Second Sunday after Epiphany- Ach Gott, wie manches Herzeleid

A deep note sounds from the pedalboard of the organ, and over it a serene web of harmony builds up over it, wandering, sighing from key to key. It's not an improvisation; but it has that quality of searching and discovery. Each voice enters one by one and dances with the other in counterpoint; but instead of strictly repeating itself, the melody subtly changes. While the alto and soprano start with an interval of a fourth, the tenor leaps further, to a fifth, and the feeling of urgent search is heightened. It's as if the artist is trying to represent something that only he can hear, getting closer and closer to the form of perfection in his head. The words echo this arduous journey: “der schmale Weg ist truebsalvoll”, the narrow way is full of trouble. But out of all the chaos and uncertainly, the bass crystallises into a recognisable chorale melody. It's like a film of a glass breaking, run backwards: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nHN7ia1Dn3I . Reinforced by sombre horns, the melody rings out and gives direction to all the herzeleid- heart's pain- which ensnares the upper parts. So under this winding road is a firm foundation.

The next movement is psychologically fascinating. It starts off as just another accompanied chorale- vigorous, well-crafted and reassuring. All the singers join together to sing a familiar tune. But at the end of each line, the jolly rhythm pauses and we're left with one singer's own words, sung to a freer speech-rhythm and more emotionally anguished. It's as if we're zooming in on the thoughts of each one. Under the confident collective chorale, all the individuals are full of fears, frustrations and disappointment that their flesh and blood is only concerned with earthly and vain things.

(And for those of you who wonder why the man in the picture is distracted, just look at where his eyes are going.)

But the last person whose “thought-bubble” we see, the bass, takes the individual meditation forward. Although we experience Höllenangst und Pein- fear of Hell and pain- in our own fallen consciences, we can voluntarily push away this pain once we recognise how to defeat it: “Ich darf nur Jesu Namen nennen”- “I need only speak the name of Jesus”. It's almost reminiscent of a Buddhist attitude to suffering. To be liberated from mara, the pain of being attached to physicality, one just needs to look it in the eye, recognise it and let it go. And the freedom that results from the letting go is depicted in the bass's flourish on Freudenhimmel- “heaven's joys”- the melodic line goes up like a firework!

So after a brief triumphant recitative, it's those joys we hear in the duet for soprano and alto; both parts compete in exuberance, echoing each other on the words “Will ich in Freudigkeit zu meinen Jesu singen”- I will sing to my Jesus in joyfulness. And we close with a chorale melody “straight”, as it were. Those tormenting inward thoughts have been acknowledged and stepped away from- and, for now, they return no more.

Cantata for the First Sunday After Epiphany- Liebster Jesu, mein Verlangen

Monty Python's Life of Brian was part right. Jesus was the Messiah, and he was also a very naughty boy. But what can you expect from a child of dubious paternity, born to a teenage mother in occupied Palestine? It's not exactly domestic bliss. True, the immediate danger of the last instalment of the Christmas Oratorio has passed; Herod the raging dictator is dead, the wise men have long fled and there's nothing to be seen of the gold. Quite possibly it was in the Nazareth branch of Cash Converters. Jesus, Mary and Joseph are getting on with ordinary Jewish life. It's a pain, and so is He.

At least, that's the context for this week's cantata- Mary and Joseph searching desperately for the twelve-year-old Jesus in Jerusalem, and Jesus's irritating smugness and apparent indifference to their distress when he's found showing off to all the crusty old rabbis in the Temple. Bach wrote three cantatas for this week, one each year from 1724 to 1726. This one is arguably the most intriguing. It's almost entirely dialogue between two solo voices, soprano and bass. Now Bach had a fairly steady supply of experienced older boy soloists in Leipzig at this time. They all could have excelled in the part of the truculent, brilliant teenage Jesus. And if literalism was the name of the game, then Bach could well have given lines to a bass soloist to be Joseph, and even given Mary's lines to an alto. (Bach certainly was willing to indulge in a little gender-bending irony in the St Matthew Passion when the alto soloist, assuredly sung by a male in Bach's time, is addressed by the chorus as “O du Schönste unter den Weibern”- “O you, fairest of women”. ) It could have been a jewel of an operatic scena, a gift to future generations of performers to show the terror and relief of the Virgin Mary. As an example of how a composer a generation before Bach did precisely this, have a listen to Henry Purcell's Blessed Virgin's Expostulation- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7eN-tvmXkNY .

But clearly Bach didn't want that. Just like in the Christmas Oratorio nine years later, Bach doesn't simply want to dramatise actual events. This is not wannabe mini opera, hobbled by lack of scenery and finger-wagging church authorities. Instead, we step outside the particulars of the story and go to the universal. In the dialogue, the bass takes the role of a timeless saving Christ, not a twelve-year-old Jesus with his voice on the edge of breaking. The soprano sings for every searching soul in history, not just one particular distraught Jewish mother in Jerusalem circa 12 A.D.: “Ach! mein Hort, erfreue mich, Laß dich höchst vergnügt umfangen”- “Ah, my desire, make me joyful, let me embrace you with the greatest delight.”

It would be unfair to describe the first movement as a soprano solo; in fact, the oboe is as much in the limelight as the singer. It often rises above the voice's own melody and lingers on after the text has finished, as if the heights of emotion push beyond the limits of language. And even with tiny forces, there's still a remarkable feeling of grandeur it. The recording by the intriguingly named Les Folies Françoises is real chamber music, one-to-a-part in an intimate acoustic, and all the more intense for that.

The response from the bass soloist is concise to the point of brusqueness, and at first sight exactly as unfeeling as the teenage Jesus must have seemed: “What's this, that you were looking for me? Don't you know I must be on my Father's business?”. But this isn't a reproach- it's a signpost. “Hier, in meines Vaters Stätte, Findt mich ein betrübter Geist.”- here in my Father's house the troubled spirit finds Me. The aria that follows is one of those glorious Bach moments for the bass- warm and deeply paternal. It almost seems insolent to point out little technical details like the false relation on betrübter:

(Bars 47-49, bass part)

Here, Bach adds an unexpected flat to the B natural that came a fraction of a second earlier, plunging us unprepared into a minor tonality and making us feel quite how troubled the soul is. But analysis has to stop at some point, and when it comes to music like this, the earlier the better for my limited powers. In fact, when I was making notes while listening to this movement, I just ran out of words- rather like the soprano soloist in the first movement. I lacked a sublime oboe obbligato, so I just put a row of stars: it really is so beautiful, but never over-blown, especially when sung at that serene mezzo-piano that is at the heart of the greatest Bach arias for bass.

And after that moment of sublime self-declaration, soul and Saviour, soprano and bass, wind themselves ever closer together. The cantata started with separate movements given to each voice; the next movement gives them genuine dialogue, interleaved and responsive. The soul rejoices that dieses Wort, das itzo schon Mein Herz aus Babels Grenzen reißt – “this Word wrenches my soul from out of the borders of Babylon”. Grenze was also the word used in East Germany for the Berlin Wall- and the musical destruction of the Grenze between Christ and the soul is a moment of genuine unification too for the soul and the saviour, as joyful as any December night in 1989. Finally, both voices are united in a duet where they share the same words. This is so much more than just singing from the same hymn-sheet. It means that at last, their desires and wills are one- in the same way as true lovers, or the persons of the Trinity (which amounts to much the same thing). Heaven and Earth have come together- “Nun verschwinden alle Plagen, Nun verschwindet Ach und Schmerz!”- now all troubles, all pain and sorrow blow away in the wind! We're a world away from the initial themes- fear and separation are long forgotten.  

And finally two more singers, alto and tenor join our soloists for the closing chorale. We rejoice that heaven and earth have met- not as individuals, but singing all together with the best four-part Lutheran joy. 

Christmas Oratorio, Day 6- The Feast of the Epiphany. Christmas is Over. Happy War

The Three Kings reach Bethlehem and give their gifts to Jesus in an idyllic scene of adoration. It's the ideal time for Bach to give us a calm, pastoral ending- the shepherds with their safely-grazing sheep, Mary dressed in an improbably clean and anachronistically bright blue shift, Joseph looking slightly dull and worthy at the back. That's what Epiphany- the feast of the Three Kings- is all about. Right? Well, yes- Bach gives us all that, for a moment or two. But what drives the end of the whole sequence is conflict. The story focusses on a secret escape from a terrified duplicitous dictator; the music is harmonically unstable and unsettling. And underlying it all is an ongoing war of the spirit with a snorting, raging Enemy that will only be won decades in the future through tortured self-sacrifice.

The opening chorus brings us back to the world of Christmas Day, at the very beginning of the Oratorio. Trumpets, kettle-drums and a lively flourish from the strings. But there's something wrong. Christmas Day's opening chorus started in the trumpets' favourite key, D major; it happily cycled through to A major and later did some interesting things around E major. It all works beautifully and creates no psychological jolts for the listener. Today's opening chorus starts as if it's playing the same game. Again, we start with a strong triple-time entry in D major with trumpets and drums, then a move towards A major to give us a touch more excitement. Even if you don't know a D major chord from a Dover sole, you feel that things are right.  Exciting, beautiful, yes, but in a familiar sort of way. But as soon as that rightness gets settled in the listener's minds, we're thrown.

At Bar 20, Bach makes what can only be described as a harmonic lurch into strange and remote territories, full of notes like C natural and D sharp which are completely alien to what came before. (Incidentally, for any of you geeky enough to want to check the score, a fairly decent public domain version is at http://javanese.imslp.info/files/imglnks/usimg/4/47/IMSLP26544-PMLP06314-Bach-BWV248roslerVS.pdf .) And remember that Bach's instruments were tuned to be very good at playing in ordinary keys like C major and A minor with not many sharps or flats; indeed, in these keys they were more in tune than ordinary twenty-first century instruments. But in distant keys with more sharps and flats, they sounded strange and un-nerving. You can hear the difference when comparing Karl Richter's 1965 recording on modern instruments and tuning with John Eliot Gardiner's; Richter's merely sounds quieter, muted, intriguing at this point. With Gardiner and his eighteenth-century style band, the harmonic shift feels like a brief encounter with a banana skin on a dancefloor. We stay upright, but we'll have to take care not to end up heels-over-head. The old, confident tonality does return, backed up with the trumpets- but again it has to fight against these strange, dissonant interjections, made with insistently repeated notes on strings and oboes. The Christmas world of unalloyed joy is not as simple as we thought.

And when the chorus come in, they sing of struggle against a raging enemy. Their first line is almost comical in its vivid vocabulary- schnauben means to snort, as a raging boar might when confronted with a hunter trying to turn him into sausages. “Lord, when our proud Enemy snorts with rage, grant that we in firm faith may look to your power and help!”. Not exactly calming Christmas card stuff; we've moved on from that. And opposition and conflict are written into the way the words underlay the music. feinde Schnauben, “the enemy snorts” doesn't just rhyme with Feste glauben- “firmly believe”- it's set to exactly the same melodic pattern. Firm belief directly takes on the steaming nostrils of the enemy in Bach's web of musical counterpoint- and wins out, despite those persistent wobbles into strange unnerving tonality.

So why is Bach talking about enemies and conflict? The answer comes in the next recitative, which has one of the few moments when a character appears in the oratorio and speaks his own lines solo, rather than simply being described by the Evangelist. And surprisingly, it's not a Wise Man, or Joseph- but bad King Herod. This is the sort of enemy Bach is talking about in the opening chorus- not a vague sense of moral evil, but human, personal, and very dangerous. But he's also faintly ridiculous. The tenor steps aside and gives an opportunity for the bass soloist to practice his best fake-innocent wheedling voice as he says he wants to know where to find the Christ child, “dass ich auch komme und es anbete”- “that I may also may come and worship him”. You can almost imagine the Wise Men silently thinking “Yeah, right, Herod”.

And this lighter touch continues in the next aria. When the soprano sings “Spricht der Höchste nur ein Wort, Seiner Feinde Stolz zu enden”- “when the Highest One speaks a single word to put an end to the Enemy's pride”- there's a lovely whimsical staccato rhythm on Stolz zu enden, well brought out by Nancy Argenta on John Eliot Gardiner's DG recording. It brings to mind a primary school teacher waving her finger at a particularly badly behaved child- “I'm speaking, so don't even think about interrupting!”. And there's a long instrumental “outro” to finish, which re-enacts that bouncy rhythm. It's just a reminder that yes, there's a war on- but there's no need to get too frightened when the enemy is as transparent as Herod, and the person really in charge can squish him with a single word.

We return to the story, with some more cool recitative from the tenor Evangelist. The wise men stealthily escape over the border, keeping an eye out for the agents of the state. Initially, the music is calm, austere and reminiscent of Alan Bennett's dictum that people reading Scripture should aim for the same level of excitement as the Saturday afternoon football results. But Bach does something interesting (when does he ever not?). After a brief chorale interjection, the tenor recit moves from being straight quotes from the Biblical narrative to something more impassioned. Firstly, there's an emotional address to the Kings, bidding them farewell (“So geht! Genug, mein Schatz geht nicht von hier”- “Go then, it's enough that my treasure remains here”). This develops into a rhapsody of ardent love for the Christ child. People complain about “Jesus is my boyfriend” lyrics in happy-clappy evangelical worship songs today; but Bach's unknown librettist beats them all at this point:

“He stays here by me, I will not let him leave me. His arm will embrace me out of love and with great tenderness. He will remain my bridegroom, I will dedicate my breast and heart to him. I know well that he loves me; my heart loves him ardently too.”

And the instrumentation mirrors this journey from cool scripture to burning passion. It stops being recitativo secco (literally “dry recitative”) accompanied only by the keyboard, and acquires the more fruity tones of two instruments whose name is literally Love: oboes d'amore, with a richer, sweeter Semillon tone than the conventional oboe's drier Pinot Grigio. Finally, the tenor's recitative blossoms into an aria. Is it going to be more meditative love-stuff? On the contrary- there is a war on, you know! After the declaration of love, it's time to concentrate on the enemy. The previously sensuous oboes d'amore set up a 2/4 march-time (particularly jagged and unsentimental in Nikolaus Harnoncourt's recording), while the tenor mocks the stolzen Feinde once again: “Now you proud enemies may try to scare me- what sort of fear can you arouse in me?”.

In fact, for all the language of passion and war, Bach is using the music to give a strictly orthodox Lutheran plan for dealing with any fiendish temptations. First, you read the word of scripture calmly, unadorned- that's the first, dry part of the recitative. Then you go into your own emotional response to the text- that's the richer, more impassioned accompanied section of the recitative. Finally, you follow this with practical external action, mocking the wiles of sin and the flesh- the aria, with all its lithe marching vigour.

We're almost at the end of the two-week long journey now. But Bach still has some surprises up his sleeve. Firstly, all the soloists- soprano, alto, tenor, bass, join together to sing a recitative together- that's never happened before in the whole piece. It's a beautiful last opportunity for them to take a bow together (figuratively speaking, of course)- but there's more important work to be done. The trumpet sounds, the drums thunder; all our memories of Christmas Day, so long ago, are rekindled again. Time for final unalloyed jubilation to bring our great Oratorio to a unified close? Yes- and no. Despite the jubilation of the brass, the chorus don't come in with unison joy as on Christmas Day. Nor do we have with florid fugal entries as they did at the start of today's segment. It's Bach's last shock for us. What they sing is the chorale melody which is at the heart of the St Matthew Passion, known to us as O Haupt voll Blut und Wunden. While the drums and trumpets blare, the shadow of the Cross falls.

There's some controversy on whether this tune unequivocally signified “crucifixion” in Bach's day; it started as a secular love tune, after all. And it's true that not all of the congregation in St Thomas's in Leipzig on Epiphany Sunday 1735 might have known that this tune was used as the backbone of the great Passion setting sung there a few years previously. But Bach certainly knew that melody's significance to his own grandest setting of the Passion of Christ. Its inclusion here must be Bach's deliberate choice to cast us forward from the waning days of Christmas to the black heart of Good Friday. Just like the king's final gift of myrrh, used for anointing the dead, it points us forward from the beginning of life to its end.

This war isn't won at Bethlehem, surrounded by gold and frankincense; for Bach, it's won on a lonely cross outside Jerusalem, thirty-odd years later. But the struggle has now begun. For the great composer, dramatist, theologian and human being of St Thomas's, Leipzig, the hope of eventual victory is sure. Christmas is over. Happy war.

Christmas Oratorio Day 5- the Sunday after New Year

“Modern” means “lush, rich, well-upholstered, grand”. It also means “soupy and lacking rhythmic drive or any scholarly input”. At least that's the impression you'd get from some reviewers of Bach recordings. I'd normally be on their side- I've never heard a performance of a Bach cantata from a modern symphony orchestra with the dance of Philippe Herreweghe's Collegium Vocale Ghent, the beauty of sound of Masaaki Suzuki's Bach Collegium Japan. But Ricardo Chailly is a man on a mission to remind the world that you can be lithe, exciting and most of all fast with Bach, even if you're using modern instruments with not a gut string in sight. Admittedly, his 2010 Christmas Oratorio recording is with a modern-instrument orchestra that ought to have Bach's choral tradition in its blood- the Leipzig Gewandhaus: founded in Bach's lifetime, providing musicians for St Thomas's since 1840, and keeping the flame of Bach's cantatas alive in throughout the Communist regime.

And flame is precisely the right metaphor for Chailly's performance of the opening chorus for the Sunday after New Year. It crackles along a shade faster even than John Eliot Gardiner's recording. The brightness of the chorus's light vowel sounds and generally high tessitura (including excitable near-squeaks from the sopranos on “sei dir Gott!”) is heightened by the modern pitch, a semitone higher than the baroque standard.

But the brightness quickly darkens; we are in a territory of danger and political intrigue, as hazardous as 1980s East Germany. The chorus's “Wo ist der neugeborne König der Jüden?”, with its repeated Wo?...

 Bach, Christmas Oratorio, No. 45)

...reminds me of nothing more than the crowd's mocking three-fold “Wir, Wir, Wir haben keinen König” turba (crowd) chorus in the St John Passion:

(Bach, St John Passion, No. 46 opening)

The key and time signature is the same too, and the soprano part which follows is more or less note-for-note, with the word Koenig at the end of a B minor triad. (I've highlighted it in green). Bach would have last performed the Passion less than three years previously in April 1732, and it seems unlikely that the near-quote is completely accidental. The textual similarities with the Passions don't end here, anyway- the later tenor recitative sings of Herod summoning the high priests and elders in exactly the same terms as in the St Matthew Passion. But these resonances go beyond the simple similarity of the words and the music. They're both examples of political power in the hands of weak and frightened men; Herod at one end of Jesus's life, Pontius Pilate and the Jewish priests at the other. And the blood of innocents is shed as a result of the rulers' fear and weakness in both cases.

But the crucial difference is that the alto soloist is musically integrated into the turba, standing apart and playing the part of a believer listening to the story. The alto responds “Sucht ihn in meiner Brust”- look for him in my heart. There's no way that this is literally dramatising a character present in the Gospel story. Instead a temporal division is made in the drama to create two narrative levels, held in tension. The kings, and Herod are the base level; but Bach's own listeners, eighteen hundred years later, are themselves given a place in the drama at a higher level. So the distinction between actor and audience, singers and congregation, is being blurred and chipped away; Bach is showing that his listeners are still as much part of the great continuing drama of salvation as the kings, the shepherds and the child in the manger were.

Christmas Oratorio Part 4- New Year's Day, the Naming of Jesus

Fallt mit Danken, fallt mit Loben! Bach's first command to the congregation in the New Year seems quite unnerving on the printed page- fall down with thanks and praise! Now! It has slight reminiscences of a sergeant shouting at his squaddies to get down and give him twenty press-ups. But Bach's congregation- at least the ones who were awake and theologically switched on- would know precisely the reason for this peremptory command. When should every knee bow? At the Name of Jesus. At least St Paul says so in his letter to the Phillipians, and who am I to argue?.

So today is the feast of the Name. The call to kneel is nothing to be frightened of- just the appropriate action on this day of all days. And the music of the opening chorus is a swinging triple-time minuet, gently soothing. Rather than excited trumpets cutting through the sound as on Christmas morning, Bach gives us darker-hued horns trilling gently within the orchestral texture. And the text is more muted too; God's response to the Feinde Wut und Toben – the Devil's rage and fury- isn't fighting or struggling but “Dämpft”- he calms it down.

After a brief restrained interjection from the tenor setting the scene for today- Jesus is named and circumcised on the eighth day after his birth- we hear what is effectively a litany on the name of Jesus from the bass. Six times he repeats “mein Jesus” with different attributes- my Jesus is a refuge, is my life, has given himself to me... the sequence continues. It's reminiscent of the Eastern Orthodox practice of repeating the name of Jesus in hypnotic prayer- ultimately the aim is to transcend the words and achieve a more mystical union.

And the bass's repetition of mein Jesus is only brought to an end by the soprano line entwining itself around his melody. To me, it seems like a depiction of the interplay between masculine and feminine attributes of the soul's love for Jesus. The soprano addresses Jesus in a gentle chorale melody as meine Seelen Bräutigam- “my soul's bridegroom”, while at the same moment the bass declaims more firmly and passionately “Komm! Ich will dich mit Lust umfassen”- “Come! I will embrace you with desire!”. Bach runs the text for the upper voice and the lower voice simultaneously, making them into a unity rather than a dialogue. The love of the soul for the creator is something that transcends any one gender; once it is reached, the mystical union is beyond any analogy of male or female desire.

And so, quite correctly, we break free of that seductive analogy in the next section. Rather than having a picture of two lovers, a treble sings with another echoing him; it's a charming song of confidence, with an affectingly naïve “Nein!” or “Ja!” from the echo soprano at the end of each stanza. Some people feel it's a less successful section: Simon Heighes in the Oxford Composer Companion to Bach says that the echoes are “inappropriate” and that Bach is sticking too closely to the secular cantata Herkules which he re-worked. But I think it works- that little piping echo doesn't have to be the voice of Christ himself, but a voice from the believer's own unadorned faith, with “not the tiniest seed of fierce terror” (“den allerkleinsten Samen jenes strengen Schreckes”).

So we move from boyish, naïve treble-piping back to the confident masculine bass voice of the soul, again accompanied with the lighter chorale; the soul resolves that “your name alone shall be in my heart”, and we proceed to a lithe, skeletal, vigorous tenor aria (is it fair to say that tenors are sometimes a touch quicker and more active than basses? Maybe I'm just biased). The text is full of words like kraft, macht, eifrig- force, might, eager- and the scoring seems like a little double violin concerto, while the tenor is made to work far harder now than in his relatively relaxed solos as the Evangelist. Meanwhile, the first and second violins scrap against each other for supremacy like rival cares and duties. Appropriately enough- the theme of the aria is that a Christian's life is just sheer hard work.  

And the conclusion of the cantata is another sixfold litany on the name of Jesus:

Jesus richte mein Beginnen,

Jesus bleibe stets bei mir,

Jesus zäume mir die Sinnen,

Jesus sei nur mein Begier,

Jesus sei mir in Gedanken,

Jesu, lasse mich nicht wanken!

Interspersed with these six lines are varied instrumental interjections. Bach apparently used to slip these little interludes in on the organ between the lines of congregational hymns, and was told off for distracting people with his virtuosity. But here, they give a wonderful richness to the chorale setting; Bach gives us a tiny snapshot of different emotions before each line, but the singers always return to the same word- Jesus. Models of faithful Lutheran behaviour. But look at the subtle difference between lines 1-5 and the last one. The first five lines all talk about Jesus; only the last line directly addresses him, and that's why Jesu is in the vocative- “O Jesus, let me not stray!” I think it seems particularly appropriate to the day when resolutions are made- and broken.

PS. Sharp-eyed readers may note that I'm not keeping my resolutions very well either, and am a few days behind on this blog! Apologies- the Christmas Oratorio is quite big, as you see. There are two segments of the Oratorio left to do before we get back to the weekly cantata cycle- one for the First Sunday after New Year and for Epiphany, January 6^th. This year, these both fall on the same day- so expect some double-helpings this week too.

Christmas Oratorio, part 3- the Third Day of Christmas

Midwinter spring is its own season

Sempiternal though sodden towards sundown,

Suspended in time, between pole and tropic.

It's December 27 1734, and Bach's musicians are probably feeling as groggy and overfed as most people are on the day after Boxing Day. At least this segment only needs to be played once, at St Nicholas' Church- the previous two were given at St Thomas's too. And for the third day in a row, they give life to a masterpiece. Royal trumpets meet pastoral woodwind in the introduction as the shepherds approach their King- who happens to be poor, helpless and powerless. It's all about inverted expectations on multiple levels. So the chorus addresses the earth-bound Jesus as Herrscher des Himmels- Lord of heavens; they ask the baby to hear their babbling, “erhöre das Lallen”. When the babbling actually consists of a formally perfect choral fugue, clearly something is unusual here! But the key to it is the request to look upon the heart's joyful praise- der Herzen frohlockendes Preisen- the only thing where appearances can't be deceiving. And this theme is crucial for today's section of the Oratorio- the combination of external worship and internal meditation.

The shepherds act as the models of how to relate to God in the eternal world. Firstly, they move. After a quick interjection from the tenor Evangelist, Bach dramatises their decision to go on pilgrimage with a little turba chorus. It's the same sort sort of vigorous choral interjection that Bach gave to the disciples and the raging crowds in his Passion settings. It's functional, dramatic music that moves the plot on concisely, rather than allowing time for meditation. “Let's go to Bethlehem”, they say- and within less than a minute, they're on their way, with concise encouragement from the bass soloist and a chorale.

You are not here to verify,

Instruct yourself, or inform curiosity

Or carry report. You are here to kneel

Where prayer has been valid.

And once they reach Bethlehem, the textures slim down and the scale diminishes. We have a duet for soprano and bass, accompanied by those rustic-sounding oboes d'amore. It's as if only a couple of people could squeeze into the stable at a time. It may not be the most earth-shattering piece Bach wrote; but it sums up that simple sequence of action that we're called to at Christmas- first go to the manger; then kneel at a place where prayer is strong. And all the time we're still playing with the strange upside-down-ness of Christmas- addressing a little baby, yet talking about “deine Vatertreu”- your fatherly love.

But the really sublime moment (at least to my ears) comes next. The Evangelist speaks up again, describing not only the shepherds' spreading the word about the new baby. Yet the narrative shifts from the external to the internal: “Maria aber behielt alle diese Worte und bewegte sie in ihrem Herzen.”, “Mary kept all these words and stored them away in her heart”. Bach does something rather magical here; indeed, I think it's a sign of his genius that his recitatives are never dull. (As a demonstration of how difficult it is to write exciting and compelling recitative, I'd point out Ton Koopman's reconstruction of the St Mark Passion, where the recits are newly composed by Maestro Koopman himself in immaculate Baroque style. I confess to finding them eye-wateringly boring...) But here, Bach shifts into a new harmonic territory for the words bewegte sie, with a little chromatic slither in the bass which lets us feel we're entering new pastures- and then we're into what could be an operatic aria for Mary herself. I love the feeling of patient pondering in the solo violin introduction. It could be Mary walking up and down in a room, or possibly the passage of thoughts one after the other in her mind as she tells herself: “Schließe, mein Herze, dies selige Wunder
Fest in deinem Glauben ein!” - “My heart, store away this blessed wonder firmly in your faith”. This section of the oratorio could so easily be staged. It's tempting to imagine an impassioned Mary alone and looking out at an ecstatic audience after the departure of the shepherds.

But this isn't opera. It would have been sung with no costume, by a boy or young man in a musician's gallery, possibly not even visible to the congregation. But this is part of the power of the piece. At one level, it's a song that Mary sings after the birth of Jesus as she meditates on what has just happens- as it might have happened then and there, and nowhere else. But by transcending any staging and by being sung by a high-voiced male, not a female, the aria breaks free of the bounds of time, place and gender in the narrative. It's the song that Bach is offering all his congregation (and, by extension, us) to share in for all time.

Time present and time past

Are both perhaps present in time future,

And time future contained in time past.

A brief recitative speeds up the pace as we stand up from the crib. The chorale that follows is a simple repetitive tune with remarkably slow, short three-syllable lines (“Ich will dir/ Leben hier,/ Dir will ich abfahren”). But under the child-like melody are complex harmonies. For just one example, I've outlined in red how the tenors and basses rise up a whole octave through the texture in the last three bars, singing words that mean “With you I will one day soar, full of joy, beyond time, to another life!”. And how appropriate that they reach their peak on the word “Life”.

And after this rise to life, we go back. The tenor recitative tells of a joyful return home for the shepherds; and after a brief, simpler chorale echoing that joy, that's exactly what Bach does. We return to the opening chorus, back to the combination of king's fanfares and shepherds' pipes. The great journey of the first three days of Christmas is over, and Bach's congregation return home too.

And the end of all our exploring

Will be to arrive where we started

And know the place for the first time.

The next time they hear Bach's music it will be a new year.