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Time, Death, Eternity: Imagining the Soul of Johann Sebastian BachGeorge E. Atwood, Ph.D. This essay describes a search for the soul of Johann Sebastian Bach, as it is expressed and symbolized in his music. I want to thank two people who helped me. My dear friend Patricia Price served as a muse for the project as a whole and made a number of important contributions along the way. Benjamin Stolorow, who knows much about Bach and his music, also provided indispensable ideas and helped me to understand the structure of many of Bach’s creations. In what follows, I have drawn on the biography by Christopher Wolff: Johann Sebastian Bach: the Learned Musician (2000). This exploration presents some fairly serious difficulties, in view of the immense edifice that is Bach’s music. Beethoven famously remarked, on being asked what he thought of Bach’s lifework, “Nicht Bach, sondern Meer sein!” Not a brook, but rather an ocean! Albert Schweitzer regarded Bach as the product of decades and even centuries of developments in European music, the objectivation, as he put it, of a vast historical process. Bach was born more than 300 years ago, in Eisenach, Germany, into a culture,
an early Lutheran religious worldview, and a language very far removed
from our own. How can one hope to cross that great divide and actually
find the individual, the personality, the inner feelings that were his?
He left us almost nothing written describing his own emotional experiences.
Some commentators have compared the historical record of his life in this
connection to that of Shakespeare, about whom we also know very little.
The material develops in the form of a series of interconnected thought trains, with some selections from Bach’s music recommended to be listened to along the way. I want to encourage everyone who follows the presentation to join me in entertaining the idea that Bach’s most central personal themes, his most essential life experiences, are inscribed in his music. I chose as my initial example the prelude and fugue in C Major in Book
1 of the collection known as The Well-tempered Clavier. I have made this
selection for two reasons: first, the music is exceptionally beautiful;
and second, the part that follows the prelude - the fugue in C major -
contains, numerologically encoded, Bach’s presence itself. Most
Bach scholars agree that he played with number symbolism in his music,
and that the number 14 was for him a representation of his own name. When
the letters B – A – C – H are replaced by their respective
numerical positions in the alphabet: 2 – 1 – 3 – 8,
adding the numbers together, one arrives at the sum of 14. There are exactly
14 notes in the theme – the so-called subject of this first fugue,
played in what is called “stretto “ (the theme is played overlapping
itself in different keys, over and over). So translating the fugue into
its numerical and alphabetical equivalent, it is as if voices are saying:
”Bach … Bach … Bach … Bach …etc. The fact
that he did this encourages me in the belief in what simply has to be
true in any case, namely, that he is everywhere present in his music.
After the prelude, which consists in a series of chord progressions that
he originally wrote out as an exercise for one of his sons learning to
play keyboard instruments, please listen closely to the repeating melody
of the fugue, in which the 14 notes are played again and again in different
keys. I ask this question: why would Bach want to create such a structure,
one in which his own name is repeated over and over? Is the music simply
a signature written in sound again and again? Or is it his way of saying:
“I am, I am, I am, I am…..?” What significance attaches
to the fact that not one but two (and sometimes three and even four) voices
simultaneously intone the name? Johann Sebastian was of course a Bach
in a long line of Bachs, and so does this series of repetitions show that
the long line of succession across the family’s many generations
continues on indefinitely? Does it affirm a personal continuity in time,
a constancy of his own individual identity? .I shall now give an account, as best I can reconstruct it, of how my thoughts developed regarding the soul of Johann Sebastian Bach. Before this project was even a gleam in my eye, in years and decades past, my acquaintance with Bach included the melody of his cantata (147) known as Jesu: Joy of Man’s Desiring, since this is played everywhere and at all times, at weddings, at funerals, in dentists’ offices, in elevators. I had listened a few times to one or two of the Brandenberg concertos And I was also familiar with the famous melody from the cantata (140) known as Wachet auf, ruft uns die Stimme (The voice calls to us Awake!). Cantatas 140 and 147 figure importantly in my presentation later. 1. I recall an impression from these, and others of Bach’s creations to which I was occasionally exposed, an impression of the music as cyclical and repetitive, rather than linear and progressive. The music always seemed to start and end “in the middle:” no clear origin, no intermediate section following, no identifiable conclusion. In my imagination I saw circles and cycles, always repeating, rather than journeys from one recognizable point in space and time to another. It would begin and then end, but forever in the middle. Could this absence of linear development, I remember wondering, be relevant to the experience of time, as if the passage of time, from the past through the present to the future, was somehow held in abeyance in Bach’s works? Is there some issue in Bach’s lifeworld pertaining to a resistance against the flow of time, to an attraction to the transtemporal? . What such an attraction could mean I had no idea. It is sometimes said that much of the religious music during the Baroque period displays a timeless, eternal quality, representing to the musician and the listener a symbolic materialization in sound of God’s work creating the universe, of the cosmic harmony of heaven and earth. The extreme order of Bach’s music is one of its most pronounced qualities, and perhaps could be viewed in this light as expressing his faith in God and a world possessing transcendent perfection. I became aware some years after these early ruminations on temporality that Bach lost both his parents when he was a young child, first his mother, then his father. Without knowing anything more about his biography, I wondered if what I perceived as the timeless quality of his music could possibly relate to this experience, the loss of a loved one being something that occurs in time, whereas in timelessness there is perhaps no such thing as loss. Maybe his music, I thought, provided a way of transcending a tragic world, ruled over by the progression of time, a world in which death is inevitable, and, when it occurs, irrevocable. 2. One of the first things one learns about Bach in a study of his life and work is that he was the great synthesizer. Traditionally sacred and secular music are freely blended and integrated in his compositions. German, Italian, French, Spanish, and many other national musical heritages are drawn together. He wrote for practically every musical instrument, and he draws upon every musical form and genre: vocal, instrumental, solo, choir, orchestra, opera, concerto, etc.. Bach’s genius resided in his ability to bring things together in new and dazzling combinations – his was therefore an originality of synthesis, rather than one of radical change and revolution. It occurred to me that perhaps there are two kinds of genius: one devoted to extending and integrating all that has come before, and the other to destroying existing structures and replacing them with new ones. If Bach represents the former of these, we might say Picasso exemplifies the latter, since it was the hallmark of his long career to overthrow existing traditions, including the ones he established himself. I think genius that expresses itself by pulling elements together into new unities is guided mainly by love; but genius that leads revolutions and destroys the old, although love may be present, is full of aggression and hate as well. Eros in the one case, Thanatos in the other. It cannot be an accident that Bach was a loving husband, who worked his whole life to hold his family together and passed on to his children all that he could of his music, whereas Picasso, in dramatic contrast, did all he could to destroy the women of his life, and went out of his way to injure and destroy his children as well. Rather than there being two kinds of genius, however, it probably would make more sense to speak of two poles of creative genius, one that synthesizes and integrates diverse elements from the past, and the other that creates revolutionary forms overthrowing the structures elaborated in the past. Both poles would therefore be present in every act of creation, differing only in their relative salience. In Bach, unquestionably, synthesis and love predominate. He was always weaving and reweaving unities out of previously unconnected elements. One may ask: what drives a man to do this throughout a lifetime? The idea occurred to me that it might be associated with a fragmentation, a feeling of being in pieces, or of the world itself having disintegrated in some essential way, so that the synthesizing trend in his musical compositions would express an underlying need to heal his own fragmented selfhood, and/or to restore to a shattered world its lost coherence. This idea turns out to be an essential one and is developed further in the next sections. Now, however, I suggest listening to a selection from Bach’s music that one of my colleagues at Rutgers University claims is the single most beautiful piece of music in all of creation: the aria from the Goldberg Variations. I should say that I have still another colleague at my school who says that although this aria is a “nice little ditty,” there are many other pieces of music, including some Bach himself composed, equaling or exceeding it in beauty. The aria appears at the beginning and then again at the end of the variations making up this work. Many have thought that this arrangement creates a circular structure in the set of variations as a whole, wherein at the end one is returned to the beginning, which could mean that the entire sequence could be played forever, around and around, and therefore transcends time and partakes of eternity. This might be seen as an instance of Bach’s music in its timeless aspect. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 3. Let me now tell some things that are known about Bach’s childhood years. He was the youngest child of eight, in a large extended family tracing back over several generations of musicians. During his childhood, there were two constant companions: Music and Death. His father, Ambrosius Bach, was the director of town music for Eisenach, where Bach was born.in 1685. . His mother Marie and her husband were 41 years old at the time of Bach’s birth. The father had an identical twin, Christoph, also an accomplished musician and an important part of their lives. What was it like to be the youngest child in that incredible family? The house was full of children and young people, virtually all of them occupied with music. At one point Johann Sebastian lived with 6 siblings (a sister had died in infancy before he was born) as well as two cousins (orphans from his extended family whose parents had died of the plague) and his father’s young apprentices. Johann Forkel, Bach’s first biographer, describes an important yearly event that must have deeply influenced him: reunions in which members of the larger extended family would gather together and spend a few days celebrating and making music. I picture these occasions as times that were filled with great joy for all concerned, including the very young Johann Sebastian himself. “As the company consisted wholly of cantors, organists and town musicians … the first thing they did, when they were assembled, was to sing a chorale. From this pious commencement they proceeded to drolleries which often made a great contrast with it. For now they sang popular songs, the contents of which were partly comic and partly naughty, all together and extempore, but in such a manner that the several parts thus extemporized made a kind of harmony together, the words, however, in every part being different.” (quoted in Wolff, 2000, p. 27) And now, let’s talk about Death. Bach’s sister, his parents’ first child, had died in infancy 14 years before Bach was born. He lost a brother when he was two months old, and another sister when he had just turned one. In addition to the continuing loss of numerous more distant relatives, his eighteen year-old brother Balthasar died when Bach was six, and the next year one of the cousins who had been in the house Bach’s whole life, working as an apprentice to his father Ambrosius, also died, at the age of 16. But these losses, difficult though they must have been, were not the most profound ones of his early years. In 1693, Christoph, Bach’s father’s twin, then town musician in Arnstadt, not far from Eisenach, died suddenly. Bach’s son, Carl Phillip Emmanuel, annotated the family genealogy with the following description regarding the twin brother: “These twins [Christoph and Ambrosius] are perhaps the only ones of their kind ever known. They loved each other extremely. They looked so much alike that even their wives could not tell them apart. They were an object of wonder on the part of great gentlemen and everyone who saw them. Their speech, their way of thinking – everything was the same. In music, too, they were not to be told apart: they played alike and thought out their performances in the same way. If one fell ill the other did too.” (quoted in Wolff, 2000, p. 34) We need to imagine what it might have been like for one’s father to have a duplicate, someone reportedly greatly loved by the family, and then to learn that this magical double, this man who could only be distinguished from his father by his clothing, had died. What foreboding might the boy feel, then at the age of eight, knowing that everything that occurred in the life of his father’s twin occurred also in his father’s? Within a year, Bach’s mother Marie died. Nothing is known about the cause of her death except that it was sudden. Her husband left home on a trip with his wife in good health, only to return two weeks later to find her dead and already buried. Ambrosius, shocked by the loss of his wife and saddled with the responsibility for so many young ones, after only a few months remarried within his extended family, to a widow of one of his cousins, Margaretha, who herself had two daughters. “Twelve weeks and one day”(according to a statement written by Margaretha) into the life of the reconstituted family, Ambrosius himself died, possibly after an illness involving much suffering. (surviving records from the family indicate the presence in the Bach home of great numbers of medications). The nine-year old Johann Sebastian had lost his father, his father’s duplicate, and his mother. What was the experience of this child in the midst of such a catastrophe? The only facts concerning this time that remain available to us are his school attendance and grades in the year 1694-1695, a period that included the illnesses and deaths of his mother and father: he was absent on fifty one and one half days, a greater number of absences than are recorded in any of his other years of schooling. His grades, formerly at the top of his class, fell during this time. Can words describe the depth of trauma involved in such tragedy? Can mourning occur when so many losses are involved? What happens to a child who continues on, even in the face of such events? What happens inwardly, secretly, to the soul of the child, even as outwardly he or she resumes the activities of daily life? And how is all of this related to Bach’s music? A few months after the death of his father, Johann Sebastian and his brother Johann Jacob, three years older, were sent to live with Johann Christoph, in Ohrdruf, a small town 25 miles from Eisenach, where the brother was the organist at St. Michael’s Church. Christoph was fourteen years older than Johann Sebastian and had spent a number of years as an apprentice to Johann Pachelbel. The next several years spent in Ohrdruf continued Bach’s education, academically and musically, and his school records from that period show him at the top or near the top of all his classes, performing at a level matching or exceeding students who were years ahead of him. One story from this period may have importance for an understanding of his continuing struggle to master the tragic circumstances of his childhood, and also for knowing how these struggles became reflected in his music. I call this story: The Moonlight Robbery, and it appears in Bach’s obituary, written by his son Carl Philipp Emanuel. Most commentators believe that this story must have originated with Johann Sebastian himself: “The love of our little Johann Sebastian for music was uncommonly great even at this tender age [12 years, approximately]. In a short time he had fully mastered all the pieces his brother had voluntarily given him to learn. But his brother possessed a book of clavier pieces by the most famous masters of the day – Froberger, Pachelbel, Kerl – and this, despite all his pleading and for who knows what reason, was denied him. His zeal to improve himself thereupon gave him the idea of practicing the following innocent deceit. This book was kept in a cabinet whose doors consisted only of grillwork. Now, with his little hands he could reach through the grillwork and roll the book up (for it had only a paper cover); accordingly, he would fetch the book out at night, when everyone had gone to bed and, since he was not even possessed of a light, copy it by moonlight. In six months’ time he had these musical spoils in his own hands. Secretly and with extraordinary eagerness he was trying to put it to use, when his brother, to his great dismay, found out about it, and without mercy took away from him the copy he had made with such great pains.” (quoted in Wolff, 2000, p. 45) How are we to interpret this story? What could have been the sources
of Johann Sebastian’s driving need to make his brother’s secret
musical possessions his own? I am also struck by the assertiveness, the aggressiveness implicit in this little tale; the young Bach, contravening his brother’s wishes, finds a way to take what he has to have, what he must have felt was necessary for his own emerging purposes. He thought to himself: “to hell with Johann Christoph, I will make this music my own!” My friend Patricia Price helped me see an analogy here between Bach’s defiant copying of the music in the secrecy of the night and Prometheus’ stealing of fire from Zeus and giving it to mortals, a mythical crime symbolizing the child’s appropriating of parental power to itself and defining its own independent identity, agency, and destiny. Pat also suggested that the imagery of this story of the robbery in the night embodies an ancient archetype of the prophet who unrolls the sacred scrolls and translates the divine word to humanity at large. Inasmuch as music in the Lutheran church during Bach’s time tended to be regarded as immanently containing the word and even the very presence of God, I find this suggestion incredibly interesting. 4. How specifically was Johann Sebastian affected by the deaths of his loved ones? How did this later show itself in his compositions? What invariant organizing principle was created out of all these experiences? If the inferences cited earlier regarding an abiding sense of fragmentation were correct, how did the losses contribute to this sense? What form did the fragmentation itself take? Trauma such as he suffered has to have left a lasting imprint on his experiences, and this imprint will inevitably show itself in the structure of his creations. With a view toward reconstructing the answer to these questions, to discovering the pattern inscribed in his music, I listened to his orchestral works and his solos, to his instrumental compositions and his vocal creations - to The Goldberg Variations, A Musical Offering, The Well-tempered Clavier, The Art of the Fugue, The St. Matthew Passion, The St. John Passion, The Mass in B Minor, a vast number of partitas, preludes, sonatas and fugues, the cello suites, to all of the concertos including especially the Brandenbergs, and finally, to many, many of the cantatas. Here are some thoughts that occurred as I listened to one of these, entitled Schweigt stille, plaudert nicht (Be silent; chatter not), also known as: The Coffee Cantata. This piece of music, generally considered to be a purely secular work, is a two-person opera, a comic opera actually, in which a grumpy, aging father – Schlendrian – argues with a spirited, defiant daughter, Lieschen. The quarrel between the two concerns coffee: whereas Lieschen has great love for this beverage, taking intense pleasure in it, Schlendrian regards her doing so as a kind of addiction she should overcome and renounce. Back and forth the two of them go, the one affirming that coffee is most lovely, sweet, and enjoyable, and the other asserting the importance of giving it up. What follows is a translation of a short section of the cantata in which one hears Schlendrian and Lieschen in conflict over her continuing enjoyment of this drink. Schlendrian: You naughty child Lieschen: Dear Father. Do not be so strict Schlendrian: If you do not quit coffee Lieschen: Agreed! Schlendrian: Here now I’ve got the little monkey Lieschen I can easily learn to bear this Schlendrian: You will not venture to the window Lieschen: This also, but heed my request Schlendrian: You will not receive from my hand Lieschen: Yes, yes, but leave me to my pleasure [coffee] ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Coffee Cantata ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- I am aware that the lyrics in Bach’s cantatas were provided by his librettist and therefore cannot be identified as uniquely his own. I would say however that in writing music for words perhaps originally penned by another, he made those words his in the creation as it finally emerged. I have therefore chosen to understand the theme of this piece of music as an expression of Bach himself. The conjectures offered in the following may at the very least apply to what the words meant to Bach, even if he did not compose all of them himself. A careful listening to Lieschen in this cantata makes one imagine that she is talking about something more than just coffee. She repeatedly emphasizes, in an earlier section than the one I played how sweet it is – she sings out, with great passion, that it is “sweeter than a thousand kisses, milder than a fine Muscatel”. This conflict between father and daughter is a more basic one than a disagreement over a particular beverage. Furthermore, in the last stages of the piece, the father tells the daughter she must refuse coffee lest she never become married, and that if she gives up coffee then the way is clear for her to marry. Lieschen, on hearing this repeated, agrees finally to give up coffee so that she can have a husband. But at the very, very end, after the argument has been won by Schlendrian, she adds: she will make it an explicit part of her wedding contract that she be allowed to have …..COFFEE! Thus the argument returns in a circle to where it began. This final twist in the story, in which Lieschen both marries and maintains her access to her beloved coffee, was almost certainly added to the cantata by Bach himself. One morning in the Fall of 2003, as I was driving to the college where I teach –a 45 minute commute - and listening to this cantata, especially the last part, I recall asking the question: What is coffee? It seems to be more than just a drink, based on the way Bach has Lieschen singing about it. It emerges in the music as the most desirable of all desirable things. What, I asked, did Bach see in this story about a clash between two wills, one seeking a pleasure of the senses, and the other opposing that and affirming the renunciation of that pleasure. And what could it have meant to Bach that ceasing to drink coffee will enable this young woman to marry? On the face of it, the introduction of a difficulty with marriage appears almost as a non sequitur in the unfolding story, because there is no obvious reason why drinking coffee should interfere with a young woman’s marriage prospects. I am aware that coffee had only recently been introduced into German society during Bach’s time, and perhaps was initially regarded as a corrupting influence. Bach himself, however, is known to have had great love for this beverage. In another of Bach’s cantatas, No. 140 (Wachet auf, ruft uns die Stimme), the image of marriage is used as a symbol of the union of humanity with Jesus Christ at the End of the World, where Christ is pictured as the groom and the souls of humanity are pictured as the bride. Could it be, I asked myself as I was driving down the road to my college, that this is somehow also part of what is being spoken of in this music? Is it possible that Schlendrian and Lieschen symbolized for Bach two conflicting parts of himself, the former standing for intense religiosity and a commitment to union with God, and the latter to a love for humanity, for the world, for all the pleasures of the senses? I asked further, were there two sides of Johann Sebastian Bach, one orienting toward Heaven, the locus of his lost parents, uncle, and siblings, and the other orienting toward Earth, and toward all of the desirable things one finds in the realm of living human beings? The Earth includes coffee, wine, good food, the pleasure of ones’ company with others, the love of women and sexuality, professional achievement and success, parenting and family life, and an endless succession of other mundane purposes and goals. Heaven, in sharp and enduring contrast, releases us from the suffering of earthly existence into a timeless realm in which death does not interrupt life, a realm that includes those most dearly, deeply, profoundly loved, namely, the lost ones of Bach’s youth: his father, his mother, his father’s twin brother, his own siblings and other relatives and acquaintances who had died.. Could it be, I wondered, that Bach was a man torn in half between these two poles, one pointing toward Heaven, the other toward Earth, and that in his music both poles were represented, and at different moments and in different ways, brought together, fused, integrated, only later to separate, differentiate, but then again to reintegrate and fuse still again, and endlessly back and forth, separation and reunion, in cycle after cycle? A bringing together of the two warring sides would then be symbolically expressed in the part of the cantata’s story it is believed was added by Bach himself, in the image of Lieschen both marrying (uniting with God) and continuing to have coffee (partaking of earthly life). Sacred and secular are thereby joined in everlasting union. Let us try again to picture the young Bach’s grief, the situation in which he found himself following the loss of his most dearly beloved family members. Moving forward over the years to 1727, Bach wrote Cantata 198: The Trauer Ode (Ode to Mourning/Grief), composed to mark ceremonies in honor of the recently deceased Christiane Eberhardine, wife of August II, King of Poland. I have chosen to see in Bach’s creation an echo of his own mourning. It is unlikely that Bach contributed the specific words that follow: my construction therefore concerns what I believe these words, which he incorporated into one of his greatest creations, may have meant to him. I am therefore imagining the significance Bach’s music had for its own composer, and using the resulting images in an effort to picture his experience of the tragedies of his life. This cantata begins as follows: Lass Fuerstin, lass noch einen Strahl Aus Salems Sterngewoelben schiessen. Und sieh, mit wieviel Traenenguessen umringen wir dein Ehrenmal. Princess, Let a ray shoot out of the starry vaults of Salem [Jerusalem]. And see with how much of a downpouring of tears we encircle your time of honor. The cantata here visualizes the Queen as casting a look back at the world – sending a ray from the stars -and witnessing the overwhelming grief of all of those who loved her. Even as she looks back, the world is pictured here as looking upwards toward her, vowing never to forget her until the end of time. Doch, Koenigen, du stirbest nicht, Man weiss, was man an dir besessen; Die Nachwelt wird dich nicht vergessen, Bis dieser Weltbau einst zerbricht. So, Queen, you do not die , One knows, what one possesses in you, posterity will not forget you, until this created world is one day destroyed.. The Trauer Ode pictures the princess, also referred to as the queen, as a beloved mother to her followers, and is creating an image in which this mother looks back upon the world, as she stands upon the threshold of everlasting life. I was reminded by this of what I have understood occurs when an object falls into a black hole in space - an outside observer does not actually see the object disappearing, but rather witnesses an endless process of ever closer approximations to the hole’s event horizon. This approaching of the boundary line that goes on without end has to do with a slowing of time inside such an intense gravitational field. I think of Bach’s mother, and his father and other loved ones, as analogously approaching the gateway to Heaven but never quite passing in and disappearing, remaining forever in view in some essential way. I also picture them as perceiving his love for them; as the world of the living looks toward Heaven and promises to hold the dear departed in its consciousness always. This may correspond to the part of Bach remaining forever involved and engaged in loving his mother and father and others who died, so many of whom became lost to him on the plane of ordinary temporal existence, but not on that of the timelessness of Heaven.. By 1727, the year of the Trauer Ode, Bach had also lost his first wife, numerous children of his own, and all of his many siblings. His whole life was a Trauer Ode, an ode to mourning the deaths that followed him at every step. On the other hand, one could say that precisely the opposite is also the case, namely that Bach’s life was equally a Freude Ode, an Ode to Joy. What was his response to the loss of his first wife, Maria Barbara, who had passed away in 1721, after bearing him 7 children (4 dying in infancy)? After a period of mourning he found a second wife, Anna Magdalena, with whom he fathered 13 more children (only 7 of these survived infancy). Bach’s life was simultaneously one of never ending sorrow and ever renewed passionate creation.. So he was torn between the human and the divine, between the eternal and the temporal, and he found in music a way of expressing both of these currents of his nature. This duality is interestingly reflected in the only recorded statement Bach made regarding the essential purpose of music: “true music … [pursues] as its ultimate and final goal … the honor of God and the recreation of the soul.” (quoted inWolff, 2000, p. 8) If it is true that Bach was a divided soul, with the essential rift being between eternity on the one side and the temporal world of earthly life on the other, then how perfect it is that Bach’s primary mode of musical expression was that of counterpoint, embodying the relationship between two (or more) voices that are independent in contour and rhythm, but interdependent in harmony. He did not invent this musical form, but he was its greatest genius. A great many of Bach’s creations are marked by the presence of two separate melodies, one following the other, played concurrently, interlacing, merging, separating, and alternating, representing in sound the duality of his inner nature. 5. Let us now turn to another of Bach’s cantatas, No. 140: Wachet auf, ruft uns die Stimme. As noted earlier, the story on which this cantata is based, drawn from one of the Gospels in the New Testament (Matthew), uses the metaphor of marriage to represent the union of the Souls of Humanity (the bride) with Jesus, Son of God (the groom). In the biblical story there is a great wedding to take place, but a number of people are sleeping as the moment of the actual marriage approaches. The call to the sleepers to awaken (Wachet auf!) stands for a call to humanity to prepare for the Second Coming of the Lord and of Eternal Salvation. In the selection I suggest listening to from this cantata (track 4 on most CD versions, its most well known section), there are two distinct parts that alternate and overlap - one of which – the initial instrumental part– calls to mind people and perhaps even animals in motion, dancing, walking, running, leaping, such imagery being bodily in nature, existing in space and in time, on the earth – the other part, which comes in after a period, is a Lutheran chorale, celebrating the glory of God, giving voice to the coming union with Jesus Christ. This second part, embodying the divine side of the dichotomy, appears superimposed on the first part, representing earthly life – they alternate and then coincide, playing simultaneously, almost like a kiss at the final moment of the marriage, uniting Heaven and Earth, Jesus and the Soul of Humanity, blending and unifying the Eternal and the Temporal, the Finite and the Infinite. As you listen to the selection, pay attention to the arrival of the chorale melody and hear it as the Coming of the Lord. And join me in picturing this unification as a symbol of a healing of the rift in the soul of Johann Sebastian Bach. Benjamin Stolorow helped me to hear the duality within the music, and the fusion of the two sides as well. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Cantata 140: Wachet auf, ruft uns die Stimme ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
6. A brief discussion of the structure of the Goldberg Variations in its relevance to the project of portraying and healing the rift in Bach’s soul The Goldberg Variations, as mentioned in the first part of the presentation, are sometimes described as circular rather than linear in their organization – the work begins and ends with the same piece of music, the aria. This circularity suggests the possibility of the work being played around and around, forever, which connotes the eternal world beyond time and space. The Goldbergs are also sometimes described as fractal in their structure, meaning that the same organizing patterns appear and reappear at whatever level of analysis one chooses. An extremely simple example is in the aria itself: this piece of music that appears at the beginning and the end of the set of variations as a whole begins and ends at essentially the same point: two Gs played an octave apart. Thus the aria in itself one can regard as circular in structure. When we come to the sequence of 30 variations contained within the repetitions of the aria, we can see that they are organized into 10 sets of 3 variations each. Each of these triplets – possibly symbolizing the Holy Trinity, while the number 10 may symbolize the 10 Commandments – follows a common pattern: generally the first variation is a dance, the second is a virtuosic piece, and the third is a canon. A dance is concerned with bodily motion and the world of time and space in which such motion occurs, and therefore can be viewed as symbolic of earthly life. The virtuosic pieces that follow the dances, often involving rapid sequences of ascending and descending notes, one can look at as transitional way stations on a journey that is being depicted in sound. The canons that then appear - involving a melody which follows itself (like row, row, row your boat) - because of their structure, are temporally disrupted and prevented from traversing a linear pathway from beginning to end. This interruption of the linear flow of time itself points toward a world beyond time, namely the realm of Heaven. So each triplet may be heard as depicting a journey from Earth through a transition to Heaven. The canons themselves (there are actually only 9, because the 10th triplet involves something different) in turn are related to one another by changes in the keys in which they are played. The first canon, variation No. 3, is played at the unison (meaning the repetitions of the melody are in the same key as the original presentation of it). The second canon, variation No. 6, is played “at the second,” meaning one key higher than that of the original presentation. The third canon, variation No. 9, is “at the third” (two keys higher), etc. etc., until we reach the 27th variation, which is a canon played “at the ninth.” If one visualizes this progression of the canons as described, they undergo an ascension and create what my friend Benjamin Stolorow pointed out to me amounts to a “Stairway to Heaven,” paralleling the movement taking place inside each triplet. The final triplet in the Goldbergs does not present a canon – variation
No. 30 is what Bach calls a “Quodlibet,” a piece of music
derived from popular songs often sung at festivities, such as the family
reunions of Bach’s youth. I wonder if the ascent along the stairway
to Heaven thus also represents a return to an idealized time of music
and joy predating the advent of tragic loss in Bach’s early years.
It is interesting in this connection to review the words belonging to
the melodies Bach chose to complete his sequence of the 30 variations:
they concern separation and loss. I will have some further comments on
the content of the Quodlibet in a later thought train..
The Chaconne begins with a sequence of a few notes that present the primary
theme of the piece in four measures, and then it is followed by a series
of 60 variations on that theme, divided into two parts of 30 each. The
structure of the chaconne is extremely similar to that of the Goldberg
Variations. The presentation of the theme, corresponding to the ground
bass in the aria of the Goldbergs, occurs both at the beginning and at
the end of the piece (the theme also appears in the middle, between the
two sets of 30). The music as a whole therefore forms a circle, which
suggests the possibility of it being played endlessly, through eternity.
Contained within the boundaries of the recurrence of the theme are the
variations. The Goldbergs are also divided into two parts, of 15 variations
each. The Chaconne – from Partita #2 in D minor ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
8. Over the course of the last decades, I have taught a senior seminar at Rutgers University on the theme of madness and genius. Each year, a small group of advanced undergraduate psychology students and I select someone from history who shows in his or her life acts of genius and moments of madness. The purpose of my seminar has been to solve the riddle of the relationship between these two categories of human experience. This is the sort of question that will never receive a final answer, but that generates many interesting things along the way as one engages in the search. Among the individuals we have studied have been: Carl Gustav Jung, Soren Kierkegaard, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Friedrich Nietzsche, Jean-Paul Sartre, Martin Heidegger, Sylvia Plath, Virginia Woolf, Franz Kafka, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Vincent Van Gogh, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and a number of others. A generalization has emerged from these studies, unexpectedly: acts of creative genius appear, almost without exception, to be associated with a rift in the soul, a duality within which the integrity of the person’s very selfhood is broken, and the acts of creation, always appearing as something profoundly driven, have as one of their most important meanings and purposes the goal of unifying the broken self, mending the disintegrated soul, bridging over the chasm that has opened up within the person’s identity through a creative synthesis of both sides. The circumstances and specific dynamics of this splitting of the soul differ from creator to creator, but the fact of the duality seems not to.. This generalization would appear to apply to Johann Sebastian Bach. Would it be correct also then to say that Bach was mad? Certainly not, if one looks at his life by any external standard. His was outwardly an exemplary life, both professionally and personally, and this in spite of the great tragedies that haunted him throughout its long course. On the other hand, this was a life occupied with the most stunning creative achievements, occurring again and again, and one may wonder about the driving need involved in such work and about whether this drivenness might indeed be seen as a form of madness in another sense. In the midst of thinking about this issue, and having become so focused on the inner pattern of Bach’s music that I was myself driven to dwell upon it continuously, deeply, obsessively, overwhelmingly, day and night, something happened. Eines Morgens, als ich aus unruhigen Traeumen erwachte, fand ich mich zu Johann Sebastian Bach verwandelt. One morning, as I awoke from restless dreams, I found myself transformed into Johann Sebastian Bach. Let me tell you two of the dreams and my thoughts regarding them. Although my focus will be on how the dream imagery relates to what was then a still-developing interpretation of Bach, I am also aware that in this understanding I have identified deeply with him and that the ideas intensely reflect my own situation and my own dualities and history of traumatic loss. In one of these dreams it was nighttime and I was in a building that was being heated by a tall brick structure that somehow was both a wood burning stove and also a chimney. The structure was built into the wall of the building, so that one part faced into the room I was standing in while the other part faced outside into the night. There was a sense of great heat being generated inside the structure. A voice intoned the words: “IF THE ILLUSTRATOR DIES, MADNESS WILL OCCUR.” Then there was an image of a number of dogs running and jumping up on the portion of the brick structure that was outside the building, biting and snapping at the bricks and dislodging a number of them. Fire and smoke emerged from the places the bricks had been knocked away. There was a sense that if the structure broke down, that would be the equivalent of whatever was meant by the idea that the illustrator might die. In thinking over the dream after awakening it occurred to me that Bach was himself an illustrator, an artist who produced drawings and paintings in sound, auditory hieroglyphs as it were, displaying the bipartite structure of his soul. I suddenly saw Bach as identified with the theme-subject of his creations, e.g., as in the Goldberg Variations and in the Chaconne. The internal unity of the theme thus would represent for Bach the constancy and coherence of his own sense of personal identity. The snapping dogs seemed like they might be the variations that depart from the inner coherence of the theme, and that therefore threaten to destroy its pattern and order, symbolized by the danger of the entire brick structure being pulled down by the dogs, producing a chaos of fire and heat. This idea leads to a different interpretation of why Bach begins and ends the Goldberg Variations with the aria: here one might view the aria’s two appearances as bookends serving to hold the wholeness of the structure of the variations together and preventing a disintegration and disruption of its internal pattern and order. The Chaconne as well has 3 appearances of its theme subject: at the beginning, in the middle after the first 30 variations, and then again at the end. These recurrences are like the front cover and back cover of a book, and a spine in the middle binding all the pages together inside the common structure. If the unruly, rambunctious variations were allowed to proliferate and not always returned to their origins, a calamity of unimaginable scope would occur. The illustrator might die. Even as I was thinking these thoughts a different and complementary idea crystallized: perhaps the variations are embodiments of Bach’s own ambivalent individuation in relation to his mother and father, his becoming a distinct person, existing in his own right. The theme subject of the variations would then correspond to the parental matrix out of which the child forms, transported by the tragic conditions of Bach’s early life into the afterworld beyond death. The recurrence of this subject, in the two repetitions of the aria in the Goldbergs and in the three repetitions of the theme in the Chaconne thus represents a kind of holding environment in which the developing, emerging child is contained, and, I would add, restrained. The variations would then be Bach as an individual, carving out his unique destiny and expressing his unique individuality in a life located in the only place such a thing can occur: on earth, in space and in time. Although he could go a certain distance from the everlasting bonds of connection to his lost loved ones in this journey of individuation, there always remained a limiting boundary within which his variation from his origin needed to be contained. This was owing to his continuing connection to the lost ones, sustaining ties he could not mourn and without which he would have ceased to be himself. Bach’s authenticity itself may thus be seen to have been divided between Heaven and Earth. Recall again the so-called Quodlibet, appearing as the last of the Goldberg variations. There are two melodies combined in this short piece, both drawn from folksongs as indicated earlier. The first of these begins with the words: Ich bin so lang nicht bey dir g’west I have been away from you so long These words would seem to apply to the variations themselves, which have departed from the theme established in the aria and undergone a long journey of their own elaboration. If the aria contains the bond to the parents, and the variations represent Bach’s individuation, this first song expresses a longing to return, a painful tension brought about by the separation itself, as if the aria misses the variations and is calling them back to itself. The second song offers a kind of explanation for why this separation occurred and has gone on for so long. Kraut und Ruben haben mich vertrieben Cabbage and beets have driven me away The person who has strayed from his mother would have remained by her side if she had provided the sustaining food that he wanted and needed (Fleisch). But what she gives is unsatisfying (Kraut und Ruben). Could these images reflect as well the tension within Bach between the side of him that sought to remain forever faithful and devoted to his mother (and father), even in their deaths, and that other side that wanted to make his own way and partake of what life on this earth has to offer? This latter Bach could never be wholly satisfied with the spirits of the dead, however much he loved them, because they did not and could not provide more than what a spirit can give. This was the Bach who was embodied also by Lieschen in the coffee cantata, who although she prepares herself for marriage (union with heaven), also arranges for access to coffee (participating in earthly life).. And it is also true that he could never wholly break away from the ties that were never mourned, bonds with which the very substance of his being remained engaged to the end of his days. As this final variation ends, the aria returns once more, closing the distance that has opened up in the journey of the variations and healing the rift in Bach’s divided soul. The second dream concerned an international crisis between two nations, perhaps like India and Pakistan. The image was of there being two geographically distinct regions or countries that were so alien to each other that no one from the one was ever allowed to pass into the other. However, there was a small piece of territory located precisely on the boundary separating the two that was a kind of demilitarized zone, where emissaries might meet and negotiate, where very limited contacts between the two estranged realms could occur. In thinking about this dream, I saw the two regions as the two sides once again of Bach’s own personality: Heaven and Earth, Eternity and Temporality, the Infinite and the Finite, the Sacred and the Secular.. His music would then be like the emissaries meeting in the transitional space between these separated nations, serving to bring them together and avert the catastrophe of them somehow flying violently and permanently apart. In regard to the question of madness and genius in the case of Johann Sebastian Bach, these reflections lead to the notion that Bach’s creativity served to hold him together, to maintain the cohesion of his own identity and sanity, and this was achieved by integrating and balancing a passionate love of life with an equally passionate, continuing love for all those he had lost. It occurs to me that the drivenness of his creative work in this connection also relates to the tragic circumstances of Bach’s own death in 1750. In his last years, his vision was impaired by cataracts and he became almost completely blind. His health, according to his son (CPE Bach), was otherwise excellent, and so he might have lived many more years. However, he chose to undergo two extremely dangerous, horrifically painful eye surgeries in an attempt to recover his ability to see. The loss of his sight must have meant the end of his career as a composer and musician. The result of the surgeries was that his vision was not restored and he developed a raging infection and eventually a stroke that killed him after months of terrible suffering. It is my understanding that his life was a life of musical creation, and that he could not have done otherwise than to risk all in reaching for the possibility of a restored capacity for creative work. 9. There is the prevalent idea that psychological interpretation “reduces” the work to which it is applied. An extreme example of such a view is that of C.S. Lewis (Lewis & Tiullyard, 1939), who regarded psychological interpretation of a work of art as a form of heresy, a sacrilege, virtually a blasphemy that attacks all that should remain inviolate and autonomous. I have tried to understand the truth that may be contained in such a notion. There is a form of psychological study that perhaps is accurately characterized as a reduction: that would be when the interpreter begins with a preconceived psychological schema, and the interpretation becomes an exercise in assimilating the material being studied to that schema. In such an instance the resulting portrait tends not to bring out anything intrinsic in the work of art being studied, but rather will recast the material as an echo of what is already known and presupposed as true. An example of this might be Ernest Jones’ interpretation of Shakespeare’s Hamlet as a variation on the Oedipus Complex. Many psychoanalytic studies of art are of this type. A second way in which psychological interpretation could be a reduction would be when this one context of meaning is conceived as the central and exclusive place of a work’s significance as a whole. Then indeed we have reduced that work and stripped it of the meanings it otherwise might have beyond the horizons of the psychological viewpoint. I have never though encountered anyone who would argue for such a reductionistic approach, and sometimes I wonder if what we have here is a demon of psychobiography, conjured up by scholars and thinkers who want to resist this sort of inquiry for reasons other than the ones given on the surface. No sophisticated person would use a psychological interpretation to take anything away from a creation in terms of its many possible meanings, and yet there are the reactions of C.S. Lewis and others who seem to suggest that some dire threat against a work is inevitably appearing when it is given a psychological reading. I am interested in such fanatically antireductionist opinions, which seem to me to be rooted in personal issues regarding individual origins and a need to sever the connection between one’s life and one’s work, as if some urgent requirement could only be satisfied, some terrible crisis could only be averted, if one’s work could break free from the life that gives it birth and enjoy an autonomy and self-sufficiency on its own terms C.S. Lewis himself was a person who underwent a religious conversion to Christianity during his adulthood, a metamorphosis that he felt as the discovery of a transcendent meaning taking him above and beyond the painfully limited personal life he had previously led. One could perhaps understand that for him psychological interpretation would be experienced as a return to a life history and an origin he needed to believe he had essentially jettisoned in the experience of his own conversion. . If interpretation proceeds not by imposing a preconceived schema and refrains as well from claiming a preeminent and exclusionary validity for itself, then a nonreductionistic mode of study may be pictured. Then all we have is a work and a way of understanding that work, lying peacefully alongside others ways of understanding and appreciating it, threatening none. Does the specific set of ideas I have developed in this little essay in any way reduce Bach’s music? For myself alone, the interpretation takes nothing away from his creations; in fact, they become more beautiful than ever. And yet, still and all, I think C.S. Lewis may be on to something in his resistance to psychological interpretation. I think his argument would be that such interpretation removes the mystery from a work of art, which means also that limits become set on how that work is likely to be seen. What if someone looked at the analysis I have offered here, and said something like the following: Johann Sebastian Bach suffered from a pathological grief reaction, involving a splitting of his selfhood in consequence of an inability to mourn? Such a simplifying formula is not inconsistent with all I have said. Does even the offering of the interpretation in a way hypnotize the listener, and channel his or her perception of the music into limiting pathways, and thus strip Bach’s creations of their capacity to take one into completely other territories of meaning? And is that not an act of violence against the freedom of a work of art to be experienced in an unlimited number of ways? References Wolff, C. (2000) Johann Sebastian Bach: The Learned Musician. W.W. Norton & Co., New York. Lewis, C.S. & Tillyard, G.M.W. (1939) The Personal Heresy. Oxford University Press, London.
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