It's Sunday, February 7, 1723 in Leipzig, and Bach has written a new
cantata for the choir of St Thomas' Church. Just like hundreds of
other Sundays, you might say. But this Sunday is like no other.
Today, Bach is on trial. He's come to Leipzig hoping to get the job
of Cantor; and he's been instructed to write and direct a new piece
to show off his musical abilities to the town council. This isn't
Bach the confident Kantor of Leipzig. Today, we hear from Bach the
third choice interviewee, as he struggled to change the minds of his
reluctant possible employers.
Because it's certain that the Leipzig town council didn't really want
Bach. The first man they offered the job to was Telemann, renowned
for his work at Hamburg. Even when the council agreed to let him
carry on composing operas and let him off the work of teaching the
choir school boys Latin, he still turned them down, tempted by a pay
rise from the Hamburg council. Choice number two was Christoph
Graupner, an old boy from St Thomas's choir. He must have wowed the
judges a few weeks earlier on 17 January with his Magnificat: they
offered him the job outright without hearing Bach at all. But
Graupner was contractually tied to his own post as court chapel music
director at Hesse-Darmstadt and had to reluctantly turn them down
too. Possibly he wasn't as reluctant as all that; the offer from
Leipzig enabled Graupner to claim a pay rise from his courtly
employer too. Finally the Leipzigers looked to Bach.
So what did he give them? The first movement plunges into a dark,
harmonically unstable world. But it's far more than just a polished
bit of abstract music; this is liturgical drama, with all the
richness of opera. It's could almost a deleted scene from an
unwritten Passion. Jesus and the disciples are preparing to go to
Jerusalem- for the very last time before the Crucifixion. Naturally,
the wonderfully slow-on-the-uptake disciples don't realise this. The
tenor tells the story, and then the bass takes up the role of Christ
himself, telling the disciples “Behold! We go up to Jerusalem”.
Where a lesser composer might have set these quotations from the
Gospel in strict dry-recitative form, with just chords played on a
keyboard to underpin it, Bach makes the lower strings of the
orchestra into a dark, foreboding halo around Jesus's words. And the
response from the disciples is equally vivid. Bach bends the meaning
of the Gospel text slightly. Strictly speaking, the text is third
person narration: “They understood nothing and did not know what
had been said.”. But Bach turns
it into a turba (crowd)
chorus, making “Was? Was?”
(“What? What?”)
stand out in the
choral texture by repeatedly giving it to the three lower parts
simultaneously. It's as if the disciples were a load of elderly
relatives with dodgy hearing aids.
And to follow, we have the
faithful soul's emotional response to the events distilled into an
aria- again, just as in the Passion. The soul wants to be drawn to
Jesus, just like the disciples were drawn in the first line of the
whole cantata. But in the easy-listening serenity, there's some
trade-mark word-painting; a harmonic twinge on the word “Leid”
pain. The meditation
is followed by the bass's recitative. The libretto at this point is
dense and full of allusions, to the point of being indigestible at
first hearing. There's a reference to “Tabors
Berge”- Mount Tabor:
that was another example of the disciples getting the wrong end of
the stick, where St Peter's response to a heavenly vision of Moses
and Elijah was to ask if they'd like some tents. Yes, it's didactic;
but to me it seems that Bach is making a theological point- that
serene emotional contemplation and more learned teaching go hand in
hand. And at the end of the brief sermon from the bass, we end with a
flourish- time to dance!
And
the dance continues all the way through the tenor aria; a swinging
triple-time courtly dance, with flourishes from the upper strings.
All that's left is for Bach to reiterate his connection to the two
hundred years of Lutheran music again, with the final chorale setting
of words by Elizabeth Kreuziger. She was one of Luther's own
associates in the 1520s and helped to forge the Lutheran chorale as a
literary genre. Here, it's strangely bittersweet; the lively
eighteenth-century orchestral accompaniment contrasts with the
downbeat sixteenth-century melody. But this just gets the point of
the paradoxical words of the hymn:
“Ertöt
uns durch dein Güte, Erweck uns durch dein Gnad; Den alten Menschen
kränke, Daß der neu' leben mag”
:
“Slay us in your goodness, wake us with your grace; sicken the old
man, that the new may live”.
So
this morning Bach has given the Leipzigers a mini-Passion; then
meditation; then a quick sermon; a courtly ball; and finally tied it
back to the roots of Lutheranism. He's shown them that he can write
opera as well as their first choice, Telemann; and that as a writer
of courtly dances, he can match
choice number two, Graupner. And it's all steeped in a learned
theology that is uniquely his own. Surely the Leipzig councillors
will welcome him with open arms? We must leave the last words with
one Councillor Abraham Plaz. His comment of April 9, 1723 at a
Council meeting to confirm Bach's appointment is recorded and has
become immortal:
“Da
man nun die Besten nicht bekommen könne, so müße man mittlere
nehmen”
“Since the best man could not be obtained, we'll have to take
mediocre ones.”
Sadly, this sums up the attitude of the Council to Bach- one that
would last another twenty-seven years.
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