Along with the St. Matthew Passion and the St. John Passion, the Mass in B Minor completes the triumvirate of what many consider the three greatest large-scale works by Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750), if not three of the greatest works by any composer of any era. Yet those arriving at today’s performance with expectations founded upon recollections of Bach’s two great Passions will find in the Mass an entirely different work.

Whereas Bach’s Passions were essentially quasi-operatic retellings of the historical events leading to the crucifixion of Jesus, a Mass – whether that of Bach or another composer – tells no story as such. Instead, it is a portion of the Roman Catholic liturgy standardized largely during the middle ages. In musical terms, a Mass is a complete musical setting of the “mass ordinary” – that is, the portions of the worship liturgy whose texts remain consistent regardless of the day of year or occasion (as opposed to the “mass proper” – parts of the liturgy whose texts vary from day to day). These texts are in Latin (with the exception of the Greek Kyrie), and include the Kyrie (“Lord, have mercy...”), Gloria (“Glory to God in the highest...”), Credo (the “Creed” or “Symbolum Nicenum”: “I believe in one God...”), Sanctus (“Holy, Holy, Holy, Lord God of Hosts...”), and Agnus Dei (“Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world...”). In particularly expansive Masses, each of these parts may be broken into smaller subsections; Bach’s B-Minor Mass includes a total of twenty-seven such divisions, each of which takes the form of a musical movement with its own unique instrumentation and character.

By the mid-18th century, countless composers had employed roughly this same form in thousands of Masses over hundreds of years within the Catholic Church, yet it was hardly an obvious choice for J. S. Bach. After all, Bach was Lutheran, not Catholic, and in the Lutheran church only the Kyrie and Gloria portions of the Catholic Mass had been retained for regular worship. Why, then, did Bach compose a complete Mass? As is often the case with questions about Bach’s motivations, we cannot be sure – yet the circumstances surrounding the work’s composition certainly provide hints.

Whereas in the 21st century, great classical compositions might be expected to achieve for their composers some level of immortality, particularly if those works are festooned with prizes or are referenced in new editions of college music textbooks, composers during Bach’s time generally assumed that their works would be heard, perhaps acclaimed for a short while, and then forgotten by subsequent generations. (They had counted neither on our modern taste for old music nor for music scholars’ penchants for unearthing it.) More to the point, Bach nearly always wrote his music with an immediate and ephemeral purpose in mind: a particular church service, a student in need of a new piece to refine a specific skill at the keyboard, or perhaps a desire to further his professional causes via a musical dedication to a well-connected patron.

But this seems to have changed during the final decade of J. S. Bach’s life. As the composer’s health deteriorated prior to his death in 1750 (his maladies ranged from acute diabetes to blindness), Bach must at times have reflected upon what if any legacy his music might ensure – music whose renown rarely extended beyond a small portion of northern Germany, and whose specific performance purposes were long since fulfilled. It should not surprise us, then, that many of Bach’s works completed during his final years bear the hallmarks of a composer seemingly intent on leaving behind something more permanent. There is the Art of Fugue, an astounding compendium of fugues and canons for unspecified instruments, meant to demonstrate the contrapuntal potential inherent in the single musical theme; there is the Musical Offering, a demonstration of fugal and canonic techniques for keyboard, all based upon a musical theme provided by the King of Prussia in 1747; then there are the so-called “Goldberg Variations,” a collection of thirty variations on an “aria.” What unites these late works is a sense that this is music not to be performed and then forgotten, but rather to establish a lasting record of the composer’s technical achievements.

The B-Minor Mass belongs in the same category. It must have crossed the composer’s mind that a Missa tota, or complete Mass, could have a more significant and lasting impact (particularly in Catholic lands) than did his prior sacred works. Indeed, it is clear that when Bach completed the Mass around 1748 or 1749, the work was meant not to provide music for a particular performance or worship service (or if it was, we have no record of any such performance taking place prior to the composer’s death), but rather to offer a kind of enduring Bach-anthology, spanning the better part of the composer’s career. This was accomplished in two ways (see table below). First, Bach constructed the Mass in the late 1740s by combining with newly-composed music entire portions of the Mass he had completed many years earlier. The Sanctus, for example, was composed as a standalone work in 1724 before being recast as part of the B-Minor Mass; an even larger part, the Kyrie-Gloria Missa dates back to 1733, at which time Bach had presented it to Friedrich August II, Elector of Saxony, in hopes of attaining a post at the court chapel in Dresden. But Bach’s efforts to revive his earlier styles extended to a second level, as many movements of the B-Minor Mass are adaptations of movements from the composer’s old cantatas and other works.

Much is often made of Bach’s habit throughout the B-Minor Mass of recycling his older music. However, these self-borrowings (known as “parodies”) are unsurprising given the likely aim of the Mass to chronicle a career. More to the point, recycling one’s music in this manner was very much the norm for Bach as well as for other Baroque-era composers, for whom writing “original” music was never as important as writing great music. For the Mass’s “Crucifixus” movement, for example, Bach returned to music he had created during his youth. The words of the “borrowed” work, a cantata last heard on Easter Sunday in 1714, began: “Weinen, Klagen, Sorgen, Zagen, Angst und Not Sind der Christen Tränenbrot, Die das Zeichen Jesu tragen” (“Weeping, lamentation, worry, apprehension, anxiety and distress are the bread of tears of Christians who bear the mark of Jesus”). Many years later, a sixty-four-year-old Bach remembered from the old cantata its bass instruments’ repeating chromatic descents, its triple-meter pulse traded haltingly among instruments, and the four singers’ tortured suspensions, and decided these musical marks of “weeping” and “lamentation” – these tears shed by those who “bear the mark of Jesus” – were in fact perfectly suited to this part of the Mass, the singers simply trading the words “Weinen, Klagen, Sorgen, Zagen” for “Cru-ci-fi-xus, Cru-ci-fi-xus...”

In a similarly inspired stroke, Bach reused for the “Qui Tollis” portion of the Mass music originally written in 1723 for Cantata 46. Here, the text is from the book of Lamentations: “Schauet doch und sehet, ob irgendein Schmerz sei wie mein Schmerz der mich troffen hat...” (“Behold and see if any grief is like my grief, which has befallen me...”). It is another dirge in triple meter, but here, above singers, continuo players, and anxious if weary viola parts, flutes paint dizzying circles above our heads. While the text during this moment of the Mass tells of He “who takes away the sins of the world,” the music that Bach adapted from his cantata ensures that our focus rests not on our freedom from sin, but rather on the depth of sin from which we ask to be freed. Here in the new work, as in most of Bach’s recyclings, an aftertaste of the original words lingers; the “sins to be taken away” are neither abstract nor inconsequential, but are those that have caused unparalleled grief.

Here, as elsewhere in the Mass, Bach’s reuse of earlier music shows a composer near the conclusion of his career, not choosing the easier path by rehashing old music, but instead recalling music and words he had used long ago, breathing into them new life and new meaning, and adding yet another layer of complexity to already dizzyingly complex music. To these repurposed portions of music Bach adds new material, but even here he seems eager to chronicle all of the styles he had employed to brilliant effect throughout his career, from the grandiose trumpet- and timpani-laden exclamations infusing the French-styled Gloria to arias borrowed from Italian opera (the Christe and Laudamus Te movements, for example), and even Renaissance-style counterpoint reminiscent of Palestrina (Kyrie II). The B-Minor Mass, then, is as close to a musical self-portrait as we have from Bach, and one hopes that the composer might have been pleased that we still consider the work equal to anything else he composed – or perhaps more properly, to everything he composed.

© Jonathan Gibson, 2024