There's More Religion Than You Think in Bach's 'Brandenburgs'

According to this view, Bach’s ideal appointment was his stint from 1717 to 1723 as Kapellmeister (director of music) for Prince Leopold of Anhalt-Köthen. Leopold’s court observed the Calvinist faith, a liturgically austere branch of Protestantism that prohibited elaborate music in its church services.

So here — unlike in his previous positions at the Lutheran court of Weimar and at Lutheran parishes in Arnstadt and Mühlhausen — Bach was freed from having to continually oblige the church. He could focus instead on “pure” instrumental music, like the “Brandenburg” Concertos, today’s holiday-season standbys.

But was that truly his goal? Listeners and scholars who speak of Bach’s works as “sacred” versus “secular” generally understand these terms to mean “religious” as opposed to “nonreligious.” Bach and most of his contemporaries, however, don’t seem to have understood sacred and secular to be mutually exclusive categories. The distinction they observed was between liturgical music (for the church service) and secular music (out in the world).

Secular and liturgical works were both religious: A central purpose of all serious-minded music, wherever performed, was to honor God. Consider Bach’s manuscripts for the Six Harpsichord Concertos (BWV 1052–57) and the church cantata “Now come, savior of the gentiles” (BWV 62), both of which open with his inscription “Jesus, help me” right before the first bar of music and close with “To God alone the glory” after the last bar.

Those today who view religion negatively sometimes go even further and view Bach’s church cantatas as essentially instrumental concertos, with the religious texts more or less extraneous. But historically informed interpretation suggests the opposite: Bach’s instrumental concertos, including the “Brandenburgs,” are essentially church cantatas with implicit (and therefore harder-to-read) “texts” that do have real meaning.

In the 1721 presentation manuscript that he dedicated (probably as a veiled job query) to “His Royal Highness: Monseigneur Christian Ludwig, Margrave of Brandenburg & So Forth,” Bach had called this collection “Six Concertos with Various Instruments.” The name “Brandenburg” Concertos was coined in the 19th century by the leading Bach biographer Philipp Spitta. (We can be grateful that Bach and Spitta were unaware that Ludwig’s true primary title was Margrave of Schwedt: The “Schwedt” Concertos doesn’t have much of a ring to it.)

Scholarly consensus now holds that Bach composed some of the “Brandenburg” Concertos during his Köthen tenure and others in his final years at Weimar. But although his aristocratic employers, had they known about it, might have disapproved of his formally dedicating any of “their” music to someone else, it hardly seems likely that in 1721 Bach could have drawn upon an untapped hoard of concertos.

So by all indications, the “Brandenburgs” would have been included in the weekly programs of the Köthen palace concerts, and these pieces do indeed line up well with Leopold’s documented interests. Remarkably, the prince’s investiture festivities, in 1716, had included not only a superabundance of concert offerings but also a scholarly oration exploring how musical order and societal order are analogous.

As it happens, each of the six “Brandenburgs” delves into issues of hierarchy and order. The Sixth is musically and socially the most unconventional of the set. Two violas, with cello, are pitted against two viols, with violone.

At the time, violas were customarily low-rent, undemanding orchestral instruments, while viols were high-end, virtuoso solo instruments. Bach reversed these roles, such that the violas perform virtuosic solo lines while the viols amble along in repeated eighth notes. Pursuing these two radical instrumental treatments within the same work was unprecedented (and wouldn’t be imitated).

It’s an excellent musical illustration of the time-honored theme of the “world upside down.” Visual examples include mice chasing cats; servants riding on horseback while noblemen have to go behind on foot; and peasants serving communion in the cathedral while priests sweep the adjacent streets.

These kinds of inversions play a significant part in Christian scripture, which frequently proclaims that with God the first shall be last while the last shall be first; the lowly shall be exalted while the exalted shall be brought low.

The function of the world-upside-down imagery in Bach’s Lutheranism, as in scripture, was not to foment earthly upheaval, but to inspire heavenly comfort: The hierarchies of this sinful world are a necessary injustice for the sake of order, but, in light of the equality that awaits the blessed in paradise, they are ephemeral.

A marvelous example of inverted imagery in Bach’s church cantatas is the fourth movement of “Whoever lets only the dear God rule” (BWV 93), where a soprano-alto duet gives voice to a hymn text by means of instrument-like countermelodies, while the violins and viola nonverbally intone the actual hymn tune. Voices and instruments, upside down.

All three movements of the Fourth “Brandenburg” feature a solo violin part that is continually overshadowed by a duo of lowly recorders. Today’s listeners revel in the violin’s isolated flurry of activity about three minutes into the first movement. The audiences at Leopold’s palace, however, would have heard this as an egregious breach of musical and social decorum. The violin’s rowdy flare-up occurs not within an episodic solo section, as it ought properly to have done, but interloping into the start of the group refrain, an elegant French court dance led by the pair of recorders.

A parallel example of a soloist’s hollow virtuosity fluttering atop an elegant dance-like group refrain is the alto aria from Bach’s church cantata “Whoever may love me will keep my word” (BWV 74). Here the violin’s jangling figurations serve to bolster the text’s notion that Jesus’s blood renders the enraged rattling of hell’s chains as comically useless.

In the first movement from the Fifth “Brandenburg,” the three soloists — flute, violin and harpsichord — work episode-by-episode to undercut the sway of the ensemble refrain, set in the “stile concitato” (the militant style, projected by repeated 16th notes). At their second episode, the flute and violin take up bits of the group refrain’s pitch content, but reconfigure it in the “stile affettuoso” (tender style, here projected by smoothly connected pairs of eighth notes). It’s only a few steps from there before the harpsichord — in pre-1721 concertos, conventionally just a humble chordal-accompaniment instrument — assumes an ever more unruly star-soloist character and completely overwhelms the ensemble.

The most powerful example in Bach of undermining the “stile concitato” by “stile affettuoso” occurs in the aria for bass and chorus from his church cantata “Hold Jesus Christ in remembrance” (BWV 67), where Satan the violence-bringer is stunningly subdued by Jesus the peace-bringer.

In the egalitarian treatment of his eccentric combination of soloists for the Second “Brandenburg,” Bach abandoned altogether the hierarchies of his “various instruments.” Here the high-and-mighty trumpet, lofty solo violin, middling oboe and lowly recorder uncharacteristically perform interchangeable lines of undifferentiated passagework. A similar leveling of the Baroque orchestra can be found in the interchangeable writing for trumpets, strings, oboes and recorders in the choruses from the cantata “Jerusalem, praise the Lord” (BWV 119).

The fluidity between the secular and liturgical in Bach is also illustrated by the fact that several Brandenburg Concertos find repurposing in his church cantatas for Leipzig, where he moved after Köthen. Bach employed the first movement from the First “Brandenburg” — doubtless on account of its riotously flamboyant horn parts — as the Sinfonia for “False world, I do not trust you” (BWV 52); and he arranged a souped-up version of the first movement from the Third Concerto — with its triadic trinity of three violins, three violas and three cellos — as the Sinfonia for “I love [God] the most high with all my mind” (BWV 174).

Accepting the idea that the “Brandenburg” Concertos harbor social and religious designs needn’t involve downplaying the magnificence of Bach’s artistic gifts. But insisting on exclusively aesthetic contemplation of his works — or implying that in the “Brandenburgs” he was freed from the perceived burden of including religious content in his music — pales their meanings, diminishes their complexity and reduces their stature.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.