During his life, Johann Sebastian Bach was hired about a dozen times to write music for two communities, for special occasions in a prince’s court (the Brandenburg Concertos) or for the liturgical needs of a city’s Lutheran church, focusing on training boys, conducting choral ensembles and composing new works, mostly more than 200 cantatas for Sunday services. He also took these jobs to support his two wives — the first died at 35 — and the 20 children he fathered, only half of whom reached adulthood.
Bach, the radiant sun of Baroque music, was driven to compose wherever he went — not only practical music for the Glory of God and Church but also to his peerless standards, works for keyboard, cello, orchestra, choir and organ chorales based on Lutheran hymns. Composing to his aesthetic and for services, Bach, who I can’t imagine was routinely unsatisfied with his output, hated the control his bosses’ expectations exerted on him.
Who were those bosses? Micromanagers — city council members, church officials, school dons who, in the still growing Protestant Reformation, argued about what they deemed Bach should do: stick to writing folk-oriented music congregants could sing and, thereby, stiffen their faith or let him give freely of his gift, composing adventuresome music on his own schedule. Put your hired genius in a box like a Lutheran pastor or trust the C.V. of his “divine” creativity. Anyone with an ear thanks Bach for siding with the latter, and chafing with the fuddy-duddies.
By the time Bach arrived as the church and school cantor in Leipzig (from 1723 to his death in 1750), he had had many run-ins with his “betters.” Three times, protesting their meddling, he quit working, stopped teaching, and, as we’d say now, quit replying to their emails. He didn’t stop writing, however. In 1733, he found an opportunity in nearby Dresden (this time a court position with guaranteed freedom) for which he penned, in his words, a “trifling” Kyrie and Gloria, based on the Ordinary of the Mass, for the King of Poland’s Catholic court.
Bach earned the assignment as court composer, but, foregoing relocation (there was no better salary), he used it as leverage to quiet his Leipzig nags. That year he left the Kyrie and Gloria, finished, and performed once or twice. This would be the first half a Missa tota, which he didn’t return to until after his 60th birthday.
The Ordinary is a set of movements — Kyrie, Gloria, Credo, Sanctus, Benedictus and Agnus Dei — that in a composer’s design are contrastively dramatized into sections. The Catholic enactment of Holy Communion had been expanded over centuries of pre-Bach composers with tropes or additions, expounding the musical potential of the faith ritual. As the form grew and drew the parishioners’ awe, not unlike the light-coloring stained glass of churches, composers morphed the liturgical service into a performative saga. While the papal hierarchy kept the mass close to the vest, the composer opened its potential toward narrative and declarative inclusion. Think of grand rendering of the New Testament in Handel’s Messiah, ecstatic encroachment up to three hours.
What of this history shows up in Bach’s B Minor Mass? Answer: His determination to design what his ideal audience wanted and he could achieve. You can hear him dismiss the irksome pettiness of church and council in his tender and propulsive creativity; you can hear the text echo the Ordinary and release its prescriptions to sublime sonorities, which Martin Luther would have found nakedly excessive; and you can hear the euphoria of faith with a musical rhetoric not unlike the soulfulness of, say, a rousing speech by President Obama, lofting above the partisan tumult, whose noise we are drowning in today.
Lofty, indeed, was Sunday’s performance of the Mass in B Minor by San Diego’s Bach Collegium. Scored for flutes, oboes, trumpets, strings, basso continuo, chorus and, chosen from within, five soloists — an ensemble for which the Mass contrasts joy with solemnity, fugal complexity with trumpety brightness and sacred texts with vocal wizardry.
It’s not possible to ring every bell the concert occasioned; however, one requires mention. The group’s founder/conductor Ruben Valenzuela leads with contagious exuberance; when his left arm arcs toward the roofbeams, choir and orchestra, like vocal salutes, raise their volume in kind. Few agree there’s one time-tested “way” to perform Bach; Valenzuela’s approach is epitomized by an avidity for volume. I call it an American style — choruses can be loud and louder, vibrant, pulsing, often with a bounce, while staying grounded in the Baroque harmonic path. The Mass fits this Western style to a T: melded textures, rare rubato, unsentimental, edges sharp or ragged with enthusiasm, to the brim and over.
To my delight, the big room, or nave, of the Point Loma’s All Souls Episcopal Church corrals and absorbs Valenzuela’s take on the Mass just so. No soul is left behind. The venue bends to the choir’s fortes and projects more than their number, nearly two dozen. Their volume inflates as well when adding three particular soloists: soprano Esteli Gomez, whose operatic tone intensifies every held note; countertenor Jay Carter, half angel, half adult; and the bass-baritone Enrico Lagasca, whose low range tones resemble liquid mahogany.
The opening pageant is composed of three settings of the Kyrie eleison, “Have Mercy,” with Bach’s assigned moods: first, an immense choral fugue brings waves of thick-woven vocal and instrumental exchange; second, a duet for sopranos and two violins, pleasingly demure in its entreaty; and third, a short mysterious fugue, in ancient style, that briefly unsettles the plea. Such shifting emotion is dramatic, its suddenness alluring. A writer I like notes Bach’s mood-layering, which “fills the congregation with a sense of confused wonder.” Such music characterizes a fickle Almighty who needs petitioning since he, to the beholden, deals all the cards.
To that wonder comes God’s undoubted answer, the Gloria, one of several high choral praises in the Mass, unmistakably Lutheran, with thesis-like surety in its sonic spectacle. In rendering Glory’s praises, the Collegium choir, at times, overpowers the orchestra and sends the seraphic voices into Messiah levels. The effect, I think, is the point: Baroque exaggeration of ornament and volume can, perhaps should, feel like cathedral stone.
Along the road to Glory is the lovely Father/Son duet, “Dominus Deo,” between the soprano as God and the countertenor as Jesus, a dialogue of bespoke respect. Stephen Schultz’s flute obbligato over a pizzicato bass was poignant and warm. So, too, the “Que sedes,” with countertenor Carter as Christ, mediating between God and his flock, backed by the hair-curling melismas of Kathryn Montoya’s oboe d’amore. So, too, again, the growly “Quoniam,” featuring the earful river-bottom of Lacasga’s voice.
The Gloria closes with a jolting “Cum Sancto Spiritu.” It’s a propulsive choral dance that Valenzuela steers with breathless fervor. It’s been said by the Bachian elite that Johann Sebastian, whose musical family members go back centuries, appropriated in these joyful romps remnants of pagan wildness, here tamed by meter but irrepressible in spirit — a force, perhaps in the thrilling American style, that’s now natural to the Collegium.
In the second half, Bach dovetails more movements in which he must set the wordiest of Christian texts: the Nicene Creed, “I believe in one God,” and all the rest. The dominant sound is unified belief, the chorus exalting its dogmatic message. For me, the most musically interesting part is the most divergent: A quickened summary, written in contrastive forms, of Jesus’s story — made flesh through Mary, torturously murdered by Pontius Pilate, and brought back to life once, for a revelatory visit, witnessed and remembered.
The highpoint of the Credo is the “Crucifixus.” This is the lone movement among the 27 parts that stings with its chromatic Chaconne, or stubbornly repeated line, tone-painting Christ’s drooping decay on the cross, rendered with rare Bachian dissonance. A quartet of soloists push the tones up the hill and roll them back down while two flutes add a shrill finality on top. Strikingly simple and moving.
The rest of the Mass in B Minor comments on — justifies, energizes, glorifies — the Credo’s message and mission. In grand choral succession, “Sanctus,” “Osanna,” and “Dona nobis pacem,” (“Give Us Peace”) express the effusive rewards of the faithful — the Dante-like rise to the supernal heights, a rarefied air that breathes the “majesty of God,” and a “sky full” of glittering Heaven. To ensure our welcome, Bach blasts the gates open with three Baroque-period trumpets, or tromba, valveless horns in D major.
And yet the composer, to delay the celestial payoff, inserts two arias between the final movements. First is the restrained quiet texture of tenor Michael Jones with “Benedictus” and, again, chillingly precise, Carter’s solo on the feathery burden of “Agnus Dei,” a music of painful deprivation, in which the Lamb’s sacrifice echoes Christ’s. The violins, dragging the doomed motif along in unison, curries a stark inevitability.
Bach’s Mass may be the apotheosis of what he wanted his music to achieve—to exist for the Glory of God, in a sense, to embody it. I think that to ask music to exist for God may also be among the highest expressions we can make to whatever it is that magnetizes that desire. In short, music may be or is God. Either suits me fine.
When I listen to the Mass, I know why some of us don’t need religion or divine being, and ascribe to neither. But it’s also true, based in the history of human wishes, that we long for the harmonic cohesion of that idea — to be watched over by a force of loving grace, who just might, if not should, exist, and that Bach, despite the world of illusion and tragedy we all live in, is himself convinced that a deity exists whose ultimate concern for us is reached via music. It may be that after hearing the Mass in B Minor, or his other masterpiece, St. Matthews Passion, strivers and strays are a bit closer to accepting its verity and a bit less willing to ponder its illusion.
Cultural critic and memoirist, Thomas Larson, archives on his website nearly 500 publications over the past 30 years, including his longform feature stories for the San Diego Reader. His new book, On Listening & Not Listening — a multipart essay on the relentless noise in American culture, media, and politics from the listener’s perspective — is due later this year from Bloomsbury.
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