“Clarity. We must be together.”
I sang with the Oregon Bach Festival for about ten summers—a wonderful experience for me, on many levels. I met good friends, enjoyed the Pacific Northwest, and ate incredible food. It was an idyllic chapter in my life, one I will always cherish. Most importantly, I sang a lot of Bach: the “Big Three” (the Mass in B Minor, and the Passions According to Matthew and John) and many, many cantatas, all under the leadership of Helmuth Rilling, who was a master of this repertoire, and an inspirational teacher. His rehearsals with us were focused, efficient, and very informative—he knew how to get what he wanted. Occasionally he would stop mid-rehearsal and, with exasperated patience, ask, “What is most important?” Then answer his own question: “Clarity. We must be together.” He had a funny, telling gesture-- the choir would be lurching its way enthusiastically through some passage, and he would stop us, grimace, wipe his hands on both sides of his mouth—as though cleaning off drool or spilled food. We’d laugh, but the point was made: without clarity, our energy resulted in a wasteful mess.
Bach’s St. John Passion presents us with three fronts upon which we must fight for clarity: language, pitch, and rhythm. The first is the singers’ particular battle: given a text, we must make that text clear to our listeners. We do well to remind ourselves that Bach's principle job in Leipzig was to save souls; he utilized pitch and rhythm to clarify his presentation of text, rendering it more effective and compelling than it would be as bare, recited words. The Passion narrative, and its power to change the hearts of his parishioners, was his highest priority. Bach never composed less than glorious music, and his musical invention and imagination cannot really be separated from his text setting; but his priority wass to get the text out where listeners can hear it and be edified by it.
Bach compiled his text from three sources: the Passion narrative from the Gospel of John, contemporary poetry which explores emotional and theological questions raised by this narrative, and chorale verses which were familiar to his target audience. Each text type requires careful presentation by the performers. Some ensembles, honoring Bach’s primary purpose in presenting this work, translate these texts into the native language of the performers and listeners; most ensembles, though, sing Bach’s work in its original German, out of consideration for Bach’s skill in setting that language. The word accents, rhythms, and sentence structure of German determine, to a startling degree, Bach’s rhythmic patterns and melodic contours; and these patterns and contours, translated into musical gesture, don’t necessarily fit with other languages.
Modern performers, and listeners, choose to experience Bach at his musical best; we are no longer so compelled by his evangelical fervor, that we are willing to compromise his art. Nonetheless, it helps me, as singer and as conductor, to assume that projection of the text is paramount, and that the rest of what happens stems from accomplishing this. One must assume that Bach fully intended that his listeners understand the words he had set-- and that he succeeded in bringing this about. The spaces in which Bach performed were highly reverberant, constructed of stone, glass, and wood; clear verbal projection was very difficult. Voices had to be relatively free of vibrato by modern standards, clear and unwavering in pitch, bright and somewhat “cutting” in quality. They had to be light enough in production that they could produce the coloratura Bach required of them, clearly and in tempo. Loud, heavily produced voices would cloud the acoustic, leading to the loss of details which make words comprehensible. A detached, almost staccato articulation would also have been necessary; a legato approach, in choral singing especially, would caused details in a reverberant acoustic to smear together, distorting on all three fronts: language, pitch, and rhythm.
German is a good language to sing, in dealing with such requirements. The consonants are strong, the vowels are clear, and there are “stops” between words—all of which contribute to a text’s comprehensibility in a difficult acoustic environment. And the accompanying instrumentalists, responding to the singers’ priorities, provide the same sort of lightness, articulation, and word-influenced accents—in fact, I suspect that an awful lot of what we now expect from “baroque” instrumentalists, in terms of style, articulation, volume, etc., is based not only in the physical nature of their instruments, but in the needs of the singers who collaborated with these players almost three hundred years ago, and who insisted that their words be heard and understood. If singers and instrumentalists alike are compelled to communicate the Passion text to listeners, they will of necessity rein in and channel their resources, expending their energies far differently than they would be required to do in concerted music composed a hundred years and more later, when orchestra size and volume, as well as performance halls, had changed to such a degree that composers were confronted with a very different set of priorities.