197
Gott ist unsre Zuversicht (2 parts)
”
1736–37
195
Dem Gerechten muß das Licht (2 parts)
”
1742
120a ‡
Herr Gott, Beherrscher aller Dinge (2 parts, incomplete)
”
probably 1729
157
Ich lasse dich nicht, du segnest mich denn
Funeral service
2/6/1727
194 ‡
Höchsterwünschtes Freudenfest (2 parts)
Organ dedication
11/2/1723a
190a
Singet dem Herrn ein neues Lied (lost)
Bicentennial of the Augsburg Confession
6/25/1730
120b
Gott, man lobet dich in der Stille
6/26/1730
Anh. 4
Wünschet Jerusalem Glück
”
6/27/1730
Anh. 15
Siehe, der Hüter Israel (lost)
Special homage
unknown (Leipzigperiod)
THE “GREAT PASSION” AND ITS CONTEXT
On Good Friday 1727, close to the end of his fourth year in Leipzig, Bach presented at St. Thomas’s a work of extraordinary musical dimensions, the Passion According to St. Matthew, BWV 244. When Anna Magdalena Bach later identified an apparently disjoined continuo part as belonging “zur groß Bassion” (to the great Passion),79 everyone in the Bach family circle knew what she meant, for not only did the “great Passion” overshadow all Bach’s other settings of the biblical Passion story, but its outsized formal dimensions and performance requirements, its compositional sophistication and technical mastery, and its powerful and poignant expressive qualities left behind all that had been customary or even conceivable in sacred music of the time. The St. Matthew Passion, which formed the pinnacle of the vocal works composed by Bach for the Leipzig churches, reached its lofty heights on the shoulders of his earlier works. To be sure, the large-scale Passion music benefited from the extraordinary experience Bach had gained in four years that burst with unceasing cantata composition and performance. However, two works in particular played an especially important role in the conceptualization and grandiose design of the “great Passion”: the Magnificat of Christmas 1723 and the St. John Passion from the spring of 1724.
The Magnificat, BWV 243a, the first larger-scale composition for the Leipzig main churches, was performed at a small festival of sacred music during Bach’s first Christmas season in his new city. Of the various works performed then (see Table 8.6), Bach’s only setting of the Canticle of the Virgin (Luke 1:46–55) represented the fullest and most elaborate compositional effort of his then-young career. Having begun his duties after the high feasts of Easter and Pentecost had already passed, Christmas 1723 offered the first opportunity for an exhilarating musical statement. At Vespers services in Leipzig, “the Magnificat was sung in German on regular Sundays but performed in concerted form and in Latin on high feasts.”80 Following a local Christmas tradition that had originated in the late Middle Ages and had also been observed by his predecessors,81 Bach expanded the setting of the Magnificat by interpolating four German and Latin songs of praise, so-called Laudes: “Vom Himmel hoch, da komm ich her,” “Freut euch und jubiliert,” “Gloria in excelsis Deo,” and “Virga Jesse floruit.” At St. Thomas’s, these inserted movements were performed from the east organ loft, the swallow’s nest opposite the main musicians’ gallery at the west end of the church. But even at St. Nicholas’s, where the performing conditions did not permit this kind of stereophony, the double-choir structure of such an expanded Magnificat could not but produce a splendid and festive effect (see Table 8.14). Apart from its unusual five-part choral setting and rich instrumental scoring, the piece’s symmetric frame and the different polyphonic textures and expressive gestures of the individual movements were distinctive innovations. Bach’s close reading of the concluding Lesser Doxology, with the phrase “sicut erat in principio” (as it was in the beginning), resulted in a finale that presents a literal repeat of the opening movement, not as an abstract architectural device but as an effort to translate this portion of the text meaningfully into music.
TABLE 8.14. Magnificat in E-flat major, BWV 243a
Vocal-Instrumental Ensemble I:
Vocal-Instrumental Ensemble II:
Magnificat
Laudes
1. Magnificat: SSATB, 3tr/ti, 2rec, 2ob, str, bc
2. Et exultavit: S II, str, bc
A. Vom Himmel hoch: SSATB, bc
3. Quia respexit: S I, ob, bc
4. Omnes generationes: SSATB, 2ob, str, bc
5. Quia fecit: B, bc
B. Freut euch und jubilieret: SSAT, bc
6. Et misericordia: AT, str, bc
7. Fecit potentiam: tutti
C. Gloria in excelsis Deo: SSATB, str, bc
8. Deposuit potentes: T, str, bc
9. Esurientes: A, 2rec, bc
D. Virga Jesse floruit: SB, bc
10. Suscepit Israel: SSA, tr, str, bc
11. Sicut locutus est: SSATB, bc
12. Gloria Patri: tutti
A decade later, between 1732 and 1735, Bach substantially revised the Magnificat. For the new version, BWV 243, he deleted the interpolated Christmas movements, thereby neutralizing its liturgical destination, transposed the piece from E-flat to D major, one of the standard “trumpet keys,” and modified the instrumentation by replacing recorders with the more modern transverse flutes and, for movement 10, the solo trumpet with two oboes in unison. These largely pragmatic decisions, which converted the Magnificat into a Vespers repertoire piece, indicate that Bach was striving to convert his Magnificat into a liturgical work that would be suitable for any festive occasion.82
If Christmas 1723 plunged Bach into a whirlwind of musical activities, the subsequent Good Friday, April 7, 1724, provided an opportunity of a very different kind. After a tempus clausum longer than that of Advent—six weeks of Lent during which no concerted music was permitted except on the Marian feast of Annunciation, March 25—the morning service on Good Friday at the Leipzig main churches followed a long-standing tradition: singing the St. John Passion in the four-part polyphonic setting by Martin Luther’s musical adviser, the Wittenberg cantor Johann Walter, as reprinted in the 1682 choir songbook by Gottfried Vopelius.83 Protestant churches in other cities, especially court churches, had long before introduced more modern versions of the musical Passion, and by around 1700 they also incorporated contemplative and other pieces as well as arias and recitatives, with instrumental accompaniments. Leipzig’s New Church, since Telemann’s years a hotbed of innovation in matters of sacred music, saw the performance of a Passion oratorio at the Good Friday morning service in 1717,84 so that Johann Kuhnau felt under pressure to compete. But the Leipzig consistory resisted until 1721, when councillor Gottfried Lange, noting that people were flocking to the Good Friday service at the New Church and that cantor Kuhnau “very much liked to perform the Passion historia in figural style,”85 was able to persuade the consistory to give in. Although they granted no changes for the morning service, they allowed the Vespers liturgy to be revised in order to accommodate a musical Passion in place of the traditional practice, under which the congregation sang rhymed Passion paraphrases in the form of the twenty-three-stanza hymn by Sebald Heyden “O Mensch bewein dein Sünde groß” of 1525 or the twenty-four stanzas of Paul Stockmann’s “Jesu, Leiden, Pein und Tod” of 1633. And as the St. Thomas sexton, Johann Christoph Rost, duly noted, “on Good Friday of the year 1721, in the vesper service, the Passion was performed for the first time in concerted style.”86
The composition then presented was Kuhnau’s St. Mark Passion, which has survived only in incomplete form.87 But even from the fragment, we can see that Kuhnau established a model that remained valid for Bach insofar as it focused on the unaltered biblical narrative distributed among s
oloists (evangelist and various soliloquentes, or solo speakers: Jesus, Peter, Pilate, etc.) and choir (various turbae, or crowds: High Priests, Roman Soldiers, Jews, etc.), interrupted here and there by hymn strophes and contemplative lyrics—so-called madrigal pieces set to freely composed verse, mainly in the form of arias. The whole structure was divided into two parts, one to be performed before and one after the Vespers sermon. Sexton Rost was describing what had become a musical service, with the preached sermon at the center extended and enveloped by the musical sermon of the dominant musical Passion. The first part was sandwiched between two congregational hymns, “Da Jesus an dem Kreuze stund” of 1640 and “O Lamm Gottes unschuldig” of 1545, and the second part was always followed by the sixteenth-century motet “Ecce quomodo moritur justus” (Isaiah 57:1–2) by Jacob Handl.
While the 1721 Good Friday Vespers service featuring Kuhnau’s St. Mark Passion took place at St. Thomas’s, the Passion performance of 1722 was held at St. Nicholas’s and that of 1723 under the direction of the first prefect, Johann Gabriel Roth, back at St. Thomas’s, since the venue alternated yearly between the two churches. Evidently, no one thought to inform Bach, who innocently scheduled his St. John Passion for April 7, 1724, at St. Thomas’s. This plan came to the attention of the city council, “since the title of the music sent around this year revealed that it was to take place again in St. Thomas’s.” The upshot was that just four days before the performance, Bach was instructed to change the location to St. Nicholas’s. According to the council proceedings, he quickly agreed to comply, “but pointed out that the booklet was already printed, that there was no room available, and that the harpsichord needed some repair, all of which, however, could be attended to at little cost; but he requested at any rate that a little additional room be provided in the choir loft, so that he could place the persons needed for the music, and that the harpsichord be repaired.”88 At the council’s expense, a flyer announcing the new location was printed and the necessary arrangements regarding harpsichord and performance space were made. For the St. John Passion, Bach needed to accommodate a vocal-instrumental ensemble that was larger than what he had used at St. Nicholas’s before, even larger than that for the cantata BWV 63 or the Magnificat (Table 8.6). Indeed, since on Good Friday the motet singers were not needed at St. Thomas’s, Bach must have intended to combine the first and second choirs, a circumstance he would later use to advantage for the double-choir scoring in the St. Matthew Passion. Moreover, additional forces on the instrumental side were also required, not merely to enlarge the string section and to provide dual continuo accompaniment (organ plus harpsichord), but to permit sonorities of special effect (transverse flutes,89 viole d’amore, viola da gamba, and lute) as demanded by the pathos and expression in the biblical narrative in general and the lyrical reflections upon it in particular.
Because of the Leipzig consistory’s apparent requirement of adhering to the biblical Passion text, Bach could not use an existing Passion oratorio text such as a famous 1712 libretto by the Hamburg consul Barthold Heinrich Brockes, Der für die Sünde der Welt Gemarterte und Sterbende Jesus, in which biblical narrative is supplanted by rhymed paraphrases and which Reinhard Keiser, Telemann, Handel, Johann Mattheson, Gottfried Heinrich Stölzel, Johann Friedrich Fasch, and many other composers set to music. So Bach or a collaborator had to assemble the appropriate texts to complement the biblical narrative. The result was a compilation of individual poems excerpted from publications by Brockes, Christian Weise, and Christian Heinrich Postel (see Table 8.15) that recalls the heterogeneity of texts in the first annual cantata cycle. Bach did, however, take the gospel of St. John as a point of departure and structured the entire work around the design of the biblical narrative. The musical disposition of the Passion clearly suggests that Bach based his composition on a close reading of the biblical dialogue and its literary structure, especially in the tribunal scene in part II, central to the Passion story in the book of John. A likely starting point for Bach’s compositional plan was the existence of repeated text passages in the Gospel account, such as the words “Jesum von Nazareth” and “Kreuzige ihn.” Also the concentration of different crowd responses (turba choruses) in the central scene of part II must have suggested to him the possibility of providing a strong, unifying, and well-focused musical architecture by establishing a system of musical correlations.
In its harmonic design and compositional plan, Bach’s musical setting of the biblical narrative from John 18:1 to 19:42 gives the impression of a through-composed score independent of the chorales and contemplative arias yet mindful of them. Bach’s blueprint is especially apparent in the coherent way that the dramatic and ardent dialogue of the tribunal scene in part II unfolds from movement 16 to 18, 21, 23, 25, and 27. While the interjected chorales and arias function as pillars of harmonic stability, they also enhance the intensity and depth of expression reflected in the rapid sequence of sharp and flat keys—nos. 19 (three flats) 22 (four sharps) 24 (two flats) 28 (three sharps) 35 (four flats)—and the correspondingly contrasting colors of vocal-instrumental sonority.
The Passion performance of 1724 provided Bach with the first opportunity to put his own stamp on the Good Friday Vespers service, which had only recently become the musical highpoint of the year (the sermon, for all its length, could be thought of as a mere interruption of an essentially musical service). He was able to define the event and to shape both its perception by the worshippers and their expectations for subsequent years. Never before had Bach been in a position to engage in such a showcase performance, one that needed to be exceptionally well prepared and that greatly advanced his experience with large-scale compositions. In its textual components and organization, he adhered to Kuhnau’s model—presumably a requirement of the Leipzig clergy—but he chose dimensions that exceeded any of his two-part cantatas, the Magnificat, or the lost Weimar Passion of 1717. Lacking a homogenous libretto, he designed the work along the lines of the seventeenth-century Passion historia, with the biblical text, punctuated by hymn stanzas, functioning as the structural backbone. This approach also allowed for substantial changes that Bach later made to the work, replacing some of the poetical movements in order to modify its external gestalt, musical content, and theological character.
TABLE 8.15. Libretto Design of the St. John Passion, BWV 245 (first version, 1724)
Second version (1725), substituted (II) and added (+) movements: 1II. O Mensch, bewein (chorale chorus); 11+. Himmel, reiße (aria with chorale); 13II. Zerschmettert mich (aria); 19II (20). Ach windet euch nicht so (aria); 40II. Christe, du Lamm Gottes (chorale chorus).
Such changes are particularly evident in the second version of the St. John Passion, performed a year later, on Good Friday 1725. Bach replaced the opening and concluding movements with two chorale elaborations, “O Mensch, bewein dein Sünde groß” and “Christe, du Lamm Gottes.” Also, one of three aria substitutions featured a chorale, “Jesu deine Passion,” which along with “O Mensch, bewein” was especially well chosen.90 Bach clearly intended these true classics from the rhymed Passion repertoire to help adapt the St. John Passion to the ongoing cycle of that year’s chorale cantatas. By using these two complex chorale settings to frame the entire work, he demonstrated the impact and significance of a musical architecture—not merely to present a novel formal accent but to forge a genuine new identity for the piece. A third revision of the St. John Passionmay have been prompted by Bach’s having composed his St. Matthew Passion, as he now dropped the only two passages that were drawn from the Gospel of St. Matthew (Peter’s lament and the earthquake scene). There is also a fourth version—dating to 1749, the year before Bach’s death—that undoes most of the structural changes made since the first but requires larger forces than before. Judging by the surviving set of original performing parts, the orchestra consisted of an expanded body of strings (with additional stands for violins, violas, and violoncellos) and a continuo group bolstered by a contrabassoon, to provide an especially weighty fou
ndation.
In addition to these four discernible versions of the St. John Passion that emerged in its twenty-five-year history, Bach began, around 1739, a thorough revision of the work, which by then had already undergone two massive transmutations. This revision, intended to preserve the work in an autograph fair copy and to restore the basic structure of the original version, also entailed a careful stylistic overhaul of the entire score. For whatever reason, Bach broke off after twenty pages, in the middle of the tenth movement. Because that revision remained unfinished, an aura of incompleteness surrounds the St. John Passion.91 Conceivably, Bach stopped his work because of an unpleasant affair that took place in the spring of 1739, recorded by the town scribe on March 17, ten days before Good Friday:
Upon a Noble and Most Wise Council’s order I have gone to Mr. Bach here and have pointed out to the same that the music he intends to perform on the coming Good Friday is to be omitted until regular permission for the same is received. Whereupon he answered: it had always been done so; he did not care, for he got nothing out of it anyway, and it was only a burden; he would notify the Superintendent that it had been forbidden him; if an objection were made on account of the text, [he remarked that] it had already been performed several times.92
The incident, emanating from the civic rather than church authorities, clearly involved an issue of administrative supervision. We do not know whether Bach’s angry reaction resulted in the cancellation of a performance of his own composition and the last-minute substitution of another work (possibly Telemann’s Brockes Passion, which Bach must have performed at around that time), as a calendar of Passion performances during Bach’s Leipzig period cannot be reconstructed without omissions and conjectures (see Table 8.16).93
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