Bach: Music in the Castle of Heaven by Gardiner John Eliot

Author:Gardiner, John Eliot [Gardiner, John Eliot]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780385351980
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2013-10-29T00:00:00+00:00

Now, without so much as a week to reflect or take stock, Bach plunges ahead with his Second Leipzig Cycle on 11 June 1724 (see diagram, Plate 16). There is an unmistakable shift in his approach but not the slightest diminution in quality. The first cycle was boldly experimental – in the diversity of its forms, in its varied instrumentation and in the huge challenges it posed to Bach’s performing forces – but the second is, if anything, bolder still. The technique of his players and singers is to be stretched still further, the new music demanding an instant responsiveness to the pulse and mood of the moment: singers need to match the instruments for precision and agility; players reciprocally need to shape and inflect their lines like singers. There will also be fewer concessions to his listeners’ scruples. That much is clear from the outset of his first cantata, BWV 20, O Ewigkeit, du Donnerwort. It is an astonishing piece, one that sets the tone for the whole cycle and sums up so many of the original features we will encounter – a new range of expression, the use of operatic technique to enliven the doctrinal message and wild contrasts of mood. In this instance Bach takes his lead from the Epistle’s plea for ‘boldness in the day of judgement’ (1 John 4: 16–21) to fire his imagination and powers of musical invention. We seem to be already in the death-throes of the Trinity season, not at its start – but then Bach’s was an age that had the taste for apocalypse, and the theme crops up regularly and unexpectedly.t While the tune of Johann Rist’s hymn was familiar enough to his congregation, Bach’s treatment of it was novel and shocking. Where the previous year’s vision was of a faith-propelled anticipation of eternity in BWV 21, fear, rather than comfort, is now the subtext of BWV 20 – the chilling prospect of an eternity of torture and pain. It is the spur to man to save his soul: the only way towards salvation is for him to renounce sin. The hymn tune dominates all three segments of the opening chorale fantasia (fast – slow – fast). Bach saw to it that the combined energies of the Thomaner trebles were channelled into the rising melodic cantus firmus (O Ewigkeit) (‘O eternity’) and reinforced by the martial slide trumpet propelling the three lower voices in its wake before they splinter off in the sharply dotted style of the instruments (du Donnerwort) (‘thou thunder-word’). Powerful cross-accents and a huge upward sweep for the basses on Traurigkeit (‘grief’) characterise the double fugue. Abruptly the orchestra screeches to a halt on a diminished seventh. Only a bold dramatist would risk stopping the forward momentum to convey trepidation – personal and petrifying – and Bach had good reason to be proud of this. (Any late-coming worshippers entering at that point would have been frozen to the spot, their neighbourly greetings silenced.) Out of the ensuing

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