Johann Sebastian Bach (79 page)

 

Bach apparently composed the quadruple fugue as an afterthought while the engraving of
The Art of Fugue
was already in progress. The composing manuscript, which dates from 1748–49, belongs among the latest musical manuscripts from Bach's hand, and its unfinished state (it breaks off after 239 measures) may tempt us to think that death stayed the composer's pen. Even Carl Philipp Emanuel was misled, as shown in a note he appended many years later to the last manuscript page: “NB. While working on this fugue, in which the Name BACH appears in the countersubject, the author died.”
³⁷
But the incomplete form in which the fugue has been transmitted does not correspond to what actually existed at the time of Bach's death. Before composing the quadruple fugue, Bach would have had to test the combinatorial possibilities of the four themes. His draft of such contrapuntal combinations has not survived, but a description, at least, of the composer's intentions is included in the Obituary, which mentions the “draft” for a fugue that “was to contain four themes and to have been afterward inverted note for note in all four voices.”
³⁸
From this statement, we can reasonably surmise that
The Art of Fugue
at the time of Bach's death was less incomplete than what has come down to us. But whatever the lost draft contained, it must not have been sufficiently worked out to bring the quadruple fugue to an end.

Nevertheless, even in its unfinished state,
The Art of Fugue
stands before us as the most comprehensive summary of the aged Bach's instrumental language. At the same time, it is a highly personal statement; the letters BACH woven into the final movement represent much more than a fanciful signature. Theory and practice merge in this work. By letting the substance of the musical subject be logically uncovered and systematically exhausted, by employing traditional and novel techniques of composition as well as old and new elements of style, Bach created an autonomous work of art that embodies the character and universality of his art. The significance of the work at an important historical moment was captured well by Marpurg in dedicating the second volume of his own fugal treatise to the two elder Bach sons:

 

I take the liberty of laying before Your Honors the principles of an art that owes its improvement particularly to the excellent efforts of your famous Father. One need not look back even half a century to discover the happy moment when a beginning was made of combining imaginative harmonic changes with an agreeable and unified melody [referring to the new Italian style of the Vivaldi generation]. At the very time when the world was beginning to degenerate in another direction, when light melody making was gaining the upper hand and people were becoming tired of difficult harmonies, the late Capellmeister was the one who knew how to keep to the golden mean, and taught us how to combine an agreeable and flowing melody with the richest harmonies.
³⁹

 

The grand-scale project of
The Art of Fugue
seems to have occupied the composer's mind throughout the last decade of his life. Seen in this light, however, the work is less the crowning conclusion of a representative series of monothematic compositions (beginning with the
Goldberg Variations
and including the
Musical Offering
and the
“Vom Himmel hoch” Variations
) than the conceptual background and theoretical underpinning for many of Bach's works written during the 1740s. Yet the language of
The Art of Fugue
, despite its remarkably broad stylistic palette, is marked by significantly greater systematization, concentration, and abstraction than any of the other monothematic instrumental cycles, let alone the magnificent
B-minor Mass
. Nevertheless, the Mass similarly reflects a long-term engagement and—within the limitations dictated by vocal composition, a fixed liturgical genre, and a long historical tradition—a comparable systematic musical exploration that Bach defined for himself.

Bach's grandiose plan to set a solemn Mass can already be discerned in the layout of the Kyrie-Gloria Mass of 1733 (Table 12.3). This aim is apparent in the five-part texture of the vocal writing, the large orchestral contingent, and especially the sophisticated design of its individual movements. The opening three-movement Kyrie group clearly proclaims the composer's ambition: Kyrie I is an extended fugue with obbligato orchestra, the Christe adopts the style of a contemporary opera duet, and Kyrie II draws on retrospective vocal counterpoint, thereby relegating the orchestra to the role of doubling the choral parts. The entire Kyrie complex shows the great value Bach placed on highly contrasting compositional styles and techniques. Its movements also outline a sequence of keys from B minor to D major to F-sharp minor, forming a B-minor triad, thereby signaling a broadly conceived harmonic scheme for the entire work that centers on D major (the trumpet key).

The Gloria complex of the musically self-contained Kyrie-Gloria Mass of 1733 resolutely builds on the stylistic variety of the Kyrie group by offering four large-scale choruses (“Gloria in excelsis / Et in terra pax,” “Gratias agimus tibi,” “Qui tollis peccata mundi,” “Cum sancto spiritu”) interspersed with four equally large-scale solo movements with obbligato instruments, each with a full polyphonic orchestral accompaniment. Thus, the Gloria section gives a solo aria to each concertist of the five-voiced choir and an obbligato part to each family of instruments in the orchestra (strings, flutes, reeds, and brass): combining solo soprano II with solo violin (“Laudamus”), soprano I and tenor with flute (“Domine Deus”), alto with oboe d'amore (“Qui sedes”), and bass with horn (“Quoniam”).

When did Bach begin to expand his Kyrie-Gloria Mass into a complete setting of the Mass? A possible clue lies in an early version of the Credo intonation,
⁴⁰
but this merely indicates that the Credo added to the Mass during the years 1748–49 had a prehistory. We do know that in the late 1730s and early 1740s, Bach copied, performed, and examined numerous Masses by composers ranging in time from Palestrina to his own contemporaries.
⁴¹
For example, he performed the six-voice
Missa sine nomine
by Palestrina, with added cornettos, trombones, and continuo, and the
Missa sapientiae
by Antonio Lotti. And compositional studies with a direct impact on the
B-minor Mass
include a “Credo in unum Deum” intonation, BWV 1081, added to a Mass in F major by Giovanni Battista Bassani, and a contrapuntal expansion of the “Suscepit Israel” movement, BWV 1082, in a Magnificat setting by Antonio Caldara. In its first version, the Symbolum Nicenum (Credo section) of the B-minor Mass comprised only eight movements, as the duet setting of “Et in unum Dominum” also incorporated the text portion “et incarnatus est…” After finishing this duet, however, and possibly after finishing the entire score of the Symbolum, Bach decided to reapportion the text underlay of the duet, free up the “et incarnatus est” section, and compose a separate movement for this liturgically pivotal text traditionally treated with special musical emphasis. In its overall design, now comprising nine movements, the Symbolum gained a strengthened symmetrical layout. Bach turned what had been a 2+1+2+1+2 design (eight movements, choruses boldface) into an architecture of 2+1+3+1+2.

T
ABLE
12.3.
Mass in B Minor

The Symbolum opens and closes with a pair of contrasting choruses: “Credo” (motet, on the liturgical chant) together with “Patrem omnipotentem” (concertato fugue) at the start, and “Confiteor” (likewise on the liturgical chant) together with “Et expecto” (again, concertato fugue) at the end. By including two settings in an emphatically retrospective style (“Credo” and “Confiteor”) based on medieval chant, Bach added a theological, historical, and compositional dimension that the Kyrie-Gloria Mass of 1733 lacked. Thus, in setting the chants, Bach uses the (musical) canon technique in order to accent the (liturgical) canonical value of the Mass text in general and the Nicene Creed in particular, while the archaic style of the two cantus firmus settings allows the work to embrace a wide span of the compositional history of the Mass genre. In the theological realm, we find that following the “Confiteor,” which is set in imitative counterpoint, two different settings of the text “Et expecto resurrectionem” (And I await the resurrection) draw a line between “the expecting” and “the expected”: an expressive Adagio, filled with unprecedented chromatic and enharmonic devices that illustrate the suffering in this world, contrasting with an upbeat Vivace that portrays, in anticipation, the life of the world to come. The two framing choral pairs of the Symbolum are each adjoined by two arias that function as connecting links to the central choral complex. This center emphasizes in a musically persuasive way the Christological core of the Nicene Creed: “And he was made incarnate,” “He was crucified,” “And he was resurrected.”

This central group of three choruses includes both the oldest and the most recent compositions of the entire Mass: “Crucifixus,” a movement based on the chorus “Weinen, Klagen, Sorgen, Zagen” from cantata BWV 12 of 1714, and “Et incarnatus est,” an inserted afterthought and apparently Bach's last choral setting, dating from 1749. In the scheme of things, the “Crucifixus” coming immediately after “Et incarnatus est” would seem to threaten a stylistic and aesthetic clash of incompatible music.
⁴²
Bach, however, avoids such a conflict: he subtly links the two movements by providing both with a similar structural underpinning, and unifies them by using a repeated melodic pattern in each. The six-note violin figure that shapes the “Et incarnatus est” from beginning to end (and, for the concluding measures, even slips into three-part canonic counterpoint) gives way to the seven-note ostinato bass line of the “Crucifixus.”

The Sanctus and the movements that follow it date from the time the score of the Mass was completed in 1748–49. All of them, however, derive from earlier works. The Sanctus was originally written for Christmas 1724, though in a slightly different scoring for three sopranos, alto, tenor, and bass. The “Osanna” derives from a secular cantata movement dating from 1732, and the Benedictus from an unknown original. Even the Agnus Dei is a parody of a 1725 cantata movement; however, not only does it evince substantive changes, it also contains newly composed passages, such as the entrance of the alto in canon with the unison strings, a genuine tour de force in enhancing a parody with new material.
⁴³
This case strikingly documents Bach's intention to improve where necessary, the contrapuntal structure of the work. Finally, the “Dona nobis pacem,” being a musical reprise of the “Gratias agimus tibi,” shows evidence both of Bach's understanding of this final section of the Ordinary of the Mass—a song of thanksgiving—and of his artistic intention to round off a work that originated over decades, but whose separate sections were now put together to form a whole. Even so, the paper dividers—that is, the numbered autograph title pages inserted for all four Mass sections (Table 12.3, boldface subheadings)—and the noticeable differences in the scoring of the various sections preserve traces of the work's genesis.

In the completed score, which embraces a wide spectrum of vocal-instrumental polyphony, Bach was able to underline what he perceived as the timeless validity of the liturgical and musical meaning of the ancient Mass. Hence, the multiple compositional styles that constitute the
B-minor Mass
cannot be reduced to a mere historical anthology of exemplary settings. True, where Bach borrowed from existing music, he selected from among the best he had. To some extent, he may also have been guided by the aspect of preservation, for he could see very well the difference between the short-lived fashions of the German cantatas on the one hand and the longevity of the Latin Mass on the other—not to mention the parochial qualities of the cantatas visà-vis the universality of the Mass. So he chose this most historical of all vocal genres to embody the
summa summarum
of his artistry, that of the capellmeister-cantor.

We know of no occasion for which Bach could have written the
B-minor Mass
, nor any patron who might have commissioned it, nor any performance of the complete work before 1750. Thus, Bach's last choral composition is in many respects the vocal counterpart to
The Art of Fugue
, the other side of the composer's musical legacy. Like no other work of Bach's, the
B-minor Mass
represents a summary of his writing for voice, not only in its variety of styles, compositional devices, and range of sonorities, but also in its high level of technical polish. The Mass offers a full panoply of the art of musical composition, with a breadth and depth betraying not only theoretical perspicacity but also a comprehensive grasp of music history, particularly in its use of old and new styles. Just as theological doctrine survived over the centuries in the words of the Mass, so Bach's mighty setting preserved the musical and artistic creed of its creator for posterity.