(oratorio, 1727)
William F. Buckley once remarked that the music of Bach was perhaps the greatest single evidence of the existence of God. Surely the sustained magnificence of Bach’s artistry does indeed seem nothing short of miraculous. The robust piety of his music, though, is never mere religious artifice. It is a reflection of Bach’s own personal commitment of faith. Perhaps the high-water mark of this artistry is his St. Matthew’s Passion.
Like so much of Bach’s work, St. Matthew’s Passion was written to be performed at the church for which he regularly contributed new compositions to use in the weekly worship services. It was not written as a piece for the concert hall but for the Sunday service. Over the course of his life, he wrote music for every season of the church year but it was in this composition for Holy Week that he particularly outdid himself. St. Matthew’s Passion was first performed on Good Friday, 1727, though it underwent numerous revisions as it was performed again and again throughout Bach’s life. What an experience it must have been for members of his congregation to spend a portion of Good Friday in such a manner, meditating on this majestic combination of words and music. And its power to move the listener to the deepest spiritual contemplation remains just as great today.
Marshaling all his compositional skills, and putting them at the service of not one but two orchestras and choirs, Bach was able to fashion a piece of great musical complexity and spiritual depth, one that went far beyond the standard Baroque passion settings with which the audiences of his day would have been familiar. The text was created by Christian Henrici, who wrote under the pen name Picander. Like Bach, he lived in Leipzig, and there is little doubt that the two men collaborated on this sublime combination of the actual text from the latter chapters of Matthew’s Gospel, already extant hymns and chorales (which would have been familiar to their audience), and original poetry of great beauty and emotional weight.
The passion opens with a chorus that sets the tone for the entire piece: “Come you daughters, share my mourning.” What follows is a sustained meditation on the atoning death of Christ. Unlike the more celebratory Messiah by Handel, the concentration of Bach’s work is upon Christ’s agony, suffering, abandonment, and death. In fact, the resurrection is only mentioned in passing. The emphasis is upon the pain and anguish that Jesus took upon himself in our stead: scourged, mocked, beaten, spat upon, tortured, then crucified. Hence there is a stately, elevated, brooding sadness that marks both the words and the music, and the listener is left to contemplate the great exchange—the innocent Lamb of God dying for the guilty.
To listen intently to this masterpiece is to be reminded of the immensity of what Jesus Christ accomplished as “the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world” (John 1:29). Bach does not allow us to simply contemplate this sacrifice as a theological abstraction. Instead, we feel it. The deeply emotive music lets us experience again the redemptive sacrifice that arises from the boundless depths of God’s grace and mercy. Bach reminds us that our salvation comes at a very high price. Therefore, our proper response is not only wonder at what God has wrought on the cross but also heartfelt introspection and repentance.
Johann Sebastian Bach was born in Germany in 1685 to a family with a rich musical heritage. In the span of seven generations, it produced fifty-three prominent musicians. But what this particular Bach was able to accomplish outstripped anyone else in his lineage. Schooled in Eisenach, the same school Martin Luther had attended, he received his earliest musical education from his father. But by age ten he had lost both parents, and the young orphan went to live with his elder brother Johann Christoph. It was not long before his immense gifts began to manifest themselves.
He was first a singer and then a violinist in the chamber orchestra of Prince Johann Ernst of Weimar. Then he became the organist in Arnstadt. Always hungering to learn more, in October 1705 he undertook a two-hundred-mile journey on foot to study with renowned organist Dietrich Buxtehude. He had received permission to be gone for four weeks, but was so enthralled that he stayed for four months. On returning to his post in Arnstadt he was severely criticized for his breach of contract in being gone so long and also for employing the new methods and the stylistic flourishes he had picked up from Buxtehude. Never one to abide criticism very well, Bach soon moved—with his new bride—to Mulhausen to take another position. This was the first of several short appointments before he finally settled in Leipzig, where he remained for the rest of his life.
Bach never saw his work merely as some sort of musical diversion for the worship service. He saw his cantatas as an important element in the service, a means of preaching the Word, glorifying God, and pointing the listener toward a deeper understanding of the message of the gospel. As Leonard Bernstein has noted, “For Bach, all music is religious; writing it was an act of worship. Every note was dedicated to God and to nothing else.”1 He frequently annotated his manuscripts with the acronym JJ (Jesu Juva, “help me, Jesus”) or SDG (Soli Deo Gloria, “to God alone, the glory”).
In reality, Bach was nothing less than a theologian who worked with a keyboard. Always a voracious student of the Scriptures, he marked up his Bible with underlined passages, corrections of errors in the translation, and notations in the margins. Near 2 Corinthians 5:13–14 he penned, “In devotional music, God with his grace is always present.” His extensive library was equally divided between works on music and theological works. The fruit of his study was to invest his cantatas with a rich theological understanding.
Much of Bach’s music was quite literally an exegesis of Scripture. He used music to make biblical texts come alive, to open them to his listeners by the use of music that captured the interior drama of the passage around which he composed. He wanted to reveal the feelings and emotions of the text so that his hearers might experience the truths of the gospel for themselves. Such was his effectiveness that Swedish theologian Nathan Soderblom once referred to Bach’s music as “the fifth gospel.”
Bach was also a master at word painting, or finding musical equivalents for verbal and written ideas. He could conjure such effects as an undulating melody to represent the sea, or on a more serious note could construct the music around the text in such a way as to maximize its impact. In St. Matthew’s Passion, for example, he used a distinctive accompaniment from the string section, with long, sustained notes, to create a sort of aural “halo” around the words of Christ (sort of like a musical “red letter edition”). Then, as Jesus is dying, this accompaniment drops out altogether for the first time as the phrase, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” is sung. It is a moment of incredibly powerful emotional effect.
Sometimes Bach’s methods were more playful. He was fascinated with numbers and hid numerical clues throughout his works. In one work there are exactly ten repetitions of the phrase “These are the ten holy commandments,” and in other places he uses patterns of five to represent the five wounds Jesus suffered on the cross, patterns of three for the Trinity, or four for the four Gospels.
Ultimately, Bach wanted his music to illuminate the Word of God, to throw light upon it. After all, as he once said, “The aim and final reason for all music should be none else but the glory of God and refreshing the soul.”2 Bach was a confessional Lutheran in his theology, staunchly orthodox and traditional in his beliefs, but he was also deeply influenced by the actively devotional faith of the Pietists and the idea of spiritual oneness with God that was taught by the German mystics. Bach was also open-minded enough in his theology to structure one of his greatest works (Mass in B Minor) largely around the Catholic mass.
When he began to lose his eyesight he sought the help of a quack doctor whose surgery brought about blindness. (In fact, this same surgeon worked on Handel, with the same result.) Bach’s very last work was dictated from his deathbed, a chorale entitled, “Before Thy Throne I Come.” Having finished it, he left this earth in search of that throne and his everlasting rest.
In 1977 when scientists were planning to send a probe with artifacts from earth into space in the hope that they might be discovered by unknown civilizations in other galaxies, there was much debate over what to send that would best represent the human race. Lewis Thomas was confident in his suggestion that it be “the complete works of J. S. Bach.” Then he hesitated. “But that would be boasting.”3