verba docent

Luther's bible

It is impossible to stress the importance of the bible to Martin Luther and the sect that bears his name.  It was, after all, his desire (along with other church reformers) to make the scriptures available to all churchgoers that helped to ignite the Protestant Reformation.  So the symbolic importance of the bible must surely be at the heart of Lutheranism.

Because of this, my other theory—firmly related to my theory of Bach’s B Minor Mass as a study of the Trinity—is that the larger architecture of his Mass mirrors the shape of the bible itself.

Just a reminder (as well as a preview for the Credo and beyond): I believe that each large section of the B Minor Mass focuses on one “person” of the Trinity, while at the same time always including the other two, since they are by nature indivisible.  Flowing from this is the idea that each “person” of the Trinity is associated with a different large section of the bible.

The Kyrie, which I suggest focuses on God the Father, with his association with judgment for sin, can be likened to the Old Testament, the Hebrew bible in which Yahweh is the central figure.

The Gloria, which explores the many aspects of Christ the Son, can be linked to the Gospels, which tell the story of Jesus’ life on earth.

In the previous post, I previewed my discussion yet to come about the Credo, which Bach structured as a reflection of the Christian church.  As the Holy Spirit’s role is to inspire faith through sacraments and administer God’s plan on earth, this third person of the Trinity is associated with the work of the church.  In this sense, the Credo belongs to the Acts of the Apostles and Epistles—the books of the New Testament that codify Christ’s teachings.

Finally, following on from my thought in the previous post that the Sanctus, Benedictus, Agnus Dei and Dona nobis pacem are associated with the Most Holy Place, or God’s throne, I’d suggest that this last section can be tied to the eschatological final chapter of the bible, Revelation.  If the liturgical purpose of the Mass is to bring humankind into God’s presence, then it seems plausible that Bach might have pictured the final section of his Mass setting as taking place in the eternal presence of God.

Just in narrative terms, I like the idea that the “Dona nobis pacem”, which repeats the music of the “Gratias agimus tibi” (a common practice in Mass settings of this period), is more of a promise than a petition—a vision of heaven and eternal peace.

Audio: ending of B Minor Mass– glimpse of eternal peace?

Of course, we’ll never know what Bach was thinking when he so carefully organized and structured his B Minor Mass; I suppose that’s why it’s so much fun to conjecture.  All I know is this: I can’t believe that the same man who created such unity of structure in his Passions and even in the more disparate Christmas Oratorio wouldn’t have had an overarching design in mind for his Mass.  Our job is not to find the answer to this puzzle, but an answer.

Tabernacle

My first idea about the large structure of the Mass was inspired by a note that I found in the Robert Shaw archive at Yale.  In a handwritten note analyzing the opening Kyrie, he likened the first four bars as the approach to Chartres Cathedral.  That got me thinking about sacred architecture in general, and it struck me that the structure is a bit like the Old Testament tabernacle.

The Kyrie is like the laver, where the priests had to wash themselves to enter God’s presence.  In the Kyrie, the congregants proclaim their need for mercy, a spiritual cleansing.

The Gloria can be seen as the altar of burnt offerings, where sacrifices were made to God.  In Christian theology, the literal sacrifice is replaced by sacrifices of “praise and thanksgiving”—the very heart of the Gloria text.

As I will describe in later posts, the Credo is Bach’s musical representation of the church.  It is structured architecturally in symmetrical pairs of movements around the central “Crucifixus”.  In this sense, it is similar to the Holy Place in the tabernacle, the detailed layout and furniture of which is prescribed by God in Exodus.

Although the section which encompasses the “Sanctus” to the “Dona nobis pacem” is not necessarily a single section in terms of the structure of the Mass, I believe that in Bach’s setting, this acts as a single section, comparable to the Kyrie, Gloria and Credo, united by the repeat of the “Osanna in excelsis”, and the repeat of the “Gratias agimus tibi” music for the final chorus.  In this tabernacle analogy, I see this section as the equivalent of the Most Holy Place, which housed God’s presence in the ark of the covenant.  The text of the “Sanctus” suggests this: in Isaiah, the six-winged seraphim (like the six-part choir, unique in Bach’s output) surrounding God’s throne sing, “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord Almighty; heaven and earth are full of thy glory.”

In the liturgical sense, the purpose of the Mass is to take the congregant from the outside to the inside: from unworthy sin to God’s presence.  Sacred architecture—from the tabernacle to the Temple in Jerusalem to the layout of the great European cathedrals—was designed to reflect this process.  And I believe that Bach may have compiled/composed his own Mass in such a way as to reflect in music the very institution that he loved so much, and spent his life serving.

Well, here we are only a few hours before the Dessoff Choirs’ performance of the B Minor Mass, and I’m only halfway done with this exploration of the work through this blog.  I guess I shouldn’t be surprised—even apart from the fact that I had to take some time off to finish my dissertation, it is just such a huge work, and there is so much to say about it.

But there is a little poetry in only getting this far as well, since Bach himself stopped for a decade and a half after finishing the Kyrie and Gloria in 1733!  I won’t wait that long—even though the performance will have come and gone, I plan on continuing this project in the coming months.  After all, the B Minor Mass will still be around long after all of us are gone…

But for those of you who are attending the concert, I did want to take a moment and “skip to the last page”.  Although the compositional history of the B Minor Mass suggests that the Mass is in some ways a compilation of some of Bach’s greatest music, reworked for the Mass text, I personally see a larger plan to the work, centered around some basic Lutheran theological concepts.  I have foreshadowed this conclusion by stressing the importance of the Trinity in these posts, but I think there are some other large-scale patterns to be found as well.

The next two entries explore some thoughts that I’ve had over the years as I’ve searched for ways to communicate the “Gestalt” of this incredible work.  It is completely speculative, but not without some basis in Lutheran theology.

See you again for a discussion of the Credo!  I hope you’ll forgive me for taking a little break after performing the B Minor Mass before resuming this task…

The following is the second of two excerpts from the program notes for Saturday evening’s performance of the B Minor Mass at the Church of St Mary the Virgin, West 46^th St, in Manhattan.  For ticket information, please visit www.dessoff.org.

The performance history of the B Minor Mass in America is inex­tricably bound with New York City; it was here that most new developments in performance practice associated with the Mass were introduced to American audiences. At first, the work was presented in the great 19th-century tradition of large choirs and orchestras. The Bethlehem Bach Festival in Pennsylvania, which fit that model, holds the honor of having given the American premiere, on March 27, 1900. But New York was only beaten by days—the New York Oratorio Society performed the work on April 5th. Indeed, the work became a staple of the Oratorio Society’s concert season, and, beginning in 1927, they performed it annually for decades, continuing the 19th-century large-ensem­ble tradition.

But as early as the 1920s, there were glimmers of the new “modernist” approach to Bach, with Kurt Schindler’s 1922 perfor­mance of the work with the Schola Cantorum, in which the more subjective, “Romantic” excesses were avoided. Critics were slow to catch on, however, and Schindler was criticized for the lack of passion in his performance. In 1934, Olin Downes, the venerable New York Times critic, accused Leopold Stokowski of grotesquely rushing the tempi so that he and the Philadelphia Orchestra could catch their train home! In that era, it was standard for the B Minor Mass to be presented in two two-hour seatings, with an extended break between them for dinner. Current recordings are about half that length.

It was the appearance of refugees from Hitler’s Germany that really changed the Bach performance practice landscape, however. Fritz Stiedry presented Bach’s works with chamber choir and made an attempt to reproduce obsolete instruments. Of par­ticular importance to the development of Bach performance prac­tice was Julius Herford, who became a mentor to a generation of American choral conductors, most notably Robert Shaw. Although Shaw was known for his work with large symphony choruses in the 1940s and ’50s, such as the Collegiate Chorale and the Cleveland Symphony Chorus, he presented Bach’s choral works with the smaller Robert Shaw Chorale as well. Shaw’s 1960 tour and recording of the B Minor Mass were deeply influential. In that interpretation, Shaw employed the stile concertante principle, in which the vocal soloists sing the opening expositions of fugues. This practice, well-documented in several Bach cantatas, derives from the ubiquitous Baroque concerto grosso genre. It allows for added textural contrasts, as well as an organic expansion through a fugal movement. Arthur Mendel, the great Bach scholar who conducted the Cantata Singers in New York in the 1950s, also used this technique.

Two conductors whose work was later associated with other cities—Margaret Hillis in Chicago and Thomas Dunn in Boston—began their conducting careers in Manhattan, and both presented critically acclaimed small-scale performances of the B Minor Mass in the 1950s and ’60s. Dunn, who spent many years as conductor of the Handel and Haydn Society in Boston, was especially heralded as the prototype of the new generation of “scholar-conductors.” When the period instrument movement gained momentum in the 1960s and ’70s, these conductors, who had introduced so many “au­thentic” innovations in the 1940s through ’60s, lost their position in the vanguard, though all continued to be associated with Bach’s choral music.

In terms of the “early music revolution,” New York lagged behind Boston, particularly in the use of period instruments, for many years. It wasn’t until Johannes Somary’s performance with Amor Artis in 1980 that the B Minor Mass was first presented with period instruments in Manhattan. Fast on the heels of that performance was the truly revolutionary recording and New York performance of the work by Joshua Rifkin, in which all of the choral parts were sung by soloists. Rifkin has performed the B Minor Mass with one voice per part many times since then, including a 1993 performance here at St. Mary the Virgin.

In the same way that the B Minor Mass is at once a compen­dium and an organic whole, the use of various ensembles within the larger ensemble seeks to illuminate the larger patterns in the work. These textural shifts echo the theological shifts from death to life at many junctures in the Mass. The alternation of ensembles highlights the symmetrical architectural shape of the Credo, which telescopes to the Crucifixus at its center before returning the way it came, via solo and stile antico movements. The use of solo voices in the concertato group makes personal what is otherwise corporate—a musical effect that brings to mind the “Ich” of so many of the cantata texts that Bach set that were influenced by the Pietist movement in the Lutheran church, which stressed a deeply per­sonal, even intimate relationship with Jesus. And the juxtaposition of performing forces, somewhat akin to different manuals of the organ, amplifies the chiaroscuro of Bach’s writing, which traverses an entire universe of musical expression.

In a sense, this evening’s performance pays homage to the long and important performance history of the B Minor Mass in New York. In tribute to Mendel and Shaw, we use a concertato group of vocal soloists. In an homage to our recently deceased colleague, the con­ductor Johannes Somary, we collaborate with the Arcadia Players, one of New England’s premier period instrument ensembles. In recognition of the chamber ensembles presented by Stiedry, Hillis, and Dunn, only part of the choir sings the stile antico movements and the more intimate Qui tollis peccata mundi and Et incarnatus est.  And in a nod to Rifkin, whose once-contentious theory has now become more widely accepted, we present the Crucifixus sung by the soloists.

Finally, we pay tribute to our own heritage: I am the fourth conductor in Dessoff’s long history to lead this magnificent work, following Paul Boepple, Michael Hammond, and Amy Kaiser. This is just as it should be—all singers, amateur or professional, should have the privilege and thrill of performing what may well be the most significant work in the choral repertoire. Robert Shaw, in his 1957 Cleveland Orchestra program note, expresses beautifully the need for this work to be the property of all choral singers:

“It is the purpose of this performance to provide, in as rich a manner as we may, both a listening and a performing experience to members of the Cleveland Orchestra com­munity—which includes its chorus. Bach is above all a composer whose understanding and enjoyment are found in participation; his choral writing is undeniably an act of common worship.”

Maybe it’s a good thing that Bach never put on a performance of the B Minor Mass.  Released from the prosaic history of a single performance, the performer feels connected to the universal aspect of this work—that it exists in a fresh, contemporary way for each new generation, open to reinterpretation as each new perfor­mance strives to reflect the Baroque ideal of revealing nature’s perfection.

The following is the first of two excerpts from the program notes for Saturday evening’s performance of the B Minor Mass at the Church of St Mary the Virgin, 145 West 46^th St, in Manhattan.  For ticket information, please visit www.dessoff.org.

In this inaugural Dessoff Midwinter Festival, we have used the metaphor of “Bach as prism” to explore the many facets of J.S. Bach’s work, as well as the unparalleled influence that he has had on subsequent generations of composers. The B Minor Mass, justly considered by many to be Bach’s magnum opus, is the perfect work to close our Refracted Bach festival, as it shows us several aspects of Bach’s musical refraction at work.

As observed in notes for the “Stile Antico” concert, Bach con­sidered himself just another in a long line of artisan musicians in the Bach family. He was intensely aware of his family’s—and his region’s—musical heritage, and throughout his life he compiled an archive of musical works by his own forbears as well as major com­posers of the North German school. His love of older musical styles extended further into the past as well. He was an ardent student of the music of Palestrina and other masters of Renaissance polyphony, and he put this study to great use in the B Minor Mass, where he employed the stile antico technique in a number of move­ments, particularly the Credo and Confiteor.

In the Festival’s opening lecture, George Stauffer discussed the extraordinary provenance of the B Minor Mass: scholars now believe that, with the exception of the first four measures of the opening Kyrie, every single movement may have been refashioned from earlier cantata movements. Given the specific function of so many of those cantatas (which would have been heard at most only one Sunday every three years, given the lectionary cycle), it is not surprising that Bach might have wished to give some of his great­est vocal movements another airing. In our Festival Sing-In, we sang through the extant original cantata movements and mar­velled at Bach’s ingenuity in recrafting these already stunning pieces.

Another “prism” aspect of the B Minor Mass lies in the history of the work, which might be characterized as a compilation as much as a composition. As Bach advanced in age, his “encyclope­dic” tendencies, already prominent, became stronger. In the final years of his life, he compiled several collections, such as the Art of the Fugue, which explored all the possibilities inherent in fugal writing, and the Clavier-Übung, his great collection of keyboard works. He also composed the Christmas Oratorio which, like the B Minor Mass, is largely a collection of movements adapted from earlier cantatas. In exhibiting this encyclopedic instinct, Bach was squarely a product of his age: the urge to draw together large col­lections and explain sweeping patterns in nature was part of the Baroque mindset, reflected especially in the sciences, mathematics, and philosophy of the era. Ever the devout Lutheran, Bach’s desire to pull together all of the existing musical forms, from the earliest Gregorian chants to the most modish style galant, carried with it religious connotations, as he sought to reflect God’s creation in order to reveal the hand behind the divine design.

Read more: Program Notes #2

The bass aria “Quoniam tu solus sanctus” leads directly into one of Bach’s most ebullient pieces of vocal music—the “Cum sancto spiritu”.  The form of this movement is vaguely reminiscent of the “Gloria in excelsis Deo” and “Et in terra pax” combination; it begins with a concerto-style, instrumentally-derived section in which the text “Cum sancto spiritu in gloria Dei patris” (“with the holy spirit, in the glory of God the Father”) is bandied about in different vocal combinations.  The compositional history of this movement is unknown, but it would hardly be surprising to discover that it began life as a concerto grosso.

Albrecht Dürer, Adoration of Trinity, 1511. In the upper center of the painting, we see the classic depiction of the Trinity: Christ on the cross, the bearded God the Father above him, and the Holy Spirit portrayed as a dove.

Audio: Opening of “Cum sancto spiritu”

Like the opening movement of the Gloria, this concerto-like material is succeeded by a fugal section.  And as wonderfully exciting as the opening music is, it is in the virtuosic fugue that we see yet again Bach’s compositional genius.

The fugue subject, first presented by the tenors, is given its triumphant Affekt from the heraldic upward leap of a fourth and back down again, on the text “cum sancto”—an element that will become very important in the second fugal exposition.  From there, Bach spins out a series of ever-rising sequences, building excitement to the next entry:

Audio: fugue subject

In this first fugal exposition, the voices are accompanied solely by the continuo.  Even so, it is a dense texture: as each new voice enters—tenor, alto, soprano I, bass, soprano II—the swirling 16^th-note melismas that follow on the heels of the fugue subject create a densely woven tapestry of sound.

As I have suggested before in these posts, I believe that Bach represents the holy spirit through the extensive use of 16^th-notes, such as in the Pentecost cantata BWV34, O ewiges Feuer—“O Eternal Fire”— or the motet Der Geist hilft unser Schwachheit auf—“the spirit gives aid to our weakness.”

Even from its title, there is no doubt that the “Cum sancto spiritu” is dealing with the holy spirit.  Like the cantata and motet cited above, the main feature of both fugal expositions is the omnipresence of fiery 16^th-notes.  Listen to this recording of the first fugal exposition—as always, performed by Masaaki Suzuki and the Japan Bach Collegium, and used here with their kind permission.

Audio: 1st fugal exposition

The music actually becomes more complex in the second exposition of the fugue, in this case beginning with the Soprano I section.  This time, the orchestra doubles the singers.  But more important, each “Cum sancto” entry—that rising and falling heraldic fourth that I mentioned earlier—is surrounded by a series of “false entries” of the fugue subject, each echoing that “cum sancto” incipit.  You can see this in the score excerpt at the right below; the altos (middle line) have the fugue subject in the second system, but it is partly camouflaged by the other entries.  Are these the tongues of fire from Pentecost that can be found in BWV34?  Perhaps… certainly, if nothing else, it produces an exhilarating effect.

When I work with choirs on Bach, I am always on the lookout for what I like to call the “ecstatic moment” in a festive piece, often including trumpets and timpani.  It generally happens near the end of a movement: Bach will build up the excitement, joy and exhilaration in a piece, and yet just when you think that it can’t get any more exciting, he’ll somehow ratchet it up one more level.  I’ve always felt that way about the end of the “Cum sancto spiritu.”  In this excerpt from the conclusion of the piece (and therefore the conclusion of the larger Gloria section), Bach builds the tension with a simple rising scale in the Soprano II part; he releases that tension with a burst of trumpets and timpani, accompanying a number of exquisitely crafted rhythmic inner parts.  It is pure ecstasy.

Audio: ecstatic ending

In Bach’s early cantatas, particularly those composed in Weimar, he experimented a good deal with different instrumental combinations in order to heighten the Affekt of the music. In Leipzig, he seemed to standardize the instrumentation more, with combinations of oboes and strings (and occasionally flute) carrying the bulk of the instrumental obbligato accompaniments.

This makes his choice of instrumentation for the “Quoniam tu solus sanctus” all the more potent: the combination of a bassoon duet and corno di caccia is surely one of Bach’s most distinct instrumental scorings.

The corno di caccia—the “horn of the chase”, or hunting horn—has an association with the pastoral that both predates and postdates Bach’s music. The corno di caccia often appeared in pairs in Bach’s more festive cantatas for holidays, almost never appearing in the same cantata as trumpets and timpani.

Two of my favorite appearances of the corni di caccia are in the fourth cantata in the Christmas Oratorio, as well as the cantata BWV1, Wie schön leuchtet der Morgenstern. In both cases, the pastoral triple meter reinforces the sense of the pastoral—in both these cases, perhaps referring obliquely to the lowly nature of Jesus’ birth in the manger.

However, Bach does not seem to be referring to the pastoral in this bass aria from the B Minor Mass. Instead, the solo corno di caccia—which is only present in this single aria—seems to be taking the traditional role of the trumpet, which was associated (as I have written earlier) with kingship.

Indeed, the bass solo “Grosser Herr, o starker König” from earlier in the Christmas Oratorio, accompanied by trumpet rather than horn, shows this royal connection, as well as the same kind of stentorian bass sound heard in the “Quoniam tu solus sanctus”.

The text of that aria encompasses both the kingly and the pastoral: “Great Lord, o powerful King, dearest Savior, o how little you care about the glories of the earth! He who sustains the entire world, who created its magnificence and beauty, must sleep in a harsh manger.”

Many scholars believe that Gottfried Reiche, the virtuoso trumpeter with whom Bach worked in Leipzig, would have played the difficult corno di caccia parts as well as the trumpet parts, so unlike in modern performances, the first trumpeter would simply swap instruments, rather than having a poor horn player sit for 45 minutes and then have to play this very difficult opening ritornello!

Audio: opening ritornello

The text of the Mass movement is certainly quite kingly in nature: “For you alone are holy, you alone are most high, you alone are the Lord.” The bass’ melody is firm and triumphant, and though it does feature some running 16th-note passages, the overall effect is majestic and declamatory:

Audio: 1st vocal entry

For me, as wonderful as the bass and corno di caccia are, it is the quite extraordinary (and unique) writing for the pair of bassoons that makes this movement so special. Here is a section in which they are truly given an opportunity to shine; the bassoon duet is accompanied by slurred 8th-notes in the horn, a figure that presages a similar motive in the following choral movement. Rarely are bassoons untethered from their role as Baroque continuo instruments and allowed such a flight of fancy! (Incidentally, if you want to explore a cantata in which the bassoon has a prominent role, check out BWV 150…)

Audio: bassoon duet

Whatever the theological reasons for using corno di caccia instead of trumpet to represent Christ’s kingship, the musical effective is magical. This movement, with its dark and somewhat muted timbre, is instantly transformed in the segue to the closing chorus of the Gloria.

Hendrik van Balen, Trinity (Christ at God's right hand), 1620

I have been so lucky in my oboists in my “Bach lifetime”!  The oboe plays such a huge role in Bach’s vocal works, and I truly could never have considered our complete cantata project in Sydney had I not had such a wonderful stable of oboists, including some very gifted young players.

When I was discussing the tempo for the “Qui sedes ad dexteram Patris” with Joyce Alper, who played principal oboe in our Worcester performance, she earned my immediate respect by saying, “I hope you don’t mind a relatively fast tempo—I see this movement as a dance.”

I couldn’t agree more.  The 6/8 meter, which flows freely with 16^th-notes throughout, gives the movement a lyrical lilt.  As George Stauffer suggests, it is likely an Italian giga, and if not so fast as Bach’s thrilling instrumental gigues, certainly not slow.  Perhaps because it’s in B minor, or because the text contains the words “miserere nobis”, or because it comes out of the rather sober choral movement, but too often, I’ve heard performances of this aria that stress the sin rather than the mercy!

Personally, I hear the oboe ritornello, from the very opening downward gesture, as the pouring out of God’s mercy:  

Bach’s use of the deeper oboe d’amore, which so often carries with it the wordplay association of God’s love for mankind, gives the movement a particular rich, warm flavor.

Underneath the lyrical, flowing oboe part, the strings alternate staccato and slurred articulations:

Listen to the instrumental opening—in typical ritornello form, Bach presents the motto material and then develops it through the Fortspinnung section, with its sequences and repetitions.

Audio: Qui sedes, opening ritornello

The alto solo takes up the musical material from the ritornello, especially in the opening of the vocal part.  Perhaps because there is relatively little text in this movement (just “who sits at the right hand of God, have mercy on us”), there is comparatively little musical material—it is all largely derived from the opening ritornello.

Audio: 1st alto entry

Bach even explores the 16^th-note figure near the end, in a coda that features the passing around of the 16^th-note pattern after a short Adagio.  The movement ends with a truncated form of the ritornello.

Audio: end of “Qui sedes”, from Adagio

So often in the explorations of these movements, I find some very direct theological connections between the text and Bach’s music.  I have to admit that I have always struggled to do so in this movement, perhaps because, like nearly all of the movements in the B Minor Mass, it is almost certainly a parody movement.  There seems to be no attempt to illustrate the word “sit”—unlike in the “Et resurrexit” later in the Mass, when Bach has the basses sing the word “sedet” squarely on the beat, in contrast to the syncopation around them:

Instead, Bach focuses on the more all-encompassing sense of blessing and mercy, setting the movement in B minor, which, as I discussed inan earlier post (“Facing the blank page”), is often used to represent God’s mercy and help in times of trial.  It is a beautiful and intimate movement, a wonderful contrast with the festive choral movements that feature trumpets and timpani.

Unknown 15th century, Parlement of Paris, Crucifixion

The duet that we looked at in the previous post, “Domine Deus”, leads directly into the chorus “Qui tollis peccata mundi.” In fact, the chorus’ text finishes the sentence begun in the previous duet: “Lamb of God… who takes away the sins of the world, have mercy upon us.”

In an otherwise praise- and thanksgiving-filled Gloria, this movement is more soft and somber, with choir accompanied by strings and a pair of flutes, who play 16th-notes throughout. But even here, the movement fits the idea of the Gloria as a “catalog” of the Son’s attributes: yes, he is worthy of praise, but he is also the person of the Trinity who brings the sinner to repentence.

Just like the “Gratias agimus tibi,” this movement is a parody of an earlier cantata, in this case the cantata BWV46, Schauet doch und sehet. This cantata, written for the tenth Sunday after Trinity, is linked to readings about the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem. The text from the cantata chorus reads, “Behold and see, if there be any sorrow like my sorrow, that has come upon me. For the Lord has made me full of anguish on the day of his wrathful anger.”

Not surprisingly for Bach, for whom music and theology were always intertwined, there are several layers of connection and intertextual reference in this parody movement. The text of the cantata movement has also come to be linked to Christ’s separation from God on the cross, as in the tenor aria from Handel’s Messiah. In this clip, you can hear that aria, as well as its heart-breaking accompanied recitative leading into it.

Because of the traditional relationship between the Lamentations text and the crucifixion scene, Bach is consciously linking this movement from the Mass to the idea of crucifixion, asserting the core principle of Christianity: Jesus is the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world through his sacrifice on the cross.  Bach’s transposition from the original flat-key of D minor to this sharp-key of B minor only increases its rhetorical connection to the cross, as we’ve discussed before.

Musically, there are only a couple of ideas, but they are combined so artfully to create a very moving piece. The main theme in the voices, which is presented canonically throughout the movement, consists of a descending minor triad followed by the evocative rising minor sixth. Bach makes this all the more powerful by creating suspensions in the voices:

Audio: first vocal entry

The descending chromatic “miserere nobis” which ends the phrase, pleading through pulsing pairs of 8th-notes, only increases the plaintive Affekt of the music.

Soaring over this material, which repeats in different vocal combinations through the movement, is the pair of flutes. Bach takes over this instrumentation from the original cantata movement; the use of the soft flutes, with their association with intimate suffering, is perfect for this Mass text as well.

This is hardly the first time that Bach has used a pair of flutes to represent suffering and mercy. I have already discussed the soprano aria “Aus der Liebe” in the post marked “Bassetto”. Another great example, with a text related to this one, is the “Et misericordia” from the Magnificat, whose text is “and his mercy continues from generation to generation for those who fear him.” For that alto-tenor duet, Bach uses a pair of flutes, reinforced (possibly for volume reasons) by muted strings.

The active 16th-note patterns of the flute parts swirling around the long notes in the vocal parts of the “Qui tollis peccata mundi” produce a different effect, to be sure, but these pieces are cut from the same cloth. Listen to a section of this movement when the music becomes particularly impassioned:

Audio: impassioned section of “Qui tollis peccata mundi”

Finally, it might be interesting to listen to the cantata movement that Bach refashioned for his “Qui tollis peccata mundi.” You’ll see that there is a long orchestral ritornello, whereas the Mass movement starts attacca from the vocal duet with the choir. There is also a central B section in the original, with a chromatic, faster fugue setting the text “For the Lord has made me full of anguish on the day of his wrathful anger.”

http://bach-cantatas.com/BGA/BWV046-BGA.pdf

Durer, Father and Son detail from Adoration of the Trinity

The “Domine Deus” is matched only by its analogous movement in the Credo, “Et in unum Deum”, for its focus on purely theological concepts. It turns out to be beautiful music, but that music is solely in service of one idea: the relationship between the Father and the Son within the Trinity.

Here is the text of the movement:
“O Lord God, heavenly King, God the Father Almighty, O Lord, the only-begotten Son, Jesus Christ, the Most High, O Lord God, Lamb of God, Son of the Father.” As you can see, this text establishes that Jesus is God’s only son, and that they are both worthy of the highest praise.

Bach reflects this relationship in the most ingenious way. First, the idea of canonic imitation pervades the piece, both in the soprano and tenor solo parts and in the instrumentation, which consists of a solo flute accompanied by strings. Even the first three measures set up the idea of a canon:

Audio: Domine Deus, opening canon

If anything, the vocal parts are even more perfectly crafted. Throughout the bulk of the movement, one singer sings the text about God the Father, while the other sings about God the Son. This emphasizes the fact that, even within the Trinitarian “Godhead”, each member keeps its own individual characteristics. Then, the singers swap words for later phrases, reflecting the individual-yet-corporate mystery of the Trinity.

Here is the opening vocal part. In the first phrase, the tenor begins, singing about the Father; after a phrase from the opening ritornello, the soprano takes over those words. Even when they come together and sing in major thirds, they are still singing different words:

Audio: 1st vocal entry

It is only near the end of the movement, which is preparing to lead directly into the “qui tollis peccata mundi”—the end of the sentence which begins with the “agnus dei” of this duet—that the soloists sing the same words—“Lord God, Lamb of God, Son of the Father”, again reinforcing the fact that the Gloria is about the Son, even though the Father and Holy Spirit make their own appearances:

Audio: Domine Deus, Agnus Dei

As I have often done, I like to mention a moment in a movement that I find particularly beautiful. In this movement, there is a moment in the instrumental ritornello where the violins hold a long high A for two bars, while the flute has an active, almost “Holy Spirit-like” role, as we discussed in the Kyrie. I have always thought that when that high A finally resolves, it is such an effortlessly beautiful melody! Here it is:

Audio: hovering violin note