Why Bach Moves Us

William H. Scheide, Princeton, New Jersey

Johann Sebastian Bach; painting by EliasGottlob Haussmann, 1748

George B. StaufferFEBRUARY 20, 2014 ISSUE

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

One of my most moving encounters with themusic of Johann Sebastian Bach took placein the spring of 1997 in New York City’sCentral Synagogue. I was there to pay lastrespects to Gabe Wiener, a talented youngrecording engineer who died of a brainaneurysm at age twenty­six. I hadapproached Gabe earlier in the year to see ifhis recording company, PGM Classics,would consider collaborating with theAmerican Bach Society, which I led at thetime, to produce a compact disc ofpreviously unrecorded organ music fromBach’s circle. Gabe enthusiastically agreedto the proposal, and together we embarkedon a project we called “The UncommonBach.” We had just settled on the repertoryand the organ when I received word of his death.

There was great lamenting at the memorial service that this talented young manhad been snatched away in the midst of important work, with so much promiseunfulfilled. The service began with Gabe’s recording of Salamone Rossi’sHebrew setting of the Songs of Solomon, a gorgeous yet relatively unknownVenetian masterpiece. It continued with readings from the Torah, eulogies, andthe Kaddish. But at the center of the service, at what proved to be the emotionalhigh point, a countertenor sang the Agnus Dei from Bach’s Mass 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 pleasedwith the highly effective aria, and in 1749 he refined it a final time for insertioninto the concluding portion of the B­Minor Mass. Time was running out. Thecataracts that had plagued his eyesight for some time were rapidly advancing,and the Agnus Dei was one of the last pieces he completed before submitting tothe eye operations that led to his death. Bach normally expanded music whenhe revised it for further use, but in this unusual case he shortened the original,distilling its emotional and musical essence and creating a new, intensifiedversion of the piece. He had less than a year to live.

As the singer intoned the ancient Latin text—Agnus Dei, qui tollis peccatamundi, miserere nobis (Lamb of God, who taketh away the sins of the world,have mercy upon us)—enhanced by a poignant unison violin line andanguished pauses, I could not help but marvel at the miracle of hearing thismusic from the Roman Catholic Latin Mass Ordinary, written by a Lutherancomposer in Leipzig, in a Reform Jewish temple in New York City. AfterwardI asked Peter Rubinstein, the senior rabbi of Central Synagogue, why he pickedthis particular work rather than something from the Jewish repertory. “Wechose Bach’s Agnus Dei,” he replied, “because it was the right piece, indeedthe only piece capable of expressing the inexpressible—the anguish we feelover the inexplicable loss of young Gabe Wiener.”

Just how Bach managed to express the inexpressible, especially with regard todeath, and what life experiences stood behind his compositional decisions areat the center of a lively new book by the distinguished British conductor JohnEliot Gardiner. Stepping in as president of the Leipzig Bach Archive at thebeginning of this year, Gardiner has devoted his life to the performance ofBach’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 thantwo hundred years.

Unlike Mozart, Beethoven, and other classical composers for whom personalletters abound, Bach left behind little correspondence. He never wrote anautobiographical sketch, even though he was invited to do so several times, andin only three instances—a job inquiry to an old school chum, a concernedexchange with town officials over the misdemeanors of his son JohannGottfried Bernhard, and underlinings and marginalia in his Calov Bible—doeshe offer a glimpse of his inner self. All the rest must be pieced together fromcouncil records, pay receipts, anecdotes, brief printed notices, a carefullyworded obituary, and other scraps of information. Bach’s character hasremained largely hidden from view.

As a result, biographers have been forced to fend for themselves, frequentlyreimagining Bach through the prism of their own life and times. JohannNicolaus Forkel, a passionate keyboard player and German nationalist, firstportrayed Bach in 1802 as a virtuoso organist and harpsichordist and modelcitizen for Germany’s rising middle class. Later in the century, Philipp Spitta,born into a family of theologians and leader of the Lutheran church­musicrevival, portrayed Bach as the Fifth Evangelist, vigorously spreading the gospelthrough his Lutheran cantatas, motets, and Passions. And more recently,Christoph Wolff, former dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences andUniversity Professor at Harvard, presented Bach as a “learned musician,” anintellect worthy of Sir Isaac Newton and a town music director well acquaintedwith the faculty of the university in Leipzig.

It is no surprise, then, that Gardiner proposes yet another image of Bach.Moving beyond the hagiographies of the past, he presents a fallible Bach, amusical genius who on the one hand is deeply committed to illuminating andexpanding Luther’s teachings through his sacred vocal works (and thereforecomes close to Spitta’s Fifth Evangelist), but on the other hand is a rebelliousand resentful musician, harboring a lifelong grudge against authority—apersonality disorder stemming from a youth spent among ruffians and abusiveteachers. Hiding behind Bach, creator of the Matthew Passion and B­MinorMass, Gardiner suggests, is Bach “the reformed teenage thug.” In the prefacewe read: “Emphatically, Bach the man was not a bore.” Neither is Gardiner.

Gardiner draws on the most recent findings of the Bach Archive research team,especially Michael Maul’s important study of the St. Thomas Choir. Thismaterial was not available to previous biographers. But he believes the key tounlocking Bach’s concealed character lies in the music itself, “the anchor towhich we can return again and again, and the principal means of validating orrefuting any conclusion about its author.” In this sense his approach resemblesthat used for Shakespeare in Will in the World by Stephen Greenblatt, who

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called on passages from the Bard’s works to flesh out an otherwise skeletalbiography. The chief difference is that Greenblatt considered all the plays andsonnets, whereas Gardiner limits himself to Bach’s vocal works—a restrictionthat raises problems.

While it’s difficult to imagine a controversial Bach biography, given theoverall lack of documentary material, Gardiner’s reappraisal comes close to it.For instance, in evaluating Bach’s initial years in Eisenach, where he was bornin 1685, past biographers have attributed his school absences to domesticproblems: illnesses and the deaths of Bach’s parents, leaving him an orphan atage ten. Gardiner suggests instead that the absences may have resulted from anegative atmosphere in a school and town filled with “rowdy, subversive,thuggish” boys. Earlier writers have viewed Bach’s subsequent stay with hisolder brother Johann Christoph in Ohrdruf as a period of academicaccomplishment, with Bach achieving good grades and high class standingunder the progressive educational reforms of Jan Amos Comenius. HereGardiner sees a sinister element in the dismissal of cantor Johann HeinrichArnold, reportedly for “bullying, sadism and sodomy.” Might Bach have beena victim of Arnold’s? Gardiner asks.

At age fifteen, Bach moved north to Lüneburg, where he sang in the St.Michael’s Matins Choir, studied organ with Georg Böhm, and made trips toHamburg to observe the great North German organist Johann Adam Reincken.In this instance Gardiner points to the turf wars of the Lüneburg prefects overserenading rights, creating gang clashes fought by “embryonic Jets andSharks.”

Gardiner concludes that Bach was “bred en bawn in a brier­patch” like BrerRabbit, and that this thorny upbringing set the stage for a troubled professionallife. Thus Bach’s stay in Arnstadt, where he “really showed the first fruits ofhis application to the art of organ playing and composition,” according to hisformal obituary, becomes a battleground with a rowdy, intractable studentchoir and a local cultural milieu that was not sympathetic to him. Bach’s nextpost, Mühlhausen, where he wrote cantatas of remarkable beauty andinvention, was plagued by conditions that “prevented [him] from doinganything worth while.” And Weimar, where “the pleasure his Grace took in hisplaying fired him with the desire to try every possible artistry in his treatmentof the organ,” according to the obituary once again, is also viewed as a periodof unending conflict with his employers.

ll this builds to Bach’s arrival in Leipzig in 1723, where Gardiner sees thewell­known squabbles with members of the Town Council as the ultimate

consequence of emotional wounds from a troubled youth:

The strong impression one gets is of a man almost constantly at odds withsomeone or something. It should not surprise us, then, if we find that theselifelong problems with anger and authority were incubated in theunsavoury atmosphere and environment of his early schooling and inchildhood traumas.

This approach reaches a climax when Gardiner reads a hidden agenda into theLeipzig cantatas. He questions whether Cantata 178, with its “dire, sibyl­likemood of warning against hypocrites and prophets,” was Bach’s way ofchanneling his frustration and vituperative energy into his music and thenwatching as it “rained down from the choir loft on to his chosen 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 palpablefury, with Bach fuming at delinquent malefactors.” This begins to sound likeSusan McClary’s infamous portrayal of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony as the“throttling, murderous rage of a rapist 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 positionsleading up to his appointment in Leipzig, the music is indeed our bestindication of his personality. By excluding Bach’s keyboard and instrumentalpieces from discussion, however, Gardiner disregards telling evidence that hehimself deems critical for understanding Bach’s character. For example, hementions the astonishing organ tablatures, discovered only in 2005, of worksby Reincken and Dieterich Buxtehude that Bach wrote out when he wasbetween thirteen and fifteen years old. But Gardiner doesn’t acknowledge whatthey tell us. The neat, meticulous, almost flawless notation points to adisciplined, methodical, well­trained teenager deeply committed to learning hiscraft. And the music suggests a prodigy eager to take on the most technicallychallenging organ music of the time. This does not seem to square with theimage of a wild, unruly boy running around Ohrdruf and Lüneburg withhoodlums.

And in Cöthen, characterized by Gardiner as a “provincial backwater,” Bachnevertheless managed to produce the Brandenburg Concertos, the solo violinand cello pieces, and other instrumental and keyboard works that reveal hiscomplete embrace of dance music, perhaps the most important influence on hismature style other than his adoption of Vivaldi’s music in Weimar. A quickcomparison of Well­Tempered Clavier, volume 1, with Well­TemperedClavier, volume 2, or the Weimar cantatas with the Leipzig cantatas shows

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how critical the formal use of dance at the Cöthen court was to Bach’s eventualformulation of a powerfully engaging universal style. Cöthen may have been apetty court, compared to those in Berlin or Dresden, but for Bach the stay therewas a life­altering experience.

The Thomasschule and Thomaskirche in Leipzig, where Bach was the choir director from 1723 until his death in1750; painting by Felix Mendelssohn, 1838

The truth about Bach’s personality probably rests somewhere in the middle.The picture of Bach as humble Lutheran servant of God, model child, and fullymature adult is undoubtedly too saccharine. The arguments with town councilsshow a strong will and prickly temperament, and his private biblical exegesissuggests inner resentment. Gardiner is to be applauded for yanking us back toreality, for underscoring that the youthful pranks mentioned by C.P.E. Bachmay refer to a less responsible side of his father. But the letters of familyamanuensis Johann Elias Bach, describing a cantor’s home filled with visitors,carnations, and canaries, suggest a warm domestic haven rather than the lair ofan angry young man.

he obsessive search for Bach’s dark side subsides in the second half of the

book, when Gardiner arrives at the music he knows and loves best, the Leipzigvocal works. Here the tone brightens.

Bach’s decision, upon becoming cantor of St. Thomas, to provide a newcantata for each Sunday and festival day of the church year was the mostmomentous compositional decision of his life. It was common at the time forcantors to produce annual cantata cycles of approximately sixty works each.Georg Philipp Telemann, writer of 1,700 cantatas, and Christoph Graupner,with 1,400 to his credit, could shake church pieces out of their sleeves, and it isno surprise that they were offered the St. Thomas position before Bach. ButBach’s writing was much more substantive and intense, and the commitment toweekly cantata composition during his initial Leipzig years was a dauntingpersonal challenge. He had only a modest supply of earlier works. He had noprofessional copyists at his disposal. He had no more than a motley band ofsingers and instrumentalists.

The weekly routine of cantata production must have been arduous: composinga thirty­minute work, overseeing the preparation of performance parts,rehearsing the score, and finally performing the music one, two, or even threetimes, depending on the Sunday or feast day in question. Even moreremarkable was the multiyear commitment: the steady production, week in andweek out, with Passions, oratorios, and Latin­texted works added at the highpoints of Christmas, Easter, and Pentecost. The obituary stated that Bachcomposed five annual cycles, making a total of approximately three hundredcantatas. Only two hundred or so survive.

Gardiner’s direction of the “Bach Pilgrimage,” the performance of thecomplete cantatas in liturgical order during the course of 2000, gives him aunique insider’s feel for Bach’s vocal music and the rhythm of an annual cycle.His walkthrough of the annual cycles of 1723–1724 and 1724–1725 (the othersare more fragmentary) provides a marvelous sense of the liturgical seasons andBach’s musical reaction to them.

There are great advantages to approaching the cantatas this way. We canexperience, for instance, the tremendous burden of Bach’s first Christmas,when he had to compose, prepare, and perform nine works over a span ofsixteen days. We can see just how methodically he approached compositionwhen he began the second annual cycle, based on chorale tunes, by assigningthe melody first to the soprano voice, then to the alto, then to the tenor, andfinally to the bass, respectively, in the opening choruses of the first four works.Or we can note how toward the end of the same cycle Bach became enamoredof the oboe da caccia, an exotic instrument with the body of an oboe and thebell of a horn, using it in six of the last twelve works.

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These and other day­to­day matters come to life in Gardiner’s tour through thecantatas, as his writing picks up the lyrical flow of the music:

Here we see a great composer at the height of his powers meeting thechallenges of a self­imposed regimen week by week and adjusting hischoice of form, his approach and his tone of voice to each underlyingtheme, each symbol and each metaphor arising from the texts laid out infront of him. There can be no doubt as to the magnitude of the task or therapidity with which his skill developed.

Gardiner believes it was Bach’s identification with Martin Luther that made allthe difference. Luther’s earthy German translation of the Bible, a “prose of thepeople,” provided Bach with bold images to paint in music. It was the perfectcounterpart to Luther’s hymns and hymn texts, to which Bach returned timeand time again. Luther’s advocacy of music and his conviction that it couldmake scripture come alive legitimized Bach’s compositional ambitions.Picking up Spitta’s mantle, Gardiner makes the case that the cantatas, ratherthan the keyboard or instrumental works, are Bach’s greatest achievement. Andwithin the cantatas it is the sacred pieces, backed by Bach’s fervent faith, thatshine above the secular works, which in Gardiner’s view do not display thesame intense conviction.

rowning the cantata cycles are the Passions. Of the two that survive,Gardiner finds the St. John the most dramatic, perhaps because the text offeredoptimal opportunity for contrasts. On a small scale, this played out in arias suchas “Betrachte, meine Seel” (Consider, my soul), in which the torn and blood­streaked back of the flogged Christ is likened to a rainbow symbolizing divinegrace. Bach painted this image with exotic violas d’amore accompanied by alute (or lute harpsichord, in a subsequent performance). On a large scale, itplayed out in the turbulent choruses of the hysterical and vengeful mob thatcontrast with the serene recitatives and arias portraying Christ. The chorales,perhaps actively sung by the congregation (this remains open to debate), stoodas markers for the listeners, signposts of familiar texts and melodies thatengaged them more deeply in the drama. Gardiner is right to point 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, eventhough they were already familiar with the characters and plot.

Gardiner concludes his survey of the vocal music with an extended explorationof the Mass in B­Minor, Bach’s most universal church work. Consisting mainlyof recycled movements from cantatas written over a thirty­five­year period, itallowed Bach to survey his vocal pieces one last time and pick select

movements for further revision and refinement. By shifting the text fromGerman to Latin, he was able to move the music from the Lutheran Properservice to the Catholic Ordinary. The work is permeated with secular dancemusic, which accounts for its remarkable exuberance, grace, and appeal. But italso contains deeply expressive music from Bach’s Weimar and Leipzig churchcantatas that gives it extraordinary emotional depth and drama. As Gardinerwell describes it, the Mass “celebrates the fundamental sanctity of life, anawareness of the divine and a transcendent dimension as a fact of humanexistence.” Assembled in 1748 and 1749, it was Bach’s musical last will andtestament.

Gardiner, like earlier biographers, ponders whether the work is Lutheran orCatholic. The Missa (Kyrie and Gloria) and Sanctus were compatible with theLutheran worship service, as previous writers have acknowledged. But recentevidence shows that the Symbolum Nicenum and Agnus Dei portions couldhave been performed within the Leipzig Lutheran liturgy as well. In the case ofthe Symbolum, Gardiner suggests that Bach’s late insertion of the Et incarnatusputs the Crucifixus at the very center of the music, thus reinforcing Luther’sbelief that the crucifixion was the central event of Christianity, an act thatallowed man to perceive God through Christ’s suffering and death.

This is true, but the interpolation also highlights the incarnation, which was derigueur for Catholic Mass settings of the time. There are reasons to believeBach performed the Symbolum in its initial, shorter version in Leipzig as aLutheran anthem, and inserted the Et incarnatus only when he incorporated themusic into his evolving Catholic Missa tota. The extant manuscript of the B­Minor Mass is filled with scratch­outs, corrections, revisions, and insertions. Itsuggests a work in progress.

If Bach had lived longer, it is likely that he would have created a definitive faircopy of the Mass, similar to those of the St. John and St. Matthew Passions.There he might have confirmed the Catholic nature of the whole by replacingthe Lutheran term “Symbolum Nicenum” with the Roman standard, “Credo.”He also might have given the work a name (the present title comes from thenineteenth century; the Bach family seems to have called the compilation “TheGreat Catholic Mass”).

Which brings us back to the Agnus Dei aria of this monumental piece. Its textdoes not draw on Luther’s German or the poetry of a Leipzig librettist, butrather on the ancient language of the Mass Ordinary. Is it Bach’s use of thistimeless Latin plea that still moves us so strongly today, or is it the seeminglyinexorable progression of his melodic lines and harmonic sequences? Does theperfectly proportioned structure of the piece stir primal feelings that transcend

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time, place, and creed, to express the inexpressible? Although Music in theCastle of Heaven does not fully answer these questions, it forces us to rethinkBach’s life and how adversity and faith affected his vocal compositions. And ittakes us inside his world, allowing us to see the works from the standpoint ofcomposer, performer, and listener. As Otto Bettmann 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.

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