February 23: Johannes-Passion (BWV 245); Gewandhausorchester; Hans-Joachim Rotzsch, conductor
When the text is tough.
I don’t speak German, but I have some vaperous comprehension from literature, history, crossword puzzles, and my grandparents’ Yiddish. I love those 19th century German Romantic songs of forlorn men rending their shirts, singing, ‘Mein herz, mein herz’. Testing myself just now, I guessed “I don’t speak German” would translate to German as “Ich ken nicht spracht Aleman”; it’s actually, “Ich spreche kein Deutsch.” Not bad.
One German word that always sticks out to me is Juden. The ears (understandably) prick up!
I was unfamiliar with Bach’s St. John’s Passion before this week. For today’s post, I listened to the 1976 recording of the Gewandhaus Orchestra conducted by Hans-Joachim Rotzsch on Sony Classical (Apple Music, Youtube, Spotify) without having first read the text.
So in Part 6, when our narrator/evangelist sang the words, “der Jüden nahmen Jesu,” I felt a sinking feeling. The first reaction was, as always, “keep my name out of your mouth”:
This feeling isn’t new. It first arose in college, reading Dickens and Shakespeare. It continued in my early adulthood reading a biography of Brahms that featured his champion, the eminent Austrian critic Eduard Hanslick, making sweeping complaints about ‘Jewish physiognomy’. A recent Schumann biography reprinted excerpts of Clara and Robert talking terribly about the their Jewish ‘friend’ Felix Mendelssohn’s ethnic predispositions. With Wagner, let’s not even start.
I read up on the text of the St. John’s Passion, along with some of the debates on exactly how anti-Semitic Bach’s work is. The best and most accessible commentary is from the New Yorker’s Alex Ross in a piece from 2016. His commentary is elegant, informed and fair. But no matter how you contextualize or rationalize it, this text has been used in furtherance of the blood libel and justifications for pogroms against Jews for generations.
I long ago resigned myself to the idea that enjoying European art requires hanging a giant asterisk near it, as so much points towards the industrialized mass murder of my recent ancestors. (I wrote about meeting a real life American Nazi in an essay here.)
Bach was a genius, and a man of his time. He was a devout Lutheran, a sect whose founder published a giant book called On the Jews and Their Lies. We don’t know enough about Bach to know what was in his heart, but I suspect it wasn’t entirely peace and goodwill towards all his fellow men.
Nevertheless, here are some excerpts from St. John’s Passion:
We kick off with music breathtaking and dramatic, a depiction of Christ on the cross. Droning and pulsing strings and oboes fight off any settled key. When the chorus enters it’s chills down the spine:
The opening presages the opening of Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony (Bernstein conducting):
And perhaps even Brahms’ first symphony (Karajan conducting):
Part Three is just exquisitely beautiful:
Our bass singer Theo Adam finishes Part Ten like it’s a Verdi aria:
Much of the recording features giant sounds from over one hundred musicians, but Part 19 strips down to a lute, two strings and a bass. I had to check if my app switched to a different album. It’s tragic and wonderful:
I risk this Substack turning into a Peter Schreier stan account. Even so, in Part 20, listen to Peter’s lyrical and pained singing about the redemption of humanity after the murder of Jesus. Here’s the translation:
Consider how His blood-stained back in every aspect is like Heaven, in which, after the watery deluge of the flood of our sins was released, the most beautiful rainbow as God’s sign of grace was placed!
I absolutely love the tenor’s magical half step intervals, at the 1:09 and 1:13 marks in the clip above, which I’ve circled below:
I will revisit this piece at some point, but I think I need to leave it on the shelf for a while. More organ up next week.