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MUSIC Bach to the future pandemic

Listening to one of the great composer’s cantatas, DAVID YEARSLEY is struck by how it resonates so acutely in the era of Covid

NEAR the beginning of one of the most concerted creative outpourings in the history of Western music, and still in the hearty haleness of mid-life, the 38-year-old Johann Sebastian Bach — one wife recently buried and several of the children by his new young wife soon to die — composed the cantata Es ist nicht Gesundes an meinem Leibe (There Is Nothing Healthy in My Body).

Devoted to human illness, spiritual and physical, in the time of pandemic, it is just one of dozens of Bach’s works that would nowadays require a trigger warning: “This cantata may contain unpleasant, unsettling, even disturbing material.”

The text of the opening chorus is overladen with guilt and self-loathing: “There is nothing healthy in the face of God’s threats and there is no peace in my bones from my sin.”

The cantata’s poetry is drawn from a collection published in 1720 by the Lutheran clergyman Johann Rambach, who also wrote a tract on Christ’s crucifixion, a thick bludgeon of a book owned by Bach’s second wife Anna Magdalena.

One of the greatest masters of Christian masochistic imagery before Mel Gibson’s Passion of Christ, Rambach loved to write about pain and suffering, all the better to advertise the joys awaiting the saved in heaven.

After rising up from its opening pitch that seems to anchor listeners to their own depravity, the bass line at the start of the cantata is dragged down through a figure that by Bach’s time had long been the musical signifier of death.

Up on the deck of this sinking ship, we hear heavy-burdened sighs from the orchestra. A still slower, more lugubrious version of this same figure is then emitted by the chorus — the mortal body bewailing its own ills in downcast song.

At dramatic moments in the course of this portentous musical discourse, Bach introduces a full texture of brass instruments playing the familiar tune of the Passion chorale, whose text would have been known to contemporary congregations: “My heart is filled with longing/To pass away in peace.”

From the tribulations of the earthly body, release comes only from escaping the world itself. This hymn shimmers as if from heaven and it is both harmonious with, and independent from, the tortured, serpentine counterpoint of the voices and other instruments.

A tenor recitative follows this chorus. Like 18th-century operas, Bach’s cantatas generally alternate movements devoted to the quick delivery of slabs of text — recitatives — with arias, more static reflections using shorter poetic units and involving a great deal of textual repetition.

In twisted, pain-wracked melodic contours and lashing chromatic harmonies, Bach lays out the central thesis of the work: “The whole world is a hospital, filled with countless people, even children in their cribs, stricken by illness.”

One person suffers the fever of lust, another stinks with pride, a third — and here, one thinks of the healthcare executives of our times —  is tossed into a premature grave by the consumption of avarice. The leprosy of sin devastates the limbs of all people.

“Who is my doctor?” asks the recitative rhetorically at its panicked conclusion.

The answer is voiced only late in the subsequent bass aria, in ecstatic arcs of soaring melody — all joyful hope in contrast to the pained introversion of the preceding recitative: “You are my doctor, Lord Jesus, only you know how to cure my soul.”

The sicknesses catalogued are both metaphorical and real. Sin is the cause of all suffering but Bach’s musical depictions of a host of maladies in the bass aria alone are so detailed and evocative that they must have made his infirm and often sickly congregations uncomfortably conscious of their bodies and all the diseases and discomforts that afflicted them.

Death lived among them, not in the care home for the elderly on the edge of town.

After the cry for help that opens this bass aria, “leprosy” and “boils” are depicted in twisting, repeated figures that capture both the immediate pain and the relentless progress of disease.

Later, ineffective “herbs” and “compresses” offer glimpsed hopes of comfort but these quickly give way again to pain and despair until the doctor Jesus makes his house call at the door of the soul.

Though composed before our antiseptic age, this aria offers an unforgettable evocation of the way the patient’s squirming and sweating in the waiting room gives way both to anticipation and to dread as the door opens on to the bright white of the examination room — except that during the pandemic the waiting room is most often your own ever-shrinking quarters, a real prison, or the street.

On the most obvious the level, the cantata relates the scorn for earthly existence harboured by millenarians and political quietists.

In a world of questionable medical procedures and menacing diseases that killed the malnourished and maltreated with even greater efficiency than Covid-19, the only hope is offered in heaven.

In that Bach’s gripping music captures the opposing forces of hope and futility so often felt by sick people, then as now, it offers a strange solace.

Even in its exacting representations of suffering, the cantata soothes, partly by looking beyond its immediate circumstances and sorrows, while at the same time wallowing in them.

One doesn’t have to be religious to recognise the weirdly ecstatic quality in the music and the complicated psychological state it represents.

Dependent on the body to be sung, played and heard, the cantata nonetheless strives to overcome the human condition, even if death is the only real cure.

Does the music succeed in healing itself? There may be nothing healthy in this music but it does not die.

As the goodly doctor Hippocrates reminds us: “Ars longa, vita brevis” — “Life is short, art eternal.”

This is an extract from a longer article by David Yearsley in Counterpunch, counterpunch.org. He can be reached at  [email protected].

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