J.S. Bach
O Lamm Gottes, unschuldig (BWV 618)
“Behold! The Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world!” (John 1:29)
The Bach you have just heard comes from his Orgelbüchlein (BWV 599-644), a collection of 46 organ chorales mostly composed between 1708 and 1717.[1] Originally intended as a chorale cycle of 164 pieces to cover the entire liturgical year, Bach only finished a third of the task. It is a setting of the text O Lamm Gottes, unschuldig written by Nicolaus Decius in 1531[2], one of six settings Bach wrote to the text.
O Lamm Gottes, unschuldig is an adapted translation of the Agnus Dei, extended with more vivid imagery, in particular the allusion to Christ’s Passion (it is for this reason that the text became used rather as a hymn for Passiontide). Like the Latin model, the Lamb of God is called thrice, twice asking for mercy and the third time asking for peace. The text, as in current German hymnals, alongside the Catherine Winkworth’s translation of 1863 goes:
|
O Lamm Gottes, unschuldig[3] Gieb uns dein Frieden, o Jesu. |
O Lamb of God, most stainless! Grant us Thy peace today, O Jesu! |
This specific text, with its allusions to the passion of Christ, reminds us of the importance of Christ’s title of ‘Lamb of God’.
In the Old Testament animal sacrifice is common-place; Leviticus tells us that when a priest performs a sacrifice, “Thus…[he] shall make atonement on your behalf for the sin you have committed, and you shall be forgiven”.[4] Hebrews tells us, “Indeed, under the law almost everything is purified with blood, and without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness of sins.”[5] Lambs were often the chosen sacrificial animal, their white coats being a symbol of both purity and cleanliness.
However the sort of sacrifice in the Old Testament is only enough as a temporary covering of sins; thus God sent his only son, like the lamb stainless and perfectly free from sin, to be the ultimate sacrifice for the forgiveness of all our sins. St. Paul, in his epistle to the Romans, summarises it, “For what the law was powerless to do because it was weakened by the flesh, God did by sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh to be a sin offering. And so he condemned sin in the flesh, in order that the righteous requirement of the law might be fully met in us, who do not live according to the flesh but according to the spirit.”[6]
The magnitude of this action is then expressed by St. Paul in his epistle to the Hebrews, where he says, “Therefore, my friends, since we have confidence to enter the sanctuary by the blood of Jesus, by the new and living way that he opened for us through the curtain (that is, through his flesh), and since we have a great priest over the house of God, let us approach with a true heart in full assurance of faith, with our hearts sprinkled clean from an evil conscience and our bodies washed with pure water.”[7] It is only through the events of Good Friday, where Jesus becomes the Paschal Lamb, that we can have a direct line to the Father and where the words of the epistle of James, “Draw near to God, and he will draw near to you”[8], are fully enabled.
It is down to the close association of the text O Lamm Gottes, unschuldig with Passiontide, and more specifically Good Friday, that Bach used it as the centerpiece of the massive first movement of the St. Matthew Passion, where he inscribes the melody in red ink in the autograph score.
Agnus Dei, 14C altar painting from Prague
Although in the Orgelbüchlein none of the lyrics to the chorales are preserved, the music is closely linked with the text. When applying for the post of the organist in Halle, Johann Gotthilf Ziegler (who was one of Bach’s students during his Weimar period) wrote to the town council: “As concerns the playing of chorales, I was instructed by my teacher, Capellmeister Bach, who is still living, not to play the songs merely offhand but according to the sense [Affect] of the words”.[9]
The role of the literary side of the Orgelbüchlein is a significant shift from the preceding tradition of organ chorale scoring – Bach is perfecting the organ chorale form by making the contrapuntal elements in his music a means of reflecting certain emotional aspects of the words.[10] This relationship between the text and the music only becomes more sophisticated over time, reflected by Bach’s use of specific musical figures for specific phrases. We see this in bars 12 and 13 of O Lamm Gottes, unschuldig where uncomfortable chromaticism occurs precisely at the word ‘verzangen’ (despair). It is of course important to have in mind that for an eighteenth-century Lutheran, with an intimate knowledge of the chorales and their texts that Bach is using, such a relationship between the words and the music would have been instantly recognisable and thus the result quite powerful.
Albert Schweitzer, in his monograph on Bach, distinguishes the mournful semi-quavers tied in twos at the start of O Lamm Gottes, unschuldig as a motif of ‘grief’, expressing ‘a noble complaint’, in what he identifies as Bach’s ‘musical vocabulary’ exemplified in the Orgelbüchlein.[11] Indeed the general ambience of O Lamm Gottes,unschuldig is one of sorrow that is clearly reflecting the Passion of Christ. Bach sets the chorale tune in strict canon at the fifth between the alto and tenor and even the accompanying voices are partially canonic. Having the melody always running in the middle of the texture illustrates Jesus’ human Incarnation, in the midst of us; the canon creates a strong image of ‘following’, for instance that the faithful are to follow in the example of Christ, or, from the chorale text “Our sins thou bearest for us”. This idea of ‘following’ is also found in Bach’s other Orgelbüchlein setting of the Agnus Dei text, Christe, du Lamm Gottes BWV 619, a canon at the twelfth between the tenor and soprano.
As is evident from Herr Ziegler’s letter to the Halle town council, Bach understands the importance of Affect for the listeners’ greater response to the lyrics of the chorale, in this case the great memory of the Passion of Christ. This follows Descartes’ mechanistic physiology, which assumes that a sound is an external element that can exert a rational and repetitive influence on human affects to evoke an emotional response. Athanasius Kircher, a major theoretician of Affects in music, maintained that dissonant intervals slow down life processes and hence induce sadness, while consonant intervals have the opposite effect. In his theory, musica pathetica, he says of the interval of a minor second: “Totius musicae anima semitonium est” (‘the semitone is soul of all music’)[12]. Johann Mattheson’s treatise, Das neu-eröffnete Orchestre, expands this theory, assigning emotional qualities not only to intervals but whole musical scales.[13]
Frederick Frostwick, April 2020
Footnotes
[1] R. Stinston, Bach: The Orgelbüchlein, New York & Oxford 1999
[2] J. Mearns, Rev., A Dictionary of Hymology: Setting forth the Origin and History of Christian Hymns of all Ages and Nations, ed. J. Julian, New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1908
[3] The comma differs in the current German hymnals: EG has it before unschuldig (innocently slaughtered), whilst GL has it afterwards (innocent lamb).
[4] Leviticus 4:35, NRSV
[5] Hebrews 9:22, NRSV
[6] Romans 8:3, NRSV
[7] Hebrews 10:19-22, NRSV
[8] James 4:8, NRSV
[9] English translation quoted from : The New Bach Reader…, pp. 336, no 340
[10] Ph. Spitta, Johann Sebastian Bach: His Work and Influence on the Music of Germany, transl. by C. Bell, J.A. Fuller Maitland, London 1899, vol. 1
[11] A. Schweitzer, J.S. Bach, transl. by E. Newman, New York 1966, vol. 2
[12] A. Kircher, Musurgia universalis sive ars magna consoni et dissoni, hg. von U. Scharlau, Hildesheim 1999 [1650]
[13] J. Mattheson, Das neu-eröffnete Orchestre, Hamburg 1713, pp. 231-253
[14] N. Losseff and J.R. Doctor, Silence, Music, Silent Music, Ashgate Publishing, Ltd., 2007
Bibliography
Górny, Rhetorics of Johann Sebastian Bach’s ‘Orgelbüchlein’: An introduction with a Case Study of BWV 614, transl. by Z. Wachocka, 2017
Remes, Textual illustration in J.S. Bach’s settings of ‘O Lamm Gottes, unschuldig’, 2015
Losseff and J.R. Doctor, Silence, Music, Silent Music, Ashgate Publishing, Ltd., 2007
Organduo.it
en.wikipedia.org
biblestudytools.com