The Poetry of Communal Sentiment: The Chorales of the St. Matthew Passion

J. S. Bach's St. Matthew Passion is commonly viewed as one of the summits of Western music. Hardly anyone who is familiar with the work will deny that it is stunning in dramatic construction, emotional effect, and sheer mastery of musical invention; marrying music and story with an overwhelming visceral immediacy as St. Matthew's account of the agony, arrest, trial, and crucifixion of Christ is cast as a sprawling theatrical drama. Even Friedrich Nietzsche declared of the Passion that "whoever has completely forgotten the meaning of Christianity may hear it here, truly as the Gospel." The virile atheist Nietzsche perceived a truth that the average lover of the Passion for its musical and dramatic brilliance may very well miss—the work is a large-scale presentation of the core of Lutheran theology, directing its audience to the meaning of Good Friday as an indictment of our unrighteousness before our Lord, salved by the paschal sacrifice of Calvary.

 The Passion is comprised of several different kinds of music—large, intricate choruses; recitatives that serve to advance the narrative, and poetic arias that represent the believer's self-examination and personal response to the events. And then there are the chorales, sung to time-honored texts in four-part harmonizations with basic accompaniment from the orchestra. Too often they are treated as brief, transitory stopping points in which Bach dutifully meets the need of his congregation for familiar tunes, taking a breather from the imaginative complexity of the other music. However, for the Lutheran, the chorales ought to be the most significant component of the Passion. This is not only because most of them are very familiar to Lutherans today, but because they encapsulate the purpose of the hymnody that so strongly characterizes the Lutheran tradition. In his meticulous placement and arrangement of the hymns, Bach takes us directly to the soul of the Gospel. They not only contribute striking expressive effects to Bach's great lyric tragedy, but they most fully unveil the transcendent dimensions of Bach's conception, ministering to the believer by convicting, beguiling, challenging, and assuring with the saving message of cross and crown.

The St. Matthew Passion is a dizzyingly complex edifice; one of the most carefully-crafted works of art to ever be composed. It is helpful to think of it as containing three "layers" of narrative that it uses to dramatize the Passion account. The main narrative stratum, consisting mostly of recitatives by soloists representing the characters in the story (including a tenor "evangelist" for St. Matthew himself), sweeps the listener along in the action using only the text of the Gospel. For the second "layer," Bach's librettist Christian Friedrich Henrici (known as Picander) devised a series of "commentaries" in the form of solo arias to accompany each major event in the story, as the soloists offer various emotional reactions to the proceedings. The thirteen four-part chorale harmonizations are certainly "commentaries," but in some ways they operate as a third layer, because they are communal rather than solitary commentaries. While the arias proceed directly from the stirred soul and are often very raw and unfiltered in their grief, devotion, and outrage; the chorales represent the sentiments that the Christian community ought to have. They include prayers for forgiveness, expressions of awe and marvel, and dire admonitions to piety. What goes on when we sing a hymn in the Divine Service? The words of life are being placed in our mouths as our minds are schooled with true doctrine and our hearts with beautiful music that appropriately illustrates the doctrine. Hymns can be "sermonic," laying out the essence of a theological truth from a pastoral perspective (i.e. "Dear Christians, One and All, Rejoice," LSB 556 ) or they can be "poetic," representing the reactions that we ought rightly have to such truths (i.e. "If God Himself Be For Me," LSB 724). The rhythm of the Divine Service consists of declaration and response. Bach knows this fully, and thus the Passion takes on something of that rhythm as it proceeds—the evangelist declares the Word, the soloists respond with pathos, and the community both declares and responds through the Church's great gift of hymnody.

Let us briefly examine the most significant hymns in the Passion, and their place and significance in its structure. We will limit ourselves to those hymns which occur more than once and act as binding motifs—but the unforgettable one-off usage of the Agnus Dei in the opening chorus is surely worth a look. Place yourself in the shoes of a faithful churchgoer at the St. Thomas Church in Leipzig on Good Friday 1727. For four years you have been treated to the master's astounding cycles of sacred cantatas throughout the church year, as well as his first immortal Passion setting in 1724 (the St. John Passion). The first lamenting orchestral chord of the opening chorus sounds, and you are immediately enveloped. The music churns along inexorably at a lilting but urgent pace, not just drawing listeners in but gripping them by the throat as they enter into the most important story of all. The double choir then enters to engage in a rousing dialogue, creating an aural image of bustling crowds running every which way and coalescing to view the awful spectacle of the Savior's journey to Golgotha. But then, amidst all this electric activity, you hear, floating across the sacred space of the church from the organ loft, the unearthly purity of a small group of sopranos (which, in Bach's day, would have been a boys' choir). They are intoning the hymn O Lamm Gottes Unschuldig ("Lamb of God, Pure and Holy," LSB 434), a paraphrase of the threefold adoration in the Service following the consecration of the Eucharistic elements as the Lamb now dwells among us on the altar. This hymn enters the fray as a beam of light in the yet-unheard major key and forces the music to modulate along with it. Its text is a reminder of the great truth of atonement that lies on the horizon as juxtaposed with the nearly chaotic calls to weep that comprise the text of the main choirs. The boys' choir "mediates" the music by revealing the whole picture of the cross on the other side of grief. This man of sorrows bearing His cross is the very Lamb of God Who takes away the sins of the world, and Who feeds us weekly with His body and blood. This is paradigmatic for what Bach will do with the chorales in the entire work—right when one least expects it, new dimensions of space and time are opened up in the form of an eminently recognizable tune, utterly transformed within its context and designed to pierce the soul with the pathos of eternity, showing the listener that their understanding of Good Friday cannot end with sorrow.

The most important chorales in the Passion, however, can be boiled down to three. One hymn appears twice, one three times, and one five times. All of them tend to accompany specific  theme of the Passion narrative, and are encountered at the stops along the journey where they are most appropriate. The first of these is the graceful, songful old tune O Welt, ich muss dich lassen; which originated with a secular song by Heinrich Isaac in the fifteenth century about the sadness of leaving the royal city of Innsbruck. This melancholic yet peaceful character is carried over into its most frequent hymnal adaptation, to Paul Gerhardt's magnificent text "Now Rest Beneath Night's Shadow" (LSB 880). Bach's settings take full advantage of the piece's gentle lyric character, communicating on a purely auditory level the ravishing warmth of Christian hope. However, the text of both its Passion settings is a damning reminder of our great transgressions that are responsible for slaying the King of the World. The music and text, then, combine to represent both Law and Gospel—the words inform the listener that they are the ones who really deserve this hideous fate. Yet the music carries all the soothing connotations of the Lutheran view of death for the believer as a "great sleep" in God's security, informing us on a deeper level that the ransom has indeed been payed and our rightful punishment has been handled by Christ, allowing us to live in peace and look forward to eternity. It is telling, too, that both occurrences of the hymn require the chorus to instantly transform from bystander roles—respectively, the disciples at the Last Supper asking which one of them will betray Him, and the mocking accusers at His trial—into the congregation. We are all those hopelessly ignorant sinners who are unaware that we are the ones who have betrayed our God through our rebellion, and we all mock and ridicule Him when we disobey Him. The text of both is quite harsh and condemning, but the Gospel is hinted at through the sheer warmth and beauty of the music. For the child of God, comfort is indeed veiled behind every proclamation of the Law as one returns to one's baptism for reassurance.

The second most important chorale in the Passion is the first one that appears chronologically, as the third movement of the work after the opening chorus and recitative. This is the somber Lenten hymn Herzliebster Jesu, was hast du verbrochen? ("Oh Dearest Jesus," LSB 439). The function of this piece, like the Agnus Dei, is to draw attention to Christ as the blameless Lamb of God, sacrificed for the transgressions of those who deserved to die instead. It breaks into the initial scene very quickly, as Jesus predicts His death to His disciples. The choral response is one of immense shock—Jesus can only speak the truth, but this monstrous prophecy is unfathomable to our sense of reason and justice. What law has Christ broken? None at all—which is why His death is such a scandal. The next time we hear it is a rare occasion where Bach presents a chorale in something other than a straightforward four-part setting. We are now in the midst of the terrible agony in the garden, where the disciples fail to heed Christ's injunction to stay awake and keep watch with Him. Bach punctuates the tenor soloist's magnificently expressive lines over a throbbing, incessant orchestral backdrop reminiscent of the falling of blood, sweat, and tears with the lines of the hymn, sung a cappella, to state the fact that "my sins have struck You"—this agony is a direct result of what we have done. The final manifestation of this chorale is not until later in Part II when the crowd clamors for crucifixion. This is a short, urgent, yet highly memorable setting that is in the same key as the first setting; but the tune is warped with startling and unorthodox chromaticism as the bystanders become ever more horrified at what the guiltless Lamb must go through. Thus, this hymn accompanies the Passion's moments of utmost horror and incomprehension.

Herzlich tut mich verlangen (almost always used with Bernard of Clairvaux's medieval text "O Sacred Head Now Wounded," LSB 449 and 450) is one of the most well-known and beloved Passion hymns today, and there is proof from Bach's oeuvre that he had a profound affinity for the chorale, as it is one of the most frequently-used hymns in his cantatas. The utmost prominence that he assigned it here is not only a manner of the poignant beauty of its tune, but very possibly due to its unique origin as a Renaissance love song that originally conveyed the text "My heart is captured by a tender maid." It is not unreasonable to assume that Bach knew this and seized upon its transposition into a sacred context. If O Welt and Herzliebster Jesu are hymns of the Law, telling us who really deserves this torture, this chorale is pure Gospel. He is wounded, mauled, and stricken for love of His flock; and through contemplation of His suffering, we get a taste of just how boundless His care for us really is. This inspires responses of unwavering devotion to the One Who has captured the believer's heart, paralleling Luther's beloved interpretation of Christ as the mystical Bridegroom Who enchants us to Him. We first hear it twice in rapid succession during the Last Supper scene in Part I, separated only by a recitative. The first, in E major, stems from Christ's declaration that He will rise again on the third day, expressing an intense loyalty to the "source of all goodness" Who has "refreshed me with milk and sweet food." However, Peter and the rest of the disciples then pledge never to deny Him, followed by the hymn's migration a semitone down to E-flat and conveying much the same sentiment, but this time with the recognition that commitment to Christ means not just rejoicing in times of bliss but staying alongside Him in the midst of trials as well.

We do not hear the love-motif again until about a quarter into Part II, where the semitone descent continues into D major. Next, the chorale has migrated to F major, which contains only one flat (the chorale first appeared with four sharps). The lifeblood of Christ is slowly being drained away, as is the key signature, and it is here, right at the moment of utmost discomfort where we might want Bach to gloss over the facts, as Jesus is mercilessly flogged, that Bach lingers the most. Now that the sacred head truly is wounded, he presents two consecutive verses which serve as a more extended opportunity for meditation on the blood offering that is being poured out. Finally, we reach the final chorale in the Passion, and perhaps the most moving. It is finished has been uttered and the deed has been done. Bach here completely abandons a key signature, writing the piece in the dark, exotic Phrygian mode (a scale of all white keys beginning on E), which seems to speak from another world. The harmonies the audience has come to expect by now are drastically altered, and the character of the setting is indicative of the darkness that has settled over the earth—the hymn is whispered, spellbound, and dumbstruck.

Yet it is the text that is most telling. Sorrow has not fled and will not do so until the grave is found empty on the third day, but the verse speaks of the believer's assurance of eternal rest and release from earthly fears—a release that is now made possible by what has just happened. The audience has been through an exhausting gamut of emotions thus far, and this chorale may be pinpointed as the locus of classical tragedy where catharsis is achieved. Through the venting of fear and pity, we are purged. Through the meditation of the Passion, we come to see the unspeakable beauty beyond the surface. The elation of love wins over all, but it is a love that is made most manifest through a sacrificial act that defies all understanding. The key signature is empty, the music bleached and pale, and the community has been silenced by the taming power of the act. They have nothing more to say. It is finished.

One cannot imagine the St. Matthew Passion without its chorales. They are some of the most meaningful and immediate pieces in the work, utilizing a dazzling array of techniques to communicate the thematic essence of the Passion story as interpreted by Bach the theologian, and disseminated by Bach the composer.  Bach is frequently admired most as a master polyphonist and musical intellectual, but perhaps the greatest insignia of his genius is found in his ability to reveal the infinite poetry and relevance of these "simple" hymns for his audience of "dear fellow redeemed" who have been bought with the blood of the Lamb.

Davis C. Smith is an MA student at Hillsdale College's Graduate School of Classical Education. His research interests include aesthetics, hymnody and liturgics, the Western literary tradition, the intersection of Athens and Jerusalem; and the theology of Augustine, Luther, and Kierkegaard. His work has been featured by the Sigma Tau Delta Review, Voegelin View, and the Consortium for Classical Lutheran Education.