Musical Moments #9 - Happy Easter!
“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 composers and is one of his crowning accomplishments.
John V. Sinclair, Artistic Director and Conductor
“Study Bach: there you will find everything.”
–Johannes Brahms
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“Music, the greatest good that mortals know, and all of heaven we have below.”
–Joseph Addison
Christ on the Mount Olives is the only oratorio Beethoven wrote. After its premier in 1803, the work was performed every year in Vienna until 1825 when it was banned by the man responsible for music in the Viennese court. Once yearly performances were stopped, the composition fell into the rarely staged category with the exception of the work’s final chorus. Choral musicians affectionately refer to this section as the “Hallelujah from the Mount of Olives.”
Interestingly, Beethoven’s triumphal 1802 work was premiered in the United States in 1809 and actually was his first success with America audiences.
We are offering two versions today: one in English and, in the purest of musical practices, one in German. We recorded the English text version in 1998 and performed the one sung in German in 2004, with the latter being an unedited live performance. The German version has a short introduction by tenor soloist Robert Breault. You will find that the language choice colors the sounds of the piece, and we are better people when we listen to anything by Beethoven twice.
Happy Easter!
John V. Sinclair, Artistic Director and Conductor
“Music is the electrical soil in which the spirit lives, thinks and invents.”
–Ludwig van Beethoven
Listen on YouTube (German)
Listen on YouTube (English)
