Musical Monday #1 - The Crucifixus

“Music, once admitted to the soul, becomes a sort of spirit and never dies.”

–Edward Bulwer-Lytton

“And if we look at the works of J.S. Bach — a benevolent god to which all musicians should offer a prayer to defend themselves against mediocrity — on each page we discover things which we thought were born only yesterday, from delightful arabesques to an overflowing of religious feeling greater than anything we have since discovered.”

–Claude Debussy

“The Crucifixus” is my favorite movement in Bach’s monumental B-minor Mass.

Scholars believe that during his lifetime Bach never heard his B-minor Mass, and only a partial performance led by his son C.P.E. Bach was given in 1786 over thirty-five years after J.S. Bach’s death. The first chorus in Cantata BWV 12 supplied the musical precursor to “Crucifixus” with the libretto extolling weeping, crying, sorrow, and sighing.

This section of the Mass is built on the short, repeated, bass line. And while the vocal and instrumental writing is imitative, it avoids direct repetition. The term “passacaglia” refers to a repeated bass line (ostinato) in triple meter. I chuckled when one of our orchestra players showed me a handwritten note on the “Crucifixus” page of her B-minor Mass part. It read, “Pachelbel, this is how a more talented composer uses a repetitive bass line.” (Referring to Pachelbel’s famous Canon.)

Bach would have probably called this compositional technique a “lamento” bass line. For me, his treatment of this mournful text perfectly matches the music. Eminent Bach scholar Dr. Christoph Wolff in his newly released book, Bach’s Musical Universe, states, “. . . Bach in each case paid particularly close attention to underscoring the sense of the text. This is most obvious in his setting of “Et incarnates,” “Crucifixus,” and “Et resurrexit” (nos. 16-18), where the texts lend themselves to intense musical expressivity.”

To be sure, Johann Sebastian Bach’s B-minor Mass is a powerful movement from one of Western music’s most influential composures and is one of his crowning accomplishments.

John V. Sinclair, Artistic Director and Conductor

“Study Bach: there you will find everything.”

–Johannes Brahms