Bach's Reflections on the Passion
Johann Sebastian Bach, composer of St Matthew Passion, born 1685.
Passion season has come and gone again, and for many it will be another year until the next performance of Bach’s St Matthew Passion or St John Passion. There are few works so deserving of this rich performative tradition as the Matthew Passion, which represents the heights of musical expression in the early eighteenth century. Following Victoria Costa’s recent series on Passion settings, I wanted to offer some comments on the sense of time found in a particular aria of Bach’s Matthew Passion, “Mache dich, mein Herze, rein” (“Purify yourself, my heart”), first performed in Leipzig in 1727, and, in particular, to try to describe the way in which Bach plays with time such that his music is able to invite us to reflect. (Here’s a link to a recording with John Eliot Gardiner and the English Baroque Soloists.)
The opening of the Matthew Passion—in contrast to the dramatic choral opening of the John Passion—is unsettling. The music sounds rather as if it has been waiting for you, and creeps over you. It is in this context that, a couple of hours after the tightly-strung opening of the Matthew Passion, we arrive at “Mache dich.” Bach presents “Mache dich” as the ultimate contrast to the opening of the Passion. The aria begins with the same pulsing rhythm as opens the Passion—similarly in 12|8 time—only the rhythmic character, at the beginning tight and foreboding, is now broader and stately, perhaps even comforting. Here we reach B♭ major, the furthest distance from E minor: in this way, the aria both recalls and transforms the past.
To feel the expression of “Mache dich” is to be compelled to reflect—to think in time, and to listen in time. Bach achieves this remarkable feat by playing with our expectations: he creates patterns of expectation, and then weaves them together, their interactions generating further shapes. These interactions, these patterns dissolving into one another in time, sound with crystal-like clarity. What I’m describing is an immense kind of complexity, infinitely multiplied in performance; but also immense precision.
Figure 1: an excerpt from “Mache dich” in St Matthew Passion.
It is the way in which these patterns sound in time that can cause us to reflect. Even the untrained listener can grasp various discrete, enchanting “shapes” in Bach’s music. We could discuss, for example, the patterns of expectation in the opening melody which ascends to a high sustain over the word rein (“pure”), before falling to an ebbing, repetitive figuration, the higher notes always the same, but the lower notes changing regularly by step. And, below this, the pattern of expectation in the bass which descends stepwise, like a ground, and lament-like in contour. But in combination, these patterns fall over one another in strange ways. Dissonances express where we might not expect them to, and yet at the same time we predict them because of the expectations established by prior patterns (see Figure 1 for a keyboard reduction of the opening of “Mache dich”).
The result is that the music looks forward but only according to the terms of its history; it is as if the future is saturated with its past, such that the present expression is hardly present at all but rather is this intangible relation between past and future. There is, in other words, a kind of distance from the present moment.
This sense of temporal distance is enhanced when Bach betrays these patterns of expectation, stretching notes, for instance, giving space to dissonances, with the effect that time itself seems stretched, as if the expressions betray the time of the music, as if the intangible expressions represent the intangible time. In sum, Bach’s composition causes us to think “in time”: the act of reflection is literally composed into the music.
There is always a kind of lament in reflection (in the case of the Matthew Passion what the music laments is quite clear), but the remarkable expression of “Mache dich” is that it holds this reflection within an immense warmth. It is as if it expresses rather the transformation of its lament, which it carries gracefully.
The successful performance of “Mache dich,” I am sure, relies upon this distance and reflection. This expression is captured especially well in the recordings by Nikolaus Harnoncourt and the Concertus Musicus Wien (Teldec, 2000) and Frans Brüggen and the Orchestra of the Eighteenth Century (Philips, 1996), who approach the aria with a kind of self-effacing dignity, as if their bodies and instruments are vessels for the music rather than the subject of indulgence.
Is it possible to listen with this same kind of reflection? When I listen to “Mache dich,” for example, I become aware that not simply am I listening in a different way, the structure of which I have described; but that I hold myself differently, too, as if I have to open myself to its expression rather than draw it out of it. I find myself sitting upright, poised but relaxed, and aware of a kind of unbearable sadness that is peculiarly weightless and ultimately uplifting.
Stephane Crayton is a composer based in Cambridge, UK. He is writing a Ph.D. at King’s College, Cambridge, on theories of musical meaning, in which he focuses on disorder. He is especially interested in the work of Jean-Philippe Rameau and Luciano Berio. He supervises undergraduates at Cambridge and also teaches in London at the Royal Academy of Music, junior department.