Bachowskie nawiązania do chorału "Christ lag in Todesbanden"

Abstract

Bach’s Allusions to the Chorale ‘Christ lag in Todesbanden’ The last three decades of research into the music of J.S.Bach have been centred on his connection with Protestant theology, the influence of church tradition on his sacred music, the meaning of the doctrine of affections in his compositions, and finally on the rhetorical clue for opening our minds to discern the ‘revealed truth’ in cantatas, chorales, and passions, to name but a few. This approach, however, carries the risk of bringing one’s own vision into the analysis of his pieces to a degree that might prove uncalled for by the composer. To illustrate such ambiguities in rhetorical analyses I have chosen Bach’s allusions to the chorale ‘Christ lag in Todesbanden’. The cantor from Leipzig used references that reached beyond music, and even beyond simple mimetic devices, and led the listener towards deeper meaning and rhetoric principles of evenly laying the content throughout a piece of music. Thus, diverse arrangements of the title chorale have been analysed, including BWV 625, BWV 695 (with the version where chorale is contained in the pedal – BWV 695a) as well as BWV 718, and finally the popular cantata Christ lag in Todes Banden (BWV 4). The conclusions were rather obvious: Bach did not use the standard set of devices or formal solutions in order to represent the same words or concepts. Each time he approached them with masterly refined form that he individually applied. The skills of musical ‘elocutio’ fully blown in the cantata were only in a limited way used by Bach in his instrumental compositions, in which dependence of the formal construction (dispositio) on the general meaning of a religious text was decisively more significant than onomatopoeias. By principle, Bach also preferred hidden references.