Johann Sebastian Bach - Mass in B Minor (1749)
Johann Sebastian Bach - Mass in B Minor (1749)
Johann Sebastian Bach was not a famous man—he wrote music for a church. The frantic financial ledgers scribbled in his notebook indicate clearly that he was worried about money, and the increasingly clumsy and frail musical ledgers populating his scores demonstrate the precarity of his health toward the denouement of his 65-year life. Of all the artist-patron-audience configurations throughout the history of Western classical music, Bach’s repeated assignment to musically honor the glory of God under hermetic conditions resulted in one of the most fascinating and mysterious exchanges between the dictates of an outside party and the internal prerogatives of an artist dedicated to generating unfamiliar resonances in his modest audience.
Bach’s Mass in B Minor, composed in some sense over 25 years and finally completed in 1749, one year before the composer’s death, is an absolutely breathtaking attestation to the triumph of the creative soul over adverse forces. Structured entirely around the forward movement of the canonical Neapolitan Mass, with a Kyrie Eleison and a Christe Eleison and a Sanctus and all that, resplendent life subsists within his self-imposed structural limitations. Opening with an unforgettably dense and ominous rendering of its titular chord, the Mass in B Minor is the most magical effusion of sound and feeling in Bach’s entire body of work. The source of one’s pleasure in listening to this 2-hour work often shuttles back and forth between the inimitable melodic flow, aided by Bach’s telltale strategy of “counterpoint,” which presides over the entire piece and guides us splashlessly through the Mass structure, and the often-stunning and complex arrangements and standout melodic “hooks” that feel doubly prophetic: because they tell us abstractly about our relationship with God, and also because Bach was playing with complex harmonies in a way very few others were even attempting.
This innovation isn’t easily accounted for in historical terms. Bach plied his trade mostly alone, which makes it harder to trace his influences. This very condition of his life and work, of course, may have motivated indirectly a large swath of what we consider Bach’s distinctive traits as a composer. There is, for example, undeniably something insular about Bach’s stylistic approach to Baroque music. Math is often mentioned in reference to Bach’s compositions, most famously in Douglas Hofstadter’s 1979 mindbender Gödel, Escher, Bach, and the association is far from unreasonable. Bach’s telltale creative strategy of “counterpoint,” in which a single melody is accompanied by a second melody that isn’t quite a uniform harmony nor certainly unison—instead, in the staggered entry system of counterpoint, a melodic line, having moved on from its first iteration, is made to swirl together with its earlier self again and again even as it (the first line) shifts harmonic emphasis—often with the effect of “voicing out” the prevalent chords of the song. Counterpoint therefore effects a sense of freedom within limitations: the sonic mesh of harmonically related melodies feels unusually liberated for the era, but those sinews of sound are ultimately harnessed to the forward movement of the general composition. The Mass in B Minor again strikes me as the most lithely balanced and emphatic rendition of a theme common to the rest of Bach’s work—in this case, that balance of math equations and doodling, where the ascension of the title phrase in the “Sanctus” feels as Fibonaccian as it does a purely ear-cleansing lilt of utter devotion, each aspect reinforcing the other, posing for the listener an unusual and edifying relationship between the polar sensations of aesthetic uniformity and dispersion. It is hard to describe the manner in which some works of art somehow, as if by magic, deploy rigid structures to aid in rather than attenuate the expression of deep feeling. Bach must have thought about this a lot—surely he had the time to.
The musicians in Bach’s day who performed his music played on instruments that did not quite look like ours: violins were massive, flutes looked like goddamn recorders, and there was no piano—only a harpsichord. The musicians who recorded Bach from the earliest days of the relevant technologies did not realize this, and the evidence of this oversight resides within just about every canonical Bach recording until the mid-1960s. Flouting all of the above historical conditions, these musicians assimilated Bach’s music into the performance motifs of the contemporary era, including singers who trilled as if they were doing Rigoletto. During that mid-1960s period, however, there emerged an innovative and, to many, surely obnoxious group of scholars and conductors who decided to emphasize what they called “Historically Informed Performance,” in which they’d play harpsichords and flutes that looked like recorders, and in which the singers would project their melodies “straight,” without trills, as one imagines the Homeric Sirens would. I am mentioning because I think Historically Informed Performance is a cool idea but more than that I happen to think it sounds good. On Philippe Herreweghe and the Collegium Vocale Gent’s 2011 CD recording of the Mass in B Minor, there is a certain tactile vividness to the imprecise scrapes of the old instruments, and when you hear the dueling sopranos on the unforgettable and very modern “Christe Eleison,” you’ll never want to hear classical vocal music rendered as any metaphorical/illustrative figure than the ones elicited by their voices: two ribbons intercrossing repeatedly in the night air, a flowing river and its tributary, the movement of the stars.
Seeing as Bach evidently cognized the magnificence of God through the irreducible yet (somehow) systematic complexity of the natural world, this imagery checks out. The Mass in B Minor, aside from counterpoint and structure and patronage and history, is an incredibly enveloping work of art that is beautiful in the way that things that are more than beautiful are beautiful—sunrises, laughs, Luka Dončić sinking a stepback three. Bach’s 17th-century establishment of a “room of one’s own” took Virginia Woolf’s later invocation of artistic independence (for women, in her particular case) to a biographical extreme, and it’s easy when thinking about Bach to let your mind wander into a rumination on the relationship between creative output and personal fulfillment in other arenas of life. Let your mind wander back to the music, however—and be assured that it will run the gamut of internal experience over the course of this lengthy composition—and realize that you are happy, that this is what matters, that Bach teaches us to listen to the vicissitudes of the moment, the little explosions of experience we are even more primed to hear for their having unfolded within and between tightly established structures. Bach wasn’t famous, and he didn’t make much money. But he accomplished something awe-inspiring, perhaps singular, within and beyond his craft: he communicated with God, and he told all of us exactly what He said.