The additions to the text of the Gospel are of two sorts. First there are the chorales, which appear in great frequency owing to the numerous repetitions of a few melodies. One, the special Passion chorale, O Haupt voll Blut und Wunden, recurs five times, with different words, and the harmonies each time newly constructed. The intention is evidently to fix the thought upon the prevailing tone of the subject, in the same fashion, diversely applied, as that of the modern Leitmotiv. Beside these chorales stand Picander’s verses which are set in the form, not only of arias or ariosos, but also of recitative; and these, to throw the biblical recitative into greater relief, have, for the most part, an accompaniment of wind instruments: sometimes the single voice is blended, as in converse, with the voices of the choir. Usually in the Passion music the company of the faithful came simply as prologue and epilogue; here, on the contrary, it attends throughout, and from one side of the church answers to the voice of the Daughter of Zion on the other. Once and again the multitudinous cry breaks in upon the pathos of her song; and it seems as if no place were void of the all-pervading agony. At the end both choirs join together in a hymn of tender watching addressed to the Saviour as he lies sleeping in the tomb.
We should certainly fail to appreciate Bach’s place as a writer for the church, if we left out of regard his Masses. That a composer so peculiarly representative of Protestantism should have written such works will only surprise those who are unfamiliar with the usage of Lutheran worship. The conservatism of Leipzig, in particular, retained many Catholic customs which the Protestant churches as a rule had discarded, for instance, the surplices of minister and choir, and the ringing of a bell during the eucharistal office. Latin motets, hymns, and responses, were sung on high festivals; and the use of the Latin Magnificat furnished Bach with a theme for perhaps the splendidest of his shorter church compositions.
The original performance of the Magnificat throws an interesting light on the manner in which the old tradition of the Latin singing was fused with an entirely popular service. The famous work, notable also as the first masterpiece which Bach produced at Leipzig, was not performed on the Christmas of 1723, as we now hear it, as a continuous whole. It was broken up by a string of Christmas songs, which, we may rather say, served as a curiously wrought setting to enhance the beauty of the gem it enclosed. At every pause the thanksgiving of the virgin-mother was interrupted by verses of a well-loved German hymn, Vom Himmel hoch, by the Gloria in Excelsis, and by little songs, part in Latin, part German, of the most homely simplicity. Most likely the church too kept the old German fashion, with its cradle and lullaby and touching chorus of angels. Strangely out of place must the superb canticle have sounded, but for that reverent spirit which breathes through it and makes it a fulfilment of Protestant feeling, and a contrast only by completion.
Besides these occasional performances, the first three divisions of a complete Mass—the Kyrie, Gloria, and Credo—formed a regular part of the service on Sundays and feast-days; the Sanctus distinguished the three high festivals of the Lutheran kalendar: the only element of the Mass which is not known to have been sung was the Agnus Dei, and even of this we have evidence that it was performed in the University Church (from a Mass of Haydn) later on in the eighteenth century.
Accordingly there is nothing to hinder the supposition that Bach employed his Masses for production in the Leipzig churches. Concerning two of the five he wrote[63] this is highly probable; and a similar influence is suggested by the transcripts of several Italian Masses, drawn from such different sources as Palestrina and Lotti, which exist in Bach’s autograph and in that of his wife and son. At the least the latter bear witness to the hold which this form of church-*music had taken upon his mind. But it was not until he had traversed the whole field of Protestant music that he allowed himself to rise to the conception of a work that should embrace the universal faith of Christendom, whose voice should be persuasive to the hopes and beliefs of Catholic and Protestant alike, the sonorous majesty of the one growing intense in the human earnestness of the other. To this Mass in B minor[64] Bach put all his strength, consecrated every resource of inspiration and art, every possibility of voice and instrument. While Catholic writers have treated the Mass music as the gorgeous accompaniment of a mighty pomp, in which the outward, dramatic, impressiveness stands in the foreground, Bach passes back to the verities of which the sacred office is the symbol. Thus his Kyrie is not the mere opening of a stately pageant. From four bars of majestic chorus, the orchestra go on at once to announce a theme unsurpassed in the entire range of Bach’s music; each of the five voices of the choir take it up in turn and weave together their passionate, yet restrained cry for mercy. The human passion of the Kyrie eleison has its counterpart in the tender, almost personal feeling of the Christe eleison, which is set as a duet to an exquisitely melodious accompaniment of the violin, and in the closing Kyrie chorus, which, instead of being conceived in the usual way as a petition to the Holy Spirit, resumes the tone of the first and sums up the total supplication in a spirit now suggestive of the broad treatment of the Catholic writers but soon betraying the hand of Bach in its conciseness, its more nervous motion and acuter harmonies. The same abandoning of traditional currents in order that he might go back straight to the springs lying deep in the nature and experience of the world, to which the office of the holy communion owes its life, is equally manifest throughout the Mass. The Gloria becomes again the angel-song of the nativity. Bach throws himself at once into the spirit in which he wrote the Christmas Oratorio; and of this great work the later chorus is a sort of summary, to be used again for performance at Christmas. But if his profound grasp of the reality of that which he expressed is the supreme excellence of Bach’s High Mass, no less striking in its way is the discrimination with which he treats the different elements of the Creed. Intellectual dogmas find an intellectual rendering, as in the curious places in which the union of the divine nature in Christ is reflected by a canon, first in the unison, then in the fourth below. But doctrines which are more directly bound up with the soul of Christianity are recited with a fulness of living sympathy, which feels the pathos of the human life of Christ, pulses with unspeakable awe and an intensity almost terrific at the rehearsal of his death, then springs up in most glorious rejoicing at the resurrection. The declaration of his personal faith did not obscure in Bach’s mind the fact that he was writing a work which should hold true for the one catholic, apostolic church of which existing churches were all alike members. He returns to this thought openly in the article of baptism, where the Gregorian intonation, Confiteor unum baptisma, is pronounced, as a second subject, by the basses and wrought with superb art into the texture of the fugue.
Words, however, can give but a very faint impression of this masterpiece of universal Christendom; and daring with forced fingers rude to touch its perfect outline, I leave inviolate the lyrical tenderness of the Agnus Dei and the yearning desire[65] of the Dona nobis pacem, the restful consummation of the whole. Nor can I describe the infinite fertility of the design, the happy frequency with which in the arie a single instrument, violin, flute, hautboy, or horn, is made to enhance the delicacy of the human voice, or the splendour of the grouping of the orchestra, equally noble in sonorous magnificence and in chastened softness. Whether in its art or in its religion the High Mass stands among the creations of Bach’s master-spirit, first and alone, but for its sole equal, the Passion according to Saint Matthew.
CHAPTER VIII.
We quitted the direct narrative of Bach’s life at the point when the arrival of the new rector of the Thomasschule gave it an interval of peace and quietness, an interval of which we took advantage to review the great ranges of church-music which fell as an official task to the cantor. The four years of Gesner’s rule are the ripest and busiest in Bach’s life; not that they include his greatest individual works, with the notable exception of the High Mass, but that they are the most productive, and of works attaining a more uniform level of first-rate excellence than any others. After 1735 Bach was content to relax somewhat, and he employed his time, less in composing new cantatas or the like, than in revising, solidifying, and balancing his earlier works. He must also have retired more into the quiet of his family life, and devoted himself to his private pupils, after the blow struck at his influence in the school by Gesner’s successor, Ernesti.