Er kommt, er kommt
Johann Sebastian Bach’s stirring Cantata 140 sounds the turn of the Church’s liturgical year toward Advent.
After the magnificent opening chorus, Wachet auf, the tenor recitative proclaims: “Er kommt, er kommt” — “the Bridegroom comes!”
And the first duet between the Christian disciple (soprano) and the Lord (bass) tenderly evokes the Jesus mysticism which constitutes the theological heart of Bach’s cantatas.
I have long maintained that Dante and Bach are among the very greatest theologians in the Western Christian tradition. And that music and poetry can be theological forms as precise in their way and certainly much more evocative than many a conceptually abstract academic treatise.
One of my favorites “Advent” poems comes from the wonderful collection, Gitanjali, of the Indian poet, Rabindranath Tagore:
Silent Steps
Have you not heard his silent steps?
He comes, comes, ever comes.
Every moment and every age,
every day and every night he comes, comes, ever comes.
Many a song have I sung in many a mood of mind,
but all their notes have always proclaimed,
“He comes, comes, ever comes.”
In the fragrant days of sunny April through the forest path he comes,
comes, ever comes.
In the rainy gloom of July nights on the thundering chariot of clouds
he comes, comes, ever comes.
In sorrow after sorrow it is his steps that press upon my heart,
and it is the golden touch of his feet that makes my joy to shine.
A blessed Advent season.
Robert,
I can tell it is your post by the opening sentence. As usual. You are our troubadour. A welcome charism in building up. Grazie.
Amen to everything said about “Wachet auf!”
But the Bach cantata that’s stuck in my mind recently has been the one (I think it’s called “Gleich wie der Regen…”) with the line asking to spared the ravages of the Pope and the Turk.
I’m pretty sure Bach typically had fairly good relationships with contemporary Catholics (perhaps especially potential employers), and am curious if he had any sort of relationship other than mythological with real life Muslims.
I’d hardly want to gainsay what the original poster said about Bach and Dante as theologians (can anyone nominate a third?), but I wonder sometimes if our profound ignorance of the culture Bach came out of (probably since everybody in his intellectual background since Luther tends to qualify as a road not taken and we tend to rewrite history to give ourselves predecessors) doesn’t tend to make us see him as some sort of noble savage, which he certainly was not. Corrections of my ignorance and prejudice certainly welcomed.
This reminds me of the ambiguous MARANATHA which appeared in the liturgy on Saturday and is used in some hymns probably composed for Advent. Apparently the underlying Aramaic could mean “May the Lord come” or “the Lord has come” depending on the way the letters in the Greek transliteration are divided. Either way it is appropriate to Advent.
I would like to be listed among those who never considered Bach to be a noble savage. I had two Lutheran great-grandparents, who later seem to have attended the Episcopal Church, but I don’t think that explains it.
Incidentally one of Bach’s many children became a Roman Catholic. Carl Philip Emmanuel?
Thank you for the introduction to the Gitanjali.
What a marvelous find!
I believe the son of Bach who became a Catholic was Johann Christian, who had a career in Italy before he went to London (where I believe he stayed Catholic) and met the young Mozart. CPE Bach in his North German context is not likely to have become Catholic.
Gee, I thought representing the contemporary attitude toward Bach as seeing him as something of a noble savage was a nicer provocation than “feminization of the clergy” (may I say I’m a little disappointed in mlj in using that phrase since fairly clearly there is a crisis in masculinity in our society that it is both cheap and inaccurate to blame on female encroachment?)
What I meant was that there is a tendency to see Bach as some kind of native genius moved by the Spirit rather than a man produced by a definite culture. I too have Lutheran (I think they called themselves evangelical) ancestors, not to mention a late mother-in-law who was the child of Church of Sweden missionaries, but a culture that is barely aware of Goethe or Eichendorff, let alone Klopstock, what sense is there of the post-Luther religious poets, and the classical and theological scholars who formed Bach’s intellectual background? Many of us have actually read the books Dante read, but hardly so for Bach.
Since Lutheran ancestors have come up, I am curious about the fact that my great-great-grandparents in mid-19th century Baden lived as a married couple for more than ten years before she converted to Catholicism. I didn’t know this was done at that time — anybody else have any experience of this?
It came to me. Johann Christian B. was the convert.
“I have long maintained that Dante and Bach are among the very greatest theologians in the Western Christian tradition.”
Another who shared this assessment was the late Jaroslav Pelikan. He authored books on both figures and nominated Bach as “the fifth evangelist.” A third favorite was Goethe, also considered by Pelikan to be a profound, if unorthodox, theologian.
Thanks to Patrick for recalling the great historian of theology, Jaroslav Pelikan. His book, Bach among the Theologians, does provide some of Bach’s cultural and theological context to which Gene made reference.
David Hart in his recent book, The Beauty of the Infinite, calls Bach “the greatest of Christian theologians, the most inspired witness to the ordo amoris in the fabric of being.” He elaborates: “It is in Bach’s music, as nowhere else, that the potential boundlessness of thematic development becomes manifest: how a theme can unfold inexorably through difference, while remaining continuous through each moment of repetition …”
Hart instances, as the consummate achievement in this regard, the “Goldberg Variations.”
Since I first saw Jerome Robbins’ ballet set to Bach’s “Goldberg Variations” at the New York City Ballet, I have thought it to be the consummate artistic representation of Trinitarian communion: a blessed foretaste of the heavenly Jerusalem.