Fugues Without Words:

A H earing of Four Fugues from

The We l l -Tempered Cla v ie r
as P assion Music

Tim othy A. Smith

As concerns the playing o f chorales, I was

instructed by my teacher, Capellmeister Bach,
who is still living, not to play the songs merely
offhand but according to the Affect of the
words.
Johnn Gotthilf Ziegler (1746)

his article offers a circumstantial argument for motivic connec­

T tions between four fugues in The Well-Tempered Clavier and the

St. Matthew Passion. The fugues in question are those in c-sharp
m inor and b m inor o f Book I, and the f-sharp m inor and b m inor o f
Book II. N o doubt the m ost provocative place to begin threading
such a connection would be with Charles Burney’s curious censure o f
Bach’s fugal technique in his 1789 General History of Music.

[Johann] Sebastian Bach . . . disdained facility so much, that his

genius never stooped to the easy and graceful. I never have seen a
fugue by this learned and powerful author upon a motivo, that is
natural and chantant, or even an easy and obvious passage, that is
not loaded with crude and difficult accompaniments.*2

'Adapted from a paper read at the University o f Glasgow, April 25, 2009, in
conjunction with a study day on “Bach’s Passions” sponsored by the Society for
Music Analysis.
2Burney, A General History of Music, III, 110, as quoted in Yo Tomita, “Bach’s Credo
in England: A n Early History,” Bach Studies from Dublin, eds. Anne Leahy and Yo
Tomita (Dublin: Four Courts Press Ltd., 2004), 206.

45
46 Bach

What seems quaint to us about Burney’s attitude is the notion of

no place in music for doubt or despair, the ominous theme, the
sinister, or even the difficult. N ot without irony then, we realize that
Bach was sometimes drawn to the “unnatural motivo” for its very
oddness, revealing even crudity to have found its rhetorical master. As
we shall see, the obdurate subject exists for Bach to evoke dilemma,
and the fugue its reconciliation.

Regarding Burney’s unnatural motivo, the c-sharp minor fugue of

The Well-Tempered Clavier, Book I, represents the case in point
(Example la). Its subject exposes the dodgy interval o f a diminished
fourth, a melody that would draw red marks from most any teacher
today. For Bach, however, it is the interval’s very distress that
demands its hearing and creative address. Whether o f curiosity or
concern, it is also the diminished fourth that draws us to the fugue in
the fervor o f inquiry and hope o f clarification. In the dissonance o f its
introductory gesture, the c-sharp minor fugue posits a problem that
awaits the arrival o f other motives for its resolution.

Example 1. (a) 1722, c-sharp minor subject WTC I; (b) 1727, St.
Matthew Passion “Lafi ihn kreuzigen”; (c) c-sharp minor obligo WTC
I; (d) c-sharp minor authorial inclusions WTC I

The promised resolution arrives in the fugue’s obligo (Example lc),

a cambiata figure in counterpoint with the subject. This outwardly new
idea is actually the old motivo reinvented— in rhythmic diminution of
 F o u r W TC F ugues as P assion M usic 47

its contour, with transformation o f its foul fourth to a third. To some

it may seem too bold a thought to describe Bach’s method here as the
“salvific” power o f counterpoint applied to the lost, the implausible,
the misshapen, and grotesque. We shall return to this fascinating
fugue in a moment, but dare not leave it without first having observed
that its obligo represents not merely the solution to a musical problem,
but the composer himself (Example Id).

Another solution to the diminished fourth is echoed in music that

Bach would compose, five years later, in the St. Matthew Passion’s
paired turba fugues on “Let him be crucified” (Example lb). Here
one might suspect that even Burney would have praised Bach’s setting
of the affective word “crucify” with a diminished fourth. But if fitting
here, why should any diminished fourth in Bach be thought strange?
Obviously, words do make a difference, but is it Burney’s allegation
that Bach was a “learned and powerful author” of texted music and yet
one insensible to nature in works for the clavier? 3 This would indeed
be the case if our examples had no connection to each other. If,
however, they come o f the same purpose, then the latter surely
interprets the former, with neither being odd.

The prospect o f one fugue interpreting another raises an

intriguing question. If it is true that the c-sharp minor fugue is passion
music, then is Bach’s quotation o f its obligo in the f-sharp minor fugue
o f Book II our cue to hear that work in the same way? Remarkably,
these paired oblighi number among the rare motifs in The Well-Tempered
Clavier that receive development in more than one fugue.4 Compare

T h e hypothesis of this article represents the opposite o f Johann Adolph Scheibe’s

complaint that Bach wrote choral music too instrumentally, with the present
argument being that the “unnatural motivo” exists, in Bach, for the very rhetorical
purpose that Scheibe accused him of being ignorant. The reader will recall one of
Scheibe’s objections is that Bach “demands that singers and instrumentalists should
be able to do with their throats and instruments whatever he can play on the clavier.
But this is impossible” (BD II, no. 400). See the New Bach Reader, eds. Hans T. David
and Arthur Mendel, rev. and enlarged by Christoph Wolff (New York: W. W.
Norton, 1998), 338.
T h e A-flat fugue o f the WTC 11 employs the same obligo in an ascending sequence.
The various genera o f counterpoint {oblighi) are treated in David Ledbetter’s book on
The Well-Tempered Clavier (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2002), 94-
96. This particular figure is classified in Angelo Berardi’s Documentiarmomd (of which
48 Bach

Example 2 with the music o f Example 1c, which had been written
twenty years before.

Example 2. 1742 WTC Book II—fugue in f-sharp minor, obligo.

Note relationship with the obligo of the c-sharp minor fugue in
Book 1 (Example lc).

Now that we are ready to leave the c-sharp minor fugue, let us
note its two lament!—the most visited and sometimes hackneyed of
eighteenth-century formulae. In the context that we find ourselves, it
bears reminder that Bach grounded the Cructfixusoihis B-Minor Mass
in this very idea— a figure that is doubly signified when transformed
by melodic inversion. In his Symbolum canon o f ca. 1747 (BWV 1077),
Bach would describe the inversion o f a lament as “a symbol o f Christ
who will crown those who carry his cross.”' Take special note then of

Bach made a copy, VBN II/B /4) as d'un solpasso—the repetition of a motif with
transposition. In the f-sharp minor and A-flat fugues of the WTC 11, as well as the c-
sharp minor o f Book I, the motif is not transposed but repeated on different scale
steps of the same key. Ledbetter notes that the obligo may have implied an element of
wit or conceit, hence a rhetorical gesture. The fascinating element o f Bach’s obligo in
the c-sharp minor fugue o f the WTC I pertains to his transformation (in bar 41) of
a descending diatonic sequential motif, by means of melodic inversion, into an
ascending chromatic figure that replicates the pitches o f the fugue’s subsequent
laments, in their melodic inversion (see Example 3). The f-sharp minor fugue of Book
2 treats the obligo similarly. In both, the “conceit” bears an uncanny resemblance to
BWV 1077 (see footnote 5). Also o f interest, the cambiata within the obligo o f the c-
sharp minor fugue mimes the contour of its main subject in rhythmic diminution.
Not counting its melodically inverted statement, this changing-tone figure is heard
41 times in 14 episodes. Furthermore, the obligopresents Bach’s signature motif three
times— the first instantiations of Bach’s name in The Well-Tempered Clavier.
5In BWV 1077 the canon leader is a lament, which is melodically inverted in the
follower voice. Beneath the canon Bach wrote “Symbolum: Christus Coronabit Crucigeros”
(literally, “Symbol: Christ will crown those who carry his cross”)- The reader o f this
 Four WTC F u g u e s as P a s sio n M u sic 49

Example 3a, where the c-sharp minor fugue inverts its lament,
superimposing it upon the obligo, which has also been inverted.

E xam ple 3. T h e lam ent, 1722, Well-Tempered Clavier B o o k I,

fugue in c-sharp -m in o r, (a) in th e m elodic in v ersio n o f the
obligo, (b) in its d escen d in g fo rm .

The examples thus far have modeled chiasmus, chromatics, and

the composer’s name in tones. To that list, presently, we’ll add a

journal will require no reminder o f Bach’s use o f Symbolum, too, in the Mass in B
Minor. It bears observation that the historical Symbolum conveys a meaning distinct
from the modern English “symbol.” In the tradition o f St. Ambrose (fourth-century,
and adhered to through the Middle Ages), we are informed that each Apostle
contributed one article to the SymbolumApostolorum while under the inspiration o f the
Holy G host at Pentecost. Also o f fourth-century provenance, Rufinus wrote that the
Apostles “for many just reasons decided that this rule o f faith should be called the
Symbol.” According to Rufinus, the Greek ou|i(3oA ov (“symbol”) means: “indicium,
i.e., a token or password by which Christians might recognize each other, and collatio,
that is to say an offering made up o f separate contributions” (from The Catholic
Encyclopedia). In the third-century correspondence o f St. Cyprian and St. Firmilia, the
word Symbolum had been used m ore simply as a Trinitarian symbol and confession
o f faith prior to baptism. Either way, the “symbol” is both personal and corporate,
an affirmation o f one’s own belief in concert with others o f the same. In accord with
historical usage then, one might render Bach’s Symbolum: Christus Coronabit Crucigeros
as: “This is my belief, in agreement with Christians o f all times and places: Christ will
crown those who carry his cross,” (see footnote 14).
50 Bach

fourth idea— the “Q m tollis contour.” Interpreting “passion” broadly

to include the Cruafixus and Q ui tollispeccata ntundi o f the Mass in B
minor, such motifs in the W TC should be analogous to their affect in
Bach’s passion music, where we have opportunity o f hearing them
with words. Accordingly, and for reasons that will become apparent, the
present author has interpreted these ideas as passion signifiers, hailing
the approach as the hearing o f “fugues without words.”

The obvious allusion is to Mendelssohn, and its implication is that

music alone can carry an affect without reliance upon words. That
said, what we are really probing here is the possibility of a conscious
association o f motifs in texted music with works for the keyboard. One
might argue that a more timely allusion would be to Bach’s own four-
part chorales.6 Although this body o f work is routinely published
without words, some eighty percent o f the chorale settings were
harmonized with specific texts in mind .7 While this tradition had
precedence in the organ choralbuch and chorale prelude publications of
Bach’s day, it bears reminder that the average Saxon sang these hymns
every Sunday and often in between. The words were second nature to
them, and they could not but hear a melody without its words coming
automatically to mind. N ot only was this Bach’s liturgical reality, but
the theoretical literature o f his age recognized the playing of wordless
chorales as the rhetorical foundation o f cantusfirmus, which art Bach
is recognized to have elevated to its highest form. As Bach’s student,

6In his venerable essay “Bach the Tone Poet,” Hans Rosenzvald wrote the following:
As we speak of chorale music and its intimate connection with chorale
poetry, we cannot help but point to its symbolical significance in other
works— a symbolism that reveals the poetic sense more frequently than
does any other single device in Bach’s work. Realize what a chorale meant
in the life o f a churchgoer at St. Thomas o f Leipzig, for instance, where
Bach was a cantor. Consider what this churchgoer would associate with a
chorale, and you will understand Bach’s specific use of it---- Taking it for
granted that almost every listener knew these chorales, we know that his
association was by no means unconscious, that, as a matter o f fact, these
quotations directed his thoughts into definite channels. . . . Whenever
Bach leads a melody close to a well-known chorale tune, we can assume
that many of those who listened for the first time to the aria (in a cantata
or in another work in which allusion to a chorale is made) associated the
new music with the old, the free invention with the traditional congrega­
tional hymn. (See http://www.oldandsold.com/articles02 / jsbach4.shtml.)
7Spitta found but six cantatas to be without direct or oblique allusion to a chorale.
 F o u r W T C F u g u e s as P a s sio n M u sic 51

Johann G otthilf Ziegler, has reminded us in the quotation at the

beginning o f this article, the musician’s compositional and improvisa-
tional duty was fidelity to the text. With Ziegler’s maxim no doubt in
mind, Robin A. Leaver has observed o f published versions o f the
four-part chorales that om it the words:

Without the texts one can state in theoretical terms what is

happening, but not why Bach chose these extravagant harmonies.
In knowing the text it becomes clear why he chose what at first
sight seems an extraordinary harmonic route to take. And then it is
not a question of simple word painting but the more significant
expression of a theological concept.8

Before applying the “without-words” m ethod to another fugue,

one m ust be plain; this essay is not about to claim proof o f any
referential o r even correlative association between any o f its examples.
It explores an intuition, really, and the critic m ight well object that it
offers no more o f a case than the symmetry o f two novels, let us say
by Dostoevsky and Hemingway, each having its character who says,
“Please pass the sugar. ” 9 Whereas the argument is abductive, it is
logical nonetheless, and possessed o f a certain power o f explanation."’
T he theory is simply this: it is reasonable to hear affect in non-texted

8Leaver, e-mail correspondence with the author, May 6, 2009.

9In his short story, “Three Versions o f Judas,” the Argentinean poet, Jorge Luis
Borges, observed the proper role o f intuition as preceding p ro o f in the formulation
o f hypotheses: “W hoever peruses this essay should know that it states only
Runeberg’s conclusions, n o t his dialectic or his proof. Someone may observe that no
doubt the conclusion preceded the ‘proofs.’ For who gives himself up to looking for
proofs o f something he does not believe in or the prediction o f which he does not
care about?”
"Again quoting Rosenzvald (see footnote 6): “That which musicians commonly call
musical logic is by no means all we should be aware of, if we want to understand the
great, the architecturally beautiful forms o f the cantor o f St. Thomas. In order to do
justice to the logic o f his proceedings, we must never confine ourselves to the analysis
o f his music from the point o f view o f motives, themes, rhythms, harmonic fabric,
contrapuntal textures, and other purely musical devices, but we must always derive
the logic o f the musical inspiration from the words— and not, as shown, only in
purely vocal music but also wherever instruments are used by Bach to illustrate the
religious context o f vocal music and, to a large extent, in instrumental music. In turn,
we must not evaluate his poetry as absolute poetry but see it in close connection with
the liturgy, with worship, with Protestantism.”
52 Bach

counterpoint that has been reclaimed, years after the fact, in a word.
In the case of the c-sharp minor fugue, that word was “ crucify.”

On then to Bach’s setting of the word gefangen in the St. Matthew

Passion. Let us imagine him at his writing desk about to compose the
duo aria with interpolated chorus, “Now is my Jesus captured.”
Having scouted the oudying provinces of his past work, the
contrapuntist once more finds the motivic crumb to his liking in The
Well-Tempered Clavier, this time its fugue in B minor (Example 4). O f
all the clavier works that one might hear as passion music, this is the
most likely. Its “deeply symbolic” key of B minor, observes David
Ledbetter, had “several definite associations for Bach,” including “the
fullness of human suffering,” particularly “the suffering of Christ.”11

We’ve no need to belabor this example more except to observe

that it is chiastic on many levels and at least deserving of a long
footnote on this count.12 Formal considerations aside, one is more
taken by the affecting tenor of the passage, as it represents one of the
loveliest moments of The Well-Tempered Clavier. This is music of
profound tenderness and compassion. The composure o f this music,
its stillness and tranquility, provides a place of repose— a refuge from
the angst of the fugue’s painfully chromatic subject (Example 8a),
which Bach has coupled with a most dismal counter subject of the

"Ledbetter, Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier: The 48 Preludes and Fugues (New Haven: Yale
2002), 228, 332.
12Example 4 is the elaboration o f a contrapuntal complex that is reducible to the
solid- and dotted-line segments of its top left. Applying the solid-line excerpt to
Bach’s setting o f gefangen in the St. Matthew Passion (Example 5a), we discover not
merely the counterpoint of five years before, but the retention o f its very white-note
pitch classes. The b-minor fugue o f 1742 (Example 5b) maintains, as in the St.
Matthew, the counterpoint remarkably intact. The diagonal segments o f Example 4 are
analogous, either by repetition or by double counterpoint at the octave. The net
structure is therefore chiastic, a relationship reinforced by its diagonally paired
voicings for STB and SAB respectively. The most intriguing aspect o f the example
is that one can hear double counterpoint at all, for its inverting voices are identical
as to both contour and rhythm. In point of fact, the contrapuntal technique is that
of canon at the fifth. That we perceive a contrapuntal inversion hinges upon the
“capture” of one contour by different scale-steps in the key (hence the solmization
syllables of Example 4). In other words, it is not contrasting melodies, but
contrasting modalities of the same melody, that have been bound to each another in
double counterpoint.
F o ur WTC F ugues as P assion M usic 53
cnos
 F o ur WTC F ugues as P assion M usic 55

descending pentachord. To Burney, the b-minor fugue might have

represented the oddest of the odd— as an eccentric blend o f motivos as
ever there was.

But let us return to our story, as five years later Bach had the
impulse to quote this lovely music at the very moment, in St. Mat­
thew’s Gospel, when Jesus would be put into chains (Example 5a).
The operative word (gefangeti) means “captured.” At this dramatic
point Prof. Burney would again, no doubt, have found it odd, Bach’s
choice to quote neither the chromatic subject nor dismal counter
subject of the b-minor fugue, but its serene episodic material.
Admittedly, the up-tempo o f this quotation has effected a rather
dramatic transformation o f mood. By no stretch o f the imagination
could one apply the word “serene.” Yet somehow Bach has managed
to retain the compassion and tenderness. Herein lies the brilliance of
the quotation: mid the ruckus o f the choir’s haltets and bindet nicbts, the
soprano and alto recall Gethsemane justly, as the garden it should have
been, and the unjustness o f Jesus’ arrest is thereby amplified.

Yet the story continues. Fifteen years later we see Bach putting
the finishing touches on a second cycle o f preludes and fugues. Hard
at work on the last fugue, he is determined now to dance. Reaching
into his tool bag o f musical memories and techniques over the years
threaded for its quick reclamation of ideas, the composer determines
once more to exploit thzgefangen complex (Example 5b). To appreci­
ate the similarity of these excerpts, compare Examples 4 and 5.

Before commenting on the implications o f this, let us attempt to

cement a theory of relationship between b-minor fugues by highlight­
ing the “j2 ui tollis contour” to which we have referred (Example 6).
This melody is presaged in David Ledbetter’s discussion o f Langloz’s
influence upon Bach in general, and the b-minor fugues o f the WTC
in particular. Although Langloz’s work predates Bach’s Mass in B
Minor by two decades, one might be forgiven for having lapsed into
the habit o f calling the parenthesized passage o f Example 6a the “Qut
tollis contour.” In the Mass, both the triad and sixth are minor,
56 Bac h

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 F o u r W TC F ugues as P assion M usic 57

although one might tentatively posit connection to the St. Matthew’s

agonizing “Eli, E li” where both are major (Example 6b).13

This is all very interesting of course, but it has nothing to do with

our thesis until we’ve observed that three fugues in The Well-Tempered
Clavier also employ the Qui tollis contour. N ot surprisingly, these
include both o f the fugues in b minor, as well as the f-sharp minor of
Book II with its borrowed obligo from the c-sharp minor o f Book I.
Obviously, this could all be grand coincidence. Obversely, relation­
ships like these are many times purposeful, therefore possessed of a
particular sort o f meaning— the direction that we must now explore.
Our theory being one o f influence between Bach’s passion music and
The Well-Tempered Clavier, one must begin to suspect that the signifiers
o f chiasmus, chromaticism, the Q ui tollis contour, and authorial
inclusion, when observed in ample proportion to each other, may be
taken to indicate Bach’s intentional reference to Christ’s passion as
testimony of his own.14

In voicing the word “intention,” the present author is o f course

well aware that he has touched the third rail o f musicological
discourse, in consequence o f which there may be those who will
dismiss the idea out o f hand. To the skeptic he can but offer, in reply,
Laurence Dreyfus’s cogent rebuttal o f the intentional fallacy in The

’’Langloz’s coupling of this gesture with a lament confirms the passionate subtext,
although neither motif is intrinsically the property' o f passion music perse. Each idea
alone could well exemplify Baroque affectation at its finest, and together they strike
precisely the right mood. If for no other reason than that Bach used the former to
set the clause, “who takes away the sins o f the world,” and the latter in the Crucifixus,
then portions of the Mass in B Minor are germane to this article.
14In addition to the practical matter o f augmenting the liturgical repertoire, Bach’s
compositional purpose was to glorify God. This outlook is represented in two
sources. First, in his repeated dictation to his pupils, from Friedrich Erhard Niedt’s
Musikalische Handleitung (1706): “The aim and final reason, as of all music, so of the
thorough bass should be none else but the Gory o f God and the recreation of the
mind. Where this is not observed, there will be no real music but only a devilish
hubbub” (The New Bach Reader, 17). The second source is the Symbolum canon (BWV
1077) where the composer wrote: Domino Possessori hisce notulis commendare se volebatJ.
S. Bach (“By means o f these notes J. S. Bach wanted to please God”), supra footnote
5.
58 Bach

Cambridge Companion to Bach}' In short, Dreyfus reminds us that the

underlying assumption of all music scholarship, particularly music
theory, is that things are the way they are for a reason, and that
attempts to tell those reasons are efforts, equally, to tell the com­
poser’s intentions. Secondly, it must be very clear by now that our
conjecture has nothing to do with that type of pseudo-critical inquiry
that commends a work o f art upon the basis of criteria that the artist
has himself devised. 16 The premise is, rather, that Bach’s perennial
self-quotations can have the effect, upon the hearer, o f binding certain
works to each other. The claim is, further, that Bach was keenly aware
o f this power, and used it to great effect. The common denominator
between Bach, his music, and us, is the motivo with its marvelous
power o f affectation.

Which returns us to Burney and his problem o f the “unnatural

m o tiv o In Bach it seems inevitable that all avenues o f coming to
terms with the motivo do indeed lead to the motive— not the musical
one but the composer’s. It goes without saying that the recommenda­
tion is one o f cognisance here, and not credulity, as the matter of course.
Discerning the purpose of many composers, if not impossible, is at
least tricky. But for Bach it is not all that difficult, really. Historically,
we have the pertinent artifacts, and the tools to interpret them.' The
primary evidence for a relationship between b-minor fugues o f Fhe
Well-Tempered Clavier is musically motivic. By contrast, the primary
evidence for a relationship between said fugues and Christ’s passion
is authorially motivic. In support of this interpretation, we have
considered Bach’s self-quotations from the earlier c-sharp minor and

15Laurence Dreyfus, “Bachian invention and its mechanisms,” The Cambridge

Companion to Bach, ed. John Butt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 171
ff.
10Daniel Melamed writes that “a work of art means what it means, not what its
creator says it does.” This observation, while true, is of little help in determining what
the work actually means. O n the other hand, Daniel Melamed’s research on Bach’s
Passions is enormously helpful. Melamed would no doubt agree that we are at least
curious about the creator’s ideas about meaning, for what is the artwork itself if not
its creator’s idea? Too, there is the possibility that the critic and composer may
actually agree. This being the case, we’ve no recourse but to affirm the meaningful
existence, though not necessarily the authority, o f any authorial claim. (See Melamed,
Hearing Bach's Passions [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005], 132.)
1 See footnotes 5 and 14.
 F our WTC F ugues as P assion M usic 59

b-minor fugues of the WTC I, to which the St. Matthew Passion added
the words “kreuzigen” and “gefangen,” and to which Bach added the
melody of his name. In short, the entire aforementioned appear to be
connected to each other, and to Christ’s passion, by signifiers both
musical and authorial. These signifiers integrate marked instances of
chiasmus, chromaticism, xheQuitollis contour, and authorial inclusion.

We shall return to this thought before long. But first, now seems
the right moment to address a knotty problem that our premise, if to
be plausible, must engage. The problem is that the b-minor fugues of
the The Well-Tempered Clavier are of singular contrast in style and affect,
with the earlier work commonly acknowledged to be passion music,
but the later comprising its contradiction. When conjoined with
Christ’s suffering, the latter is, to borrow Burney’s turn of phrase, an
“unnatural motivo.” The reason? It is a lively and joyful dance. Unable
to reconcile the gravitas of the 1722 work with its jovial counterpart
of 1742, most commentators are content to write off the latter as
parody. The parody comes to mind because suffering is, on the face
of it, irreconcilable with the optimism of Bach’s farewell fugue to The
Well-Tempered Clavier. This is a serious problem. What are we to make
of Bach’s apparent association of Jesus’ arrest with the steps of a
passepied? Is this really passion music, or simply that species of
creativity sometimes exercised, like God’s creation of the whale, for
the mere sport?

One solution is to hear the b-minor fugues, both the tragic and
comic (if one might put it that way), as being related by Aristotle’s
rhetoric of the specific topos, an application of which is to reveal a
relationship by means of antithesis. While the b-minor fugues dwell
at opposite ends of the style spectrum to be sure, they share tonic and
mode, contoured outline of their subjects, and noteworthy instances
of Bach’s name nonetheless. It seems plausible that such a contrived
likeness, in the face of such contradiction, may exist to point
elsewhere—that nexus of meanings transcendent of the music itself.
Theological in aim and intensely personal in method, Bach’s rhetoric
reveals not suffering per se, but the joy and hope that Christ’s suffering
achieves for the individual believer. From this perspective it becomes
possible to reconcile the passepied with Christ’s passion. Too, as Eric
Chafe has shown, there exists within Lutheranism a plausible account
60 Bach

of such paradoxal an account that finds corroboration in proto-

Kandan thought—those apparent contradictions that occur in spheres
where phenomena and noumena intersect. This is, however,
epistemological territory that we should be happy to leave to the
philosophers and theologians, but not without first having acknowl­
edged the following insight from John Butt:

This is particularly evident in Bach’s very Lutheran tendency to

provide cheerful, dance-like music for the believer’s acceptance o f
death; quite often he employs the m ost patently secular music at
this juncture as if to suggest that the impulse for worldly joy can be
redirected towards heavenly joy. In a real sense, then, b oth the
rhetorical texted works and the m ost abstract polyphony o f the late
works dem onstrate a distillation o f the one eternal em otion, “the
intellectual love o f G od.” 19

If one recognizes here the rationalistic philosophy of Wolff,

Leibniz, and Spinoza, it is no doubt because Bach was familiar with
the concept of loving God with his whole mind. Spinoza’s “intellec­
tual love of God” is therefore apropos, and finds expression in the
intellectual forms of art to which Bach is so famously held to account.
That said, what the Lutherans maintained as a confessional proposi­
tion, and the rationalists did not, was the helplessness, the needful­
ness, and the unnaturalness of the human experience apart from God.
Above all, the human person needs both to give and receive
empathy—the spiritual wellspring of all artistic passion. In addition,
therefore, to the intellectual love of God, Bach’s passion music
reminded the faithful of the command to love God with all of one’s
heart and soul and strength. It is this command that required of the
Church Year a Holy Week in dramatic summation of every other
week. It is this function that required passion music, as a form, to
convict the individual mind by appeal to the heart. The object, in turn,
of turning the mind was to resolve the will, which speaks to the
problem of individual strength. O f that word, “individual,” need we

"TonalAllegory in the VocalMusic of]. S. Bach (Berkeley: University of California Press,

1991), 15. Chafe likens the allegorical canons of Bach’s oeuvre with Lutheran paradoxa
noting that they are rooted in antithesis.
I9“‘A Mind unconscious that it is calculating’? Bach and the rationalist philosophy of
Wolff, Leibniz and Spinoza,” in The Cambridge Companion to Bach, ed. John Butt
(Cambridge University Press, 1997), 71.
 F o u r W TC F ugues as P assion M usic 61

say more? Indeed we must, for the habit o f any artist, from Cranach
to Warhol, of including himself in the work o f art presumes an
unusual state o f mind. The argument requires us, therefore, to
consider Bach’s own frame o f mind at a particular moment in the St.
Matthew Passion, a moment that will be identified in due course, as well
as its relationship to the fugues o f The Well-Tempered Clavier. In order
to make the point, however, it will first be necessary to devote three
paragraphs to the religious context of Bach’s Leipzig.

To the Leipziger o f 1727, suffering with Jesus in his hour o f pain

was motivated, in large measure, by the hope that this same Jesu would
“help” in the pain o f one’s own hour, a thread that is tighdy woven
throughout the fabric of Bach’s liturgical oeuvre. O f singular impor­
tance here is the actuality and worth o f the individual human being—
for whose crime was it that Jesus suffered if not that o f the middle-
aged grocer in the third row, fourth from the left center aisle o f the
Thomaskirche in the Vesper’s service o f Good Friday, 1727? And
whose death did that grocer most dread but his own? Liturgically, of
course, it is true that Good Friday was a corporate observance and
rite. But at its heart was the need o f individual Christians to identify
with their crucified Lord.211The corporate exercise was therefore both
directed toward, and contingent upon, personal devotion, with each
intensifying the other. As to the individual, the most requisite need
that was attended to in the recitation o f Jesus’ suffering belonged to
persons who could be repulsed by the cruelty that people inflict upon
other people, and who required periodic reminding that they them­
selves had meted out the malice that they themselves endured. Jesus’
passion belonged to those who could feel another’s anguish to the
point o f bleeding, crying, and dying to that secret impulse to hurt
another human being. In short, the purpose of Passion Week was to
commend compassion. From the post-Christian point of view, all of
this is well and good— for some, no doubt, enough dogma to attach
to such a religious work as the St. Matthew Passion.

■'"Where the Line was to be drawn between corporate and private devotion lay at the
heart of the Lutheran debate that would exact its pound of flesh during Bach’s
Miihlhausen appointment, hounding him even to Leipzig. Vestiges of the Orthodox
vs. Pietistic controversy continue among Lutherans today.
62 Bach

But to those with the wont o f exploring Bach’s passion music

more Christianly, it would be to discover nobody with capacity enough,
nobody with firm enough resolve, nobody with enough strength to walk
the Via Dolorosa to its painful summit. Nobody, that is, but “Jesum
von Nazareth.” The Lutherans believed that perfect empathy required
compassion o f the sort that only God could give— hence the
incarnation o f God to suffer cruelty at the hand of his own creation.
Hence too the high point o f the St. Matthew Passion where Peter, after
parading his perfect intentions, found himself incapable o f loyalty
even to the good things that he had resolved. His inability to empa­
thize, perfecdy, was perfected in receiving that which he had found
himself unable to extend in return.

Regardless then o f one’s point of view, this was a good and moral
drama. The liturgies o f Jesus’ suffering represented the acts o f the
people, individuals in concert with each other, not the cold creed of
class, guild, confederation, holy office, parish, or diocese. The last
twenty-four hours of Jesus’ life required, in consequence, a music that
was highly personal, emotive, kind, and supremely conscious o f one’s
weakness and offense, failings, transgressions, selfishness, vile
intentions, nakedness, and vulnerability in the face o f death. To the
Lutheran o f Bach’s day, Christ’s passion surely demanded, above all,
a music that was universal— for every Leipziger, that is, who had ever
sinned or who would ever die.

The polemic o f the preceding paragraphs will have served its

purpose if the point has been made that even the composer could claim
no artist’s right to be above the fray. While it is tempting to say that
aesthetics could not be allowed to trump “the holy,” in Bach’s manner
o f thought it seems obvious that the liturgy was wholly aesthetic and
that no distinction could be made between metaphysics and aesthetics
as fixed in a drama with no authors— only actors. If Holy Week was
for the individual, then it was for the individual composer no less, and
for whom the creation o f passion music could not seem to have been
dispassionately begun. This was music that demanded the alignment
and convergence of passions— that of the composer, the choir, the
congregant, and Christ— only after which could it be observed,
rightly, as corporate.
 F o u r W TC F ugues as P assion M usic 63

A poignant expression o f this convergence is heard in the bass

aria, “Gerne will ich mich bequemen” o f the St. Matthew Passion
(Example 7). Here, six times in musical tones, Bach has spelled his
name, with the words demanding the approach— “I will gladly submit
myself to take up the cross and cup, since I drink as my Savior did.”
The question here is, to whom does the personal pronoun “I” refer?
In applying the musical symbol for his name to the word “cross” (an
“unnatural motivo” o f the first order)21 the composer has stipulated
that “I” am Johann Sebastian Bach.

(a ) Vn. m m . 5 - 6 (b ) Vn. m m . 1 7 -1 8 ( c ) Vn. m m . 4 1 -4 2 (d ) Vn. mm. 6 5 - 6 6

K reuz und Be - [c h e r] K reuz und Be - [c h e r]

Exam ple 7. 1727— St. Matthew Passion, “G erne will ich mich
bequem en” (23): chiasmus and authorial inclusion.

The practice of painting himself into the picture is one o f the least
understood facets, and most misunderstood, in Bach. As unambigu­
ous in manner as the foregoing example might be, we sometimes find
it difficult to apprehend Bach’s gesture as the abasement of self. It
may be that your experience has been like that o f the present author,
with most people interpreting the b-a-c-h motivo, in the heady A r t of
Fugue for example, as full o f pride. Perhaps the idea o f a penitent and
broken Bach is too personal and passionate a thought— one that
requires o f us, like the pedestrian who has spied the beggar on the
corner, either to drop his humble farthing into the hat or to avert his
eyes and cross the street. If the token is indeed one o f humility, then
how could it be otherwise in works of such presumptively non-
liturgical provenance as The Well-Tempered Clavier or the A r t of Fugue?
The argument closes then with the possibility that any self-reflexive

21In Bach’s hand copy, the Greek Chi (X) is substituted for the word “Kreuz.”
64 Ba c h

gesture in Bach necessarily denotes the alignment of passions that we

have observed. O f the The Well-Tempered Clavier fugues in this study,
three notable instances are found in the c-sharp minor of Book I
alone (Example Id), and six more in the b-minor fugues of both
volumes (Example 8).

Example 8. Authorial inclusions in the b-minor fugues, Well-

Tempered Clavier, (a) 1722, Book I, subject; (b) 1742, Book II,
chromatic episode.

Conclusion

Over the years of listening to Bach’s keyboard works, our

common experience has been to feel transported from the concert
hall to the prismatic and chandelier-strung palace, the privacy of the
parlor, the opera, the reverberant splendor of the cathedral, and even
to the shadow of the mighty fortress. Each of us has often wondered
why, in listening to variation 25 of the Goldberg Variations for example,
one feels like an eavesdropper on that private and passionate moment
of Peter’s “Erbarme dich.” In wordless works like these we have
experienced every idiom, form, and technique of the eighteenth
century, including the repertoire of Bach’s own passion— church
music. To our ears the impetus to easy distinction, the canard of the
sacred versus secular, has in consequence been blurred, and the
schooled boundaries made permeable. Whereas the tide of this essay
implies four “passion” works in The Well-Tempered Clavier, other
contenders would certainly include the d-sharp minor and b-flat
 F o u r W TC F ugues as P assion M usic 65

minor fugues o f both volumes— indeed even more fugues and genres
than we could now name. The four in question were chosen for their
effective presentiment o f “passion signifiers”— chiasmus, chromati­
cism, the Q td tollis contour, and authorial inclusion. Conveniently,
these four also exemplify Bach’s habit o f self-quotation— motivic cues
that have directed us, however tentatively, to the St. Matthew Passion.

While the connection may be, to our ears, tentative, to the

burgher o f Bach’s generation the experience o f hearing these fugues
would have been quite unlike our own. Because we understand them
to have been made for pedagogical reasons, our ears are tuned to hear
them that way. But Bach’s “congregation,” having stepped outside the
house of worship to become his “audience” or “student,” would not
have compartmentalized his music so. To summarize our most
obvious example, how could they have heard as anything other than
passion music the c-sharp minor fugue of The Well-Tempered Clavier I
with its cruciform subject in quotation o f the “Crucify him” fugues of
the St. Matthew Passion, and their collective allusion to the advent
chorale, “Nun komm, der Heiden Heiland?” Does not, even now, that
subject trigger a certain regress of memories and intertextual relation­
ships? Again, one is drawn to the observation o f Robin Leaver:

We are accustomed to hearing the Matthew Passion (and the John) in

isolation from the cantatas of the church year. This was not the
experience of the Leipzig churchgoers. The Passion undergirded
the weekly celebration of the Lord’s Supper, and also daily
individual and family devotions. What we see as a once a year
experience, was for them a daily experience. Thus in this daily
culture a connection between the Well-Tempered Clavier and the St
Matthew Passion would not appear surprising as it does to some in
the 21st century.22

Inevitably, given the furious acceleration o f Bach’s compositional

output o f the 1720s, incidences of self-quotation are bound to have
occurred, if o f no other cause than expedience or accident. The
foregoing examples suggest, however, that some of these were
anything but accidental. On occasion they seem rather to emanate
from the mind that circles around a “predominant attitude” or

^Leaver, e-mail correspondence with the author, May 6, 2009.

66 Bach

passion .23 As Leaver has consistently and eloquently reminded us,

Bach’s was an eschatological passion, centered upon the cross and the
spiritual benefit o f Eucharistic worship.24 Although the liturgical high
point o f this passion was Holy Week, Bach’s continual devotion to
carrying the cross for the sake o f the crown is evident in works
ostensibly so far removed from the liturgy of Holy Week as The Well-
Tempered Clavier from the Saint Matthew Passion. It is that intuition and
belief that suggests the possibility o f hearing “fugues without words.”

23The term “predominant attitude” comes from the symbolist poet, Paul Valery.
24Robin A. Leaver, “Eschatology, Theology and Music: Death and Beyond in Bach’s
Vocal Music,” Bach Studiesfrom Dublin, eds. Anne Leahy and Yo Tomita (Dublin: Four
Courts Press Ltd., 2004), 129—47.
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