Free Listen to This by Alex Ross Page A

“theme” is really a set of chords, framing limitless flux. (The copy reproduced on the previous page was probably made not long after Bach’s death.) Lament figures crop up throughout, sometimes plainly presented and sometimes hidden in the seams. A D-major middle section functions as a respite from the prevailing gloom of the piece, yet the apparition of a descending chromatic line high in the treble hints that these brighter days won’t last. Soon after, D minor returns, with a four-note lament motif planted firmly in the bass—the shade of “Fors seulement,” Lachrimae , and Lamento della ninfa.

    It would appear that Bach has gone beyond rituals of mourning to a solitary, existential agony. In the words of Susan McClary, “the lone violinist must both furnish the redundant ostinato and also fight tooth and nail against it.” For McClary, the chaconne has become a formal prison for the struggling self. But Bach hasn’t entirely forgotten the sway of the dance. Alexander Silbiger, in a revealing essay, draws attention to passages of “repeated strumming,” “rustling arpeggiations,” “sudden foot-stamping.” Often Bach tests the limits of his variation scheme and lands back in D minor with a precarious lunge: “Some of these ventures bring to mind a trapeze artist, who swings further and further, reaching safety only at the last instant and leaving his spectators gasping.” The violin’s more florid gestures also make Silbiger think of jazz artists and sitar players, who “create the illusion of taking momentary flight from the solid ground that supports their improvisations, to the occasional bewilderment of their fellow performers.” In the end, the Ciaccona might be a grave dance before the Lord, the ballet of the soul in the course of a life.
    In 1748 and 1749, the last full years of his earthly existence, Bach assembled his Mass in B Minor, rearranging extant works and writing new material in a quest for a comprehensive union of Catholic and Lutheran traditions. At the heart of the Mass is the section of the Credo that deals with the death of Jesus Christ on the cross:
    Crucifixus etiam pro nobis
He was also crucified for us
sub Pontio Pilato, passus
under Pontius Pilate, suffered,
et sepultus est.
and was buried.
    To find music for this text, Bach went back thirty-five years in his output, to the “Weinen, Klagen, Sorgen, Zagen” chorus, with its twelve somber soundings of a chromatic bass. But he stepped up the pulsation of the ground, so that instead of three half notes per bar we hear a faster, tenser rhythm of six quarter notes per bar. He changed the instrumentation, adding breathy flutes to tearful strings. He inserted a brief instrumental prelude, so that, as in Purcell, we first hear the bass line without the voices. Bach thus expanded the structure from twelve to thirteen parts. Whether he intended any symbolism in the number thirteen is unknown, although most of his listeners would have been aware that the Last Supper had thirteen guests. This is in Bach’s own hand:

    As in Didone and Dido and Aeneas, the chromatic pattern evokes an individual pinned down by fate. This time, the struggler is not a woman but a man, one who knows full well what fate has in store. Bach makes Jesus Christ seem pitiably human at the moment of his ultimate suffering, so that believers may confront more directly their own grief and guilt. (Martin Luther vilified the Jews, but he also preached that Christians should hold none but themselves responsible for Christ’s killing.) It is a quasi-operatic scene, although it is witnessed at a properly awed distance. The voices wend away from the bass, moving in various directions. There are slowly pulsing chords of strings on the first and third beats, flutes on the second and third: they suggest something dripping, perhaps blood from Christ’s wounds, or tears from the eyes of his followers. In the thirteenth iteration, the bass singers give up their contrary