Why Bach Moves Us - MITweb.mit.edu/arn/Public/BACH=WhyBachMovesUs, George...enthusiastically agreed to the proposal, and together we embarked on a project we called “The Uncommon

Why Bach Moves UsGeorge B. Stauffer FEBRUARY 20, 2014 ISSUE

William H. Scheide, Princeton, New Jersey

Johann Sebastian Bach; painting by EliasGottlob Haussmann, 1748

Bach: Music in the Castle of Heavenby John Eliot GardinerKnopf, 629 pp., $35.00

One of my most moving encounters with the music ofJohann Sebastian Bach took place in the spring of 1997 inNew York City’s Central Synagogue. I was there to paylast respects to Gabe Wiener, a talented young recordingengineer who died of a brain aneurysm at age twenty-six. Ihad approached Gabe earlier in the year to see if hisrecording company, PGM Classics, would considercollaborating with the American Bach Society, which I ledat the time, to produce a compact disc of previouslyunrecorded organ music from Bach’s circle. Gabeenthusiastically agreed to the proposal, and together weembarked on a project we called “The Uncommon Bach.”We had just settled on the repertory and the organ when Ireceived word of his death.

There was great lamenting at the memorial service thatthis talented young man had been snatched away in themidst of important work, with so much promiseunfulfilled. The service began with Gabe’s recording of Salamone Rossi’s Hebrew setting ofthe Songs of Solomon, a gorgeous yet relatively unknown Venetian masterpiece. It continuedwith readings from the Torah, eulogies, and the Kaddish. But at the center of the service, atwhat proved to be the emotional high point, a countertenor sang the Agnus Dei from Bach’sMass in B Minor.

The Agnus Dei is one of Bach’s last creations, derived from music he had used twice before,in 1725 and 1735, with different texts. He was clearly pleased with the highly effective aria,and in 1749 he refined it a final time for insertion into the concluding portion of the B-MinorMass. Time was running out. The cataracts that had plagued his eyesight for some time wererapidly advancing, and the Agnus Dei was one of the last pieces he completed beforesubmitting to the eye operations that led to his death. Bach normally expanded music when he

Why Bach Moves Us | by George B. Stauffer | The New York R... http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2014/02/20/why-bach-moves-us/

1 of 8 5/19/18, 10:33 PM

U

revised it for further use, but in this unusual case he shortened the original, distilling itsemotional and musical essence and creating a new, intensified version of the piece. He hadless than a year to live.

As the singer intoned the ancient Latin text—Agnus Dei, qui tollis peccata mundi, misererenobis (Lamb of God, who taketh away the sins of the world, have mercy upon us)—enhancedby a poignant unison violin line and anguished pauses, I could not help but marvel at themiracle of hearing this music from the Roman Catholic Latin Mass Ordinary, written by aLutheran composer in Leipzig, in a Reform Jewish temple in New York City. Afterward Iasked Peter Rubinstein, the senior rabbi of Central Synagogue, why he picked this particularwork rather than something from the Jewish repertory. “We chose Bach’s Agnus Dei,” hereplied, “because it was the right piece, indeed the only piece capable of expressing theinexpressible—the anguish we feel over the inexplicable loss of young Gabe Wiener.”

Just how Bach managed to express the inexpressible, especially with regard to death, andwhat life experiences stood behind his compositional decisions are at the center of a livelynew book by the distinguished British conductor John Eliot Gardiner. Stepping in as presidentof the Leipzig Bach Archive at the beginning of this year, Gardiner has devoted his life to theperformance of Bach’s vocal works (he has conducted them all), and the biographical gaps heseeks to close in his lengthy study have perplexed Bach scholars for more than two hundredyears.

nlike Mozart, Beethoven, and other classical composers for whom personal letters abound,Bach left behind little correspondence. He never wrote an autobiographical sketch, eventhough he was invited to do so several times, and in only three instances—a job inquiry to anold school chum, a concerned exchange with town officials over the misdemeanors of his sonJohann Gottfried Bernhard, and underlinings and marginalia in his Calov Bible—does heoffer a glimpse of his inner self. All the rest must be pieced together from council records,pay receipts, anecdotes, brief printed notices, a carefully worded obituary, and other scraps ofinformation. Bach’s character has remained largely hidden from view.

As a result, biographers have been forced to fend for themselves, frequently reimaginingBach through the prism of their own life and times. Johann Nicolaus Forkel, a passionatekeyboard player and German nationalist, first portrayed Bach in 1802 as a virtuoso organistand harpsichordist and model citizen for Germany’s rising middle class. Later in the century,Philipp Spitta, born into a family of theologians and leader of the Lutheran church-musicrevival, portrayed Bach as the Fifth Evangelist, vigorously spreading the gospel through hisLutheran cantatas, motets, and Passions. And more recently, Christoph Wolff, former dean ofthe Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and University Professor at Harvard, presentedBach as a “learned musician,” an intellect worthy of Sir Isaac Newton and a town musicdirector well acquainted with the faculty of the university in Leipzig.*


2 of 8 5/19/18, 10:33 PM

It is no surprise, then, that Gardiner proposes yet another image of Bach. Moving beyond thehagiographies of the past, he presents a fallible Bach, a musical genius who on the one handis deeply committed to illuminating and expanding Luther’s teachings through his sacredvocal works (and therefore comes close to Spitta’s Fifth Evangelist), but on the other hand isa rebellious and resentful musician, harboring a lifelong grudge against authority—apersonality disorder stemming from a youth spent among ruffians and abusive teachers.Hiding behind Bach, creator of the Matthew Passion and B-Minor Mass, Gardiner suggests, isBach “the reformed teenage thug.” In the preface we read: “Emphatically, Bach the man wasnot a bore.” Neither is Gardiner.

Gardiner draws on the most recent findings of the Bach Archive research team, especiallyMichael Maul’s important study of the St. Thomas Choir. This material was not available toprevious biographers. But he believes the key to unlocking Bach’s concealed character lies inthe music itself, “the anchor to which we can return again and again, and the principal meansof validating or refuting any conclusion about its author.” In this sense his approachresembles that used for Shakespeare in Will in the World by Stephen Greenblatt, who calledon passages from the Bard’s works to flesh out an otherwise skeletal biography. The chiefdifference is that Greenblatt considered all the plays and sonnets, whereas Gardiner limitshimself to Bach’s vocal works—a restriction that raises problems.

While it’s difficult to imagine a controversial Bach biography, given the overall lack ofdocumentary material, Gardiner’s reappraisal comes close to it. For instance, in evaluatingBach’s initial years in Eisenach, where he was born in 1685, past biographers have attributedhis school absences to domestic problems: illnesses and the deaths of Bach’s parents, leavinghim an orphan at age ten. Gardiner suggests instead that the absences may have resulted froma negative atmosphere in a school and town filled with “rowdy, subversive, thuggish” boys.Earlier writers have viewed Bach’s subsequent stay with his older brother Johann Christophin Ohrdruf as a period of academic accomplishment, with Bach achieving good grades andhigh class standing under the progressive educational reforms of Jan Amos Comenius. HereGardiner sees a sinister element in the dismissal of cantor Johann Heinrich Arnold, reportedlyfor “bullying, sadism and sodomy.” Might Bach have been a victim of Arnold’s? Gardinerasks.

At age fifteen, Bach moved north to Lüneburg, where he sang in the St. Michael’s MatinsChoir, studied organ with Georg Böhm, and made trips to Hamburg to observe the great NorthGerman organist Johann Adam Reincken. In this instance Gardiner points to the turf wars ofthe Lüneburg prefects over serenading rights, creating gang clashes fought by “embryonicJets and Sharks.”

Gardiner concludes that Bach was “bred en bawn in a brier-patch” like Brer Rabbit, and thatthis thorny upbringing set the stage for a troubled professional life. Thus Bach’s stay inArnstadt, where he “really showed the first fruits of his application to the art of organ playing


3 of 8 5/19/18, 10:33 PM

A

and composition,” according to his formal obituary, becomes a battleground with a rowdy,intractable student choir and a local cultural milieu that was not sympathetic to him. Bach’snext post, Mühlhausen, where he wrote cantatas of remarkable beauty and invention, wasplagued by conditions that “prevented [him] from doing anything worth while.” And Weimar,where “the pleasure his Grace took in his playing fired him with the desire to try everypossible artistry in his treatment of the organ,” according to the obituary once again, is alsoviewed as a period of unending conflict with his employers.

ll this builds to Bach’s arrival in Leipzig in 1723, where Gardiner sees the well-knownsquabbles with members of the Town Council as the ultimate consequence of emotionalwounds from a troubled youth:

The strong impression one gets is of a man almost constantly at odds with someone orsomething. It should not surprise us, then, if we find that these lifelong problems withanger and authority were incubated in the unsavoury atmosphere and environment of hisearly schooling and in childhood traumas.

This approach reaches a climax when Gardiner reads a hidden agenda into the Leipzigcantatas. He questions whether Cantata 178, with its “dire, sibyl-like mood of warning againsthypocrites and prophets,” was Bach’s way of channeling his frustration and vituperativeenergy into his music and then watching as it “rained down from the choir loft on to hischosen targets below.” More than that, he characterizes the aria “Weicht, all’ ihr Übeltäter”(Begone, all you evildoers!) from Cantata 135 as “angry music executed with a palpable fury,with Bach fuming at delinquent malefactors.” This begins to sound like Susan McClary’sinfamous portrayal of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony as the “throttling, murderous rage of arapist incapable of attaining release.”

All this makes for lively reading. But what are we to make of it?

It seems to me that for Bach’s formative years and professional positions leading up to hisappointment in Leipzig, the music is indeed our best indication of his personality. Byexcluding Bach’s keyboard and instrumental pieces from discussion, however, Gardinerdisregards telling evidence that he himself deems critical for understanding Bach’s character.For example, he mentions the astonishing organ tablatures, discovered only in 2005, of worksby Reincken and Dieterich Buxtehude that Bach wrote out when he was between thirteen andfifteen years old. But Gardiner doesn’t acknowledge what they tell us. The neat, meticulous,almost flawless notation points to a disciplined, methodical, well-trained teenager deeplycommitted to learning his craft. And the music suggests a prodigy eager to take on the mosttechnically challenging organ music of the time. This does not seem to square with the imageof a wild, unruly boy running around Ohrdruf and Lüneburg with hoodlums.

And in Cöthen, characterized by Gardiner as a “provincial backwater,” Bach nevertheless


4 of 8 5/19/18, 10:33 PM

Sotheby’s

The Thomasschule and Thomaskirche in Leipzig, where Bach was thechoir director from 1723 until his death in 1750; painting by Felix

Mendelssohn, 1838

T

managed to produce the Brandenburg Concertos, the solo violin and cello pieces, and otherinstrumental and keyboard works that reveal his complete embrace of dance music, perhapsthe most important influence on his mature style other than his adoption of Vivaldi’s music inWeimar. A quick comparison of Well-Tempered Clavier, volume 1, with Well-TemperedClavier, volume 2, or the Weimar cantatas with the Leipzig cantatas shows how critical theformal use of dance at the Cöthen court was to Bach’s eventual formulation of a powerfullyengaging universal style. Cöthen may have been a petty court, compared to those in Berlin orDresden, but for Bach the stay there was a life-altering experience.

The truth about Bach’s personality probablyrests somewhere in the middle. The pictureof Bach as humble Lutheran servant of God,model child, and fully mature adult isundoubtedly too saccharine. The argumentswith town councils show a strong will andprickly temperament, and his privatebiblical exegesis suggests inner resentment.Gardiner is to be applauded for yanking usback to reality, for underscoring that theyouthful pranks mentioned by C.P.E. Bachmay refer to a less responsible side of hisfather. But the letters of family amanuensisJohann Elias Bach, describing a cantor’shome filled with visitors, carnations, andcanaries, suggest a warm domestic havenrather than the lair of an angry young man.

he obsessive search for Bach’s dark side subsides in the second half of the book, whenGardiner arrives at the music he knows and loves best, the Leipzig vocal works. Here the tonebrightens.

Bach’s decision, upon becoming cantor of St. Thomas, to provide a new cantata for eachSunday and festival day of the church year was the most momentous compositional decisionof his life. It was common at the time for cantors to produce annual cantata cycles ofapproximately sixty works each. Georg Philipp Telemann, writer of 1,700 cantatas, andChristoph Graupner, with 1,400 to his credit, could shake church pieces out of their sleeves,and it is no surprise that they were offered the St. Thomas position before Bach. But Bach’swriting was much more substantive and intense, and the commitment to weekly cantatacomposition during his initial Leipzig years was a daunting personal challenge. He had only amodest supply of earlier works. He had no professional copyists at his disposal. He had nomore than a motley band of singers and instrumentalists.


5 of 8 5/19/18, 10:33 PM

The weekly routine of cantata production must have been arduous: composing a thirty-minutework, overseeing the preparation of performance parts, rehearsing the score, and finallyperforming the music one, two, or even three times, depending on the Sunday or feast day inquestion. Even more remarkable was the multiyear commitment: the steady production, weekin and week out, with Passions, oratorios, and Latin-texted works added at the high points ofChristmas, Easter, and Pentecost. The obituary stated that Bach composed five annual cycles,making a total of approximately three hundred cantatas. Only two hundred or so survive.

Gardiner’s direction of the “Bach Pilgrimage,” the performance of the complete cantatas inliturgical order during the course of 2000, gives him a unique insider’s feel for Bach’s vocalmusic and the rhythm of an annual cycle. His walkthrough of the annual cycles of 1723–1724and 1724–1725 (the others are more fragmentary) provides a marvelous sense of the liturgicalseasons and Bach’s musical reaction to them.

There are great advantages to approaching the cantatas this way. We can experience, forinstance, the tremendous burden of Bach’s first Christmas, when he had to compose, prepare,and perform nine works over a span of sixteen days. We can see just how methodically heapproached composition when he began the second annual cycle, based on chorale tunes, byassigning the melody first to the soprano voice, then to the alto, then to the tenor, and finallyto the bass, respectively, in the opening choruses of the first four works. Or we can note howtoward the end of the same cycle Bach became enamored of the oboe da caccia, an exoticinstrument with the body of an oboe and the bell of a horn, using it in six of the last twelveworks.

These and other day-to-day matters come to life in Gardiner’s tour through the cantatas, as hiswriting picks up the lyrical flow of the music:

Here we see a great composer at the height of his powers meeting the challenges of aself-imposed regimen week by week and adjusting his choice of form, his approach andhis tone of voice to each underlying theme, each symbol and each metaphor arising fromthe texts laid out in front of him. There can be no doubt as to the magnitude of the taskor the rapidity with which his skill developed.

Gardiner believes it was Bach’s identification with Martin Luther that made all the difference.Luther’s earthy German translation of the Bible, a “prose of the people,” provided Bach withbold images to paint in music. It was the perfect counterpart to Luther’s hymns and hymntexts, to which Bach returned time and time again. Luther’s advocacy of music and hisconviction that it could make scripture come alive legitimized Bach’s compositionalambitions. Picking up Spitta’s mantle, Gardiner makes the case that the cantatas, rather thanthe keyboard or instrumental works, are Bach’s greatest achievement. And within the cantatasit is the sacred pieces, backed by Bach’s fervent faith, that shine above the secular works,which in Gardiner’s view do not display the same intense conviction.


6 of 8 5/19/18, 10:33 PM

Crowning the cantata cycles are the Passions. Of the two that survive, Gardiner finds the St.John the most dramatic, perhaps because the text offered optimal opportunity for contrasts.On a small scale, this played out in arias such as “Betrachte, meine Seel” (Consider, my soul),in which the torn and blood-streaked back of the flogged Christ is likened to a rainbowsymbolizing divine grace. Bach painted this image with exotic violas d’amore accompaniedby a lute (or lute harpsichord, in a subsequent performance). On a large scale, it played out inthe turbulent choruses of the hysterical and vengeful mob that contrast with the serenerecitatives and arias portraying Christ. The chorales, perhaps actively sung by thecongregation (this remains open to debate), stood as markers for the listeners, signposts offamiliar texts and melodies that engaged them more deeply in the drama. Gardiner is right topoint out the St. John Passion’s close ties with opera and its musical devices. As was true ofopera, audience members could purchase the printed text at the event, even though they werealready familiar with the characters and plot.

Gardiner concludes his survey of the vocal music with an extended exploration of the Mass inB-Minor, Bach’s most universal church work. Consisting mainly of recycled movements fromcantatas written over a thirty-five-year period, it allowed Bach to survey his vocal pieces onelast time and pick select movements for further revision and refinement. By shifting the textfrom German to Latin, he was able to move the music from the Lutheran Proper service to theCatholic Ordinary. The work is permeated with secular dance music, which accounts for itsremarkable exuberance, grace, and appeal. But it also contains deeply expressive music fromBach’s Weimar and Leipzig church cantatas that gives it extraordinary emotional depth anddrama. As Gardiner well describes it, the Mass “celebrates the fundamental sanctity of life, anawareness of the divine and a transcendent dimension as a fact of human existence.”Assembled in 1748 and 1749, it was Bach’s musical last will and testament.

Gardiner, like earlier biographers, ponders whether the work is Lutheran or Catholic. TheMissa (Kyrie and Gloria) and Sanctus were compatible with the Lutheran worship service, asprevious writers have acknowledged. But recent evidence shows that the Symbolum Nicenumand Agnus Dei portions could have been performed within the Leipzig Lutheran liturgy aswell. In the case of the Symbolum, Gardiner suggests that Bach’s late insertion of the Etincarnatus puts the Crucifixus at the very center of the music, thus reinforcing Luther’s beliefthat the crucifixion was the central event of Christianity, an act that allowed man to perceiveGod through Christ’s suffering and death.

This is true, but the interpolation also highlights the incarnation, which was de rigueur forCatholic Mass settings of the time. There are reasons to believe Bach performed theSymbolum in its initial, shorter version in Leipzig as a Lutheran anthem, and inserted the Etincarnatus only when he incorporated the music into his evolving Catholic Missa tota. Theextant manuscript of the B-Minor Mass is filled with scratch-outs, corrections, revisions, andinsertions. It suggests a work in progress.


7 of 8 5/19/18, 10:33 PM

*

If Bach had lived longer, it is likely that he would have created a definitive fair copy of theMass, similar to those of the St. John and St. Matthew Passions. There he might haveconfirmed the Catholic nature of the whole by replacing the Lutheran term “SymbolumNicenum” with the Roman standard, “Credo.” He also might have given the work a name (thepresent title comes from the nineteenth century; the Bach family seems to have called thecompilation “The Great Catholic Mass”).

Which brings us back to the Agnus Dei aria of this monumental piece. Its text does not drawon Luther’s German or the poetry of a Leipzig librettist, but rather on the ancient language ofthe Mass Ordinary. Is it Bach’s use of this timeless Latin plea that still moves us so stronglytoday, or is it the seemingly inexorable progression of his melodic lines and harmonicsequences? Does the perfectly proportioned structure of the piece stir primal feelings thattranscend time, place, and creed, to express the inexpressible? Although Music in the Castleof Heaven does not fully answer these questions, it forces us to rethink Bach’s life and howadversity and faith affected his vocal compositions. And it takes us inside his world, allowingus to see the works from the standpoint of composer, performer, and listener. As OttoBettmann once remarked, Bach’s “music sets in order what life cannot.”

Johann Sebastian Bach: The Learned Musician (Norton, 2000); reviewed in these pages by Robert L. Marshall, June 15, 2000. ↩

© 1963-2018 NYREV, Inc. All rights reserved.


8 of 8 5/19/18, 10:33 PM

Documents

Why Bach Moves Us - MITweb.mit.edu/arn/Public/BACH=WhyBachMovesUs, George...enthusiastically agreed to the proposal, and together we embarked on a project we called “The Uncommon