that lightening in the air

visiting the St. Matthew Passion

It’s nearly spring, and the weather is out to get you: one day a little more warm, the next day too cold, and when in the middle, smelling interestingly on the edge of things to come. This is true even in the middle of a city as large as where I am; and it’s appropriately maddening. Right before the good weather comes, this particular movement does not have the graceful inevitability of fall, but instead, has almost more chanciness than one can bear.

I was lucky, a few weeks ago, to see a large St. Matthew Passion at the church around the corner, the large cathedral that dominates the top of the park where I am usually smelling the maddening air in question.

The St. Matthew Passion (by Bach, is there any other?) is a giant work, massive like the largest organ one can imagine, playing a fugue that goes on past just where you can bear. It’s no easy feat to put on or to listen to; and while the hall was packed, more than a few people awkwardly departed early (one man left in the middle of Erbarme Dich, can you imagine), no doubt because they came in the belief they’d be sitting through a much easier famous thing, like Handel’s Messiah or something. I took the kids, and one son made it through; Mama, he said right before we got home and after making fun of three and a half hours long piece of art music with da capo arias interspersed for twenty minutes, that was boring but good.

I first listened to this piece in anticipation of something like a duty: the work in its entirety is studied for three months by all students at the college I went to for undergrad, and as a good musician I wanted to get to know it sufficiently beforehand. So, the summer before the sophomore year of music class, while I was working inexplicably for the alumni office who, that summer, wanted cloth napkins sewn out of cheap brick-pattern quilting fabric that smelled like they used double the amount of stiffener, for the homecoming dinner, and I knew how to use the machine and thus became hired, I made these napkins, several hundred of them, and listened to the St. Matthew Passion by Bach on, I think this is true, a Sony Walkman.

Obviously I’m describing something deeply pleasant, except for the fabric stiffener, of course. The St. Matthew Passion is good and complicated, and working at something mildly precise while getting to know it was, very much itself. I like listening to or reading heavy things in the summer, and while many things about the piece were puzzling (I too was bemused initially at the da capo arias which, ABA, repeat the opening section, each time without fail.) I got to have favorites, and I found during the next year that listening to Sind Blitzen, sind Donner on the music library’s record player to be better than the walkman. I bought a small stereo that had the right range of brightness for baroque cd’s. Eventually, I analyzed the chords for class.

The studying of this piece for three months is set up to be an immersive experience bar none, spaced out over all this time, hours of class discussion on each aria, section, chorus, and hymn. One of my favorite professors translated the text for us all, to have something better than your average liner notes. I have memories associated with friends, acquaintances, and former loves at almost every note. This makes listening to this piece with equanimity almost impossible. Add to this that the subject of the work, the suffering and passion of the innocent, and the guilt and remorse one feels on the contemplation of such, and what was already meant to be almost unbearable becomes asymptotically—more. This makes it better and not worse, but believe me, listening to the music is like being in a tactile space, dark wood, heavy, and there are splinters.

But this time, listening to it towards the top of Lent, instead of the building intensity of almost-almost-easter, and seeing it in person, all at once, I did see not just the remembered things, but something small that was new. My plan for this Lent has been to recall the Easter part of Lent more strongly than in previous years, since this is the point, and wandering in remorse is often necessary but the aesthetic of it will get you down in the wrong way if not done with care. It helped to have brought the children to it: and time was making an enormous bow, since F., who is just newly fifteen, came to another concert of the same when still in the womb (and gave an enormous leap at Barabam! the chord), and now has exited it, fully, taller than me and getting into Bach before I remembered to mention B’s existence to him.

But the thing I noticed was the lightening: not the lightening of Sind Blitzen although that is still probably favorite. But the lightening, the very rare lightening of a chord in the middle of something so heavy: like the lift when Komm Süßsses Kreuz gets to the “so hilfst mir es selber tragen” part (measures 30-34, see also 46) and the line raises up, and the chords give you brief relief from the heaviness of cross-carrying, which the viola da gamba then echoes in the following lines. I don’t have a more complicated analysis at present than some kind of shift from minor to major is there, but the smallness of these moments give you so much amidst a cathedral’s worth of suffering.

It can be hard to put these moments together, scattered as they are across the length of time, and the unfamiliarity of the nous at connecting the resonance and meaning of that many pieces of music, all at once. But this time, after twenty years or so, and holding on to errant children through but one short intermission, I started to hear the lifts together in a piece, forest instead of simply trees; and by the time of Mache dich, mein Herze rein (make in me a clean heart o god) I heard maybe the point I had been missing for lo, quite some time.

There’s no way to imitate the resurrection in musical notes. The SMP stops short of it, just at the death and burial of Christ, because it has to. Yet imitating passionate human remorse in isolation poses something of a danger: because if that’s all you hear, maybe that’s all, for a while, that you get. But mixed in with the heaviness of Bach’s sorrow is a mixture: it is like the weather, a changeable something you can hear just beyond what is heard, these moments of lightening pointing just beyond themselves; the feeling of being torn between happiness and sadness, which the last piece, ‘we sit at thy grave weeping,’ imitates so well.

But there is a strange pocket of time in it too: and before and once you get to “Mache Dich,” something on the order of experienced time shifts. The aria isn’t any longer in the time-space of looking back, unable to help Christ any more than those with him were. Instead the music describes the space of already being forgiven, already made pure: and surrounded by the always-already of this lifting as always-going-to-happen. (This happens also a bit earlier, as mild comic relief of the küchlein in “Sehet Jesu hat die Hand.”) But Mache dich’s music almost has nostalgia for itself, if nostalgia could be rescued from itself; there is this much relief and recognition and fore-backwards-knowing in it. That’s it, you’re free: you can’t experience it yet in time, but it already happened; and the aria itself feels like being surrounded by relief, and held; you’ve been safe the whole time. You’d miss it if you were following along in the usual-time order that the structure of the whole work suggests. But it is there, a moment out of time, all the same.

It was lovely to listen to. Onward to spring, and to things to come.