Tempus
Clausum. Closed season. For
a few weeks each year, Bach's manic work-schedule stepped
down a gear; no new cantatas were required for Sundays in Lent. So
there's a strange gap for us here. Admittedly, it's allowed me to
catch up with things; last week we looked at the cantata for the
Sunday before Ash Wednesday more than a week late after the
mountainous sublimity of Ich Habe Genug pushed
my schedule out of kilter. But now we're in a strange wilderness-
only a few scraps of specifically Lenten music until we crawl out of
the desert into the astounding riches of Bach's Holy Week.
Because
it's Bach, the scraps are actually pretty tasty. Although he wrote
(almost) no specifically Lenten cantatas, we do have the specifically
Lenten chorale preludes from the Orgelbuechlein or
Little Organ Book, written in his time at Coethen around 1713.
They're little only in the sense that a diamond is little- tiny,
perfectly formed and self-sufficient. They range in length from about
a minute to a mighty five minutes .
First,
O Lamm Gottes unschuldig- O
guiltless Lamb of God. It's
based around a tune which sends shivers down the spine of anyone who
knows the St Matthew Passion. There, it's given to the soprano
in ripieno in the mighty first
chorus, soaring above the two double choirs as the final touch to the
great dance of grief. But the harmonic ambiguity of the melody allows
it to work equally well in a major-key context as a a minor one; and
here, the quality is completely different- pastoral, gentle,
reassuring from the outset. Yet a bittersweet quality has come in by
the end; inherent in the paradoxical image of the Lamb: sweet, gentle
and innocent, but undoubtedly destined to be separated from its
mother and at best sheared, at worst slaughtered.
The
next, Christe du Lamm Gottes-
that familiar “Du”, addressing
Christ as a family member or friend!- is an even more intimate.
Played lightly (with a barely perceptible pedal part in Alessio
Corti's recording, for example) it's innocent and simple; an
effective little coda to its predecessor, focussing in again on the
Lamb itself, pure and simple at the eye of a hurricane of struggle.
The struggle comes in the next piece- Christus der uns
selig macht – Christ, who
makes us holy. It only arrives at triumphant resolution after titanic
struggles up and down chromatic scales. And what is the means of that
making holy? The Cross, the theme of the next chorale, Da
Jesus an dem Kreuze stund- “When
Jesus hung upon the Cross”- not a raging, tortured lament as one
might expect, but a still meditation.
It
should be obvious by now that these pieces are far more than just a
collection of helpful exercises for beginner organists, or even
practical filler material for a gap in the service. There's a genuine
theological progression, starting from the chorale texts Bach chose,
but made explicit by his own musical treatment. Like the cantatas,
they're another sort of sermon in music. And this is made perfectly
clear by the next piece, the greatest of this set, O
Mensch, bewein dein Suende gross- O
man, bewail your grievous sin. The unheard words of the chorale call
on us to look on the whole course of Jesus' life, from birth to death
and resurrection. Bach responds to this by slowing down and
decorating the melody to an almost obsessive extent. Time seems to
stop, as a familiar tune stretches out into eternity. Five hundred
years earlier, the early polyphonic masters of Notre Dame, Leonin and
Perotin did it with their great organa built over well-known melodies
slowed down into infinity. (If you haven't heard Perotin's Viderunt
Omnes, stop what you're doing,
type it into Google and listen to it now. Your life will be better).
Even earlier, the great anonymous plainchant graduals from the ninth
and tenth centuries played the same trick. By eroding metre into a
continuous ever-changing flow, it takes you to a place where the
simple passage of time, sixty seconds a minute, starts to lose its
meaning; you become conscious of a new sort of time that is both now
and eternal.
But
the purpose of this is not just to achieve a gorgeous interior mental
state. Having touched eternity, we must return to everyday life. The
last piece of the sequence, Wir
danken dir, Herr Jesu Christ (We
thank you, Lord Jesus Christ),
returns
to the world of clear metrical rhythm, foursquare construction. For a
minute, we are jubilant and thankful; our contemplation is over, and
we have entered into the spirit of Lent- penitence and contemplation,
yes, but preparation for a glorious Easter too. I'm slightly ashamed
that I described these little pieces as “tasty scraps” earlier;
the Lenten scraps that fall from Bach's table have proved to be a
wholly unexpected feast.
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