BACH VS. JOHN

Duccio di Buoninsegna (c. 1255 – c. 1318): Christ before Caiaphas

In the current cultural climate in which every tradition and piece of art by dead White men is being questioned for its validity, I find that I am often asking myself: is classical music really for everybody? In a basic sense, I have always believed this to be true. On the other hand, as the classical music community examines all the racism, misogyny, and homophobia baked into a lot of this music and its institutions, it’s hard not to recognize the ways that the traditions can exclude. Yet, the truth is, as a gay man of color who has spent much of his life on the outside looking in, classical music is the thing that kept me alive through my fraught adolescence and through which I have found community. As usual, no thing is just one thing, and art can hold many truths at once.

Ever since encountering the music of Johann Sebastian Bach as a singer, I have been quietly asking myself this very question of Bach’s music. One summer while singing some of his church cantatas with the conductor and Bach expert Helmuth Rilling in Weimar, Germany, where Bach worked for a spell before settling in Leipzig, a journalist actually posed this question to me. Caught off guard by someone daring to ask this question about one of the most hallowed masters of the classical music canon in front of a camera, I quickly replied that yes, I did believe it was for everyone. But in truth, I wasn’t so sure of my rapid-fire answer. When I met Bach through his violin concertos and Brandenburg concertos as a young violinist and violist, I fell madly in love with his music and just assumed it was for everyone. As a singer who must grapple with text, I now often wonder if this is indeed true as his music requires that I deliver dogmatic Lutheran texts meditating on the life and teachings of Jesus Christ. While they may be exquisite musical settings of these texts, there is no avoiding the dogma.

I am about to embark on a personal journey examining this question, asking as many as people as I can about their thoughts on the matter as part of major recording project that is in the works (stay tuned to this space…). In the meantime, I can’t help ruminating on this question this week in Columbus, Ohio, where I am performing one of Bach’s most “problematic” works in regard to inclusivity: his St. John Passion.

JOHANN SEBASTIAN BACH: St. John Passion

St. John’s Evangelist is a lot like a lawyer, attempting to prove to the supreme court of the world that Jesus was – beyond a reasonable doubt – the long-awaited for Messiah who would die for us, and in doing so, absolve the world of its sins and realize the promise of everlasting life. He is constantly making his case, perpetually quoting prophecies throughout his telling of the story, as if to say: “Look! It was foretold that this would happen, and it DID happen! Ergo, he IS the Messiah!” He almost spends more time on these aspects of the narrative than the actual action of the Passion story. John’s telling begins directly with Judas’ betrayal of Jesus and the ensuing arrest. The crucifixion is described briefly and in a perfunctory manner. Moments that are explored in great depth and detail in St. Matthew’s earlier telling of the Passion story are completely glossed over. It’s almost as if John is saying: I know you already know this story and what happened here. There is the sense that he is recounting it as a review, because more importantly, he has a point to prove – he wants to win you over to his side.

It is often debated whether the John Passion is antisemitic. Indeed, a central aspect of John’s agenda is to draw a line between the Christians and the Jews. As he recounts the betrayal of Jesus, he insists on identifying the crowd turning Jesus over to Pilate as Jews, implying a group of villains who hold blame for the crucifixion of the Messiah – people who were decidedly not of his own community, not “us”, not Christians.

In a time marked by a critical eye focused on monuments and canon, it boggles my mind that we hold so much space for Bach’s piece. Yet the power of the piece is undeniable. In a way, it demands that we create space for it. The piece’s critique on humanity is overwhelming in its impact. Performing Bach’s setting of John’s story here in Columbus, it has struck me just how much his musical setting fights with this agenda of John’s. 

The Jesus Christ that John paints is one who is sure of himself, self-assured in his power and autonomy: a man who is certain of his fate and confident in how his story will unfold. He does not waver in his faith, he does not question the process, and pray to his un-answering father in the Garden of Gethsemane like Matthew’s Jesus. He knows he is God. He is assured of his place in the Kingdom of Heaven. Shockingly, Bach is not so interested in this Jesus as a character. His music is somewhat perfunctory – simply accompanied by continuo in a dry or secco recitative style with just keyboard and bowed bass. Almost all his text is set syllabically and without ornament, it passes by quickly. Bach’s approach to Matthew’s much more humanized and complex Jesus is entirely different: He gives that Jesus his own orchestra, setting his lines in a very structured and complex manner as accompanied recitatives that surround his words with a halo of strings. Bach then further draws out the moments of Jesus’ anguished and terrifying journey through the Matthew Passion story with more arias from the soloists meditating on each milestone event. 

Jesus is the clear protagonist of Bach’s setting of St. Matthew’s gospel. In the John, it is the people who surround Jesus upon whom Bach fixes his gaze. With fewer arias meditating on the choices and actions of Jesus, it is the choruses which take center stage. Bach draws out the crowd scenes in the John Passion in the most dramatic of ways: from the very beginning of the piece, where groups of people only utter single lines in John’s text, Bach gives them pages upon pages of musical treatment. Even lines as simple as “Jesus of Nazareth” or “Be greeted, King of the Jews” take minutes to perform, as there are so many measures of complicated orchestral music and choral fugues to contend with. Bach’s setting of John’s simple line “Crucify him!” is perhaps some of the most terrifying music he ever composed, with each voice part in the choir wailing “Crucify” at the tops of their ranges in a tightly packed fugal setting that evokes the bloodthirst of a mob enraged by the false narrative that a man has committed an unforgivable sin that is only punishable by death. 

“Crucify him!” from Bach’s St. John Passion

One of the most extreme examples of this focus on the crowds of people surrounding Jesus is when the soldiers at the crucifixion gamble for who will take Jesus’ tunic as they divide his clothes as he dies on the cross. This seemingly minor moment in the drama is perhaps Bach’s longest choral fugue in the entire piece, whereas he only gives four or five measures of secco recitative to the Evangelist to describe the crucifixion itself. No arias to meditate on the suffering of Jesus, no soloist meditations on the number of nails driven into his hands and feet. Just a simple mention of the event. Yet page after page of virtuosic orchestral playing (especially in the cellos, who have an insane sixteenth-note figure with difficult string crossings that is nearly impossible to play at tempo) for these soldiers rolling dice to see who will win a tiny scrap of Jesus’ clothes.

“Let us not tear it, but cast lots for it” from Bach’s St. John Passion

People often comment on how wonderfully crafted these crowd scenes are in Bach’s St. John Passion. His musical painting of these moments creates vivid characterizations of crowds of people: mobs mad with rage and fear, soldiers who are cold-blooded mercenaries. Bach’s musical extension of these moments really forces the listener to focus on the people who form the messy community around Jesus, sometimes at the expense of Jesus himself. I had a baritone colleague say to me recently that the role of Jesus in the St. John Passion is almost a throwaway role. While I certainly don’t agree with that, I do take his point regarding the sheer lack of musical material in comparison to everyone else. Bach is so focused on the people who surround Jesus, he even adds in a line from the Matthew Passion in order to flesh out Jesus’ disciple Peter more fully: rather than just leaving it at the cock crowing (as was prophesied…again John making his case) after Peter’s third denial of Jesus, Bach takes the line from Matthew’s text that describes Peter weeping bitterly once he realizes his failure, despite being foretold that this would happen. Again pulling focus away from Jesus, he stretches out this inserted moment stolen from Matthew, giving the Evangelist his most beautiful music of the evening as he vocally attempts to paint Peter’s weeping with a long, chromatic melisma.

With all this focus on crowds and people, which requires almost everyone on stage to perform these many extended moments, it’s hard not to feel that Bach is reminding everyone that it is ALL OF US who failed Jesus and betrayed him in this story. It’s not just the Jews of John’s narrative who are vilified. It is Pilate, it is Peter, it is the Roman soldiers, it’s his disciples…it’s everyone. If anything, Bach is as inclusive as possible when identifying who failed here. It was a systemic failure of the entire community. Listening to these moments that Bach composed in the early 1700’s here in Columbus three centuries later, it’s difficult to not think of the mobs of people eating their own on social media, whether they be right-wing trolls spewing conspiracy theories and transphobic fallacies or hordes of keyboard warriors looking to cancel the next person they perceive to be oppressive, offensive, and worthy of a call out.  In an age in which millions of innocents have needlessly perished over the past few years, whether they have been killed in a brutal and unnecessary war, murdered by a police officer with a hand gun or a domestic terrorist with a semi-automatic weapon, or claimed by an uncontrollable pandemic that has suffocated millions, the aggrieved and enraged mobs remain, the politicians still machinate about how to keep a hold on power, and the disaster capitalists continue to cast lots as they compete to pick up the scraps left in the wake of all this needless death and suffering. 

It’s hard to imagine our world more polarized and angrier than it is now. While there is most certainly a lot about which we can and should disagree, we still must share this planet with each other. Yet so few seem content with anything less than mutually assured destruction. Either you agree with one’s point of view or you must be removed from existence and society. I feel so much anguish about this fraught moment in human history and often wonder how and if we will be able to pull ourselves back from the brink of what feels like the end of the world.

Final Bass aria from Bach’s St. John Passion

Despite all of these failings, Bach still holds out such profound hope for us. Toward the end of the piece, just after the Evangelist / John announce that Jesus has died, the bass soloist rises to sing an aria in which he affirms the promise of everlasting life and the absolution of sin Jesus’ sacrifice affords. As he sings, a solo cello dances around his melody, and the chorus intones its dedication to Christ behind him with a beautiful chorale tune. By invoking the chorus in this way, Bach makes the crowd suddenly sound like a choir of angels who form a halo around this promise the bass soloist delineates in his aria. In the midst of this dark, chaotic, and depraved humanity that populates the Passion story, Bach composes a quiet ray of hope. Being in such stark contrast with everything else in the piece, that gentle glimmer manages to shine like a beacon and becomes one of the most arresting moments of the piece. It’s as if Bach is saying, there is divinity somewhere inside all of us, and we can access it…as long as we attune our minds to this higher aspect of our souls. 

There were moments during last night’s performance when I almost couldn’t bear the hope this aria holds for humanity. My eyes watered, I felt my throat clench, and it was all I could do not to burst into tears. Rather than ponder if this music is for everyone, last night I wondered: is everyone worthy of Bach’s hope for humanity? I don’t know how sure I am of that with the current state of the world. However, one thing I am certain of is that everyone needs this music right now. Perhaps more than ever.

In case you aren’t in Columbus, OH this weekend for these performances with the Columbus Symphony, you can hear a recording of the work I did with Jeannette Sorrell and Apollo’s Fire a few years ago by clicking the button below.