Search - Johann Sebastian Bach, Konrad Junghanel :: Bach: Actus Tragicus

Life goes beyond death itself

Jacques COULARDEAU | OLLIERGUES France | 11/15/2006

(5 out of 5 stars)

"To evoke death, the fear we may feel in front of death, and yet the certainty death is a new beginning and not an end because it is Christ's death we are living through our own death, the BWV4 Cantata "Christ lay in the bonds of death" creates the depth of this double experience by systematically contrasting, verse after verse, one voice against the others, one voice against one other, and one voice against one instrument or all of them. Bach of course uses the form of the fugue to make each highlighted element run after the background element or elements in a never-ending and never-slowing-down chase. That is Bach's way to both celebrate and mock death, so much so that the cantata turns into a love song to death, a feast or a festival dedicated to death, the master of ceremony of life itself, the maitre d' of our souls. This final metaphor of Christ as a meal to feed our hungry souls is both cannibalistic and ambivalent between the nourishing mother and the castigating father, the two things you need to go along the way: good food and a forceful loving incitation. This is the most typical element of Bach's art: associating antagonistic elements and making them partners beyond their contradiction. The pipes opening the BWV106 Cantata "Actus Tragicus" or "God's time is the very best time" create a light and yet deep solemn background in which the voices can strut and take us on a rather contrasted dance that splices together the slow enjoyment of God's time, of our time when filled with God, and the more dynamic dance to celebrate that joy. And in this perspective death becomes the main lesson the teacher God can teach us to train us into wisdom and intelligence. Death then becomes a multifarious vocal experience and expression of life when it is guided in an orderly way by the wise vision of an end that balances our whole life into the new beginning this life of ours entitles us to have, or even maybe claim. And Paradise becomes a ladder of light, and singing angels, that we will forever climb without any effort, any tiredness, and in the full enjoyment of an enterprise turned pleasure, bliss. The bliss that resounds behind and within the effort that led us to this divine heaven of the mind in real life, or of the soul in death. The small BWV196 Cantata "The Lord Careth for Us" is a short moment of certitude and conviction that God is on our side, though there is a dramatic and tragic note in the aria since God is on the side of those who fear him. Satiety in both the support from God and our fear of God. The final BWV12 Cantata "Weeping, Lamenting, Worrying, Fearing" opens with a lamenting yet serene trumpet that sounds like enjoying its lamentation that crosses centuries and continents into the universal beauty of the certitude of a solace beyond and through our never ending lamenting celebration of God in the bread of tears that Jesus willed to us along with his blood. The whole cantata, words, music, voices, is the total and permanent alliance of all antagons of life and death, mind and soul. And I guess we all know the aria "Kreuz und Kronen sind verbunden", "Cross and Crown are bound together", and the so clearly triumphant and luminous trumpet that a nearly inaudible lengthening of a note or a silence turns into an ecstatic contemplation of the miracle of death and life. Quite a performance for the Cantus Cölln that renders Bach's music in his best attire, that of the certitude that God's beauty can only lie in the union of antagons and opposites. This conception goes as far as the deepest medieval centuries and the fathers of the Church, of Christianity, Saint Augustine and Saint Thomas Aquinas.



Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris Dauphine & University of Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne

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