That's what tops the little list I made for myself of points to include in writing program notes on J. S. Bach's cantata, "O Ewigkeit, du Donnerwort" (BWV 20). If the sound of Donnerwort is not enough to make your eyes pop open, be advised that it means "thunder word." The complete English title on the front of the Stuttgart Bach-Ausgaben score is "Eternity, thou thunderous word."
It's a chorale cantata, the first in the cycle of chorale cantatas Bach composed in his second year (1724) as Kantor in Leipzig. It's based on a 16-stanza hymn from the previous century by a poet and dramatist named Johann Rist. It's not a very good hymn. The sixteen stanzas were reduced to twelve when it was published in a later hymnbook, and that didn't improve it much. Verse after verse after verse (sigh) describe the torments of an eternity in hell. Only toward the end does the hymn writer warn you to take heed and shape up now so that you don't offend a righteous God and end up damned forever.
One senses that 18th century German Lutherans appreciated a good scare.
And where better to experience it than in church? There was no opera company in Leipzig in Bach's time, no regular theatre, only traveling troupes passing through during trade fairs.
Bach lets loose with the drama in this cantata. A full-on French overture (ba-da-DUM, da-da-DAH) accompanies the chorus singing the first stanza of the chorale. There's weeping and wailing in the bass section with an ascending arpeggio of minor seconds on the word Traurigkeit (sadness, troubles). Chromaticism everywhere. And some crazily expressive and deeply creepy arias and duets.
And oh! jolly good music for the bass soloist, including a wake-up call sounded first by a trumpet (a sliding trumpet in Bach's day) immediately after the sermon that was preached in the middle of the cantata (and was surely at least an hour long).
I'm lucky I never had to sit through this one as a child. I'd have been deeply shaken, perhaps scarred for life. I remember lying awake at night, at the age of seven or eight, contemplating eternity and scaring myself half to death. And I wasn't even thinking about an eternity in hell -- I was thinking about heaven. My father came upstairs to check that my sisters and I were asleep, and I confessed to him that I was not looking forward to going to heaven and endlessly singing hymns in an eternal church service. (When your father is a church organist, this is not an easy thing to share.) My good father said that Jesus loved me, that God loved me and whatever heaven was, it would be something I liked. I could go to sleep.
He was a good explainer, Herb Gotsch. And a good theologian, too.
We're singing BWV 20 in the Bach Cantata Vespers at Grace Church in River Forest on November 24, Christ the King Sunday, a day when there's a lot of power and awesomeness to contemplate, as well as a cross and whiffs of the trumpet sounding for the final judgment. These end of the church year Sundays are troubling, amplified by the chaotic times we live in and all the apocalyptic movie images we may carry in our minds.
(My late husband, movie aficionado Lon Grahnke, made me watch at least one Mad Max movie with Mel Gibson. We saw "Apocalypse Now" once in a midnight showing, sitting in the front row before a very big screen with Dolby Surround-Sound echoing off the walls.)
My official notes for the cantata service bulletin await a final edit from me, in which I may have to tone down the drama I've written into them. I've listened to several conductors' performances of the cantata, and they're astonishing for different reasons, but the one by John Eliot Gardiner raises hairs on the back of my neck.
(I'd link to a performance on YouTube. But I keep getting error messages when I try to go there. Will the Last Judgment kick off with YouTube going down?)
The original audience for BWV 20 heard the cantata on a June morning on the First Sunday After Trinity in 1724. I can't help wondering if it was, for them, perhaps the equivalent of a good summer horror movie, with the final impression being less about piety and more about dramatic catharsis. I don't know. I can't know--I'm almost three centuries away from their experience, and an additional 75 years away from the German landscape in which Johann Rist lived after the The Thirty Years War. Even Lutheranism has changed a bit in those centuries, and we have plenty of newer images of a hellish German landscape. Heck, plenty of hell in places here in America, too.
I had not meant to get so dark in this post.
Music, art, literature mediate the fear and terror of knowing that there are forces far bigger than us at work in the world. That time is an endless mystery not measured by clocks. That we must account for our lives win some way, at some point, if only to ourselves.
No wonder that we need a God who loves us. And people who remind us of that even in our darkest moments.
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| The Harrowing of Hell, depicted in the Petites Heures de Jean de Berry, 14th-century illuminated manuscript commissioned by John, Duke of Berry. |
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