A source of ongoing inspiration for me each week are the church cantatas of Johann Sebastian Bach. There are usually several for each Sunday of the church calendar, composed over his many years of service in Weimar and Leipzig, Germany. Very few cantatas, however, were composed for, or performed during, the austere season of Lent. But Lent draws to a close with Holy Week, for which Bach composed various settings of Christ’s Passion story, some of which have been lost. The two which survive (Bach’s St. Matthew and St. John Passions) I would place on a par with any other great achievements of Western Civilization.
These early weeks of Lent I’m listening to parts and pieces of Bach’s Passion According to St. Matthew. If all we had left of Bach’s work was the opening movement, Kommt, Ihr Töchter, (Come, Ye Daughters) we would be scouring libraries and church archives all over Europe to find out more about this amazing composer and his powerful work.
To better appreciate what Bach has pulled off in this and so many other of his works, it helps to listen as though we were 17th Century Germans who had learned in grade school to sing polyphonically, that is, in rounds (“Are You Sleeping, Are You Sleeping, Brother John?) or by dividing the class into two or three parts singing different melodies at the same time, songs which were chosen or composed according to certain rules of harmony and mathematics, to blend and support each other even in their contrasts and differences. While we today typically compose and listen for one melody with supporting rhythm and harmony, the ear of the Medieval and Baroque European delighted in hearing and holding together two or three contrasting melodies, or one melody overlapping itself in successive waves, in a canon. Try listening to Baroque music with the bass turned way up, so that the cellos and basses match the violins, flutes and other soprano instruments in volume and importance, to get the intended effect. Listen to the bass parts as melodies in their own rights.
In the opening movement of Bach’s St. Matthew Passion, several things are going on simultaneously, like German clockwork. But the effect is not merely mechanical; it’s all highly charged, emotionally. In the first, or A, section, the bass parts are stepping painfully along, like Jesus dragging his cross through the streets of Jerusalem. Or they climb up the scale in great upwellings of grief or guilt. One choir (the daughters of Zion) and the treble instruments (violins, winds) have wailing-like motifs, while another choir weaves in and out, singing parts of a Lutheran hymn (a chorale), which the audience or the congregation would have known, O Lamm Gottes Unshuldig…” In some English language hymnals today we know it as, “O Lamb of God Most Holy, Who On the Cross Did Suffer…”
In the middle, or B, section, the strings take up a hammering motif, meant, of course, to remind us of the Crucifixion. Within the choral parts is a dialog, between the daughters of Zion and the gospel witness (St. Matthew?):
Behold him! Who? The Bridegroom!
Behold him! Where? Upon our Sin!
Behold him! What? The One Patient as a Lamb!
The effect is to draw us into the crowd along the Via Dolorosa in Jerusalem, among those lamenting Christ’s coming death, or those mocking and egging him on, or, in true Reformation realism, among both groups simultaneously. As Luther said, “We all carry the nails of Christ’s cross in our pockets.”
But Bach does not overplay his hand. Just as his most joyful works carry notes and tones of “Nevertheless,” fleeting harmonic nods to grief and dissonance (he was orphaned, widowed and bereaved of half his children and went blind in his lifetime), so do his most tragic and sorrowful works carry notes of comfort and assurance, brief flashes of hope and of divine redemption to come. The third section then, a reworking of the opening A part, heightens the tone of grief and outrage, in concert with the words, and yet ends on a solid, triumphant major chord, expressive of Bach’s Reformation faith. For, “He was bruised for our iniquities, and by his stripes we are healed.”
In terms of emotional and spiritual impact, a musical setting of the Passion was the 18th Century counterpart of today’s movies with their computer-generated special effects, meant likewise to move us, such as The Passion of the Christ. Every year when I listen to Bach’s setting of the Passion story according to St. Matthew or St. John, I hear new things that bring out elements of Christ’s last hours before his death that I had not considered, or not felt, before, but which music brings out and drives home in ways deeper than words alone.
A performance note: Fans of Bach’s music owe much to conductors like Herbert Von Karajan, Karl Richter, Nicolaus Harnoncourt and Gustav Leonhardt, who popularized the Kapellmeister’s works for previous generations. But some more recent conductors have pushed forward the recovery of 18th Century styles of performance, instrumentation, and even the use of Baroque era instruments , connecting sacred and secular music with the dance forms from which they were often drawn. The effect is of a much clearer, lighter, livelier, more intimate and probably more historically faithful experience of Renaissance and Baroque music for both performer and listener. Most notable among the new/ancient performers would be John Eliot Gardiner and the Monteverdi Choir with the English Baroque Soloists, Ton Koopman, with the Amsterdam Baroque Orchestra and Choir, Philippe Herreweghe of Belgium, and Rudolf Lutz of the J.S. Bach Stiftung, of Switzerland.