Read Johann Sebastian Bach Online
Authors: Christoph Wolff
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 groà Bassion” (to the great Passion),
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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 1:46â55) 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.”
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Following a local Christmas tradition that had originated in the late Middle Ages and had also been observed by his predecessors,
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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.
T
ABLE
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 | Â |
2. Et exultavit: S II, str, bc | Â |
 | A. Vom Himmel hoch: SSATB, bc |
3. Quia respexit: S I, ob, bc | Â |
4. Omnes generationes: SSATB, 2ob, str, bc | Â |
5. Quia fecit: B, bc | Â |
 | B. Freut euch und jubilieret: SSAT, bc |
6. Et misericordia: AT, str, bc | Â |
7. Fecit potentiam: tutti | Â |
 | C. Gloria in excelsis Deo: SSATB, str, bc |
8. Deposuit potentes: T, str, bc | Â |
9. Esurientes: A, 2rec, bc | Â |
 | D. Virga Jesse floruit: SB, bc |
10. Suscepit Israel: SSA, tr, str, bc | Â |
11. Sicut locutus est: SSATB, bc | Â |
12. Gloria Patri: tutti | Â |
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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.
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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 Adventâsix weeks of Lent during which no concerted music was permitted except on the Marian feast of Annunciation, March 25âthe 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.
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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,
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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,”
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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 groÔ 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.”
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The composition then presented was Kuhnau's
St. Mark Passion
, which has survived only in incomplete form.
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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 soloists (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 lyricsâso-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 57:1â2) 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.”
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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,
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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 keysânos. 19 (three flats)
22 (four sharps)
24 (two flats)
28 (three sharps)
35 (four flats)âand the correspondingly contrasting colors of vocal-instrumental sonority.