Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Calvin R. Stapert is professor emeritus of music at Calvin College, Grand Rapids, Michigan. His previous books include My Only Comfort: Death, Deliverance, and Discipleship in the Music of Bach; Handel's Messiah: Comfort for God's People; and A New Song for an Old World: Musical Thought in the Early Church.

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MY ONLY COMFORT

William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company

Contents

Preface..............................................xi"Essential" and "Canonical" Bach.....................3Bach the Theologian..................................7Bach's Musical Language..............................12Cantatas.............................................20Motets...............................................29Chorale Preludes.....................................31Passions and Oratorios...............................33Mass in B Minor......................................42Prologue: My Only Comfort............................51Part I: Death........................................62Part II: Deliverance.................................74Part III: Discipleship...............................165Glossary.............................................227Works Cited..........................................231Index................................................235

Introduction

The earliest ancestor of J. S. Bach that we know of is a certain Viet Bach, a baker from Hungary who, in the late sixteenth century, fled to the Thuringian region of Germany because of his Lutheran religion. This we learn from a genealogy that Bach compiled in 1735. The genealogy adds that Viet "found his greatest pleasure in a little cittern, which he took with him even into the mill and played upon while the grinding was going on" (The New Bach Reader, 283). From this humble, pious baker who loved to play the cittern sprang a line of musicians so numerous that, by the time his greatest descendant, Johann Sebastian, was born in 1685, the name Bach was synonymous with "musician" in Thuringia.

Viet, of course, could have had no idea of the magnitude of the influence his descendants would have on the musical life of Thuringians for the next two centuries. Much less could he have had any idea that one of them would be revered during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as one of the greatest musicians of all time, perhaps even as the greatest of them all. In his wildest dreams he could not have imagined that at the beginning of the twenty-first century millions of people around the whole world would be paying tribute to that descendant on the 250th anniversary of his death. Even Johann Sebastian himself, though he was very much aware of his musical ability, would no doubt be surprised to see how much fuss the world — not just Thuringia — is making over his anniversary.

Though the whole world is celebrating Bach's anniversary, it is fair to say that few people truly understand his music because an understanding of his music begins with the cantatas. The cantatas are central to what musicologist Richard Taruskin calls the "essential Bach," but they are peripheral to the Bach most people are familiar with — the "canonical Bach" of the Brandenburg Concertos, the suites and sonatas, the Well-Tempered Clavier, the Mass in B Minor, and, to a certain extent, the Passions. I do not mean to say that these "canonical" works are not in some sense "truly" Bach. That, of course, would be absurd. But I do mean to say that these "canonical" works are best understood in the light of the cantatas, not vice versa.

The great nineteenth-century composer Johannes Brahms understood something of the importance of the cantatas. His friend Siegfried Ochs told a story in his autobiography that reveals the high esteem in which Brahms held the cantatas. One evening Brahms and three friends — Ochs, Hans von Blow, and Hermann Wolff — were discussing music. According to Ochs, Brahms

fell upon Hans von Blow with the reproach that he played much too little Bach, moreover was not concerned enough with him and knew next to nothing of, as an example of the best of his creations, the church cantatas. Blow defended himself and claimed to know at least seven or eight cantatas well. "That proves that you know none of them, for there are more than two hundred," said Brahms. (Trans. in Knapp, "Finale of Brahms' Fourth," 4)

He then went to the piano and played a movement from Bach's Cantata 150.

Whatever the truth may be regarding the details of this charming anecdote, it certainly rings true with what we know about Brahms. As one of the subscribers to the Bach Gesellschaft edition of the complete works of Bach, he was well known for his admiration of Bach. And since that edition begins with the cantatas, and therefore would have been the first works the subscribers received, there can be little doubt that Brahms' knowledge of the cantatas was thorough and comprehensive. Furthermore, at least one of the sources for the theme and some of the technical procedures of the last movement of Brahms' Symphony No. 4 was the movement of Cantata 150 mentioned in the story.

Posterity in general has not been as astute as Brahms, so the cantatas became, and remain, a peripheral part of Bach's output. The reason Bach's cantatas, in the eyes of posterity, moved from the center to the periphery is the post-Enlightenment preference for generic religious feeling over an explicit Christian message. Bach's cantatas do not fit that bill; they are nothing if not explicitly Christian. So after his death in 1750, Bach's un-Enlightened music was hardly known until 1829, when Felix Mendelssohn conducted a performance of the St. Matthew Passion. This started a revival that gave Bach's music an honored place in the classical music canon, a place it still occupies today more securely than ever. But, as we have already noted, the "canonical Bach" is not the "essential Bach." The emphasis in the canonical Bach is on the instrumental music. The vocal music, of course, is not totally ignored, but the post-Enlightened mind accepts it only after mentally divorcing the music from the explicitly Christian content of its texts. The Mass in B Minor, because of a well-ingrained post-Enlightenment habit of mentally filtering out the undesirably specific content of Mass texts, had little problem entering the canon. It could even be trumpeted as "the greatest piece of music ever written." But the Passions, certainly no less great, present a big problem to the post-Enlightenment mind. So do the cantatas. Although the cantatas are of smaller dimensions than the Passions, they are so numerous and maintain Bachian levels of artistry so consistently that they can hardly be ignored. The problem is that the Passion and cantata texts are more explicitly Christian than post-Enlightened minds can tolerate, and they require great mental gymnastics to render them generically religious. Therefore, for most music lovers, they exist uncomfortably at the margins of Bach's repertory.

In his 1991 New York Times review of the Teldec recordings of the complete church cantatas of Bach (reprinted in Text and Act, pp. 307-15), Richard Taruskin summarizes the post-Enlightenment problem with the "essential Bach" of the cantatas. It stems, he says, from the Enlightenment definition of music, given classic formulation by Charles Burney in the 1770s and still repeated in various guises in most dictionaries today: "Music is the art of pleasing by the succession and combination of agreeable sounds." To this Taruskin exclaims:

How utterly irrelevant this whole esthetic is to the Bach of the cantatas!...