Sebastian Bach

by Reginald Lane Poole

Bach is stated to have written a Passion music in five different shapes. Two of these are the familiar Passions according to S. Matthew and S. John, which are the truest reflexion of the master’s genius in his ripest years. The other three were long supposed to have been lost, unless a S. Luke Passion, which exists in Bach’s autograph, might possibly be claimed as his work. Lately, however, the acute study of Dr. Rust has discovered part of a S. Mark Passion to lie hid under the guise of the Dirge for the Queen of Poland, Bach having sought in this way to give permanence to a work of which the original motive was merely fugitive;[55] and Professor Spitta has made it probable that Bach also wrote the music to a Passion following the text of no single evangelist, which was produced at the Thomaskirche in 1725.[56] He further offers an elaborate and conclusive defence of the genuineness of the S. Luke Passion, which he places without hesitation in the early years of Bach’s residence at Weimar.[57]

The S. John Passion comes second in the series, and was brought out in 1724. Of the presumptive work of 1725, above-mentioned, a solitary chorus exists in record. The Passion according to S. Matthew follows in 1729; and last of all, in 1731, that according to S. Mark. The printed text of this, which we still possess, was adapted by Picander to the Dirge of 1727; but it had necessarily to be greatly augmented for the occasion, and of this supplemental music nothing remains to us.

The dramatic presentment of the passion of Jesus Christ is one of the oldest traditions of the German people. A continuous line unites the Passion Play of Ober-Ammergau with the Mystery of the medieval church. In this respect the reformation made no change in the popular religious custom. We may find it at Zittau, in 1571, when a stage was erected in the church, and the drama acted by the schoolmasters and choir; or we may trace it in every part of Silesia, Upper Saxony, and Thuringia, down to the close of the seventeenth century. Side by side this popular representation stood the church usage of distributing the parts of the passion-narrative between the officiating priest and the choir, a usage which plainly took its origin in a desire to give life to the Latin words. The necessity of it was removed when the Gospel came to be recited in the vernacular tongue, but the habit had struck too deep roots in the heart of the people to be interfered with. The Catholic wont survived, with so much else in the Lutheran churches of Middle Germany; and the musical Passion remained, at Leipzig at least, a part of the regular service until the second half of the eighteenth century. German Passions at once sprang up, and won an ever-increasing popularity, since it was now attempted to exalt their religious impression by an artistic treatment of the subject as a whole. At first the music hardly departed from the strict medieval recitation; then it was varied by the introduction of hymns; the form of the motet was added, and found so attractive that it was applied universally and nothing was left for a solo voice. The recited Gospel—once the basis of the whole—seemed to be falling into disuse, when it was suddenly revived in the shape of the new Italian discovery, the recitative, especially in that most expressive variety, the arioso. Instrumental accompaniment became the rule; the story was interrupted by short symphonies; above all, the aria was introduced, to give stress to the spiritual feeling of the text, as a sort of emotional commentary. Finally, the Italian importation was naturalised, as it were, by the insertion of chorales, at first sung by the congregation, and increasing in number to twenty, thirty, or even more.

Hitherto the foreign element had been drawn from the concerted music of the Italian churches. A more potent influence entered Germany during Bach’s youth, that namely which proceeded from the Italian theatre—opera or oratorio, it mattered little; for in each, though the form was different, the spirit was the same.[58] The first result in Germany has an analogy in the contemporary stage of the history of the church cantata. The place of the chorale or direct biblical recitative was taken by poems written for the occasion; it was sought to realise a religious impression, not by these plain and popular means, but by the poetic unity of the composition. A reaction, however, soon took place in favour of the popular form; and the Passion text of Brockes (1712), which combined chorales and the words of the Gospel, slightly altered, it is true, with the general structure of an oratorio, immediately established itself as a model, and was set to music, within six years of its publication, by musicians of the eminence of Keiser, Telemann, Handel, and Mattheson. It forms also the basis of Bach’s S. John Passion; but here the biblical narrative is followed with entire fidelity,[59] and the master has proceeded with such independent judgment that his work stands quite remote from the strange medley of sacred and secular, old and new, with which his immediate predecessors had to be contented. The music they wrote to it was indeed of great individual beauty, but in their hands it never gained the symmetry of an organic whole. It is Bach’s peculiar glory to have succeeded in this endeavour where everyone else had failed. He adopted not the forms of the Italian oratorio, but he absorbed its spirit. He blended it in a manner of which no previous composer had ever suspected the possibility, with the profound religiousness of the national chorale. Above all, he created a recitative of his own, stripped of all that was theatrical and entirely appropriate to the setting forth of the divine narrative. In his Passion music he brings to absolute completeness the form for which his conception of the church cantata had been through long years the preparation. But musical power alone could not have achieved what Bach achieved. It was his perfect sympathy with the religious sense and emotional needs of the German people, his reverent acceptance of all that was noble in the musical tradition of his race, that enabled him to mould the ideal fulfilment of that which had been imperfectly foreshadowed in the presentments of the passion, whether as an act of divine service, a folk-play, or an oratorio.

The Passions according to S. John and S. Matthew lie before us as the noblest monuments of Bach’s spirit. Often as they have been compared, to the inevitable disadvantage of the former work, it needs little study of them to shew that any comparison must be strained and unnatural. Each is in truth incomparable, whether in relation to the other, or to the rest of sacred music. The S. John Passion is the perfection of church-music; the S. Matthew reaches the goal of all sacred art, while its colossal dimensions take it almost, happily not quite, out of the range of church performance. The S. John Passion stands closer to the oratorio, as we may learn from the way in which nearly every choral sentence, that is to say, whatever is spoken by the disciples, the Jewish crowd, or the soldiers, is wrought into a regular chorus, or at least several times repeated. This arrangement certainly impairs the proportion of the different parts, since it appears to lay a greater emphasis upon the voice of the many than upon the single utterance of Christ or another. There is, however, always a musical fitness in these elaborations, and nothing can be more artistic than the way in which, for example, the sentence, We have a law, and by our law he ought to die, is rehearsed as the subject of a fugue, the most formal and (so to say) legal phrase that music admits, and also the most expressive of the dispersed yet unanimous speech of a multitude. It is part of the idea of Passion music to break the continuity of the narrative in the Gospel by chorales and by meditations, in the form of arias or of developed recitative (called arioso), dwelling upon the weighty moments of the story, after the fashion of the chorus in Greek tragedy; and Bach has taken advantage of the custom to insert in the S. John Passion some of his most melodious and most profoundly impressive creations. But, what is highly significant of the spirit in which he planned his work, he never allows these to interrupt the real unity of the narrative, almost invariably prolonging the vocal cadence of the foregoing recitative by leaving it on the dominant harmony. “The course of the action and the reflections upon it seem thus to be linked in unbroken sequence, as if the one sprang irresistibly to the other.”[60]

The entire work is begun and ended by great choruses. The opening one was written and prefixed later, the original chorus having been relegated to the close of the first part of the S. Matthew Passion;[61] that at the end has also a similar inspiration to the concluding chorus of the latter work, but its preservation in its present form as well is a matter for which we cannot be too grateful, whether we regard most the exquisite pathos of its melody or the perfect flow of the several instruments, which, in their separate progressions, give a personal, almost an individual, sentiment to the composition. This sentiment lies at the root of the Passion according to S. John, and makes a peculiar contrast to the universality which is the note of that according to S. Matthew. As though to merge this mood in a broader sympathy with his fellow-believers, Bach has protracted the end so as to close the work by a chorale, the distinctive symbol of congregational brotherhood.

If this be the motive of the unusual termination of the earlier Passion, Bach has no need to explain his intention in the Passion according to S. Matthew. In the first bars of the opening chorus the long majestic tread of the basses is heard clearly to introduce us to the thought of a drama of which the whole world is the spiritual scene, all mankind, in their Representative, the actors. The never-ending wail of the violins preludes to a tragedy which sums up all human suffering. The cry has slowly risen to its height when the daughters of Zion are shown to us, assembled to mourn, in the same piercing measures, the Bridegroom as he passes on bearing his cross. A chorus of believers, with wondering question, first interrupts their lament, finally takes up their burthen and unites in the common sorrow. Meantime the listening ear detects a third choir, of a single voice, singing as from afar, and again strangely breaking off, the chorale, O Lamb of God. The art of the work is stupendous; but more wonderful still is the truthfulness with which it figures forth the immensity of the drama to which it is the prologue.

Nevertheless it was far remote from Bach’s mind to present the Passion in the guise of a drama; it would have been altogether foreign to the essence of his genius. The Passion he will shew to us as a picture, or rather as a series of pictures. He takes the text of S. Matthew without gloss or change; choruses he leaves in the terse briefness of natural utterance, repeating little or not at all. He seeks to give just expression to the words by a thoughtful distribution of the speeches between two complete choirs, each with its own organ and orchestra. Above all he separates the words of Jesus from the rest of the recited narrative by a different accompaniment, that of a string quartet, within which setting he places them, with the purity of a crystal, as within an aureole.[62] At certain moments of supreme dignity, the simple recitative rises into the measured melody of the arioso, the words, however, remaining without change. In this way the solemn act of the last supper is carried to a sublime height, and inspired with a supernal tenderness, wherein music reaches its noblest and most divine ideal. Once only does the glory fade from around Christ’s words, and that is at the last cry, Eli, Eli, lama asabthani. Here it is the organ—the accompaniment of the human recitative—which alone sustains the harmony. It is the finest thought in all Bach’s writing.