My Only Comfort: Death, Deliverance, and Discipleship in the Music of Bach (Calvin Institute of Christian Worship Liturgical Studies Series) - Softcover

Stapert, Calvin R.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0802844723 ISBN 13: 9780802844729

Publisher: William B Eerdmans Publishing Co, 2000

Synopsis

In the history of Western music, J. S. Bach is unsurpassed in mastery of technique and profundity of thought. He was also a devout Lutheran with a broad knowledge of Scripture and theology. Given Bach's combination of musical prowess, personal devotion, and theological depth, it is not surprising that his music stands unexcelled among artistic expressions of the Christian faith. With the passage of time, however, many of the essential keys to understanding Bach's music have been lost. My Only Comfort uniquely reconnects modern listeners with Bach's music, enabling them to listen to Bach with renewed understanding and appreciation. After an introduction to Bach, his theological knowledge, his musical language, and the various genres of sacred music in his output, Calvin Stapert leads readers through specific works by Bach that express, interpret, and vivify some of the principal doctrines of the Christian faith. For each work discussed, Stapert provides relevant quotations from the Heidelberg Catechism (a novel and provocative approach to the study of Bach), a literal translation of the text set beside the German original, and textual and musical commentary meant to contribute to a more perceptive and devotional listening to the work.

About this title

About the Author

Calvin R. Stapert is professor emeritus of music at Calvin College, Grand Rapids, Michigan. His previous books include My Only Comfort: Death, Deliverance, and Discipleship in the Music of Bach; Handel's Messiah: Comfort for God's People; and A New Song for an Old World: Musical Thought in the Early Church.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

MY ONLY COMFORT

Death, Deliverance, and Discipleship in the Music of BachBy Calvin R. Stapert

William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company

Copyright © 2000 Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8028-4472-9

Contents

Preface..............................................xi"Essential" and "Canonical" Bach.....................3Bach the Theologian..................................7Bach's Musical Language..............................12Cantatas.............................................20Motets...............................................29Chorale Preludes.....................................31Passions and Oratorios...............................33Mass in B Minor......................................42Prologue: My Only Comfort............................51Part I: Death........................................62Part II: Deliverance.................................74Part III: Discipleship...............................165Glossary.............................................227Works Cited..........................................231Index................................................235

Introduction

"Essential" and "Canonical" Bach

The earliest ancestor of J. S. Bach that we know of is a certain Viet Bach, a baker from Hungary who, in the late sixteenth century, fled to the Thuringian region of Germany because of his Lutheran religion. This we learn from a genealogy that Bach compiled in 1735. The genealogy adds that Viet "found his greatest pleasure in a little cittern, which he took with him even into the mill and played upon while the grinding was going on" (The New Bach Reader, 283). From this humble, pious baker who loved to play the cittern sprang a line of musicians so numerous that, by the time his greatest descendant, Johann Sebastian, was born in 1685, the name Bach was synonymous with "musician" in Thuringia.

Viet, of course, could have had no idea of the magnitude of the influence his descendants would have on the musical life of Thuringians for the next two centuries. Much less could he have had any idea that one of them would be revered during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as one of the greatest musicians of all time, perhaps even as the greatest of them all. In his wildest dreams he could not have imagined that at the beginning of the twenty-first century millions of people around the whole world would be paying tribute to that descendant on the 250th anniversary of his death. Even Johann Sebastian himself, though he was very much aware of his musical ability, would no doubt be surprised to see how much fuss the world — not just Thuringia — is making over his anniversary.

Though the whole world is celebrating Bach's anniversary, it is fair to say that few people truly understand his music because an understanding of his music begins with the cantatas. The cantatas are central to what musicologist Richard Taruskin calls the "essential Bach," but they are peripheral to the Bach most people are familiar with — the "canonical Bach" of the Brandenburg Concertos, the suites and sonatas, the Well-Tempered Clavier, the Mass in B Minor, and, to a certain extent, the Passions. I do not mean to say that these "canonical" works are not in some sense "truly" Bach. That, of course, would be absurd. But I do mean to say that these "canonical" works are best understood in the light of the cantatas, not vice versa.

The great nineteenth-century composer Johannes Brahms understood something of the importance of the cantatas. His friend Siegfried Ochs told a story in his autobiography that reveals the high esteem in which Brahms held the cantatas. One evening Brahms and three friends — Ochs, Hans von Blow, and Hermann Wolff — were discussing music. According to Ochs, Brahms

fell upon Hans von Blow with the reproach that he played much too little Bach, moreover was not concerned enough with him and knew next to nothing of, as an example of the best of his creations, the church cantatas. Blow defended himself and claimed to know at least seven or eight cantatas well. "That proves that you know none of them, for there are more than two hundred," said Brahms. (Trans. in Knapp, "Finale of Brahms' Fourth," 4)

He then went to the piano and played a movement from Bach's Cantata 150.

Whatever the truth may be regarding the details of this charming anecdote, it certainly rings true with what we know about Brahms. As one of the subscribers to the Bach Gesellschaft edition of the complete works of Bach, he was well known for his admiration of Bach. And since that edition begins with the cantatas, and therefore would have been the first works the subscribers received, there can be little doubt that Brahms' knowledge of the cantatas was thorough and comprehensive. Furthermore, at least one of the sources for the theme and some of the technical procedures of the last movement of Brahms' Symphony No. 4 was the movement of Cantata 150 mentioned in the story.

Posterity in general has not been as astute as Brahms, so the cantatas became, and remain, a peripheral part of Bach's output. The reason Bach's cantatas, in the eyes of posterity, moved from the center to the periphery is the post-Enlightenment preference for generic religious feeling over an explicit Christian message. Bach's cantatas do not fit that bill; they are nothing if not explicitly Christian. So after his death in 1750, Bach's un-Enlightened music was hardly known until 1829, when Felix Mendelssohn conducted a performance of the St. Matthew Passion. This started a revival that gave Bach's music an honored place in the classical music canon, a place it still occupies today more securely than ever. But, as we have already noted, the "canonical Bach" is not the "essential Bach." The emphasis in the canonical Bach is on the instrumental music. The vocal music, of course, is not totally ignored, but the post-Enlightened mind accepts it only after mentally divorcing the music from the explicitly Christian content of its texts. The Mass in B Minor, because of a well-ingrained post-Enlightenment habit of mentally filtering out the undesirably specific content of Mass texts, had little problem entering the canon. It could even be trumpeted as "the greatest piece of music ever written." But the Passions, certainly no less great, present a big problem to the post-Enlightenment mind. So do the cantatas. Although the cantatas are of smaller dimensions than the Passions, they are so numerous and maintain Bachian levels of artistry so consistently that they can hardly be ignored. The problem is that the Passion and cantata texts are more explicitly Christian than post-Enlightened minds can tolerate, and they require great mental gymnastics to render them generically religious. Therefore, for most music lovers, they exist uncomfortably at the margins of Bach's repertory.

In his 1991 New York Times review of the Teldec recordings of the complete church cantatas of Bach (reprinted in Text and Act, pp. 307-15), Richard Taruskin summarizes the post-Enlightenment problem with the "essential Bach" of the cantatas. It stems, he says, from the Enlightenment definition of music, given classic formulation by Charles Burney in the 1770s and still repeated in various guises in most dictionaries today: "Music is the art of pleasing by the succession and combination of agreeable sounds." To this Taruskin exclaims:

How utterly irrelevant this whole esthetic is to the Bach of the cantatas! [For the] essential Bach was an avatar of a pre-Enlightened — and when push came to shove, a violent anti-Enlightened — temper. His music was a medium of truth, not beauty.... [For him] there is no "music itself." His concept of music derived from and inevitably contained The Word. (309-10)

Post-Enlightenment discomfort with the specific message of Bach's vocal music appeared already on the eve of Mendelssohn's performance of the St. Matthew Passion. Mendelssohn's teacher, Carl Friedrich Zelter, said that the obstacle "toward appreciation" in Bach's music was "the altogether contemptible German church texts, which suffer from the earnest polemic of the Reformation." Such a "thick fog of belief," he said, "stirs up nothing but disbelief" (quoted in Taruskin, 311).

That post-Enlightened attitude persists to the present. Here is a blurb that appeared in Encore, the magazine of BMG Classical Music Service. To reassure its post-Enlightened customers that buying CDs of Bach's cantatas and Passions would not threaten their generic religious sensibilities, BMG makes this outrageous claim:

From his cantatas to his epic Passions and oratorios, most of Bach's music was written for the Lutheran Church. Interestingly, Bach never used his music to interpret or dramatize the sacred texts he set. Instead, he distilled their message into music of unparalleled purity and profundity.

Perhaps the most flagrant statement along these lines came from Albert Schweitzer. He said that the texts of the cantatas and Passions "are so insignificant that we need all the beauty of the music to make us forget them" (J. S. Bach, le musicien-pote, 241). Bach would have been horrified! His aim was to write music that would vivify the Christian message of the texts and make them memorable. That was the end to which he bent his uncommon energy and unsurpassed musical skill.

Bach the Theologian

To call Bach a theologian may seem a bit of a stretch. He was not a theologian by profession; he never even went to university. But as a composer for the Lutheran church in the eighteenth century, he had to have more than a little theological knowledge. Even leaving aside the evidence of his compositions, there is good reason to believe that Bach had a fair amount of theological knowledge. What evidence there is should be enough to convince all but the most committed skeptic, not only that Bach did know more than enough theology to do his job well, but that his deep faith drove him to study theology beyond the requirements of his job.

Bach's theological knowledge was rooted in what he learned when he was young. He grew up in the Thuringian area of Germany, in the heart of "Luther country."

Martin Luther was born at Eisleben, in the northern part of Thuringia, in 1483, and died there in 1546. He went to the Lateinschule in Eisenach (the same that Bach was to attend two centuries later) and to the University of Erfurt, and it was at the Wartburg Castle, overlooking Eisenach, that he found refuge after being excommunicated and outlawed by the Diet of Worms. The spiritual presence of [Luther] remained strong throughout Thuringia. (Boyd, 2)

Since he grew up in an environment steeped in Lutheran tradition, it would be surprising if Bach did not receive a good amount of religious instruction at home.

Bach was eight years old when he first registered in the Latin school in Eisenach. He advanced rapidly in a curriculum that was heavily oriented toward religious instruction.

In Quinta he studied the Catechism, Psalms, and Bible, history, writing, and reading, particularly the Gospels and Epistles in German and Latin.... In Quarta Sebastian studied the German Catechism and Psalter, Latin declensions, conjugations, and vocabulary. (Terry, Bach: A Biography, 21)

Two years later, after both of his parents died, he went to Ohrdruf to live in the home of his older brother, Johann Christoph. For five years he attended the Klosterschule, a school with a fine reputation, "where the progressive educational reforms of Comenius ... had been adopted, and which attracted pupils from as far away as Kassel and Jena" (Boyd, Bach: A Biography, 8). Here, too, theology was at the heart of the curriculum, and again his progress was rapid.

It would appear that, coming to Ohrdruf from Eisenach, probably in February 1695, he worked his way out of Quarta in half a year. He was barely ten when he entered the class, the average age of whose pupils was twelve. Its curriculum comprised `Teutsche Materien' (Catechism, Gospels, Psalms), Comenius's Vestibulum, Reyher's minor Dialogues, essays (exercitia styli), and Greek rudiments. Promoted on the examinations held in August 1695, Sebastian passed up to Tertia and faced the unamiable Arnold, who taught more intensively the subjects already studied in Quarta, substituting Reyher's larger Dialogues for Comenius. Again Sebastian's precocity is evident: the youngest Tertian, he was in July 1696 first among the seven `novitii'. By July 1697 he climbed to the top of the class and was promoted to Secunda. Here, besides studying Cicero's letters in Johannes Rivius's edition, he was introduced to that stout champion of Lutheran orthodoxy, Leonhard Hutter's (1563-1616) Compendium locorum theologicorum (1610), hard fare for a young mind. (Terry, Bach: A Biography, 27-28)

Bach's school days concluded with three years at the Michaelisschule in Lneburg from 1700 to 1702. Again "a distinctly theological education formed the center of instruction" (Stiller, 175). Hutter's Compendium continued to be part of the curriculum, and through it Bach

became intimately acquainted with the most essential details of orthodox Lutheran theology.

Thus we may say without reservation that Johann Sebastian Bach's training in school was extensively carried out and determined theologically, predominately in the sense of strict Lutheran orthodoxy, and that he possessed a finished theological education when he left school. (Stiller, 175)

"Finished" is surely too strong a term. Though he advanced rapidly and is reported to have been of "quick comprehension" and "extraordinary understanding" (Stiller, 175), he was still only seventeen when he left school. But it is clear that his study did not end with his schooling. His jobs kept him in close contact with pastors and people in academia. Some of them — for example, Georg Christian Eilmar, who was the pastor of the Marienkirche in Mhlhausen when Bach worked at the Blasiuskirche in the same town — became his close friends. Eilmar was godfather to Bach's first child, and it is hard to imagine that they did not engage in theological discussions that were more than casual and occasional. Part of the requirement for the job at Leipzig was to pass a substantial and thorough theological test, and once on the job Bach of necessity had to discuss cantata texts with the pastors.

Bach's library indicates that he "did his homework" and that he would have been able to hold his own in both professional and convivial theological discussions with colleagues and friends. When he died, an inventory of his belongings, including his books, was made. Fifty-two titles (over eighty volumes) appear on the inventory, all of them theological works (see The New Bach Reader, 253-54). At the top of the list is "Calovius, Writings, 3 volumes" (about which more presently). Next come two sets of Luther's complete works. Also included are Martin Chemnitz's fourvolume reply to the Council of Trent, Olearius's three-volume Bible commentary, and Johannes Mller's Defense of Luther. Most of the authors were orthodox Lutherans, but two Pietists, Auguste Hermann Francke and Philipp Jakob Spener, also appear on the list. There is a volume by Heinrich Bnting entitled Itinerarium Sacrae Scripturae, which describes the travels of characters in the Bible. Josephus's History of the Jews is there, as is a volume of sermons by Johann Tauler, a fourteenth-century Dominican monk and follower of the mystic Meister Eckhart.

The only books from Bach's library known to survive today are those at the top of the inventory, the three volumes of the Bible commentary of Abraham Calov. Actually Calov was more the compiler than the author, as the title page makes clear.

J. N. J. [In Nomine Jesu.] The German Bible of Dr. Martin Luther so clearly and thoroughly expounded from the original language, the context, and the parallel passages, with the addition of the exposition to be found in Luther's writings, so that, in addition to proper arrangement, everywhere the real literal understanding, and to a considerable extent also the salutary application, of Holy Scripture, especially together with the inspiring words of that man of God, is presented by Dr. Abraham Calov. (Trans. Leaver, J. S. Bach and Scripture, 52)

Bach's copies of these three volumes are now in the possession of the Concordia Seminary library in St. Louis, but their whereabouts was unknown until they were discovered in a farmhouse near Frankenmuth, Michigan, in 1934. In his introduction to J. S. Bach and Scripture, Robin Leaver tells the fascinating story of the rediscovery of these volumes by Pastor Christian G. Riedel of Detroit, a delegate to the meetings of the Michigan District of the Lutheran ChurchMissouri Synod in Frankenmuth. Riedel was staying with his cousin, a seventy-four-year-old farmer named Leonard Reichle, who showed him the third volume of the Calov Bible commentary. Riedel noticed something on the title page that Reichle had missed — Bach's monogram and the date 1733! Subsequent searching eventually led to the discovery of the remaining two volumes in a chest in Reichle's attic. Bach's monogram was on each volume.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from MY ONLY COMFORTby Calvin R. Stapert Copyright © 2000 by Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.. Excerpted by permission of William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Edition details

• Publisher: William B Eerdmans Publishing Co
• Publication date: 2000
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0802844723
• ISBN 13: 9780802844729
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 241