Besides, perhaps, for love, no subject has inspired more heart-rending music than death. The rich body of religious and non-religious texts on the subject, accumulated over millennia, have served as the basis for much of this music, and we are proud to present a survey of some of the most beautiful and poignant works meant to comfort the dying and those they leave behind, ease their passage to the next world, and make sense of this most universal of human experiences.
We open our program with Max Reger’s (1873-1916) motet Der Mensch lebt und bestehet. Written at the outset of the Great War, the piece sets a poem of Matthias Claudius, who also authored Der Tod und das Mädchen, famously set by Franz Schubert. Reger’s setting of the three opening lines of Claudius’s poem recalls biblical texts on the transience of man such as Psalm 90 (set by numerous composers over the years) and Isaiah 40 (which forms the basis of the second movement of Johannes Brahms’ Ein Deutsches Requiem).
Reger’s Op. 138, which this motet opens, retreats from the dense, Baroque-style polyphony of his Op. 110, which draws inspiration from the music of Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750). This collection, instead, features more homophonic, though no less chromatic, material. Though the motet opens in A minor, Reger sometimes strays far from this harmonic area as the choir wends its way through the first two dark lines of text. As in many other of his works, however, Reger closes the piece in the parallel major key as a way to treat the final couplet, which focuses the listener not on the transitory nature of life but the eternal nature of God.
We then present an older complement to this motet, Jacobus Gallus’s (1550-1591) Ecce quomodo moritur justus, which quickly caught on as a keystone of the Tenebrae Responsories for Holy Saturday upon its publication in 1587. Achieving great popularity in the Catholic communities of Central Europe, it was almost immediately adopted across confessional lines as a funeral motet in the Lutheran churches of the region, where Bach and George Frideric Handel both encountered it in their youths. Handel later quoted portions of it in his Funeral Anthem for Queen Caroline of 1737, and it became common practice to sing the entirety of Gallus’s original motet at the conclusion of the Passion performed on Good Friday in Leipzig during Bach’s tenure there.
Though a seemingly simple setting of an excerpt of Isaiah 57, the motet possesses several features that help to explain its popularity. Its judicious use of modal shifts creates a vague sense of emotional unmooring, heightening the feeling of musical peace when it settles back into its original orientation. This, combined with its unusual rhythmic scansion, reinforces the sense of being thrown off-balance by loss and grief. Both parts of the motet conclude with the same beautiful refrain, setting the text “…and his memory shall be in peace.”
The first third of our concert comes to a close with Bach’s motet Komm, Jesu, Komm. Bach penned at least six of the finest motets of the Baroque era, four of which are thought to have been written for funerals. Komm, Jesu, Komm, scored for two equal choirs, is a living monument to the Lutheran concept of the ars moriendi – literally, the “art of dying.” This philosophy’s focus is on dying well, the preparation of the soul for the journey to Heaven, and the promise of the Resurrection. The piece opens with three plaintive calls of “Komm” before opening out into various antiphonal episodes between the two choirs. Several highly expressive motives, setting textual passages describing the weariness of old age, are passed between and developed by each vocal part before the opening 3/2 gives way to a livelier common-time section setting the text “Ich will mich dir ergeben” – “I wish to surrender myself to you.”
This short section serves as a short bridge between the opening tableaux and the most substantial section of the piece, an extended gigue-like meditation on Jesus’s declaration in John 14:6 that he is “the way, the truth, and the life.” Bach reserves his most elegant writing for this compound-time dance between the two choirs, both of which enjoy opportunities to spin out long, uninterrupted passages that self-assuredly wheel around the circle of fifths. Once both choirs work through several of these episodes, they come together in the traditional manner of double-choir motets at the close of the section, after which they conclude the work with a beautiful choral “aria.”
Our program then shifts its focus to the Orthodox perspective on the passage of the soul. Galina Grigorjeva’s Na Ishod (On Leaving) lies at the intersection of various traditions, styles, and influences, immersing the listener in a solemn, mystical, and ethereal journey from deathbed to burial. Grigorjeva, born in 1962 in the Ukrainian SSR, received her training in Ukraine and then Russia before settling in Estonia in 1994. Much of her music, including this work, draws upon traditional Russian Orthodox chant, Renaissance polyphony, and influential contemporary works to create a sound world appropriate to the texts she often sets. Na Ishod sets passages from the canon of Orthodox texts on dying, including excerpts from the “Canon to Jesus Christ Our Lord and the Virgin Mary on the Hour of Leaving of Orthodox Souls” and “On Burying Lay People.”
The first movement, setting the Orthodox equivalent of the Catholic Kyrie, opens with harmonies reminiscent of traditional Russian Orthodox chant that open into more modern, dissonant sounds. This stand-alone movement gives way to Part II of the work, the “Canon on the separation of the soul from the body,” consisting of the second and third movements. The second, a dense canon for eight independent vocal parts, tenor soloist, flutist, and percussionist, evades a regular collective pulse – ironically, through the layering of strict rhythmic permutations of its various melodies, equivalent in some sense to a medieval mensuration canon.
This movement is introduced by the tenor soloist, intoning a melody that Grigorjeva composed in imitation of traditional Orthodox chant. Various sections of the chorus flit in and out of the texture behind the soloist, their entrances staggered to deliberately avoid the suggestion of any regular meter. The arrival of the flute then ushers in the second section, which begins passively but gradually grows in restless energy as various sections of the choir enter, intoning their melodies in combinations of drones, eighth notes, quadruplets, quintuplets, and septuplets. Meanwhile, the flute builds in improvisatory energy to a great climax suggestive of the soul’s growing anxiousness to leave the body. This finally gives way to an abrupt modal shift and slow fade, as if to depict the acceptance of the dying. The third movement, stripped of the treble voices, is the darkest of the work and the most faithful to the traditional sounds of Orthodox chant. Opening with a gloomy, unison depiction of the night of death, it gradually builds to arresting four-part harmony heralding the sound of the last trumpet that signals the Judgment Day.
The final part of the work, consisting of the fourth and fifth movements and subtitled, “After the soul leaves the body,” is, appropriately, far more reserved. The fourth movement, a serene prayer for rest, is the opposite of the previous movement in almost every way. Though it uses the tenors of the choir to buttress the treble voices, there are no basses present. Similarly banished are the dark harmonies and dense textures of Part II, replaced by open, sonorous homophony as these voices intone words of a traditional Kontakion, the first of two hymns that will close the work. This gives way immediately to the second, which emphasizes, like Reger’s setting of Claudius’s poem, that God alone is immortal and that the same fate awaits every earthly being. Like the second movement, this one opens with and develops another melody suggestive of Orthodox chant, but, like the first, ends with expansive homophony and a reserved, intimate conclusion. Following the completion of this movement, we pay homage to the practices of Baroque Leipzig with an echo of the refrain of Gallus’s motet.
Fittingly, we then conclude our concert with the grandest of Bach’s motets, his beloved Jesu, meine Freude, which stands alone among Bach’s motets in several respects. Scored for various configurations of voices, but predominantly for five, including divided sopranos, it courses its way through eleven distinct movements, every other of which is based on a successive verse of Johann Crüger’s eponymous chorale. In these respects, it is similar to several chorale cantatas Bach composed during his first years in Leipzig, though at least part of the motet likely predates Bach’s arrival there.
The motet bears further resemblances to this class of cantatas in its rigidly regular deployment of Crüger’s hymn and the web of symmetrical structures that exist between its eleven movements. The first and last movements (verses 1 and 6 of the original chorale) are classic chorale harmonizations, the third and seventh (verses 2 and 4) embellished versions, and the fifth and ninth (verses 3 and 5) more complex harmonizations but still recognizable as such. Other layers of symmetry, meanwhile, unfold underneath this surface structure: The second and tenth movements employ much of the same material, the fourth and eighth employ similar three-voice textures and far more gentle writing than the movements setting the more defiant passages of Romans 8, and the middle movement, around which the whole artifice revolves, is the grandest – an extended five-voice fugue and concluding choral “aria.”
Also noteworthy is the degree of pictoriality Bach employs. In the second movement, the word “Verdammliches” (“damnable”) is set to a fully diminished seventh chord—containing two interlocking tritones, the “Devil’s interval”—and approached by a falling figure in the lower voices, perhaps depicting the condemned’s fall into sin. Later in this same movement, the text “those who [do not] wander in the ways of the flesh” is set to a subject that indeed wanders, first through a falling tritone, and then through a series of steps that wander up and down the staff. The fifth movement illustrates its text of defiance (“Trotz”) with recurring unison passages—rarely heard in Bach’s music—as an illustration of the righteous’s resolve to defy the “old Dragon.” Both the sixth and eighth movements display a recurring motif in Bach’s music, the depiction of the Holy Spirit (signified by “Geist” or “geistlich”) with elaborate melismas. At the beginning of the next movement, Bach then foreshadows a striking passage of his later St. John Passion in the way he sets the repeated exclamations of “Weg, weg” – “Away, away!”
This concert presents some of the most poignant and beautiful examples of music written to ease the passage of the soul, make sense of the phenomenon of death, and give comfort to both the living and the dying, and it is our hope that it may have this effect on you, our audience, if you are in need of comfort. Thank you for joining us, and we hope to see you for the conclusion of our season in May.
~ Nate Widelitz
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