to appear in the Old and New Testaments, the Apocrypha and the Koran. He appears as protector of the children of Israel (Daniel 12:1), inspiring courage and strength, and was venerated both as the guardian angel of Christ’s earthly kingdom and as patron saint of knights in medieval lore. Michael is acknowledged in Christian lore as being responsible for ensuring the safe passage into heaven of souls due to be presented before God. Hence the offertory prayer in the Catholic Requiem Mass sed signifer sanctus Michael repraesentet eas in lucem sanctam – ‘May the holy standard-bearer Michael bring them into the holy light.’ First established under the Roman Empire sometime in the fifth century, Michaelmas (Michaelisfest) was an important church feast, as it was one of the traditional quarter-days on which rents were levied and agreed in northern Europe, the start of the new agricultural year for many people and, in Leipzig, the day of one of its three annual trade fairs. When Lucifer, highest of the Seraphim, led a mutiny against God, he became transmogrified into the Devil, appearing either as a serpent or as a ten-headed dragon. Michael, at the head of God’s army in the great eschatological battle against the forces of darkness, was the key figure in his rout.

  m When I first heard the cantata, in the late 1960s, in a Karl Richter performance, I was struck by Bach’s utterly original combination of corno and oboes locked together in a combative tussle. ‘Jazz trumpets,’ I thought at the time, and there is indeed something of a jam session feel to this passage. We have no idea precisely what instrument Bach intended here by his designation of corno. Some scholars take this to mean cornetto, but when performed on the archaic cornett it involves the player in elaborate and treacherous cross-fingerings, which inhibits the projection of sound. After we tried this out in London, for our performance in Santiago de Compostela in 2000 Michael Harrison brought along his mid-nineteenth-century German chromatic valve trumpet in C as an alternative, if anachronistic, solution, managing to make it sound credibly cornetto-like in timbre. Ultimately it is not the form, make or date of the instrument that guarantees conviction, but the skill and imagination of the player.

  n Peter Wollny has drawn my attention to the existence of a grandfather clock in Weimar installed by Bach’s intractable and reclusive employer, Duke Wilhelm Ernst, to measure out the precise duration of every second of his life.

  o Just three years before his death Bach revived this cantata. Since he could no longer justify the services of a professional copyist, he wrote out the parts himself, rather shakily. Such was the labour involved in the downward transposition for this revival (from E to D major) that he must have had compelling artistic reasons for it. It is strange, therefore, to find him going back to the E major version for one last time, incorporating all the changes he had just introduced in the D major version. The flauto piccolo now becomes a traversa part, with detailed articulation marks inserted by Bach for almost every single note. One seldom comes across this degree of detailed notation in the performing material for any other of the cantatas of the 1720s.

  p There are exceptions. By far the best movement in Telemann’s cantata Du aber, Daniel, gehe hin (c. 1710) is an aria reminiscent of Bach’s use of a similar motif, with gamba bariolage, oboe obbligato and recorder pulsation, in BWV 115, Mache dich, mein Geist, bereit, which dates from Nov. 1724. There is a similar movement in the Brockes-Passion by Stölzel from 1725, another composer whom Bach is said to have admired.

  q Brahms looked forward to the arrival of the tomes of the Bach-Gesellschaft complete edition of 1851–7 as others might the instalments of a thriller. This reverence and enthusiasm for Bach are reflected in several of his choral works, notably in his Opus 74 motets – in O Heiland, reiß die Himmel auf, which owes much in its structure to BWV 4 in achieving musical unity over a large canvas, and, still more, in Warum ist das Licht?, which, like BWV 125, ends with a chorale setting of the Nunc dimittis – Luther’s ‘Mit Fried und Freud’.

  r Funeral services in the Lutheran church did not normally involve instruments, but an exception was sometimes made with regard to motets. Notwithstanding the likelihood of a basso continuo accompaniment or the (optional) addition of colla parte instruments in the double-choir motets, we have Bach’s original performing material for only one of these, BWV 226, Der Geist hilft unser Schwachheit auf, with strings doubling one choir and woodwinds the other.

  s Despite the attempts by Daniel Melamed (J. S. Bach and the German Motet (1995), pp. 85–9) and others to propose a piecemeal assembly of the motet, the fact is that in performance it coheres admirably well – but so, of course, does the Credo of the B minor Mass, a movement that, as we shall see in the next chapter, was definitely cobbled together from material originating in different times in Bach’s life. Bach is so good at erasing tell-tale traces of any grafts and at bringing total assurance to the finished entity that we can never be sure at which particular moment he decided on the final use of any particular work. There are passages which suggest an earlier (Weimar) provenance – particularly the ninth movement, the sublime ‘Gute Nacht’ duet for sopranos to which the tenors provide a vocal bassetchen continuo with the altos threading a line through the middle with the hymn tune. But this in no way detracts from its perfect placement at the heart of the motet. If a movement here or there strikes one as more akin to his keyboard music then it just goes to show that Bach created far fewer stylistic barriers between the various genres in which he cast his music than subsequent commentators would have us believe.

  t This is a stretched-out version of DSCH (or, in German musical notation, De-Es-Ce-Ha), a musical cryptogram in the manner of BACH that will spell out the initials of Dmitri Shostakovich 200 years on.

  u Handel, too, was clearly inspired by the verses from I Chronicles 25 and 28 when he set them to music as the culmination of his double-choir oratorio Israel in Egypt (1739).

  v The classic example – from another faith – is of course the Whirling Dervishes. Steven Runciman describes ‘their mystic practices, their rhythmic dances that brought them into a state of ecstasy, in communion with God’ (A Traveller’s Alphabet (1991), p. 63). Just as the Christian church tried to expunge holy dancing, so Ataturk’s regime tried to suppress the Dervishes.

  13

  The Habit of Perfection

  Perfection is achieved, it seems, not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.

  – after Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Terre des Hommes (1939)

  Ky-ri-e … Ky-ri-e … Ky-ri-e e-le-i-son!

  The inscribing of that initial three-fold Kyrie in sound at the outset of Bach’s B minor Mass seems almost a physical act, one in which each of us – as listener or performer – is individually or collectively involved. Those four dense, action-packed bars are presented to us as an imposing succession of imploring gestures – just as graphic in their way as an altar-tableau by a Titian or a Rubens. From the downbeat of that first massive B minor chord and its anguished sequel, our expectations have been alerted. At the conclusion of these bars an immense solemn fugue begins to open out, bearing with it a measured sense of prayer. We soon realise that we have been launched on one of the most epic of all journeys in music, a setting of the Ordinary of the Mass unprecedented in its scale, majesty and sobriety. Once aboard, anchors weighed, we are there for the duration – the next hundred minutes or so – to disembark only when the final chord invoking pacem (‘peace’) has vanished into the ether.

  To the unsuspecting listener such a strong sense of inexorable unfolding would imply an uninterrupted, start-to-finish conception and execution in the composer’s mind. But the facts and what we can glean of Bach’s interrupted steps in constructing his great Mass suggest otherwise. It is only in the last three decades that scholars have generally agreed that Bach completed the Mass in the last two years of his life. The seeds of its inception, however, lie some forty years earlier, during those exploratory years he spent at the ducal court o
f Weimar – an early version of one of its movements, the Crucifixus, was indeed composed there. He would have been aware that his friend and cousin J. G. Walther had formulated a project to set the Kyrie from the Mass as a de profundis, a cry from the depths by the embattled sinner, basing it on the chorale Aus tiefer Not schrei ich zu dir (Luther’s paraphrase of Psalm 130).1 No trace of Walther’s work remains; yet perhaps Bach remembered it when he himself set Luther’s de profundis chorale in the Clavier-Übung III. Significantly he set it in the harsh, anguished key of F minor, which Bach reserved for his most poignant, sin-burdened movements. It resembles both in mood (Kyrie I) and key (Kyrie II) the urgent entreaties of a beleaguered soul in Bach’s Missa. A different and shorter Kyrie and Agnus Dei pairing (BWV 233a) has survived from these Weimar years; then no further Mass settings for another quarter of a century.

  It was in his middle years that Bach turned his mind to setting Latin texts. What drew him to the idea of setting the complete Mass, with its immutable Catholic text in Latin, is far from certain: in any case it was an unusual form for an eighteenth-century Lutheran composer to essay. Luther had sanctioned its continued usage in liturgical worship, notwithstanding the sturdy vernacular versions of the Greek and Latin originals he bequeathed to his followers. His main concern was for full, universal comprehensibility – and in this Luther could have misjudged the tenacious attachment by the more conservative members of his congregation to the old Latin. So, the twin movements of the Greek Kyrie and its sequel, the Latin Gloria, survived to constitute the short Missa in Lutheran liturgical parlance alongside their new German-language equivalents. Bach’s first attempt in the shorter genre was composed in 1733. It is certainly difficult for us now experiencing those monumental opening bars not to hear them as anything other than the harbingers of his complete Mass. Perhaps that indeed was Bach’s plan from the outset, but there is no way for us to be sure. Initially, at least, these bars were but the prelude to the two-movement work he dedicated to the new Elector of Saxony, Friedrich August II. It is entirely plausible that at the time Bach saw this presentation Missa as a work sui generis, sufficient in itself. Many years would need to pass before it occurred to him to incorporate the Dresden Missa as the opening pair of movements of the Missa tota with which we are so familiar. Such ambiguity of function and purpose is typical of the piecemeal origins of the B minor Mass, which, to the consternation of its nineteenth-century admirers, did not spring complete and fully armed from the imaginative head of its creator. It required years of gestation and assimilation, and for Bach most probably there may never have been the satisfaction of experiencing it directly through performance and so no opportunity to put it to the test as a summation for posterity of his compositional skills.

  Having encountered Bach at his workbench in the Thomasschule, we can picture him leafing through the scores of those 150 or so cantatas on which he had lavished so much creative invention in his early Leipzig years, wondering what would become of them. In black moods he may have feared that they would end up being used as scrap paper or firelighters.a Setting the complete Latin Mass, this immutable statement of faith, to music was one way to step aside from the specific and parochial context of his church cantatas, slanted to the weekly homily and geared to illustrating the Sunday sermon, and to uncover fresh compositional challenges. For Bach, as a Christian, the Bible had enormous referential value. It had furnished him with scripts for musical dramas and offered him parables and stories to which everyone of his congregation could relate. In its Latin form, the Ordinary of the Mass allowed him to concentrate on universal themes and in a language weathered by time. At all stages in Christian history it has provided a point of reference and the central means by which individuals can find and redeem themselves. Bach helps us, his interpreters and listeners, towards that end. More than that, through his passionate engagement with the text of the Latin Mass, Bach makes a forward leap, staking out new areas for music to illumine and expound biblical doctrine. His Latin Mass setting is thus both a repository of human doubts and tussles of faith, and a celebration of birth and life. For, compared with other musical approaches to Mass settings of the time, Bach’s gave a fresh emphasis to the human story within it. A narrative filament runs all through his Mass, rising to the surface at key moments, such as the appearance of the angels to the shepherds in the Gloria in excelsis, and in the three linked movements at the centre of the Nicene Creed, the Et incarnatus, the Crucifixus and the Et resurrexit. But the most poignantly human moment is reserved for that ghostly bridge-passage that links the Confiteor to the Et expecto. In these extraordinary bars we can detect traces of Bach’s own struggles – with tonality, counterpoint and harmony – but perhaps even with belief. The human emphasis here is presented to us as a bulwark against the fear we habitually feel of the terror of the dark. He lets us feel that terror – because he may have felt it, too, and knew how to overcome it.

  In 1733 the completion of the Mass lay a long way in the future. The glimmer of an idea of how to improve his situation in Leipzig, or even to escape it altogether, came to him sometime during his forty-ninth year. We have already seen how around this time his professional situation in Leipzig had deteriorated (see Chapter 6). The new burgomaster, Jacob Born (see Plate 11e), having spoken directly to Bach and tried to force him to take his teaching duties more seriously, reported back to the council that ‘he shows little inclination to work’2 and had attempted to have him disqualified from continuing in office.

  Despite signs of genuine approbation from his students, in his beleaguered state Bach’s willingness to channel all his creative energies into the service of the Thomasschule and the music-hungry liturgy of the town’s churches had clearly diminished. Yet there is no reason to conclude that his creative genius was suddenly dormant. It simply needed another outlet. Three years earlier he had told the Leipzig councillors to look to the Dresden Court to see how music can and should be organised. This was not so much a case of sour grapes as a simple acknowledgement that a far higher value was placed on music and its practitioners in the Saxon capital than in Leipzig. There, the glamorous array of musical talent could enable a composer of Bach’s professional standing and ambitions to operate and prosper – or so he thought.b Everything points to an understandable desire on his part to escape the confines of Leipzig and to become a part of that talent, rather as he had in his Cöthen years. He was already on friendly terms with many of the Dresden musicians and had good reason to see his professional future linked in some substantive way with that of the Electoral Court. Just then, however, a vacancy for organist presented itself at the Sophienkirche, where Bach had previously given acclaimed organ recitals. Ever the shrewd operator of the family network (and, at the outset of his career, as we have seen, very much its beneficiary), Bach set his sights on this prestigious opening – not for himself, but for Wilhelm Friedemann, his eldest son, by then already an accomplished musician. So with the zeal typical of a solicitous father, he wrote Friedemann’s two letters of application himself, but under his son’s signature. To make absolutely sure that his candidature was cast-iron, Bach even copied his own Prelude and Fugue in G (BWV 541) and, just as a precaution, placed it in Friedemann’s music case ready for his audition on 22 June. He need not have worried. Friedemann was offered the position and received warm commendation from within the Dresden Court Capelle.

  Bach now had a valid excuse to travel to Dresden to help his son settle in. Scooping up Anna Magdalena and his three eldest children, he set off. Barely a month after leaving Leipzig, he presented a petition to the Elector, Friedrich August II, requesting a court title – ‘a Predicate … in your Hoff-Capelle’ – along with a beautifully written set of twenty-one parts of his new Missa. This left him a bare month in which to compose the two opening movements of one of his most monumental church compositions. The autograph score – but significantly not the presentation parts – is written out on Leipzig paper of the sort he had been using for the past six months, so that it
is possible he had already begun the Missa, or at least its opening Kyrie, during the Lenten period following the death of August the Strong (1 February 1733). This was a time when concerted music was forbidden in the Leipzig churches, and his duties as Thomascantor (though not his teaching obligations) were less onerous. Two questions arise: was the opening Kyrie first performed on 21 April 1733, when the new Prince-Elector visited Leipzig for the Oath of Fealty?3 And, from the sporadic errors of transposition in his autograph score, can we assume that Bach was copying from an original version in C minor? If so, perhaps it was this version of the eventual Kyrie I (but so far without those imposing four bars we referred to at the outset) that was performed in April 1733 in Leipzig. Yet this would hardly have been the most tactful moment for presenting the new Elector with a score or parts, let alone a petition for a court title.

  The Gloria would certainly have been considered inappropriate during what was still a period of official mourning. Almost all of its nine movements can be shown to have originated in previous compositions, some now lost. So when, at the end of June, he set off for Dresden, Bach may have had the basic outline of the Missa already present in his mind and with new ideas as to which of his earlier compositions would be most suitable for inclusion. It would still require phenomenal skill to refit them within the pre-existing structure of the Ordinary before the new Missa was ready and parts could be copied. The watermarks of the parts presented to the Elector clearly indicate that the paper originated in Dresden. Some are in his own elegant hand, others in that of the family members accompanying him there – but not written by Thomasschule students in the weekly sweatshop where the cantata parts were normally copied out. On close inspection they are full of the kind of detail that makes sense only in the context of an actual or an imminent performance.