Upon this prescribed formula Bach has poured all the wealth of his experience, his imagination, and his piety. His science is not brought forward so prominently as in many of his works, and where he finds it necessary to employ it he subordinates it to the expression of feeling. Yet we cannot hear without amazement the gigantic opening movement in which the awful burden of the great tragedy is foreshadowed; where, as if organ, orchestra, and double chorus were not enough to sustain the composer’s conception, a ninth part, bearing a choral melody, floats above the surging mass of sound, holding the thought of the hearer to the significance of the coming scenes. The long chorus which closes the first part, which is constructed in the form of a figured choral, is also built upon a scale which [310] Bach has seldom exceeded. But the structure of the work in general is comparatively open, and the expression direct and clear. An atmosphere of profoundest gloom pervades the work from beginning to end, ever growing darker as the scenes of the terrible drama advance and culminate, yet here and there relieved by gleams of divine tenderness and human pity. That Bach was able to carry a single mood, and that a depressing one, through a composition of three hours’ length without falling into monotony at any point is one of the miracles of musical creation.
The meditative portions of the work in aria, recitative, and chorus are rendered with great beauty and pathos, in spite of occasional archaic stiffness. Dry and artificial some of the da capo arias undoubtedly are, for that quality of fluency which always accompanies genius never yet failed to beguile its possessor into by-paths of dulness. But work purely formalistic is not common in the St. Matthew Passion. Never did religious music afford anything more touching and serene than such numbers as the tenor solo and chorus, “Ich will bei meinem Jesu wachen,” the bass solo, “Am Abend, da es kühle war,” and the recitative and chorus, matchless in tenderness, beginning “Nun ist der Herr zur Ruh’ gebracht.” Especially impressive are the tones given to the words of the Saviour. These tones are distinguished from those of the other personages not only by their greater melodic beauty, but also by their accompaniment, which consists of the stringed instruments, while the other recitatives are supported by the organ alone. In Christ’s despairing cry upon [311] the cross, “Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani,” this ethereal stringed accompaniment is extinguished. What Bach intended to signify by this change is not certainly known. This exclamation of Jesus, the only instance in his life when he seemed to lose his certainty of the divine coöperation, must be distinguished in some way, Bach probably thought, from all his other utterances. Additional musical means would be utterly futile, for neither music nor any other art has any expression for the mental anguish of that supreme moment. The only expedient possible was to reduce music at that point, substituting plain organ chords, and let the words of Christ stand out in bold relief in all their terrible significance.
The chorals in the St. Matthew Passion are taken bodily, both words and tunes, from the church hymn-book. Prominent among them is the famous “O Haupt voll Blut und Wunden” by Gerhardt after St. Bernard, which is used five times. These choral melodies are harmonized in simple homophonic style, but with extreme beauty. As an instance of the poetic fitness with which these chorals are introduced we may cite the last in the work, where immediately after the words “Jesus cried with a loud voice and gave up the ghost,” the chorus sings a stanza beginning “When my death hour approaches forsake not me, O Lord.” “This climax,” says Spitta, “has always been justly regarded as one of the most thrilling of the whole work. The infinite significance of the sacrifice could not be more simply, comprehensively, and convincingly expressed than in this marvellous prayer.”
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This wonderful creation closes with a chorus of farewell sung beside the tomb of Jesus. It is a worthy close, for nothing more lovely and affecting was ever confided to human lips. The gloom and agony that have pervaded the scenes of temptation, trial, and death have quite vanished. The tone is indeed that of lamentation, for the Passion drama in its very aim and tradition did not admit any anticipation of the resurrection; neither in the Catholic or Lutheran ceremonies of Good Friday is there a foreshadowing of the Easter rejoicing. But the sentiment of this closing chorus is not one of hopeless grief; it expresses rather a sense of relief that suffering is past, mingled with a strain of solemn rapture, as if dimly conscious that the tomb is not the end of all.
The first performance of the St. Matthew Passion took place in the Thomas church at Leipsic, on Good Friday, April 15, 1729. It was afterwards revised and extended, and performed again in 1740. From that time it was nowhere heard until it was produced by Felix Mendelssohn in the Sing Academie at Berlin in 1829. The impression it produced was profound, and marked the beginning of the revival of the study of Bach which has been one of the most fruitful movements in nineteenth-century music.
A work equally great in a different way, although it can never become the object of such popular regard as the St. Matthew Passion, is the Mass in B minor. It may seem strange that the man who more than any other interpreted in art the genius of Protestantism should have contributed to a form of music that is identified [313] with the Catholic ritual. It must be remembered that Luther was by no means inclined to break with all the forms and usages of the mother Church. He had no quarrel with those features of her rites which did not embody the doctrines which he disavowed, and most heartily did he recognize the beauty and edifying power of Catholic music. We have seen also that he was in favor of retaining the Latin in communities where it was understood. Hence it was that not only in Luther’s day, but long after, the Evangelical Church retained many musical features that had become sacred in the practice of the ancient Church. The congregations of Leipsic were especially conservative in this respect. The entire mass in figured form, however, was not used in the Leipsic service; on certain special days a part only would be sung. The Kyrie and Gloria, known among the Lutheran musicians as the “short mass,” were frequently employed. The B minor Mass was not composed for the Leipsic service, but for the chapel of the king of Saxony in Bach’s honorary capacity of composer to the royal and electoral court. It was begun in 1735 and finished in 1738, but was not performed entire in Bach’s lifetime. By the time it was completed it had outgrown the dimensions of a service mass, and it has probably never been sung in actual church worship. It is so difficult that its performance is an event worthy of special commemoration. Its first complete production in the United States was at Bethlehem, Pa., in the spring of 1900. It is enough to say of this work here that all Bach’s powers as fabricator of intricate [314] design, and as master of all the shades of expression which the contrapuntal style admits, are forced to their furthest limit. So vast is it in scale, so majestic in its movement, so elemental in the grandeur of its climaxes, that it may well be taken as the loftiest expression in tones of the prophetic faith of Christendom, unless Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis may dispute the title. It belongs not to the Catholic communion alone, nor to the Protestant, but to the Church universal, the Church visible and invisible, the Church militant and triumphant. The greatest master of the sublime in choral music, Bach in this mass sounded all the depths of his unrivalled science and his imaginative energy.
There is no loftier example in history of artistic genius devoted to the service of religion than we find in Johann Sebastian Bach. He always felt that his life was consecrated to God, to the honor of the Church and the well-being of men. Next to this fact we are impressed in studying him with his vigorous intellectuality, by which I mean his accurate estimate of the nature and extent of his own powers and his easy self-adjustment to his environment. He was never the sport of his genius but always its master, never carried away like so many others, even the greatest, into extravagancies or rash experiments. Mozart and Beethoven failed in oratorio, Schubert in opera; the Italian operas of Gluck and Händel have perished. Even in the successful work of these men there is a strange inequality. But upon all that Bach attempted—and the amount of his work is no less a marvel than its quality—he affixed the stamp of final and inimitable perfection. [315] We know from testimony that this perfection was the result of thought and unflagging toil. The file was not the least serviceable tool in his workshop. This intellectual restraint, operating upon a highly intellectualized form of art, often gives Bach’s music an air of severity, a scholastic hardness, which repels sympathy and makes difficult the path to the treasures it contains. The musical culture of our age has been so long based on a different school that no little discipline is needed to adjust the mind to Bach’s manner of presenting his profound ideas. The difficulty is analogous to that experienced in acquiring an appreciation of Gothic sculpture and the Florentine painting of the fourteenth century. We are compelled to learn a new musical language, for it is only in a qualified sense that the language of music is universal. We must put ourselves into another century, face another order of ideas than those of our own age. We must learn the temper of the German mind in the Reformation period and after, its proud self-assertion, led to an aggressive positiveness of religious belief, which, after all, was but the hard shell which enclosed a rare sweetness of piety.
All through Bach we feel the well-known German mysticism which seeks the truth in the instinctive convictions of the soul, the idealism which takes the mind as the measure of existence, the romanticism which colors the outer world with the hues of personal temperament. Bach’s historic position required that this spirit, in many ways so modern, should take shape in forms to which still clung the technical [316] methods of an earlier time. His all-encompassing organ style was Gothic—if we may use such a term for illustration’s sake—not Renaissance. His style is Teutonic in the widest as well as the most literal sense. It is based on forms identified with the practice of the people in church and home. He recognized not the priestly or the aristocratic element, but the popular. His significance in the history of German Evangelical Christianity is great. Protestantism, like Catholicism, has had its supreme poet. As Dante embodied in an immortal epic the philosophic conceptions, the hopes and fears of mediaeval Catholicism, so Bach, less obviously but no less truly, in his cantatas, Passions, and choral preludes, lent the illuminating power of his art to the ideas which brought forth the Reformation. It is the central demand of Protestantism, the immediate personal access of man to God, which, constituting a new motive in German national music, gave shape and direction to Bach’s creative genius.
It has been reserved for recent years to discover that the title of chief representative in art of German Protestantism is, after all, not the sum of Bach’s claims to honor. There is something in his art that touches the deepest chords of religious feeling in whatever communion that feeling has been nurtured. His music is not the music of a confession, but of humanity. What changes the spirit of religious progress is destined to undergo in the coming years it would be vain to predict; but it is safe to assume that the warrant of faith will not consist in authority committed to councils or synods, or altogether in a verbal [317] revelation supposed to have been vouchsafed at certain epochs in the past, but in the intuition of the continued presence of the eternal creative spirit in the soul of man. This consciousness, of which creeds and liturgies are but partial and temporary symbols, can find no adequate artistic expression unless it be in the art of music. The more clearly this fact is recognized by the world, the more the fame of Sebastian Bach will increase, for no other musician has so amply embraced and so deeply penetrated the universal religious sentiment. It may well be said of Bach what a French critic says of Albrecht Dürer: “He was an intermediary between the Middle Age and our modern times. Typical of the former in that he was primarily a craftsman, laboring with all the sincerity and unconscious modesty of the good workman who delights in his labor, he yet felt something of the tormented spiritual unrest of the latter; and indeed so strikingly reflects what we call the ‘modern spirit’ that his work has to-day more influence upon our own thought and art than it had upon that of his contemporaries.”[75]