Bach's Johannespassion (Part 3: the mystery of the choir)

In the past two articles I wrote on Bach's Johannespassion, I referred to the dual role of the choir (Part 1 and Part 2).

"The pain that accompanies the joy, borne of Christ's suffering, becomes our own pain, the people's pain, the choir's pain, as the choir plays the part of Christ's followers and indeed all humankind." 

"The choir itself has two roles -- to sing to God as Christians, and to reenact the passion as a mob, as Jews." 

"I find the structure of the work fascinating in the way it moves back and forth between different characters, arias, recitative and the chimerical choir."

The choir of this oratorio sings three kinds of music:

1. Chorales sung from the point of view of Christ's followers today; these chorales open and close the work, are not taken from the Gospel according to John but from Bach's contemporaries, to include from the works of Barthold Heinrich Brockes, an early Enlightenment (!) poet. Example:

2. Interjections as part of the drama of Christ's betrayal and execution, with the choir in the role of the Jewish people of Jerusalem. This is known as a turba. The choir's singing here is never longer than a few lines, and comprise the piece's highest dramatic tension. Indeed, without them the entire work would lose a great deal of its cruelty, its force, its passion. Example:

3. Rarely, the choir partakes in an aria sung by a soloist. The only instance of this in the Johannespassion is the bass aria "Mein teurer Heiland, laß dich fragen". The question that the soloist is asking: Savior, am I made free from death by your own death? Has your suffering redeemed the whole of the world? The bass sings that Christ's answer, his affirmation, comes from his silence, his bowed head. The choir's role is to sing with near-whispering gentleness behind the melody: Jesus, you who have died are now immortal. May I never turn to anyone but to you in my hour of need [death], you who expiates my sins.

Have a listen:

An uncircumventable aside: If you are reading the above lyrics -- which in their way form the central paradox of Christianity, much as just about every aria from this work does -- and can understand them solely as nice-sounding clauses of a contract that you as a non-believer never signed, then I can only ask you to pair the text with the music, listen to them, and to attempt to conceive of their meaning (their truth) to pious Christians. I ask this not because I want you to convert to a faith that I myself don't even follow, but because I want to share the good news that Bach's music is the only link I have in my age and experience to the potential truth of any religion, and specifically to the promise of Christ's love. Neither paintings nor arguments nor good deeds convince me. I adhere to the default atheism of my time, anchored though I am in some sort of antiquated, aesthetecized reverence. It is only when I listen to Bach's music that I 'feel' religious, not simply moved or touched or inspired or spiritual, but religious, a mortal devotee of a sacred faith.

It is fair to ask whether, in the case of the Johannespassion's power over me, this is most directly the result of the choir's role(s) in both 

• portraying the erstwhile enemies of Christ as actors on a stage,
• and returning to the present to affirm in song their adherence to him as modern Christians. 

In mediating between the past and the present, in giving us such a vividly unified representation of our human ugliness towards the beautiful (the mob, mocking a suffering man) and of our capacity for loving devotion, the choir embodies the promise of our reconciliation with God through prayers to Christ for his intercession. If the choir itself has a Manichaean identity, its message is wholly optimalist: our human failures, as long as we emulate Christ, will be redeemed, and our suffering will be replaced by our admission into paradise. Bach was a composer whose choirs sing these failures mournfully, sing the emulation lovingly, the redemption reverently, sing of Christ's suffering instead of our own, and sing of paradise with all of the joy that music can muster.