Classical & Opera: Bach...the missing score

Published on Tuesday 4 August 2009 18:55

AMONG the odd assortment of Festival opera this year, no production is more curious than that billed as Johann Sebastian Bach's Actus tragicus. After all, the greatest ever Lutheran church composer never actually wrote an opera.

Closer inspection, however, reveals this to be a modern assemblage of six of Bach's sacred cantatas, fused together as a stage presentation by the late opera director Herbert Wernicke in 2000, now about to see life again in Staatsoper Stuttgart's 2006 restaging. The title is taken from the nickname attached to the composer's famous funeral cantata.

The idea has obvious novelty value. The common theme – approaching death – is viewed through the cross-section of an apartment block in which numerous individuals act out their lonely existences. But Actus tragicus – together with a connected, fortnight-long early-evening series of Bach Cantatas at Greyfriars Kirk, featuring a variety of international ensembles – does raise one of the most tantalising questions about Bach. Why did he never turn his genius to the opera stage?

Was he too busy fulfilling his church duties during the apogee of his career in Leipzig, where he was cantor of St Thomas's Church from 1723 to his death in 1750, and where he churned out new cantatas on a weekly basis, not to mention full-length Passions, the Mass in B minor and everything else the musically rich Lutheran liturgy demanded of him?

Such an assumption is too simplistic and misleading, argues Glasgow University music professor John Butt, a notable Bach scholar and, as artistic director of the Dunedin Consort, about to play an active part in the Festival's Greyfriars series.

A clue to Butt's reasoning lies in works such as the famous Coffee Cantata, one of more than 20 secularised cantata adaptations Bach wrote for performance in the ubiquitous coffee houses of 18th-century Leipzig. For besides his busy church duties, he was responsible for planning and directing the coffee-house concerts. "It's the missing side of his career, the dark side of the Moon," Butt explains. "There's a theory that Bach spent more hours of his working week on this secular activity than on his church activity." Yet it seems he was too busy actually administering the popular concerts to have time to create much original music for them. We know, for instance, that he included excerpts from Handel's operas in his programmes. But when it came to opportunities to create full-blown operas, was Bach simply in the wrong place at the wrong time? Records show that for any aspiring opera composer, Leipzig was the last place to be in the 1720s. The city's opera house had closed after a huge row between the theatre and the owners of the land it occupied. "By the time Bach came on the scene, the people were gagging for opera," says Butt. "The situation had left a huge gap for high-class Italianate music. A lot of what Bach was expected to do was seen as a substitute. In a sense, Bach's cantatas were designed to fill the operatic vacuum." And by that, strangely enough, Butt is referring to his church cantatas.

But could the dogmatic spiritualism of church music ever truly compensate for the lush vagaries of opera? Butt is convinced that the civic leaders knew exactly what they were doing when they appointed Bach. They could have picked Telemann, who was the safe favourite of the conservative lobby, but in the end, through some good fortune (Telemann tuned them down for a better offer), the progressives got their way and appointed Bach the modernist, knowing he would shake up the musical life of the largely Protestant city.

In doing so, Bach took a lead from opera, but not without recognising the deep sensitivities of the liturgy and the underlying philosophy of Lutheranism.

"As a Lutheran, the worst thing you could do was to die and not have your faith," Butt explains. "So it was the job of the preacher to ensure the weekly regeneration of that faith among those in the pews." Bach's cantatas were designed to reinforce that message. And there's little doubt that opera, which Bach knew well enough from his regular visits to nearby opera hot-spot Dresden, provided him with the tools to address that.

Just look at the typical make-up of a Bach cantata – a scene-setting Sinfonia (in other words, an Overture) followed by a stream of recitatives, da capo arias and choruses – not so much copies of your typical Handelian operatic sequence as astonishing foretastes of Mozart and Classical opera.

Indeed, there's a wonderful DVD of John Eliot Gardiner rehearsing Bach's Christmas cantata Christen, tzet diesen Tag with his superlative Monteverdi Choir and English Baroque Soloists (hear the same team in Bach and Handel at the Usher Hall on 3 September), in which he describes the final chorus in language more typical of a stage director.

"The music starts with a fanfare of trumpets, like Stadtspfeiffers announcing the election of a new Burgmeister in the Marktplatz," says Gardiner. "Then the chorus of woodwind and strings, crisp and scherzo-like, blow the dust off the wigs of the town council. Finally, after a kaleidoscope of colour and bustle of movement, the human multitude enters with words of exuberant joy." It could almost be the flamboyant opening crowd scene of a typical 19th-century bel canto opera. But it was written for the church.

There's a temptation to suggest that Bach essentially wrote opera for the church. Butt, whose latest book, Bach's Dialogue with Modernity, deals with new interpretational slants on Bach's Passions, offers a caveat to that argument in delightfully modern domestic terms. "Opera is like a vacuum cleaner, sucking the audience out of their seats and into its midst on the stage," says Butt. "Bach, in his cantatas, uses the tools of opera but reverses the cleaner mechanism and blows the experience out to the man in the pew."

Which begs the question: do we approach Actus tragicus – the opera – as something to escape into, or something to inhale for private contemplation? As a dramatised tapestry of Bach cantatas, the dichotomy is fascinating. And the unquestionable thrill of Bach's music might just make it work.

&#149 Actus tragicus is at the Edinburgh Festival Theatre, 4 & 5 September; Bach at Greyfriars runs from 20 August until 3 September.