Music & the Arts - Trinity Church

The gigantic opening chorus invites the listeners, as witnesses. Then
follow two brief chamber music scenes as a chronicle of Jesus’ relationship
with his disciples, who are typically interrogative and contentious.
The Gospel of Matthew is much concerned with Jesus’ establishment of
community.
The scene on the Mount of Olives brings the first climax of the piece,
the sublime song for tenor and chorus, “Ich will,” in which the singer’s
plaintive, contorted phrases break off at peaks of unrest, only to be answered
over and over by a hushed, anxious lullaby sung by the choir (“sempre p!”).
In this great adventure in negative capability, for which Picander has
provided a polyphonic structure and attractive folk poetry, the lonely
tenor is eventually excised, the summation left to the choir, and finally
only to the instruments.
Part Two
Scene Central Image Conclusion
1. Before the Accusers Geduld Erbarme dich
(Palace of the High Priest) (silence) (miserere)
2. Before Pilate Können Tränen Komm, süßes Kreuz
(desperation) (hope for resignation)
3. Golgotha Sehet Mache dich
(transcendence) (burial rite)
Epilogue post-burial questions ritual summary
The aria for mezzo-soprano and choir that begins Part Two (“Ach nun”)
is a counterpoise to the monumental opening chorus. The images are again
from the Song of Songs and the story of the Wise and Foolish Virgins, but the
touching reduction to a single singer, “most beautiful among women,” accompanied
by sympathetic companions, establishes the human scale and prepares
us to pick up the strands nearest in our subconscious, Peter and Judas.
The first scene is blistered by the first set of crowd utterances, which
become increasingly fierce as the Second Part proceeds, but its heart is in
Jesus’ silence, and eventually in the heartsick response to Peter’s denial.
Scene 2 begins by completing the story of the penitent Judas; Bach opens
a fresh textural window, the solo violin illustrating the jingling of (blood)
money. Fierce crowd responses dominate the ensuing pages, momentarily
quelled by the trance of the soprano aria “Aus Liebe.” Central to the scene is
“Können Tränen,” a black and white woodcut text, austerely scored, stingy
with its material, arduous, obsessive, inconsolable. This unlovable piece
inhabits the harshest moments in the drama. Its residue remains in “Komm
Süsses Kreuz,” which renders in its bass line Jesus’ stumbling steps, while the
bass singer’s longing for resignation contends with the agitation hovering in
the obbligato gamba.
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Scene 3 is increasingly expansive and elegiac, established by the remarkable
aria for alto with choir, “Sehet,” which urges the faithful, in advance of
Christ’s inevitable death, to “rest in Jesus’ arms,” a psychological projection
forward. After Christ’s death there are three punctuations: first a setting of
the Passion Chorale that attends acutely to every note of the melody, then
the brief earthquake scene with its ecstatic witnesses, and finally, at the
culminative point, where the composer and poet must produce something
more, something yet unheard but imminent, Bach and Picander deliver
“Am Abend” and “Mache dich” – generous, intimate, enfolding, from the
day of its first performance a crucial link to transcendence and consolation
for all who can embrace them.
We have Bach cantata working texts with scratched out lines, we have
scores with written over fugue subjects, but we don’t have the conversations
these colleagues might have had in their offices or on the street (they didn’t
need to write letters!). The closest I can get to the matter-of-fact, workaday,
fervent world in which this piece originated is my own experience in 1960
as a volunteer choir member at the Spandauer Johanisstift, to which I rode
the S-Bahn for rehearsal on Wednesdays (one hour past the gloomy prison
which still housed Rudolf Hess) and performance in Zehlendorf on Sunday
(one hour past the point of the Wannsee where Kleist ended his life) to
learn Bach cantatas. The splendid conductor, Hans-Martin Schneidt, was
in a constant world of Bach – in the year I knew him did he ever mention
any other subject? But most strange, in his rehearsals with those intense
high-school age seminary students: not once do I remember him making
a “musical” point. In a state of high agitation he would stop and literally
scream the text. And a correction, in character or detail, would be made.
Or suddenly, in a burst of school-teacher calm, he would patiently go back
over the Bible story behind the words, with similar good results.
One week we did “Ich steh’ mit einem Fuss im Grabe” (“I stand with
one foot in the grave”) and I was struck by the peculiar name of the poet
– Picander. As the limping rhythm of the first number began, our women
singing the beautiful chorale, I remember thinking, who were these guys,
Bach and Picander? I would have guessed them to be vehement, emphatic
yeomen like Hans-Martin Schneidt, busy, full of big plans.
© John Harbison
Program notes courtesy of John Harbison and Emmanuel Music, Boston.