Bach, a genius in the service of God

2023-12-20 17:02:06

«If there is anyone who owes everything to Bach, it is God. » From the pen of the Romanian philosopher and writer Emil Cioran (1), the quip is one that music lovers love – and admire, convinced that, like Rembrandt for painting or Bernanos for literature, Johann Sebastian Bach put all his fervor and artistic mastery at the service of the divine celebration.

The composer also wrote on his scores “ Glory to God alone », namely “To God alone is the glory”, a formula inherited from Martin Luther (1483-1546), the great theologian of the Reformation. It crowns all the five pillars of its doctrine on the salvation of the soul, called the five “ Sola ”, at the center of which the “ Christ alone ”, or “Christ alone”.

A city and two men

Coming from an important line of musicians (there have been 80 since the 16th century!) active in Saxony and Thuringia, in eastern Germany, Bach was born in Eisenach, a town also marked by the presence of… Martin Luther. Years apart, the two men attended the same Latin school and the same Saint-Georges church, where Bach was baptized.

«The very young Bach was certainly not unaware of these historic and sacred places, so mysterious and at the same time so heavy with reality: for those, like him, who had been raised in a solid Lutheran faith», writes his biographer Alberto Basso (2).

The powerful expressiveness of his music, the painful, dazzling accents of the witnesses at the feet of the cross or of the faithful confronted with the vanity of the world as well as the weight of sin also resonate with vivid memories of the Thirty Years’ War (1618-1648). . This European conflict, from which Germany particularly suffered, pitted the Catholic house of Habsburg against the Protestant coalitions and caused unprecedented and lasting economic and demographic devastation. The horrors of massacres, famines, epidemics still cast their cruel shadows in Bach’s time.

The missions of the “Cantor”

From the first cantatas to Mass in B minor which he refined, modified, increased for more than twenty years, the musician, to whom we also owe an incomparable instrumental production (organ, harpsichord, violin, cello, etc.), worked without ceasing or rest for the liturgy.

In Leipzig, where he was cantor from 1723 until his death, he offered a multiplicity of scores intended for the churches of Saint-Nicolas and Saint-Thomas, whose musical forces he animated, as a teacher and administrator as much as a creator . Not without tensions, even recurring quarrels, with his municipal supervision as evidenced by several angry letters from an artist with a strong character.

«Music is the only thing that should rightly be honored after the word of God.
Luther

The pages composed for the services respond to the Lutheran spiritual canons of which Johann Sebastian Bach has the writings in his library as well as those of his commentators. The composer thus responds to the first of “ Sola », « Scripture alone » (“Only the Scriptures”), music being the privileged vector of the living Voice of the Gospel. For Luther, himself an author of hymns, it responds to the Augustinian principle of “song like twice-said prayer».

Aloïs Marignane for La Croix-L’Hebdo

Bach is in line with this privilege granted to the ear, more than to sight, in the celebration of the sacred, like King David or Saint Paul ensuring that “faith comes from listening”. “Music is the only thing that should rightly be honored after the word of God,” says Luther.