Ich habe genug- Cantata for the Feast of the Purification (February 2)

Like Everest, some masterpieces are just there. You can't meaningfully analyse them without slipping into poetic adoration or stunned silence. Anything I write this week has even less chance than usual of being helpful or coherent. Trawling through Ich habe genug, with all its dark perfection, would be like trying to delineate the night sky on the back of a cornflake packet with a broken pencil . So I'll cheat a little bit. Instead of blathering about what Bach (and his unknown librettist) has done, I'll go through how other performers have made Bach live. Working out what paths mere human beings have taken to reach the summit of the mountain seems less sacrilegious and pointless than wrestling with the mountain itself.

I'm told that this cantata has more recordings than any other. Part of it is the fact that Bach himself made versions for bass, alto and soprano; and it seems somewhat churlish not to allow the tenors to have a go too. Another factor in the equation is the bottom line. A solo cantata is cheaper and quicker to record than one that needs a whole gaggle of singers, who generally are as easily herded as cats on the wrong side of a door. So of the five intrepid soloists I've listened to, one is a baritone, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau (I say a baritone- it would be more appropriate to say the baritone of the twentieth century); one a countertenor, Andreas Scholl; one bass-baritone, Thomas Quasthoff;; one mezzo-soprano, Lorraine Hunt Lieberson; and one soprano, Emma Kirkby. (Apologies to tenor-lovers.)

The first path I heard was overwhelmingly that of weariness and struggle. I listened to Dietrich Fisher-Dieskau's 1983 recording with Helmut Rilling. The recorded sound is ever-so-slightly too bright, typical of the early digital era. But as an instrument, Fischer-Dieskau's voice is as rich as it ever was in his 1950s and 60s recordings, although here there's a slightly brighter resonance at the top giving an edge to the sound. And to me the overall emotional message feels almost distraught, the song of a believer who has come the end of a weary life with little left except his faith. The repetitive turns on “den Heiland” - the Saviour - are heavy, determined, almost wrenched out. On “Ich hab' ihn erblickt”, “I have glimpsed him” we hear rock-hard certainty, and a tiny core of joy in the pain. This is what this soul has left at the end of his life; a single, transformative moment of touching the divine that has driven him on, almost onto to his deathbed. This Ich habe genug means “I have had enough experience of this life, no more, let me go!”

Rilling maintains this weight in the string accompaniment; the recitative that follows the first aria has a rising scale that here sounds like an exhausted stump up a flight of stairs to a longed-for bed. And even the sleep that follows in the aria Schlummert ein, ihr matten Augen- “Sleep now, you tired eyes”- is troubled. Yes, Fischer-Dieskau's voice is still radiant- how could it now be in this music? But there's a bitter note of anger when he sings “Welt, ich bleibe nicht mehr hier, hab' ich doch kein Teil an dir”- “I'll stay no more with you, World, you have no share in me”. And in this performance, as in life, the magical moment of longed-for rest never lasts for more than a moment. The crucial thought is “hier muss ich das Elend bauen”- “Here must I build up my pain”- the mortal's pain is all the worse for it being self-created, self-trapped in our own web of desires. The only solution to escape from the pain that paradoxically binds the soul to the world is to rejoice in approaching death. Is it fanciful to say that Bach's Lutheranism seems to run close to a Buddhist theology of Nirvana? The dancing aria that concludes the cantata is chilling in its joyful embrace of annihilation, sung with gritted teeth by Fischer-Dieskau. That is the joy that is offered to the lifelong suffering soul; that our little life is rounded with a sleep.

The next way up the mountain was one of Enlightenment elegance. Andreas Scholl's most recent 2010 recording of Ich habe genug with the Kammerorchester Basel comes from a totally different soundworld. The string melodies are delicately phrased, in contrast to Rilling's heavy repetitions. The plucked string accompaniment to the continuo lends a more intimate touch too. As a whole, the orchestra seems far more flexible; the resolution of the chord at the end of the first aria is delayed, to emphasise the gorgeous bareness of the open fifth. Scholl's very first entry has a subtly altered rhythm from that sung by Fischer-Dieskau, shortening and lightening the last note of the upward melody and avoiding the over-emphatic. Countertenors have a shorter shelf life than many other singers, and Scholl's voice is not as uniformly butter-rich as it used to be. Certainly his earlier recording of this piece with Philippe Herreweghe was more luscious in places. But a slight touch of autumnal thinness and the option of a leaner vocal colour is completely appropriate to this piece.

There's always a sense of elegance at the heart of Scholl's and the Basel players' performance. The rising accompaniment in the second movement, which seemed rather like a pensioner's stumble up a loosely carpeted stairway in the Rilling recording, is a smooth effortless ascension here. And Schlummert ein is sung straightforwardly and elegantly, with a sense of a rueful smile in the voice at hab' ich doch kein Teil an dir, followed by a geniune pianissimo lullaby-feel for the last repetition of that gorgeous melody. But I'm going to be churlish in the face of such beauty. In the elegance of the phrasing, this performance almost feels like a Baroque “Allegory of Sleep” without ever getting to the heart of the genuine sense of rest. And there's a surprising gear-change into Scholl's baritone voice in the last movement when he has to sing “Tod” on a bottom G. It all serves to reinforce the sense of slightly unreal but beautiful eighteenth century artifice.

Our third path is sparkling human joy, refreshed with genuine calm rest. Thomas Quasthoff has the darkest, richest voice of any of our guides, accompanied stylishly but unshowily by the Berliner Barock Solisten. Here we see a different emotional register; more joyful than Fischer-Dieskau's downtrodden fist-shaker, more human than Scholl's serene Baroque rhetorician. A real sense of joy infuses the singing after “Ich hab' ihn erblickt” in the first movement. But the real highight is Schlummert ein, where Quasthoff's low pianissimo notes sound like the apotheosis of a snore. You can hear him relaxing into them and just having a good time. His voice just fades into the melody and...Mmmmm... Zzzzzz. No-one sings more quietly or more richly here- the real bass-baritone deep resonances win out, and create a heart-stopping ppp. And immediately afterwards on the words Welt, ich bleibe nicht mehr hier, where Fischer-Dieskau is raging and Scholl detached and transcendent, Quasthoff is triumphant and radiant.

The final movement, with its vigorous dance rhythms, seems to have been revitalised by the previous hypnotic aria and recitative. It's as if the search for the end of life's pain isn't enervating at all; rather, knowing that nothing can ultimately harm us enables the seeker to take part in life more fully. All our worries about risks are nothing when we contemplate the security of salvation after death. In this interpretation, Ich freue mich auf meinem Tod means less “I rejoice in (the prospect of) my death”, but “Confident that my death is nothing to fear, I now rejoice”.

So far, we've only looked at men leading us up the precipice. And yes, it was rare (although not unheard of) for women to sing Bach's liturgical music in services. But we know that Bach's wife, Anna Magdalena Bach, was an accomplished singer and had part of this particular cantata copied into her own notebook. But even if we didn't have any evidence that Bach sanctioned performances by women, that would be no reason for us to spurn performances like our next one.

The fourth path: vibrant intensity and a heroic struggle, centre-stage. Lorraine Hunt Lieberson gives us a diva's performance in the best sense of the word. From the very outset, she seems separate from the orchestral texture. Compared to the eighteenth-century chamber music sound of Scholl and the Basel Kammerorchester, she could be alone on a stage, illuminated a single spotlight. It's ironic, as Hunt Lieberson was once a viola player in the middle of very band that accompanies her on this recording- the Orchestra of Emmanuel Music from Boston, Massachusetts. The slightly more recessed, almost hesitant sound of the orchestra, with tear-drop diminuendi from the bass line, allows the soloist to grab our attention. Yes, her vibrato might be a surprise to those of us used to the austerity of so-called Early Music. But the vibrato is always there for a reason; a spicy condiment, generously but thoughtfully added, rather than an incessant marinade.

Again, Schlummert ein is the most precious jewel. The passion of the earlier movements is still there- it's a wakeful lullaby, unlike Quasthoff's reverie. And the thrillingly intense quiet of Hunt Lieberson's voice tides us over the huge gaps made by the conductor at Bach's pause-points. These are magical pools of absolute silence- deeper in intensity than any simple absence of noise. But this stillness is by no means the end of the story. The last movement has some of the pugnacious quality of Fischer-Dieskau; the soul here will fight on. When the soloist sings “Freue” -joy- you can feel it's a hard-won joy after a struggle equivalent to that of any romantic heroine.

And lastly, pure church simplicity, with Emma Kirkby and the always-wonderful Freiburg Baroque Orchestra, conducted by Gottfried von der Goltz. It's ridiculous to suggest that Emma Kirkby sings with a “boyish” tone, as if it was somehow un-female to sing lightly, unaffectedly and without vibrato. In fact, plenty of boys have used vibrato as an expressive device in the past- and they still do sometimes. But what Emma Kirkby brings in her recording is a quality of directness and transparency. This recording isn't about her as a performer- this is about the music.

There's an almost instrumental quality to her singing; the words are there, but not hammered out or milked for their emotional heart. They're just there, and to me this feels like the most liturgical of all the performances. That's not to say that it's cold. The “Ach!” in the second movement really stabs through you, and the strings have some exciting echo-effects in the last movement. But I could imagine Kirkby's Schlummert ein being sung as a solo at Evensong in an Oxford college chapel, with the last light of a winter's afternoon filtering through the gothic tracery and a sublime quiet contentment spreading through the congregation.

Of course, one needs to be a supreme performer to achieve this level of self-effacement. And this has to be the heart of the paradoxical message of the piece: that the journey to utter self-less-ness fulfils all your desires and needs; that death is the fulfilment of life, not its extinction; and that when you declare “Ich habe genug” - I have enough, I need no more from life - you are given more sublime gifts that anyone could possibly imagine. Struggle, elegance, joy, passion, simplicity: five paths up the mountain. One inexpressible masterpiece for all time.

Nimm was dein ist und gehe hin!- Septuagesima

“Take what's yours and get out! Get out, get out!” Without any introduction, the congregation's ears are assaulted with a solid block of choral polyphony. It's dense, complex and chromatic; the clearest thing about it is the repetition of “gehe hin! Gehe hin!”, running incessantly through all the vocal parts. And suddenly it finishes as abruptly as it began; the door slams shut.

It's yet another moment of psychological genius. The tense, dark instrumental interlude that follows, with its repeated bass notes has the feeling of being left outside, stammering- we expected more than this! Give us what's fair! Yet the whole point of the cantata is that human ideas of what's fair are just that- human.

On this particular Sunday in February 1724, Bach's congregation would have just heard the parable of the Labourers in the Vineyard. It's a wonderfully perverse story where an landlord insists on paying all his contractors exactly the same full daily wage, even though some have worked all day and others have only turned up an hour before home-time. Surely the people who were in work at nine o'clock in the morning deserve more than the people who were only hired at five in the afternoon? That would be fair, reasonable and completely in line with the fallen world of invoices, timesheets and payslips . Those who work harder and longer get more; the lazy ones who roll in late get their pay docked. Not in this vineyard, though. You've got your pay; now get out and don't grumble!

And the second movement is all about coming to terms with this odd, inhuman, unfair divine notion of reward that isn't deserved. Over a bass line that's still pulsating (frustrated rage?), the alto tells us “Murre nicht”- don't grumble. But it's not an insensitive fobbing-off; the text addresses us as “lieber Christ”, “dear Christian”, and the vocal line is tender, reassuring. Even so, it's a difficult message for modern ears; Er weiß, was dir nützlich ist- God knows what is good for you. And the chorale that follows just repeats the assertion: Was Gott tut, das ist wohlgetan, Es bleibt gerecht sein Wille- What God does is well done, his will remains just. Without any complex accompaniment and foursquare in its harmonies, it feels like the sort of chorale that usually concluded a cantata. It may not be the end of the cantata- but it's certainly the end of the argument. Far better, says the tenor in the brief recitative that follows, to let contentment reign. And we see the flowering of that contentment next: the the soprano aria, lovely and serene again and again repeating the word genugsamkeit- “contentment, the treasure of life”.

And we end with another old familiar chorale for Bach's congregation. This one dates back to the sixteenth century, both in words and music; it's as if Bach is pointing out that fact that he's dealing in old wisdom, not anything new: “Was mein Gott will, das g'scheh allzeit, Sein Will, der ist der beste”; “What my God wills, that always comes to pass; his will is the best”. And the unexpected twisting harmonies on the very last line leave us hanging. We expected more than this!

So, an unexpected ending to a cantata that is literally unsatisfactory- it leaves us wanting more! So either Bach was having a rushed week- or he is playing a very clever theological-musical game. How can we say as listeners we expected more when we were given the glories of the Genugsamkeit aria, as beautiful as anything Bach wrote? How could the labourers expect more when they were paid a full daily rate? And how can the congregation shake their fist at God and say “we wanted more than this!” when he died for them? Take what has been given you and go and do something with it. Gehe hin!

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.