Into the Score: Bach St. John Passion

Bach’s St. John Passion opens and closes with extensive movements for chorus, with orchestra (the final chorus is followed by a chorale). In between, the musical material of the St. John Passion unfolds across several temporal planes, each with its own text type, purpose, and style.

One layer is that of the biblical narrative—the actual words from John, chapters 18 and 19, outlining the actions and conversations that make up the story. An “evangelist” (a tenor soloist) and other figures from the bible (Jesus, Pilate, et. al.), recite this prose, as music, in a form of heightened speech called recitative. Musically, this recitative layer comprises one solo voice at a time reciting the prose via melodies tracing and amplifying the contours of the words, supported by bass notes and chords from a continuo group—organ, cello, and bass, sometimes with lute or harpsichord. Where the biblical narrative includes a group of people (a crowd, a panel of high priests, etc.) saying something, Bach sets their words using the chorus (usually joined by the full orchestra). To reinforce the sense of multiples of people, these choruses are often contrapuntal, with staggered entries among the voice parts. The movements of this layer move quickly, as the action they’re portraying does.

Bach intermittently presses pause on the biblical narrative, slows down time, and steps aside from the immediate action in a second layer: solo arias. Here, the text is not biblical prose but highly emotive devotional poetry that reflects on some aspect of the action we’ve experienced. Musically, these atmospheric movements vary highly one to the next. Each has a specific instrumentation, tempo, and sense of gesture that, combined, enhance the emotion evoked in the poetry. These subjective movements, in first or second person perspective, helped Bach’s listeners interpret the narrative and incite their own devotion.

The remaining layer: chorales. These movements, sung by the chorus, accompanied by the full orchestra, present hymn tunes, harmonized in four parts, with poetic texts, set syllabically, in regular phrase groups. In Bach’s own church, the congregation likely would have sung along. Thus the chorales offer the community gathered a moment for collective contemplation.

At the outset, before the baritone has started, instrumentation and rhythm fashion an extraordinary atmosphere. The organ plays tasto solo, with no chords, leaving room for the delicate plucking of the lute (evoking the pricking of thorns), paired with the haloed sound of the violas d’amore. The movement from the lute contrasts the violas’ chain of suspensions, which, as the musical term suggests, suspends their sound across every first and third beat.

Melody and harmony amplify the imagery. “Ängstlichem” (anxious), “bittrer” (bitter), “schmerzen” (suffering), “Dornen” (thorns), and other anguished words are often approached melodically via a tritone—the most angular interval available (marked with a red TT, below), and enmeshed in dissonant, tightly-wound diminished harmonies (highlighted in yellow, below). At “blühn” (bloom) and “süsse Frucht” (sweet fruit), smooth melodies settle on relaxed, consonant harmonies.

Taken together, the ebb and flow perfectly conveys the text’s pairing of opposites.

One sometimes overlooked feature of Bach’s church music, meant not as facile entertainment but as a conveyance of a biblical text and concomitant significance, is that it’s sometimes meant to be fiendishly difficult. The challenge is sometimes part of the aesthetic and religious experience. As for the exceedingly—yet beautiful—tenor aria, Erwäge, here’s what consummate interpreter and scholar of Bach, Sir John Eliot Gardiner, has to say:

Its exceptional difficulty for the singer is never a matter of oversight let alone willfulness on Bach’s part, but intrinsic to his philosophical purpose. The stupendous technical effort required by the tenor—with virtually no time to breathe—to emulate the mellifluous and weightless fluency of the superhuman violas demands that we ponder human fallibility. The dactylic motif sung by the Evangelist when describing Jesus’s scourging returns and permeates the entire aria—insistent enough to remind us that it is the weals on Jesus’s back that are here being evoked, but now softened and curved in such a way as to suggest that promised rainbow. Then, early in the B section, after the tenor sings the scourging rhythm for the first time and the instruments strain to delineate the “flood-waves of our sins’ deluge,” Bach parts the clouds and suddenly the rainbow miraculously appears. To bring this off in performance requires, besides stamina, imagination and a rock-solid technique, a combination of tensile strength and lyricism never easily achieved.