Music in the History of the Western Church

Certainly no other religious institution has come so near the solution of the problem of the proper use of the instrumental solo in public worship. Through the connection of the organ music with the people’s hymn in the choral prelude, and the conformity of its style to that of the choir music in motet and cantata, it became vitally blended with the whole office of praise and prayer; its effect was to gather up and merge all individual emotions into the projection of the mood of aspiration that was common to all.

The work performed by Bach for the church cantata was somewhat similar in nature to his service to the choral prelude, and was carried out with a far more lavish expenditure of creative power. The cantata, now no longer a constituent of the German Evangelical worship, in the eighteenth century held a place in the ritual analogous to that occupied by the anthem in the morning and evening prayer of the Church of England. It is always of larger scale than the anthem, and its size was one cause of its exclusion in the arbitrary and irregular reductions which the Evangelical liturgies have undergone in the last century and a half. There is nothing in its florid character to justify this procedure, for it may be, and in Bach usually is, more closely related to the ritual framework than the English anthem, in consequence of the manner in which it has been made to absorb strictly liturgic forms into its substance. Bach, in his cantatas, kept the notion of liturgic unity clearly in mind. He effected this unity largely by his use of the choral as a conspicuous element in the cantata, often as its very foundation. He checked the Italianizing process by working the arioso recitative, the aria for one or more voices, and the chorus into one grand musical scheme, in which his intricate organ style served both as fabric and decoration. By the unexampled prominence which he gave the choral as a mine of thematic material, he gave the cantata not only a striking originality, but also an air of unmistakable fitness to the character and special expression of the confession which it served. By these means, which are concerned with its form, and still more by the astonishing variety, truth, and beauty with which he was able to meet the needs of each occasion for which a work of this kind was appointed, he endowed his Church and nation with a treasure of religious song compared with which, for magnitude, diversity, and power, the creative work of any other church musician that may be named – Palestrina, Gabrieli, or whoever he may be – sinks into insignificance.

Bach wrote five series of cantatas for the Sundays and festal days of the church year – in all two hundred and ninety-five. Of these two hundred and sixty-six were written at Leipsic. They vary greatly in length, the shortest occupying twenty minutes or so in performance, the longest an hour or more. Taken together, they afford such an astonishing display of versatility that any proper characterization of them in a single chapter would be quite out of the question. A considerable number are available for study in Peters’s cheap edition, and the majority are analyzed with respect to their salient features in Spitta’s encyclopedic Bach biography. Among the great diversity of interesting qualities which they exhibit, the employment of the choral must be especially emphasized as affording the clue, already indicated, to Bach’s whole conception of the cantata as a species of religious art. The choral, especially that appointed for a particular day (Hauptlied), is often used as the guiding thread which weaves the work into the texture of the whole daily office. In such cases the chosen choral will appear in the different numbers of the work in fragments or motives, sometimes as subject for voice parts, or woven into the accompaniment as theme or in obligato fashion. It is more common for entire lines of the choral to be treated as canti firmi, forming the subjects on which elaborate contrapuntal choruses are constructed, following precisely the same principle of design that I have described in the case of the organ choral preludes. In multitudes of cantata movements lines or verses from two or more chorals are introduced. There are cantatas, such as “Wer nur den lieben Gott,” in which each number, whether recitative, aria, or chorus, takes its thematic material, intact or modified, from a choral. The famous “Ein’ feste Burg,” is a notable example of a cantata in which Bach adheres to a hymn-tune in every number, treating it line by line, deriving from it the pervading tone of the work is well as its constructional plan. The ways in which Bach applies the store of popular religious melody to the higher uses of art are legion. A cantata of Bach usually ends with a choral in its complete ordinary form, plainly but richly harmonized in note-for-note four-part setting as though for congregational singing. It was not the custom, however, in Bach’s day for the congregation to join in this closing choral. There are cantatas, such as the renowned “Ich hatte viel Bekümmerniss,” in which the choral melody nowhere appears. Such cantatas are rare, and the use of the choral became more prominent and systematic in Bach’s work as time went on.

The devotional ideal of the Protestant Church as compared with the Catholic gives far more liberal recognition to the private religious consciousness of the individual. The believer does not so completely surrender his personality; in his mental reactions to the ministrations of the clergy he still remains aware of that inner world of experience which is his world, not merged and lost in the universalized life of a religious community. The Church is his inspirer and guide, not his absolute master. The foundation of the German choral was a religious declaration of independence. The German hymns were each the testimony of a thinker to his own private conception of religious truth. The tone and feeling of each hymn were suggested and colored by the general doctrine of the Church, but not dictated. The adoption of these utterances of independent feeling into the liturgy was a recognition on the part of authority of individual right. It was not a concession; it was the legal acknowledgment of a fundamental principle. Parallel to this significant privilege was the admission of music of the largest variety and penetrated at will with subjective feeling. This conception was carried out consistently in the cantata as established by Bach, most liberally, of course, in the arias. The words of the cantata consisted of Bible texts, stanzas of church hymns, and religious poems, the whole illustrating some Scripture theme or referring to some especial commemoration. The hard and fast metrical schemes of the German hymns were unsuited to the structure and rhythm of the aria, and so a form of verse known as the madrigal, derived from Italy, was used when rhythmical flexibility was an object. For all these reasons we have in Bach’s arias the widest license of expression admissible in the school of art which he represented. The Hamburg composers, in their shallow aims, had boldly transferred the Italian concert aria as it stood into the Church, as a sign of their complete defiance of ecclesiastical prescription. Not so Bach; the ancient churchly ideal was to him a thing to be reverenced, even when he departed from it. He, therefore, took a middle course. The Italian notion of an aria – buoyant, tuneful, the voice part sufficient unto itself – had no place in Bach’s method. A melody to him was usually a detail in a contrapuntal scheme. And so be wove the voice part into the accompaniment, a single instrument – a violin, perhaps, or oboe – often raised into relief, vying with the voice on equal terms, often soaring above it and carrying the principal theme, while the voice part serves as an obligato. This method, hardly consistent with a pure vocal system, often results with Bach, it must be confessed, in something very mechanical and monotonous to modern ears. The artifice is apparent; the author seems more bent on working out a sort of algebraic formula than interpreting the text to the sensibility. From the traditional point of view this method is not in itself mal à propos, for such a treatment raises the sentiment into that calm region of abstraction which is the proper refuge of the devotional mood. But here, as in the organ pieces, Bach is no slave to his technic. There are many arias in his cantatas in which the musical expression is not only beautiful and touching in the highest degree, but also yields with wonderful truth to every mutation of feeling in the text. Still more impressively is this mastery of expression shown in the arioso recitatives. In their depth and beauty they are unique in religious music. Only in very rare moments can Händel pretend to rival them. Mendelssohn reflects them in his oratorios and psalms, – as the moon reflects the sun.

The choruses of Bach’s cantatas would furnish a field for endless study. Nowhere else is his genius more grandly displayed. The only work entitled to be compared with these choruses is found in Händel’s oratorios. In drawing such a parallel, and observing the greater variety of style in Händel, we must remember that Bach’s cantatas are church music. Händel’s oratorios are not. Bach’s cantata texts are not only confined to a single sphere of thought, viz., the devotional, but they are also strictly lyric. The church cantata does not admit any suggestion of action or external picture. The oratorio, on the other hand, is practically unlimited in scope, and in Händel’s choruses the style and treatment are given almost unrestrained license in the way of dramatic and epic suggestion. Within the restrictions imposed upon him, however, Bach expends upon his choruses a wealth of invention in design and expression not less wonderful than that exhibited in his organ works. The motet form, the free fantasia and the choral fantasia forms are all employed, and every device known to his art is applied for the illustration of the text. Grace and tenderness, when the cheering assurances of the Gospel are the theme, crushing burdens of gloom when the author’s thought turns to the mysteries of death and judgment, mournfulness in view of sin, the pleading accents of contrition, – every manifestation of emotion which a rigid creed, allied to a racial mysticism which evades positive conceptions, can call forth is projected in tones whose strength and fervor were never attained before in religious music. It is Bach’s organ style which is here in evidence, imparting to the chorus its close-knit structure and majesty of sound, humanized by a melody drawn from the choral and from what was most refined in Italian art.

“One peculiar trait in Bach’s nature,” says Kretzschmar, “is revealed in the cantatas in grand, half-distinct outlines, and this is the longing for death and life with the Lord. This theme is struck in the cantatas more frequently than almost any other. We know him as a giant nature in all situations; great and grandiose is also his joy and cheerfulness. But never, we believe, does his art work with fuller energy and abandonment than when his texts express earth-weariness and the longing for the last hour. The fervor which then displays itself in ever-varying registers, in both calm and stormy regions, has in it something almost demonic.”74

The work that has most contributed to make the name of Bach familiar to the educated world at large is the Passion according to St. Matthew. Bach wrote five Passions, of which only two – the St. John and the St. Matthew – have come down to us. The former has a rugged force like one of Michael Angelo’s unpolished statues, but it cannot fairly be compared to the St. Matthew in largeness of conception or beauty of detail. In Bach’s treatment of the Passion story we have the culmination of the artistic development of the early liturgic practice whose progress has already been sketched. Bach completed the process of fusing the Italian aria and recitative with the German chorus, hymn-tune, and organ and orchestral music, interspersing the Gospel narrative with lyric sections in the form of airs, arioso recitatives, and choruses, in which the feelings proper to a believer meditating on the sufferings of Christ in behalf of mankind are portrayed with all the poignancy of pathos of which Bach was master.

Injudicious critics have sometimes attempted to set up a comparison between the St. Matthew Passion and Handel’s “Messiah,” questioning which is the greater. But such captious rivalry is derogatory to both, for they are not to be gauged by the same standard. To say nothing of the radical differences in style, origin, and artistic conception, – the one a piece of Lutheran church music, the other an English concert oratorio of Italian ancestry, – they are utterly unlike also in poetic intention. Bach’s work deals only with the human in Christ; it is the narrative of his last interviews with his disciples, his arrest, trial, and death, together with comments by imagined personalities contemplating these events, both in their immediate action upon the sensibilities and in their doctrinal bearing. It is, therefore, a work so mixed in style that it is difficult to classify it, for it is both epic and implicitly dramatic, while in all its lyric features it is set firmly into the Evangelical liturgic scheme. The text and musical construction of the “Messiah” have no connection with any liturgy; it is concert music of a universal religious character, almost devoid of narrative, and with no dramatic suggestion whatever. Each is a triumph of genius, but of genius working with quite different intentions.

In the formal arrangement of the St. Matthew Passion Bach had no option; he must perforce comply with church tradition. The narrative of the evangelist, taken without change from St. Matthew’s Gospel and sung in recitative by a tenor, is the thread upon which the successive divisions are strung. The words of Jesus, Peter, the high priest, and Pilate are given to a bass, and are also in recitative. The Jews and the disciples are represented by choruses. The “Protestant congregation” forms another group, singing appropriate chorals. A third element comprises the company of believers and the “daughter of Zion,” singing choruses and arias in comment upon the situations as described by the evangelist. It must be remembered that these chorus factors are not indicated by any division of singers into groups. The work is performed throughout by the same company of singers, in Bach’s day by the diminutive choir of the Leipsic Church, composed of boys and young men. Even in the chorals the congregation took no part. The idea of the whole is much the same as in a series of old Italian chapel frescoes. The disciple sits with Christ at the last supper, accompanies him to the garden of Gethsemane and to the procurator’s hall, witnesses his mockery and condemnation, and takes his station at the foot of the cross, lamenting alternately the sufferings of his Lord and the sin which demanded such a sacrifice.

Upon this prescribed formula Bach has poured all the wealth of his experience, his imagination, and his piety. His science is not brought forward so prominently as in many of his works, and where he finds it necessary to employ it he subordinates it to the expression of feeling. Yet we cannot hear without amazement the gigantic opening movement in which the awful burden of the great tragedy is foreshadowed; where, as if organ, orchestra, and double chorus were not enough to sustain the composer’s conception, a ninth part, bearing a choral melody, floats above the surging mass of sound, holding the thought of the hearer to the significance of the coming scenes. The long chorus which closes the first part, which is constructed in the form of a figured choral, is also built upon a scale which Bach has seldom exceeded. But the structure of the work in general is comparatively open, and the expression direct and clear. An atmosphere of profoundest gloom pervades the work from beginning to end, ever growing darker as the scenes of the terrible drama advance and culminate, yet here and there relieved by gleams of divine tenderness and human pity. That Bach was able to carry a single mood, and that a depressing one, through a composition of three hours’ length without falling into monotony at any point is one of the miracles of musical creation.

The meditative portions of the work in aria, recitative, and chorus are rendered with great beauty and pathos, in spite of occasional archaic stiffness. Dry and artificial some of the da capo arias undoubtedly are, for that quality of fluency which always accompanies genius never yet failed to beguile its possessor into by-paths of dulness. But work purely formalistic is not common in the St. Matthew Passion. Never did religious music afford anything more touching and serene than such numbers as the tenor solo and chorus, “Ich will bei meinem Jesu wachen,” the bass solo, “Am Abend, da es kühle war,” and the recitative and chorus, matchless in tenderness, beginning “Nun ist der Herr zur Ruh’ gebracht.” Especially impressive are the tones given to the words of the Saviour. These tones are distinguished from those of the other personages not only by their greater melodic beauty, but also by their accompaniment, which consists of the stringed instruments, while the other recitatives are supported by the organ alone. In Christ’s despairing cry upon the cross, “Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani,” this ethereal stringed accompaniment is extinguished. What Bach intended to signify by this change is not certainly known. This exclamation of Jesus, the only instance in his life when he seemed to lose his certainty of the divine coöperation, must be distinguished in some way, Bach probably thought, from all his other utterances. Additional musical means would be utterly futile, for neither music nor any other art has any expression for the mental anguish of that supreme moment. The only expedient possible was to reduce music at that point, substituting plain organ chords, and let the words of Christ stand out in bold relief in all their terrible significance.

The chorals in the St. Matthew Passion are taken bodily, both words and tunes, from the church hymn-book. Prominent among them is the famous “O Haupt voll Blut und Wunden” by Gerhardt after St. Bernard, which is used five times. These choral melodies are harmonized in simple homophonic style, but with extreme beauty. As an instance of the poetic fitness with which these chorals are introduced we may cite the last in the work, where immediately after the words “Jesus cried with a loud voice and gave up the ghost,” the chorus sings a stanza beginning “When my death hour approaches forsake not me, O Lord.” “This climax,” says Spitta, “has always been justly regarded as one of the most thrilling of the whole work. The infinite significance of the sacrifice could not be more simply, comprehensively, and convincingly expressed than in this marvellous prayer.”

This wonderful creation closes with a chorus of farewell sung beside the tomb of Jesus. It is a worthy close, for nothing more lovely and affecting was ever confided to human lips. The gloom and agony that have pervaded the scenes of temptation, trial, and death have quite vanished. The tone is indeed that of lamentation, for the Passion drama in its very aim and tradition did not admit any anticipation of the resurrection; neither in the Catholic or Lutheran ceremonies of Good Friday is there a foreshadowing of the Easter rejoicing. But the sentiment of this closing chorus is not one of hopeless grief; it expresses rather a sense of relief that suffering is past, mingled with a strain of solemn rapture, as if dimly conscious that the tomb is not the end of all.

The first performance of the St. Matthew Passion took place in the Thomas church at Leipsic, on Good Friday, April 15, 1729. It was afterwards revised and extended, and performed again in 1740. From that time it was nowhere heard until it was produced by Felix Mendelssohn in the Sing Academie at Berlin in 1829. The impression it produced was profound, and marked the beginning of the revival of the study of Bach which has been one of the most fruitful movements in nineteenth-century music.

A work equally great in a different way, although it can never become the object of such popular regard as the St. Matthew Passion, is the Mass in B minor. It may seem strange that the man who more than any other interpreted in art the genius of Protestantism should have contributed to a form of music that is identified with the Catholic ritual. It must be remembered that Luther was by no means inclined to break with all the forms and usages of the mother Church. He had no quarrel with those features of her rites which did not embody the doctrines which he disavowed, and most heartily did he recognize the beauty and edifying power of Catholic music. We have seen also that he was in favor of retaining the Latin in communities where it was understood. Hence it was that not only in Luther’s day, but long after, the Evangelical Church retained many musical features that had become sacred in the practice of the ancient Church. The congregations of Leipsic were especially conservative in this respect. The entire mass in figured form, however, was not used in the Leipsic service; on certain special days a part only would be sung. The Kyrie and Gloria, known among the Lutheran musicians as the “short mass,” were frequently employed. The B minor Mass was not composed for the Leipsic service, but for the chapel of the king of Saxony in Bach’s honorary capacity of composer to the royal and electoral court. It was begun in 1735 and finished in 1738, but was not performed entire in Bach’s lifetime. By the time it was completed it had outgrown the dimensions of a service mass, and it has probably never been sung in actual church worship. It is so difficult that its performance is an event worthy of special commemoration. Its first complete production in the United States was at Bethlehem, Pa., in the spring of 1900. It is enough to say of this work here that all Bach’s powers as fabricator of intricate design, and as master of all the shades of expression which the contrapuntal style admits, are forced to their furthest limit. So vast is it in scale, so majestic in its movement, so elemental in the grandeur of its climaxes, that it may well be taken as the loftiest expression in tones of the prophetic faith of Christendom, unless Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis may dispute the title. It belongs not to the Catholic communion alone, nor to the Protestant, but to the Church universal, the Church visible and invisible, the Church militant and triumphant. The greatest master of the sublime in choral music, Bach in this mass sounded all the depths of his unrivalled science and his imaginative energy.

There is no loftier example in history of artistic genius devoted to the service of religion than we find in Johann Sebastian Bach. He always felt that his life was consecrated to God, to the honor of the Church and the well-being of men. Next to this fact we are impressed in studying him with his vigorous intellectuality, by which I mean his accurate estimate of the nature and extent of his own powers and his easy self-adjustment to his environment. He was never the sport of his genius but always its master, never carried away like so many others, even the greatest, into extravagancies or rash experiments. Mozart and Beethoven failed in oratorio, Schubert in opera; the Italian operas of Gluck and Händel have perished. Even in the successful work of these men there is a strange inequality. But upon all that Bach attempted – and the amount of his work is no less a marvel than its quality – he affixed the stamp of final and inimitable perfection. We know from testimony that this perfection was the result of thought and unflagging toil. The file was not the least serviceable tool in his workshop. This intellectual restraint, operating upon a highly intellectualized form of art, often gives Bach’s music an air of severity, a scholastic hardness, which repels sympathy and makes difficult the path to the treasures it contains. The musical culture of our age has been so long based on a different school that no little discipline is needed to adjust the mind to Bach’s manner of presenting his profound ideas. The difficulty is analogous to that experienced in acquiring an appreciation of Gothic sculpture and the Florentine painting of the fourteenth century. We are compelled to learn a new musical language, for it is only in a qualified sense that the language of music is universal. We must put ourselves into another century, face another order of ideas than those of our own age. We must learn the temper of the German mind in the Reformation period and after, its proud self-assertion, led to an aggressive positiveness of religious belief, which, after all, was but the hard shell which enclosed a rare sweetness of piety.