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).

 

The Early Church Fathers and Music

The church fathers were highly influential Christian writers and scholars who interpreted the Bible and set down some principles to guide the early church.  Some – Clement of Alexandria, Origen, St. Basil, and St. John Chrysostom – wrote in Greek; others – St. Ambrose, St. Augustine, and St. Jerome – wrote in Latin.  The value of music, they believed, lay in its power not only to inspire divine thoughts but also to influence – for good or evil – the character of its listeners.  Philosophers and church leaders of the early Middle Ages did not strongly dwell on the idea – which we take for granted in our day – that music might be heard solely for sheer delight in the play of sounds.  While they did not deny that the sound of music was pleasurable, they held to the Platonic principle that beautiful things exist to remind us of divine and perfect beauty.  Apparent worldly beauties that inspire only self-centered enjoyment or desire of possession were to be rejected.  This view forms the basis for many of the pronouncements about music made by the church fathers (and, later, by some theologians of the Protestant Reformation).

Music, then, was the servant of religion, and only music that opened the mind to Christian teachings and disposed it to holy thoughts was deemed worthy of hearing in church.  On these grounds, instrumental music was excluded, at first, from public worship, though the faithful were allowed to use a lyre to accompany hymns and psalms in their homes and on informal occasions.  On this point, the fathers ran into difficulty, for the Hebrew Scriptures (the Old Testament) and, especially, the Psalms, are full of references to the psaltery, harp, organ, and other musical instruments.  How were these to be explained?  The usual means was allegory.  The tongue is the “psaltery” of the Lord; by “harp” we must understand the mouth, which is made to vibrate by the Holy Spirit as if by a plectrum; the “organ” is our body.  These and similar explanations were typical of an age that delighted in allegorizing Scripture.

From: A History of Western Music by Donald Jay Grout and Claude V. Palisca; 5th edition (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1996 [1960]), pp. 25-26.

 

Music and the Church

The late conflict between the Bishop of London and the Rev. Stewart Headlam as to the godliness of dancing ended practically in the excommunication of the dancers and the inhibition of the popular clergyman, whose version of the Thirty-Nine Articles includes Land Nationalization, Free Speech, Communion for Stage Players, and a Democratic Constitution for the Church.  Mr. Headlam’s teaching, nevertheless, seems to have travelled further than the Bishop’s, for we hear, from Georgia, of a troop of factory hands removing the benches from their church on a Friday evening, and having a hearty dance.  At a church in North Carolina, a brass band was allowed to perform some stirring rhythmical hymn tunes for the edification of a Negro congregation.  These pious colored persons, we are told, “began to grow a little nervous and restless about the feet and, in a short time, the whole crowd was indulging in a regular old breakdown.”  This is shocking, no doubt, to our insular conception of a church as a place where we must, on no account, enjoy ourselves, and where ladies are trained in the English art of sitting in rows for hours, dumb, expressionless, and with the elbows uncomfortably turned in.  But, since people must enjoy themselves sometimes, why not in their own churches as well as in places where drinking bars, gambling tables, and other temptations to enjoy themselves unhealthily and indecently are deliberately put in their way?  “Dancing is an art,” says Mr. Headlam.  “All art is praise,” says Mr. Ruskin.  Praise is, surely, not out of place in a church.  We sing there; why should we not dance?

The Puritans, from whom we inherit our prejudice against such a proposal, objected to dancing and singing in all places and at all seasons.  Merry England never shared that objection.  We admit it in church only because we can afford to dance elsewhere.  But, how about the people who have no such opportunities: no drawing rooms, no money, no self-control in the presence of temptation and license?  We do not want to see Westminster Abbey turned into a ballroom.  But, if some enterprising clergyman with a cure of souls in the slums were to hoist a board over his church door with the inscription, “Here men and women, after working hours, may dance without getting drunk on Fridays, hear good music on Saturdays, pray on Sundays, discuss public affairs without molestation from the police on Mondays, have the building for any honest purpose they please – theatricals, if desired, on Tuesdays, bring the children for games, amusing drill, and romps on Wednesdays, and volunteer for a thorough scrubbing down of the place on Thursdays” – well, it would be all very shocking, no doubt.  But, after all, it would not interfere with the Bishop of London’s salary.

A music review by George Bernard Shaw, originally published in The Star, a London newspaper, on May 14, 1888; reprinted in London Music in 1888-89 as Heard by Corni di Bassetto (Later Known as Bernard Shaw) with Some Further Autobiographical Particulars by George Bernard Shaw; reprint (New York: Vienna House, 1973), pp. 34-35.  The reprint volume was originally published in 1937.

As a young man, the famous playwright George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) worked for six years (1888-1894) as a music critic in London.  His complete music reviews were collected and published in four volumes in the 1930s.

 

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.

 

Augustine on Music

Augustine mentions, more than once, that he was vulnerable to being moved by the sound of music.  At Milan where, at first, he used to come to the cathedral to admire Ambrose’s oratorical skill, he found himself not only impressed by the content of the discourses but also gripped by the psalm chants.  He knew that fitting music is capable of bringing the meaning of words home to the heart.  When he was a young man, he found music indispensable to his life as a source of consolation.  In his maturity, there was little time for that anyway, but he remained persuaded by Plato’s thesis that, between music and the soul, there is a “hidden affinity,” occulta familiaritas (Confessions, 10.49).  No other art is equally independent of at least four of the five senses and so controlled by mathematical principles.  What power of the mind is more astonishing than its ability to recall music without actually hearing any physical sounds?  The observation seemed, to Augustine, a striking demonstration of the soul’s transcendence in relation to the body.

From: Augustine: A Very Short Introduction by Henry Chadwick (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 47.