On Bach: Der Geist Hilft, Orchestral Suite No. 4, Concerto for Three Violins, and Mass in B Minor

The day before the calendar resets, we routinely consider what has transpired over the last twelve months, and how we might resolve to do better in the next twelve. There’s much to say, but how best to contribute to the conversation? A lot of ink has been spilled about the ineffectuality (at best) or insidious impact of echo-chamber intra-enclave dialogue. Blitzes of 140-character cherry-bombs leave the mind and nerves too tattered to wage the longer battles of complex conversation. Fleeting chyron captions flash on and off before stories can be fleshed out with facts. Caustic talking-head crossfire eats away at the ideal of reasoned discourse like so much acid rain on an ancient limestone temple. It can be very difficult to hear long-form amidst the noise and exhaustion. Pop songs and tweets aren’t so far apart. The just-right length of a pop hit requires just a few minutes. The formulaic structure arouses our expectations only to unfailingly confirm them in the final chorus, perhaps with an all-caps key change. The holiday music heard seemingly everywhere at this time of year palliates, too. Endless repetition and the familiarity of finite repertoire ensure easy listening. But the decision to attend an entire concert signals a willingness to engage with more complex musical ideas and to become a participant in a longer, nuanced exchange. This, perhaps, is the greatest contribution we can make: to pause, together, to seek the best our art has to offer by collaborating as players, singers, and listeners.

Each New Year’s Eve, Amor Artis seeks the best our art has to offer in the music of J.S. Bach. It demands the utmost from those who attempt to play and interpret it. Embroidered with elaborate detail and rich with gold-dense harmonies, the sheer craft of it is our greatest artistic treasure. We naturally revel in the heightened sense of execution the music demands, whether we’re performing it or listening to it; the challenge becomes part of the aesthetic experience. When it builds an intricate edifice of interlocking lines atop a foundational harmonic progression, Bach’s counterpoint exteriorizes his inner architectural genius. To see a Bach score on paper is to be dizzied by black ink; to hear a Bach score in the hands of experts is to be dazzled by the capabilities of the human mind and body. Two hundred and seventy years’ worth of musical and technological invention haven’t rendered the splendor of Bach’s creations any less brilliant.

Heard in this way, as sheer sound, Bach’s music is deeply satisfying. But part of the durability of Bach’s musical treasures, I think, is the way they transcend technique and pull us beneath the ink-speckled surfaces to engage with multiple layers of meaning. Even in his purely instrumental music, Bach’s natural feel for musical rhetoric begets clear, incisive musical sentences and paragraphs worthy of the greatest orators. It sounds as if he’s trying to work through something with us, in conversation. The instrumental works reconcile staggering complexity with powerful simplicity, meticulous contrapuntal constructions with ornate melodies that nonetheless sound improvised. In his church music, where words provided the starting point, Bach often complemented the required biblical texts with additional poetic passages and aimed to illuminate and amplify their themes with his music. Bach was routinely drawn to theological concepts that reconcile seemingly opposite qualities in paradoxical oneness: infant and king, lowest abasement and greatest glory, exultation and humility. Those with spiritual compasses trained on Bach’s particular Lutheran theology will find deep resonance in his settings of sacred texts. Perhaps because his initial intent was to connect directly to his congregation (many of Bach’s sacred compositions were written, purposefully, in the vernacular, using hymn tunes well known by his congregation), they still manage to broadcast on universally recognizable frequencies. For listeners of all stripes, Bach’s compositions have the potential to conjure worlds beyond and entrance us into aesthetic reverie. Yet they never leave behind entirely their earthly humanness.

Over the past several seasons, Amor Artis has included on its program one of Bach’s motets. This evening we present the one that I find most uplifting, Der Geist hilft unsrer Schwachheit auf (“the Spirit helps our weakness.”) Its music suggests that in Bach’s imagination the holy spirit comes to us not as some ephemeral, transparent ether but rather as an invigorating force that brings strength and ease in equal measure. The motet’s opening musical gesture doesn’t disperse slowly like swirls of smoke so much as effortlessly loop round and round, like the coordinated twirl of ballerinas pirouetting across a stage with a gravity-defying gracefulness that camouflages all exertion. Indeed, in the chorale text that closes the motet, the spirit, at once “holy fire” and “sweet consolation,” strengthens our weak flesh so that we might, as one translation puts it, “gallantly struggle,” through death and life, to reach the almighty. May the joyous elegance of this music carry us through the beginning of 2019 as we resolve to gallantly struggle, each in our own way.

Over the past several seasons we have also enjoyed several of Bach’s violin concertos, and this evening we present the stunning Concerto for Three Violins. Before he got a major appointment in the court at Weimar (1708–1717), Bach had been something of a maverick, holding several positions for short periods while gaining notice as an organ virtuoso. He had lost both parents by age ten, and his provincial education did not include worldly travels. Fortunately, Bach’s brother Johann Christoph exposed him to music of French masters, and Johann Sebastian undertook the autodidactic task of copying out the works of Italian masters such as Corelli, Torelli, and Vivaldi. He soon put this new knowledge to good use, landing an appointment in the court of Prince Leopold at Cöthen (1717–1723). The Prince loved music and supported a skilled group of instrumentalists for whom Bach would write a large number of secular works, including, possibly, a concerto for three violins (I say “possibly” because this concerto was reconstructed from an adaptation Bach later made for harpsichords; source materials for this version, for violins, don’t exist). This composition makes clear that Bach not only assimilated the Italian concerto style but put his own mark on it. While his Brandenburg Concertos colorfully pit different instrumental colors against each other, here he works only with strings. The essence of the concerto style is the interplay between the soloist (or in this case, soloists) and the ensemble. Bach’s inventive combinations and laser-cut counterpoint, three hundred years old, are as dazzling now as they surely were then. The interdependence of the individual lines is, to me, the most beautiful part. They wouldn’t be nearly as satisfying without rubbing up against and crossing over one another. Though Bach would write beautifully for unaccompanied solo violin elsewhere, here he embarks on a different project. Here is a bustling, cooperative community in music.

Bach left Cöthen in 1723 to become the Cantor of the Thomaskirche and director of music for the town of Leipzig. Upon arrival he set out to create a “well-regulated church music,” and crafted several year-long cycles of church cantatas and settings of the Passion for use in the town’s churches. By the 1730s, though, with several astonishingly prolific years and profuse amounts of sacred music behind him, he could turn his attention beyond the weekly requirements of the church. In 1729 Bach took an additional post as director of the town’s Collegium Musicum. His work with this group offered some reprieve from his squabbles with church and civic officials and gave him an opportunity to write secular music to be performed among friends and music lovers. This evening we present the fourth of his orchestral suites. Its music brims with energy while dancing Bach’s logic, blending coffeehouse conviviality with the French refinement characteristic of the dance forms upon which the movements are based. The title of the last movement, Rejouissance, connotes festive rejoicing, making music for the fun of it.

The cycle of cantatas Bach created in that same year, 1729, included one for New Year’s Day on a text from Psalm 48: “Gott, wie dein Name, so ist auch dein Ruhm bis an der Welt ende” (“God, as thy Name is, so is thy praise, to the ends of the earth.”) Bach crafts a delightfully pointed, jaunty fugue subject for these words and proceeds to dispatch it to “all the ends of the earth,” through each of the four voice parts, and from the lowest instruments all the way to the top notes of the trumpet. To close, Bach punctuates the chorale with splendidly pompous brass fanfares.

If the concerto and suite represent Bach’s going for broke with instrumental splendor, and the cantata and motet show us his most festive spirit, the Mass in B Minor, which he wrote in the final years of his life, presents Bach’s most ardent plea for peace with his most essential music. To set the last three words, dona nobis pacem (and bring to a close a two-hour Mass setting), he uses just two simple musical ideas. They intertwine in various guises among the voices, working out their harmonic implications in a variety of keys. The full orchestra merely doubles the voice parts until about two thirds of the way through, when the trumpets overcome the worldly gravity of the low instruments and soar upward. At first the move is almost imperceptible, but gradually the three trumpets sublimate completely and crown the entire movement with independent counterpoint high above the corporation below.

This final minute of music, one of the most sublime in the entire repertoire, encapsulates the endeavor: the pursuit of perfection in the earthly realm to reflect one beyond. Bach tried his best to write secular music of the highest art and sacred music worthy of the glory of God, but of course he was just a human being, in spite of his otherworldly gifts. How fortunate we are that this disparity seemed to light the fire ever burning within him. Over the course of his career, he attempted not just a “well-regulated church music,” but a well-regulated music, writ large, that systematically explored the art’s many facets. Human, divine, refined, colossal, individual, corporate: Bach’s music constantly commingles these strata, and in the commotion are revealed our relationships to each other and to the world around us. The exuberant music Bach wrote to celebrate New Year’s Day in Leipzig in 1729 still resonates with those of us optimistic about turning over a new leaf in New York City in 2019, 290 years later. On New Year’s Eve, when we consider what we’ve done and where we’re going, Bach’s music provides the perfect soundtrack for reflection, revelation, and aspiration.

At a Bach Concert

Coming by evening through the wintry city We said that art is out of love with life. Here we approach a love that is not pity.

This antique discipline, tenderly severe, Renews belief in love yet masters feeling, Asking of us a grace in what we bear.

Form is the ultimate gift that love can offer – The vital union of necessity
With all that we desire, all that we suffer.

A too-compassionate art is half an art.
Only such proud restraining purity
Restores the else-betrayed, too-human heart.

— Adrienne Rich