credo of the B minor mass: Style and symbol, The

Musical Times, Summer 1999 by Humphreys, David

DAVID HUMPHREYS examines the role of Scripture as a shaping force in the music of Bach

THE 17TH CENTURY saw a sharp bifurcation of musical style which remained in force during the first half of the following century and beyond. On the one hand lay the stile nuovo, characterised by the advent of recitative and declamatory aria as elements of the birth of opera, an intrinsically instrumental type of counterpoint and (perhaps most important of all) the predominance of the continuo principle, involving a decline in importance of inner voices at the expense of an increasingly polarised treble and bass. Over and against this stood the stile antico, or stylus gravis, an artificially preserved version of so-called `Golden Age' counterpoint, which sought to preserve the glories of the 16th century in a degenerate modern period. This style of counterpoint, taught by theorists such as Cerone, Berardi and Fux, was and long remained a pre-requisite for the mastery of vocal counterpoint, and was regarded as an essential part of he composer's craft. In the 18th century a mastery of the stile antico was still considered something of an acid test of the fully equipped composer. As Johann David Heinichen observed in 1728:

This antique, affective style is certainly the most beautiful in that the composer can here show his fundamental exactness in composing. For the chords in this style must at all times be pure, their progression and resolution strict and removed from all liberties, the cantabile preserved without numerous leaps in all parts. The latter [should be] laden with syncopations and beautiful suspensions of consonances and dissonances and all the parts filled throughout with affective thoughts, themes and imitations, [but] without anything fanciful in character. Here we seek the true composer.1

One reader of this glowing tribute was almost certainly JS Bach, who acted as an agent for Heinichen's Der General-bass in der Composition and shared with its author an interest in the stile antico which lasted throughout his career. Like many contemporary composers of far lesser stature, he prided himself on his mastery of the techniques expounded by Fux, whose Gradus ad Parnassum was in his possession. Christoph Wolff's Das stile antico in der Musik Johann Sebastian Bachs (1968) still stands as an exhaustive account of its use in Bach's work. Examples of the stile antico can be found (though not in its strictest form) in quite early pieces such as the Actus tragicus (Cantata no.106), but his interest in it greatly increased towards the end of his life, and is reflected in his choice of works by Palestrina, Antonio Caldara and Johann Hugo von Wilderer, which he copied for performance in Leipzig, as well as by his study of Fux's treatise, first published in 1725. It also owed something to the influence of Lorenz Mizler, whose Corespondierende Sozietat der musikalischen Wissenschaften he joined in June 1747 after several years of informal association. Mizler's Society not only fostered an interest in musical arcana of the type found in abundance in the engraved keyboard collections, but also bred a respect for the craft of counterpoint as found in the Musical offering and the Art of fugue. Finally, the cultivation of conscious archaism in Bach's late works corresponds to an undeniable streak of perverse obstinacy in his character, expressing itself in the form of a defiant rejoinder to critics such as Scheibe, who denigrated his music as `turgid and confused' by comparison with the more fashionable younger composers of the Dresden court.2

Like so many of the resources available to a composer of Bach's day, the stile antico could also be pressed into service for purposes of symbolism and characterisation. A central preoccupation of any opera composer, for example, was the task of selecting ideas from a text and representing them by appropriate musical means in accordance with the required Affekt. Heinichen wrote a celebrated chapter on the application of themes, or topoi, and the selection of musical equivalents.3 Bach's awareness of the uses of style in characterising a text or extra-musical idea can be seen in a number of examples. In 'Es ist der alte Bund' from Cantata no.106, alluded to above, a deliberately archaic fugue is sung by the three lower voices to represent the harsh Old Testament fatalism of the text, contrasting it with the visionary utterance of the soprano ('Ja, ja, komm, Jesu, komm'). And in `Quam olim promisisti' from the Magnificat, the archaic fugue characterises `our forefather Abraham and his seed for ever'. Neither of these movements represents the stile antico in its purest form, but as austere permutation fugues of a type Bach largely abandoned in his later period they undeniably stand out by virtue of their archaism from their surroundings. Finally the discovery of a hidden programme, derived from classical astronomy, for the Goldberg Variations shows that Bach made a calculated use of the stile antico, this time in its pure form, to represent Jupiter, the father of the Gods, in variation 22.4