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5

“Before thy throne I will appear”

Christian Marclay, Graffiti Composition, 1996-2002, Portfolio of 150 digital prints. Printed by Muse X Editions, Los Angeles, published by Paula Cooper Gallery, New York, Courtesy, the artist and Paula Cooper Gallery. © Christian Marclay.


Given the duration of this liturgical rupture in Bach’s life, another interpretation seems more probable, even if I can provide no better way to evidence for such a re-reading than can Denis Laborde, from whom the idea came to us (Laborde 1998). If Bach went through an acute crisis after several performances of the Passion and the reactions it provoked, this had nothing to do with the unhappiness that he would have felt in the face of the incomprehension his creative audacity received. Much to the contrary, it was he himself who doubted: Have I gone too far? Are not the measure and reserve imposed by the liturgy with respect to the aesthetic mobilization of emotion wise and useful bulwarks in the face of the danger that means may become the end? Intoxicated by the force of my art, was I able to make the death of Christ a spectacle, rather than contributing to the liturgy? One sees how the myth overtakes reality: the exclamation that we attribute to the shocked bourgeoise—may it not rather have been the issue that bothered Bach himself? Can we not suppose that he then decided to write no more religious music, not because the burgermeisters were wrong, but because they were right?15 The creator, rendered obsolete by his creation, may have put the word of God under a bushel, rather than transmitting it.

A curious transformation, by default, in which Bach becomes a composer-creator. It is certainly in the aftermath of this experience that, having solved one after another of the most arduous problems arising from a double obedience to the laws of horizontal polyphonic writing and to the vertical laws of tonal harmony, he in fact becomes an artist in the modern sense, an original creator preoccupied with musical forms, writing works unique in their genres and taking care to publish them.16 But, far from being a triumph, this work is a bitter response, experienced as a personal setback. Unless, perhaps, his grinchy complaints are the public vestments of an intimate repentance, for the thought that pride was able to make him approach sacrilege? To make music for music’s sake, the aesthetic ideal of the nineteenth century, so proud of its own boldness, is only a penitence for Bach the believer, sent back to his modest task of the world here below. Definitely, he would have participated in establishing a world of autonomous music, but for lack of anything better, protecting his heart he may have thought: I cannot be God’s priest in music—all that remains for me is to infinitely perfect and transmit my art. Let men make of it what they will. For the rest, I turn it over to God: to him alone be glory.

15. Va dans ce sens, et dans celui du rôle de serviteur de la Parole qu'il se donne, le fait qu'il continue à remplir son office à l'église Saint-Thomas, mais en faisant donner des cantates de ses contemporains.
16. On the other hand, Bach continues to make use of the organ, particularly for writing chorales, the most Lutheran moment for liturgical music. He does so until his death in 1750, as expressed by the mythic scene of the chorale dictated on his death bed to his son-in-law, Altnickol, doubtless retitled ex post in order to fit this final scene: “Vor deinen Thron tret ich hiermit.” But this exception only confirms the rule. When Bach develops at length the chorales that have accompanied him throughout his life, he does so now with a “didactic and speculative purpose,” as Basso emphasizes (1985: 643), by accentuating their contrapuntal rigor, whether concentrated or at length. Contrary to his earlier practice, he wants to publish these collections in a carefully arranged and organized way, such as the famous Leipzig collection by the above-mentioned son-in-law, or earlier, in 1739, in the third part of the Clavier-Übung. Using the model of the two catechisms by Luther, he gives the chorales shorter versions (the little chorales and the duos) for amateurs, and longer, highly elaborated versions, for trained musicians and professionals. But one can scarcely imagine that at Weimar he would have given these “exercises” this dedication of impertinent modesty: “produced as recreation of the soul for amateurs.”