Oratorios, Passions, Latin works.

The three works that Bach called ‘oratorios’ fall within a very short period: the Christmas Oratorio of 1734–5, the Easter Oratorio and Ascension Oratorio of 1735. The librettists are not known for certain. The place for Bach’s oratorios in the Lutheran liturgy was the same as that for the cantata; the only difference between the oratorio and cantata texts is that the former have a self-contained ‘plot’ or take the form of narration with dialogue. This conforms with the history of the genre, although Bach held the tendency to formal expansiveness firmly in check, in comparison with standard Italian practice. In the Christmas Oratorio, especially, the normal character of a single self-contained work is contradicted by its being split into sections for six different services between Christmas Day and Epiphany, and this is further emphasized by Bach in his use of different performing forces for the sections (although these are based on an underlying general scheme, and are grouped round six scenes from the Bible, with certain divergences from the allocation of lessons to be read at the various services). The unusual conception of an oratorio performed over several days is reminiscent of the Lübeck Abendmusiken, and the Christmas Oratorio obviously belongs to the oratorio tradition established by Buxtehude. All three of Bach’s oratorios are essentially based on parodies of secular cantatas whose music, initially associated with a particular occasion, could reasonably be re-used in this way (the Christmas Oratorio from nos.213, 214 and 215 among other works; the Easter Oratorio by a reworking of parts of bwv249a; the Ascension Oratorio above all from bwv Anh.18). However, there is so much that is new and individual in the Christmas Oratorio, especially in the biblical choruses and the chorales, and in the Ascension Oratorio, that the works are in no sense subordinate to their originals. The pervasive use of texts from the Gospels, moreover, gives the works a special status, linking them to the Protestant historia and thus ultimately to the Passion.

Of the five Passions mentioned in the necrology two survive (St Matthew and St John), for one the text survives (St Mark) and the other two are lost. Judging from the source it seems probable that the anonymous St Luke Passion – which is certainly not by Bach – was included among his works in error because the score, dating from about 1730, was copied in his hand and contained additions by him. This means that only one Passion remains to be accounted for. Recent research has shown that various movements in the second version of the St John Passion (1725) were taken from a Passion composed for Weimar, most notably the chorus ‘O Mensch bewein’ and the three arias ‘Himmel, reisse’, ‘Zerschmettert mich’ and ‘Ach windet euch nicht so’. Curiously enough, Hilgenfeldt (1850) mentioned a Passion by Bach dating from 1717, giving no indication of the source of his information, and Bach gave a guest recital at the Gotha court during the Passion period in 1717, making it conceivable that he put on a Passion performance while the post of Kapellmeister was vacant. Also, he performed Keiser’s St Mark Passion in Weimar in about 1713, so his interest in the genre is established for the period. The missing fifth Passion must almost certainly, therefore, be a lost Weimar work, but the traces are too few to allow any conclusions to be drawn about it.

The three known works represent the same type of oratorio Passion, in the tradition of the historia, in which the biblical text is retained as a whole (with ‘parts’ for soloists – Evangelist, Jesus, Pilate etc. – and the turba choruses for disciples, high priests etc.), and is interrupted by contemplative, so-called ‘madrigal’ pieces set to freely composed verse, as well as by chorales. A special feature of Bach’s Passions is the unusual frequency of the chorales, which are set in simple yet extremely expressive four-part writing. The text of the St John Passion of 1724, Bach’s first large-scale vocal work for Leipzig, is not a unified piece of work. The freely composed parts rely heavily on the famous Passion poem by B.H. Brockes (Der für die Sünde der Welt gemarterte und sterbende Jesus, 1712) and on texts by C.H. Postel (c1700) and Christian Weise (1675); besides this, the Evangelist’s part contains interpolations from St Matthew’s Gospel. Unlike any other of Bach’s large-scale works, the St John Passion underwent substantial changes of every kind in the course of its various performances. For the second performance, in 1725, Bach produced a much altered version adapted conceptually to the cycle of chorale cantatas (see §13) by the incorporation of movements based on a cantus firmus. In a third version (probably of 1732) the interpolations from St Matthew were cut and a new aria and sinfonia added (both lost). Finally a fourth version of 1749 saw the work restored to something much closer to its original form; besides some changes to the text, for his last performance of a Passion in Leipzig Bach greatly enlarged the performing forces (by a part for bassono grosso among other things). It seems that Bach began a thorough-going revision of the work in 1739, but for some reason abandoned the process halfway through movement 10 and did not resume it; furthermore the alterations he made at that time were not adopted in the 1749 performance. For all the modifications made over the 25-year period, the setting of the biblical Passion text remained the work’s constant centre, around which the madrigalian movements in particular were fitted in various ways like different settings for a gemstone. Bach skilfully exploited the network of internal textual correspondences which is unique to St John’s Gospel, and convincingly translated it into an ‘architectural’ structure.

The history of the St Matthew Passion, with its double chorus, is less complicated, though not entirely straightforward. In this case the date of the first performance seems now to be established (the Thomaskirche, Good Friday 1727), but some details of that occasion remain unclear because of lacunae in the source material (version bwv244b). Furthermore, some ten movements from the St Matthew Passion were incorporated into the Cöthen funeral music of 1729 (bwv244a), and the consequences of that for the repeat of the Passion in the same year are not known. On the whole the St Matthew Passion is a considerably more unified piece than the St John, for which the primary reason is its use of Picander’s text. Its greater textual and musical scale allows more space for the arias and ‘madrigal’ pieces in which the coupling of arioso with aria is an especially characteristic feature. Another special feature is the way the strings provide an accompanying halo in Jesus’s recitatives. The pervading cyclical formation of the work (from the interrelating of the chorales, tonal organization and paired movements) is in some respects even more pronounced than in the St John Passion, while it lacks the earlier work’s ‘architectural’ centre. After 1729 the St Matthew Passion had at least two more performances under Bach’s direction. In 1736 he made some important changes, chief among them emphasizing the separation of the two choruses and instrumental ensembles by division of the continuo, exchanging the simple chorale at the end of part i for ‘O Mensch bewein’ and replacing the lute in ‘Komm süsses Kreuz’ with bass viol. The additional alterations of about 1742 were mainly a matter of meeting practical performing conditions.

In its main sections, that is in the ‘madrigal’ pieces, the St Mark Passion of 1731 was a parody work whose main sources are the Trauer Ode (Cantata no.198) and the Cöthen funeral music (bwv244a). While only the text survives, the musical design can in part be deduced from these models, although they scarcely permit it to be reconstructed satisfactorily. The Bach literature includes discussion of parody relationships which go further than this, but they seem to raise more questions than they answer. The most plausible suggestion, made by Smend (1940–48), is that some of the exceptionally large number of chorales in the St Mark Passion may have survived in the collections of Bach’s four-part chorales.

In Bach’s time Latin polyphonic music was still often used in ordinary Lutheran Sunday worship, particularly, in Leipzig, at important church feasts. Further, the concerted Magnificat continued to hold its place in Vespers. Bach had been interested in Latin polyphonic music at least since his Weimar period, as his copies of pieces by other composers demonstrate (Peranda, Durante, Pez, Wilderer, Bassani, Caldara, Lotti, Palestrina etc.; catalogue in Wolff, 1968). He also wrote insertions in this style for other composers’ works, and made some arrangements (Sanctus bwv241; Credo intonation for a mass by Bassani; ‘Suscepit Israel’ for a Magnificat by Caldara). His earliest surviving work of this type is probably the Kyrie bwv233a on the cantus firmus ‘Christe, du Lamm Gottes’. Then in his first year at Leipzig came the five-part Magnificat, first the E version with four inserted Christmas pieces (bwv243a), revised in D major in 1733, without the Christmas pieces, for use on any major feast day (bwv243). Among the various Sanctus settings attributed to Bach, apart from bwv232^III, probably only bwv237 and 238 (both 1723) are original compositions. The four short masses (bwv233–6), mostly parody works based on cantata movements, date from about 1738. In the careful selection of models and the subsequent reworking of the musical material, these works, together with the B minor Mass, amount to a valuable anthology of Bach’s vocal writing in music of outstandingly high quality. The transposition of German cantata movements into mass settings did more than replace German words, contingent on the time and occasion of their writing, with the timelessness of the Latin (and Greek) texts; it also removed the limitations imposed on the cantatas by their place in the annual church cycle and gave them a more general validity. The longer-term outcome of this was seen soon after 1750, when specifically the Latin sacred music was hailed by connoisseurs like Marpurg, Kirnberger, Hiller and even the south German Prince-Abbot Gerbert as a particularly important sector of Bach’s music.

Bach’s masterpiece in this genre is of course the work known – though not conceived as a unity – as the B minor Mass. Its genesis stretched over more than two decades. Bach’s aim seems originally to have been to bring together a collection of exemplary large-scale mass movements rather than to create a single, cyclical work on an unprecedented scale. In assembling the whole score in 1748–9, however, the composer undoubtedly had the intention of making it a comprehensive work of consistent quality. The oldest section is the Sanctus of 1724. The Kyrie and Gloria come from the 1733 Missa dedicated to the Dresden court, while the Credo or ‘Symbolum Nicenum’ was composed only during Bach’s last years. In many respects these two main sections represent Bach’s ideals not of Latin polyphonic music alone but of vocal music altogether: in their stylistic multiplicity (the contrast of deliberately archaic and modern styles; the experimentation with the widest variety of instrumental and vocal techniques); their abandonment of the da capo aria and the recitative; and in their formal perfection. The 1733 Missa (reminiscent of the Magnificat in its five-part writing) emerges as a completely integrated, unified whole, typified by the inner logic of the tonal organization (B minor–D–F minor–D–A–D–G–B minor–D) and the disposition of the vocal and instrumental solos. The Credo is a particularly good example of Bach’s many-layered and symmetrical layout (Table 1). The Missa and the Credo have a series of parody originals (including movements from Cantatas nos.29, 46, 171, 12 and 120); in the latter the ‘Credo’, ‘Et incarnatus’ and ‘Confiteor’ seem to be the only original compositions.

An earlier version of ‘Credo in unum Deum’ exists, dating from the early 1740s, while ‘Et incarnatus’ may be the last vocal composition that Bach completed. However, Bach’s reworking of earlier material went much further than usual. In ‘Agnus Dei’, in particular, nearly half the movement was completely revised, using new thematic material. When the entire work was nearly finished Bach revised it once more, probably in 1749, adding ‘Et incarnatus’ (the words of which he had originally set as part of the aria ‘Et in unum Dominum’). The music of the new ‘Et incarnatus’ is reminiscent of a movement in Pergolesi’s Stabat mater, and in its combination of unorthodox polyphony and musically expressive gesture points the way forward to a new stylistic sensibility. It is all the more astonishing that Bach successfully followed it with the earliest music in the mass, the ‘Crucifixus’ (from the second movement of Cantata no.12) – though he did bring this up to date with a more empfindsam style of continuo and more subtle instrumentation of the upper parts.

It was obviously not by chance that Bach turned in his old age to the mass genre. With its centuries-old tradition, by comparison with such modern genres as the cantata and oratorio, the setting of the mass had a natural affinity to the historical and theoretical dimensions of Bach's musical thinking, which also bore fruit in the monothematic instrumental works of his last years.

Bach, §III: (7) Johann Sebastian Bach

Date: 2015-12-11; view: 812