Redeeming the St. John Passion by Robert L. Marshall The St. John Passion is Johann Sebastian Bach’s most controversial work. It is, indeed, his only controversial work. The sticking point is the fact that the Gospel according to John specifically and repeatedly identifies those hysterically crying out for the death of Christ as “the Jews.” And Bach has set those moments all too effectively. The Gospel according to Matthew, in contrast, like the other two synoptic gospels, does not use the “J” word in this context at all; it consistently refers to the crowd simply as “the people.” Some professional Jewish musicians have refused to participate in performances of the St. John Passion at all; the music scholar Richard Taruskin has severely condemned what he characterizes as the work’s anti-Semitism. In recent decades, performances of the St. John Passion more often than not have been accompanied by a warning label of sorts, in the form of a scholarly symposium or pre-concert lecture designed to come to terms with the unquestionably troubling problem the work poses for contemporary sensibilities. One scholar alone, Michael Marissen, the author of Lutheranism, Anti-Judaism, and Bach’s St. John Passion, has, by his own reckoning, taken part in literally hundreds of such public events. As for me, I first heard the St. John Passion 15 years after the end of the Second World War, when the psychic wounds were still raw. The music was deeply expressive and beautiful, and breathtakingly complex in that inevitable, inexorable way that is Bach’s alone, but the words set to that music were altogether painful to hear. The relentless denunciation of the Jews, moreover, was expressed in the German language, inextricably linked in those years with ranting tyrants and demagogues and marauding SS troops. One could imagine Goebbels hollering these lines with the chorus: “Die Juden aber schrieen...‘Weg, weg mit dem, kreuzige ihn!’” (“But the Jews screamed…‘Away, away with him. Crucify him!’”) English speakers of my generation never heard the German word Juden except when it was spoken—that is, shouted—by a Nazi. One could try to excuse or relativize the Passion’s “Jewish problem” by noting that anti-Semitic, or at least anti-Jewish, stereotypes are part of the Western cultural tradition. The caricatures and utterances of Jews in the works of Shakespeare, Dostoevsky, Dickens, T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, just to name a few Western giants, are familiar to us all. But they are works of the imagination. The Gospel according to John, in contrast, purports to be factual, to convey historical truth; and the Jews in it, whether they are taken to represent only the authorities or the entire Jewish people, are more than a single repellent individual crafted for a play or poem or book. They stand accused and convicted of the blackest crime: deicide. Note, however, that unlike Shakespeare et al., Bach was not the author of his text. By virtue of his position as director of music for the Orthodox Lutheran church of Leipzig, and according to the guidelines established by the clerical authorities there, Bach was obliged to set his music verbatim to the holy biblical text of the Passion story—the word of God as expressed in the Gospel according to John and translated into German by Martin Luther—for performance on the most somber day of the liturgical calendar, Good Friday. And he did so in indelible fashion. Bach’s great Passion settings are a synthesis of musical styles and traditions. On the one hand, they are descended from the long medieval liturgical tradition in which the Gospel readings of the Passion story during Holy Week were given as sung dramatizations. The narrator, called the Evangelist, was joined by solo singers taking on the roles of Jesus, Pilate, and other personae, while a chorus took on the role of the various crowds: soldiers, priests, the mob. After the Reformation, which stressed the importance of presenting the Gospel to the congregation in the people’s own tongue, these so-called responsorial Passions were sung in German, not Latin. By the 17th century, appropriate congregational hymns (chorales) were added to the pure biblical text. Their purpose was to meditate on the larger meaning of biblical events for the contemporary believer. Bach built his Passion settings on a considerably more recent, and secular, innovation as well: Passion Oratorios. These nonliturgical compositions, developed only 20 or so years before he composed the St. John Passion, were settings of rhymed paraphrases (rather than the literal biblical text itself) in the style of the recitatives and arias of the contemporary Italian opera. The most significant and influential Passion Oratorio text belonging to this new repertoire was by Barthold Heinrich Brockes. His libretto “Jesus, Martyred for the Sins of the World,” published in 1712, became enormously popular and was eventually set to music by almost a dozen composers, including Georg Philipp Telemann and Handel. The development of the Passion Oratorio notably took place in the progressive city of Hamburg and was, in fact, an early symptom of Enlightenment thinking and religious tolerance. The clergy, not surprisingly, objected to replacing the Gospel verses with a modern paraphrase, but the secular establishment, the Hamburg Senate, sought to ensure that the new text would not incite religious animosity. In a remarkable, and hitherto largely neglected, document dated April 14, 1710, the senate, explicitly invoking the name and authority of Luther (and paraphrasing the reformer’s own “Meditation on Christ’s Passion” of 1519), issued this stern injunction: “Our blessed Luther…emphatically indicates that the right and proper goal of the reflection on the Passion must be aimed at the awakening of true penitence…and of a life pleasing to God. The other things, such as violent invectives and exclamations against Pilate, Judas, the Jews (especially when entire sections are filled with them) can by no means be tolerated.”1 Some have argued that the Brockes text is virulently anti-Semitic—and yet, for all its graphic, bloody, Baroque imagery, the Jews are never mentioned explicitly except in the phrase “King of the Jews” and in the caption “Chorus of Jews,” which appears in the libretto only. Christ’s tormenters are characterized as sinners, murderers, henchmen, devils, as “a furious brood of vipers” (“Sünder, Mörder, Schergen, Teufel, ergrimmte Natterbrut”), but also, innocuously, as “they” (“sie”). In 1717, a successful performance of Telemann’s setting of the Brockes Passion in Leipzig persuaded the local conservative church authorities to permit such “theatrical” treatments of the story in the city’s main churches so long as they retained the biblical texts rather than adopt the newly minted rhymed versions of them. By 1721, Bach’s predecessor as St. Thomas Cantor, Johann Kuhnau, inaugurated an annual Good Friday tradition with a performance of his own St. Mark Passion. Following the Leipzig prescription, the words of chapters 18 and 19 of Luther’s German translation of the Gospel according to John provide the narrative framework for Bach’s composition. A tenor, in the role of the Evangelist, relates the events while a bass takes on the role of Jesus. Other solo voices represent Peter, Pilate, and some of the lesser characters. In the crowd scenes, the chorus variously takes on the roles of the high priests, the mob, or the soldiers. Bach’s settings of these scenes draw on the full spectrum of choral techniques, from incisive chordal outbursts to free polyphony to formal fugal expositions. It is precisely these powerful crowd choruses that have become the locus of distress for the modern listener. Some modern theologians have argued that the rhetoric of the Gospel according to John, the last of the four to be set down, reflects conflicts among traditional and early Christianized Jewish communities in the period following the destruction of the Temple and that John, himself a Jew (like the 12 disciples and indeed Jesus), was directing his resentment toward the religious establishment: in short, “the Jews.” Others maintain that John’s target encompassed all those who rejected Jesus and refused to follow him (that is, not only those who had official status): in short, once again, “the Jews.” The implication, then, is that the problem is with John’s choice of words, specifically the Greek noun “hoi Ioudaioi” and, following it, in Luther’s translation, “die Juden.” The Greek expression, however, could also have been translated as “the Judeans,” i.e., the residents of the province of Judea. For example, in Luke’s narrative of the Nativity (2:4), Luther’s version states that Joseph left Nazareth and entered “in das jüdische Land zur Stadt Davids...Bethlehem.” The German “das jüdische Land” would most readily be translated into English as “the Jewish territory” or “the land of the Jews.” In the King James Version, however, the passage reads “Joseph went into Judaea, unto the city of David.” But there is no gainsaying the fact that all other standard English translations, and, I suspect, the standard translations in just about all the modern languages, render John’s Greek in the Passion narrative as the equivalent of “the Jews.” So the biblical, theological, and linguistic problems, along with the modern moral problem, persist, and modern theologians continue to grapple with them. A new German translation of the Bible published in 2006, Die Bibel in gerechter Sprache (“The Bible in fair language”), for example, prepared by a consortium of scriptural scholars, aims to rectify these troubling passages by rendering Luther’s “die Juden” most usually as “die jüdische Obrigkeit” (the Jewish authorities). As for the St. John Passion, Bach is able to redeem the work without the help of modern theological revisionism. He has done so by means of the texts of the remaining two-thirds of the work and their extraordinary settings. In addition to the biblical verses, the text of the St. John Passion draws on traditional congregational hymns and contemporary poetic verse. While the Gospel narrative relates the historical events, the poetic verses, set mostly as elaborate arias, express the emotional responses of the individual believer. The congregational chorales assume a more reflective, timeless perspective, that of the Christian community as a whole: in a word, the Church. In Bach’s time, all these roles and points of view were entrusted to the same performers. The dramatis personae of the biblical story, the participants in the meditative chorales, and the soloists in the arias were all members of Bach’s chorus. Each singer was called upon to empathize with, to portray, and to enact a number of roles in the course of the performance. The same bass who sang the role of Jesus in one recitative was part of the crowd calling for Christ’s blood in another. In short, the singers were all, in turn, believers, disciples, Romans, Jews; victims, tormenters, the damned, the blessed. Bach could do nothing about the words of the Gospel according to John itself, but he almost certainly played the decisive role in selecting the other texts included in the Passion. These texts express compassion, empathy, and gratitude for Christ’s suffering and a resolve to follow him and at least to try to emulate his mercy—to weep and mourn his sacrifice, and to rejoice in it, as it is that act that brings everlasting life. These texts go on to counsel awareness of Christ’s innocence and the corresponding awareness of one’s own sins. The sermon these texts impart teaches that it is one’s own sins—and, by clear implication, not only those of some Jewish zealots who lived in the Middle East centuries ago—that are responsible for Christ’s suffering. Below the surface of all the modern controversy and hand-wringing about the “Jewish problem” of the St. John Passion is one particularly fraught and disquieting question: What, if anything, does the mere existence of such a work reveal of Bach’s personal attitude toward Jews? In short, nothing, because nothing definitive is known about Bach’s personal relations with Jews. It is not even known whether Bach ever had any personal contact with Jews, because—with few exceptions—they were generally banned from living in Leipzig and the regions of Thuringia and Saxony, where Bach spent almost the entirety of his life. They could and did, however, visit the Leipzig trade fairs, and Bach may have met Jews on those occasions. There has also been speculation that Bach’s friend, Johann Abraham Birnbaum, the university professor of rhetoric who published a famous defense of the composer’s music in the 1730s, may have been a Jewish convert. There is, at all events, reason to believe that the Lutheran Bach was unusually tolerant of other religions for someone of his time and place. His relationship with one of his employers, for instance, Prince Leopold of Köthen, a Calvinist, was exceptionally warm, almost brotherly. Bach later described his years at the Calvinist court of Köthen as the happiest of his life. Also, Bach repeatedly made an effort to ingratiate himself with the Catholic Court at Dresden. He famously offered to provide music for the church service there by sending to King Frederick Augustus II of Saxony, as a modest display of his earnestness (and his ability), a handsome dedication copy of the B-minor Mass—a work that the Bach family later referred to as “the great Catholic Mass.” It is striking, in fact, that Bach’s relations with both the Calvinist prince during his Köthen years and the Catholic Court in nearby Dresden during his Leipzig years were considerably better than those with any of his Lutheran employers. But far more important is the evidence provided by the underlinings and marginalia in Bach’s personal copy of a massive annotated edition of the Bible known, after the name of the editor, as the Calov Bible. Bach completely ignored passages that can be read as hostile to the Jews. The only remark in the volume specifically concerning the Jews that Bach was inclined to mark at all was a fairly favorable one in the book of Ecclesiastes. The annotator observes: “The writings of the Jews differ from those of the Gentiles in that the Jews have received God’s word and commandments and that they teach us through their writings that everything proceeds according to God’s will and order, and for that reason these writings are all the more useful to read.” It is easy to conclude, moreover, from Bach’s marginalia that the biblical figure whom he most revered (after Christ, of course), and the one with whom he most identified, was King David, the legendary author of the Psalms. Bach annotated three passages in 1 and 2 Chronicles, which narrate the life of David. Beside 1 Chronicles 25, which describes the musical forces provided by David for the divine service, Bach writes: “NB: This chapter is the true foundation of all God-pleasing church music.” At 1 Chronicles 28:21, commenting on David’s injunction to Solomon “to use every willing man who has skill for any kind of service,” Bach observes: “NB: Marvelous proof that, along with other parts of the divine service, music, too (and especially), was ordained by God’s spirit through David.” Finally, Bach entered the following remark at 2 Chronicles 5:13–14 describing the use of musical instruments to praise the Lord: “NB: Wherever there is devotional music, God, with His grace, is ever present.” These three observations make up fully half of the grand total of six comments—as opposed to the numerous underlinings and strokes in the margins—that Bach entered into his Calov Bible. Note, too, that Bach launches his monumental setting of the St. John Passion not with some newly invented modern poetic verses penned by his librettist (as he does the St. Matthew Passion) or some appropriate chorale text or a passage from the New Testament. He instead chooses to open with lines taken almost verbatim from the Psalms, specifically Psalm 8. The text of Bach’s chorus runs “Lord, our ruler, whose fame is glorious in all the earth.” (The opening of Psalm 8 reads: “O Lord, our Lord, how excellent is thy name in all the earth.”) Besides fulfilling theological purposes, such as stressing Jesus’s divine nature from the outset, the citation can serve as an homage to King David, whom Bach viewed not only as a biblical hero, but also as a fellow musician whose conviction that music was an indispensable adornment to the divine service enriched and justified his own calling. The St. John Passion gives voice to some of the loftiest sentiments of the human spirit. It does so through the medium of some of the most profound, expressive, and beautiful music ever conceived by the mind of man. Neither that supreme masterpiece nor its incomparable maker needs any apology. https://youtube/watch?v=mKRvnS2HFF4
Posted on: Sat, 04 Oct 2014 01:31:53 +0000
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