The Bach Motets.

Singers in choirs or vocal ensembles who have had contact with these pieces come to live in awe of and respect for them, their complexity, the particular balance and lightness they demand, the extremes of communal vocal stamina and concentration, their density.  And yet, as with all of Bach’s music, humanity shines through that complexity, overcomes it – there is enough to occupy our minds for years, but our hearts are touched almost instantly.

As an ensemble whose singers perform from memory, internalising the motets of JS Bach represent a challenge of mountainous proportions.  But once we all stand on that peak, we don’t feel the toil in our vocal or mental ‘legs’, we are liberated by the perspective we have gained and the possibilities it reveals.  With only eight of us and most of the music one voice per part, each individual line requires full responsibility, bringing a madrigalian quality to these pieces that allows for intense personal expression within the communal thrust of the group.  At times, voices are at odds and can express a striking freedom and flexibility; at others, a torrent of energy pulls all of us in the same direction towards one of Bach’s great apotheoses.  Being able to act and react to his kaleidoscopic musical elements without the need for reference to a score makes us feel most alive as musical beings.

We were lucky to record these works in the inspiring and beautiful Bachkirche in Arnstadt, formerly the Neue Kirche which came to be named after its most famous organist, though he was little more than a teenager at the time.  Solomon’s Knot has a strong connection to Arnstadt through the wonderful Thüringer Bachwochen festival, and we have performed these works in concert there, as well as the Johannes-Passion and many other works.  Mercifully spared from Allied bombs, one can’t help but feel the Geist [spirit] of Arnstadt’s musical Bachs unser Schwachkeit aufhelfen [aiding us in our weakness], dominated as it is by historic and beautiful churches, not least the glorious 13th-century Oberkirche, where yet more Bachs held the post of organist.

Bernd Göbel’s wonderfully louche 1985 statue of the young JS Bach in the market square reminded us that, like most of us, Bach was young and awkward once, something which seems to come through in his motet, Lobet dem Herrn. Some scholars doubt this was penned by JSB, but who else could pull off such an audacious opening double fugue, or effervescent final Alleluia?  The infelicities of text underlay and occasionally foursquare harmonic movement suggest to me that the work could have been written as early as his Arnstadt years.  Its cleaner, four-voice texture certainly seemed to bounce off that wood and stone with a reassuring resonance.

How to approach and perform some of these pieces is a conundrum for us.  Lobet den Herrn may well not have been written for a funeral, but it’s joie de vivre is mirrored by a ‘joie de mourir’ in JS Bach’s other motets, which almost certainly were funereal.  Recent research by Meinolf Brüser suggests that Singet dem Herrn ein neues Lied, one of the most joyful pieces in the repertoire (save its central section), was written for the funeral of the first chorister appointed by Bach at the Thomasschule in Leipzig, a youth who had died while still at the school.  How are we to imagine that choir of boys and young men singing such life-affirming music in the face of such tragedy?  How are we to reconcile this in performance ourselves?

For me, we see here the pendant to the profound angst and mourning in so much of Bach’s other church music, expressing a Lutheran longing for release from the sins of the earthly life, a life where death was ever-present.  Johann Sebastian had lost a wife and three children by the age of 35.  If the world and its sin are to be shunned, then once death is obtained, it is the longed-for apotheosis, Es ist vollbracht!  That joyful, even light-hearted upward rush to heaven into the arms of the Lord is something to be truly celebrated.  And, like the motets of Johann Sebastian, not to be feared.  Fürchte dich nicht!