This tag was created by James A. Brokaw II. The last update was by Elizabeth Budd.
Tilge, Höchster, meine Sünden BWV 1083 / BC B 26
Penance Service, 1746–1747
It was not until the middle of the twentieth century that the music world learned of the existence of a composition on Psalm 51 by Johann Sebastian Bach. The initial spark was provided by the publication in 1957 of a letter written by Karl Straube in 1946, four years before his death. At that time Straube was cantor emeritus of St. Thomas Church in Leipzig. The letter was to Hans-Georg Gadamer. In March 1946 Gadamer, then rector of the University of Leipzig, had delivered a talk in Straube’s place on Bach and Weimar in that city of the classicists. In his wide-ranging letter, Straube discussed Gadamer’s address:It is astonishing how the master altered the works of his professional contemporaries for his own purposes. . . . There is a remarkable arrangement of Pergolesi’s Stabat Mater preserved in the autograph, adapted for worship services in St. Thomas Church. First, in place of the early church sequence, he gave the Italian’s work a versified version of the 51st Psalm in the German language. . . . [H]e then altered the music for the voices, dissolving the large, sustained note values of the original in rich melismas to create intensifications that he considered necessary for interpretation of the German text. Finally, he altered the choruses, redesigning them according to the rules of double counterpoint with the ultimate goal of intensifying their effects.
Where Straube had gained his knowledge is not revealed in the letter to Gadamer. Today we are aware that the Bach autograph incidentally mentioned by Straube had already become known in the 1930s and that the New Bach Society (Neue Bachgesellschaft) had planned to publish it in 1940 as its annual gift to its membership. This tradition was interrupted by World War Two and its consequences, so that the important source would have to be discovered a second time. This occurred in several stages. In 1961 Emil Platen, later director of music at the University of Bonn, presented an analysis of the manuscript, found in the Berlin State Library, the result of several years of study.1 This was followed a year later by a practical edition prepared by Diethard Hellmann, then cantor and organist at the Christ Church in Mainz.2 While Hellmann had been prompted by Karl Straube’s letter to produce his edition, Platen had pursued his research while unaware of it and learned only after the fact of Straube’s “right of primogeniture,” so to speak. In any case, both publications faced a formidable obstacle that seemed insurmountable at first: the only thing available to them was a Particell, or short score, in the hand of Johann Sebastian Bach. This abbreviated sketch contained the choral parts, the basso continuo, and, here and there, hints as to the instrumental component. The way forward was provided by referring to the original, the Stabat Mater by Giovanni Battista Pergolesi, to fill out the reduction score. This was, of course, only a compromise solution, as became clear by 1968 at the latest. In that year Alfred Dürr discovered the original performance parts among anonymous manuscripts in the Berlin State Library and thereby uncovered many further revisions by Bach.3
The reason for the lengthy separation of the source materials from one another probably has to do with the inadequate way Bach himself labeled them. He occasionally marked his arrangements of works by other composers neither with his own name nor with that of the original composer. In this case, he titled his score reduction with Psalm 51. Motetto a due Voce, tre stromenti e Continuo; the performing parts, copied out by his student and later son-in-law Johann Christoph Altnickol, were marked only Psalm 51. Even so, it must have been known in the Bach family that this involved an arrangement of another composer’s work. The manuscript of the Pergolesi arrangement turned up at an auction of foreign compositions from the estate of C. P. E. Bach in 1789, but without the name of any composer.4 Both sources were acquired by the music collector Caspar Siegfried Gähler, mayor of Hamburg-Altona. In the early nineteenth century—still before they found their way to the Berlin State Library—the sources for 51. Psalm appear mostly in connection with the name Pergolesi. The identification was no great feat, since for several decades several other arrangements of the Stabat Mater had been in circulation; it was a frequently discussed work that could claim the status of a classic.
The biographical tradition leaves many questions open as to the genesis of Pergolesi’s original work. Supposedly, shortly before embarking on a journey to Rome, the deathly ill composer had received the commission from the Archconfraternity of the Knights of Our Lady of Sorrows of Naples to compose a Stabat Mater that would take the place of one by Alessandro Scarlatti and, like Scarlatti’s, be performed annually in March in the church of the brotherhood. Pergolesi is said to have accepted an advance of ten ducats and devoted himself to the work with the last of his strength, although the composer Francesco Feo, his close associate, repeatedly tried to dissuade him from doing so. Pergolesi is thought to have died immediately after completing the composition in Pozzuoli, his final home; the advance of ten ducats did not even cover his burial expenses.
The text for Pergolesi’s composition is the Stabat Mater sequence, a Latin poem originally for private devotion. Documented since the thirteenth century, it is grounded in the veneration of Mary, which had been growing since the fourth century. As a consequence of its individual character, it received official recognition very late, in 1727, when it was incorporated into the liturgy. The influence of medieval Minnedichtung, or poetry of courtly love, can be seen in the course of the twenty paired half strophes of three lines each. The Stabat Mater has been the subject of numerous translations, adaptations, and imitations—up to and including Gretchen’s prayer from Goethe’s Faust, “Ach neige, neige, du Ohnegleiche, dein Antlitz gnädig meiner Not!” (O Virgin Mother, thou who art full of sorrows, bow thy face in mercy to my anguish now!).5
The unidentified librettist working for Bach hews closely to the meter and rhyme scheme of the Latin text. We do not know at whose instigation he chose Psalm 51, one of the seven penitential psalms. His task was in no respect an easy one: to transfer a unified exemplar in a foreign language to German; to provide it with a new subject in the same strophic form; to follow the sequence of the psalm and, in doing so, find formulations that fit the existing music smoothly. All this was easily the equivalent of squaring the circle. In spite of all the librettist’s efforts, a regrouping at one place could not be avoided. The penultimate movement—properly speaking, the beginning portion of the final movement—had to change places with the preceding movement due to textual considerations. This resulted in a disruption of Pergolesi’s systematic key scheme; in addition, the closing “Amen” seemed too short. Bach’s version provides a remedy by having the “Amen” movement not only in F minor, as in the original, but also immediately afterward in F major.
The many other aspects of Bach’s arrangement can be mentioned here only cursorily. These involve the exchange of frequent sequences, repetitions of motives and pitches in the original replaced by phrases with differentiated melodies, newly created longer vocal lines, the replacement of unison or homophonic passages with polyphonic voice leading, and even a newly composed obbligato viola part that is handled in a concertante fashion. Syncopated rhythms in the style of the Neapolitan opera of the period are often moderated or concealed, intervallic leaps that are too expressive are broken up, and excessive demands on vocal virtuosity are cut back to a more manageable level. All measures taken by Bach are intended to bring a stylish work of church music with unambiguously operatic features closer, wherever possible, to the world of his own cantatas. Why he expended so much effort in his advanced years—perhaps 1746 or 1747—and to what use he put the rather ambivalent result: these questions remain unanswered to this day.
Footnotes
- Platen (1961).↵
- Hellmann (1963); Hellmann (1989).↵
- Dürr (1968).↵
- Leisinger (1991, 109, 116).↵
- Schulze here appears to have conflated Gretchen’s prayer at the shrine in the city wall in part 1 (lines 3587–89) with the scene in the mountain gorge in part 2 (lines 12069–71), perhaps in service of language that is easily apprehended aurally. The translation is drawn from the first of these, in Luke (1987, 114).—Trans.↵