THE TEARS OF BEAUTY, AND VICE VERSA

SOME THOUGHTS ON BACH’S ST MATTHEW PASSION

I listen to this every year on Good Friday, as do many Dutchmen; when I was 15 my parents took me to hear what at the time was the country’s finest performance, by the Bach Association, with the great Dutch baritone Laurens Bogtman as Christ – a role the associations of which so overwhelmed him that he spent months spiritually preparing himself for the performance. Since then, I have preferred the 1964 Stuttgart version now on the Decca Ovation label, directed by Karl Münchinger, with Elly Ameling (soprano), Marga Höffgen (alto), Fritz Wunderlich (tenor) and Tom Krause (bass), who are all magnificent, but the miracle of this version is Peter Pears as the Evangelist.

This year, following it as always with the German text and a (rather horrid) English translation, I was struck differently by the Christian Friedrich Henrici’s (“Picander”’s) German poetry. When I was young, the pietistic texts of the arias tended to revolt me, but now I understand them better and appreciate them more. Because there are in fact four levels of text, and thus of poetry, in the work: 1) the Evangelist, who recites the narrative; 2) the characters, who act out the drama; 3) the Chorus, who give an emotional but controlled reaction, moving but (because?) restrained; and 4) the “I” of the arias, who gives a distinctly unrestrained emotional reaction. The texts of this group are the ones most controversial and, I notice with amusement, rather bowdlerised in the English translation – not that they are obscene, but they have a quality very similar to the poetry of Crashaw: quite unashamed of what to the sophisticate appears bathos, joining the great cosmic emotions of the Passion to intimate and quotidian imagery. An example: in the alto aria “Können Tränen meiner Wangen”, reacting with total grief to the flagellation and binding of Jesus, the text says, “If my cheeks’ tears cannot accomplish anything, O take my heart as well! But let it also, at the floods, when the wounds gently bleed, be the sacrificial bowl.” Or, in the monumental and moving final chorale, “Wir setzen uns mit Tränen nieder”, it says “May your grave and tombstone be for the frightened conscience a comfortable pillow and a resting place for the soul: there the eyes fall most pleasantly asleep.” In my old age I find these effusions endearing rather than annoying, as I do Crashaw’s “The Weeper”, for instance.

Some of the choruses, on the other hand, are magnificently moving in their disciplined, economical German. The one that struck me this year was no. 55, “Befiehl du deine Wege”, which I will try and give here bilingually:

Befiehl du deine Wege               Entrust your ways
Und was dein Herze kränkt       And what pains your heart
Der allertreusten Pflege               To the very faithfullest care
Des der den Himmel lenkt;       Of him who directs the Heaven;
Der Wolken, Luft und Winden       He who to clouds, air and winds
Gibt Wege, Lauf und Bahn,       Gives roads, course and direction,
Der wird auch Wege finden       He will surely find ways also
Da dein Fuss gehen kann.       Where your foot can go.

One miraculous little economy German can give that English can’t: “Faithfullest care/Des der den Himmel lenkt” Long live inflected languages. To the care “des” – of him; “der” – who, “den” – the, accusative singular masculine, with “Himmel” heaven, and the verb goes at the end. It clicks together like a beautiful machine.

So – this Good Friday, a little plaudit for the much-maligned Picander (of whom I have not been able to find a likeness), ennobled by the immortal and not nearly always austere Johann Sebastian.

ODDLY LENT

Tenebrae: part of a Good Lent

In a longish lifetime I’ve found that I’m never original; so there must be others who have had a peculiar Lent with a shambolic ending. You know who you are. It’s mainly for you that I’m writing this, and of course for myself.

When one gets serious about one’s faith, or mainly so, one of the things one dreams about is a Good Lent. With a little real fasting, with lots of profound prayer, with charity and sharing: a shapely movement of the soul’s days from Ash Wednesday to Easter.  And then reality comes along.

Even when I was young and Lent was not much practiced – except for the St Matthew Passion on Good Friday, a Dutch tradition – I was always exercised about the fact that Christianity had chosen the most glorious time of year, full of bird-song, fields of flowers, trees in bloom, fresh green everywhere, the sap rising, for its gloomiest meditations. As a child and later a teenager I did not feel particularly sinful, so penitence was hardly a topical concept; I was sorry for what those people had done to Jesus, but when I was introduced to the great 17C Dutch poet Revius’s sonnet “’Twas not the Jews who crucified Thee, Jesu . . . ‘twas I, my Lord, ‘twas I did this to Thee”, my reaction was Well, no, it wasn’t.

When you get older you realise, first, that maybe it wasn’t but in the circumstances it might well have been: how do I know that had I been a believing Jew or a routine-bound Roman corporal in Jerusalem on that day I would have had the intelligence and  the courage to stand up against the crowd?

That, however, is not the point of the poem or the meditation it reflects. And as you go deeper into the faith we inherit you come to a new awareness: doing it to anyone is doing it to Him. OK, you and I have not crucified anyone lately, we’re not into torture and murder; but there are many ways of doing the dirty on others, and every one of them comes out of a bag of nails. Giving comfort to a grieving stranger or relative is comforting Him; withholding love from anyone is withholding it from Him.

As you look at your aging self in the mirror of hindsight, you see a decidedly unlovely Dorian Gray. So you acquire the dream of a Good Lent that will maybe, with some serious effort, make you ready for Easter. And then, as I said, reality sets in.

Reality provides us with all sorts of distractions, excuses, and daily messes that really muck up our Good Lent. And when Easter rolls around we know that we have not fasted enough, the theological or devotional texts we were going to read remained untouched beyond Chapter 3, our prayer has been subject to John Donne’s distractions even more than usual, we didn’t go and visit that old person in the next street or village we’d promised ourselves we’d see, we didn’t even go to church on Good Friday, our CD player was on the blink so the St Matthew Passion was out, we ended up feeding passing friends from far away, and here we are, supposedly meditating by the tomb in perfect silence like a Victorian painting of the mourning Marys, but in reality shopping for Easter food, hiding eggs, doing e-mail, and a hundred other unworthy things. What a mess.

And then there comes, at the moment when one does pray, a still small voice that says, “That Good Lent you so wanted to have, supposedly for Me – did it occur to you that that was entirely your idea, conceived by and for you? I do not necessarily want your Good Lent any more than I want smoking bulls’ meat on the altar: if you can look at your life and see the bits that really don’t go with my Father’s love, and if that view makes you miserable enough desperately to want Me, Us, to change it (because you now know that you can’t), then, little lad, you will have had a Lent that’s good enough for Me.” And you realise that you have been given a major lesson in humility. And you get ready for Easter’s celebration, with a rather tremulous joy in your heart. 

SPRING CLEANING?

The current Catholic guidelines for Lent emphasise its triple nature: fasting, prayer and sharing. I have never been good at fasting, perhaps because there was a famine in occupied Holland when I was 3. Giving up chocolate and similar tiny deprivations have always seemed jejune, yet one should do (without) something. The best Lenten fast I ever had was a few years ago when, recognising myself to be choleric in nature, I gave up anger: not only did it work but it was of genuine spiritual value. This Lent I’ve gradually given up Scotch whisky, though abandoning prejudices would have been even harder and much more valuable . . . .    

The Catholic texts I’ve read stress the fact that all three exercises, and Lent generally, are intended to clear our inner decks of the clutter that comes between us and God. This I sympathise with. Prayer, the second item, would appear at first to be a much more direct line to God than fasting; yet John Donne already noted in his Devotions how difficult silent prayer on one’s own can be. “I throw myself down in my chamber, and I call in and invite God and his angels thither, and when they are there, I neglect God and his angels, for the noise of a fly, for the rattling of a coach, for the whining of a door.” The mind’s capacity for distraction is so extensive that one wonders if it is not diabolical.

            As for sharing, enough envelopes from worthwhile charities turn up in my mailbox that an increased level of giving is easy; yet then one wonders if that ease itself is not a snare and delusion. Shouldn’t it be harder, less pleasant, more sacrificial? That depends, I conclude, on the purpose of the exercise. If the purpose is to torment oneself, as in flagellation, then indeed one should do something more painful or at least demanding, like working in a soup-kitchen or hospital visiting. If the purpose is to bring the greatest possible amount of help to many, significant giving to good and well-run charities probably accomplishes that better. If the underlying (Lenten) purpose is to bring one closer to God and His values, each such gift should perhaps be accompanied by a serious and prolonged meditation on the people it is helping.

            Can one wish people a “Happy Lent”? It seems like a contradiction in terms, or even a sarcasm. Yet spring cleaning a house, while tiring, is a joyful experience, as everyone who has tried it knows. If we see  Lent not as a gloomy penitence but as a spiritual spring cleaning before Easter, it takes on a different colour.

            But. 

            But, says an inward voice, what about the Cross? The recent CNN documentary on  Jesus used what looked to me like clips from Mel Gibson’s “The Passion of the Christ” to remind us of the sheer gory and humiliating horror of crucifixion. They were perhaps overdoing it: the expression on the Roman soldiers’ faces is likelier to have been one of bored distaste than the Gothic leers we saw on the screen. But it was a useful reminder that elegant crucifixes hide a damned unpleasant truth. Being nailed to two chunks of wood and left to die of choking was the execution method for rebellious slaves. In some way or other, we need to share in this, however great the distance.

            The prayer of the Angelus asks “that, as we have known the incarnation of thy son Jesus Christ by the message of an angel, so by his cross and passion we may be brought unto the glory of his resurrection.” Our cheerful spring cleaning metaphor breaks down on Good Friday. So what do we do?

            This, I think, is where prayer shows itself to be superior to all but the most extreme forms of fasting and almsgiving. For through prayer we can move to Galilee, to Jerusalem, even to Golgotha. Prayer, when supported by the twin pillars of reading and meditation, is the temple where we can share in the suffering, the silence, and finally the morning joy of Easter. It is the house of the Lord which we must first clear of its merchants, its money-changers, its ox and ass, its doves, its noise of fly and its rattling of coach; when we have done that, it is the house of the Lord into which, with the Psalmist, we can be full of joy to go.

            On Good Friday I try always to follow the old Dutch Protestant custom of listening to Bach’s St Matthew Passion. Doing this with real concentration is one of the finest ways I know of living that extraordinary day of pain, sacrifice and salvation. At its end, one is emptied of all emotion as the church’s tabernacle is empty of the host, and open as its door. I’ll try and write a little more about this in the days to come.