G sharp minor isn't a friendly key to play in at the best of times.
With its four sharps and a double-sharp, it's the musical equivalent
of picking over barbed wire. In Bach's day, it would have been even
more painful. The tuning systems that were used made nice friendly
keys like C major and G major sound even more rich and in tune than
they do today. But the pay-back was that if you played in remote
keys with more than a few sharps and flats, the effect was unnerving
at best- and at worst like having pins driven into your forehead.
This necessarily wasn't considered a bad thing. Bach's generation
liked to keep the characters of the individual keys, without
smoothing them all out like modern tuning systems (A much more
technical explanation of this is at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Well_temperament) . And so when you hear
a sudden chord of G sharp minor played on instruments of Bach's time,
it shoots right through you.
And unbalanced discord shooting through harmonious relationship is
precisely what this week's cantata is all about. It all starts off
very solidly and almost pompously. A stately opening chorus, with
fanfare-like interjections for the “Friedefürst”- the
Prince of Peace- ends with a solid, confident declaration: “D'rum
wir allein in Namen dein Zu deinen Vater schreien”. It's a
common enough sentiment in Lutheran theology: only through Jesus'
name do we call to the Father. And the word “schreien”
resolves downwards in a confident A major chord.
But
the second movement tears this apart- it's a direct criticism of the
first movement's confidence. We start with the repeated word “Ach!”
from the
alto. “Ach”
is a remarkable word. It's not just a cry of
pain, despite the resemblance to “ouch” in English; it literally
means pain. The only
words that the singer can express are “pain, pain, pain”. Bach's
vision is terrifying. This is the cry we make to the Father through
Jesus: not confident Lutheran foursquare chorale singing, but weeping
with pain. When we finally get to some more actual words in the rest
of the line, ironically they can only emphasise the inarticulacy of
the tormented soul: “Unaussprechlich ist die Not”:
the agony is indescribable, and
all that can be expressed is agony itself.
Here is the alto's “Ach!”. Instead of a solid, falling
resolution like at the end of the first movement, it rises up,
un-grounded and uncertain:
Du
Friedefürst, second movement, bars 11-15
And if we look more closely, we see it's sung to two jagged fragments
of the movement's opening melody. It's almost as if the singer is too
overwhelmed with the pain to complete the lyrical line- a musical
depiction of angst that is unaussprechlich, fear of sin
combining with fear of God to break the song into pieces.
Du
Friedefürst, second movement, bars 1-4 (keyboard reduction)
With
the third movement's brief recitative link for the tenor, we begin
the fourth movement with an unsettling thought: we can scarcely cry
to the Father through Christ if he turns away from us. But here we
are taken from uncertainty into a new sublime sound-world, one very
rare even for Bach: a terzett or
trio of voices, the soprano, tenor and basses weaving round each
other hypnotically. Only the yearning of the cello underneath reminds
us of the pain of the previous movement, as the three voices repeat
the phrase “wir bekennen unsre Schuld, wir bekennen”
again and again- “we confess
our guilt, we confess”; and there's a lovely thinning of the
textures as the voices sing “wir... bitten nichts als um
Geduld”- we ask for nothing
but patience.
Yet
the outside world crashes back in. The next alto ario takes us from E
major to F sharp minor, and then on the words “die
scharfen Ruthen”- the harsh
rod- we have a chord of the dreaded G sharp minor (with an added F sharp for extra spice):
It's
the very edge of usability in the tuning system that Bach would have
used. And although we return to a more tuneful A major by the end of
the recitative to lead into a muted chorale, the cantata as a whole
still seems a strange and unsettled.
What
is going on? Well, one suggestion is that Bach isn't only on the edge
of tuneful harmony in the music. In the words, he and his librettist
are flirting with a controversial theological doctrine that some
people think is on the edge of heresy. The key words are in the
wonderful serene trio: “Es brach ja dein erbarmend Herz,
Als der Gefallnen Schmerz Dich zu uns in die Welt getrieben”. “Your
merciful heart yielded, for the pain of the fallen drove you to us in
the world.”. This is actually dangerous stuff; it suggests that
within the eternal and unsuffering Trinity, the pain of a fallen
world reached all the way up to the Godhead. It may be heretical, but
it explains why at the heart of this cantata there is a moment of
stillness- a trinity of voices, dancing round each other- which is
suddenly interrupted when we are thrown back to a world of pain.
Bach's music follows the journey of God's Son to a world of anguish.
And it's appropriate that in journeying from heavenly harmony to the
moment of the deepest earthly discord, we reach a key with four
sharps and a double-sharp. For the German word for a sharp is kreuz-
a cross. Only there do we see
the Friedefürst, the
prince of peace.
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