Bach's Mass in Bm ("Agnus Dei")

By: Bernard Chazelle

Cruel of me, I know, to leave you Bach-less for so long, but the agony is over. This is the "Agnus Dei" from the Mass in Bm (itself in Gm). The Mass was never performed in full during Bach's lifetime. (Why Bach would compose a Catholic mass is a long story having to do with job advancement.) Just a voice on top of a spare continuo and violin obbligato: in other words, the music lives or dies on the quality of its melody. But this is no "Ode to Joy," with Beethoven drowning out a banal ditty in awkward arrangements. Bach's melodic gifts are here in full display.

We might be living through a unique moment in history: no truly great composer anywhere but great music and a plethora of great musicians. The conductor, Philippe Herreweghe, and the singer, Andreas Scholl, are two of them. Scholl's ueber-subtle, sustained-only vibrato is a model of control and taste. As to Herreweghe, I am no HIP snob, but the Belgian psychiatrist has made the trend as compelling as anyone could. To clarify, I love the sound of authentic performance, especially of that caliber, but I am dubious about the philosophy behind it. No one has a clue what Bach sounded like (no evidence he used countertenors), and Joshua Rifkin, who would know more about this than anyone, has argued that HIP performances are almost certainly historically wrong. No doubt Bach sounds best in a church but the greatness of the music is that you don' t have to be in a church to grasp it. An iPod is just fine. Musicians should be encouraged to fool around with the classics with their own modern sensitivities and outgrow this bizarre cult-like worship of "great art" as holy relics. (No doubt my gentle jab at Beethoven above will elicit screams of horror.) Today's musicians don't even improvise their own cadenzas, and Bach would have laughed at their poor improvising skills.

I also dislike the concert hall. The concert hall is a secular church. No one is allowed to express any emotion whatsoever unless prompted. And if you're such a peasant you applaud at the wrong time, the audience lets you know of your social status. But when Mozart conducted his symphonies, the audience would applaud and holler spontaneously whenever they pleased, just the way we would do at a rock concert or a jazz club. This sacralization of music (a byproduct of the Romantic era) is one of the major reasons classical music has died as an art form (say compared with hip hop and jazz, which is where the best and most vibrant western music is to be found today).

The Agnus Dei is a parody of the aria of Cantata BWV 11 that Bach wrote 10 years earlier: same music, different words. (And that aria, too, was cribbed from his wedding cantata.) Shocked by such shameless self-plagiarism? Well, remember that Bach's work was typically meant to be performed only once and then tossed, so why wouldn't he reuse his musical ideas? Imagine Charlie Parker performing Ko-Ko just once and throwing it away forever.

The Cantata 11 was written in 1735 for the feast of the Ascension. The preceding months had not be kind to Bach. He and his wife, Anna Magdalena, lost 2 daughters aged 3 and 4, one son aged 3, and one daughter only 3 days old. Bach adored children. Except for the St Matthew Passion, the only music he composed for posterity can be found in the instruction books he wrote to teach his children (eg, the well-tempered clavier). Like the Vietnamese and the Palestinians, of course, a devout 18c Lutheran musician wouldn't feel the pain of losing his children as we would. (I know this because I read the New York Times.) Yet I've been told by some of the world's greatest medievalists that Charlemagne grieved over the loss of his little daughter his entire life. Never could let go of it. So maybe what I read in The Times is crap, and perhaps Bach had departures other than Jesus' on his mind when he put his music to these words:

Thy departure and early separation
causes me exceeding great pain.
Ah, stay yet a while
or I shall be engulfed by sorrow.

— Bernard Chazelle