two music vignettes

bach on bach, schütz trutherism

When I said last week there was only one St. Matthew Passion, I was not strictly speaking telling the truth.

There are as it happens a few more. Some tales on two favorites.

1. Ja, mir hast du Arbeit gemacht, J. Ludwig Bach

After college, I was in a bit of musical pickle. I didn’t want to study music professionally, but I also wanted more than musical messing around. Strange events took me to Zoltán Kodály music education certification classes in my hometown, a program where they have to explain to you before you start that inevitably, you will cry in public at how hard it is; they were telling the truth. While there, I met a german lady who had a lead on a choir back in D.C., something at the Deutsche-Schule, a place for ex-pats up near Rockville, MD, where her husband did something like baroque performance practices with the ex-pats and diplomats’ kids altogether. This was just the strange kind of choir I could get behind, so I joined up. We sang Pärt’s Berliner Mass and the Weihnachtsoratorium. And one Easter, we did Ludwig Bach.

I find this piece every few Easters or so: it’s a little difficult to track down (you can’t search for the chorale lyrics “grosse könig” safely any more), and my bad memory for names makes the moment when I can remember it’s a different and weirder Bach than normal, but not which one somewhat anxious. But fortunately I have the email from the Deutsche-Schule still. To make it to the concert venue, a Lutheran church west of Bethesda, I remember getting out to the furthest reaches of the red line to the northwest, and then putting all my trust in a taxi. The church was so quiet in a february spring, when it is still believably cold in DC, and so spare: mid century modern and perfectly set to the woods to catch the light. The entire choir of german speakers laughed me to scorn at one point for not getting the “t” on “zu” clearly enough on a big entrance, god bless them. The cantata ends with one of the loveliest versions of the herzliebster jesu passion chorale that I know: each line is broken up by a simple baroque underlay of repeated chords at the eighth-note, and the line “Keins Menschen Herze mag indes ausdenken, Was dir zu schenken (no human heart may conceive of what is fit to give you)” lands particularly well. In my memory it is perfectly entwined with the before-spring wood-dark from the large clear windows, and the pale light reflecting off midcentury beige marble within.

2. Heinrich Schütz, Matthäus-Passion

Further back, there’s the memory of mid-century milled concrete, and this version of the Passion.

Schütz’s version is in many ways the anti-Bach, and can serve as a kind of antidote the the harshness of having everything drawn out too long. From the opening (das leiden) to the end (Herr, wir haben gedacht, daß dieser Verführer sprach/Lord, we have remembered that this deceiver said) the motion is swift and the twist of the chords straight to the point. The music sits on the line between renaissance and baroque, a really remarkable blend of the center-less-ness of polyphony and the driving narrative form that even just a few pointing chords of harmony can give; one must listen to know it’s possible to make this happen. There’s also something really satisfying to hear the narration chanted rather than arpeggio’d; and the final crowd songs, where there is tergiversation over what to do with the body, are remarkable for going further than SMP Bach maybe wanted to go, to prefigure what will come soon enough, the extraordinary breaking through of almost unrecognizable joy.

This one also comes with many memories of not getting the German quite right; learning the chant late at night over a campus grand piano; being in good voice; sharing the narrating chant with a good teacher; and most of all, the music understanding the plot. It’s in the momentum of the action of the argument, perhaps, that most of all gives the argument its weight; and something of the forward motion we can’t help but listen for—the flipping over of the entire world, a reversal bar none.

Hope you get to listen, and enjoy!