The paradox is that Handel, the worldly spirit, is most characteristically represented in today’s repertory by his vocal music on sacred subjects, while Bach, the quintessential religious spirit, is largely represented by secular instrumental works. And yet it may be less a paradox than a testimonial to the thoroughly secular, theatrical atmosphere in which all music is now patronized and consumed, and the essentially secular, theatrical spirit that informs even Handel’s ostensibly sacred work—a spirit that modern audiences instinctively recognize and easily respond to. The modern audience, in short, recognizes and claims its own from both composers; and in this the modern audience behaves the way audiences have always behaved. Nor is it in any way surprising: Handel, not Bach, was present at the creation of “the modern audience.” Indeed, he helped create it.
Not that Handel’s secular instrumental output was by any means inconsiderable or obscure. We have already had a look at one of his two dozen concerti grossi, works that (simply because they were published) were far better known in their day than the Brandenburg Concertos or any other instrumental ensemble works of Bach (see Exx. 5-13 and 14). Handel also composed a number of solo organ concertos for himself to perform between the acts of his oratorios. In their origins they were thus theatrical works, but two books of them were published (one of them as a posthumous tribute) and became every organist’s property.
In addition, more than three dozen solo and trio sonatas by Handel survive, of which many also circulated widely in print during his lifetime. Except for a single trio sonata and some instrumental canons in a miscellaneous collection called The Musical Offering, and a single church cantata published by a municipal council to commemorate a civic occasion, the only works of Bach that were published during his lifetime were the keyboard compositions that he published himself.
Handel’s largest instrumental compositions, like Bach’s, were orchestral suites. And as befits the history of the genre, Handel’s orchestral suites were among the relatively few compositions of his that arose directly out of his employment by the Hanoverian kings of England. One was a kind of super-suite, an enormous medley of instrumental pieces of every description (but mostly dances) composed for performance on a barge that kept abreast of George I’s pleasure boat during a royal outing on the River Thames on 17 July 1717, later published as “Handel’s Celebrated Water Musick.” A whole day’s musical entertainment, it furnished enough pieces for three separate sequences (suites in F, D, and G) as arranged by the publisher.
Handel’s other big orchestral suite was composed for an enormous wind band (twenty-four oboes, twelve bassoons, nine trumpets, nine horns, and timpani, to which strings parts were added on publication) and performed on 27 April 1749 as part of the festivities surrounding the Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle that ended the War of the Austrian Succession. This was a great diplomatic triumph for George II, who had personally led his troops in battle (the last time any British monarch has done so) and won important trade and colonial concessions from the other European powers, including a monopoly on the shipping of slaves from Africa to Spanish America. Handel’s suite was published as “The Musick for the Royal Fireworks.” In arrangements for modern symphony orchestra by the English conductor Sir Hamilton Harty, these suites of Handel’s were for a while staples of the concert repertoire—especially in England, where they served as a reminder of imperial glory. They are the only Handelian instrumental compositions ever to have gained modern repertory status comparable to that enjoyed by the “Brandenburgs,” and they lost it when England lost her empire. Handel’s instrumental music was always a sideline, and so it remains for audiences today, even though modern audiences value instrumental music far more highly than did the audience of Handel’s time and are much more likely to regard instrumental works as a composer’s primary legacy.
For Handel was first and last a composer for the theater, the one domain where Bach never set foot. His main medium was the opera seria, the form surveyed in chapter 4. There we had a close look at the genre as such. Here we can concentrate on Handel’s particular style as a theatrical composer. For our present purpose it will suffice to boil his entire quarter-century’s production for the King’s Theatre on the London Strand down to a single consummate example. Such an example will of course have to be a virtuoso aria giving vent to an overpowering emotional seizure; for an opera seria role, as we know, was the sum of the attitudes struck in reaction to the complicated but conventionalized unfolding of a moralizing plot in a language that was often neither the composer’s nor the audience’s. The great opera composer was the one who could give the cut-and-dried, obligatory attitudes a freshly vivid embodiment, and who could convey it essentially without words.
Nothing could serve our purpose better than an aria from Rodelinda, one of Handel’s most successful operas, first performed at the King’s Theatre on 13 February 1725, right in the brilliant middle of Handel’s operatic career, and revived many times thereafter. The libretto was an adaptation—by one of Handel’s chief literary collaborators, Nicola Francesco Haym, an expatriate Italian Jew who also acted as theater manager, stage director, and continuo cellist—of an earlier opera libretto, produced in Florence, that was based on a play by the French tragedian Pierre Corneille that was based on an episode from a seventh-century chronicle of Lombard (north Italian) history.
The title character is the wife of Bertrarido, the heir to the throne of Lombardy, who has been displaced and forced into exile by a usurper, Grimoaldo, the Duke of Benevento, who has succeeded in his plan with the treasonable aid of Garibaldo, the Duke of Turin, a former ally of Bertrarido. The moral and emotional center of the plot is the steadfastness of Rodelinda’s love for Bertrarido and his for her, enabling both their reunion and Bertrarido’s restoration to his rightful throne.
The aria on which we focus, Bertrarido’s “Vivi, tiranno!” (Ex. 7-1), was actually added to the opera for its first revival, in December 1725, so as to give the noble Bertrarido a more heroic aspect and also to favor the famous alto castrato Senesino with a proper vehicle for displaying his transcendent vocal artistry. It is sung when Bertrarido, having killed Garibaldo off stage, returns to confront Grimoaldo. Instead of killing him outright, he hurls his sword to the ground at his rival’s feet and sings, contemptuously:
Like a good seria character, Grimoaldo capitulates to this demonstration of austere magnanimity and gives up his claim to the throne.
“Vivi, tiranno!” is a perfect—and perfectly thrilling—specimen of aria as “concerto for voice and orchestra.” Its “A” section is structured exactly like a Vivaldi concerto, with a three-part ritornello that frames the whole, and returns piecemeal in between the vocal episodes (Ex. 7-1a). It symbolizes the aria’s affect—stormy indignation, thundering wrath (both as felt by Bertrarido and as summoned forth from Grimoaldo)—with string tremolos that can be related either to the old stile concitato or to the onomatopoetical writing we encountered in the storm episode from Vivaldi’s “Spring” concerto. As we know from chapter 4, such devices were standard procedure in the “simile arias” that formed the opera seria composer’s stock-in-trade. The tremolo clearly retains its meaning in Handel’s aria, even though there is no explicit simile (that is, no direct textual reference to the storm to which the characters’ emotions are being musically compared).
As in the most schematic concerto movement, the vocal part in “Vivi, tiranno!” never quotes or appropriates the music of the ritornello and never carries material over from episode to episode. It is a continually evolving part cast in relief against the dogged constancy of the ritornello. Indeed the opposition of solo and tutti is dramatized beyond anything we have seen in an instrumental concerto. It is made exceptionally tense—even hostile—by having the instruments continually insinuate the ritornello within the episodes whenever the singer pauses for breath, only to be silenced peremptorily on the voice’s return. This, too, is expressive of an unusually tense and hostile affect.
The most spectacular representation of rage, however, is reserved to the singer and takes the most appropriate form such a thing can take within a dramatic context. The progressively fierce and florid coloratura in this aria is calculated to coincide on every occurrence with the word furor—“rage” itself. The singer literally “pours it out” as the text enjoins, setting Grimoaldo a compelling and exhausting example. The most furious moment of all comes when one of the singer’s rage-symbolizing roulades is cast in counterpoint against the stormy tremolandos in the accompanying parts (Ex. 7-1b).
The aria, in short, is a triumph of dramatically structured music—or of musically structured drama, if that seems a better way of putting it. The “purely musical” or structural aspects of the piece and the representational or expressive ones are utterly enmeshed. There is no way of describing the one without invoking the other. An intricately worked out and monumentally unified, thus potentially self-sufficient, musical structure serves to enhance and elevate the playing-out of a climactic dramatic scene. And the structure, in its lapidary wholeness, with contrasting midsection and suitably embellished reiteration, enables the singer-actor to reach a pitch that is both literally and figuratively beyond the range of spoken delivery.
Comparing Handel’s aria with the opera seria arias examined in chapter 4—mostly by actual Italian composers writing for actual Italian audiences—points up the somewhat paradoxical relationship of this great outsider to the tradition on which he fed. It is Handel who, for many modern historians and the small modern audience that still relishes revivals of opera seria, displays the genre at its best, owing to the balancing and tangling of musical and dramatic values just described. Handel’s work is indeed more craftsmanly and structurally complex than that of his actual Italian contemporaries, who were much concerned with streamlining and simplifying those very aspects of motivic structure and harmony that Handel continued to revel in.
His work, in short, was at once denser (and, to an audience foreign to the language of the play, perhaps more interesting) and stylistically more conservative. In his far more active counterpoint (just compare his bass line to Vinci’s or Broschi’s in chapter 4) he affirms his German organist’s heritage after all, for all his Italian sojourning and acclimatizing. And by making his music more interesting in its own right than that of his Italian contemporaries, he gave performers correspondingly less room to maneuver and dominate the show.
In this way, for all that Handel seems to dominate modern memory of the opera seria, and despite his unquestioned dominance of the local London scene (at least for a while), he was never a truly typical seria composer, and as time went on, his work became outmoded. Unlike the actual Italian product, his operas never traveled well but remained a local and somewhat anomalous English phenomenon, admired by foreign visitors but nevertheless regarded as strange. A crisis was reached when Farinelli—the greatest of the castratos, with whose typical vehicles we are already familiar—refused to sing for Handel and in fact joined a rival company set up in ruinous opposition to him. The 1734 pastiche production of Artaserse sampled in chapter 4 was in fact a deliberate effort, on the part of the rival Opera of the Nobility, to depose Handel from his preeminence and, Grimoaldo-like, usurp his place in the affections of the London opera audience.
Handel’s grip on the London public, or at least its most aristocratic faction, had already been challenged somewhat in the 1720s by a series of easy, tuneful operas by Giovanni Bononcini (1670–1747) imported to London together with their composer, a somewhat older man than Handel but one whose style was more idiomatically Italian and up-to-date. Another bad omen for Handel, the worst in fact, was the huge success in 1728 of The Beggar’s Opera, a so-called “ballad opera” by John Gay, with a libretto in English, spoken dialogue in place of recitative, and a score consisting entirely of popular songs arranged by a German expatriate composer named Johann Pepusch (1667–1752).
This cynical slap in the face of “noble” entertainments like the seria had an unprecedented run of sixty-two performances during its first season (for a Handel opera a run of fifteen performances was considered a great success), and, altogether amazingly, was revived every season for the rest of the eighteenth century and beyond. (It has had hit revivals even in the twentieth century and spawned a huge number of spinoffs and adaptations, including some very famous ones like the Threepenny Opera of Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill.) On every level from its plot (set among thieves and other London lowlifes) to its “moral” (namely, that morals are sheer hypocrisy) to its musical and dramatic allusions (full of swipes at operatic conventions and lofty “Handelian” style), The Beggar’s Opera has been characterized as “frivolously nihilistic.”1 But it also played into a prejudice that was the very opposite of frivolous or nihilistic—namely, a peculiarly English version of the old prejudice (as old, we may recall, as Plato) against “delicious” music as a corrupting force that was inimical to the public welfare. The “soft and effeminate Musick which abounds in the Italian Opera,” wrote the playwright John Dennis (1657–1734), a particularly vociferous London critic, “by soothing the Senses, and making a Man too much in love with himself, makes him too little fond of the Publick; so by emasculating and dissolving the Mind, it shakes the very Foundation of Fortitude, and so is destructive of both Branches of the publick Spirit.”2 In an Essay upon Publick Spirit published in 1711, the year of Handel’s London debut, Dennis even argued that British wives should keep their men away from the opera lest they become “effeminate” (by which he meant homosexual). And he proceeded to attach this issue to one that mattered in Britain as it mattered at that time nowhere else on earth—the issue of patriotism, and its attendant religious bigotry:
Is there not an implicit Contract between all the People of every Nation, to espouse one another’s Interest against all Foreigners whatsoever? But would not any one swear, to observe the Conduct of [opera lovers], they were protected by Italians in their Liberty, their Property, and their Religion against Britons? For why else should they prefer Italian Sound to British Sense, Italian Nonsense to British Reason, the Blockheads of Italy to their own Countrymen, who have Wit; and the Luxury, and Effeminacy of the most profligate Portion of the Globe to British Virtue?
One need hardly add that all of these fears and intolerances intersected on the sexually ambiguous figure of the castrato, the very epitome of Italian license and excess, who added insult to injury by commanding princely fees far beyond the earning power of domestic singers. In the same year that Dennis’s essay appeared, Joseph Addison, the eminent satirist, poked malicious fun at the castrati and their fans through an invented character, “Squire Squeekum, who by his Voice seems (if I may use the Expression) to be ‘cut out’ for an Italian Singer.”3
The Beggar’s Opera gave all of these resentful views a colossal boost. Its success was a presage that the opera seria, even Handel’s, could no longer count on the English audience to take it seriously. And indeed, within a decade of its production, both Handel’s own opera company and the Opera of the Nobility had gone bankrupt. Neither Handel nor the castrati were the losers, though. As Christopher Hogwood, a notable performer of Handel’s music and a leader in the revival of an “authentic” period style of presenting it, has shrewdly observed, if The Beggar’s Opera was a bad omen it was because it “killed not the Italian opera but the chances of serious English opera”4—something that would not emerge until the twentieth century, and then only briefly.
Meanwhile, if Handel was to continue to have a public career in England, it would have to be on a new footing. It would take another kind of lofty entertainment to recapture his old audience. Here is where Handel’s unique genius—as much a genius for the main chance as for music—asserted itself. Whenever opera had encountered obstacles on its Italian home turf—for example, those pesky ecclesiastical strictures against operating theaters during Lent—its creative energies had found an outlet in oratorio, especially in Rome, where Handel had served his apprenticeship. Handel had even composed a Roman oratorio himself (La resurrezione, 1708) and on a trip back to Germany in George I’s retinue he composed a German oratorio on the same Easter subject: Der für die Sünde der Welt gemartete und sterbende Jesus (“Jesus, who suffered and died for the sins of the world”), usually called the Brockes Passion after the name of the librettist.
In fact, Handel had already composed some minor dramatic works on English texts, including Acis and Galatea (1718), a mythological masque, and another masque, Haman and Mordecai on an Old Testament subject, both commissioned by an English patron, the Duke of Chandos, for performance at his estate, called Cannons. Handel had also enjoyed great success with some English psalm settings he had written on commission from the same patron (now called the Chandos Anthems), in which he had drawn on indigenous choral genres for which Purcell had set the most important precedents: anthems and allegorical “odes” to celebrate the feast day of St. Cecilia (music’s patron saint), royal birthdays, and the like.
A pastiche revival of Haman and Mordecai, expanded and refurbished (though not by Handel) and retitled Esther, was performed in 1732 in the explicit guise of “an oratorio or sacred drama” and attracted so much interest that Handel himself conducted a lucrative performance on the stage of the King’s Theatre, where business that year was otherwise slow. The next year Handel wrote a couple of English oratorios himself (Deborah, Athalia). As operatic bankruptcy loomed, these experiences gave Handel an idea that the English public might welcome a new style of vernacular oratorio tailored to its tastes and prejudices. The result was Saul (1739), a musical theater piece of a wholly novel kind that differed in significant ways from all previous oratorio styles. As a genre born directly out of the vicissitudes of the British entertainment market, the Handelian oratorio was a unique product of its time and place.
How was it new? The traditional Italian oratorio was simply an opera seria on a biblical subject, by the early eighteenth century often performed with action, although this was not always allowed. In England, the acting out of a sacred drama was prohibited by episcopal decree, but Saul was still more or less an opera in the sense that its unstaged action proceeded through the same musical structures, its dramatic confrontations being carried out through the customary recitatives and arias, making it easy for the audience to supply in their imagination the implied stage movement (sometimes vivid and violent, as when Saul, enraged, twice throws his spear, although the actual singer of the role makes no move).
The listener’s mind’s eye was helped in other ways as well. The imaginary action was “opened out” into outdoor mass scenes unthinkable in opera, with opulent masque-like choruses representing the “people of Israel.” Among the main advertised attractions, moreover, was an especially lavish orchestra replete with a trombone choir, with evocative carillons, and with virtuoso instrumental solos, as if to compensate for the diminished visual component. All the same, Saul—like Esther and Deborah before it, and Samson, Belshazzar, Judas Maccabeus, Solomon, and Joshua after it—remained centered in its plot on dramatized human relations, the traditional stuff of opera. It was in a sense the most traditionally operatic of all of Handel’s oratorios, since the title character—the melancholy and choleric ruler of Israel, racked by jealousy and superstition—is complex, and the action implies a judgment of his deeds.
The other Old Testament oratorios listed above (excepting only Belshazzar) are all tales of civic heroism and national triumph. Esther, Deborah, Samson, Judah Maccabee, and Joshua were all saviors of their people, the Chosen People. All were heroes through whom the nation, over and over again, proved invincible. (And even Belshazzar, while not directly about Israel’s heroism, depicts the destruction of Israel’s adversary.) Here is where Handel truly showed his mettle in catering to his public, for the English audience—an insular people, an industrious and prosperous people, since the revolutions of the seventeenth century a self-determining people ruled by law, and (as we have seen) a latently chauvinistic people—identified strongly with the Old Testament Israelites and regarded the tales Handel set before them as gratifying allegories of themselves. “What a glorious Spectacle!” wrote one enraptured observer
to see a crowded Audience of the first Quality of a Nation, headed by the Heir apparent of their Sovereign’s Crown [the future George III], sitting enchanted at Sounds, that at the same time express’d in so sublime a manner the Praises of the Deity itself, and did such Honour to the Faculties of human Nature, in first creating those Sounds, if I may so speak; and in the next Place, being able to be so highly delighted with them. Did such a Taste prevail universally in a People, that People might expect on a like Occasion, if such Occasion should ever happen to them, the same Deliverance as those Praises celebrate; and Protestant, free, virtuous, united, Christian England, need little fear, at any time hereafter, the whole Force of slavish, bigotted, united, unchristian Popery, risen up against her, should such a Conjuncture ever hereafter happen.5
As the historian Ruth Smith has observed, the author of this letter “deploys the analogy of Britain with Israel to present the idea of a unified nation as natural, desirable, and, in the face of foreign aggression, essential,” and praises Handel’s music as an impetus that “can not only allude to, but actually create, national harmony and strength.”6 Handel’s oratorios, in short, were the first great monuments in the history of European music to nationalism. That was the true source of their novelty, for nationalism was then a novel force in the world.
The letter just quoted, printed in the London Daily Post in April 1739, referred to the première performance of Israel in Egypt, the next oratorio Handel composed after Saul, which transformed the genre yet further away from opera and made it yet more novel and more specific to its time and place. For Israel in Egypt almost completely abandons the dramatic format—that is, the representation of human conflicts and confrontations through recitatives and arias—in favor of impersonal biblical narration, much of it carried out by the chorus (i.e., the Nation) directly, often split into two antiphonal choirs as in the Venetian choral concerti of old. It is thus the most monumental work of its kind, and in the specific sense implied by the writer of the letter, which relates to vastness and impressiveness, the most sublime.
This specifically Handelian conception of the oratorio as an essentially choral genre—an invisible pageant, it would be fair to say, rather than an invisible drama—completely transformed the very idea of such a piece. So thoroughly did Handel Handelize the oratorio for posterity that it comes now as a surprise to read contemporary descriptions of his work that emphasize its novelty, indeed its failure to conform to prior expectations. One contemporary listener wrote in some perplexity about Handel’s next biblical oratorio after Israel in Egypt—namely Messiah, now the most famous oratorio in the world and the one to which all others are compared—that “although called an Oratorio, yet it is not dramatic but properly a Collection of Hymns or Anthems drawn from the sacred Scriptures.”7 That is precisely what the word “oratorio” has connoted since Handel’s day. Now it is the dramatic oratorio that can seem unusual.
Israel in Egypt, the prototype of the “anthem oratorio,” recounts the story of the Exodus, with a text compiled from scripture by Charles Jennens, a wealthy dilettante who paid Handel for the privilege of collaborating with him, and who had already written the libretto for Saul. This new “libretto” was no original creation but a sort of scriptural anthology that mixed narrative from the Book of Exodus with verses from the Book of Psalms. Its first ten vocal numbers (seven of them choruses) collectively narrate the story of the Ten Plagues of Egypt. In musico-dramatic technique they collectively embody a virtual textbook on the state of the “madrigalistic” art—the art of musical depiction—in the early eighteenth century, an art of which Handel, perhaps even outstripping Vivaldi, was past master.
Even the little recitative that introduces the first chorus contains a telling bit of word painting—the dissonant harmony and vocal leap of a tritone illustrating the “rigor” with which the Israelites were made to serve their Egyptian masters (Ex. 7-2a). The fact that these effects of melody and harmony do not exactly coincide with the word they illustrate does not lessen the pointedness of the illustration: the sudden asperities, incongruous with the rest of the music in the recitative, send the listener’s imagination off in search of their justification, which can only be supplied by the appropriate word.
The first of the plagues—the bloody river—is a choral fugue (Ex. 7-2b), in which we again encounter some time-honored devices: melodic dissonance in the subject (a diminished seventh) to portray loathing, and a passus duriusculus to combine that loathing with the river’s flow as the fugue subject recedes from the foreground to prepare for the answer. The next plague (no. 5, “Their land brought forth frogs”) is set not as a chorus but as an “air”—a truncated aria (very common in Handel’s oratorios) in which the “da capo” is represented by its ritornello alone (Ex. 7-2c). Handel chose to make this number a solo item not only to provide some variety for the listener (and some respite for the choristers) but also because he evidently thought the illustrative idea—leapfrog!—would work better as an instrumental ritornello for two violins than in the voice.
The idea of purely instrumental “imitation of nature” was a Vivaldian idea, as we know from the Four Seasons, but no other composer had ever taken instrumental imitations to such lengths as Handel resorted to in Israel in Egypt—epoch-making lengths, in fact, since the art of “orchestration” as “tone-color composition,” serving expressive or poetic purposes and requiring an extended instrumental “palette,” achieved a new level in Handel’s oratorios, and nowhere more spectacularly than in no. 6, “He spake the word” (Ex. 7-2d). The word here, of course, is the word of God, and so the burnished sound of the trombone choir, associated with regal and spectacular church music since the Gabrielis in Venice at the end of the sixteenth century, was the inevitable choice to echo the choral announcement that God had spoken. Later, the two insects mentioned in the text (flies and locusts) are imitated by string instruments in two sizes. The massed violins are treated especially virtuosically. Demanding of ripienists all a soloist’s skills is another mark of “gourmet” orchestration, marking not only the player but the composer as a virtuoso.
The gathering storm leading to the representation of the “hailstones for rain” in no. 7 (Ex. 7-2e) calls a large assortment of new (woodwind and timpani) colors into play. Here Handel had a precedent in the French court opera, where orchestrally magnificent storm scenes had been a stock-in-trade since Marin Marais’s Alcyone (1706), which spawned a legion of imitators (culminating with a volcanic eruption in Rameau’s Les Indes galantes of 1735) and which, like many court operas, had been published in full score. No. 8, “He sent a thick darkness” (Ex. 7-2f), introduces a new, unheard-of color—high bassoons doubling low violins, but later descending to their normal range and trilling—as well as softly sustained but very dissonant chromatic harmonies to represent the covering gloom. The huge tutti chords slashing on the strong beats in no. 9 (“He smote all the first-born of Egypt”) make almost palpable the grisliest calamity of all (Ex. 7-2g).
Yet no matter how lofty or how grisly the theme, Handel’s representation of the plagues remains an entertainment—an entertainment that an exhaustive description like the one offered here threatens to impair. It has indeed been a tiresome exercise, and apologies are offered to those rightly exasperated by it, for tediously cataloguing the means by which such vivid effects are achieved has the same dampening effect as does the explanation of a joke.
But although the dampening may dull the joke, it may also serve a good purpose if it forces us to realize and confront, through our annoyance, what might be otherwise overlooked or forgotten—that these marvelous and musically epochal illustrations are indeed, for the most part, no more (and no less) than jokes. Like all “madrigalisms,” they depend on mechanisms of humor: puns (plays on similarities of sound), wit (apt conjunctions of incongruous things), caricature (deliberate exaggerations that underscore a similarity). And, as Handel knew very well, audiences react to such effects, despite the awfulness of the theme, as they do to comedy. We giggle in appreciation when we “get” the representation of the leaping frogs and the buzzing flies, and we guffaw when the latter give way to the thundering locusts.
But what of the smiting of all those Egyptian boys? Do we laugh at that, too? We do—or, at least, so the music directs us—just as we have laughed at crop failures, bloody rivers, “blotches and blains.” The withholding of empathy for the Egyptians is an essential part of the biblical account of the Exodus, and the scorn of the biblical Israelites and their religious descendants for the ancient oppressor is what enables the success of Handel’s strategy. This separation of self and other plays also into the ideology of nationalism; a great deal of English national pride (or any nation’s national pride) depends on a perception of separateness from other nations, and superiority to them. Of all of Handel’s oratorios, it is perhaps easiest to see in Israel in Egypt how the manifest religious content coexists with, enables, and is ultimately subordinate to the nationalistic subtext. Hence the essential secularism of its impulse and its enduring appeal.
This applies even to Messiah (1741), the one Handel oratorio that was performed within the composer’s lifetime in consecrated buildings and could count, therefore, as a religious observance. The work, or excerpts from it, is still regularly performed in churches, Anglican and otherwise, especially at Christmas time (although its original performances took place at the more traditional Eastertide). But it is much more often performed in concert halls by secular choral societies. That is appropriate, since, like the rest of Handel’s oratorios, Messiah’s true affinities remain thoroughly theatrical.
What distinguished it from its fellows and gave rise to its occasional special treatment was its subject matter. Practically alone among Handel’s English oratorios, it has a New Testament subject and a text, again compiled by Jennens, drawn largely from the Gospels. That subject, the life of Christ the Redeemer with emphasis first on the portents surrounding his birth, and then on his death and resurrection, brings the work into line with the most traditional ecclesiastical oratorios, and with the even older tradition of narrative Passion settings.
Messiah may have been commissioned by the Lord Lieutenant of Dublin to raise money for the city’s charities. Handel wrote the music with his usual legendary speed—in twenty-four days, from 22 August to 14 September 1741—and finished the orchestral score on 29 October, setting out for Dublin two days later. The first performance took place at the New Music Hall on Fishamble Street on 13 April 1742.
The première performance of Messiah is an especially important date in the history of European music because Handel’s atypical New Testament oratorio is the very oldest work in the literature to have remained steadily in active repertory ever since its first performance. Unlike any other music so far mentioned or examined in this book, with the single equivocal exception of Gregorian chant—and even the chant lost its canonical status at the Second Vatican Council in 1963—Messiah has never had to be rediscovered or “revived,” except in the sense the word is used in the theater, whereby any performance by a cast other than the original one is termed a revival. The continuous performing tradition of European art (or literate) music—which we can now (and for this very reason) fairly call “classical music”—can therefore be said to begin with Messiah, the first “classic” in our contemporary repertoire, and Handel is therefore the earliest of all “perpetually-in-repertory” (“classical”) composers.
Handel himself conducted yearly London “revivals” of Messiah, beginning the next year at the Theatre Royal, Covent Garden. The work became a perennial and indispensable favorite with the London public when Handel began giving charity performances of it in the chapel of the London Foundling Hospital, starting in 1750. These were the “consecrated” performances that led to the work’s being regarded as an actual “sacred oratorio,” although that was not the composer’s original intention. By the time of Handel’s death on 14 April 1759 (nine days after conducting his last Foundling Hospital Messiah), the British institution of choral festivals had been established, and these great national singing orgies (particularly the Three Choirs Festival, which has continued into our own day) have maintained Messiah as a unique national institution, vouchsafing the unprecedented continuity of its performance tradition (although the style of its performances has continued to evolve over the years, in accord with changing tastes—another sign of a “classic”).
By the end of the eighteenth century Messiah was accepted and revered as true cathedral music. It is all the more illuminating, therefore, to emphasize and demonstrate its secular and theatrical side. This aspect of the work can be vividly illustrated both from its fascinatingly enigmatic creative history and from its performance history.
In order to compose at the kind of speed required by the conditions under which they worked, seventeenth- and eighteenth-century composers frequently resorted to what have come to be called “parody” techniques—that is, to the reuse or recycling of older compositions in newer ones. Every church and theater composer indulged in the practice. There was really no choice. The only question involved the nature of the sources plundered and the specific means or methods employed. Was it only a process of “cannibalization”—eating one’s own young (adapting one’s own works)—or did it involve what would now be regarded as plagiarism? And if the latter, did the practice carry the ethical stigma now attached to plagiarism—or, for that matter, any stigma at all?
The question comes up with particular inevitability in connection with Handel, since he seems to have been the champion of all parodists, adapting both his own works and those of other composers in unprecedented numbers and with unprecedented exactness. Indeed, ever since the appearance in 1906 of a book (by one Sedley Taylor) entitled The Indebtedness of Handel to Works by Other Composers, the matter has been a cause for inescapable concern on the part of the composer’s admirers, and a whole literature on the subject has sprouted up—two literatures, in fact: one in prosecution of the case, the other in Handel’s defense.
The prosecutors have built an astonishing record. Several of Handel’s works consist largely—in extreme cases, almost entirely—of systematic “borrowings,” as they are euphemistically called. Israel in Egypt is among them. Of its twenty-eight choruses, eleven were based on pieces by other composers, some of them practically gobbled up whole. Three of the plagues choruses—including “He Spake the Word” and “He gave them hailstones,” both singled out for their epoch-making orchestration—were based on a single cantata (or more precisely a serenata, music for an outdoor evening entertainment) by Alessandro Stradella (1639–82), a Roman composer whose music Handel encountered during his prentice years. Compare, for example, Ex. 7-3 with Ex. 7-2d.
Other famous cases detailed by Taylor include a setting of John Dryden’s classic Ode for St. Cecilia’s Day, performed in 1739, the same year as Israel in Egypt, based practically throughout on themes and passages appropriated from a then brand-new book of harpsichord suites (Componimenti musicali) by the Viennese organist Gottlieb Muffat. More recently it has been discovered that no fewer than seven major works composed between 1733 and 1738 draw extensively on the scores of three old operas by Alessandro Scarlatti that Handel had borrowed from Jennens. Perhaps Handel’s most brazen appropriation involved the “Grand Concertos” (concerti grossi), op. 6, familiar to us from chapter 5. They were composed in September and October of 1739 and rely heavily for thematic ideas on harpsichord compositions by Domenico Scarlatti, a fellow member of the Class of 1685, which had been published in London the year before.
Noticing how many of Handel’s “borrowings” involved works from the 1730s, and particularly the exceptionally busy years 1737–39, some historians have tried to connect his reliance on the music of other composers with a stroke suffered in the spring of 1737, brought on by overwork, that temporarily paralyzed Handel’s right hand and kept him from his normal labors. Whether as evidence of generally deteriorated health or as a reason for especially hurried work following his enforced idleness, the stroke has been offered as an extenuating circumstance by some who have sought to defend Handel from the charge of plagiarism.
Stronger defenders have impugned the whole issue as anachronistic. To accuse Handel or any contemporary of his of plagiarism, they argue, is to invoke the Romantic notion of “original genius” at a time when “borrowing, particularly of individual ideas, was a common practice to which no one took exception” (as John H. Roberts, one of Handel’s ablest “prosecutors,” has stated the case for the defense).8 Going even further, some of Handel’s defenders have claimed his “borrowing” to have been in its way a good deed. “If he borrowed,” wrote Donald Jay Grout (paraphrasing Handel’s contemporary Johann Mattheson), “he more often than not repaid with interest, clothing the borrowed material with new beauty and preserving it for generations that otherwise would scarcely have known of its existence.”9
The philosopher Peter Kivy, in a general discussion of musical representation, once cited a piquant example of such “improvement”: a bit of neutral harpsichord figuration from one of Muffat’s suites that Handel transformed into an especially witty “madrigalism” by summoning it to illustrate Dryden’s description, in the Ode for St. Cecilia’s Day, of the cosmic elements—earth, air, fire, and water—leaping to attention at Music’s command (Ex. 7-4).10 And surely no one comparing the choruses in Ex. 7-2 with their models in Stradella can fail to notice that everything that makes the Israel in Egypt choruses noteworthy in historical retrospect—the lofty trombone chords, the insect imitations, the storm music—came from Handel, not his victim.
Historical distance affects the case in other ways as well: Handel and his quarries being equally dead, it may no longer be of any particular ethical or even esthetic import to us whether Handel actually thought up the themes for which posterity has given him credit. (Nor could he, or any other composer of his day, have had an inkling of the eventual interest posterity would take in his reworkings.) Indeed, comparing Handel’s dazzling reworkings with their often rather undistinguished originals can even cast some doubt on the importance of inventio (as Handel’s contemporaries called facility in the sheer dreaming up of themes) in the scheme of musical values, and cause us to wonder whether that is where true “originality” resides.
And yet it does considerably affect our view of Handel and his times to know that recent scholarship, and particularly John Roberts’s investigations, have pretty well demolished the foundations of the old “defense.” Roberts has shown that what we call plagiarism was so regarded in Handel’s day as well; that, while widespread, “it frequently drew sharp censure”11; and that Handel was often the target of rebuke. One of his critics, ironically enough, was Johann Mattheson, so often cited in Handel’s defense, who openly and angrily accused Handel of copping a melody from one of his operas. Another was Jennens, of all people, who wrote to a friend (in a letter of 1743 that came to light only in 1973) that he had just received a shipment of music from Italy, and that “Handel has borrow’d a dozen of the Pieces & I dare say I shall catch him stealing from them; as I have formerly, both from Scarlatti & Vinci.”12
We know from chapter 4 that Leonardo Vinci, unlike Alessandro Scarlatti, was a contemporary and a rival of Handel’s. Handel “borrowed” from Vinci as a way of making his style more up-to-date, which is to say more profitable. This begins to sound like a familiar plagiarist’s motive for “borrowing,” and Roberts has discovered a unique case where Handel both borrowed from a Vinci score (Didone abbandonata, first performed in 1726) and “pastiched” it as well—that is, arranged it for performance in London under its original composer’s name. Sure enough, Handel rewrote the passages he had borrowed for his own recent operas so as to obscure his indebtedness to Vinci’s. If the old defense—that borrowing carried no stigma—were correct, there would have been no reason for Handel to cover his tracks. And that may also explain why, of all the borrowings securely imputed to him, Handel altered the ones he made from Domenico Scarlatti the most. It may well have been because, of all the music he borrowed, Scarlatti’s keyboard pieces were most likely to be recognized by the members of his own public.
In the case of Messiah, Handel’s known borrowings were of the “cannibalistic” kind—the kind that even now entails little or no disrepute. Self-borrowings, which do not raise any question of ownership, can be called borrowing without euphemism. They are generally regarded, even in the strictest accounting, as a legitimate way for a busy professional to economize on time and labor. And yet they, too, can be revealing in what they tell us about Handel’s (and his audience’s) sense of what was fitting—in a word, about their taste.
Several of the most famous choruses in Messiah are of an airy, buoyant, affable type that contrasts most curiously with the “sublime” and monumental style of Israel in Egypt. Ornately melismatic, they require a kind of fast and florid, almost athletic singing that is quite unusual in choruses, and they sport an unusually light, transparent contrapuntal texture, in which the full four-voice choral complement is reserved for climaxes and conclusions only. Their virtuosity and their trim shapeliness of form are completely unlike anything one finds in the actual sacred choral music of the day—that is, music meant for performance in church, whether by Handel (who, never having an ecclesiastical patron, wrote very little) or by anyone else.
They are, however, utterly in the spirit of latter-day “madrigalian” genres—genres based on Italian love poetry—such as the chamber cantata pioneered by Carissimi and Alessandro Scarlatti (a genre in which Handel especially excelled during his Italian apprenticeship), and related breeds like the serenata or the duetto per camera.
The last-named (the “chamber duet” as it is sometimes called, rather stiltedly, in English) was simply a cantata for two voices. It became popular enough by A. Scarlatti’s time to be regarded as a separate genre—replete with specialist composers, like Agostino Steffani (1654–1728)—partly because in matters of love, two, as they say, is company. Of all the postmadrigalian genres, the duetto was likeliest to be explicitly pagan and erotic. A typical text for such a piece might address or reproach Eros (Cupid) himself, the fickle god of amorous desire:
These are the words of a duetto by Handel himself, and as a glance at Ex. 7-5a will show, he wove his paired vocal lines into garlands that wrap around one another to illustrate the “netting” to which the text refers (and behind that, of course, the physical writhing for which the textual words are a metaphor). Should it surprise or dismay us to discover that this erotic duet became the basis for not one but two choruses in Messiah? Handel reworked the opening section into “For unto us a Child is born” (no. 12, Ex. 7-5b) and the closing section (not shown) into “All we like sheep have gone astray” (no. 26).
In fashioning the chorus shown in Ex. 7-5b, Handel tossed the duet material as a unit between the high male/female pair (sopranos and tenors) and the low one (altos and basses). Only once, briefly, near the end, does Handel amplify the duet writing into a quartet by doubling both lines at consonant intervals. Elsewhere the choral tutti consists of a chordal outburst (“Wonderful Counsellor!”) that is newly composed for Messiah and caps every section of the chorus with a climax. In “All we like sheep,” we have another case where one of Handel’s happiest descriptive ideas (the wayward lines at “gone astray”) turns out to have been not composed but merely adapted to the words it so aptly illustrates.
The use of such material as the basis for an oratorio on the life of Christ has tended to bemuse those for whom the sacred and the secular are mutually exclusive spheres. One way of excusing the apparent blasphemy has been to declare that the duetti, composed during the summer of 1741, were actually sketches for Messiah, composed that fall, and that therefore the text was merely a matter of convenience—“little more than a jingle, words of no significance whatever, serving merely as a crystallizing agent for music which was later to be adapted to a text that had not even yet been chosen,” according to one squeamish specialist.13 Another writer, the influential nineteenth-century formalist critic Eduard Hanslick, used the apparent incongruity to argue that the expressive content of music was unreal, and that any music could plausibly go with any text!
These circumlocutions are easily refuted, for the esthetic discomfort that gave rise to them was not Handel’s. It is obvious, for one thing, that the main melody of “For unto us a Child is born” was modeled carefully on the Italian text, simply because the very first word of the English text is quite incorrectly set. (Say the first line to yourself and see if you place an accent on “for.”) But then, the texts (and, consequently the music) of the duetti will seem incongruous, something to be explained away, only if we regard Messiah as being church music, which it was not. Despite its embodying the sacredest of themes, it was an entertainment, and its music was designed to amuse a public in search of diversion, however edifying. The musical qualities of the duets, being delightful in themselves, could retain their allure in the new context and adorn the new text—and even, thanks to Handel’s “madrigalistic” genius, appear to illuminate its meaning.
The character of the entertainment Messiah provided—in particular, the absence of any contradiction between the oratorio’s means and aims and those of the secular shows with which it originally competed—is also clarified by its performance history. The aria “But who may abide the day of His coming?” (no. 6) was originally assigned to the bass soloist, and like many oratorio arias, was cast in a direct and simple two-part form that harked back to the earlier style of Alessandro Scarlatti. The Scarlattian resonance is especially marked in this aria (Ex. 7-6a) because of its slowish (larghetto) gigue-like meter and its rocking siciliana rhythms, relieved only by some fairly perfunctory coloratura writing on the word “fire.”
In 1750, Handel replaced the bass aria with a new one for alto that retained the original beginning, but regarded the two halves of the text as embodying a madrigalian antithesis, requiring a wholly contrasting setting for the part that compares God to “a refiner’s fire.” Here the music suddenly tears into a duple-metered section marked Prestissimo, the fastest tempo Handel ever specified, heralded by string tremolos and reaching a fever pitch of vocal virtuosity. A return to the larghetto seems to mark the piece as an operatic da capo aria, but a second prestissimo, even wilder than the first, turns it into something quite unique in both form and impact (Ex. 7-6b).
One way of explaining the replacement is to regard the first version as unsatisfactory and the alteration as an implicit critique, motivated by sheer artistic idealism. In this variant, Handel, on mature reflection, decided that the aria demanded the change of range and character, and then went looking for the proper singer to perform it. If that is what happened, it was a unique occurrence in the career of a theatrical professional who always had to know exactly for whom he was writing in order to maximize his, and his singers’, potential effect.
In the case of “But who may abide,” he knew, and we know, for whom the new aria was intended: the alto castrato Gaetano Guadagni (1729–92), one of the great singers of the eighteenth century, who was then near the beginning of his career, and who had just come to England with a touring troupe of comic singers. Guadagni’s virtuosity, his histrionic powers, and his ability to improvise dazzling cadenzas had taken London by storm. Handel rushed to capitalize on his drawing power, transferring to him all the alto arias in Samson (his latest oratorio) and the perennial Messiah, and specially composing for Guadagni, in the form of the revised “But who may abide,” what his oratorios otherwise lacked: a true virtuoso showpiece for a castrato singer. “But who may abide” was the obvious candidate for this operation, since its “fire” motif gave Handel the opportunity to revert to his old operatic self and compose a simile aria in the old “rage” or “vengeance” mode typified by “Vivi, tiranno!” (Ex. 7-1).
It has been the great showstopper in Messiah ever since. And it all at once erased the distinction between Italianate sissification and manly British dignity that the institution of the English oratorio was supposed to bolster. For here a symbol of “Italian-Continental degradation,”14 as the cultural historian Richard Leppert puts it (or what Lord Chesterfield, in his famous “Letters to His Son,” would call “that foul sink of illiberal vices and manners”15), was holding forth in the very midst of what had even by then become an official emblem of proud British piety.
Handel must have loved the moment. He was getting his own back in many ways. By hiring the latest divine “ragazzo” or Italian boy, he was getting his own back against Farinelli, who had so disastrously snubbed him. By scoring such a hit with his new aria di bravura he was vindicating the exotic entertainments he had been forced so long ago to give up. And by making the British public love the infusion of Italian manners into the quintessential British spectacle (for the original “Who May Abide” was never revived, although the British have often rather incongruously tried to give the florid alto version back to the cumbrous bass), he may have been taking a sweetly secret personal revenge on the stolid tastemakers who had forced him to deny his predilections in more ways than one—for as many scholars now agree, Handel, a lifelong bachelor, was probably what we would now call a closeted gay man.
But what chiefly mattered was the success. Again the old theatrical entrepreneur had seized the main chance. His protean nature, his uncanny ability continually to remake himself and his works in response to the conditions and the opportunities that confronted him—that was Handel’s great distinguishing trait. It marks him as perhaps the first modern composer: the prototype of the consumer-conscious artist, a great freelancer in the age of patronage, who managed to succeed—where, two generations later, Mozart would still fail—in living off his pen, and living well.
Turning back now to Bach, and to his very different world, we are ready to assess the music he and his coreligionists unanimously regarded as his major contribution. That music is his vocal music, composed to a large extent in forms familiar to us from our acquaintance with Handel’s operas and oratorios, but serving an entirely different audience and an entirely different purpose. With only the most negligible exceptions (birthday odes and the like) chiefly arising out of his Collegium Musicum activities or his nominal role as civic music director, Bach’s vocal music is actual church music.
We have seen in the previous chapters how even in his eminently enjoyable instrumental secular music, and in his sometimes monumentally thrilling keyboard music, Bach managed to insinuate an attitude of religious contempt for the world, the polar antithesis to Handel’s posture of joyous acceptance and enterprising accommodation. In his overtly religious vocal music we shall of course encounter that attitude in a far more explicit guise, even though it was often communicated through the outward forms of secular entertainment.
By the time of Bach’s Leipzig tenure even the music of the Lutheran church had made an accommodation with the music of the popular theater, and this new style of theatricalized music became Bach’s medium. Even though he never wrote an opera and maintained a lifelong disdain of what he called “the pretty little Dresden tunes” (Dresden being the nearest city with an opera theater, which Bach occasionally visited), Bach became a master of operatic forms and devices. But he managed—utterly, profoundly, hair-raisingly—to subvert them.
The forms of opera came to Lutheran music through the work of Bach’s older contemporary Erdmann Neumeister (1671–1756), a German poet and theologian, who revolutionized the form and style of Lutheran sacred texts for music. Traditionally, Lutheran church music, even at its most elaborate, had been based on chorales. By the 1680s a Lutheran “oratorio” style had been developed, in which chorales alternated with biblical verses and—the new ingredient—with little poems that reflected emotionally on the verses the way arias reflected on the action in an opera seria. This style was used especially for Passion music at Eastertime. Bach would write Passion cycles of this kind as well, more elaborate ones that reflected some of Neumeister’s innovations. In his early years (up to his stint at Weimar), Bach also wrote shorter sacred works in the traditional style, closely based on chorales and biblical texts.
Around the turn of the century, Neumeister began publishing little oratorio texts in a new style, for which he borrowed the name of the Italian genre that had inspired him. Consisting entirely of vividly picturesque, “madrigalesque” verses, and explicitly divided into recitatives and arias, they were dubbed “cantatas” by their author, and they provided the prototype for hundreds of church compositions by Bach (who, however, continued to designate such pieces with mixed voices and instruments as “concertos,” retaining the term in use since the time of Schütz and the latter’s teacher, Gabrieli).
Neumeister’s cantata texts were published in a series of comprehensive cycles covering the Sundays and feasts of the whole church calendar, and they were expressly meant for setting by Lutheran cantors like Bach, whose job it was to compose yearly cycles of concerted vocal works according to the same liturgical schedule. Bach wrote as many as five cantata cycles during the earlier part of his stay at Leipzig, of which almost three survive complete. This remainder is still an impressive corpus numbering around 200 cantatas (a figure that includes the surviving vocal concertos from Bach’s earlier church postings). Only a handful of Bach’s surviving cantatas were composed to actual Neumeister texts, but the vast majority of them adhere to Neumeister’s format, mixing operalike recitatives and da capo arias with the chorale verses. Bach at Leipzig became, willy-nilly, a sort of opera composer.
But cantatas were reflective, not dramatic works. The singers of the arias were not characters but disembodied personas who “voiced” the idealized thoughts of the congregation in response to the occasion that had brought them together. Indeed, the Lutheran cantata could be viewed as a sort of musical sermon, and its placement in the service confirms this analogy.
The numbering system used for Bach’s cantatas has nothing to do with their order of composition. It was merely the order in which the cantatas were published for the first time, by the German Bach Society (Bach-Gesellschaft), in an edition that was begun in 1850, the centennial of Bach’s death. (The numbering was later taken over in a thematic catalogue called the Bach-Werke-Verzeichnis, published in the bicentennial year, 1950, and is now called the “BWV” listing.) Dating the Bach cantatas, as a matter of fact, has been one of the knottiest problems in musicology.
In dating a body of compositions like the Bach cantatas, one starts with those for which the date is fortuitously known thanks to the lucky survival of “external” evidence. One such is the Cantata BWV 61, on whose autograph title page Bach happened to jot down the year, 1714, which puts it near the middle of his Weimar period.
Cantata No. 61 also happens to be one of Bach’s few settings of an actual text by Neumeister, and it was probably the earliest of them. For all these reasons, it can serve us here as an model of the new “cantata” style, to set beside an older “chorale concerto.” It bears the title Nun komm, der Heiden Heiland—one of the most venerable Lutheran chorales (Ex. 7-7b), adapted by the Reformer himself from the Gregorian Advent hymn Veni, redemptor gentium (“Come, Redeemer of the Heathen”) (Ex. 7-7a). The cantata was composed for the first Sunday of Advent, the opening day of the liturgical calendar (in 1714 it fell on 2 December), and was therefore based on the opening text in one of Neumeister’s cycles, perhaps indicating that Bach was planning to set Neumeister’s whole book to music, as several of his contemporaries, including Telemann, did.
For its chorale-concerto counterpart, Cantata BWV 4, one of Bach’s earliest surviving cantatas but also one of the best known, would make an appropriate choice. First performed at Mühlhausen—possibly on Easter Sunday (24 April) 1707 as part of Bach’s application for the organist’s post there—it consists of a set of variations on another venerable chorale, Christ lag in Todesbanden (“Christ lay enchained by death”), which Luther had adapted from the Gregorian Easter sequence Victimae paschali laudes.
The text of Cantata no. 4 is exactly that of the chorale, its seven sections corresponding to the seven verses of the hymn, with a diminutive sinfonia introducing the first verse. That first verse setting is almost as long as the rest of the cantata put together. The sinfonia (Ex. 7-8a), which serves a kind of “preluding” function, is cleverly constructed out of materials from the chorale melody. The first line of the tune is quoted by the first violin in mm. 5–7; the second line, minus its cadential notes, is played by the second violin in mm. 8–10; the expected cadence is finally made by the first violins at the end. The first four measures are built on a neighbor-note motif derived from the melody’s incipit (first in the continuo, then in the first violins). The obsessive repetitions, a seeming stutter before the first line of the tune is allowed to progress, effectively suggest constraint—“death’s bondage.”
The elaborate first chorus is an old-fashioned cantus-firmus composition in “motet style,” in which the successive lines of the unadorned chorale tune in the soprano are pitted against points of imitation (some of them “Vorimitationen,” pre-echoes of the next line) in the accompanying voices. Although adapted here to a more modern harmonic idiom, and further complicated by the intensely motivic instrumental figuration (often drawn from the neighbor-note incipit), the procedure dates back in its essentials to the sixteenth century. By 1707 such a piece would have been considered entirely passé (or at best an exercise in stile antico) in any repertory but the Lutheran. For the final Hallelujah!, Bach livens things up by doubling the tempo and shifting over to an integrated motet style in which the soprano part moves at the same healthy speed as the rest of the choir. Still, the whole piece, like the church whose worship it adorned, fairly proclaims its allegiance to old ways.
And so does verse 2 (Ex. 7-8b), in which a somewhat “figural” version of the chorale melody in the soprano is shadowed by a somewhat freer alto counterpart, while the two sung parts are set over a ground bass the likes of which we have not seen, so to speak, since the middle of the seventeenth century. The style of verse 3, with its neatly layered counterpoint, is like that of an organ chorale prelude: the tenor sings the cantus firmus in the “left hand,” while the massed violins play something like a ritornello in the “right hand,” and the frequently cadencing continuo supplies the “pedal.” Verse 4 is perhaps the most old-fashioned setting of all. It is another cantus-firmus setting (tune in the alto) against motetlike imitations, with a very lengthy Vorimitation at the beginning that takes in two lines of the chorale. The continuo is of the basso seguente variety, following (in somewhat simplified form) the lowest sung voice whichever it may be, never asserting an independent melodic function of its own. This usage corresponds to the very earliest venetian continuo parts, circa 1600. Like the earliest Venetian “ecclesiastical concertos,” this verse could be sung a cappella without significant textural or harmonic loss. It is, in short, a bona fide example of stile antico.
By contrast, verse 5 (Ex. 7-8c), with its initial reference to the ancient passus duriusculus (chromatic descent) in the bass, shows how the chorale may be recast as an operatic lament, for which purpose Bach adopts a somewhat (though only somewhat) more modern stance. For the first time Bach relinquishes the neutral “common time” signature and employs a triple meter that has ineluctable dance associations. With its antiphonal exchanges between the singer and the massed strings (in an archaic five parts), this setting sounds like a parody of a passacaglia-style Venetian opera aria, vintage 1640, or (more likely) of an earlier German ecclesiastical parody of such a piece, say by a disciple of Schütz.
When, toward the end (Ex. 7-8d), the textual imagery becomes really morbid (blood, death, murderer, etc.), Bach seems literally to torture the vocal part, forcing it unexpectedly to leap downward a twelfth, to a grotesquely sustained low E on “death,” and leap up almost two octaves to an equally unexpected, even lengthier high D on “murderer,” while the violins suddenly break into a rash of unprecedented sixteenth notes. Comparing this tormented imagery with the jolly imagery we encountered in Handel’s Israel in Egypt (albeit equally grisly and violent, at times, in its subject matter), we may perhaps begin to note a widening gulf between the two masters of the “High Baroque.” It is an important point to ponder, and we will return to it.
In verse 6, Bach expands the scope of his imagery to incorporate, possibly for the first time in his music, the characteristic regal rhythms of the French overture as a way of reflecting the meaning of So feiern wir (“So mark we now the occasion”), which connotes an air of great solemnity and ceremony (Ex. 7-8e). Later, when the singers break into “rejoicing” triplets, the dotted continuo rhythms are probably meant to align with them. (There was no way of indicating an uneven rhythm within a triplet division in Bach’s notational practice.)
The final verse (composed later for Leipzig, probably replacing a da capo repeat of the opening chorus) is set as a Cantionalsatz, or “hymnbook setting,” the kind of simple “Bach chorale” harmonization one finds in books meant for congregational singing. (The term was actually coined in 1925 by the musicologist Friedrich Blume, but it filled an annoying terminological gap and has been widely adopted.) Bach ended many cantatas with such settings (enough so that his son Carl Philipp Emanuel could publish a famous posthumous collection of 371 of them), and it is possible that the congregation was invited to join in. We do not know this for a fact, but it does make sense in terms of Leipzig practice as Bach once listed it, where “alternate preluding and singing of chorales” by the congregation customarily followed the performance of the “composition.”
The text of Cantata no. 61 has the more varied structure prescribed by Neumeister, with “madrigals” (recitative-plus-aria texts) and biblical verses intermixed with the chorale stanzas. Such a text is more literally homiletic, or sermonlike, than the chorale concerto. In the present case, for example, only the first verse of the actual chorale is used; the rest is commentary. That single verse (Ex. 7-9a) is given a remarkable setting: not just in “French overture style” but as an actual French overture—a stately march framing a jiglike fugue—scored, as Lully himself would have scored it, for a five-part string ensemble (two violins, two violas, cello plus bassoon continuo) supporting the usual four-part chorus (perhaps even, in Bach’s own church performances, only one singer to a part). This unusual hybrid, the kind of thing we have learned to expect from Bach, resonates in multiple ways with the chorale’s text and the cantata’s occasion.
With respect to the text, the overture format gives Bach a way of emphasizing its most madrigalian aspect—the antithesis between the stately advent of Christ and the joyous amazement of mankind (marked gai, à la française) that greets him. By depicting Christ’s coming with the rhythms that accompanied the French king’s entrée, Bach effectively evokes Christ as King. Most notable of all is the absolute avoidance, in this first section, of choral counterpoint: a single line of the chorale is given a unison enunciation by each choral section in succession, and then they all get together for the second line in a “hymnbook” texture.
In this way the traditional, generic use of imitation in the fast middle section of the overture gains by way of contrast a symbolic dimension, evoking in its multiple entries a crowd of marveling witnesses. With respect to the cantata’s function, it has been suggested that by actually—and, from the liturgical point of view, gratuitously—labeling his chorus “Ouverture,” Bach meant to call attention to its placement at the very opening of the liturgical year. (Or else, conversely, the chorus’s placement at the beginning of the first Advent cantata may have prompted Bach’s choice of the Ouverture format.) Again, we are struck by the singlemindedness of Bach’s expressive purpose. For the sake of the affective contrast between the stern beginning and the “gay” continuation, he is willing to “harden” and distort the chorale melody on its every appearance with a dissonant, indeed downright ugly, diminished fourth. Such a choice reveals an altogether different scale of values from those of the ostensible model, the brilliant French court ballet. In fact, Bach appears deliberately to contradict, even thwart that brilliance with his dissonant melodic intervals and clotted texture.
From the French court we now move to the Italian opera theater—or at least to the aristocratic Italian salon (where the original “cantatas” were sung)—for a tenor recitative and aria on a reflective text by Neumeister. But both the recitative and the aria differ enormously from any that we have encountered before. The recitative itself (Ex. 7-9b) ends with a little aria, where the bass begins to move (m. 10), and engages in imitations with the singer to point up the metaphorical “lightening” of the mood. This sort of lyricalized recitative, called mezz’aria (“half-aria”) in the Italian opera house, was a throwback to the fluid interplay of forms in the earliest operas and cantatas. By the eighteenth century it was a German specialty (and one of the ways, incidentally, in which Handel often betrayed his German origins in his Italian operas for English audiences).
The aria (Ex. 7-9c), a sort of gloss on the word “Come” from the chorale, is a gracious invitation to Christ set as a lilting gigue. The ritornello, unlike the Vivaldian type with its three distinct ideas, is all “spun out” of a single five-note phrase. It is played by the whole orchestra, massed modestly in a single unison line, creating with the voice and the bass a typical (that is, typically Bachian) trio-sonata texture. The singer’s entry would come as a surprise to connoisseurs of Italian opera, but not to connoisseurs of trio sonatas, for the voice enters with the same melody as the “ritornello” and spins out the same fund of motives. For this reason Bach can dispense with the lengthy instrumental ritornello on the da capo. Instead, he writes dal segno (“from the sign”), placing the sign at the singer’s entry, which fulfills the “return” function perfectly well. This hybridization of operatic and instrumental styles is rarely if ever encountered in the opera house but standard operating procedure in Bach’s cantatas.
The next recitative/aria pair is of a kind equally rare in Italian cantatas or operatic scenes: the recitative is sung by one singer and the aria by another. That is because Neumeister has cast the recitative (Ex. 7-9d) as Christ’s answer to the invitation tendered in the previous aria. It is a biblical verse, sung by the bass, the only voice of sufficient gravity to impersonate the Lord. The singer emphasizes the word klopfe (“I knock”) in two ways, first by a short melisma, and then by a quick repetition. And that is our signal as to the reason for the curious accompaniment senza l’arco (“without the bow,” or pizzicato in more modern, standard parlance). The periodic plucked chords (with a top voice that is as stationary as Bach could make it) are Bach’s way of rendering Christ’s knocking at the church door.
The soprano aria (Ex. 7-9e), sung by a disembodied soul-voice to its heart, is the Christian’s answer to Christ’s knock. Scored for voice and continuo only, it is an even more modest aria than the one before. Again the two parts share melodic material. Although only the motto phrase (“Open ye!”) is obviously repeated when the voice enters, the whole vocal melody turns out on analysis to be a simplified version of the cello’s ritornello, shorn of the gentle string-crossings. The fact that the singer’s part is simpler than its accompaniment—especially when the high range of the part is taken into account—is already proof that although an operatic form has been appropriated, we are worlds away from the theater.
Indeed, soprano arias are likely to be the least adorned of all (and therefore especially suitable for “heartfelt” emotions, as here) because they were sung not by a gaudy castrato or a haughty prima donna but by a choirboy. (As in the Catholic church, so in the Lutheran, only male voices could be heard within its walls.) A Bach soprano aria, even one as simple as this one, was likely to strain the vocal and musicianly resources of the boy called upon to sing it. And yet when the text required it, Bach did not hesitate to write very difficult parts for the boys he trained.
Nor did he hesitate to write music of utter magnificence, despite the wan forces at his disposal. Undoubtedly his most splendid cantata was BWV 80, written at Leipzig for performance on the Feast of the Reformation, 31 October 1724. (Several of its parts were based on a much smaller cantata written at Weimar.) The Reformationsfest, as it is called in German, is the anniversary of the famous Ninety-five Theses, or articles of protest, which Luther posted on the door of the Castle Church at Wittenberg, 31 October 1517. It is thus the most important feast day specific to the German Protestant church and is always given a lavish celebration.
Bach’s Cantata BWV 80 takes its name from Ein’ feste Burg (“A mighty fortress”), Luther’s most famous chorale, with a tradition of polyphonic settings going back to the early sixteenth century. It takes its musical shape from an alternation of choral movements based on chorale verses with recitatives and arias drawn from Evangelisches Andachts-Opffer (“Evangelical devotional offering,” 1715), a book of devotional verse à la Neumeister by Salomo Franck, the Weimar court poet. At some later time, Bach’s eldest son, Wilhelm Friedemann (1710–84), made the piece even more splendid by adding a Stadtpfeifer contingent (three trumpets and timpani) to the scoring, possibly for a special performance to celebrate (in 1730) the bicentenary of the “Augsburg Confession,” the official creed of the Lutheran church, which Protestants regard as their declaration of independence from the authority of Rome. A tour of the chorale movements from this work in its final, collaborative realization will be a trip to the very summit of traditional Lutheran church polyphony in its latest and ripest phase.
To get the full effect of the tour, we will survey the four settings in reverse order, beginning with the concluding Cantionalsatz (no. 8), a setting of the final hymn verse, included here simply as a reminder of the famous tune (Ex. 7-10a). Passing back over a tenor recitative (no. 6) and an alto/tenor duet (no. 7), praising those who show a steadfastness comparable to Luther’s and promising them a reward in the next world, we come to no. 5, a setting of the third chorale verse, which speaks of Christians standing firm in their faith, and through it repelling a host of devils and fiends.
What a natural for a concerto-style setting! The steadfast Christians are represented by the chorus, singing the successive lines of the hymn in unison (or to be literal, in octaves), alternating with a richly raucous instrumental ensemble—trumpets, alto and tenor oboes, and strings—that portrays the grimacing surrounding host with a wild Vivaldian ritornello, which begins with a diminution of the chorale incipit (Ex. 7-10b), continues through a sequence, and ends with “thundering” rage-tremolandi in the strings and literally unplayable lip-trills for the clarino trumpet that produce the aural equivalent of a scowl or an obscene gesture (Ex. 7-10c). A close look at the score will turn up many extra diminutions of the chorale, thrown in wherever they can be made to fit by dint of a deceptive cadence.
Once again we skip over a recitative/aria pair on a text by Franck (nos. 3–4), except to note that (Franck being a literary disciple of Neumeister) it is a virtual replay of the second recitative-aria pair in Cantata no. 61: exhortations from the bass (concluding in an arioso) followed by an invitation, addressed by the chastened soprano to Jesus, to “Komm in mein Herzens Haus” (“Come dwell within my heart’s abode”). The aria that comes before them (Ex. 7-10d), marked no. 2, is actually a fascinating hybrid: a duet that underscores the relationship between the reflective poetry and the emblematic chorale by combining text and gloss in a single contrapuntal texture.
The soprano sings the second chorale verse to a highly decorated or “figural” variant of the original melody, while the bass carols away to Franck’s commentary on the same verse, set in an unusual (for bass) coloratura style that, by imitating the virtuoso manner of a soprano or even a castrato, seems to reflect the text’s promise that all who accept Christ will triumph over the limitations of the flesh. (As we have already observed, and as we shall observe again, this preoccupation with human limitations was a particularly important principle for Bach. It found reflections of all kinds in his music, with the emphasis sometimes on their exposure, sometimes on their overcoming.) The heterogeneous result could be called a “cantus-firmus aria” or a “sung chorale prelude.” It might be better, though, not to try to give such unique symbolic contrivances names; for they, too, are meant to display transcendence of normal (that is, humanly ordained) categories. At any rate, the unfolding of the cantus firmus takes precedence over the normal aria form, which, shorn of a contrasting section and da capo, resembles a concerto movement more than ever. Both vocal soloists are given instrumental correlates. The chorale-singing soprano is doubled by an oboe that contributes extra decorative contortions to the “figuration” of the traditional melody. Sometimes voice and instrument can even be heard ornamenting a melodic phrase in two different ways at once.
The bass, meanwhile, is paired with massed strings in unison (another typically Bachian effect we first saw in Cantata no. 61) to provide a “spun-out” ritornello at the beginning and the end and elsewhere to act as the bass’s “obbligato” or accompanying counterpoint. The basic motive out of which this string ritornello is spun is enunciated in the very first measure: it is easily recognized as a stylized bugle call, a military tattoo that encapsulates the pervasive martial imagery of Luther’s chorale poem, as it also did in operatic or madrigalian “rage” music going all the way back to Monteverdi.
Having traced the chorale now through three musical incarnations, at last we are ready to take on the cantata’s opening number, a grandiose “chorale fantasia” of a kind peculiar to Bach’s larger Leipzig cantatas. Even here, as everywhere in Bach’s choral music, the method is basically archaic, albeit updated by the most sophisticated handling of tonal harmony anyone anywhere had yet achieved. The form, in its essentials, is that of the motet—a form that goes back to pre-Reformation times and had been discarded everywhere save the Lutheran church, where alone it continued in living and evolving use. (When Catholic composers used the motet style, as we know, it was in the guise of an officially retrospective stile antico in which stylistic evolution was forbidden; eighteenth-century Catholics, when they wrote motets, adopted—or tried to adopt—the sixteenth century “Palestrina style”: not a style whose history went back to Palestrina, but a style whose history had stopped with Palestrina.)
A motet, takes shape as a series of discrete points of imitation (rather than a series of expositions of a single idea, like a fugue). In the opening fantasia of Cantata No. 80, the successive points of imitation (all accompanied by an independent and very active continuo and punctuated in Wilhelm Friedemann’s arrangement by jocund ejaculations from the Stadtpfeifer band) are based on the successive lines of the chorale. The first of them sets the procedure that will be followed consistently throughout. The chorale line is transformed by passing tones and a cadential flourish into a flowing “subject,” which is then treated according to the rules of tonal counterpoint, in alternation with its “tonal answer,” in which the first (tonic) and fifth (dominant) scale degrees are exchanged reciprocally. (Thus the tenors, entering with the subject, descend a fourth from D to A; the altos, entering with the answer, descend a fifth from A to D, and so on.) This sounds like a normal enough fugal exposition, but in fact it would be hard to find another fugue that begins with the tenor and alto entries. All the fugues we have seen thus far have proceeded either from top to bottom or from bottom to top. Deviations from this pattern, being deviations, require reasons, and such reasons are most often to be sought in the “poetic” or symbolic realm. In this case, the reason for opening out from the middle of the choral texture to the extremes becomes clear after the vocal exposition of the first “point” is complete. Unexpectedly, it is capped by the instruments (Ex. 7-10e), playing the cantus-firmus melody, sans figuration, in a marvelous canon that is close-spaced in time but could hardly be wider-spaced in pitch register. Both instrumental lines are doubled at the octave in Wilhelm Friedemann’s arrangement: the oboe by the clarino trumpet above (replacing Bach’s original scoring for three oboes in unison), and the continuo both by the violone or double bass and by the 16-foot “trombone” (Posaune) pedal stop on the organ.
Bach hardly ever specified organ “registration,” that is, the precise choice of “stops,” the settings that determined exactly which ranks of pipes were to be activated by which keys and pedals. This, too, was a deviation from his normal practice and had a special “poetic” motivation. Thanks to these octave doublings, the capping statement of the “symbolum”—the emblem or article of faith—exceeds at both ends the range of the human voice, betokening transcendence. The special nature of this fugal exposition, then, has a multiple poetic purpose. The chorale is literally heard to spread out from the “midst” of the chorus—the human vehicles of the word—and pass into the all-encompassing universal reach of the divine.
This symbolism informs the exposition of the chorale’s every line. What varies, once the basic format has been established through repetition (and recalling that the chorale is in the venerable AAB form), is the order of vocal entries. Bach’s virtuosity in controlling this teeming contrapuntal microcosm is joyously displayed at a level that few composers, if any, could match. Study of the piece will bring many exhilarating discoveries, beginning with the way the fugal entries of the second line are dovetailed with those of the first, so that the chorale melody is actually set in counterpoint with itself.
Perhaps most noteworthy of all is the way Bach contrives a FOP—the harmonic far-out point, requisite for a fully articulated “tonal” form—between the penultimate line of the chorale and the final one. The penultimate line of the chorale melody ends on F. Bach interprets this note as an applied dominant (“V of vi”) and follows it with a choral exposition (Ex. 7-10f) in which the last line of the text is sung to an adjusted version of the first phrase of the tune that goes through a circle of fifths—tenors cadencing on B (vi), basses on E (ii), sopranos on A (V), and altos on D (I), thence to the instruments who bring in the actual last phrase of the melody for a properly “achieved” conclusion in the tonic. In this way Bach supplies a “modern” harmonic structure that is unavailable in the original chorale melody (which of course was composed in “pre-tonal” times), without actually departing from or interrupting the progress of the tune.
The wonder is that, from all that we know of the conditions under which Bach worked, he never had at his disposal the musical forces that could do anything approaching justice to this mighty fortress of a chorus. Documents survive that inform us both as to the puny resources Bach had to work with, and those that he would have thought adequate if not ideal. The most telling document of this kind is a memorandum he submitted to the Leipzig Town Council on 23 August 1730, a couple of months before the celebrations at which Cantata no. 80 may have been performed in his son’s “big band” arrangement.16 The title already tells the story: “A Short but Most Necessary Draft for a Well-Appointed Church Music; Together with Certain Modest Reflections on the Decline of Same.”
Bach’s main concern was the choir, which consisted in large part of the boys he trained himself as head of the church music school. “Every musical choir should contain at least 3 sopranos, 3 altos, 3 tenors, and as many basses,” he wrote, “so that even if one happens to fall ill (as very often happens, particularly at this time of year, as the prescriptions written by the school physician for the apothecary must show) at least a double chorus motet may be sung. (And note that it would be still better if the classes were such that one could have 4 singers on each part and thus could perform every chorus with 16 persons.)” Next Bach lists the minimum stable of instrumentalists who should be at the disposal of any self-respecting music director. It hardly seems a coincidence that (with the exception of the bassoons, which were probably assumed to be doublers of the continuo line) the ensemble he describes is exactly that called for in Cantata no. 80. Indeed, Bach immediately follows the list below with a supplementary list of instruments—flutes, recorders, etc.—that are also needed from time to time. But this is the minimum:
summa 18 persons at least, for the instrumental music
By Bach’s own avowal, then, he considered thirty-four persons (plus himself and another keyboard player, who went without saying) to be the bare minimum required for a performance of a maximal piece like Cantata No. 80—and that number would have been thought puny indeed at any aristocratic, let alone royal, court. (Just recall Handel’s Music for the Royal Fireworks, with its band of fifty-five wind players.) Except for avowed attempts to re-create the conditions of Bach’s time (as in the so-called “historically authentic” performances that have been popular since the 1970s), the number would be considered stingy for a professional performance today. Yet Bach declares himself content with it, if only.
For the same memorandum reveals that in reality Bach could only count on eight regular instrumentalists (relying on local students or his own choristers to pinch-hit when possible), and that of the choristers at the school, whose services were required not just at Bach’s own church, St. Thomas’s, but at all four Leipzig churches (and who also had to pinch-hit as instrumentalists, as noted), Bach considered only 17 to be “usable” for music of “artistry” and “gusto” (taste). It has been suggested (by Bach scholar and performer Joshua Rifkin) that Bach’s church music was normally performed by no more than one singer or player to a part, if that (for, as Bach complains, most of the time some parts had to be omitted from the texture altogether due to absences).17 One often daydreams about what the music heard today sounded like when first performed. It would seem that in the case of Bach, it might be better not to know.
Or perhaps not. We might actually learn a good deal about music and its purposes if we could hear a Bach cantata at its first performance—but only if we are prepared for a lesson that challenges our most basic assumptions about the nature and purpose of music.
Those assumptions were given a classic articulation by Charles Burney (1726–1814), the great English music historian, who knew Handel in his youth and played occasionally in his orchestras. “Music is an innocent luxury, unnecessary, indeed, to our existence, but a great improvement and gratification of the sense of hearing,” wrote Dr. Burney, who went on to define it more precisely as “the art of pleasing by the succession and combination of agreeable sounds.”18 These words, probably written in the early 1770s, were published in the front matter of Burney’s General History of Music, which began appearing in 1776. They are still paraphrased in most English dictionaries, and few readers of this book will find them surprising. They will seem to most music lovers merely commonsensical.
But even “common sense” has a history, and Burney’s definition of music reflects the intellectual history of the eighteenth century, when a complex of rationalistic (that is, antimystical, antimetaphysical) ideas now referred to as “The Enlightenment” rose to prominence and eventual dominance in Europe. They will receive a more extended discussion in a later chapter, when their musical manifestations (which we now call “Classicism”) come into view. We have had a glimpse of them already in Handel, whose career was shaped by a taste comparable to the one Burney described, and who regarded all of his music, even the most exalted or profound, as a distinguished entertainment.
They have much less to do with Bach, and virtually nothing to do with Bach’s church music, which embodied a pre-Enlightened—and when push came to shove, a violently anti-Enlightened—temper. Such music was a medium of truth, not beauty, and the truth it served—Luther’s truth—was often bitter. Some of Bach’s most striking works were written to persuade us—no, reveal to us—that the world is filth and horror, that humans are helpless, that life is pain, and that reason is a snare. Even in his most exuberant work, like Cantata no. 80, Bach’s purpose in church was never just to please, and the sounds he combined there were often anything but agreeable.
When his music was pleasing, it was usually in order to indoctrinate or cajole. Just as often Bach aimed to torture the ear. When the world of man rather than that of God was his subject, he could write music that for sheer, deliberate ugliness has perhaps been approached (mainly by much later composers, after Bach’s momentous nineteenth-century “rediscovery”), but never surpassed. The daring it took to write such passages is perhaps the best testimony to Bach’s unique genius. They would have ruined Handel. But Bach’s pious congregation would have understood his purpose in a way that we can do only by dint of great imaginative effort.
Take Ex. 7-11 to begin with. It is the ritornello to a bass aria, “Ächzen und erbärmlich Weinen/hilft der Sorgen Krankheit nicht” (“Groaning [literally, saying ‘Ach’] and pitifully wailing or worrying won’t relieve sickness”) from Cantata BWV 13, Meine Seufzer, meine Tränen (“My sighs, my tears”). Despite its low BWV number, this is one of the later Leipzig cantatas, first performed 20 January (the second Sunday after Epiphany) 1726. With Seufzer in the title and Ächzen in the text, it is no wonder to see lots of slurred descending half steps—“sighs”—in all the parts. That was a conventional symbol that evoked the thing represented precisely the way a word does. Also to be expected were lots of dissonant appoggiaturas, a high degree of chromaticism, and (recalling Handel’s “They loathed to drink of the river”) chords of the diminished seventh.
But now consider the counterpoint in mm. 3–4: namely, the way in which the parallel “sighs” in the obbligato line and the basso continuo are harmonized. At the beginning of m. 3, the two voices move in parallel at the distance of nine semitones. This unusual way of specifying the interval is necessary here because, in terms of spelling and function, the intervals, though produced by parallel motion, are different. One voice progresses from one scale degree to another (E–D), while the other inflects a single degree (F–F). Thus the first harmonic interval formed between them is a diminished seventh, while the second is a major sixth. The harmonic progression, while unusual, can be rationalized as a “7–6 suspension” according to the traditional rules of counterpoint.
In the middle of m. 3, the intervals are still 7–6, even though the sixth is augmented and the constant parallel distance between the two voices is ten semitones, an interval always heard as a dissonance. This is a truly pungent progression that will take most listeners by unpleasant surprise, although on reflection it can be “justified” both in terms of counterpoint, and of course in terms of expression, since affliction and pain is the theme.
Only expression can justify what happens on the downbeat of m. 4, when the parallel doubling is again at the distance of ten semitones but both parts make degree progressions, so that both intervals are sevenths. By the rules—or, more pertinently, by customary practice—a progression of parallel sevenths is a solecism, a mistake. The writing is diseased. The effect on the naivest ear, all the more on a schooled one, is almost literally nauseous. This kind of direct analogy goes beyond Handel’s ingratiating ways of representing horror. There is no way this passage could be described as pleasant or entertaining. That is not its purpose.
One can find such examples in abundance in Bach, many of them much stronger than this one. The text, of course, is the key to finding them. Cantata BWV 101, composed in Leipzig for performance on 13 August 1724, opens with a chorale fantasia that pits the melody of the Lutheran Lord’s Prayer (“Vater unser im Himmelreich”) as cantus firmus against a choral counterpoint that carries the text of a sixteenth-century hymn:
Nimm von uns, Herr, du treuer Gott
Die schwere Straf und große Not,
Die wir mit Sünden ohne Zahl
Verdienet haben allzumal.
Behüt für Krieg und teurer Zeit,
Für Seuchen, Feur und großem Leid.
[Take from us, O Lord, thou faithful God
The heavy punishment and great distress
That we with our numberless sins
Have only too well deserved.
Preserve us against war and famine,
Plague, fire and devastation.]
Ex. 7-12 is a “piano reduction” of Bach’s setting of the second line, so that the scarcely credible dissonances with which he evoked punishment, distress, war, famine, plague, fire, and devastation can be most compactly represented and easily observed. Almost all of them, semitonal clashes, false relations and all, arise out of a reckless deployment of “nonharmonic tones” that arise in turn out of expressive “sigh” motives or their inversions, equipped with pickups that render the first notes under the slurs maximally discordant both harmonically and melodically. This music will never bring a smile, the way Handel’s famine, plague, fire, and devastation did in Israel in Egypt. And that is only partly because of the extremity of the musical means, which goes so far beyond the boundaries of what Handel or Burney or their audiences would have identified as good taste. It is also because the sufferers depicted are not “them” but “us.”
Even more unsettling are the choruses and arias where Bach—following what Carl Friedrich Zelter, a choral conductor who played a major role in Bach’s nineteenth-century rediscovery, called his “altogether contemptible German chuch texts”—gave vent to what not only Zelter but all “Enlightened” thinkers of his day despised as the “earnest polemic of the Reformation.”19 Indeed, many of Bach’s texts express ideas that most listeners, not only in Zelter’s day but in our own, would find abhorrent, for almost all modern ideas of social justice, reasoned discourse, and personal integrity are derived from the ideas of the Enlightenment.
There is no evidence that Bach believed in them. On the contrary: we have every reason to assume that he believed not in freedom, equality, and human institutions of justice as saving forces in the world, but in faith and God’s grace—as we may learn from a harrowing tenor aria, “Schweig nur, taumelnde Vernunft!” (“Shut up, stumbling reason!”) from Cantata BWV 178, composed in Leipzig in the summer of 1724. The text is a paraphrase of a verse from a sixteenth-century hymn. Past the first line the message of the text is one of comfort, but Bach is fixated on that fierce and derisive opening line—indeed, on just the opening word. Out of it he builds practically the whole first section of his da capo aria, crowding all the rest into a cursory and soon superseded middle section.
Over and over the tenor shrieks, “Schweig nur, schweig!” leaping now a sixth, now a seventh, now an octave (Ex. 7-13). Meanwhile, the accompanying orchestra, Reason’s surrogate, reels and lurches violently. The effect is nothing short of terrifying—perhaps even more now than in Bach’s own time, since we who remember the twentieth century have greater reason than Bach’s contemporaries ever had to wince at the sound of a high-pitched German voice stridently shouting reason down.
Even when Bach is not expressing actively anti-Enlightenment sentiments like these in his cantatas, his settings are pervaded with a general antihumanism such as we encountered (at least according to one interpretation) in the Brandenburg Concertos, with their implied religiously motivated contempt for human hierarchies and power relations. The contempt is much more overt in the cantatas and shows up precisely in Bach’s seeming unconcern for practical performance considerations. A work like Cantata no. 80, plausibly beyond the capabilities of the performers to whom it was perforce assigned, could be looked upon as “idealistic” in this sense, deliberately contriving a splendor and suggesting a perfection beyond terrestrial accomplishment (though certainly not beyond imagining or aspiring to).
There is another side to this as well, when Bach seems deliberately to engineer a bad-sounding performance by putting the apparent demands of the music beyond the reach of his performers and their equipment. Ex. 7-14 contains two “middle sections” from cantata arias. The first (Ex. 7-14a), “Liebster Gott” (“Beloved God”) from Cantata BWV 179, composed for Leipzig in 1723, is scored for a (boy) soprano and two oboi da caccia or “hunting oboes,” ancestors of the modern English horn. The aria begins and ends in A minor, but the middle section weirdly modulates ever “flatward,” so that it makes its final cadence in C minor.
Not only is the flatward modulation symbolic of catabasis, or “falling” in the theological sense (as a sharpward modulation symbolizes anabasis or elevation), the specific key chosen for the cadence also puts the instruments in a harmonic region where they are simply incapable of playing in tune, especially when playing, as Bach forces them to do, in their lowest, least tractable range.20 The boy, too, is asked to descend to the very bottom of his range and even beyond, where he loses all tonal support. The whole performance will inevitably come out sounding loathsome and disgraceful. And these are the words (adapted from the prophet Habbakuk): “My sins sicken me like pus in my bones; help me, Jesus, Lamb of God, for I am sinking in deepest slime.”
Nowadays, with instruments that have undergone more than a century of adaptation and with no strictures to prevent a secular performance by a well-trained mezzo-soprano, the technical demands of the aria could be easily met. But would the performance thereby become a better one? Or would an important part of the religious message of the piece—that humans are helpless and hopeless in their fallen state—be lost for the sake of mere sensory gratification?
The bass aria, “Beglückte Heerde, Jesu Schafe” (“O lucky herd of Jesus-sheep”), from the pastoral Cantata no. 104, Du Hirte Israel, höre (“Hear us, O shepherd of Israel”) is on the face of it a sweet and gentle (if slightly macabre) lullaby, but it harbors within a veritable assault by the composer on the performer. The text of the middle section (Ex. 7-14b) reads, “Here you shall taste of Jesus’s goodness and look forward, as your reward for faith, to the sweet sleep of death.” The vocal line extends for eighteen measures in a stately meter without a single rest, and with notes lasting as much as nine beats. It will reduce any singer who assays it at an appropriate tempo to a gasping, panting state in which, were the aria to continue another two minutes, he would surely receive his reward.
This undermining of human agency is something that Bach engineers again and again. Unlike Handel’s music, Bach’s church music serves the purposes of the church—that is, ministering to the soul’s salvation—and presents modern secular performers with a dilemma: either adapt the performance to the tastes of the modern secular audience (whether by modernizing the performing forces, for example, or by “secularizing” the tempos or the general demeanor) and risk losing the full force of the expressive message encoded in the music, or perform the music in an appropriate manner and risk perplexing, fatiguing, or even insulting the audience. That is why only a handful of Bach’s cantatas can be said to have really joined the modern performance repertory, and a thoroughly unrepresentative handful at that.
Besides a couple of amusing secular items like the so-called “Coffee cantata” (about a young girl’s passion for coffee—then a novelty—and the headaches it causes her father), composed for Bach’s Collegium Musicum (which actually performed in a coffee shop), the “popular” cantatas include no. 51, Jauchzet Gott in allen Landen (“Rejoice in God in every land”), a brilliant display piece for soprano and the only church cantata Bach ever composed for a women’s voice (and one of the few pieces he actually called a cantata); and no. 140, Wachet auf, ruft uns die Stimme (“Wake up, the [watchman’s] voice is calling”), in which Bach set a couple of love duets between Christ and the Christian soul in the style of “the pretty little Dresden tunes.”
Bach’s best-known religious pieces are the ones most comparable to Handel’s oratorios and to even later, Catholic religious music. They include two Passion settings (out of five he is once reported to have composed), one based on the Gospel of Matthew and the other on the Gospel of John. And, a bit paradoxically, they include a grandiose concerted setting, for chorus in as many as eight parts and an exceptionally variegated orchestra, of the Latin Mass, a text for which there was no liturgical use at all in the Lutheran church. These were the works through which Bach was “rediscovered” and reclaimed for the performing repertoire in the nineteenth century.
The Mass was assembled out of settings that had accumulated over a period of more than two decades. About half of it is derived from known prototypes (cantata choruses, mainly), and most of the rest is presumed to consist of “parodies” of this kind as well, even though their prototypes are no longer extant. The work is therefore cast in a mixture of styles that reflects its miscellaneous origins. Some of the choruses, although never without an elaborate instrumental accompaniment, are written in a deliberately archaic style that comes closer than ever to the official Catholic stile antico. Some of the arias, by contrast, are cast in the kind of showy, courtly (“galant”), somewhat operatic idiom that Bach associated with Dresden.
The Catholic electoral court at Dresden, in fact, seems to have been the original destination of the Mass, or at least of the Kyrie and Gloria, which Bach sent in 1733 to the newly ascended Elector, Friedrich August II, who also reigned (as Augustus III) as the titular king of Poland. Friedrich August was already a notable patron of the arts, from whom Bach was now seeking a favor—not a job but a title (Hofkomponist) that would entitle him to better treatment and higher pay from the Leipzig town council. Bach eventually did receive the title but not until 1736, after sending another petition.
The music, meanwhile, languished unheard. Bach returned to it in the late 1740s, after he had effectively retired from his cantorate at Leipzig, and by adding to it a Sanctus he had partly composed as early as 1724 and assembling from parodies a Credo and an Agnus Dei, he turned it into a kind of testamentary piece—a summary of all types of ecclesiastical composition unified by the ancient Latin text of the Mass, but far too long and elaborate to have been intended for actual performance anywhere.
Performances began only when Bach had been assimilated to the secular concert repertory in the nineteenth century. (Hence the curiously secular name by which it is generally known: “Mass in B Minor,” or “The B-Minor Mass,” after the key of the opening Kyrie, although most of the music is actually in D major.) Thus it is a work that has existed, in a sense, only posthumously; and it is to later music only that it can be compared. The first of many “oratorio-style” Masses in the repertoire, it is the largest of them all, but it is in no real sense the progenitor of the line. That line originated in Austria and reached its peak some decades after Bach’s death with the work of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven. But as we will learn in a later chapter, the antecedents to this Austrian genre were Italian, not German. Bach’s Mass, although a famous work today and therefore an essential part of the history of music from our perspective, was from the perspective of its own time an isolated curio—or, given its size, perhaps a white elephant.
A description of the Gloria, part of the original offering to the Saxon elector, can be our entrée into this glorious anomaly. The text is broken up into nine separate segments, if one counts the two contrasting halves of the first chorus as two separate settings. Bach certainly did, because he is known to have adapted them from two separate preexisting pieces. The first, a quick gigue, marked vivace (“lively”) and scored for an oversized orchestra of twenty or more (as per Bach’s “Short but Most Necessary Draft”), features the trumpets and drums for a brilliant evocation of the title word (which, as we know, is merely intoned by the priest in an actual liturgical Mass). The second, a hushed evocation of “peace on earth,” is suddenly in the slow “common time” of the stile antico. The trumpets and drums are silent for the most part, reintroduced only toward the end so that the piece can end grandly. Like Monteverdi’s eight-part Gloria from the Selva morale (see chapter 1), Bach’s “Gloria” chorus, with its vividly projected antithesis, is in effect a vaulting madrigal.
Thereafter, the Gloria proceeds as an alternation of choruses with arias for each of the five soloists in turn. The first aria (“Laudamus te”), for the second soprano, sets words of praise in an ingratiatingly ornate and courtly chamber style. The ritornello is a veritable violin concerto, and the vocal writing, with its trills and roulades, is as close to a castrato idiom as Bach ever came. This music was obviously meant for no choirboy, but for a Dresden court “canary.” The chorus that follows (“Gratias agimus tibi”) sets words of thanks in an austere, archaic idiom. Bach first used this music when setting the German equivalent of its text (“Wir danken dir, Gott”) in a Leipzig cantata two years before.
Next comes another operatic showpiece (“Domine Deus”), a duet for the first soprano and the tenor, in which the consubstantiality of the Father and the Son is symbolized by the twinning of the two voices. Each sings in turn about the Father and the Son, but whenever the soprano is singing “Domine Deus” the tenor is singing “Domine Fili,” and vice versa. Here the concertizing instrument in the ritornellos is the solo flute, playing for the most part in its most brilliant range, with typically “galant” affectations in the phrasing, such as slurred pairs (possibly also symbolic of consubstantiality) and long appoggiaturas.
The chorus that follows—“Qui tollis peccata mundi,” “[O Thou] who takest away the sins of the world”—maintains the lightness of the preceding duet as it describes the gentle cleansing action of the Lamb of God. The music had previously served to introduce a Leipzig cantata, on the words “Schauet doch und sehet, ob irgend ein Schmerz sei” (Behold and see if there is any pain). In both of its contexts, then, the music represented the alleviation of distress.
The last part of the Gloria puts two arias back to back before a concluding chorus. The first aria (“Qui sedes”) is an alto solo, with an obbligato for the oboe d’amore (halfway in size between modern oboe and English horn) that implies an affettuoso style of performance. The instrument closely matches the singer’s range and twines all around the vocal part as the singer pleads operatically with the Son, sitting at the right hand of the Father, for mercy. The second aria (“Quoniam tu solus,” “For only Thou”), a commanding item for the bass, features a rare obbligato for corno da caccia (“hunting horn,” now called French horn) accompanied by not one but two bassoons, thus adding two more instruments to the already swollen instrumental roster. This aria may well have been adapted from a cantata in which the text used words like hunting, chasing, or pursuit as metaphors—words for which the horn itself could stand as a further metaphor. As adapted here to the Mass text, the singularity of the scoring may symbolize the singularity of Christ, as thrice detailed by the text.
The final chorus, “Cum sancto spiritu,” invokes the glory of the Trinity with a return to the vivace tempo and the brassy scoring of the opening chorus. It is in three sections, the middle being a fast melismatic fugue somewhat reminiscent of the ones in Messiah, and adding an element of showy virtuosity to the choral writing that is as rare in Bach as it is frequent in the oratorios of Handel, his great expatriate contemporary.
There is nothing like this chorus in Bach’s surviving Passion oratorios, which were written for church use on the afternoon of Good Friday, the most solemn day in the Christian year. The one based on the Book of John, written earlier, was first performed in Leipzig in 1724, during Bach’s first year as Cantor there, and revived several times thereafter. Its text includes arias and a chorus drawn from the Passion poem by Brockes that Handel had set earlier. The St. Matthew Passion—conceived as a unity but on an enormous scale both as to duration and as to performing forces (two antiphonal choirs, each with its own supporting orchestra)—was probably first performed in 1727.
In both Passions, following the post-Neumeister conventions of the genre, the text operates on three levels, which interact to produce a sort of biblical opera-with-commentary. The original Gospel text is set as semidramatic recitative. There is a narrator (called the Evangelist), but all direct discourse (lines spoken directly by the actors in the story) is assigned to other solo voices, and lines spoken collectively by the “people,” following the “turba” (crowd) convention that goes back to the sixteenth century, were sung by the chorus, often in imitative textures that emphasized heterogeneity.
These recitatives are interrupted at strategic moments, just as they are in opera, by reflective arias—or “madrigals,” as the Lutheran poets continued to call them—meant to be set in da capo form. As in the cantatas (where, however, there is no plot line), these arias are not sung by characters but by “voice-personas” who represent and give utterance to the poet’s own meditations on the events of the biblical narration, and instruct the congregation on their Christian significance. In the St. Matthew Passion, all the arias, as well as the reflective choruses that open and close each part, are adapted from a single long Passion poem in Erbauliche Gedancken (“Edifying thoughts”), a cycle of texts for music by a friend of Bach’s, a Leipzig lawyer and playwright named Christian Friedrich Henrici (1700–64), who wrote under the name Picander and provided the texts for many of Bach’s Leipzig cantatas. The third textual element in Bach’s Passions consisted of chorales in “Cantional” or hymnbook style that are frequently interpolated to provide an additional level of commentary (and, possibly, congregational participation).
The two Bach Passion settings are quite distinct in character. The shorter and faster-moving St. John Passion is as close to an opera as Bach ever wrote (if for the moment we ignore a few minor civic or coffeehouse comedies that Bach called dramma per musica). The turba scenes before Pontius Pilate, in particular, show the Roman viceroy, the crowd, and the Evangelist interacting with great dispatch. In the excerpt given in Ex. 7-15, Pontius Pilate offers Jesus back to the crowd, who reject him and call for his crucifixion. The sharp dactylic rhythms in the orchestra recall the cry of “Kreuzige!” (“Crucify!”) from the previous chorus.
The St. Matthew Passion places more emphasis on contemplation than on action. Its emblematic sections are not the turba choruses but the monumental framing choruses on words by Picander. The one that opens the work, “Kommt, ihr Töchter, helft mir klagen” (“Come, O daughters, help me in my lamentation”) is a conception of unparalleled breadth. By the use of antiphonal choruses (and orchestras) asking and exclaiming about the tragic scene at Golgotha, a panoramic scene is conjured up. The heavy bass tread and the slow harmonic rhythm in a broad meter at once sketches the movement of the procession of the cross and conveys the mournful affect of a traditional lamento.
And it all turns out to be a gigantic chorale prelude, when a third choir of boys (soprano ripieno as Bach puts it) chimes in with the so-called Passion Chorale (Ex. 7-16), set as a cantus firmus above the fray: O Lamm Gottes unschüldig/am Stamm des Kreuzes geschlachtet (“O spotless Lamb of God, slaughtered on the Cross’s trunk”). The innocence of the victim is cast in relief against the enormity of the sacrifice by playing the G major of the chorale against the E minor of its environment. A whole panoply of tonal and harmonic effects of which Bach was then uniquely the master—modulations, deceptive cadences, and other feints—is enlisted to underscore this tragic contrast. Even without the external trappings of drama, Bach was able through his manipulation of tonal (“purely musical”) procedures to express the essence of the dramatic conflict embodied in the Passion story as viewed from the Christian perspective.
Bach was well aware of the special place the St. Matthew Passion occupied within his vast output. He regarded it, too, as a testamentary work. He prepared a lavish calligraphic score of the work, replete with inks of different colors, to preserve it at a time when most music, including his, was composed for specific occasions, to be used and thereafter discarded. That fair copy passed into Carl Friedrich Zelter’s possession and provided the vehicle for Bach’s rediscovery and canonization as a musical Founding Father when the twenty-year-old Felix Mendelssohn, a pupil of Zelter who would have a distinguished career as composer in his own right, conducted a performance of the St. Matthew Passion at the Berlin Singakademie on 11 March 1829, a little over a century after its first performance in Leipzig.
This was an event of immense cultural significance. It placed Bach in a new context, one in which the very aspects of his style that had led to his temporary eclipse—its complexity, its conservatism, its uncompromising religiosity, its very asperity, which caused it to be dismissed by some critics even during his lifetime as showing an “excess of art” and a “turgid and confused style”—could now be prized and held up as a model for emulation.21 The conditions that brought about this change in Bach’s status had a great deal to do with the burgeoning of Romanticism, to which we will return in a later chapter. There was another aspect to the reassessment of Bach, however, which needs our attention now.
The nineteenth-century Bach revival focused mainly on just a few works: the Passion oratorios, the B-minor Mass, the Well-Tempered Clavier, and a few later masterworks of an old-fashioned, abstract nature in which Bach gave full rein to his unrivaled contrapuntal virtuosity. This last group included the Goldberg Variations, a huge cycle of thirty keyboard pieces, including a series of intricate canons, all based on a single “aria” (ostinato) bass line. (The set is named—not by Bach but by posterity—after Johann Gottlieb Goldberg, one of Bach’s pupils, who supposedly commissioned it on behalf of his patron, Count Kayserling, the Russian ambassador to the Saxon court, an insomniac who needed some engrossing music to divert him during sleepless nights.) For a really dazzling quick idea of Bach’s contrapuntal wizardry we might look, not at the Goldberg Variations themselves, but at a little extra that he tossed off one day, and that remained undiscovered until the 1970s. In the flyleaf of his own personal copy of the printed edition of the work (the fourth volume of the Clavier-Übung, issued in 1747), Bach inscribed fourteen riddle canons, all based on the first eight notes of the Goldberg “aria” bass. Ex. 7-17 shows the bass line, the last canon (“Canon à 4, per Augmentationem et Diminutionem”) as Bach wrote it, and a realization (by Christoph Wolff, who discovered and authenticated the canons). The first eight sixteenth-notes of the single notated line in Ex. 7-17b are an inversion of the Goldberg bass, transposed to the upper fifth and subjected to a threefold rhythmic diminution. The realization accompanies the notated part with its inversion at the upper fourth with note values doubled; with its literal transposition at the lower fourth with note values doubled again; and inverted at the lower fifth, with the note values doubled a third time, thus restoring the original bass.
It is probably fair to say that the sheer technical dexterity in the art of composition that Bach exhibits here has never been surpassed; it is all the more impressive in the context of little joke pieces like these, for only the truly learned can afford to wear their learning lightly. (Why exactly fourteen canons, by the way? Because the name Bach, if translated into numbers according to the positions of its constituent letters in the alphabet—a device called gematriya that goes back to Hebrew cabbalistic lore—comes out 2 + 1 + 3 + 8 = 14. Bach’s numerological virtuosity has only begun to be investigated. Some scholars suspect that it may rival his musical skills; others, favoring a more “Enlightened” view of Bach, remain skeptical.) A more formal exhibition of skill was the Musikalisches Opfer (“Musical offering”), a miscellany of canons, complicated ricercars (old-fashioned fugues), and a trio sonata, all based on a weirdly chromatic “royal theme” given Bach as a subject for improvisation by none other than Frederick the Great, the Prussian king, during a visit by Bach in May of 1747 to the Prussian court at Potsdam, where his son Carl Philipp Emanuel was employed. The ultimate “speculative” work, Bach’s intended final testament, was Die Kunst der Fuge (“The art of fugue”), a collection of twenty-one contrapuncti, including canons, double fugues, triple fugues, fugues with answers by augmentation and diminution, inversion, and cancrizans (“crab motion,” or retrograde), all based on a single D-minor subject.
Bach was working on this collection on the day he died, leaving unfinished the last Fuga a 3 soggetti, in which the musical anagram of his name was to be worked in as a chromatic countersubject (Ex. 7-18). The so-called B–A–C–H cipher has been a potent musical emblem ever since the Art of Fugue was published, in 1751, in an edition supervised by Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, who refrained from finishing the last fugue (as he could easily have done), but let it trail off into a sketch, followed by a note explaining the reason.
It was no accident that the German musicians who created the Bach revival in the early nineteenth century fastened on just these pieces—the Passion oratorios and the encyclopedic, testamentary works. The Passions were the only vocal works by Bach that could find any sort of place in early nineteenth-century secular musical life. Their revival took place within the nineteenth-century German “concert oratorio” movement, something that had nothing to do with Bach or with the Lutheran tradition. Rather, it went back to Handel, or (more accurately) to the London Handelian tradition, both a prime fosterer and a beneficiary of British national sentiment.
As we will later observe in greater musical detail, the Handelian oratorio (the earliest type of oratorio meant expressly for concert performance) had been imported to the German-speaking lands by the Austrian composer Franz Joseph Haydn (1732–1809), who had encountered Handel’s work on a visit to England, been bowled over by it, and emulated it in two oratorios of his own, “The Creation,” first performed in 1798, and “The Seasons” (1801). Like most of Handel’s oratorios, and like the German oratorios that followed them, Haydn’s oratorios were performed in theaters and concert halls, not churches.
By the time Bach’s Passions were revived, the main German venue for oratorio performances had become the music festival, first instituted in 1818. As the critic and historian Cecilia Hopkins Porter has shown, these festivals transformed the German musical establishment and created a new public—the first “mass public”—for music.22 Their other main achievement was the creation of a sense of German national identity through music. It was Bach who provided a focal point for that, as Handel had done in England. (Of course, Handel—or rather, Händel—was “repatriated” and “reclaimed” by the Germans as well, and given back his umlaut, during this period.)
So burgeoning nationalism, perhaps the nineteenth century’s signal contribution to European politics and culture, which had turned Handel into an institution in England a bit ahead of schedule thanks to British “national” precocity, caught up with Bach and turned him into a competing institution just when the familiar institutions of modern concert life were being established.
The specific nature of German nationalism also favored Bach’s canonization. Where the British prided themselves on their commerce and industry, and on their liberal political institutions, the Germans, then lacking political unity, very backward industrially, and economically ruined by the Napoleonic wars, prided themselves on “art and learning,” as the composer and critic Carl Kossmaly declared shortly after the Bach revival had got underway. Their nationalism was a nationalism of culture. “In the realm of ideas,” Kossmaly averred, “in everything concerning intelligence and spiritual capacity, not only inner unity and national independence but also a decided superiority must be granted to the Germans.”23 In music, Bach was the proof. His profundity and complexity were all of a sudden national treasures; and the abstract musical speculations of his late years became harbingers of “absolute music,” the highest of all the arts, where the Germans most vehemently asserted their supremacy.
This appropriation of Bach to the politics of German secular nationalism was already evident in the earliest biography of Bach, by Johann Nikolaus Forkel (1749–1818). This book, which appeared in 1802 (one year after Haydn’s Seasons), was a landmark: it was not only the first biography of Bach, it was the first full-scale scholarly biography of any composer and one of the earliest books to be recognizably a work of musicology in the modern academic sense. It is dedicated to “patriotic admirers of true musical art.” Its preface declares that “Bach’s works are a priceless national patrimony; no other nation possesses anything to compare with it.”24 And this is its final paragraph:
This man, the greatest orator-poet that ever addressed the world in the language of music, was a German! Let Germany be proud of him! Yes, proud of him, but worthy of him too!25
So modern academic musicology, the tradition out of which (but also, in certain ways, against which) this book is written, originated, like the Bach revival and the musical canon of which Bach is now regarded as the cornerstone, as a by-product of German nationalism.
Does that matter? More generally, does it matter that Bach’s music, little known in his time and forgotten soon after his death, has been called back to active cultural duty by a cultural program unrelated and perhaps alien to it? And does it matter that it is now admired for reasons that may have little to do with what motivated it?
Many lovers of the music will have no trouble answering these questions. Indeed, the Bach revival can seem a miraculous salvage operation, hardly in need of defense or excuse. But the “universalization” of music originally created within a narrowly specific cultural context does entail some difficulties, and cannot help raising some problems, especially if the original context was a religious one.
Look again at Ex. 7-15 and consider it from a different perspective. No mention was made the first time around of the fact that the turba in the St. John Passion, following the Book of John itself, is identified not as “das Volk” or “the people” (as it is in the Matthew Passion), but as “die Juden” or “the Jews.” An accusation is being made, one that is no longer supported by responsible historical or theological scholarship, that the Jews rather than the Romans were responsible for Christ’s death. That accusation, now often called the “blood libel,” has had a bearing on a history of bloody persecutions, culminating in perhaps the most horrible page in the history of the twentieth century.
Obviously, Bach had no part of that. Nor was he, as far as anyone today can guess, personally anti-Semitic as the term is understood today, except insofar as he probably subscribed to Luther’s doctrine that the Jews should submit to conversion on pain of punishment. In all likelihood he rarely, possibly never, met a Jew and thought little about them. The St. John Passion was intended for performance before a congregation of Christian believers for whom the Gospel text was … well, Gospel. The insult it contains to Jews was wholly incidental to its purpose.
But today it serves other purposes and is performed before other audiences. Bach is long dead, but the St. John Passion lives on. Jews not only hear it nowadays, they often participate in performances of it, and are sometimes shocked to learn what it is that they are singing. Are they wrong? Does Bach’s music redeem the text? Would it impair Bach’s work from the standpoint of its present social use if the text were emended to exclude the blood libel? And if people disagree about the answers to these difficult questions, on what basis can they be adjudicated?
It is no part of the purpose of this book to provide the answers to these questions. But it is integral to its purpose to raise them, for they crystallize important historical problems—problems of appropriation, universalization, recontextualization—that have arisen along with the practice of historiography itself, and that historiography not only poses but in large part creates. Precisely because these problems are part and parcel of historiography’s essence and its legacy, historiography often remains blind to them, not regarding itself as a part of its own subject matter. But responsible historiography, most historians now concede, must contain an element of reflexivity—concern with itself as a historical entity and with its own potential cultural and social influence, alongside the entities it purports to study.
The problem of the anti-Semitic message in the St. John Passion, from which some people today may actually “learn” the “fact” that the Jews killed Christ, would never have become a problem had Bach never been revived. What was merely a latent message in Bach’s time, stating an accepted truth to which no one would have paid much attention per se, has become a potentially explicit message in our time, and a potentially mischievous one. We have history—or rather the sense of history fostered by romantic nationalism—to thank for that. The peculiarly romantic sense of the timeless relevance of history, called “historicism,” is what vouchsafed the work’s survival. The problem comes in deciding just what it is in the treasured legacy of the past that should be regarded as timelessly relevant.
Bach lived his life in defiance of the Enlightenment and was revived in reaction to it. The remaining member of the class of 1685, Domenico Scarlatti, exemplified the esthetic of Enlightenment better, perhaps, than any other musician of his time.
The son of Alessandro Scarlatti, one of the giants of the opera seria, Domenico Scarlatti was at first groomed for a career in his father’s footsteps, for which he showed a precocious aptitude. His first opera, Ottavia ristituita al trono (“Octavia restored to the throne”), was produced at Saint Bartholomew’s in Naples, Alessandro’s stamping ground, for the 1703 carnival season, when Domenico was all of seventeen years old. His last, the archetypical Berenice, regina d’Egitto, ovvero Le gare di amore e di politica (“Bernice, Queen of Egypt;” or, the “Contest of love and politics”), was produced for the Roman carnival fifteen years later, whereupon Scarlatti retired from the opera stage, at the age of thirty-two, with almost forty years of life still ahead of him.
The next year, 1719, he took a position as maestro di cappella at the cathedral of Lisbon, in Portugal, where he produced several oratorios and other sacred vocal works (some in a very chaste stile antico), and also supervised the musical education of the Infanta (crown princess) Maria Barbara, a gifted keyboard player. On her marriage to Fernando, the crown prince of Spain, in 1728, he followed Maria Barbara to Madrid, where he was known as Domingo Escarlatti, and served as courtier until his death in 1757, the last twenty years alongside the great castrato Farinelli, who (as we have seen) also retired to a sinecure at Madrid.
Scarlatti spent his years at Madrid as a pampered retainer, later a knight, and was free to compose whatever he wanted. What he wanted to compose was virtuoso harpsichord music for himself (and, presumably, his royal pupil) to perform. Unconstrained by any set requirements, yet prompted by a tremendous musical curiosity and imagination, he invented what amounted to a new style of composition, which he called “ingenious jesting with art.”26 The phrase is pregnant. It jibes presciently with Dr. Burney’s comments on the nature and value of music, and reveals a wholehearted commitment to the ideal of delighting—rather than edifying, instructing, awing, or stirring—the listener. Nothing could be farther away from the monumental worlds of Bach and Handel.
Accordingly, Scarlatti became the great miniaturist of his age, spendingthelast thirty to forty years of his life turning out upwards of 550 short, freestanding compositions for the harpsichord (and, to an undeterminable extent, for other keyboard instruments to which they are adaptable, namely organ, clavichord, and early forms of the pianoforte). These pieces were individually called sonatas, but they were in only a single “movement” and were often published under different names (such as essercizi, “studies”), or even as pièces grouped in suites. None survives in the composer’s autograph, and it is impossible to know, therefore, exactly what he called them or how he grouped them.
The reason for occasionally calling them pièces is clear enough: like those of Couperin and the other French clavecinistes, Scarlatti’s pieces are uniformly in “binary” form—far more uniformly than Couperin’s, which are often rondeaux (with recurrent refrains) or passacailles (variations over a ground). Scarlatti himself never gathered them into suites. Early copyists and editors liked to group them in pairs, similar in key but contrasting in tempo. This, too, is a practice that (while effective, and widely followed in performance) cannot with any certainty be associated with the composer.
Rather, Scarlatti evidently preferred to provide delight in single short doses—“by the shot,” one could say. But unlike Couperin, who also deserves credit for pioneering the single characteristic piece (albeit published in “ordres” or suites), Scarlatti liked to make brash statements as well as tender ones. Like any jester, he had an exhibitionistic streak. He could never have said, with Couperin (in the preface to his first book of pièces de clavecin, 1713), that “I would rather be moved than astonished.” Scarlatti’s sonatas, though occasionally tender and lyrical, are, as a corpus, the most astonishing pieces of their time.
Their astonishing character draws on several sources. One is the outstanding instrumental virtuosity they require and display (particularly in the use of special effects like crossed hands and even glissando). Another is their harmonic extravagance, manifested both in terms of boldly handled dissonance and an often flamboyant, yet exquisitely graded use of modulatory chromaticism. Still another is the fantastic variety with which their single basic shape is treated.
Finally, there is a singular imprint of local color—a local color that to listeners in countries where the international music trade flourished seemed exotic (as it must have seemed to the foreign-born Scarlatti himself, hence his penchant for noticing and drawing on it). The Scarlatti sonatas are a very early instance of exotic local color being sought and valued for its “pure” musical allure, without any symbolically nationalistic overlay. (A century or more later, this allure was exploited nationalistically by Spanish musicians, notably the pianist-composer Enrique Granados, who pioneeringly programmed, edited, and emulated Scarlatti at a time when his work had largely lapsed into “historical” limbo.)
The most remarkable aspect of Scarlatti’s sonatas, in fact, may be the absence in them (despite their frequent vivid “pictorialisms”) of anything symbolic at all. At a time when music, like the other arts, was mainly valued for its mimetic properties, Scarlatti sought to convey what Thomas Twining, a friend of Dr. Burney, called “a simple original pleasure, … no more imitative than the smell of a rose, or the flavor of a pineapple.”27 In this, Scarlatti was true to the spirit, not of his father, but of the Italian string composers of his father’s generation. His sonatas, unlike Couperin’s character pieces, were works at which old French academicians like Fontanelle might have railed.
What made them the darlings of connoisseurs and epicures from the beginning—or at least from 1739, when a selection of them was published for the first time and immediately pirated far and wide (as well as plundered by Handel for his “Grand Concertos”)—was what their British publisher Thomas Roseingrave, a famous harpsichordist in his own right, called “their Delicacy of Stile, and Masterly Composition.”28 The Scarlatti sonatas, from which the following examples have been drawn, were chosen to exemplify all these traits in turn—except sheer virtuosity, which is exemplified throughout. They are numbered here according to the catalogue of Ralph Kirkpatrick (1911–84), an eminent harpsichordist who in his biography of Scarlatti (1953) tried to put the sonatas in something resembling a chronological order. (The previously standard listing by Alessandro Longo had been an arbitrary one like the Bach-Gesellschaft ordering of Bach’s cantatas.)
The Sonata in G, K. 105, has an overall shape that can be regarded as typical for Scarlatti: the usual swing from tonic to dominant in the first half, followed by a return in the second half by way of a FOP or “far-out point” (in this case, the cadence on B minor (iii) in mm. 118–19). As is also typical for Scarlatti, the endings of each binary half match up with their counterparts more closely than the beginnings, so that a drive to completion is achieved. What makes the sonata unforgettable, though, is not its general contours but the specific harmonic content, which is also “typically Scarlattian,” but in an unusually, almost uniquely concentrated fashion. Beginning half-way through the first half, and even more pervasively in the second half, the harmony is rife with dissonant seconds, few of which can be considered “chord tones,” and even fewer of which resolve in normally prescribed fashion to consonances. In mm. 39–41 (the beginning of Ex. 7-19) their actual function is best perceived. The harmony is clearly A major. The Ds in the left hand, however, show no tendency whatever to resolve to C instead, they seem to cling to the E in a sort of decorative cluster.
In fact, this pungent decoration was widely employed by harpsichordists. Francesco Geminiani, an Italian violinist who worked in England, called particular attention to it in his Treatise of Good Taste in the Art of Musick (1749): “No performer should flatter himself that he is able to accompany well till he is master of this delicate and admirable secret which has been in use above a hundred years.”29 But before Scarlatti it was rarely written down (which was why it was a “secret”). A sort of simultaneous mordent, it was called acciaccatura (from acciaccare, to bruise or batter). Scarlatti was uniquely drawn to its use and, by notating it, put it “on the map.”
The deliciously grotesque passage shown in Ex. 7-19, where the acciaccaturas are maintained throughout like a sort of pedal (or—more to the point—like a constantly strummed open string), discloses the reason for Scarlatti’s seeming obsession with them. By combining the acciaccaturas with “Phrygian” neighbor notes (B applied to A in the first half, E applied to D in the second), Scarlatti unmistakably conjures up the sound of “Flamenco” guitars, the Andalusian gypsy style that has become pervasive in Spanish popular music, and that must have already been a conspicuous part of the sonic landscape in Scarlatti’s day.
The Sonata in E major, K. 264, is one of Scarlatti’s most vagarious essays in modulation. The first half already contains chords whose roots lie the very maximum distance—namely, a tritone—away from the tonic on a complete (rather than diatonically adjusted) circle of fifths. The second half begins with a remarkable excursion (Ex. 7-20) in which the traditional FOP seems to be pushed much farther than ever before, requiring an enharmonic alteration of the key signature to avoid a huge proliferation of double (or even triple) sharps. The harmonic distance covered in Ex. 7-20, though covered very unconventionally (by a sequence of three successive ascending whole steps adding up to another tritone: B−C [= D]−E−F), turns out to be not all that great; the cadence point at the end of the example is C, merely the “minor vi” or “flat submediant” of E (that is, the submediant of the parallel minor), and though played around with at length, it is never exceeded. Far more significant, perhaps, is the fact that the strange modulation is carried by a melodic sequence drawn from the sonata’s opening pair of measures, so that it could be regarded as a motivic development.
The “perhaps” is necessary, because a modulatory motivic development at the beginning of the second binary half, culminating in the FOP, was something that would later become a virtual sine qua non or mandate for “classical” sonata composers; but it happens only ad libitum (“when he pleases”) with Scarlatti. For him it is only one of many ways of proceeding, and a rather exceptional one at that. Its “significance” is something that we judge, inevitably, with a hindsight the composer did not possess.
The same goes for the overall shape of the Sonata in F minor, K. 481, a plaintive andante cantabile, in which the beginning of the second half features another bold enharmonic modulation over a motive derived from the first half (compare Ex. 7-21a with Ex. 7-21b), again arriving at a bizarre FOP that is the exact reciprocal of the one in the previous sonata. Instead of the submediant of a major tonic’s parallel minor, we have the submediant of a minor tonic’s parallel major.
But there is something else to notice. In this sonata, the return of the original tonic happens to coincide with a return of the opening thematic material. This dramatic “double return” (original key arriving together with the original theme) was something else that would become practically de rigueur by the last quarter of the eighteenth century, and a defining attribute of the “classical” sonata form. The double return is often thought typical of Scarlatti, because the most famous Scarlatti sonata of all—C major, K. 159, a favorite of piano teachers everywhere (Ex. 7-22)—happens to have one (compare the beginning with m. 43).
But the double return is actually a great rarity in Scarlatti’s work. If we take an exclusively “horizontal” or synchronic view of his output (that is, comparing it only to what was going on in its own time), the double return will seem an insignificant caprice, even an eccentricity. If, on the other hand, we take a “vertical” or diachronic view (comparing it to what came before and after), it will appear momentously significant, even prophetic. Which view is the true view?
Obviously, it is a question of perspective. Both are true views, but neither is the true view. To Scarlatti’s contemporaries, his sonatas, while much admired by connoisseurs, were admired as “original and happy freaks,”30 to quote Dr. Burney—the offbeat products of an imaginative but isolated and pampered genius. (It was no doubt the self-indulgent quality of his work that gave rise to the rumor, contradicted at last by recently discovered portraits, that in his late years Scarlatti became too fat to reach the keyboard when seated.) As Ralph Kirkpatrick put it, a composer as fertile, as prolific, and as nonchalant as Scarlatti “would have been perfectly capable of discovering the classical sonata form and then throwing it away.”31 And yet to many other modern historians and performers, Scarlatti’s harmonic and formal experiments have made him seem no mere eccentric, but “an epoch-making composer,”32 to quote Fernando Valenti (1926–90), an eminent harpsichordist who did a great deal to popularize Scarlatti’s work. According to this view, Scarlatti was a more “advanced” composer than Bach or Handel, his fellows in the class of 1685. There are facts that may be cited to justify such a view. The most persuasive one, paradoxically enough, would be Scarlatti’s retarded development.
Surely one of the latest bloomers among the major names in music history, Scarlatti only came into his own as a composer in 1738, with the publication of his first book, Essercizi per gravicembalo. By then the class of 1685 were all aged fifty-three, and Bach’s and Handel’s careers were largely behind them. Scarlatti was just beginning to be “Scarlatti,” and thus his effective starting point coincided with Bach’s and Handel’s finish lines. As a composer, then, Scarlatti might better be regarded not as a contemporary of J. S. Bach but rather as an elder member of the generation of Bach’s sons.
Such a view of Scarlatti, of course, reflects a general historical view that places the highest premium on teleological evolution, and on innovation, evolution’s handmaiden. It is known as the “Darwinian” theory of history, after a fundamental misreading of the work of Charles Darwin, the biologist whose (entirely non-teleological) theory of evolution has dominated natural history since 1859, the year in which his masterwork, The Origin of Species, was published. By then, of course, the members of the class of 1685 had all been dead a hundred years or more. It is clearly anachronistic from the point of view of Scarlatti and his contemporaries. Does that make it an altogether irrelevant criterion of judgment?
Many historians and musicians in the twentieth century have not thought so. The Darwinian view of music history was given a memorable expression by Igor Stravinsky, a highly innovative modern composer, when commenting on an extravagantly Darwinian historical study by Edward Lowinsky called Tonality and Atonality in Sixteenth-Century Music. Lowinsky had contended that if a historian can show a trend or an accomplishment, no matter how small or how isolated, to have been “pregnant with the seed of future developments,” then “it does not seem a matter of decisive importance whether it represents, say ten, fifteen, or twenty per cent” of the total musical output its time.33 “Or, indeed, a smaller per cent still,” Stravinsky enthusiastically chimed in, perhaps recalling the recent history of Russia, his native country, and the “Three Who Made a Revolution” (to cite the title of an influential study of Lenin, Stalin, and Trotsky by Bertram D. Wolfe).34
In back of an apparently scientific view, then, is a more general cultural assumption that significant history is the creation of small elites. When it is put in this way, the political implications (or foundations) of the view are more easily noticed. Exclusively diachronic views of historical phenomena, and the concomitant tendency to overrate innovation, have lost some ground as a result. But an exclusively synchronic view may tend to overrate eccentricity and obscure the reality of “trends and accomplishments.” Again, it is more important for us right now to understand the question than it is to adjudicate it. Rather than attempt to decide the matter of Scarlatti’s “true” significance or to harmonize the vividly conflicting perspectives on his achievement, we can regard him as an archetype of “peripheral” composers—composers who are geographically and temperamentally remote from the centers of institutional and commercial music making, but (perhaps seemingly, perhaps truly) “ahead of their time.” Whether “seemingly” or “truly” depends on the manner in which the times make contact with the individual, and (inevitably) on the interests and biases of the historian.