In order to win the clue to Bach’s vocal as well as his instrumental style, we must constantly refer back to his works for the organ. As Händel’s genius in oratorio was shaped under the influence of the Italian aria, direct or derived, and as certain modern composers, such as Berlioz, seize their first conceptions already clothed in orchestral garb, so Bach seemed to think in [298] terms of the organ. Examine one of his contrapuntal choruses, or even one of his arias with its obligato accompaniment, and you are instantly reminded of the mode of facture of his organ pieces. His education rested upon organ music, and he only yielded to one of the most potent influences of his time when he made the organ the dominant factor in his musical expression. The instrumental genius of Germany had already come to self-consciousness at the end of the seventeenth century, and was as plainly revealing itself in organ music as it did a century later in the sonata and symphony. The virtuoso spirit—the just pride in technical skill—always keeps pace with the development of style; in the nature of things these two are mutually dependent elements in progress. In Bach the love of exercising his skill as an executant was a part of his very birthright as a musician. The organ was to him very much what the pianoforte was to Liszt, and in each the virtuoso instinct was a fire which must burst forth, or it would consume the very soul of its possessor. And so we find among the fugues, fantasies, and toccatas of Bach compositions whose dazzling magnificence is not exceeded by the most sensational effusions of the modern pianoforte and orchestral schools. In all the realm of music there is nothing more superb than those Niagaras of impetuous sound which roll through such works as the F major and D minor toccatas and the G major fantasie,—to select examples out of scores of equally apt illustrations. But sound and fury are by no means their aim; Bach’s invention and science are never more resourceful than when apparently driven by the demon of unrest. In [299] order to give the freest sweep to his fancy Bach, the supreme lord of form, often broke through form’s conventionalisms, so that even his fugues sometimes became, as they have been called, fantasies in the form of fugues, just as Beethoven, under a similar impulse, wrote sonate quasi fantasie. Witness the E minor fugue with the “wedge theme.” In Bach’s day and country there was no concert stage; the instrumental virtuoso was the organist. It is not necessary to suppose, therefore, that pieces so exciting to the nerves as those to which I have alluded were all composed strictly for the ordinary church worship. There were many occasions, such as the “opening” of a new organ or a civic festival, when the organist could “let himself go” without incurring the charge of introducing a profane or alien element. And yet, even as church music, these pieces were not altogether incongruous. We must always keep in mind that the question of appropriateness in church music depends very much upon association and custom. A style that would be execrated as blasphemous in a Calvinist assembly would be received as perfectly becoming in a Catholic or Lutheran ceremony. A style of music that has grown up in the very heart of a certain Church, identified for generations with the peculiar ritual and history of that Church, is proper ecclesiastical music so far as that particular institution is concerned. Those who condemn Bach’s music—organ works, cantatas, and Passions—as unchurchly ignore this vital point. Moreover, the conception of the function of music in the service of the German Evangelical Church was never so austere that brilliancy and grandeur [300] were deemed incompatible with the theory of religious ceremony. It may be said that Bach’s grandest organ pieces are conceived as the expression of what may be called the religious passion—the rapture which may not unworthily come upon the believer when his soul opens to the reception of ideas the most penetrating and sublime.
Certainly no other religious institution has come so near the solution of the problem of the proper use of the instrumental solo in public worship. Through the connection of the organ music with the people’s hymn in the choral prelude, and the conformity of its style to that of the choir music in motet and cantata, it became vitally blended with the whole office of praise and prayer; its effect was to gather up and merge all individual emotions into the projection of the mood of aspiration that was common to all.
The work performed by Bach for the church cantata was somewhat similar in nature to his service to the choral prelude, and was carried out with a far more lavish expenditure of creative power. The cantata, now no longer a constituent of the German Evangelical worship, in the eighteenth century held a place in the ritual analogous to that occupied by the anthem in the morning and evening prayer of the Church of England. It is always of larger scale than the anthem, and its size was one cause of its exclusion in the arbitrary and irregular reductions which the Evangelical liturgies have undergone in the last century and a half. There is nothing in its florid character to justify this procedure, for it may be, and in Bach usually is, more closely related to the [301] ritual framework than the English anthem, in consequence of the manner in which it has been made to absorb strictly liturgic forms into its substance. Bach, in his cantatas, kept the notion of liturgic unity clearly in mind. He effected this unity largely by his use of the choral as a conspicuous element in the cantata, often as its very foundation. He checked the Italianizing process by working the arioso recitative, the aria for one or more voices, and the chorus into one grand musical scheme, in which his intricate organ style served both as fabric and decoration. By the unexampled prominence which he gave the choral as a mine of thematic material, he gave the cantata not only a striking originality, but also an air of unmistakable fitness to the character and special expression of the confession which it served. By these means, which are concerned with its form, and still more by the astonishing variety, truth, and beauty with which he was able to meet the needs of each occasion for which a work of this kind was appointed, he endowed his Church and nation with a treasure of religious song compared with which, for magnitude, diversity, and power, the creative work of any other church musician that may be named—Palestrina, Gabrieli, or whoever he may be—sinks into insignificance.
Bach wrote five series of cantatas for the Sundays and festal days of the church year—in all two hundred and ninety-five. Of these two hundred and sixty-six were written at Leipsic. They vary greatly in length, the shortest occupying twenty minutes or so in performance, the longest an hour or more. Taken together, they [302] afford such an astonishing display of versatility that any proper characterization of them in a single chapter would be quite out of the question. A considerable number are available for study in Peters’s cheap edition, and the majority are analyzed with respect to their salient features in Spitta’s encyclopedic Bach biography. Among the great diversity of interesting qualities which they exhibit, the employment of the choral must be especially emphasized as affording the clue, already indicated, to Bach’s whole conception of the cantata as a species of religious art. The choral, especially that appointed for a particular day (Hauptlied), is often used as the guiding thread which weaves the work into the texture of the whole daily office. In such cases the chosen choral will appear in the different numbers of the work in fragments or motives, sometimes as subject for voice parts, or woven into the accompaniment as theme or in obligato fashion. It is more common for entire lines of the choral to be treated as canti firmi, forming the subjects on which elaborate contrapuntal choruses are constructed, following precisely the same principle of design that I have described in the case of the organ choral preludes. In multitudes of cantata movements lines or verses from two or more chorals are introduced. There are cantatas, such as “Wer nur den lieben Gott,” in which each number, whether recitative, aria, or chorus, takes its thematic material, intact or modified, from a choral. The famous “Ein’ feste Burg,” is a notable example of a cantata in which Bach adheres to a hymn-tune in every number, treating it line by line, deriving from it the pervading tone of the work is well as its constructional plan. The [303] ways in which Bach applies the store of popular religious melody to the higher uses of art are legion. A cantata of Bach usually ends with a choral in its complete ordinary form, plainly but richly harmonized in note-for-note four-part setting as though for congregational singing. It was not the custom, however, in Bach’s day for the congregation to join in this closing choral. There are cantatas, such as the renowned “Ich hatte viel Bekümmerniss,” in which the choral melody nowhere appears. Such cantatas are rare, and the use of the choral became more prominent and systematic in Bach’s work as time went on.
The devotional ideal of the Protestant Church as compared with the Catholic gives far more liberal recognition to the private religious consciousness of the individual. The believer does not so completely surrender his personality; in his mental reactions to the ministrations of the clergy he still remains aware of that inner world of experience which is his world, not merged and lost in the universalized life of a religious community. The Church is his inspirer and guide, not his absolute master. The foundation of the German choral was a religious declaration of independence. The German hymns were each the testimony of a thinker to his own private conception of religious truth. The tone and feeling of each hymn were suggested and colored by the general doctrine of the Church, but not dictated. The adoption of these utterances of independent feeling into the liturgy was a recognition on the part of authority of individual right. It was not a concession; it was the legal acknowledgment [304] of a fundamental principle. Parallel to this significant privilege was the admission of music of the largest variety and penetrated at will with subjective feeling. This conception was carried out consistently in the cantata as established by Bach, most liberally, of course, in the arias. The words of the cantata consisted of Bible texts, stanzas of church hymns, and religious poems, the whole illustrating some Scripture theme or referring to some especial commemoration. The hard and fast metrical schemes of the German hymns were unsuited to the structure and rhythm of the aria, and so a form of verse known as the madrigal, derived from Italy, was used when rhythmical flexibility was an object. For all these reasons we have in Bach’s arias the widest license of expression admissible in the school of art which he represented. The Hamburg composers, in their shallow aims, had boldly transferred the Italian concert aria as it stood into the Church, as a sign of their complete defiance of ecclesiastical prescription. Not so Bach; the ancient churchly ideal was to him a thing to be reverenced, even when he departed from it. He, therefore, took a middle course. The Italian notion of an aria—buoyant, tuneful, the voice part sufficient unto itself—had no place in Bach’s method. A melody to him was usually a detail in a contrapuntal scheme. And so be wove the voice part into the accompaniment, a single instrument—a violin, perhaps, or oboe—often raised into relief, vying with the voice on equal terms, often soaring above it and carrying the principal theme, while the voice part serves as an obligato. This [305] method, hardly consistent with a pure vocal system, often results with Bach, it must be confessed, in something very mechanical and monotonous to modern ears. The artifice is apparent; the author seems more bent on working out a sort of algebraic formula than interpreting the text to the sensibility. From the traditional point of view this method is not in itself mal à propos, for such a treatment raises the sentiment into that calm region of abstraction which is the proper refuge of the devotional mood. But here, as in the organ pieces, Bach is no slave to his technic. There are many arias in his cantatas in which the musical expression is not only beautiful and touching in the highest degree, but also yields with wonderful truth to every mutation of feeling in the text. Still more impressively is this mastery of expression shown in the arioso recitatives. In their depth and beauty they are unique in religious music. Only in very rare moments can Händel pretend to rival them. Mendelssohn reflects them in his oratorios and psalms,—as the moon reflects the sun.
The choruses of Bach’s cantatas would furnish a field for endless study. Nowhere else is his genius more grandly displayed. The only work entitled to be compared with these choruses is found in Händel’s oratorios. In drawing such a parallel, and observing the greater variety of style in Händel, we must remember that Bach’s cantatas are church music. Händel’s oratorios are not. Bach’s cantata texts are not only confined to a single sphere of thought, viz., the devotional, but they are also strictly lyric. The church cantata does not admit any suggestion of action or [306] external picture. The oratorio, on the other hand, is practically unlimited in scope, and in Händel’s choruses the style and treatment are given almost unrestrained license in the way of dramatic and epic suggestion. Within the restrictions imposed upon him, however, Bach expends upon his choruses a wealth of invention in design and expression not less wonderful than that exhibited in his organ works. The motet form, the free fantasia and the choral fantasia forms are all employed, and every device known to his art is applied for the illustration of the text. Grace and tenderness, when the cheering assurances of the Gospel are the theme, crushing burdens of gloom when the author’s thought turns to the mysteries of death and judgment, mournfulness in view of sin, the pleading accents of contrition,—every manifestation of emotion which a rigid creed, allied to a racial mysticism which evades positive conceptions, can call forth is projected in tones whose strength and fervor were never attained before in religious music. It is Bach’s organ style which is here in evidence, imparting to the chorus its close-knit structure and majesty of sound, humanized by a melody drawn from the choral and from what was most refined in Italian art.
“One peculiar trait in Bach’s nature,” says Kretzschmar, “is revealed in the cantatas in grand, half-distinct outlines, and this is the longing for death and life with the Lord. This theme is struck in the cantatas more frequently than almost any other. We know him as a giant nature in all situations; great and grandiose is also his joy and cheerfulness. But [307] never, we believe, does his art work with fuller energy and abandonment than when his texts express earth-weariness and the longing for the last hour. The fervor which then displays itself in ever-varying registers, in both calm and stormy regions, has in it something almost demonic.”[74]
The work that has most contributed to make the name of Bach familiar to the educated world at large is the Passion according to St. Matthew. Bach wrote five Passions, of which only two—the St. John and the St. Matthew—have come down to us. The former has a rugged force like one of Michael Angelo’s unpolished statues, but it cannot fairly be compared to the St. Matthew in largeness of conception or beauty of detail. In Bach’s treatment of the Passion story we have the culmination of the artistic development of the early liturgic practice whose progress has already been sketched. Bach completed the process of fusing the Italian aria and recitative with the German chorus, hymn-tune, and organ and orchestral music, interspersing the Gospel narrative with lyric sections in the form of airs, arioso recitatives, and choruses, in which the feelings proper to a believer meditating on the sufferings of Christ in behalf of mankind are portrayed with all the poignancy of pathos of which Bach was master.
Injudicious critics have sometimes attempted to set up a comparison between the St. Matthew Passion and Handel’s “Messiah,” questioning which is the greater. But such captious rivalry is derogatory to both, for they are not to be gauged by the same standard. To [308] say nothing of the radical differences in style, origin, and artistic conception,—the one a piece of Lutheran church music, the other an English concert oratorio of Italian ancestry,—they are utterly unlike also in poetic intention. Bach’s work deals only with the human in Christ; it is the narrative of his last interviews with his disciples, his arrest, trial, and death, together with comments by imagined personalities contemplating these events, both in their immediate action upon the sensibilities and in their doctrinal bearing. It is, therefore, a work so mixed in style that it is difficult to classify it, for it is both epic and implicitly dramatic, while in all its lyric features it is set firmly into the Evangelical liturgic scheme. The text and musical construction of the “Messiah” have no connection with any liturgy; it is concert music of a universal religious character, almost devoid of narrative, and with no dramatic suggestion whatever. Each is a triumph of genius, but of genius working with quite different intentions.
In the formal arrangement of the St. Matthew Passion Bach had no option; he must perforce comply with church tradition. The narrative of the evangelist, taken without change from St. Matthew’s Gospel and sung in recitative by a tenor, is the thread upon which the successive divisions are strung. The words of Jesus, Peter, the high priest, and Pilate are given to a bass, and are also in recitative. The Jews and the disciples are represented by choruses. The “Protestant congregation” forms another group, singing appropriate chorals. A third element comprises the company of [309] believers and the “daughter of Zion,” singing choruses and arias in comment upon the situations as described by the evangelist. It must be remembered that these chorus factors are not indicated by any division of singers into groups. The work is performed throughout by the same company of singers, in Bach’s day by the diminutive choir of the Leipsic Church, composed of boys and young men. Even in the chorals the congregation took no part. The idea of the whole is much the same as in a series of old Italian chapel frescoes. The disciple sits with Christ at the last supper, accompanies him to the garden of Gethsemane and to the procurator’s hall, witnesses his mockery and condemnation, and takes his station at the foot of the cross, lamenting alternately the sufferings of his Lord and the sin which demanded such a sacrifice.