John Butt raises questions about J. S. Bach and his relationship to dance. As Butt describes it, the standard musicological way of thinking about Bach and his music turns on ideas of compositional authority and control, aesthetic abstraction and religiosity, and a music-stylistic complexity that betrays the composer engaged in intricate motivic working-out. Butt steers away from the mental or cerebral sphere towards the physical, the material and the bodily. Drawing on the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty, he ponders the applicability of the notion of embodiment to Bach’s music, not only to pieces labelled ‘bourée’ or ‘gigue’, but also to music with more oblique dance associations. His chapter suggests that there is no mental sphere without the physical, no music without dance.

Is there really any need for another study of Bach's Passions, particularly when these (and the Matthew Passion in particular) have inspired nearly two centuries of critical literature? When I first began to consider this project, the one approach that did not seem sufficiently explored was the detailed and comparative analysis of both Passions together. However, the customary methods of approaching Bach's choral works – surveying the compositional history, verbal texts, musical forms, styles and genres – soon seemed inadequate in light of the sheer emotional and narrative scale of the Passions. Perhaps this is partly because they relate to a story that is seminal to Western history. But this could hardly be the entire reason, given that the Gospel narratives have been set so many times to music. Bach's music interacts with the various levels of text in a way that seems to go beyond merely a successful presentation of the story and its attendant affects.

A complex of questions soon began to dominate my thought on the Passions: both of them originated in the relatively local purpose of furnishing the Leipzig liturgical year (they were heard in Leipzig only intermittently between 1724 and 1750), and the vast majority of recent research has centred on details of their composition and performance, together with issues of their original theological purpose and meaning. Yet both Passions have found a deep resonance in a wide range of historical and cultural contexts, most utterly foreign to Bach's Leipzig.

Have I really achieved what I set out to do in this study of Bach's Passions? Is this anything more than a reasonably thorough – if sometimes perverse – study of these works, adorned with various cultural metaphors (ones that, many might believe, are surely more ephemeral than Bach's music)? I have certainly tried to use a very wide range of historical, philosophical and theoretical sources, although anyone familiar with this sort of literature will realize that most of the figures with whom I have engaged come more from the mainstream of thought on modernity than from its sensationalist borders. If it still seems that I should rather have produced a more systematic guide to the Passions, somehow revealing ‘the truth’ of Bach's genius, I would certainly have failed in my enterprise, on virtually every level. For the attitude I have been adopting would tend to stress that concepts such as ‘a systematic guide’, or of a form of universal, transcendent, truth lying in art, are themselves historically conditioned. The value of this music lies, I claim, not in any universal revelation it might offer (such a notion is perfectly understandable as a form of belief, but not necessarily as scholarship), but in the way it can imply a powerful dynamic relating to the modern condition. While much about this music has proved to be valuable throughout many eras within this broader condition (its highest point of appreciation being perhaps in the nineteenth century, which was in some ways the zenith of modernity), I suggest it is particularly significant in embodying the way many movements in modernity have interacted with forms of thought surviving from pre-modern practices.

The question of whether the music ‘means’ anything in relation to its text leads to another, related, question: whose voice are we hearing? Is such a voice convincing, consistent or even truthful? Does music provide a platform for multiple voices or does it, in itself, constitute a particular voice behind that of the text? Do text and music together constitute parts of the same voice or complex of voices? Obviously, these questions rely on some of the issues brought up by previous chapters, namely, subjectivity, the experience and manipulation of time, and hermeneutics, but they also provide a stronger focus on the role of the listener as essential to the way voices are constructed and perceived. WhileChapter 3 was concerned with the way meaning could be constructed, this chapter addresses the various sources of authority lying behind the discourse.

Consideration of the listener moreover includes the need to account for the portfolio of beliefs and expectations that he or she might bring to the performance. There are perhaps three broadly defined categories by which listeners have historically inferred who or what is speaking in a Bach Passion. First, the music might mirror and amplify the Gospel text, together with the various interpretative glosses, which to a believer might mean that it is representing (or at least serving) the voice of God.

John Passion

Part 1

1. 1 Chorus: Herr, unser Herrscher

2. 2a Recitative: Jesus ging mit seinen Jüngern

3. 2b Chorus: Jesum von Nazareth

4. 2c Recitative: Jesus spricht zu ihnen

5. 2d Chorus: Jesum von Nazareth

6. 2e Recitative: Jesus antwortete

7. 3 Chorale: O große Lieb

8. 4 Recitative: Auf daß das Wort erfüllet würde

9. 5 Chorale: Dein Will gescheh, Herr Gott, zugleich

10. 6 Recitative: Die Schar aber und der Oberhauptmann

11. 7 Aria: Von den Strikken meiner Sünden

12. 8 Recitative: Simon Petrus aber folgete Jesu nach

13. 9 Aria: Ich folge dir gleichfalls

14. 10 Recitative: Derselbige Jünger war dem Hohenpriester bekannt

15. 11 Chorale: Wer hat dich so geschlagen

16. 12a Recitative: Und Hannas sandte ihn gebunden

17. 12b Chorus: Bist du nicht seiner Jünger einer

18. 12c Recitative: Er leugnete aber und sprach

19. 13 Aria: Ach, mein Sinn

20. 14 Chorale: Petrus, der nicht denkt zurück

Part 2

1. 15 Chorale: Christus, der uns selig macht

2. 16a Recitative: Da führeten sie Jesum

3. 16b Chorus: Wäre dieser nicht ein Übeltäter

4. 16c Recitative: Da sprach Pilatus zu ihnen

5. 16d Chorus: Wir dürfen niemand töten

6. 16e Recitative: Auf daß erfüllet würde das Wort

7. 17 Chorale: Ach großer König

8. 18a Recitative: Da sprach Pilatus zu ihm

9. 18b Chorus: Nicht diesen, sondern Barrabam

10. 18c Recitative: Barrabas aber war ein Mörder

11. 19 Arioso: Betrachte, meine Seel

12. 20 Aria: Erwäge, wie sein blutgefärbter Rükken

13. 21a Recitative: Und die Kriegsknechte flochten eine Krone

14. 21b Chorus: Sei gegrüßet, lieber Jüdenkönig

15. 21c Recitative: Und gaben ihm Backenstreiche

16. 21d Chorus: Kreuzige, kreuzige

17. 21e Recitative: Pilatus sprach zu ihnen

18. 21f Chorus: Wir haben ein Gesetz

19. 21g Recitative: Da Pilatus das Wort hörete

20. 22 Chorale: Durch dein Gefängnis, Gottes Sohn

21. 23a Recitative: Die Jüden aber schrieen und sprachen

22. 23b Chorus: Lässest du diesen los

23. 23c Recitative: Da Pilatus das Wort hörete

24. 23d Chorus: Weg, weg mit dem

25. 23e Recitative: Spricht Pilatus zu ihnen

26. […]

First impressions

A large proportion of Bach's congregation would have attended the premiere of the John Passion in 1724, together with its modified revival in 1725, and perhaps also the premiere of the Matthew Passion in 1727. On each occasion an organ prelude would have prepared the forthcoming Passion, setting something of the appropriate mood and – most important – establishing tonalities to enable the instrumentalists to tune. Perhaps one would have turned to the opening poetic text of the printed libretto in order to prepare for the basic character and mood of each Passion. In 1725, the opening text would have been the first verse of the chorale ‘O Mensch, bewein dein Sünde groß’, a well-known Passiontide chorale that would have engendered a suitable state of penitence. But in the original (and indeed subsequent) performances of the John Passion, the librettist compiled a composite text beginning with lines from Psalm 8, addressing the Lord ‘whose praise is glorious in all the lands’. The B-section text (now contemporary poetry) refers directly to the Passion, but again in a tone of universal triumph (‘Show us through your Passion that you, the true Son of God, at all times, even in the greatest abasement, have been glorified’). As many recent authors have noted, the notion of Jesus' glorification through abasement is common in biblical commentaries of Bach's time and in his possession.

There are many things that a book about Bach's Passions could attempt. Most obvious, perhaps, might be the sort of study that outlines the historical context of Passion settings and the role of Passions in Bach's career, followed by an exhaustive study of the Passions that Bach wrote and performed, their chronology and the details of each version and its performing forces. Readers requiring a book of this kind should, without hesitation, leave this one aside and acquire Daniel R. Melamed's Hearing Bach's Passions (Oxford University Press, 2005). Melamed also addresses larger questions about the identity of musical works in the light of the variability of their original texts and performing circumstances. Other readers might seek an interpretation of these works in terms of their theological implications and Bach's Lutheran context. Here, the list of possible books and articles is extremely extensive, but obvious places to start might be Eric T. Chafe's Tonal Allegory in the Vocal Music of J. S. Bach (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1991) and Jaroslav Pelikan's Bach Among the Theologians (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1986).

This book is hardly traditional Bach scholarship, although I would hope it will still be of interest to Bach specialists. Most important, I hope it will be a contribution to the debate about the culture of ‘classical music’, its history and possible future.

Much of my approach so far has been to investigate ways in which the music of Bach's Passions can make things happen for a potential listener in real time, through the interplay of text, music and performer. I have laid particular stress on the various types of subjectivity that the singers help to constitute, how the music creates the sense of an authoritative narrating subject and how these aspects can be mapped by the listener and can work to exercise his or her own sense of being. The final part of my investigation concerns the way the music is extended as a sequence of sonic ideas that we hear played out in the present of a performance.

The starting point here is the concept of rhetoric, an ancient art that is geared towards grasping the attention of the listener, but which is also at the heart of how the orator/composer finds ideas suitable for spinning out the central topics of an oration, giving it a sense of cohesion and direction. This attitude then spills over into performance, which would normally aim to hold our attention through specific gestures and spontaneous embellishments. In the case of a performer as expert as Bach, it is highly likely that his experience as a performer would have informed many aspects of his compositional activity, however abstract or mechanical some of these might seem.