Tag: Brocke's Passion

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Too Much Blood? Music and Mysticism in Handel’s Brockes Passion

Thelma Lovell

‘… the experience of the Holy: terror, bliss, and recognition of an absolute authority … the most thrilling and impressive combination of these elements occurs in sacrificial ritual: the shock of the deadly blow and flowing blood, the bodily and spiritual rapture of festive eating’ (Walter Burkert: Homo Necans)

Baroque is something of a catch-all term but if, as Willi Apel puts it, ecstasy and exuberance are two of its defining characteristics, then the Brockes Passion is a paradigm example of that cultural era. Yet while Handelians feast on the music (as they did during the Academy of Ancient Music’s recent superlative performance at the Barbican on Good Friday 2019) can the text be considered equally palatable to a modern sensibility? Does its undisguised fervour veer into melodrama, too crudely graphic to conform to our ideas of the spiritual?

We are so much more familiar with the deep ocean swell of Bach’s great structures in the St Matthew Passion as the ne plus ultra of sacred music. The comparison, however, is not between better or worse, but of which route to take to the heart of the religious mystery. Roughly speaking, Bach awes us from within to make us receptive to the Passion story. For Handel it is a more empirical process, from the concrete to the abstract; it is through insight into human agency and motivation that the deeper meaning filters through. Hence the Brockes re-telling was the ideal vehicle for such a natural dramatist – and it is worth remembering, as Ruth Smith observed in her fine article ‘Handel’s Brockes Passion: a Unique Composition’ in Handel News No.74 (January 2019), that the composer adhered closely to the instructions of his librettist.

If we flinch at parts of the Brockes Passion, then that is as it should be. Like it or not, we are willing voyeurs of, and thus in a sense participants in, a primeval sacrificial ritual that strengthens social bonds. An anthropologist – Durkheim comes to mind – would instantly recognise the choreographed interplay of tensions whose release can only come with the shedding of blood. This is the essence of the sacred, the mystery of mysteries that ensures divine protection for the community. The opening reference to disease that can only be cured by such means is a familiar theological trope, as for instance in Bach’s cantata 25 (Es ist nicht Gesundes an meinem Leibe), with its catalogue of suppurating horrors (at least Brockes is content with a boil or two). And then we are plunged straight into the Eucharist: the symbolic (or, for a Catholic, the actual) consuming of the victim’s flesh and blood.

This, in a nutshell, comprises the entire programme of the work. But its necessary expansion gives writer and composer much to do. For instance, there is the interplay of three layers of audience; we are watching the Daughter of Zion and the Believing Soul as they themselves watch and comment on the central events. The complex story is propelled onward with Baroque energy in a succession of distinct scenes and, most importantly, through Handel’s variety of mood and characterisation. Conflict, the motor of all drama, is everywhere. Peter’s battles with himself are a case in point: how better could we understand repentance and shame than through his three highly personal arias with their transition from militant bravado to vocal nakedness as he stands unarmed, and that final howl at the admission of defeat? There are powers beyond his control: the force majeure of the angry mob and, most painfully, his own inner limitations as he accepts that his courage has failed.

The panoply of arias for the Daughter of Zion and the Believing Soul – not especially long, but all full of concentrated emotional expression – present an ideal vehicle for Handel as painter of feeling. They embody the Christian collective torn by its own conflicted vision of the Passion: anger, disgust, pity and anguish are on display, but also a kind of horrified desire. The rite has to be fulfilled; in spite of the animal barbarity, the ending of the whole work is one of joy and relief. In the final aria all tears can – indeed must – be wiped away, for this one death brings salvation to all.

But what about the victim himself? He too is drawn into the irresistible nexus of sacrifice, though as a man he wishes desperately to avoid the physical agony. Here, Brockes and Handel jointly stage a scene thick with apprehension. We hear Christ’s juddering heartbeat as he begs his Father to spare him the fated ordeal. There is a particularly eloquent harmonic colouring (the deadness of the flattened supertonic) as he at last yields to the divine will; only thus will he too accede to divinity. The Daughter of Zion then interposes a commentary identifying the source of pollution that corrupts the community and can only be expunged by the death of Christ: it is the monster (Scheusal) of human sin.

Fast forward to the most psychologically difficult part of the Brockes Passion: the prolonged allusion to torture in music of sublime beauty – notably Dem Himmel gleicht and Die Rosen krönen. As Brockes emphasises the physical vulnerability of Christ, the mangling of the flesh, the blood, sweat and tears that brutality exacts, we may well wonder what all this has to do with spirituality. But that is precisely the point: the mystery of the sacred is heightened, not lessened, by the contrast between flesh and spirit. Belief in their reconciliation demands a correspondingly enormous investment of faith which, having once been made, is all the securer for the effort involved. But how is this to be achieved? The answer here is surely music as surrogate and enabler of the synaptic leap between logic and faith – a glimpse of aural heaven amidst the gore. In true Baroque fashion, Affekt is all-conquering, subjecting the evidence of reason to a different sort of power. Perhaps it is music itself that is sacred – benign or dangerous, depending on its uses, but undeniably a mystery.

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Playing in Tongues

Joseph Crouch

At pre-concert talks and post-concert Q&A sessions, period instrumentalists are often asked to explain the differences between a baroque and modern instrument. Answers normally focus on our relatively soft dynamic range, our darker resonance, the various challenges faced in playing instruments that lack later technological ‘advances’. While these observed variations are certainly true, they do not sound to me like compelling reasons to use our ‘period’ instruments, so I prefer to celebrate our clear advantages. First among these, for a string player, is that the combination of gut strings and a convex-curved bow gives us access to consonant sounds that steel strings and a modern bow find almost impossible to replicate. The modern bow is custom-designed to produce long, arcing, unbroken lines; it is the perfect tool for ‘painting’ sound, but it cannot match the eloquence of its baroque ancestor. So when – at a recent pre-performance discussion of Handel’s setting of the Brockes Passion – I was asked what impression the text made on me as an instrumentalist, it presented a rare opportunity. This is a slightly fuller version of my answer that day.

The question was posed in the context of a discussion about the text’s emotional content: highly wrought, often startlingly gory and deliberately disturbing. What is different about playing Brockes’s text in Handel’s setting compared to, say, an operatic story of royal intrigues, of heroism, love, lust and treachery? In terms of the emotional content of the texts the answer is, surprisingly, not much. In the end, although we might argue about the relative weight and significance of the stories, the emotions we are representing and evoking are rather similar; whether the librettist is Barthold Brockes or Nicola Haym, whether the story is religious or secular, the full range of human emotion is presented.

Furthermore, while instrumentalists as well as singers try to respond to Handel’s use of melodic, rhythmic and harmonic rhetorical devices, these devices are, in truth, often strikingly similar even when being used to depict very different characters and stories. Handel’s well-known penchant for recycling material – evident here in Sind meiner Seelen tiefe Wunden, re-used a few years later in Giulio Cesare as Cara Speme – means that the rhetorical tools used in the Tochter Zion aria immediately before the death of Christ are the same as those Handel employs to depict Sesto’s hope and anticipation of revenge. It is not easy for the cellist’s bow to delineate the differences between the hope for revenge and the hope for salvation! But that is not to say that we play the continuo lines for the two arias the same way; if the finer meanings of the text are difficult to explicate with the bow, then the linguistic sounds themselves are not. For an instrumentalist the difference between Cara Speme and Sind meine Seelen is not so much one of semantics but rather one of phonetics; the reason that the Passion is so different from Giulio Cesare is not only because of Barthold Brockes’s gospel paraphrases and highly poetic arias but simply because Brockes writes in German.

Singers work for years on clarity of diction, whether or not they are singing in their native tongue. In order to accompany them well, we instrumentalists should be prepared to do the same; playing parlante does not mean simply playing non-legato, but rather it involves creating musical phrases made up of words, syllables, vowels and consonants. The baroque string player’s right hand corresponds to the lips, teeth and tongue of the singer. The right arm, in turn, is analogous to the lungs and diaphragm. It follows that a string player’s inhalations are created by lifting the bow, which not only gives us a useful and visible way of physicalising the breath, but also reminds us that – just as the position and manner of intakes of breath are part of the singer’s rhetorical armoury – the lift of the bow should be just as carefully considered as its contact. Stopped consonants (d, b, t, k, etc.), glottals, and vocalised consonants (m, n, j, etc.) can all be concocted by the string player’s right hand; we can vary bow speed, bow angle, point of contact (distance from bridge), position and degree of exertion of fingers on the bow stick/hair, and the pronation of the wrist. A plosive ‘t’, for instance, is made with an angled wrist that allows the first finger to exert more force on the bow. The strength of the consonant depends partly on degree of pronation and exertion of the first finger and partly on the amount of time for which the air flow is restricted (i.e. the bow is still). The speed of bow at the point of release governs the strength of the plosive release; then, as the bow slows down and the right hand disengages, the syllable moves seamlessly from consonant to vowel. Because of the prevalence of plosive consonants in German (especially compared to Italian) it is easy to see the value for instrumentalists in learning to copy different vocal and linguistic articulations; by controlling the way the fingers of the right hand contact the bow stick and hair, and by treating speed of bow like the flow of air, we can make articulations of infinite variety that correspond not only to language generally but to specific languages.

Fricative consonants (the unvocalised sounds created by forcing air through a constricted channel) are an especially expressive feature of German: witness Judas’s onomatopoeically self-lacerating consonants in zerreißt mein Fleisch, zerquetscht die Knochen. These fricative sounds (z, sch, tsch, ch, zw, schw, etc.) are very hard to emulate with the bow, simply because – unlike the human voice – a string instrument cannot easily make long un-pitched, ‘a-musical’ sounds; our attempts in this area tend to mask or even obliterate the singers’ text rather than enhancing it. Here, it is much better that we match the length, colour and stress of the vowel sounds, leaving space for the singers to be clear and expressive with their consonants. The great challenge is to play in such a way as to leave space for the fricatives without allowing our own line to break, so that the instrumentalist’s syllables (i.e. bow strokes) can join together into words even though there might be silent space between them. For a singer, this is a question of making sure that the vowel is joined to the consonant sounds either side of it. For the bow, it is a question again of managing the bow speed (i.e. breath) and of keeping the bow on the string so as to articulate the sounds without breaking the line. In the Tochter Zion aria Sprichst du denn auf dies Verklagen, for example, the first word contains a short, bright vowel surrounded by two pairs of fricatives and plosives; the second word begins with a stop consonant connected to a long, dark and unstressed vowel; the third is dominated by a nasal consonant. Working out how to create these sounds with our bow is the constant game of playing in German. Of course it is also true of other languages, but the less percussive, more obviously linear musicality of the Italian language, and the predominance of the vowels as the carriers of expression, make the challenges and the techniques used rather different.

For singers the job of communicating text is overt, so the challenges faced in changing language are at least clear, if not easy. Baroque instrumentalists are, of course, well used to playing music in different languages too, but the lexicon we have traditionally used to describe our articulations (‘short’, ‘long’, ‘legato’, ‘staccato’, ‘accented’, ‘smooth’) are entirely insufficient to allow us to approach different languages in different ways. Once we accept the notion of replicating specific linguistic sounds, we can bring not only our accompaniments but also our purely instrumental music to life in a very different and more eloquent way. It was hearing Handel’s music – so familiar to me in Italian – with German texts that really brought this reality home, but the repercussions stretch beyond Handel, beyond operas and oratorios, and into concerti and dance suites and early symphonies too. In instrumental music we may lack the semantic specificity that spoken languages offer, but by employing the full variety of sounds borrowed from any and all languages we can play not only parlante, but sprechend, too.

Joseph Crouch is principal cellist of The English Concert and co-principal cellist of the Academy of Ancient Music. The new AAM recording of the Brockes Passion, the first to be based on all the available early sources, is to be published in October 2019.