Anticipation

By Richard Knox

November is a liminal time – a month-long boundary, in our latitudes, between the glorious finale of October and the run-up to the winter solstice, a term that comes from sol, or sun, and sistere, to stand still. We’re approaching the December moment when the Sun’s position at noon seems to pause before pivoting toward the new year with its promise of new life. For all earthly creatures this is a time of in-gathering – of storing up physical resources for the coming winter and, spiritually, of retreating into contemplation. I invite you to contemplate this November mood as you experience this concert.

It’s a program of two contrasting sensibilities. The first half offers two of J.S. Bach’s most intricate and extravagantly beautiful settings of religious texts expressing humankind’s deepest yearnings. After intermission you’re treated to Gian Carlo Menotti’s Amahl and the Night Visitors, a charming piece of modern folklore that contains profundities of its own. (Stay tuned.)

How does Bach speak to us?

The Master Chorale has become known, particularly over the last decade, for programs that resonate with contemporary concerns – social injustice, an accelerating sense of time passing, gun violence and police authority, the human tides of immigration, the way women are seen, our responsibility to our planetary home, the boundary between life and death we must navigate when modern medicine fails. Where does Baroque music composed for 18th-century years (and religious beliefs) fit into this mission?

The Bach scholar John Eliot Gardiner says his music endures because of its ability to reach the core of what it means to be human – that is, to wonder endlessly about our place in the universe, and to seek a spiritual foundation on which to live. This is especially true when hearing Bach’s choral works.

Gardiner says the experience of listening to (or playing, or singing) Bach conveys a sense of timelessness, of being in an eternal present. “Part of this music’s appeal to us today,” he writes, “may lie in the affirmation it makes which many of us no longer find in conventional religion or politics.”

In his tome Bach: Music in the Castle of Heaven, Gardiner writes that Mozart gives us a hint of the music we might hear in heaven, but Bach “gives us the voice of God – in human form. He is the one who blazes a trail, showing us how to overcome our imperfections through the perfections of his music.”

As a Bach-lover, I acknowledge that fully appreciating him in the 21st century requires a certain adjustment, a re-tuning of our ears and expectations. This is especially true when we’re hearing choral works sung in German where music and text combine to amplify meaning. So here are some things to listen for.

Komm, Jesu, komm

A motet is a choral composition that sets sacred texts in choral lines freely shaped to echo, overlap and expand the meaning of the words. As Gardiner puts it, they explore the border between music and language. In Bach’s hands, he says, “the results reach right to the heart of the human condition.”

Only six motets from J.S. Bach’s pen survive. Like the others, Komm, Jesu, komm was written for a funeral. But Bach rejects a gloomy or lugubrious tone and addresses the end of life with resignation and relief, in the firm belief that death is a pathway to a greater glory.

Bach wrote the piece for double choir, two separate choruses of soprano, alto, tenor and bass that combine in myriad ways — separately, overlapping and together. The motet opens with the choirs tossing the phrase “Komm, Jesu, komm” back and forth in a sort of call-and-response. The effect is not of an individual sufferer yearning to unite with Jesus but a collective plea from all humanity that builds in urgency as the choirs react and reinforce each other.

Their pleading gives way to a lament over the weariness of the body and the longing for peace and spiritual comfort. The bitterness of life is musically evoked by descending lines and jagged, dissonant intervals. The turning point comes with acceptance: “That I my all may give thee.”

Suddenly the mood and tempo shift as Bach paraphrases Jesus’ familiar declaration from the Gospel of John – “I am the Way, the Truth and the Life” – as a lilting, exuberant dance that affirms Jesus as the doorway to God: Du bist der rechte Weg / Die Wahrheit und das Leben. (“You are the sure Way / The Truth and the Life.”) In German the natural emphasis in those words exactly matches the dance’s skipping 6/8 meter. Bach’s musical elaboration of these two lines makes up by far the largest portion of the motet until a chorale brings it to a serene conclusion:

My soul is prepared.

It shall rise up with its Creator,

For Jesus is, and remains,

The true way to Life.

Bach’s text-painting throughout the motet is unerring to its end. He has the chorus wander searchingly on the word Weg (“Way”) and linger on the word bleibt (“remains”). The effect is to underscore the piece’s message of steadfast faith.

Nun komm, der Heiden Heiland

While Komm, Jesu, komm conveys a November-ish sense of mortality, this cantata turns the page on the season of Advent, with its welcome anticipation of new life.

A motet is a choral form that distills a single sacred text into a general truth, while a cantata is a mini-opera that deploys choruses, recitatives, solo arias and a closing chorale in a sort of narrative aid to contemplation and worship. Bach wrote about 300 cantatas (only 200 survive) each marking a particular landmark in the liturgical calendar.

The text of Nun komm, der Heiden Heiland has a deep history. None other than Martin Luther adapted it from a fourth-century Latin hymn by Ambrose, the bishop of Milan (and later saint). In English its title is Come, Redeemer of the Nations.

The German word “Heiden” traces back to “heathen.” It originally referred to denizens of the heath – that is, the “others” who live in wild, uncivilized places, a term evoking echoes of “pagan.” Heiden is Luther’s un-pejorative German word for “Gentiles,” the nations outside Israel. Church-going Christians are familiar with the Nunc dimittis, alludes to a passage in the Gospel of Luke when Simeon prayed that God would not let him die before seeing the Messiah. When Mary and Joseph present the infant Jesus to the Temple, Simeon takes the babe into his arms and says:

Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace, according to thy word; for mine eyes have seen thy salvation which thou hast prepared in the presence of all people, a light for the revelation to the Gentiles, and for glory to thy people Israel.

Simeon’s prayer hearkens back a further 700 years before Christ to the Messianic prophecies of the Old Testament prophet Isaiah.

Bach chose to adapt Luther’s hymn for the first Sunday of Advent to set the stage for the glorious fulfillment of the Christmas season. Sixteen introductory bars of rushing, expectant instrumental music create “a joyful shimmering,” as Jos van Veldhoven of the Netherlands Bach Society puts it, “a sense that something exciting is on the horizon, the coming of a Saviour.”

When the chorus enters, the text makes clear that God intends this birth as a boon for all mortals. The singers proclaim that the good news of Jesus’ birth is a miracle “over whom the whole world marvels.” The following aria reinforces this message, inviting all humanity to wonder at this great mystery.

The next section – a bass recitative and aria – may strike contemporary listeners as odd, with its militant exhortation to the infant Jesus – “the hero out of Judah” – to “struggle, conquer” and protect “us, the weak.” Chalk it up to the high expectations attending this newborn “Redeemer of the Nations.”

By great contrast, the brief penultimate movement is a ravishing recitative set for soprano and alto (in this performance sung in ensemble). With infinite tenderness, the singers approach the manger “and praise with joyful lips / what You have prepared for us.”

The cantata concludes with a doxology – the ancient hymn of praise to Father, Son and Holy Ghost – set as a glorious, full-voiced, four-part testament of unshakable conviction.

Amahl’s epiphany

Gian Carlo Menotti wrote the libretto for Amahl and the Night Visitors as well as the music for the opera, which premiered Christmas Eve, 1951, on NBC television. Menotti’s inspiration was his boyhood experience of Christmas in Italy.

Santa Claus didn’t bring Christmas gifts – the Three Kings did. And the gifts didn’t arrive until January 6, the Feast of Epiphany, when the Kings, led by the mysterious new star, arrived at the manger in Bethlehem. Epiphany – from a Greek word meaning “to show forth” – marks the day when Christ’s lowly birth was made manifest to the larger world, i.e., the expeditionary Kings.

The Gospel according to Matthew says these allegedly wise, exotic, gift-bearing tourists were not actually kings but “magi,” astrologer-priests from the Arabian lands of Persia or Mesopotamia (which would explain their interest in following stars). Thus, they were almost certainly not Jews but Gentiles.

So, you see, there is a link between Bach’s “Heiden Heiland” cantata and Menotti’s beloved opera about Amahl, a poor, disabled shepherd boy somewhere in the vicinity of the Judean town of Bethlehem visited in the night by travel-weary, Gentile, so-called kings on their way to Bethlehem.

It’s not clear that Menotti intended Amahl to be Jewish, as residents of Judea were. The name is not typical among Jews, although it resembles “amal,” a Hebrew word that means “toil.” Perhaps Amahl and his hard-toiling mother lived a bit further east, where the Arabic word “amal” means “hope.” It doesn’t matter to the story, for Amahl is Everyboy.

Amahl became such a durable parable because it tugs at the heartstrings as it embodies archetypal characters and timeless morals – the dreamy boy who sees things invisible to life-hardened grownups, the desperately poor mother who yields to thievery to feed her crippled son, the forgiveness extended by wise men who understand the goodness of her heart. And ultimately, the reward Amahl earns for his own purity of heart – not only his miraculous healing but the privilege of accompanying the Three Kings to greet the Christ-child.

Amahl’s story is more timely now than when it premiered 75 years ago — just three years after the founding of the Jewish state of Israel.

“The child whose birth this music celebrates was born into a divided land, and the first people to greet him were outsiders,” notes Master Chorale director Dan Perkins. “If a poor shepherd boy and three weary travelers from another land could recognize one another’s humanity across every line that separated them, perhaps this music, for one evening, can help us do the same, and see the contemporary plight of Israelis and Palestinians as the suffering of our own neighbors.”

Baritone Richard Knox writes the Master Chorale’s program notes.