Bach and Lutheran Church Music

The weeks before Easter are usually called “Passiontide” in the modern Lutheran church, though Bach would have known them as “Fastenzeit” (“fasting-tide;” the English word “Lent” is cognate with an archaic German word for “spring”); the weeks between Easter itself and Whitsun are known as “Eastertide.”  The three pre-Lent Sundays  – known as “Septuagesima,” “Sexagesima,” and “Quinquagesima” – give a not-quite-accurate countdown towards Easter.  In the Catholic rite, they count as the first Sundays in the Easter cycle.  Lent, which begins on Ash Wednesday in the week following Quinquagesima, comprises the last four days of that week and six more complete weeks.  The last of these is Holy Week, which begins on Palm Sunday and ends with Good Friday and Easter Saturday.  Lent is, thus, a time for meditation and preparation.  In the early church it was, above all, the time for new converts to Christianity to prepare themselves for baptism at Easter, and it is for that reason that the Gospels for the Sundays within the period refer only indirectly, if at all, to Christ’s passion until Palm Sunday.

Lent is no longer the “quiet” time it used to be but, even today, tokens remain, such as the practice of not singing “allelulas,” as a rule.  In Leipzig, in Bach’s day – again, differing from Weimar, as at Advent – cantatas were not sung in the Mass from the first Sunday in Lent to Palm Sunday, inclusive.  The singing of passions during Holy Week, on the other hand, was a custom of great antiquity.  The only cantatas Bach wrote for Sundays in Lent, therefore, date from this time in Weimar: “Alles, was von Gott geboren,” written for the third Sunday, was later, in Leipzig, incorporated in the cantata “Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott;” “Himmelskonig, sei willkommen,” for Palm Sunday, was composed in 1714 as the first work in which Bach, newly appointed concertmaster in the ducal chapel, took up his duty of writing a new cantata every month…

From: a booklet note by Walter Blankenburg (translated from the German by Mary Whittall) accompanying a boxed set of Bach cantatas for Easter by soloists, the Munich Bach Choir, and the Munich Bach Orchestra, all conducted by the late Karl Richter (recorded in the late 1960s and early 1970s).

 

Bach the Christian Musician

…Bach did not use the words of the Bible just for a few oratorical works, but Sunday after Sunday, year in, year out, and set to music its rhymed paraphrases with the utmost emphasis and unfailing energy: that was not craft or aestheticism, but credo!

After his death, none of his sons showed any interest in his theological literature – times had changed.  The passion for which he fought for using Scripture and Lutheran chorales in his cantatas may have been welcomed in Leipzig by the traditionalists, but the extent to which he did this was not expected even by them.  Then, we see him in person as a Lutheran who, toward the end of his life, as Lutheranism is stagnating against the background of the Enlightenment, plays a last card: the “catholic” card; that is, a supraconfessional mass with a credo in the center.

From: Johann Sebastian Bach: Life and Work by Martin Geck; translated from the German by John Hargraves (New York: Harcourt, Inc., 2006), pp. 654-655.  Originally published in 2000.

 

Luther, Bach, and Music in the Church

According to Luther, worship was not exclusively a matter of forms.  He regarded ceremonies as matters of indifference theologically, but he was not indifferent to ceremonies.  Therefore, he not only composed the hymns that we have been examining, in his versions and Bach’s revisions, but he also published two orders of worship for the revised “evangelical” form of the Mass: the Latin Formula missae et communionis in 1523 and the German Deutsche Messe und Ordnung des Gottesdiensts of 1526.  We shall be analyzing these two orders in more detail in Chapter 9 because of their bearing on the composite work of Bach now called the Mass in B Minor, but, for our purposes here, they stand as part of the musical heritage of the Reformation because of the limitations that Luther’s liturgical work placed on the church musician as both composer and performer, as well as because of the opportunities that it provided for the church musician.

From: Bach Among the Theologians by Jaroslav Pelikan (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1986), p. 27.

Jaroslav Pelikan (1923-2006) taught both history and ecclesiastical history at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut (1962-1996) and was a prolific author.

 

Johann Sebastian Bach

It is important to grasp that Bach was not only a man of strong religious beliefs and great moral probity but a dedicated musician who felt that music was one way (and, to him, the best way) of speaking to and serving God.  He was a rigorous Lutheran in creed, sometimes uneasy when serving Calvinist masters or Lutherans with strong Pietist leanings, but not (so far as we can see) bigoted.  Indeed, by the standards of eighteenth-century Germany – where the Wars of Religion had ended as recently as his own childhood (and the Peace of Westphalia, which ended the devastating Thirty Years’ War, had been signed just thirty-seven years before he was born) – he was ecumenical, certainly irenic. 

The vast majority of his religious compositions were written to be performed in a Lutheran church.  But there is nothing in them offensive to non-Lutherans.  Unlike his contemporary, Handel, Bach does not exude Protestant religiosity.  He could, and did, compose settings for the Latin liturgy and hymns.  That, indeed, is how his Mass in B Minor began, with a setting for the Kyrie and Gloria, gradually expanding, over the years, into a complete Latin mass of astounding power and complexity, which could be, was, and still is – today, more than ever – performed with equal enthusiasm and devotion by Catholics and Protestants.  His great St. Matthew Passion, which, together with the Mass, marks the summit of his artistic achievement, is set in German, the vernacular regarded as suspect for services by south German Catholics.  But, again, it is regarded with reverence by many Christians today as the most faithful and exalted musical presentation of Christ’s suffering and death. 

Bach was a Lutheran by birth, education, taste and, not least, loyalty…[Bach's music], whether performed by himself or others, had to be of the highest quality, always and everywhere.  Anything less would be an insult to the deity or, at best, a gross dereliction of duty.  Moreover, quality was not enough.  Bach was aware of the great originality of his mind, both in devising new musical forms and in perfecting old ones.  He knew he could serve God best by demonstrating his originality.  Hence, he had a religious compulsion to create, and his creations had to stretch his own powers to the uttermost and are, therefore, hard for anyone else to play.

From: Creators: From Chaucer to Walt Disney by Paul Johnson (London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 2006), pp. 83-84.