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What I Learned from Bach, the Worship Director
The Swiss theologian Karl Barth once said, “It may be that when the angels go about their task praising God, they play only Bach. I am sure, however, that when they are together en famille, they play Mozart.”
I once shared the opinion of Barth’s angels. My appreciation for the music of Johann Sebastian Bach has been slow to awaken. I remember as a teenage musician seeing his pieces as worthy but not exciting. They were exact and exacting––but who wants music to be a technical exercise only?
Where was the freedom, the joy, the heart in his music? The lines of his melodies seemed to wind and twist their way on, and on, and on, without a pause for breath. My clumsy fingers couldn’t ever quite master him. At one school concert, I slammed the piano in disgust at my tangle of errors. Bach wouldn’t forgive me; why should I forgive him? (As my dad used to say, “Last night, Michael Jensen played Bach. Bach lost.”)
The music that grabbed me was played by jazz maestro Miles Davis or composed by the Russian innovator Stravinsky. This was music with a human heartbeat, rather than the mechanical pulse I heard in Bach.
Or so I thought.
My interest in Bach was rekindled a couple of years ago by a comment from theologian David Bentley Hart, who wrote in his masterful book The Beauty of the Infinite that Bach was “the greatest of Christian theologians.” Perhaps I’d been missing something vital in Bach’s music, even its very essence. As a theologian myself, I felt compelled to look further into the master’s work.
Music for the Glory of God
Trying to see what Bentley Hart might mean, I purchased a copy of The Well-Tempered Clavier, a book of 48 preludes and fugues. There are two complete cycles of pieces in every major and minor key in the scale. As I drove myself through a couple of the best-known of these pieces, with my lazy technique and half-remembered scales, I found that the pieces were meticulously designed and intricately patterned—and made beautiful sound.
I’d been taught to expect that music ought to be about something—it should have a theme or a title—whereas Bach’s instrumental music has no other subject than itself. It doesn’t attempt to portray a landscape or a storm in sound. It just is itself.
But there’s more to this than meets the eye: Bach famously signed his pieces “SDG” (for “soli Deo gloria”)—to God alone be the glory. He was conscious of his vocation as a church musician to serve God and the people of God. The bulk of his work consists of cantatas (a piece of several movements sung by a choir backed by a small orchestra) and chorales to be performed in church settings.
Bach was conscious of his vocation as a church musician to serve God and the people of God.
But this sense of the purpose of music wasn’t limited to his church music, which was obviously about something because it had words. Bach supposedly wrote, ‘The aim and final end of all music should be none other than the glory of God and the refreshment of the soul.” Even his instrumental music is itself a theological statement.
We might say his work sings to us of the order in the creation––but also of its redemption from chaos. Bach’s designs test the limits of order. Trying to learn to play the C minor fugue, I discovered passages of seeming harmonic chaos as the three fugal voices introduce and expand the main theme, before finally drawing to a frantic, whirlwind close.
Bach as Worship Director
Bach’s most obvious theological statements were made in his choral music. John Eliot Gardiner’s marvelous biography of Bach offers us an extensive and appreciative account of Bach’s religious music.
Gardiner, an acknowledged Bach expert who has conducted and performed his choral music for many years, argues that the cantatas, which have been unjustly overlooked in the standard analysis of Bach’s work, actually form the heart of his oeuvre. In Bach, words and music form an impressive bond, which reflects his deep devotion to the Bible as a book that can shape a human life and open a soul to God.
The bulk of Bach’s church music was composed after he was appointed as the director of music at the St. Thomas School and Church in 1723. He held this post for 27 years, until he died following an eye operation in 1750.
Bach worked furiously in his first few years at Leipzig, composing a cantata every week for some years. Usually, Bach’s cantatas involve the set Gospel readings for the Lutheran liturgy, but they also incorporate well-known hymns and words that comment on the texts. They were designed to fit in around the liturgy, preparing for and reflecting on the readings and the sermon. They were an adornment to God’s Word, not a distraction from it.
It’s thought that he composed more than 300 cantatas, though more than 100 have been lost. How did he find the creative energy to do it? He worked in cramped and noisy conditions, surrounded by students, working with a scratchy pen on expensive paper, handwriting all the parts for his musicians. He had to cope with their idiosyncrasies and limitations (you can imagine him trying to figure out how to hide a lazy baritone or a wobbly treble) and, as church musicians have always found, with the quirks and complaints of the clergy. Then he had to rehearse the pieces on a Friday and Saturday, and perform them on Sunday. He then turned around and did it all over again the next week.
Music for Soul’s Refreshment
Was Bach just a journeyman composer, writing music for his ecclesiastical masters to order, rather than from personal conviction? Written evidence of Bach’s convictions is sketchy. We do know he purchased and clearly read large and sophisticated Bible commentaries. He also had in his keeping a deluxe edition of the works of Martin Luther, the great German reformer.
He purchased and clearly read large and sophisticated Bible commentaries. He also had in his keeping a deluxe edition of the works of Martin Luther.
As Gardiner says, “Bach’s working library, estimated to have contained at least 112 different theological and homiletical works, was less like a typical church musician’s and more what one might expect to find in the church of a respectably sized town,” or indeed, in a pastor’s study. Clearly, he was a committed reader of the Bible and of theology.
And it was more than that, as Gardiner shows through his analysis of the cantatas and the other great works, such as the St. Matthew Passion. Luther’s profound description of the Christian’s experience of life amid suffering and death clearly resonated with Bach. The Christian hope isn’t given, like a greeting card, as a trite fix for despair. It’s a wrestling of hope from despair. Bach, orphaned at the age of 12, lost his first wife while he was away traveling and returned to find her long buried. Of his 20 children, only 8 survived infancy.
In Bach’s Christian music, we don’t find a denial of the crushing reality of life’s hardships and bewilderments. We don’t find an avoidance of doubt. Nor is everything neatly resolved. But we do find lines of hope and joy, and we’re drawn again and again to the cross of Jesus Christ. As Gardiner writes,
In [Bach’s] hands, music is more than the traditional analogue of hidden reality, more even than an instrument of persuasion or rhetoric; it encapsulates the role of religious experience as he understood it, charting the ups and downs of belief and doubt in essentially human terms and in frequently dramatic ways, and rendering these tensions and quotidian struggles vivid and immediate.
By all accounts, Bach was an ordinary fellow in person, and a bit grumpy to boot. He once got into a mess when he swore at a bassoonist in a rehearsal—an argument that later led to Bach attacking the man with a knife in (as he claimed) self-defense. His correspondence is filled with complaints about his pay and conditions, just as any of ours would be. But his musical output clearly comes from somewhere real––a deep sense of the mercy and love of God in Jesus Christ.
My prayer is that the church musicians of today would be inspired by Bach’s work and labor with the same end in mind––to the glory of God alone.
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