The experience of listening to great music leads many of us naturally to wonder about the lives of the composers who wrote it. In some cases, composers have left documentary evidence—letters, diaries, essays, books—that helps us understand them. One thinks of Arnold Schoenberg’s writings collected in Style and Idea, or of Richard Wagner’s autobiography, or even of Beethoven’s Heiligenstadt Testament, in which he consecrated himself to art. With Johann Sebastian Bach (1685–1750), the case is more complicated: little contemporary documentation exists about his personal life. This, in turn, has led to trouble. His music is so familiar to us that we assume we know him when in fact we really don’t.
So holds Michael Marissen, whose Bach Against Modernity brings together eleven essays—some long, others quite short, all of them clearly written and closely argued—that shed light on who Bach was and what he wasn’t. A professor emeritus at Swarthmore College and the author or coauthor of five books on Bach, Marissen rejects the view that Bach was “more of a forward-looking, quasi-scientific thinker” than he was “a traditional orthodox Lutheran believer.” Marissen asks us to suspend our assumptions and scrutinize what records we do have.
The book’s lead essay examines the ways scholars and listeners of today misunderstand Bach and his music. In a word, they assume he was a more modern figure than he was—an artist first who only incidentally wrote a good deal of liturgical music; a champion of reason and religious tolerance; a man who saw himself as a cosmopolitan and progressive. One by one, Marissen reveals these assumptions to be hollow. For example, he points to Bach’s variable use of the initials J. J. (for Jesu juva, “Jesus help!”) at the beginning of his scores and S. D. G. (Soli Deo gloria, “To God alone be glory”) at the end. It is simply not the case, Marissen demonstrates, that Bach used these initials conventionally, namely in his religious works but not his secular works. He used them most of all when writing his large-scale works. Far from seeing himself as a godlike creator, Bach, in his most ambitious undertakings, sought divine help and humbly expressed his gratitude. In this refutation of conventional wisdom and in others, Marissen is thorough and compelling.
Marissen is also persuasive in his treatment of Bach’s personal copy of the Bible, an asset in understanding the composer and his music. Referred to as the Calov Bible (for the name of its editor), this three-volume edition, published in 1681–82, consists of Luther’s translation and exegesis of the Bible. Bach’s copy contains his own commentary, corrections, and underlinings. Often overlooked and just as often misinterpreted, the composer’s Calov Bible, writes Marissen, “provides wide-ranging evidence for Bach’s premodern Lutheran world- and life view, and it renders absurd the notion that he had progressivist or secularist tendencies.” He cites examples of misinterpretation that issue from a single word of Bach’s within a brief annotation to Exodus. Translating Vorspiel as “prelude,” some writers have suggested that Bach drew inspiration for one of his compositions, an eight-part motet, from Exodus 15:20. But this, Marissen shows, does not follow: Bach’s commentary in his Calov Bible dates to the 1740s; the composition supposedly “inspired” by the Exodus passage dates to the 1720s. Bach read the Bible closely because he believed it was true. Religion for him was neither pretense nor pretext. It was not mere inspiration for his art.
The longest essay in Bach Against Modernity is cowritten with Marissen’s longtime collaborator Daniel R. Melamed, the renowned Bach scholar from Indiana University. They are currently translating the librettos of all of Bach’s cantatas—multi-movement vocal works, many of them composed for the church. Their aim is to show what the librettos likely meant to Bach and to listeners and worshipers of his time. Citing angenehmes Wort from Cantata 78 as an example, Marissen and Melamed show how previous translations—as “pleasant Word” or “agreeable Word” or “delightful Word”—fail to capture the Lutheran sense of the adjective. Based on their research, they suggest angenehmes is a reference to Luther’s translation of Corinthians 6:2, where it is used to mean “acceptable,” “favorable,” or (what they think best) “propitious.” Lutherans of Bach’s time, they conclude, would have had in mind this weightier sense of the word and applied it to the text from Cantata 78. The errors in English translation can be traced sometimes to an original source, to the score (if available), or to individual parts (if the score is missing). For one thing, Bach’s handwriting can be hard to decipher, and even experts get tripped up. For another, sources sometimes contain incorrect punctuation; in extreme cases, they have no punctuation at all. Running to sixty pages and containing more than 170 footnotes, Marissen and Melamed’s essay is a tour de force. If the best Bach scholars demand a lot from their readers, it is because they demand so much from themselves.
Some of the book’s shorter essays offer commentary on specific pieces. Marissen’s analysis of the soprano aria from Cantata 64 reveals the meaning waiting to be mined in the works of Bach. The text of the aria contrasts the world of man, which “like smoke” must “fade away,” with the promise of eternal life through Jesus. Bach makes a musical representation of the world at the beginning of the aria. Underlying the opening instrumental section before the soprano’s entrance is a rhythmic pattern: the short–short–long of a dance known as the gavotte. As Marissen shows, this tightly knit gavotte pattern operates on multiple levels of awareness. It is an impressive edifice, and yet, after its initial statement, it begins to erode: its regularity is disrupted, its orderly rhythms become confused. How like the works and world of man. Amid this degradation, the soprano, with its long, held notes on stehen (to remain) and fest (securely), represents eternal life. The aria as a whole, writes Marissen,
calls attention to several key themes in a premodern Lutheran viewpoint that was continually pitted against what conservative Lutherans like Bach took to be the undue and indeed dangerous optimism of Enlightenment thinking.
These themes include the transitoriness of the world, the fallenness of its people, and the reality of eternity.
A pair of essays in Marissen’s book examine Bach in the light of Judaism. The first of these draws on his research for his 1998 book on Bach, Lutheranism, and anti-Semitism. The essay challenges head-on the notion that Bach was some harbinger of the Enlightenment by considering the St. John Passion. Religious tolerance may have been an Enlightenment virtue, but the Passion, in Marissen’s reading, is far from tolerant in its depiction of Jews. Part of the reason for this is the Gospel itself: references to Jews in John are almost always negative. Part of it has to do with Bach’s immersion in Luther’s work and in the work of Luther’s interpreters: the composer owned a set of the theologian’s collected writings, including two copies of the notorious On the Jews and Their Lies. And part of it has to do with the vividness of Bach’s musical setting, particularly in some of the choruses dealing with Jesus and Pilate. In these, Bach “went far beyond the call of duty in musically depicting Jewish opposition to Jesus.” That said, Marissen’s aim is not to excoriate the composer or to denigrate the St. John Passion; such would be antithetical to the spirit of a book that emphasizes the distance between Bach’s time and ours. The aim of the essay, instead, is to invite us to listen more attentively to a great work of art about which debate continues to swirl.
Marissen’s chapter on the Brandenburg Concertos, a set of six instrumental works, dispels another misconception about Bach’s music: that his sacred music was distinct from his secular music. All of Bach’s music was ultimately religious; its purpose was to honor God. Developing this idea, Marissen asserts that the Brandenburg Concertos “are essentially church cantatas with implicit (and therefore harder-to-read) ‘texts’ that do have real meaning.” In the sixth concerto, he finds a likeness of the Christian teaching that the first shall be last while the last shall be first. Prominent melody lines are given to violas, instruments usually heard in supporting roles, while the viols, instruments usually in the spotlight, are relegated to the background. Marissen also points to a number of instances when Bach repurposed music from the Brandenburg Concertos in church cantatas, evidence of his unified conception of music.
This short book is a product of decades of research, but its most important lessons are accessible to all music lovers. True, some readers may find that the composer they thought they knew is different, sometimes quite different, from the one depicted herein. Speaking only for myself, as someone who has taught Bach’s music for twenty-five years, I found Marissen’s Bach more interesting than I suspected, and I was gently chastened by the reminder that it is our easiest assumptions that often lead us astray.
