Bach’s Reflection on the Past

Abstract ONE OF THE QUALITIES WE ASSOCIATE most with Bach’s work in general is that which Theodor W. Adorno called his “genius of meditation”—that is, his ability to take something given, whether a chorale melody, a traditional form or style, or an instrumental idiom, texture, or device, and to think it through in a manner that is both mindful of tradition and transforming of its expressive capacity.1 Nowhere is this ability to link (Bukofzer might have said to “fuse”) past and present more evident than in Bach’s response to the Lutheran chorale tradition.2 Not content merely to cultivate the various chorale prelude types he inherited from his German forebears, Bach, as we know, reinterpreted those types, from the simplest chorale harmonizations to the most elaborately conceived chorale fantasias, in seemingly endless ways. With the aid of a unique harmonic sensibility—the quality Kirnberger seems to have meant in his calling Bach the “most sensitive of the newer composers”—Bach created settings of the utmost harmonic daring (such as the chorale “Es ist genung” that ends Cantata 60) as well as others in which subtlety is the key issue, especially with regard to the modal qualities of the melodies themselves.3 And an achievement that is insufficiently recognized in this regard is the extent to which Bach was capable not just of deriving highly individual harmonic qualities from the traditional chorale melodies but also of extending the tonal qualities of the melodies to the movement sequences of entire cantatas. The latter quality almost always involves his perceiving a link between the tonal characteristics of a given melody and the theological intent of its text and then elaborating that link in terms of the musico-allegorical design of the work as a whole. Although there are many chorales in which the matchup of text and melody offers little of interest, especially in the area of modal-tonal qualities, there are also many in which it offers a great deal to anyone with Bach’s sensitivity to detail.