Meet Chorale's B Minor Soloists

Chicago Chorale has a roster of outstanding soloists for its upcoming  performance of the Mass in B Minor, March 26: Michigan native Chelsea Shephard, soprano, recently gave an “exquisite” NYC recital debut, garnering praise for her “beautiful, lyric instrument” and “flawless legato” (Opera News). This season includes Ms. Shephard’s Carnegie Hall debut with Cecilia Chorus of New York for a World Premiere by Syrian composer Zaid Jabri and Brahms Requiem, joining Lyric Opera of Chicago’s roster for Das Rheingold, and return engagements with the Madison Bach Musicians. Past season highlights include: Beth/Little Women, Calisto/La Calisto, Pamina/Die Zauberflöte, Susanna/Le nozze di Figaro, Lauretta/Gianni Schicchi, Lisa/The Land of Smiles, Emily Webb/Our Town, and Poppea/L’incoronazione di Poppea with companies such as Madison Opera, Opera Grand Rapids, Haymarket Opera Company, and Caramoor International Music Festival. Ms. Shephard’s accolades include: Education Grant/Metropolitan Opera National Council (2016), Finalist/Lyric Opera of Chicago’s Ryan Opera Center (2015), First Place/Madison Early Music Festival Handel Aria Competition (2014), and Finalist/Jensen Foundation Competition in NYC (2014).

Chelsea holds degrees from DePaul University and Rice University.

Mezzo-soprano Angela Young Smucker has earned praise for her “luscious” voice (Chicago Tribune) and "powerful stage presence" (The Plain Dealer). Her performances in concert, stage, and chamber works have made her a highly versatile and sought-after artist. Highlights of the 2016-17 season include performances with Haymarket Opera Company, Bach Collegium San Diego, Chicago A Cappella, Seraphic Fire, and newly-founded Third Coast Baroque. Ms. Smucker has also been a featured soloist with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Music of the Baroque, Oregon Bach Festival, Bella Voce, and Les Délices. Radio and television appearances include Garrison Keillor’s A Prairie Home Companion, WFMT’s Impromptu and Live from WFMT, and WTTW’s Chicago Tonight.

Currently pursuing her doctoral studies at Northwestern University, Ms. Smucker holds degrees from the University of Minnesota and Valparaiso University – where she also served as instructor of voice for seven years. She is a NATS Intern Program alumna, former Virginia Best Adams Fellow (Carmel Bach Festival), and serves as Executive Director of Third Coast Baroque.

A "superb vocal soloist" (The Washington Post) possessing a "sweetly soaring tenor" (The Dallas Morning News) of "impressive clarity and color" (The New York Times), tenor Steven Soph performs throughout North America and Europe. Recent seasons' highlights include appearances with The Cleveland Orchestra in an all-Handel program led by Ton Koopman; the New World Symphony and Seraphic Fire in Reich's Desert Music; Symphony Orchestra Augusta in Bach's B minor Mass; San Diego's Mainly Mozart Festival Orchestra in Mozart's "Orphanage" Mass and Mass in C minor; Voices of Ascension in Bach's Magnificat and St. Matthew Passion; the Master Chorale of South Florida in Mozart's Requiem and Haydn's Lord Nelson Mass; Colorado Bach Ensemble in Bach's St. John Passion and St. Matthew Passion; Texas Choral Consort in Haydn's Creation; and the Cheyenne Symphony Orchestra in Handel's Messiah.

Described as an Evangelist “first-class across the board,” (Chicago Classical Review) Steven performed with the Chicago Chorale in Bach's St. John Passion and St. Matthew Passion, at Boston University’s Marsh Chapel in Bach’s St. Matthew Passion and with the Concord Chorale in the St. John Passion.

Steven holds degrees from the University of North Texas and Yale School of Music, where he studied with renowned tenor James Taylor.

Ryan de Ryke (baritone) is an artist whose versatility and unique musical presence have made him increasingly in demand on both sides of the Atlantic. He has performed at many of the leading international music festivals including the Aldeburgh and Edinburgh Festivals in the UK and the summer festival at Aix-en-Provence in France garnering significant acclaim as both a recitalist and singing actor.

Ryan studied at the Peabody Conservatory with John Shirley Quirk, the Royal Academy of Music in London with Ian Partridge, and at the National Conservatory of Luxembourg with Georges Backes. His is also an alumnus of the Britten-Pears Institute in the UK and the Schubert Institute in Austria where he worked with great artists of the song world such as Elly Ameling, Wolfgang Holzmair, Julius Drake, Rudolf Jansen, and Helmut Deutsch.

Ryan can often be seen collaborating with Haymarket Opera Chicago where he performed title role in Telemann’s Pimpinone, voted one of Chicago’s top 5 performances of 2013, and last season played the role of Sancho Panza in Don Quichotte.

My Third Time Around

Guest Blog by Dan Bertsche, who has sung tenor with Chicago Chorale since 2003, and currently serves as Secretary on Chicago Chorale’s Board of Directors.  

I remember approaching my first Bach B Minor Mass, in 2006, something like Sir Edmund Hillary must have approached his ascent of Mount Everest. This work is so difficult and monumental, and the only path I saw to a successful performance was through hard work, by developing lung capacity, stamina, and endurance—and by staying hydrated. Rehearsals were exhilarating, but at the same time fatiguing. After that first performance, the profound satisfaction I felt was coupled with equally profound exhaustion—both physical and vocal. “I came, I sang, I conquered. Now I want to sleep.”

My second B Minor Mass—six years ago—felt quite different. My familiarity with the score, coupled with the fact that everything was pitched at a=415 (a half-step down), allowed more space for appreciating what makes this work so very great in the first place. This was no longer a forced march to the mountaintop; but a walk through a garden of wonders. I recall marveling at the complexity and perfection of the Kyrie I; admiring the skill with which the cantus firmus emerges from the secondary material in Confiteor (still my favorite movement of the entire work); and being astounded by how there could be so many 16^th notes in so many voices and instruments in the Cum Sancto Spiritu, and that the movement could still come across with such clarity and coherence. During my second B Minor Mass, I learned to appreciate Bach as “master composer,” rather than as “master obstacle-course builder.”

This year, some of my reverence for Bach’s compositional skill has been replaced by more general gratitude for this monumental work. Had Bach not bothered to compose it, or had it been lost to history, right now Chicago Chorale would frankly be preparing to perform a lesser piece. But because of this gift to posterity, fifty-five ordinary people are experiencing the magic that happens when engaging this extraordinary work. And as we strive to bring out the very best in the B Minor Mass, the B Minor Mass is bringing out the very best in us. Our collective vocal production is more healthy and vigorous; we are listening better within and across sections; we are sitting up a bit straighter; and we are more honest with ourselves about which spots need individual attention. On some level, Chorale members know that a great performance of a mediocre work still yields a mediocre result. So we are grateful that Bach has given us a masterpiece with a nearly unlimited performance “upside potential,” and we are pulling together to get as close to that ceiling as possible.

This time around, I am also struck by how much fun rehearsals are, by how much I look forward to them, and by the fact that I leave each rehearsal more energized than when I arrive.

How will I experience my fourth B Minor Mass performance? I don’t know, but I hope I’m lucky enough to find out.

Chorale's Choices

I have written largely about the historical/musicological aspects of presenting Bach’s Mass in B Minor, over the past weeks. Such a focus is inevitable: the score is enormous, complex, surrounded and influenced by competing traditions; a conductor is forced to make decisions about every page, and to coordinate these many decisions in order to come up with a coherent whole. No work is more studied or more commented upon; no work excites more controversy. I have to be able to defend the choices I make. And I have to satisfy my own need to express a personal vision: Chorale is presenting a work of art, not a music history lecture about a work of art. In the performance history of the work, enormous choruses, numbering in the hundreds, have sung, and continue to sing, the Mass in B Minor, though the general trend has been toward smaller forces– on occasion, just one singer per part.  Chorale is fifty-six singers for this concert-- by no means a symphony chorus, but larger than the professional early music ensembles which present the most cutting edge versions of the work.  We could have chosen to bypass the work altogether, in acknowledgment of historical correctness– but then we would be deprived of the glorious experience of learning and performing the work, and our audience would be deprived of the opportunity to hear it.  So we choose to sing it, and to devote tremendous effort toward lightening our sound and articulation, while making the most of our full sound where it is needed and welcome.

Frequently, even when larger groups sing it, a smaller group, termed concertists, will introduce many of the movements, will sing particularly exposed passages as solos, will even sing the more intimate movements entirely on their own. Sometimes, these concertists will be members of the choir; alternatively, they may be the soloists who also sing the aria and duet movements.   This trend toward ripienist/concertist texture is supported by the scholarly literature. Chorale chooses to forego the ripienist/concertist procedure. It could have been interesting and appropriate for our forces, but our singers want to experience all of the music, each note, as an amateur event—an act of love.  As Robert Shaw said—music, like sex, is too good to be left to the professionals. Again, this forces us to be more careful in our control of texture and dynamics than we would be if those issues were resolved through controlling the size of the forces.

Chorale chooses to sing the Latin text with a German pronunciation.  Most ensembles use the more common Italianate pronunciation, and have good results; and recent research indicates that the German pronunciation Chorale uses, based on modern German, is not necessarily the pronunciation Bach used or intended. So we can’t defend our choice on a secure, scholarly basis.  But our choice does suggest the music’s German background.  And I agree with Helmuth Rilling’s contention that German consonants articulate more clearly than Italian, while German vowels narrow and clarify the vocal line, even for an entire section of singers, lending greater definition to Bach’s remarkably complex counterpoint.  This is particularly necessary with a group of our size:  clarity of pitch and line is far more important, in this music, than the beautiful, Italianate production of individual voices in the ensemble, which can actually work against an accurate presentation of Bach’s musical ideas.

We choose to present the Mass at Rockefeller Chapel, on the campus of The University of Chicago, because the building’s size and grandeur reflect Bach’s music more accurately than other spaces available to us. The Hyde Park community, which surrounds the Chapel, represents, in a purer form than other Chicago neighborhoods, the combination of scholarship, idealism, and high culture which can support concerts like this.  A high percentage of Chorale’s regular audience are Hyde Park residents, and they often express appreciation for the level of Chorale’s striving and seriousness of intent.  And from a purely monetary point of view, Rockefeller Chapel seats a sufficient number of listeners that, if we sell tickets effectively, we can cover a significant proportion of our production costs (which are mind-boggling) with door receipts.

Our concert is in one month.  Sunday, March 26, 3 p.m.

We have rehearsed, and I have written about the experience, since the middle of December.  The writing has focused my study, my listening, my thinking about the work; it has been a significant and helpful discipline for me.  I hope you will come to our performance; and I hope you will spread the word, and bring your friends.  I’m a believer; I am convinced that Bach’s Mass in B minor truly is “the greatest artwork of all times and all people,” and I’d like to show you why.

Composing the Mass in B Minor

Bach effectively spent his entire career composing Mass in B Minor— it consists of complete movements, and fragments, from throughout his compositional life, recomposed, reworded, reconfigured, stitched together with newly composed music — Bach scholar Christoph Wolff calls the Mass a “specimen book,” a collection of examples of genres and techniques which covers not only Bach’s personal history, but the history of Western music. In the process of compiling this music into a single great work, at the end of his life, Bach seems intent on summing up that history and presenting his summation to his successors. The Sanctus was first performed in 1724; movement 4 of the Credo, Et incarnatus est, thought to be the last music he composed, dictated to an assistant because Bach himself was blind, was completed in 1750. The remaining music reflects Bach’s experience during the intervening 26 years. Plagiarism and parody were not a dirty words in Bach’s time. Bach, and his colleagues, had immense responsibilities in the preparation and performance of music for the theater, the court, the church– and their success depended on getting it all done, rather than on satisfying a theoretical mandate that they be original.  They were free, even expected, to build upon the successes of others, to copy and share one another’s scores, to use procedures and formulas, melodies and bass lines, that had worked well for other composers, and alter them to suit their own tastes and circumstances, even to change their own products and procedures over time as needs and tastes changed.  Music was a living, volatile consumer product, constantly evolving to meet demand.  Creativity reflected one’s ability to arrange the materials at hand, as well as to invent new materials. Bach borrowed freely and happily from other composers, as well as from himself, both because this enriched his product, and because it allowed him to keep up with his workload.  It is inconceivable that Bach could have accomplished all he did in his lifetime, were he under pressure to stay away from the intellectual property of others.

An extraordinary amount of Bach scholarship over the past century has focused on sleuthing out the sources behind Bach’s music, and in preparing new and better editions of his music, based on this detective work.  And while the scholars involved in this work frequently disagree with one another, as a group they persistently push the envelope, and contribute to our knowledge of the composer and his methods.  Between them, these researchers have determined that very little of what is now called Mass in B Minor was freshly composed for the work– perhaps as few as four or five movements.  Bach selected music for the remaining movements from cantatas which he had composed throughout his career. Scholars agree that he seems to have chosen what he thought was his best work, music which would suit the character of the Mass, and would reflect accurately the new, Latin texts.   He transposed some movements to new keys, in keeping with the overall key structure of the new work; he adapted phrase structure to fit the alternate texts; he eliminated instrumental introductions and interludes, to move the dramatic action forward more efficiently; and he composed new movements, and sections of movements, where he needed them to complete the work.

Though the Ordinary of the Roman Catholic Mass consists of only five movements—Kyrie, Gloria, Credo, Sanctus/Benedictus/Osanna, and Agnus Dei—Bach divides the text and music of his Mass in B Minor into twenty-three separate movements.  With the exception of the Gratias/Dona nobis movements, and the repeat of the Osanna, each movement has different music.

Let’s consider movements 3-6 of the Credo portion: Et in unum Dominum, Et incarnatus est, Crucifixus, and Et resurrexit.  Scholars agree, based on internal evidence, that Bach adapted the duet Et in unum from an earlier composition, though that earlier work is lost.  The close imitation between the two voices is ideally suited to a love duet, probably from a secular work, and adapts easily to a text which expresses the consubstantiality of the Father and the Son.  In his original version of the Mass, Bach set the entire text of movements three and four within this one movement.  It was only in the final months of his life (determined, again, on the basis of internal evidence) that he decided he needed a separate movement to set the words “And was incarnate by the Holy Ghost of the Virgin Mary, and was made man.”  So he kept the music for movement 3 intact, had the soloists repeat earlier words, and composed a completely new movement — one of the few freshly-composed movements in the Mass, and one of Bach’s final compositional efforts.  In so doing, he created a numerical symmetry which the Credo had previously lacked, placing the Crucifixus exactly at the center of this discrete section, as well as at the center of all of the Mass movements which lie between the identical music of the Gratias and the Dona nobis movements.  It is an amazing engineering feat, adding internal structure for the connoisseur and first time listener alike.

Bach adapted the Crucifixus movement from his cantata BWV 12, where it has the words Weinen, Klagen, Sorgen, Zagen (Weeping, lamentation,worry, apprehension).  Bach scholar John Butt hypothesizes that Bach could have adapted even this early cantata movement (1714) from a similar movement by Vivaldi (Piango, gemo, sospiro e peno), but goes on to say that such laments were standard literary forms, and that, together with its descending bass line, is such a standard form that it would be stretching things to suggest that Bach did anything other than compose his own version of a common form. More interesting are the final four bars of the Crucifixus; Bach added these to the music he borrowed from himself, and with them modulates to G Major (setting up the D Major of the following Et resurrexit) and brings the choral forces down to the lowest pitches they sing in the entire Mass, representing the lowering of Christ’s body into the sepulchre. The following movement, Et resurrexit, explodes out of this depth with no instrumental introduction—voices and instruments enter with a complete change of affect, in a fanfare-like, rising triad.  Scholars assume that this movement, as well, is adapted from an earlier, secular cantata—possibly the lost birthday cantata for August I, BWV Anh. 9.  In adapting it, Bach dropped the opening instrumental introduction, which would have slowed down the drama of Easter morning, but included other instrumental interludes, which have a euphoric, dance-like character and seem to suggest heaven and earth rejoicing.

In his handbook for the study of the Mass in B Minor, John Butt recounts the experience of early Bach scholar Julius Rietz, who wrote the first published study of the sources of the Mass in 1857: “Reitz shows himself to have been a meticulous scholar, who even made enquiries into the fate of Bach’s first set of parts of the Sanctus, copied in 1724 and loaned to Graf Sporck. The inheritors of the estate informed Rietz that many manuscripts had been given to the gardeners to wrap around trees.  One can barely dare to envisage what similar fates befell other manuscripts from Bach’s circle.”  I expect Bach would not have been surprised by this; the archives and libraries of our modern world would probably astound him. Christoff Wolff suggests that one of the principle motivations behind Bach’s compilation of the Mass was his assumption that the thousands of pages of his cantata cycles would not be preserved—that they were too specific to their own time, location, and purpose to be of any use once he was gone, and that the only way he could preserve the best of his work was to use it for a Latin Mass, which would have a better chance of being saved and recognized in the future.  My years of participation in the Oregon Bach Festival have given me the opportunity to sing and study many of Bach’s surviving cantatas, but I am lucky to have had this experience—most performers know only a handful of them, and most listeners don’t know them at all.  So from our viewpoint, Bach had it right—his Mass enables us to know not only what he was able to preserve, but also the dimensions of our loss.

I read somewhere that Bach shows us what it means to be God, Mozart shows us what it means to be human, and Beethoven shows us what it means to be Beethoven. I agree with the Bach part, at least. Beyond the notes, the rhythms, the historically informed performance practices, one experiences his works as living beings, as manifestations of God in the world. They demonstrate that we humans are better than we think we are, better than much of what we see around us, and convince me that it is always worth it to keep moving ahead, not just out of habit, but because we, like Bach, are capable of holy things.

Chicago Chorale and Historically Informed Performance Practice

I began attending Oberlin Conservatory’s Baroque Performance Institute in 1978, and continued attending for about eight summer sessions following that. I first learned of the Institute through Ken Slowik, a Chicago cellist and early music specialist, who suggested that my vocal characteristics and musicological curiosity might make me a good candidate for BPI-- especially since Baroque expert Max Van Egmond was joining the faculty that summer. I listened to some of Max’s recordings, recognized a kindred spirit, and decided to take the plunge. The experience was revelatory for me: prior to that, I had never even heard of Baroque pitch, of gut strings, of wooden traverso flutes, of viols, of inégale rhythm. An entirely new world opened for my consideration, and I ate it up, eagerly and hungrily. Max was an ideal teacher and mentor for me, and I sang as often as I could, in lessons, master cases, and concerts; and I observed instrumentalists when I was not singing. BPI was all about performance; scholars and theorists attended, lectured, and added their insights, but the focus was on performing, day and night. I had never loved any musical immersion so much, in my life. And then, when BPI was over, I would return to my job, conducting choirs and teaching voice, first at Luther College, later at The University of Chicago—and I would have a hard time integrating my BPI experience with my actual day job. One year Ken invited me to sing with the Smithsonian Chamber Players (he was by this time their music director) in Washington, for a performance of Charpentier’s Les Arts Florissants , complete with dance, masks, authentic instruments from the Smithsonian collection—we were so authentic, we even lighted the performance with candles in metal reflectors. The other singers were recognized professionals in the early music field, who did this sort of thing on a regular basis; for me, it was a brief interlude, a vacation, from my teaching. The contrast struck me forcibly, and I withdrew from involvement in early music performance from that point on—I could not see any further value in doing it part way, and I did not want to give up my actual professional life. I enjoyed my students, my choirs, and could not see how this hobby of mine was contributing anything to the health of my program.

My succeeding summers were spent, first, at the Nice Conservatory, singing art songs with Gérard Souzay and Dalton Baldwin; then several years with the Robert Shaw Festival Singers; and, finally, ten summers with Helmuth Rilling at the Oregon Bach Festival. All of it was good and worthwhile and stimulating, and contributed to my professional competence.

What goes around, comes around. The bug that bit me back at Oberlin did not die; it just invaded the rest of my music making. Working with both Mr. Shaw and Mr. Rilling, I found myself observing and questioning what they were doing, comparing it to my BPI experience, wondering how it was related, how it could be different, and how I could do things differently, myself, with my own ensembles. During Chorale’s second season, already, we presented the first half of J.S. Bach’s Christmas Oratorio, and we have been programming major Baroque works, primarily Bach’s, ever since. With each successive concert, I introduce more HIPP elements, try more techniques I remember from my Oberlin experiences, require a more “baroque” sound from both the players and the singers, hire more appropriate soloists. Obviously, we do not do museum-quality reproductions of performances that Bach himself led or heard: we do not have his performance space, his highly trained 16-year old prepubescent boys, or his audience. We prepare performances for the buildings we have, with the singers we have, and with our contemporary audiences in mind. But, as I discovered at Oberlin, having a good idea of Bach’s circumstances, knowing what was physically and musically possible for him, and being aware of his goals—his desire to clarify, to instruct, to be understood, to get his message across—has really helped me to sort out what is good and necessary in what I learned at BPI.   Bach was not only a genius; he was a practical, practicing musician. Knowing what he heard, and how he did it, can only improve our performances of his work.

Why Did Bach Compose the Mass in B Minor

I grew up in a fairly segregated atmosphere: most Roman Catholics lived on the east side of town and attended Catholic school, while the rest of us, primarily Lutherans, lived on the west side and attended public school.  The two groups were not, strictly speaking, enemies, but our friends were within our own group, we participated in our own communal activities, and we did not have much to do with one another. I never set foot in the Catholic church; we stayed clear of masses, along with priests and nuns and the Virgin Mary.  I assumed no kinship between what Lutherans did on Sunday, and what the Catholics did.  My public school music teachers were Lutheran, and my piano teacher was a Lutheran; in my mind, music was a Lutheran thing. The Lutheran hymnal had hymns by J.S. Bach—he was “ours,” and we claimed him, though we knew little about him. I had no idea at all that Bach had composed several settings of the mass, and that these settings were in Latin, the same language used at our town’s Catholic church. I attended a Lutheran college, where courses in religion and music history taught me something about Roman Catholicism and broadened my knowledge of the mass as a liturgical structure and as the basis for extended musical form; but my viewpoint remained pretty parochial.  Not until I moved to Chicago for graduate school did I begin to understand that the Lutheranism I knew bore only a faint resemblance to that practiced in Bach’s time. Lutherans continue to claim Bach—some refer to him as the “fifth evangelist,” while others stress a symbolic father-son relationship between him and Martin Luther:  Luther clarified the faith, and Bach set it to music.  Some writers even describe a “Lutheran” approach to the interpretation and performance of Bach’s music.

By all accounts, Bach was deeply religious.  Although his professional responsibilities throughout his life included obligations to secular as well as religious authorities, and his surviving compositions reflect this career duality, the evidence revealed in his letters, in his professional trajectory, and in the very nature of his activities in liturgical composition and performance, leave little reason to doubt his fundamental piety and spirituality. There is little doubt, as well, that he was thoroughly Lutheran in his theology.  But Lutheranism as Bach experienced it was more than theology—it was the state church, a source of power and preferment, and it shared a good deal of space with secular authority.  When Bach compiled the first half of his mass—called the Missa, it consisted of the Kyrie and Gloria sections of the Ordinary— he was not only working comfortably within the traditions of the Lutheran Church (which continued, post-Reformation, to refer to the Eucharist as the “mass”), he was also seeking advancement from the court at Dresden, to whom he presented his Missa as a gift, in 1733.  This limited (but complete) work, approximately one-half as long as the completed Mass in B Minor, did indeed receive a liturgical performance by the Dresden kapelle, and ultimately won for Bach the worldly preferment and protection he was seeking.

The larger question about Bach’s purpose is reflected in his “completion” of the Mass in the last years of his life.  He in some respects pulled back from the day to day responsibilities of his position in Leipzig, and put his energy into the completion of major, somewhat theoretical works: Musical Offering, The Art of Fugue, and Mass in B Minor. In these works, he seems intent not only on establishing his own legacy, but in creating a veritable encyclopedia of western European musical styles, forms, and procedures.

It seems clear that Bach never intended his Mass for liturgical use—clocking in at two hours without a break, it is simply too long.  Rather, it appears to be what Bach scholar Christoff Wolff calls the summa summarum of Bach’s artistry.  Wolff goes on to say, “We know of no occasion for which Bach could have written the B-minor Mass, nor any patron who might have commissioned it, nor any performance of the complete work before 1750.  Thus, Bach’s last choral composition is in many respects the vocal counterpart to The Art of Fugue, the other side of the composer’s musical legacy.  Like no other work of Bach’s, the B-minor Mass represents a summary of his writing for voice, not only in its variety of styles, compositional devices, and range of sonorities, but also in its high level of technical polish. “

Performances of the work reflect not only our perceptions of Bach’s beliefs and intentions, but our personal entry to the work.  The first complete productions of the Mass, beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, stressed its magisterial qualities—depicting Bach as an extraordinary man who communed with God on a level beyond human emotion and expression.  Near-universal acceptance and practice of the Christian faith, which influenced all thought and politics of Bach’s time, still held a great deal of sway 100 years later.  Bach was seen as an almost sacred prototype for the heroic figure later realized in Beethoven— the first complete performance of the Mass, in 1859, was actually inspired by the success of Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis.  Many modern performances stress, instead, Bach’s humanity, his imperfection, his kinship with musical tastes and procedures of his own time.  This latter approach has invited participation by musicians who do not profess any religious creed, yet find the work to be universally compelling and uplifting. I suspect the Mass may be the most comprehensive, unifying work by any composer— Bach’s attempt to depict the universality behind both his private spirituality and the religious expression of his time.  Albert Schweitzer described the work as one in which the sublime and intimate co-exist side by side, as do the Catholic and Protestant elements, all being as enigmatic and unfathomable as the religious consciousness of the work’s creator.

Black with Notes

Chorale is seven rehearsals into its preparation for our March 26 performance of Bach’s Mass in B Minor. I am grateful for so extended a rehearsal period-- every singer in the group benefits from repeated exposure to this complex, difficult music.

A typical Bach score is black with notes. Harmonies outlined in the basso continuo rarely rest, and pitches above them change constantly to keep up. Performers become accustomed to this– one is always on the move, aiming for the next harmonic arrival point, then taking off again once it is reached. The overall effect is—page after page of notes, thousands of them; how does one organize them? Where does one begin in breaking them down into comprehensible groupings, in assigning emphasis, ebb and flow, in such a way that they all make sense, all get heard, all matter and contribute positively, without just canceling one another out in a cloud of sound?

The first movement of the Mass in B Minor, Kyrie I, immediately plunges us into this “Bach problem.” After a 4-bar, homophonic introduction, the movement unfolds in thirteen independent musical lines, in addition to the continuo line. Singers aren’t accustomed to thinking much about instrumental lines– we see five vocal lines, and figure our job is to make sense of those; it surprises us to learn that the instruments do more than just accompany us, and have their own, independent lines, weaving in and out of what we are doing. Fundamentally, there is no hierarchy; each line contributes equally to Bach’s structure and texture. We need to find hierarchy within our own lines—periods of higher energy, balanced with periods of relaxation; figures which require pointed, staccato or marcato emphasis, and figures with require legato; passages of a more soloistic character, and passages of background accompaniment. If we don’t find hierarchy within our own parts, relative to the rest of what is going on, we end up sound like a beehive on a warm day, lots and lots of buzzing.

A Chorale member commented on a performance of the Mass with his college choir, that “we just tried to sing the notes; we never did anything with all this articulation stuff.” I know what he is talking about: even with a high percentage of singers who have previously performed the work, Chorale struggles to find pitches and rhythms; vocal quality, articulation, phrasing, would be complete non-starters, were I not constantly stopping to point them out, dictate them, and work on them. The Bärenreiter piano-vocal scores we sing from are “clean”—they include very little that Bach himself did not notate in his own scores, and Bach did not customarily notate much in the vocal lines. The instrumental lines are fairly marked up, following Bach’s own score and parts, and many of these marks have been transferred to the piano reduction in the singers’ scores—but singers are not prone to look down to the piano line: following their own line is about all they accomplish at this point. So we transfer the markings to the vocal parts in rehearsal, and then rehearse characteristic phrase articulations, ornaments, etc. Taken by themselves, these articulations can seem pretty mechanical and not awfully graceful; they have to be performed with understanding and within the context of the vocal line, and this is extremely difficult– Bach demands a great deal. I urge the singers to listen to the 2015 Gardiner recording, as an example of the sort of articulation and expressiveness we are after; but it takes a great deal of familiarity for them to internalize these gestures and allow them to mean something, rather than just perform them mechanically. The individual lines have to flow; they have to alter in emphasis and adjust to the volume, the surrounding parts, the intensity of individual passages; and this requires far more than mechanical competence and repetition.

I ran across the following passage by Martin Luther yesterday: “This life therefore is not righteousness, but growth in righteousness, not health, but healing, not being but becoming, not rest but exercise. We are not yet what we shall be, but we are growing toward it, the process is not yet finished, but it is going on, this is not the end, but it is the road. All does not yet gleam in glory, but all is being purified.” Very much the same thing can be said about learning to sing this music-- our rehearsal period is a kind of pilgrimage, a process. With every preparation Chorale does of this “greatest of all works,” we draw closer to the essential truth of this great composer and his overwhelming accomplishment. The Mass in B Minor is not only the best we humans can come up with, but it is transcendingly good, and we are a part of this transcendent goodness; there is more to us, more to hope for and plan for and celebrate, than the brutality, the violence, the hatred, which we daily confront in one another. A human being, one of us, composed this monumental and life-transforming work; just knowing that, should make us better people.

Back to Bach

Chorale is four weeks into rehearsal for our March 26 performance of J.S. Bach’s Mass in B Minor. This is Chorale’s third preparation of this work, usually considered the greatest composition for chorus and orchestra in the Western canon; it is rivaled only by Bach’s other greatest choral/orchestral work, the Matthew Passion, which Chorale presented two years ago. The Mass edges out the Passion only because the Mass is truly a choral work, the choral movements greatly outnumbering, even overshadowing, the solo movements; each stands alone as a supreme example of the choral art, and the whole is an overwhelming tour de force for the choir. The Passion, which is a continuous narrative dialogue, gives far more weight to the soloists, leaving the choir to sing significantly less than it does in the Mass. Understandably, ambitious choirs tend to prefer the Mass… and this preference finds expression in the good natured euphoria greeting our opening rehearsals. The majority of Chorale’s singers have sung the Mass at least once, and are familiar both with the notes and with the overwhelming majesty of the work; and they carry the neophytes with them. We can already hear what the finished product will sound like—which is a far different experience than that enjoyed by a choir reading this mind-boggling difficult score for the first time. Our preparation is greatly influenced by the historically informed performance practice (HIPP) movement of the second half of the twentieth century. Voices, and instruments, are tuned to a=415, approximately one half step lower than modern pitch; and our orchestra will play on copies of period instruments—gut strings, wooden flutes, natural horns and trumpets, etc-- which have a very different characteristic sound than modern instruments: they are far softer in volume and quality, they play with less vibrato, and they rely more on articulation than on unbroken legato sound. Our sopranos and altos are women, rather than the boys and counter tenors Bach would have employed, but they sing with a narrower, straighter sound than modern singers would usually employ. And we work hard to sing with the kind of non-legato articulation we will hear from our instrumentalists, the kind of articulation that “reads” well when presenting music as complex and polyphonic as this, in a resonant space.

In some respects, we are a thoroughly modern choir: we are 60 singers, rather than the 8-24 some scholars think Bach had in mind; we perform in a building which, though superficially resembling a “period” building, actually has modern, diffuse acoustics, and requires non-period forces to be adequately filled with sound; and we are presenting a “mass” as a concert, rather than in a liturgical context, with appropriate, necessary breaks during which the rest of the liturgy would occur. It is important to realize that this work was never performed, in its entirety, during Bach’s lifetime—neither as a concert, nor in a service. The former was just not the way music was presented, back then; and the work is far too large, and too long, for the latter. In fact, it isn’t at all clear Bach even intended that his mass be performed in its entirety; the work seems, rather, to be an encyclopedia of his career, of the music he composed throughout his lifetime (most of the movements are reworkings of earlier pieces of his), and of the styles and procedures available to a composer in his time, from the early stile antico to the operatic, style galant popular at the time of his death (1750). Perhaps, approaching old age and conscious of his place in music history, Bach intended to leave a record of himself and his work, an autobiography of sorts, and did it through compiling this great score.

Whatever Bach intended, it is an unqualified thrill for me, and for Chorale, to prepare this immense work of art once again. Our singers will never forget the experience; and their understanding of the power of music will be changed forever. The Mass in B Minor defines choral music, and defines choral singing.

Diving into Steinberg's Passion Week

Our first rehearsal was a great success! Voices fell into place more easily than I had anticipated, and we were able to dive right into our new repertoire. After a few minutes spent turning on brains to the Russian style and Slavonic language, with a couple of motets from the more-familiar Moscow Synodical School, by Gretchaninov and Chesnokov, we moved on to our major work, Passion Week, by Maximilian Steinberg, who lived and worked in Petersburg. One is immediately struck, going from “Moscow music” to “Petersburg music,” by the difference in style between the two idioms. Moscow music, composed in Moscow before the 1917 revolution, is rich, dark, luxuriant. I read Tolstoy’s War and Peace this past summer, and was struck by Tolstoy’s description of the Countess Ellen’s “dark, heavy style of Russian beauty”-- everything he writes about her appearance and presence could be written as well about this musical style. The combination of Western harmonic movement with “exotic” eastern modalism; the mostly regular bar and phrase lengths; the galloping rhythms, which seem almost a musical representation of Cossacks riding across the steppes-- it is an immediately attractive, nationalistic musical language which speaks of every westerner’s fantasy of what romantic, imperial Russia must have been like. The idiom, like Ellen’s beauty, is immediately accessible and attractive—and rightly so: works like Rachmaninoff’s All-Night Vigil have greatly enlivened our concert life in the past few years, and have inspired numerous contemporary, non-Russian composers to seek a similar path within their own idioms.

Steinberg’s Petersburg music is a different thing altogether. In the first place, Passion Week was composed in 1923, after the revolution, in an atmosphere of ”war, anarchy, and militant atheism” (Musica Russica)—Steinberg had to have known that he was working directly against his time, and that his composition would never be performed; and this realization has to have affected his compositional mood and vision. And his systematic approach to his materials was in any case very different.  Petersburg was Russia's window on western Europe, and the conservatory there, under the leadership of Rimsky-Korsakov, was more open to a Germanic, academic way of looking at music and music composition. Steinberg's music, though based upon conscientious utilization of the same, authentic orthodox chants which inspired the Moscow composers, makes very different use of them. The Moscow composers used these “canti firmi” as a starting point, copying, manipulating, and segmenting them as they saw fit, toward the sound ideal I describe above. Steinberg treats the chants, with all their idiosyncracies, their lack of harmonic and rhythmic dynamism, lack of emotionally satisfying beginnings, middles, and ends, as the iron fist around which he weaves his accompanying polyphonies and harmonies. The resulting music seems strangely passive, at first; written without time signatures or bar lines, it seems to wander, abruptly changing course without transition or motivation, cadencing without the denoument to which we are accustomed. As our rehearsal went on, I could sense that the singers were starting to “get it”—finding Steinberg’s inner logic and pace, sensing the new and different way he had of defining sections within the music. I can tell this concert will be a big challenge for us; I also can tell that the singers are not only intrigued, but attracted. Chorale is, as always, fortunate to have such bright, educated, sophisticated singers, who confidently, fearlessly, take on new challenges. Would that we could all feel so open to learning new things!

A final comparison occurs to me. The nationalistic renaissance of interest in native British music which took place in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, inspired many fine composers, conductors, choirmasters, to create an English choral style which is the envy of the entire musical world today. Earlier composers, especially Parry, Holst, Vaughan Williams, and their associates, produced a style which seems almost to shout, “This great and green and lovely England,” a style immediately accessible and gracious to the listener. We love this music, and I would not denigrate it for a moment. But then composers like Benjamin Britten came along-- inspired by the same nationalism, the same discovery of native roots, but putting these elements to much different use. Imagine if you will a concert of favorite greatest hits by Britten and Vaughan Williams: what a fascinating juxtaposition! Expect just such a juxtaposition in Chorale’s November concerts.

Closing in on our performance

Confronted with the issues I have explored in the preceding weeks, plus a host of others, Chorale and I have made a lot of choices.

Chicago Chorale normally consists of sixty singers.  Though enormous choruses have sung the Mass in B minor, and still do, the general trend has been toward smaller forces-- on occasion, just one singer per part.  Frequently, even when larger groups sing it, a smaller group, termed concertists, will introduce many of the movements, will sing particularly difficult passages as solos, will even sing the more intimate movements entirely on their own. Sometimes, these concertists will be members of the choir; alternatively, they may be the soloists who also sing the aria and duet movements.   This trend toward ripienist/concertist texture is supported by the scholarly literature.

Chorale is by no means a symphony chorus, but we are larger than ensembles which present the most praised, modern versions of the work.  We could have chosen to bypass the work altogether, in honor of scholarship and in acknowledgment of the fact that we do not reflect cutting edge performance practice research-- but then we would be deprived of the glorious experience of learning and performing the work, and our audience would be deprived of the opportunity to hear it.  So we chose to sing it, and to devote tremendous effort toward lightening our sound and articulation, while making the most of our full sound where it is needed and welcome.

We also chose to forego the ripienist/concertist procedure—which could have been interesting and appropriate for our forces.  Such a procedure feels “professional” in the worst and most manipulative sense of the word;  and I want Chorale to experience all of the music, each note, as an amateur event—an act of love.  As Robert Shaw said—music, like sex, is too good to be left to the professionals. Again, this forces us to be more careful in our control of texture and dynamics than we would be if those issues were resolved through controlling the size of the forces.

Chorale has chosen to sing the Latin text with a German pronunciation.  Most ensembles use the more common Italianate pronunciation, and have good results; and recent research indicates that the German pronunciation Chorale uses, based on modern German, is not necessarily the pronunciation Bach used or intended. So we can’t defend our choice on a secure, scholarly basis.  But our choice does suggest the music’s German background.  And I agree with Helmuth Rilling’s point that German consonants articulate more clearly than Italian, while German vowels narrow and clarify the vocal line, even for an entire section of singers, lending greater definition to Bach’s remarkably complex counterpoint.  This is particularly necessary with a group of our size:  clarity of pitch and line is far more important, in this music, than the beautiful, Italianate production of individual voices in the ensemble, which can actually work against an accurate presentation of Bach’s musical ideas.

We chose to present the Mass at Rockefeller Chapel, on the campus of The University of Chicago, because the building’s size and grandeur reflect Bach’s music more accurately than other spaces available to us. The Hyde Park community, which surrounds the Chapel, represents, in a purer form than other Chicago neighborhoods, the combination of scholarship, idealism, and high culture which can support concerts like this.  A high percentage of Chorale’s regular audience are Hyde Park residents, and they often express appreciation for the level of Chorale’s striving and seriousness of intent.  And from a purely monetary point of view, Rockefeller Chapel seats a sufficient number of listeners that, if we sell tickets effectively, we can cover a significant proportion of our production costs (which are mind-boggling) with door receipts.

Our concert is in three weeks.  Sunday, April 3, 3 p.m.

We have rehearsed, and I have written about the experience, since the beginning of January.  The writing has focused my study, my reading, my thinking about the work; it has been a significant and helpful discipline for me.  I hope you will come to our performance; and I hope you will spread the word, and bring your friends.  I’m a believer; I am convinced that Bach’s Mass in B minor truly is “the greatest artwork of all times and all people,” and I’d like to show you why.

Compiling the Mass in B minor

Though the Ordinary of the Roman Catholic Mass consists of only five movements—Kyrie, Gloria, Credo, Sanctus/Benedictus/Osanna, and Agnus Dei—Bach divides the text and music of his B Minor setting into twenty-three separate movements, eighteen of which are for choir and orchestra alone.  That is quite a lot of music; and with the exception of the Gratias/Dona nobis movements, and the repeat of the Osanna, each movement has different music.  And all of it is great.  How does he do it?

First, it is important to realize that plagiarism was not a dirty word in Bach’s time; nor was parody.  Bach, and his colleagues, had immense responsibilities in the preparation and performance of music for the theater, the court, the church-- and their success depended on getting it all done, rather than on satisfying a theoretical mandate that they be original.  To use a restaurant metaphor:  Bach, the head chef of Leipzig or Weimar or Cöthen, was free, even expected, to build upon the successes of others, to shop for ingredients at the same markets, to use the recipes and menus that had worked well for other chefs and alter them to suit his own tastes and circumstances, even to change his own recipes over time as his needs and tastes changed.  Music was a living, volatile consumer product, constantly evolving to meet demand.  Creativity reflected one's ability to arrange the materials at hand, as well as to invent new materials.  In other words—Bach borrowed freely and happily from other composers, as well as from himself, both because this enriched his palette of possibility, and because it allowed him to keep up with his workload.  It is inconceivable that Bach could have accomplished all he did in his lifetime, were he under pressure to stay away from the intellectual property of others.

An extraordinary amount of Bach scholarship over the past century has focused on sleuthing out the sources behind Bach’s music, and in preparing new and better editions of his music, based on this detective work.  Prominent names in this work, currently, include Joshua Rifkin, Robert Marshall, John Butt, and Christoff Wolff; and while these scholars frequently disagree with one another, as a group they persistently push the envelope, and contribute to general knowledge of the composer and his work.  Between them, these men have determined that very little of what is now called the Mass in B minor was freshly composed for the work-- perhaps as few as four or five movements.  The remaining movements were selected by Bach from music for cantatas which he had composed throughout his career.  Scholars agree that he seems to have chosen music which he thought was his best work, as well as music which would suit the character of the Mass, and would reflect accurately the new, Latin texts.   He transposed some movements to new keys, in keeping with the overall key structure of the new work; he adapted phrase structure to fit the new texts; he eliminated instrumental introductions and interludes, to move the dramatic action forward more efficiently; and he composed new movements, as well as sections of movements, where he needed them to balance and complete the work.

Let’s consider movements 3-6 of the Credo portion:  Et in unum Dominum, Et incarnatus est, Crucifixus, and Et resurrexit.  Scholars agree, based on internal evidence, that Bach adapted the duet Et in unum from an earlier composition, though that earlier duet is lost.  The close imitation between the two voices is ideally suited to a love duet, probably from a secular work, and adapts easily to a text which expresses the oneness, the consubstantiality, of the Father and the Son.  In his original version of the Mass, Bach set the entire text of movements three and four within this one movement.  It was only in the final months of his life (determined, again, on the basis of internal evidence) that he decided he needed a separate movement to set the words “And was incarnate by the Holy Ghost of the Virgin Mary, and was made man.”  So he kept the music for movement 3 intact, had the soloists repeat earlier words, and composed a completely new movement -- one of the few freshly-composed movements in the Mass, and one of Bach’s final compositional efforts.  In so doing, he created a numerical symmetry which the Credo had previously lacked, placing the Crucifixus exactly at the center of this discrete section, as well as exactly at the center of all of the Mass movements which lie between the identical musics of the Gratias and the Dona nobis.  It is an amazing engineering feat, which adds internal structure for the connoisseur and first time listener alike.

Bach adapted the Crucifixus movement from his cantata BWV 12, where it has the words Weinen, Klagen, Sorgen, Zagen.  Butt hypothesizes that Bach could have adapted even this early cantata movement (1714) from a similar movement by Vivaldi (Piango, gemo, sospiro e peno), but goes on to say that such laments were standard literary forms, and that, together with its descending bass line, is such a standard form that it would be stretching things to suggest that Bach did anything other than compose his own version of a common form.  More interesting are the final four bars of the Crucifixus;  Bach added these to the music he borrowed from himself, and with them modulates to G Major (thereby setting up the D Major of the following Et resurrexit) and brings the choral forces down to the lowest pitches they sing in the entire Mass, thereby representing the lowering of Christ’s body into the sepulchre.

The following movement, Et resurrexit, explodes out of this with no pause and no instrumental introduction—voices and instruments enter with a complete change of affect, in a fanfare-like, rising triad.  Scholars assume that this movement, as well, is adapted from an earlier, secular cantata—possibly the lost birthday cantata for August I, BWV Anh. 9.  In adapting it, Bach dropped the opening instrumental introduction, which would have slowed down the drama of Easter morning, but included other instrumental interludes, which have a euphorically dance-like character and seem to suggest heaven and earth rejoicing.

In his handbook for the study of the Mass in B minor, John Butt recounts the experience of one of the early Bach scholars, Julius Rietz, who wrote the first published study of the sources of the Mass in 1857: “Reitz shows himself to have been a meticulous scholar, who even made enquiries into the fate of Bach’s first set of parts of the Sanctus, copied in 1724 and loaned to Graf Sporck. The inheritors of the estate informed Rietz that many manuscripts had been given to the gardeners to wrap around trees.  One can barely dare to envisage what similar fates befell other manuscripts from Bach’s circle.”  I expect Bach would not have been surprised by this; the archives and libraries of our modern world would probably astound him.  Christoff Wolff suggests that one of the principle motivations behind Bach’s compilation of the Mass was his assumption that the thousands of pages of his cantatas cycles would not last—that they were too specific to their own time, location, and purpose to be of any use once he was gone, and that the only way he could preserve the best of his work was to use it for a Latin Mass, which would have a better chance of being saved and recognized in the future.  My many years of participation in the Oregon Bach Festival has given me the opportunity to sing and study many of Bach’s surviving cantatas, but I am unusual in this experience—most performers know only a handful of them, and most listeners don’t know them at all.  So from our viewpoint, Bach had it right—his Mass enables us to know not only what he was able to preserve, but also the dimensions of our loss.

How does one sing Bach?

Probably apocryphal, but nonetheless interesting:  at the height of his career, German baritone Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau was asked by a young singer, “What must I do to learn to sing like you?”  To which the baritone replied, “Sing Bach.”  We revere Fischer-Dieskau for his magisterial performances of Schubert, Schumann, Brahms, and Wolf; but he sang a lot of Bach, as well, and has left us many recordings of his artistry.  His Bach impresses mightily, even with the changes in performance practice since the height of his career. How so?

Voice:  Fischer-Dieskau's’s voice is clear, focused, vibrant and slender, with a flexible, easily controlled vibrato.  It is not large, but he covers a broad pitch range, with adequate control of volume at both the top and the bottom.  His mesa di voce (ability to pass through the entire spectrum of volume and color on any pitch, without breaks or hitches) allows him to make the most of what he has, in terms of expressiveness.   His coloratura, as well, is flexible and clear, and capable of moving along evenly at lightning speeds.

Ear: Fischer-Dieskau has very good intonation— no matter the difficulty of written intervals or the speed at which they must be executed, his basic pitches are very clear.  He is aware of slight variations relative to tuning systems, adjusts to accompanying instruments, and, even up to the end of his career, was wonderfully reliable.

Brain:  High intelligence is not always a characteristic of singers, but Fischer-Dieskau is far smarter than your average bear.  One can hear in his singing that he understands musical structure, large- and small-scale; that he knows how to build intensity through tempo, vocal color, articulation, and dynamic change; and he clearly has a long-range, architectonic vision, not only of individual phrases, but of movements and of multiple-movement works.  As well, he understands and pronounces languages accurately and with a poet’s sensibility, and his poetic sense is matched by a corresponding sense of vocal line and color.

Fischer-Dieskau is on my mind because one of my ensembles is working on Winterreise, and we use his recording with Gerald Moore as a reference.  I finding myself telling the singers, when they get into trouble, “Just do it like Fischer-Dieskau does it.  Of course it is difficult and challenging, but it can be done; listen to how he does it.”  And last week I found myself saying the same thing in Chorale rehearsal.

Those who are not so crazy about Fischer-Dieskau complain that the voice, though well used, just doesn’t amount to much.  They also find his approach rather cool and cerebral, too carefully planned rather than passionate and compelling.  They would prefer more spontaneity, more risk, and more flamboyance.  One might say they want a different balance between singer and composer-- they like a singer for whom the music is a vehicle, rather than a singer who commits himself to serving the composer’s larger musical and intellectual vision.  One never fails to sense Fischer-Dieskau's complete commitment to the materials--music and poetry-- on the page.  If those materials are intrinsically demanding and transcendent, one can be sure that Fischer-Dieskau is doing his best to bring them alive for the listener

I think there is never any doubt that Bach himself is at the center of any performance of his music-- and his music is very difficult to perform.  One admires performers of Bach for their ability to get close to Bach, rather than for their personal traits and idiosyncrasies.  Bach requires the skills and characteristics Fischer-Dieskau exemplifies—and he requires that those skills and characteristics be completed devoted to accomplishing the difficult tasks he proposes.   One frequently hears Bach’s vocal music referred to as “instrumental” in nature, but I would disagree with this;  I find it, rather, just to be terribly demanding, and difficult to pull off convincingly.  Bach sets a bar which singers despair of reaching.  One really must set a Fisher-Dieskau-like standard for oneself—which brings us back to F-D’s original statement:  “Sing Bach.”  If one can learn to do an adequate job of it, one is ready for nearly anything.

Why did Bach, a Lutheran, compose a mass?

I attended a small Lutheran college.  My freshman choir sang 4-5 movements of the Mass in B Minor, and at some point during the rehearsal period this question occurred to me, and would not let go:  Masses are Catholic; why did Bach compose one?  Like many of my fellow college students, I grew up in a fairly segregated atmosphere;  most Catholics lived on one side of town and attended Catholic school.  The rest of us, primarily Lutherans, attended public school.  The two groups were not, strictly speaking, enemies, but on fundamental matters we did not have much to do with one another.  I never set foot in the Catholic church; we stayed clear of masses, along with priests and nuns and the Virgin Mary.  I assumed no kinship between what we Lutherans did on Sunday, and what the Catholics did.  Bach was a Lutheran—he was “ours,” and we claimed him, though we knew little about him beyond the chorale harmonizations we sang from the Lutheran hymnal.  College courses in religion and music history broadened my knowledge of the mass as a liturgical structure and as the basis for extended musical form, but my viewpoint remained pretty parochial.  Not until I moved to Chicago for graduate school did I begin to understand that the Lutheranism I knew bore only a faint resemblance to that practiced in Bach’s time.

Lutherans continue to claim Bach—some refer to him as the “fifth evangelist”— and others stress a symbolic father-son relationship between him and Martin Luther:  Luther clarified the faith, and Bach set it to music.  The Golomb dissertation to which I referred a few weeks ago even posits a “Lutheran” approach to the interpretation and performance of Bach’s music.

By all accounts, Bach was deeply religious.  Although his professional responsibilities throughout his life included obligations to secular as well as religious authorities, and his surviving compositions reflect this career duality, the evidence reflected in his letters, in his professional trajectory, and in the very nature of his activities in liturgical composition and performance leave little reason to doubt his fundamental piety and spirituality. There is little doubt, as well, that he was thoroughly Lutheran in his theology.  But Lutheranism as Bach experienced it was more than theology—it was the state church, a source of power and preferment, and it shared a good deal of space with secular authority.  When Bach compiled the first half of his mass—called the Missa, it consisted of the Kyrie and Gloria sections of the Ordinary— he was not only working comfortably within the traditions of the Lutheran Church (which continued, post-Reformation, to refer to the Eucharist as the “mass”), he was also seeking advancement from the court at Dresden, to whom he presented his Missa as a gift, in 1733.  This limited (but complete) work, approximately one-half as long as the completed Mass in B Minor, did indeed receive a liturgical performance by the Dresden kapelle, and ultimately won for Bach the worldly preferment and protection he was seeking.

The larger question about Bach’s purpose is reflected in his “completion” of the Mass in the last years of his life.  He in some respects pulled back from the day to day responsibilities of his position in Leipzig, and put his energy into the completion of major, somewhat theoretical works: Musical Offering, The Art of Fugue, and Mass in B Minor. In these works, he seems intent not only on establishing his own legacy, but in creating a veritable encyclopedia of western European musical styles, forms, and procedures.

It seems clear that Bach never intended his Mass for liturgical use—clocking in at two hours without a break, it is simply too long.  Rather, it appears to be what Bach scholar Christoff Wolff calls the summa summarum of Bach’s artistry.  Wolff goes on to say, “We know of no occasion for which Bach could have written the B-minor Mass, nor any patron who might have commissioned it, nor any performance of the complete work before 1750.  Thus, Bach’s last choral composition is in many respects the vocal counterpart to The Art of Fugue, the other side of the composer’s musical legacy.  Like no other work of Bach’s, the B-minor Mass represents a summary of his writing for voice, not only in its variety of styles, compositional devices, and range of sonorities, but also in its high level of technical polish. “

Performances of the work reflect not only our perceptions of Bach’s beliefs and intentions, but our personal entry to the work.  The first complete productions of the Mass, beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, stressed its magisterial qualities—depicting Bach as an extraordinary man who communed with God on a level beyond human emotion and expression.  Near-universal acceptance and practice of the Christian faith, which influenced all thought and politics of Bach’s time, still held a great deal of sway 100 years later.  Bach was seen as an almost sacred prototype for the heroic figure later realized in Beethoven— the first complete performance of the Mass, in 1859, was actually inspired by the success of Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis.  Many modern performances stress, instead, Bach’s humanity, his imperfection, his kinship with musical tastes and procedures of his own time.  This latter approach has invited participation by musicians who do not profess any religious creed, yet find the work to be universally compelling and uplifting. I suspect the Mass may be the most comprehensive, unifying work by any composer— Bach’s attempt to depict the universality behind both his private spirituality and the religious expression of his time.  Albert Schweitzer described the work as one in which the sublime and intimate co-exist side by side, as do the Catholic and Protestant elements, all being as enigmatic and unfathomable as the religious consciousness of the work’s creator.

Behind/beyond the B minor score

A first glance at a good Bach edition reveals time signatures, clefs, and a lot of notes—little else.  No color words; no tempo indications; no dynamic markings; no crescendos, decrescendos, ritardandos, accelerandos; very little to delineate phrase, articulation, emotional content; almost no ornamentation. Bach, like his contemporaries, depended upon training, convention, habit, shared tradition, to fill in these aspects of performance practice; he neither composed, nor copied out his scores, with the thought that musicians 250 years later would wonder about his intentions.  Modern musicians, if they wish to perform Bach’s music artfully and accurately, have to rely upon a kind of musical archaeology to build a backstory, upon which to base a convincing interpretation.

As a case in point, let us consider the Et resurrexit movement, #6 of the Symbolum Nicenum section of the Mass in B minor.  We see a ¾ time signature, which implies three quarter notes (six eighth notes) per bar [1 & 2 & 3 &]; we see tutti orchestra, including three trumpets and timpani, implying a forte dynamic; we see the “Et resurrexit” text, which in the context is likely to imply a brisk, upbeat tempo and mood; and the instruments have staccato marks in bar 2 (only), suggesting a light articulation (the singers have no marks). Beyond this, we make sense of Bach’s difficult, complicated music on our own.   And I have experienced, myself, performances in which players, singers, and conductors simply do their best to get through what they see on the page, heave a sigh of relief when they reach the end, and hope it is followed by something a little slower and simpler.

Singers have information instrumentalists don’t have:  they have words.  And it has been through my own attempt to sing these words with accurate accentuation, that I have come to question the interpretation, or non–interpretation, I describe above.   Two text phrases in particular have long intrigued me:  “Et resurrexit” itself, and “cujus regni non erit finis.”  Both first occur at identical, expository points in the music, with identical rhythmic placement , i.e. [1/&/2/cu/-u/jus // re/-e/gni/non/e/rit //fin/-i/ni/-is/3/&].  This always bothered me-- the natural word accents would fit much better if these identical 3-bar passages were performed in a 6/8 meter [1 & &/cu/-u/jus // re/-e/gni/non/e/rit // fi/-i/ni/-is/&/&].  Looks complicated here—sorry I don’t have the technology to diagram this more clearly; the patterns sound straightforward enough when spoken or sung.  A background in singing late renaissance and early baroque secular music leads me, through the inherent accentuation of the words, to expect, and look for, some alternation of the two meters, 3/4 and 6/8—and sure enough, the score abounds in instances of this.  One recognizes the characteristic rhythmic pattern of the Courante, a popular courtly dance of the period, and one which figures prominently in secular suites, by Bach and others.

An hour with Google yields the following:

“Courante was a court dance popular in Europe from about 1600 to 1800. In a stylized form, its music was usually the second movement of the Baroque suite. It was danced by couples using small springing or gliding steps. The musical form had two types: the Italian corrente was in fast triple metre, with quick running figures in a texture of accompanied melody; the slower French courante was conrtrapuntal in style, with shifts between 3|2 and 6|4 metre.”  (Word IQ.com)

“The “Et resurrexit” displays some of the characteristics of the Courante with its triple meter often bisected by a division of the bar into two groups of three quavers.  …probably began life in the context of secular cantatas, in which dance forms are particularly idiomatic.

“Bach used all the most basic devices of his age—the dance form, the ritornello form, tonal development, voice-leading—but combined them in such a fashion that it is often impossible to decide which has precedence at any one point.  There is clearly the overriding flavour of a dance, but at no point is a single dance form heard in its entirety. “  (John Butt, Bach: Mass in B Minor)

And much, much more.  Google is great.

These comments, and many more, reflect a constantly evolving tradition regarding the sources, and performance practice, of Bach’s works.   Performers, facing the score with which Bach himself provides us, cannot afford to neglect this tradition, and simply trust that the innate power of the music, as well as our own imagination and energy, will carry us along.  Countless listeners, musicians, scholars, hover about us, a cloud of witnesses to our particular attempts to bring this score to life.    We have to make choices, impose our own preferences, to produce coherent interpretations;  but we owe it to this tradition, to make informed choices.

What others do with the B Minor Mass

I spent much of the past week reading a dissertation related to Chorale’s current B minor Mass project: Expression and Meaning in Bach Performance and Reception--An Examination of the B minor Mass on Record, by Uri Golomb, King’s College, Cambridge, 2004. This has been an informative, entertaining read for me—I have sung Bach’s music under several of the conductors Golomb discusses, including Helmuth Rilling, August Wenzinger, Robert Shaw, Georg Solti, and Peter Schreier; and I have listened closely to recordings by several more of them, including Philippe Herreweghe, Nicholas Harnoncourt, Gustave Leonhardt, Joshua Rifkin, and John Eliot Gardiner. Golomb systematically categorizes these conductors, and many others, by date of performance (he covers recordings 1950-2000); by ensemble type and size (from the grand symphonic interpretations of Von Karajan, Solti, and Klemperer, to the one-on-a-part performances by Rifkin and Andrew Parrot); by historic vs. modern instruments; by interpretive style (romantic, “Lutheran,” Historically Informed [HIP], and a few others). He also compares the various conductors and ensembles in their versions of specific movements-- describes them according to chorus type (and under that heading, discusses the use of contrast between concertists and ripienists—soloists and tutti chortus—in choral movements), intensity, structure of dynamics, verbal and musical rhetoric, degree and type of articulation, tempo—you name it; this is an exhaustive document. One is amazed when, in his concluding chapter, he suggests that he has only scratched the surface, and identifies further areas of study.

Golomb does see a general trajectory—from a Romantic, 19th century approach, through the radically reduced textures and “lightweight,” human-scale procedures of the HIP movement, and into the recent return to a more personal, expressive, dramatic, even neo-romantic style, within the context of HIP techniques and timbres. So broad-based a study is able to include, and account for, many idiosyncrasies and disparities along the way; and, just as interesting, Golomb compares what the various conductors, themselves, write and say, with the often contradictory evidence presented on their recordings. I am particularly interested in what Helmuth Rilling has written, and said in interviews with the author: I have sung the Mass several times with Rilling in the past sixteen years, and have experienced firsthand the stylistic evolution Golomb describes in just this one conductor. I also sang a good deal under August Wenzinger, a pioneer in the HIP movement, at the Oberlin Baroque Performance Institute in the seventies and eighties, when the “light-weight” HIP movement was at its zenith, and heard conversations and arguments among my fellow-participants about Wenzinger’s “old-fashioned,” Romantic approach.

An important question the author and his subjects deal with, is—what is Bach's intent in composing the B minor Mass? And what should be the intent of modern performances of it? Is it actually a single work, or is it four separate works, never intended to be performed as a unit? Is it, and should it be, music for Lutheran worship, which Lutherans will instinctively understand better than others-- or is it music with universal appeal and meaning? And another, important question Golomb only hints at, but which permeates his study-- how should performers themselves feel about this music? Do we approach it is an immense mathematical problem, as a collection of historical styles and procedures, or as an emotionally and spiritually compelling journey? Do we commune with God—or with a human and imperfect Bach? Is this a work of such scope that it should be undertaken only by skilled professionals, or does it lend itself to valid performance by amateur forces?

I find the content of this dissertation to be not only informative, but also liberating-- if the most thoughtful and skilled musicians of our time differ so in their approaches to this work, then Chicago Chorale and I, with study, respect, and hard work, can stake out our own territory, our own approach, and be in good company. When, as a singer, I first moved from the Wenzinger approach to the Shaw approach, and then to the Rilling approach, I thought my head would split in pieces—Who was right? Where did my loyalties lie? How could I reconcile the differences I perceived, and not be ridiculed by adherents to one approach or another? My goal, as singer and conductor, has always been to serve the music as best I could—but each of these conductors has claimed that same goal, while also claiming a superior personal position. I have never had the nerve, or the ego strength, to maintain, “This is the way it has to be. God or my superior instincts came to me in a dream and told me I was right.” I rely on tradition, the best teachers I can find—and then, finally, on whatever it is that made me choose to be a musician, and remain one. Bach is a good partner in this venture-- his music is so rich, so many-faceted, it has room for just about anyone. On April 3, you will hear what I—and Chorale—are able to do with this stupendous work, this time around.