Lutheranism, Anti-Judaism, and Bach's St. John Passion: With an Annotated Literal Translation of the Libretto

124 Pages·1998·5.66 MB·English

by  Michael Marissen

Lutheranism, Anti-Judaism,
and Bach's St. John Passion
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Lutheranism,
Anti-Judaism,
and Bach's
St. John Passion
WITH AN ANNOTATED LITERAL
TRANSLATION OF THE LIBRETTO
Michael Marissen
New York • Oxford
Oxford University Press
1998
Oxford University Press
Oxford New York
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Copyright © 1998 by Oxford University Press, Inc.
Published by Oxford University Press, Inc.
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Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means,
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without prior permission of Oxford University Press.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Marissen, Michael.
Lutheranism, anti-Judaism, and Bach's St. John Passion :
with an annotated literal translation of the libretto / Michael Marissen.
p. cm.
Includes discography, bibliographical references, and indexes.
ISBN 0-19-511471-X
1. Bach, Johann Sebastian, 1685-1750. Johannespassion.
2. Bible. N.T. John XVIII-XIX. German—Versions—Luther.
3. Jesus Christ—Passion—Role of Jews. 4. Lutheran Church—Relations—Judaism.
. Judaism—Relations—Lutheran Church. I. Bach, Johann Sebastian Bach, 1685-1750.
Johannespassion. Libretto. English & German. II. Title.
ML410.B13M26 1998
782.23—dc21 97-40060
35798642
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper
For Mary, Carl, andZoe
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Preface
This essay with annotated translation is designed for both general readers
and scholars. I hope to have met the scholarly requirements of publications
in history, musicology, and religion but have tried to write in such a way
that the discussion will be readily comprehensible to readers with little or no
background in any of these areas.
To accommodate those who do not read music, I have provided track
numbers and timings of musical examples from various compact-disc
recordings.
Full bibliographical titles are provided at the end in the list of Works
Cited. Scriptural quotations are from the Calov Bible Commentary. Read-
ers wishing to check citations need to know that versification and chapter
divisions are similar but not identical in various Bibles.
In undertaking this study I would like to think that I have been motivated
by what the motto of my graduate alma matter advocates, namely the search
for "truth to its innermost parts." Readers are perhaps entitled, however, to
know a little about my background experiences and what biases may stem
from them. I grew up in Canada in a community of post-World War II
Dutch Reformed immigrants, and studied music in the United States, first
at Calvin College, an institution of the conservative Christian Reformed
Church, and later at Brandeis University, a liberal secular Jewish institution.
Bach was a focus of my work at both places, and I have come to take a par-
ticular interest in how his music reflects and shapes culture, especially in its
religious aspects.
I understand that some people will be deeply suspicious of a Christian
Bach scholar, no matter how open-minded or broadly ecumenical. The
notion of the fully objective scholar, though, is a canard. And, moreover,
any discussion involving the topic of Jesus' death surely cannot hope to be
dispassionate. As Gerard Sloyan aptly puts it:
In scholarly explorations of the crucifixion of Jesus — as considered separately
from his resurrection by both religious believers and nonbelievers in it — it is
impossible to discover dispassion, either intellectually conceived or as it touches
the whole person. Too many claims have been made for this death, too many
viii Preface
lives have been lost both in witness to its meaning and as a tragically misguided
conclusion from its meaning, for this dispassion to be possible.1
What I have striven for is thoroughness and honesty, all the while trying to
watch out for what was expressed with such great wit in Laurence Sterne's
Tristram Shandy:
It is the nature of an hypothesis, when once a man has conceived it, that it
assimilates everything to itself as proper nourishment; and, from the first moment
of your begetting it, it generally grows the stronger by everything you see, hear,
read, or understand. — This is of great use.2
I have not attempted to come up with what would result if a Lutheran, a
Jew, an atheist, and an aesthete were imprisoned in the Music Division of
the Library of Congress and given only bread and water until they reached a
consensus on Bach.
I agree with those who contend that all scholarship is advocacy of some
sort or another. Let me state up front what the principal concerns and
assumptions of my "agenda" are: Music not only reflects but also forms
culture. Great art lives on not because it is timeless but because it remains
timely. Sometimes "purely" musical explanations may be inadequate for
formally unconventional pieces — one should not just assume that matters
of religion or religiosity in music are extramusical. Moreover, music has
such wide appeal that discussion of challenging musical works may provide
one of the best focal points for meaningful dialogue on the various sorts of
issues raised by those works. (I am thinking primarily of dialogue among
religious believers with nonbelievers, and among Jews with Christians.)
That last point has been decisive for me in structuring this study. Concert
audiences of Bach's music, at least here in the United States, are remarkably
diverse. And even among the self-designated members of various groups, I
have found that there are astonishingly wide-ranging reactions to Bach's St.
John Passion. Letting others know one's strong reactions to this work is very
much on the rise, and some of the ensuing conversations have not been as
productive as they could be, in part, it seems to me, because they stem from
insensitivity and in part from weak knowledge of the work itself and its
contexts.3
At first it seemed that the most appropriate way to structure the present
discussion would be to follow the outline of a marvelous book title sug-
gested by one of my colleagues: John's Jews — Luther's John — Bach's Luther
— Our Bach. This would offer the considerable advantages of chronological
1. Sloyan, Crucifixion of Jems, 5.
2. Sterne, Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, vol. 2, chap. 19, par. 26.
3. Public reception of the work after Bach's death has tended until recently either not to
attend to religious issues at all or to engage only Luthcranism's more positive aspects.
Preface ix
movement and interpretive clarity. I decided against this progression, how-
ever, because I was concerned it might lend a false lucidity to the discussion.
Bach is, of course, the title's component that presumably most readers of
this study would want to call "ours." But for many readers there will also be
a significant sense of our John, not to mention our Luther; also, it seemed to
me that Bach's John was not necessarily identical to Luther's John. Risking
incoherence, I decided to discuss first Bach's Luther-and-John, then Luther's
Jews, then Bach's Luther-and-Jews, and finally our Bach with "our"John; ref-
erences to John's Jews appear mostly only in footnotes in the libretto trans-
lation.
Some readers may wonder why this study bothers to cite historical biblical
criticism at all. If Bach essentially predates such interests, one might think
such research irrelevant to interpreting his music. Again, I believe Bach's
music is neither timeless nor trapped in its own epoch. Bach's music lives
on in part because it is able to speak to our contemporary needs and diverse
interests. The results of historical biblical research are only beginning to
reach the general public. I concluded that reporting on some aspects would
clarify interpretation of Bach's music, and I assumed it would be worth-
while to show that the results of responsible interpretation of Bach's music
are neither so far from nor so close to the historical Jesus as many readers
might expect.
Most of today's listeners pay no attention to the libretto of Bach's St. John
Passion, in large part because they uncritically assume that notes, tone col-
ors, and rhythms are all that really matter. When people do turn attention
to the words, faulty knowledge can at times become a serious problem. For
example, some students with no knowledge of German have actually
opposed involvement with the St. John Passion on the grounds that it con-
tinually repeats the charge, "die, Jews!" (The text reads die Jiiden, pro-
nounced "dee YUden," which actually means "the Jews.") More dis-
turbingly, I have encountered remarkably strong resistance to the idea that
Bach's music even might be associated with antisemitism. Several musicians
have made remarks such as, "What is it with Jews anyway? The whole point
of great music is that it transcends anything you can put into words." I have
also heard Christian listeners say things like, "What they don't understand
is that Good Friday [the liturgical occasion for which the St. John Passion
was originally conceived] is our Holocaust."
I believe education and dialogue provide our best options for combating
ignorance and insensitivity. I very much hope the present study will do
more good than harm in promoting further discussion of the various issues
raised by Bach's music.