Bach, B Minor Mass. T. Herbert Dimmock provides an introduction and discusses the Kyrie. BDP #286. http://bachinbaltimore.org/.
If someone were to ask you to explain Bach’s B Minor Mass – or, perhaps offer an
explanation as to why it is so highly regarded – what might your response be? Of course, this is not an everyday question.
But it is a question that has popped into my mind more than once. And, for
me, the answer is easy. For me, this is the
quintessential “desert island disk.” Actually, if I were told that I could only
have only one piece of music on my “desert island” I would not hesitate in my
choice. It would be Bach’s B Minor Mass. Permit me a moment to elaborate
as to why that choice for me is so easy. To do that, let’s look together at the
first couple of movements of the B Minor Mass.
The B Minor Mass is an absolute tour de force. The B
Minor Mass is arguably the greatest music composed by Bach in his entire
life. The work is twenty-seven movements in length. Bach’s division of
the Latin Mass into 27 movements was achieved by dividing the entire mass into
smaller phrases that were the most important to him. He could have easily made
the setting five to eight movements long. After all, that is the solution that
nearly every other composer makes in setting the Latin Mass. In Bach’s case,
the choice of making many subdivisions offered him the opportunity to focus on
concrete divisions of text that he found to be of particular interest. The
reasons for those choices varied – some were liturgical, some offered chances
for musical expression particularly appealing to Bach and some surely must have
appealed to Bach for personal reasons that grew out of his life experiences.
Altogether, over the span of those twenty-seven movements,
Bach composed music in all forms, all voices, and all instruments available in
the late Baroque. Yes, one might argue or equivocate with that since opera was
emerging during Bach’s lifetime that he could have included operatic forms.
Regardless, if we do not include those few new and emerging musical forms, it
is clear that Bach incorporated everything available to him in the mature
Baroque period into the B Minor Mass. Bach assembled the B Minor Mass
late in his life, finishing it in or about the year 1749. Musicologists often
say that Bach “assembled” rather than composed the B Minor Mass because
Bach reviewed his entire life’s work while putting the mass together. He then
chose individual movements taken from various cantatas and other compositions
that he felt best expressed the thought/theology behind each phrase in the
entire Latin mass. Where he felt he might do better, he composed new music to
add to the final overall composition.
Bach died in 1750. By the way, it is no coincidence that we choose
Bach’s death date, 1750, to mark the end of the Baroque period. With Bach’s
death, composers rightly felt that everything possible to be said musically in
the Baroque style had indeed by said by Bach and Handel. Composers felt
compelled to move musical style onward to new forms of expression.
I find interesting the large sweeping thoughts that Bach so
powerfully explored in the B Minor Mass. I believe that Bach was
searching not only for what he considered a comprehensive culmination of his
life’s work, but also a compelling statement regarding what he considered to be
a set of theological truisms. Bach sought to show through his music how those
truisms were timeless. One of the biggest distinctions in the B Minor Mass is
the juxtaposition of what Bach characterized as the “old church style” and the
“new style.” The “new style” is well represented in the Bach Brandenburg
Concertos. That music is instrumental in character, typically characterized
with lively rhythms, melodies based on instrumental models (as opposed to vocal
models) and an expansive use of orchestral color. The “old style” is best
understood as the music composed a generation before Bach: Palestrina, and church
motets would be a typical of that period. That music tended to be slower in tempo, more
choral in conception. Old style melodies tended to move by step (not with
leaps).
The B Minor Mass begins with a Kyrie. The English
translation of the entire text of this opening movement, kyrie eleison, is:
‘Lord have mercy.’ Bach’s Kyrie was composed in the “old style.” Let’s look
together at the opening tune in the Kyrie. It is monumental. I find it deeply
moving and very evocative.
Recently, I was in London and while there visited the church
of St. Martins-In-The-Fields on Trafalgar Square (adjacent to the British
Museum). Inside that church I heard a lovely concert. But what stuck in my mind
more than the concert was a statue I saw. It was in a modern style: a
Giacometti kind of statue. It was elongated. It showed somebody plaintively
reaching up towards heaven, asking for mercy from the Lord. That is just what
Bach does in the opening melody of the Kyrie in the B Minor Mass.
The opening tune moves upwards in little, tentative
gestures. Listen: [music] Again and again the melody reaches higher and higher…
[music]. Between each of those higher melodic gestures are bows - gentle, humble
bows within the music. Bach is saying through his music that when we ask for
mercy, we do it in a modest, beseeching way. We don’t demand it. After all, we
are not Beethoven. We plead for mercy. Each time our pleadings go upward –
towards heaven - we immediately and humbly bow down; respectfully requesting
mercy. [music, singing] Those two components of Bach’s opening Kyrie sounds
like this: [music]
This music is enormously effective; I think that the music
makes it clear that Bach’s idea pleading for mercy was that it should be done respectfully…
I have lived with this piece for many years – in fact for decades. For me, each
and every time I perform the opening Kryie my conviction that this combination
of an insistent request being made with humility is exactly what Bach had in
mind. I invite you to consider that interpretation as you listing to this
opening movement of the B Minor Mass.