Bach's Johannespassion (Part 2: the mystery of Bach)

I had the pleasure of hearing Bach's Johannespassion on Palm Sunday in the Grossmünster of Zurich. It was sung by the Bach Collegium, in which my friend Laura sings. On Easter Sunday this year I will be in Amsterdam, and the Concertgebouw is giving the Matthäuspassion, so I will hear these two works a week apart, each for the first time. Obviously, two sung passion plays by Bach are going to have as many similarities as differences (Bach told the story of Christ's crucifixion at least three times in large-scale works), and before I sink into this later, more intimate and pensive work (Matthäuspassion), I'd like to spend more time thinking about the more intensely dramatic Johannespassion that affected me so.

For reference I really admire this recording from Munich, conducted by Karl Richter, sung by an enormous chorus of ice-cold Germans:

I find it impossible to imagine what sort of a man Bach was, harder still to imagine the emotional world he inhabited (and the far less religious one that usurped it). The music itself would point to a man of the deepest, most mystical religious devotion. The non-Biblical libretti circle over and over again around the humility needed to honor God, around the gracious gift of undeserved mercy. The thought that, until Mendelssohn, this massif of artistic ambition went mostly unperformed beyond Leipzig for a hundred years, der Schall nearly verschollen -- it boggles the mind that the question of posterity did not appear to concern him, or that any steps he took for his own posterity were only meagerly successful, and left no traces in his music. Is this Bach an artist without ego? Would our modern idea of an artist concede even the possibility of such a thing? Writing music for any given Sunday, music that lasts for a thousand years? Is this Bach merely a talented family man working to please a court patron, his talent a coincident miracle? 


Bach died only a year after Goethe was born. Did his pre-Classical art seem absurdly penitent to the heady impetuousness of those that followed? Unenlightened? Yet Bach's religious torment makes Sturm und Drang seem a tantrum. The central mystery of how man-Bach could compose Bachmusik: how do you pair a mystic's devotional selflessness with the boldness of will, the proud avidity, needed to create something so purely, complexly beautiful?

Perhaps the answer is to think of Bach as an asomatous architect. Think of the physical buildings in which Bach's music first was played. Think of every cathedral you've ever seen, think of every European capital city and its main church, Catholic or Protestant, built in the last thousand years. Who was the architect? Who composed these buildings, designed their ornaments, set the naves and arches? Are their names as familiar to you as I.M. Pei, Frank Lloyd Wright, Eiffel? Certainly not. Now, a major cathedral often took hundreds of years to finance and complete, any bethel more likely the the result of a succession of designers and builders than of any one. They reflect no auteur's vision, and cannot, for they are not a static declaration of an artistic intent; the are the living expression of a faith. The cathedrals that housed Bach's music are meant to give in earth, in stone, a place to witness a spirit God. The mason and the drafter, who are they? Servants of their savior.

It helps me then to think of Bach not as an artistic composer who wrote music for his listeners to contemplate -- there is no primarily aesthetic, enjoyment imperative here -- but instead as a mystic of sound, a builder of a musical edifice, enveloped in which the listener can contemplate life on earth and what follows eternally. The sound made flesh. Is there any other art in our time so unblemished by the vanity of recognition? Is there any other art whose ornaments, style, whose essence is so capable of conceitless surrender to devotion, and, with that surrender, of all the pure force of joy and sorrow?


Part 3: The dual role of the choir