Article - Metaphors of Time and Modernity in Bach

Metaphors of Time and Modernity in Bach
Author(s): Bettina Varwig

Source: The Journal of Musicology, Vol. 29, No. 2 (Spring 2012), pp. 154-190
Published by: University of California Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/jm.2012.29.2.154
Accessed: 04-11-2016 15:46 UTC
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted
digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about
JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
http://about.jstor.org/terms
University of California Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The
Journal of Musicology
This content downloaded from 157.182.150.22 on Fri, 04 Nov 2016 15:46:42 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
Metaphors of Time and
Modernity in Bach
B e ttina Var w i g
D efining a place for Johann Sebastian Bach in

the history of eighteenth-century music has never been an easy task for his-
torians. “Nothing emanates from him, everything merely leads up to him,”
Albert Schweitzer famously attested in 1908, putting a rather more posi-
tive spin on Johann Adolf Scheibe’s notorious jibe in 1737 that Bach was
the “Lohenstein” of music, stuck in a past age of outmoded artificiality.1
Karl Geiringer’s Bach as “the culmination of an era” (1966) was countered
154 by Robert Marshall’s Bach as “the progressive” (1976), a dualism later
bridged in Laurence Dreyfus’s 1996 portrayal of the composer as “critic
of the Enlightenment.”2 Richard Taruskin’s Oxford History of Western Music
subsequently declared Bach “an altogether atypical and marginal figure
in his day.”3 If this last assessment seems unduly exaggerated, it still serves
as a reminder that, were it not for the vast reputation he gained posthu-
mously, the composer would occupy a fairly modest position in our annals:
as respected teacher and keyboard virtuoso, as cantor at a prestigious but
provincial Lutheran institution, and as author of a sizeable body of church
music that remained local in distribution and largely became obsolete in
the decades after his death. Nevertheless, the entry for Bach in the index
1 “Es geht nichts von ihm aus; alles führt nur auf ihn hin”; Albert Schweitzer, J. S. Bach
(Leipzig: Breitkopf and Härtel, 1908), 3. For Scheibe’s comments, see The New Bach Reader,
ed. Hans T. David and Arthur Mendel, rev. ed. Christoph Wolff (New York: Norton, 1998),
338. Daniel Caspar von Lohenstein was a seventeenth-century Silesian playwright and poet
famed for his bombastic style.
2 Karl Geiringer, Johann Sebastian Bach: The Culmination of an Era (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1966); Robert Marshall, “Bach the Progressive: Observations on His Later
Works,” Musical Quarterly 62, no. 3 (July 1976): 313–57; Laurence Dreyfus, Bach and the Pat-
terns of Invention (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 219–44.
3 Richard Taruskin, The Oxford History of Western Music, 6 vols. (Oxford: Oxford Uni-
versity Press, 2005), 2:234.
The Journal of Musicology, Vol. 29, Issue 2, pp. 154–190, ISSN 0277-9269, electronic ISSN 1533-8347. © 2012
by the Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permis-
sion to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press’s Rights and
Permissions website, http://www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintInfo.asp. DOI: 10.1525/ jm.2012.29.2.154.
var wig
to Taruskin’s volume runs to two densely packed columns, whereas Bach’s

much more widely celebrated contemporary Georg Philipp Telemann
makes a meager five appearances in the book, none of them longer than
a line or two; he is remembered primarily as a candidate who was offered
the Leipzig post before Bach, and for his place in the Guinness Book of
World Records as the most prolific composer of all time.4
Needless to say, Taruskin’s lopsided portrayal replicates a familiar
historiographical pattern reaching back to the beginnings of the mod-
ern Bach revival in the nineteenth century, when the composer grad-
ually began to be elevated to his present transhistorical status. Like
Philipp Spitta and Theodor Adorno before them, musicologists today
on the whole still prefer to talk about Bach rather than about his “easy-
listening” counterpart Telemann.5 But this oversized Bach—“the icon
of music history,” in George Buelow’s formulation—sits uncomfortably
within certain broader historical narratives.6 He finds no place, for in-
stance, in Daniel Heartz’s 2003 survey of European music from 1720 to
1780, which proposes a rethinking of musical style “from the point of
view of eighteenth-century values.”7 James Webster in 2004 agreed that
Bach cannot easily be integrated into an account of eighteenth-century
European art music, although he added that this “does not negate the 155
importance of artistic achievements . . . that do not ‘fit.’”8 The same
issue surfaces in Andrew Bowie’s 2007 book Music, Philosophy, and Mo-
dernity, which presents the following sketch of music’s shifting nature
from Pre- to Post-Enlightenment: “Music moves away from more static
polyphonic forms, which can be understood in terms of the idea of the
universe as a logos-imbued, stable totality, towards the harmonically and
rhythmically more dynamic and expressive forms of the great classical
music from Haydn to Mahler and beyond.” So far, so smooth; but then
Bowie disrupts the account with a footnote: “Bach is hard to fit into this
framework . . . his music transcends the philosophical story one can tell
about musical development in his era.”9
Karol Berger’s 2007 volume Bach’s Cycle, Mozart’s Arrow offers a potential
solution to this conundrum. Berger treats Bowie’s skeletal account of music’s
4 Ibid., 2:240, 260.

5 See Theodor Adorno, Dissonanzen: Musik in der verwalteten Welt, 7th ed. (Göttingen:
Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1991), 72–73. Regarding Spitta’s view of Telemann, see Wolf-
gang Sandberger, Das Bachbild Philipp Spittas (Stuttgart: Steiner, 1997), 188–92.
6 George Buelow, A History of Baroque Music (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
2004), 503.
7 Daniel Heartz, Music in European Capitals: The Galant Style, 1720–1780 (New York:
Norton, 2003), xxi.

8 James Webster, “The Eighteenth Century as Music-Historical Period?” Eighteenth-
Century Music 1 (2004): 47–60, esp. 59.

9 Andrew Bowie, Music, Philosophy, and Modernity (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2007), 83.
t he j o u r n al o f m u sic o lo g y
transformation at greater length and in the process manages to outline a

clear space for Bach within it. He appears less intent on using Bach’s music
to question or redefine the philosophical framework he introduces. Instead,
he finds that framework repeatedly confirmed in the details of the scores
he studies, thereby, in Scott Burnham’s appreciative words, granting music
a “preeminent place” at his symposium of great thinkers of the past.10 The
topic of Berger’s symposium is a fundamental shift in attitudes to time,
connected with the onset of Western modernity in the mid eighteenth
century. This shift, to summarize rather crudely, entailed a move from a
premodern cyclical to a modern linear notion of time—two geometrical
metaphors that translate time’s elusive qualities into concrete spatial shapes.
In the earlier model, human history is contained within a static concep-
tion of eternity, whereas the second model places a premium on man-made
teleological progress. Modernity, for Berger, is “at bottom an attempt to
emancipate linear time,” and music formed a key component of the project:
“At some point between the early and late eighteenth century, between Bach
and Mozart, musical form became primarily temporal and the attention of
musicians—composers, performers, and listeners alike—shifted toward the
temporal disposition of events.”11
156 Berger’s thesis about the changing shapes of time, previously elabo-
rated by historians such as Reinhart Koselleck, is instinctively appealing.
Koselleck located this epistemological shift—what he called the “tempo-
ralization of history”—somewhere in the three hundred years between
the sixteenth-century painter Albrecht Altdorfer and the nineteenth-
century philosopher Friedrich Schlegel, between the Reformation and
the French Revolution.12 By replacing Koselleck’s defining figures with
two eighteenth-century composers, Berger significantly narrows that
gap. Given that a mere six years separate Bach’s death from Mozart’s
birth, Berger’s time frame is obviously not to be taken literally, and he
reminds his readers at various points that the process extended over sev-
eral centuries. In his introduction, he even proposes that for a “pure,
uncontaminated representative of the cyclical time in music” someone
like Johannes Ockeghem would have represented a better choice.13
Some fifteenth-century scholars may raise objections here;14 but in any
case Berger chose Bach, not Ockeghem, as the last one standing in a
10 Scott Burnham, review of Karol Berger, Bach’s Cycle, Mozart’s Arrow: An Essay on the
Origins of Musical Modernity, Hopkins Review 2, no. 2 (Spring 2009): 306.

11 Karol Berger, Bach’s Cycle, Mozart’s Arrow: An Essay on the Origins of Musical Modernity
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 16, 179.

12 See Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, trans. Keith
Tribe (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985), 9–10, 37.

13 Berger, Bach’s Cycle, Mozart’s Arrow, 12.
14 See for instance Fabrice Fitch, Johannes Ockeghem: Masses and Models (Paris: Cham-
pion, 1997), 98, which describes common strategies of intensification in Ockeghem’s music.
var wig
tradition about to be obliterated by the political and intellectual forces

of modernity. The first chorus of Bach’s St. Matthew Passion (“Kommt,
ihr Töchter, helft mir klagen”) serves as his most extended musical il-
lustration of a premodern attitude to time. The closing section of the
movement, he postulates, embodies a “powerful gesture that abolishes
time,” driven by a desire to “neutralize time and render insignificant its
relentless flow from past to future.”15
John Butt, in his 2010 book Bach’s Dialogue with Modernity, agrees
that “Berger’s overall picture of Bach’s music as essentially embracing
the cyclic principle is undoubtedly correct,” although he finds that the
St. Matthew Passion in fact projects a more linear sense of time than
the more “circular” St. John Passion.16 Butt subsequently qualifies his
position further, arguing that “there is also a dualistic sense of time that
resonates with Bach’s status on the cusp of musical modernity.” The idea
of Bach’s music as dialectical, partaking in both premodern and modern
worlds, underpins Butt’s book as a whole and leads him to consider the
(equally spatial) metaphor of the spiral as a more appropriate image
for the temporal experience offered in some of his works.17 Moreover,
beyond the seemingly timeless figures of Plato, Augustine, and Nietzsche
that populate Berger’s story, Butt grounds some aspects of his argument 157
in sources more directly linked to Bach’s early eighteenth-century con-
text. He explores, for instance, the concept of history propagated in a
North German schoolbook of the period, the Universal History of 1672
by the Lüneburg rector Johannes Buno, a volume still widely in use dur-
ing Bach’s school years. Buno’s approach, it turns out, lends compelling
support to Berger’s proposal of a prevailing premodern attitude to time,
since it presents past events largely as an undifferentiated collection of
pictorial exemplars, with little sense of an underlying causal or temporal
progression.18
But perhaps the historical inquiry can be pushed yet further, for
Buno’s History represents only one facet in the complex constellation of
ideas about time, history, and eternity among Bach’s Protestant contem-
poraries. In many ways, these complexities do not so much challenge
the outlines of Berger’s overall narrative as bring into focus some of the
potential hazards attached to a story line so broadly conceived that all
musical and historical specifics readily slip into place. What follows here
15 Berger, Bach’s Cycle, Mozart’s Arrow, 102, 117.

16 John Butt, Bach’s Dialogue with Modernity: Perspectives on the Passions (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2010), 101–9.
17 Ibid., 109–110.
18 Johannes Buno, Historische Bilder, Darinnen Idea Historiae Universalis: Eine kurtze Sum-
marische Abbildung Der fürnehmsten Geist- und Weltlichen Geschichte (Lüneburg: Elers, 1672);
see Butt, Bach’s Dialogue with Modernity, 118–19. See also Jan Chiapusso, “Bach’s Attitude
Towards History,” in Musical Quarterly 39, no. 3 (July 1953): 396–414.
is not intended, then, to argue about moving an imaginary boundary

between premodern and modern times backward or forward by a few
decades, or to grumble about this or that finer point having been over-
looked. Rather, I seek to probe whether something as amorphous as the
attitudes to time discussed by Berger and Butt can be mapped onto musi-
cal processes in a straightforward way at all, and what kind of evidence
would be required to validate such a reading. It is a widely acknowledged
problem of musicological enquiry that its object of study tends to offer
the perceptive analyst exactly the qualities he or she is hoping to find.
But individual readings of particular pieces can be rendered more or
less plausible through reference to contextual specifics that collectively
delineate a historically situated horizon of expectation. In the opening
sentence of his first chapter, Berger points toward this kind of approach
by invoking “those who heard Bach lead performances of his St. Matthew
Passion during Good Friday Vespers at St. Thomas’s in Leipzig in 1727.”19
What notions of time did this community of congregants bring to the
event, then, and how could the music they encountered have chimed
with, reshaped, or undercut those notions?
158 ***
In many popular theological and literary writings of the period, circular

conceptions of time were indeed prominent. Heinrich Müller’s Geistliche
Erquick-Stunden, a Protestant instruction book that stood in Bach’s library,
claimed that “Every day I say good night to my body when I go to bed,”
and described the true Christian as one who “dies in the evening, and
comes alive again in the morning. His grave is the bed, his shrouds are the
sheets, his death is sleep, every night is his last.”20 Johann Georg Hamann’s
Poetisches Lexicon of 1725 depicted time explicitly as “a circular ring.”21 Eter-
nity, too, as time’s opposite, was usually imagined in similar terms; a 1706
treatise by Christian Weidling stated that “blessed eternity could not be
represented more aptly than in the image of a round circle, which has nei-
ther beginning nor end.”22 Yet conflicting ideas emerge in almost all these
authors as well. As Johann Georg Walch pointed out in his Philosophisches
20 “Ich geb täglich meinem Leib gute Nacht, wann ich zu Bette gehe. . . . Am Abend
stirbt er, am Morgen wird er wieder lebendig. Sein Grab ist das Bett, seine Grab- die Bett-
Tücher, sein Todt der Schlaff, eine jede Nacht die letzte.” Heinrich Müller, Geistliche Erquick-
Stunden, oder Drey hundert Hauß- und Tisch-Andachten (Minden: Detleffsen, 1725), 53, 70.
21 “Der Zeiten Circul-Ring,” in Johann Georg Hamann, Poetisches Lexicon oder nützli-
cher und brauchbarer Vorrath von allerhand Poetischen Redens-Arten, Beywörtern, Beschreibungen
(Leipzig: Groß, 1737), 914.
22 “Nicht schöner könte die ewige Seeligkeit und seelige Ewigkeit / als unter dem Bilde
eines Circkels oder runden Kreises vorgestellet werden / welcher weder Anfang noch Ende
hat.” Christian Weidling, Emblematischer Lob- und Trauer-Redner (Leipzig: Fritsch, 1706), 387.
var wig
Lexicon of 1726, the concept of “inner” or human time, as opposed to the

mathematical outer time of the cosmos, was necessarily metaphorical.23
Hamann’s Lexicon accordingly incorporated a range of diverse and incom-
patible metaphors, including, no less, the notion of time as an arrow, as
well as those of a light that darkens daily, the waves in the sea, and “the
rust that wears down everything.”24 The cognitive dissonance generated
by these juxtapositions inevitably brought the fluid and fictional nature of
such imagery to the fore. Müller’s vision of time in the Geistliche Erquick
Stunden, meanwhile, reflects the paradox at the heart of the Christian
worldview that encompasses on the one hand the cyclical rituals of daily
death and the liturgical year, and on the other the overarching trajectory
from birth to salvation, and Creation to Final Judgment. As Müller mused
in one passage: “Lord, my time belongs to you. World, I reject you. Shall I
serve you? I have no time for that. . . . What is more fleeting than time? Its
end is eternity.”25 Many writers at the time saw humanity thus suspended
between apocalyptic linearity and everyday circularity. And although fears
of an imminent Second Coming receded somewhat after the Thirty Years’
War had failed to bring the expected return of the Messiah, eschatological
literature and predictions about the world’s end continued to circulate:
Bach copied the suggested dates of 1941 and 2408 into the margins of 159
his Calov Bible.26 In this light, the apocalyptic intervention staged in the
chorus “Sind Blitze, sind Donner” in the St. Matthew Passion, with its cries
of “Open your fiery abyss, o Hell,” still carried associations of real impend-
ing doom for listeners in the 1720s and beyond.
Conceptions of what this end of time entailed, and how time and eterni-
ty related to each other, were similarly multivalent. Müller’s suggestion that
one excluded the other (i.e., eternity spells the end of time), was confirmed
in a dictionary entry of 1731: “Time denotes a particular property of natural
things, namely that they have a beginning and an end. The duration of this
interval is called time, and is opposed to eternity, which is without beginning
or end.”27 The prevailing scientific understanding of time, however, as
23 Johann Georg Walch, Philosophisches Lexicon (Leipzig: Gleditsch, 1726), 3015.
24 “Der Rost der stillen Zeit, durch den fast alles abgenützt wird.” Hamann, Poetisches
Lexicon, 914. The conception of time as an arrow appears already in Martin Luther’s lec-
tures on Genesis; see D. Martin Luthers Werke: Kritische Gesamtausgabe, 69 vols. (Weimar:
Böhlau, 1911), 42:57.
25 “Herr, diese Zeit ist mein und dein. Welt, du bist ausgeschlossen. Soll ich dir die
nen? Ich habe keine Zeit dazu. . . . Was ist flüchtiger als die Zeit? Ihr Ende ist Ewigkeit.”
Müller, Geistliche Erquick-Stunden, 20–21.
26 See Butt, Bach’s Dialogue with Modernity, 115. For contemporary apocalyptic litera-
ture, see for instance Johann Wilhelm Petersen, Das Geheimnis des in der letzten Zeit gebähren-
den apocalyptischen Weibes (Frankfurt: Heyl, 1708).
27 “Zeit, bedeutet der natürlichen Dinge Eigenschafft, daß sie nemlich ihren Anfang
und Ende haben; die Daurung nun dieses Zwischen-Raumes heisset die Zeit, und wird
der Ewigkeit entgegen gesetzet, die ohne Anfang und Ende ist.” Allgemeines Oeconomisches
Lexicon (Leipzig: Gleditsch, 1731), 2750.
formulated in the preceding century by Isaac Newton, held that time

existed as an infinite medium before the creation and after the demise of
the universe. Newton’s theories were popularized through textbooks such
as Jacob Marperger’s Horologiographia of 1723, which stated that
time is not a movement or measurement, but it is measured according

to the movement and measurements of the heavens. . . . Time already
existed before sun and moon were made, so that by nature it is eternal,
even if the motions of the heavens stood still. . . . Time is neither the
first nor the last, but the constantly passing now.28
A similar notion of continuous renewal is outlined in the text for the

fourth movement of Bach’s cantata O Ewigkeit, du Donnerwort (BWV 20),
which depicts the sinner’s experience of eternity as an unending series
of new beginnings:
Die Zeit, so niemand zählen kann,

Fängt jeden Augenblick
Zu deiner Seelen ew’gem Ungelück
Sich stets von neuem an.
160
[The time that no one can count continuously starts anew at every mo-
ment, to the eternal misfortune of your soul.]
This idea of a perpetual Now, which also features in Berger’s account of

the St. Matthew Passion, in some ways reaffirms a premodern, fatalistic view
of human destiny. Johann Heinrich Zedler’s midcentury Universal-Lexicon
stressed that any future moments were removed from human agency:
Anything that cannot be counted among the current Now has to be

merely expected and is therefore not within our power. Not even the
very next moment of our lifespan is left to our own will; instead, we
have to await it patiently and calmly according to the will of Him who
holds our life and death in his hands.29
28 “Die Zeit ist keine Bewegung oder Abmessung, sondern sie wird nach des Himmels
Bewegung oder Abmessung berechnet . . . ehe Sonne und Mond erschaffen worden, schon
gewesen, daß sie also natürlicher Weise nach ewig ist, wann gleich die Bewegungen des
Himmels stille stünden . . . also ist die Zeit weder das Erste noch das Letzte, sondern das
stets-weichende Nun.” Paul Jacob Marperger, Horologiographia, oder Beschreibung der Einthei-
lung und Abmessung der Zeit (Dresden and Leipzig, 1723), 209.
29 “[W]ie denn alles dergleichen ist, was wir zu einem gegenwärtigen Nun nicht rech-
nen können, das müssen wir blos erwarten, und stehet daher derselbe auch eben so wenig
in unserm Vermögen. Auch nicht der allernächste Augenblick unserer Dauer, den wir nur
dencken können, ist unserm eigenen Willkühr überlassen, sondern wir müssen ihn bloß
von dem Willen dessen, in dessen Händen unser Leben und Tod stehet . . . mit Gedult und
Gelassenheit erwarten.” Johann Heinrich Zedler, Großes vollständiges Universal-Lexicon Aller
Wissenschaften und Künste, 68 vols. (Halle and Leipzig: Zedler, 1732–54), 61:732.
var wig
figure 1. Andreas Bretschneider, Pratum emblematicum (Leipzig, 1617),

no. 42. Herzog August Bibliothek Wolfenbüttel, 36 Geom. (3)
161
The premeasured duration of a human life simply became shorter with

each instant, and nothing could be done to alter time’s destructive
course. A common visual analogue for this conception of time was the
figure of Saturn, described in Johann Theodor Jablonski’s Allgemeines
Lexicon of 1721 as “an old man, with wings on his back, an hourglass
on his head, and a scythe in his hand, to show that time is fleeting and
goes by fast, destroys everything, and consumes all it brings forth.”30
Depictions of Saturn in this guise had been popular already in seven-
teenth-century emblem books, such as Andreas Bretschneider’s Pratum
emblematicum of 1617 (fig. 1). Yet if this mythological trope had a long
lineage, it was also adapted explicitly to current eighteenth-century con-
ditions. When Zedler declared, for instance, that nowadays “we have so
many things to do and to get done all the time, we hurry and scurry, we
invent and aspire, and devise all sorts of ways in which to pass our time”;
or when Christian Weidling complained about “these latest flawed times,
30 “[E]in alter mann, mit flügeln auf dem rücken, einer sand-uhr auf dem kopf, und
einer sensen in der hand, anzudeuten, daß die zeit flüchtig und schnelle dahin fahre, alles
vernichte, und was sie hervor gebracht selbst wieder verzehre.” Johann Theodor Jablonski,
Allgemeines Lexicon der Künste und Wissenschaften (Leipzig: Fritsch, 1721), 900.
in which the clocks of our lives run ever faster,” their experience seems
to come strikingly close to the sense of “acceleration” that Koselleck
identified as fundamental to a modern attitude to time.31
A key factor in this enhanced awareness of the accelerating pace of life
was the ever increasing availability of time-measuring devices. A 1738 Ger-
man translation of a French treatise by Jacques Alexandre on the history
of the clock proclaimed: “It would be a foolish and impossible endeavor
to try to tie time down and arrest its rapid course. But it is a product of
human ingenuity to be able to record the moments of its flight, to reveal
and measure the segments in which it escapes, as it were.”32 Clocks and
their bells had become a defining feature of European cityscapes during
the preceding two centuries, and the metaphor of the clock had infiltrated
many spheres of thought, from the idea of death as life’s clock running out
to Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz’s vision of the universe as a divinely tuned
clockwork.33 Clocks offered a welcome means of regularizing or supersed-
ing nature’s imperfections: Alexandre’s treatise dismissed the ineffective-
ness of the ancient sundial, which “worked neither at night, nor during
the day when the skies were cloudy.”34 Marperger moreover described a
“newly invented geographical universal clock” by Johann Baptist Homann
162 that revealed the standardization of time measurement across the North-
ern hemisphere by means of “a dial that moves in 24 hours around a
freely suspended globe, so that all proper hours around the world, in
Europe, Asia, half of Africa and America, can be observed at the same
time” (fig. 2).35 Clocks thus served as a marker of an up-to-date, civilized
existence; only in certain backward places did people still have to rely on
the crowing cock—a key moment, of course, in the Passion narrative as
31 “Diese gantze Zeit über machen wir uns offt mit allerhand Dingen viel zu thun,
und zu schaffen: Wir lauffen und rennen, wir tichten und trachten, und nehmen allerhand
vor, womit wir diese Zeit nur hinbringen können”; Zedler, Universal-Lexicon, 727. “O! was
sollen wir nicht / in diesen letzten und unvollkommenen Zeiten sagen / da unsere Lebens-
Uhr immer schneller laufft”; Weidling, Lob- und Trauer-Redner, 248. See also Koselleck,
Futures Past, 22.
32 “Die Zeit zu fesseln und sie in ihrem schnellen Lauffe aufzuhalten, wäre ein so när-
risches Unternehmen, als die Bewerckstelligung unmöglich ist. Allein die Augenblicke ihrer
Flucht zu bemercken, ihre Theile, in welchen sie, so zu sagen, entwischet, zu zeigen und zu
zählen, ist eine Frucht des menschlichen Witzes.” Jacques Alexandre, preface to Ausführliche
Abhandlung von den Uhren, trans. Christian Philipp Berger (Lemgo: Meyer, 1738).
33 See Weidling, Lob- und Trauer-Redner, 248. On the impact of these metaphors on
conceptions of musical meter, see Roger Mathew Grant, “Epistemologies of Time and Me-
tre in the Long Eighteenth Century,” Eighteenth-Century Music 6, no. 1 (2009): 59–75.
34 “Diese aber kunten ihnen weder des Nachts dienen, noch auch bey Tage, wenn
der Himmel mit Wolcken überzogen war.” Alexandre, translator’s preface to Abhandlung
von den Uhren.
35 “[I]n 24 Stunden um die frey schwebende Erd-Kugel herumgehenden Sonnen
Zeigers ... alle gehörige Stunden um den gantzen Erdboden durch Europam und Asiam,
auch halb Africam und Americam, über allen anbemerckten Orten auf einmahl zusehen.”
Marperger, Horologiographia, 108.
var wig
figure 2. Johann Baptist Homann, Neu inventirte Geographische Universal-

Zeig und Schlag-Uhr (s.l., s.a.), detail. Erlangen, University
Library, 2 VAR 16# (angeb. 83)
163
composed by Bach—for their sense of time.36 As John Butt has pointed

out, the clock embodied a palpable contradiction between the linear con-
tinuity of the time portions it measured and its circular representation
on the clock face; this duality can perhaps be thought to be reflected in
the opening chorus of the St. John Passion, with its superimposed layers
36 Ibid., 27.
of a mechanically ticking bass and continually circulating violins, which

together carry a human world of sighs and suspensions (ex. 1).37
But if the clock’s automated precision offered tangible proof of a
mechanically ordered cosmos, it also revealed time as a social construct.
Zedler asserted that the customary division of time into months, weeks,
and days happened only in order to “compare and coordinate our time
with the timekeeping of others.”38 This had become particularly evident
in February 1700, when the Protestant German states finally adopted the
Gregorian calendar reform of 1582. As a result, the ten days between Feb-
ruary 19 and 28 simply disappeared, drawing attention to the arbitrary
nature of human time measurement. Benjamin Hederich’s 1710 intro-
duction to chronology pointed out, meanwhile, that although for most
Europeans the counting of the day’s hours commenced at midnight, for
the Persians, Syrians, and Jews the day began at sunrise, whereas for the
Italians, Athenians, and Chinese it started at sundown.39 According to
Marperger, all such conventions of timekeeping contributed primarily to
maintaining civic order, facilitating political or financial transactions, and
regulating working hours. Only the lazy and the rich did not need to know
the time, he surmised, but decent working citizens depended upon it.40
164 The recently popular invention of the pocket watch hence allowed their
owners to “carry the time with them comfortably and organize their activi-
ties accordingly.”41 A housekeeping manual of 1740 mentioned the fur-
ther contraption of the alarm clock, which “emits a strong ringing sound
at the desired hour, so that one may be awoken from sleep.”42
Still, not everyone managed to be on time. In 1732, Christian Gerber
complained that the moneyed classes tended to arrive at church up to an
hour late, “because they spend much time on their attire and makeup,
or have to drink their coffee first.”43 Over the preceding decades, cof-
fee drinking had emerged as one of the most fashionable activities for
37 Butt, Bach’s Dialogue with Modernity, 113, 183–84.
38 “Wenn wir dieselbe aber in Jahre, Monate, Wochen, und Tage eintheilen, so ist
dieses nur eine Vergleichung und gleichsam Zusammenhaltung unserer Zeit mit der Zeit
anderer.” Zedler, Universal-Lexicon, 728.
39 Benjamin Hederich, Anleitung zu den führnehmsten Historischen Wissenschaften (Wit-
tenberg: Zimmermann, 1710), 80.

40 Marperger, Horologiographia, 27.
41 “Die Sack-Uhren aber haben vor andern auch dieses zum voraus, daß man sie
ohne alle Beschwehrung bey sich führen und also seine Verrichtungen darnach reguliren
kan.” William Manley, Neu-vermehrter Unterricht von Sack-Uhren, trans. T. B. D. M. (Frankfurt:
Buchner, 1728), 95.
42 “Andere haben ein Gewerck, welches zu der begehrten Stunde ein starckes Geklin-
gel macht, wodurch einer aus dem Schlaf kan erwecket werden.” Compendieuses und Nutz-
bares Haußhaltungs-Lexicon (Chemnitz: Stößel, 1740), 2:331.
43 “Sie wollen aus Faulheit und Gemächligkeit nicht gerne eine Stunde früher aufste-
hen, bringen auch mit ihrer Ankleidung und Putz viel Zeit zu, oder müssen erst den Coffé
einnehmen.” Christian Gerber, Historie der Kirchen-Ceremonien in Sachsen (Leipzig: Saueres-
sig, 1732), 352–53.
var wig
example 1. J. S. Bach, St. John Passion, “Herr, unser Herrscher,” mm. 1–4

Flauto traverso I
Oboe I
Flauto traverso II
Oboe II

Vln. I & II

Vla.
6

5
Continuo

2

165

7
6
6 4 5 3

4 2 4

4

9
8 9
6 7

7

4 4

Leipzig’s newly empowered social elites seeking to fill the ineluctably passing
hours of each day. Following the economic upswing of the 1680s, cultural
consumption expanded rapidly in early eighteenth-century German cities,
and the decades around 1700 witnessed a conspicuous rise in publications of-
fering various means of Zeitvertreib, or passing the time. Card games, fashion
and news magazines, gardening manuals, travel accounts, light devotional
literature, and books of trivia responded to the rising demand for public and
private leisure pursuits among an educated urban class with dispensable time
and income.44 The final entry in the popular song collection Singende Muse
an der Pleisse, first published in Leipzig in 1736, thematized this development:
Hundert tausend Eitelkeiten

Wählt die Welt zum Zeitvertreib:
Einerlei Tändelei
Dient nicht allen Leuten.
Jedermann Liegt daran,
Daß er sich ergötzen kann.45
[The world today invents a hundred thousand vanities as its pastimes; one
kind of frivolity does not suit everyone. All are keen to indulge themselves.]
166
As this “lifestyle of leisure” developed, boundaries between work and
free time became more clearly defined.46 A volume of 1702 asserted:
“A bow that is tensed unduly tends to break; strings that are not slack-
ened at certain times will crack, and wakefulness without sufficient rest
can beget the sleep of death.”47 Johann Friedrich Riederer’s Curieuser
Zeit Vertreiber of 1718 accordingly marketed itself to “good honest citizens
who, after the travails and heat of the day, may take a look, and thereby
for a few hours forget their troubles and concerns.”48 A book published
around 1700, entitled “Kilian Brustflecks Kurzweiliges Würffel-Spiel”
44 See Michael North, Material Delight and the Joy of Living: Cultural Consumption in the
Age of Enlightenment in Germany, trans. Pamela Selwyn (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), 1–4. See
also Tanya Kevorkian, Baroque Piety: Religion, Society and Music in Leipzig 1650–1750 (Alder-
shot: Ashgate, 2007), 19–25.
45 Sperontes, Singende Muse an der Pleisse, ed. Edward Buhle, vol. 35, Denkmäler
Deutscher Tonkunst (Leipzig: Breitkopf and Härtel, 1909), 81.

46 See North, Material Delight, 156. See also Martina Kessel, Langeweile: Zum Umgang
mit Zeit und Gefühlen in Deutschland vom späten 18. bis zum frühen 20. Jahrhundert (Göttingen:
Wallstein, 2001), 26–29.
47 “Der Bogen / welchen man zu hoch spannet / pfleget zu brechen; die Saiten /
so zu gewisser Zeit nicht abgespannet werden / zerspringen / und die gar zu unmüssige
Wachsamkeit / vermag den Schlaff des Todes zu befördern.” Philander, preface to Der
gantz neu-ausgeheckete und nun zum Vor-Schein kommende Kurtzweilige Zeit-Verkürzer (s.l., 1702).
48 “[G]ute ehrliche Burgere / die nach getragener Last und Hitze des Tages einen Blick
hinein thun / und dadurch Ihren Grillen und Beschwerden / wo nicht völlig adieu sagen /
doch auf ein paar Stunden vergessen lassen.” Johann Friedrich Riederer, Oel und Wein, gegossen
auff die Wunden der Lebendig-Toden, oder curieuser Zeit Vertreiber, 3 vols. (Frankfurt, 1718), 1:22.
var wig
(Kilian Brustfleck’s diverting game of dice), was to be used “at the gath-
erings of respectable citizens, for passing the time and delighting the
spirit.”49 The Angenehmer und kurtzweiliger Zeitvertreiber by Christian Weise
(1723) similarly promised its readers “vergnügte Gemüths-Ergetzung”
(jovial recreation of the spirit).50 The spirit of all these volumes is
encapsulated in the frontispiece to a Kurtzweiliger Zeit-Vertreiber of 1730
(vertreiben meaning literally to “drive away” or “dispel”).51 Like many of
its kind, the volume contains a selection of anecdotes and moralizing
stories, providing readers with lighthearted but wholesome diversion
during unfilled hours. In the accompanying illustration, a fashionably
attired gentleman—halfway through what appears to be a dance step and
holding a dice shaker—chases off the menacing figure of time, adorned
with the common attributes of wings, a scythe, and an hourglass (fig. 3).
Underlying these ventures was the concern that empty time posed a
potential threat, tempting people to indulge in Müßiggang (idleness), a vice
defined by Walch as the “abuse of time.”52 This moral dimension is alluded
to in the top corner of the Zeit-Vertreiber image, where a pair of scales hovers
ahead of a stormy weather front, seemingly ready to weigh whether time
has indeed been spent well. According to a religious instruction book by
Johann Arnold Zeitfuchs of 1732, people should “not be so idle that they 167
end up doing nothing at all . . . rather they shall alternate the strictness
of their work duties with legitimate acts of genuine recreation, so that af-
terwards they are all the more ready and willing to take up their arduous
tasks once again.”53 Telemann’s satirical opera Der geduldige Socrates, per-
formed for the diversion of Hamburg’s opera-going public in 1721, accord-
ingly included a da capo number with the words “Weg, weg, Müßiggang”
(Off with you, idleness; act 1, scene 3), reiterating contemporary admoni-
tions to avoid dangerous inactivity during one’s brief lifetime. Sung by the
philosopher protagonist and his four disciples, the quintet’s well-worked
contrapuntal texture—a modified five-part canon—ostensibly holds up
49 Johann Valentin Petzold, Kilian Brustflecks Kurzweiliges Würffel-Spiel, Welches Bey Ver
sammlung einer aufgeräumten Gesellschaft, zu einem Gemüths ergötzenden Zeitvertreib kan gebraucht
werden (s.l., ca. 1700).
50 Christian Weise, Angenehmer und kurtzweiliger Zeitvertreiber: Zu vergnügter Gemüths-
Ergetzung aufgesetzet (s.l., 1723).

51 The ominous implications in this Lutheran conception of Zeitvertreib are perhaps
most clearly communicated in English translation in the metaphorical expression “killing

time,” which seems to have come into English usage around the same time. See Oxford English
Dictionary Online, s.v. “kill, v.,” www.oed.com/view/Entry/103361, (accessed 20 October 2011).
52 “Der Mißbrauch der Zeit bestehet im Müßiggang.” Walch, Philosophisches Lexicon,
3015. On Müßiggang, see also Kessel, Langeweile, 26–29.

53 “Er soll nimmermehr so müßig seyn, daß er gantz und gar nichts thue . . . sondern
er soll die Strenge seiner Beruffs-Arbeit mit erlaubten Wercken der ehrlichen Ergetzligkeit
abwechseln, daß er hernach desto muthiger und williger sey, widerum an die mühsame
Arbeit zu gehen.” Johann Arnold Zeitfuchs, Promtuarium Theologico-Practicum das ist Theolo-
gisches Real-Lexicon und Moralische Anweisung (Gotha: Schallen, 1732), 1085.
figure 3. Kurtzweiliger Zeit-Vertreiber, wider die Melancholie (Leipzig,

1730). (C) British Library Board, 12315.a.22
168
var wig
a musical memento of the benefits of disciplined labor. Yet the pedantic

insistence on the opening motive, coupled with wearing repetitions in the
violin and bass parts (mm. 8–10), seems to add audibly ironic overtones to
the righteous textual message, potentially inspiring in its listeners less a zeal
for their daily chores than an unhealthy sense of boredom (ex. 2).54 Oth-
er writers, too, satirized excessive worries about how to spend one’s time.
Riederer’s volume contained the following anecdote: “Herr Crispin, in or-
der to pass the time properly, counted his window panes, so that the devil
would not find him idle in the bright light of day.”55 Another publication
mockingly contended that all of life is merely one continuous Zeitvertreib
that consists of killing the hours until the moment of death.56
The inhabitants of early eighteenth-century Leipzig certainly had
a lot of choice when it came to spending their free time, from the
thrice-annual trade fairs that brought diverse forms of entertainment,
to semi-private social gatherings such as the salon run by the writer
and feminist Christiane Mariane von Ziegler.57 Ample space for recre-
ational pursuits was furthermore offered by the city’s eight or more cof-
fee houses, as well as by several pleasure gardens, including the famed
Apel estate and the Großbosischer Garten, laid out in the late seven-
teenth century, where concerts and theater performances took place. 169
Slightly further afield, about a mile and a half south of the city, was
the Brandvorwerk, a fashionable establishment where patrons could
drink, eat, smoke, play cards or board games, pursue illicit liaisons,
and converse about the latest news. As a satirical pamphlet of 1745 at-
tested, “[T]oday, anyone who wants to get ahead . . . has to be able to
discuss political and philosophical affairs and curiosities in company,
so that the time passes and people grow old in an agreeable manner
and forget their advancing age.”58 According to the anonymous author,
places like the Brandvorwerk seemed preferable in those days to the
traditional holiday pursuit of going to church:
54 For an overview of the opera, see Martina Janitzek, “Der geduldige Socrates von
Georg Philipp Telemann,” in Telemann in Frankfurt, ed. Peter Cahn (Mainz: Schott, 2000),
260–83. The libretto was by Johann Ulrich König.
55 “Herr Crispin: Sich die Zeit recht zu vertreiben / zehlte seine Fensterscheiben /
daß der leidge Teuffel Ihn an dem hellen lieben Tag ja nicht müssig finden mag.” Riederer,
Oel und Wein, 2:44.
56 Charles Dufresny, Ernsthaffter, sinnreicher und satyrischer Zeit-Vertreib, trans. Christian
Friedrich Hunold (Halle, 1720), 5.

57 On Ziegler’s salon, see Mark Peters, A Woman’s Voice in Baroque Music: Mariane von
Ziegler and Johann Sebastian Bach (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), 42–45. On the economic meta-
phor of “spending time,” see George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chi-
cago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 7–9.
58 “[H]eut zu Tage muß einer / wer fort kommen will . . . von Staats-politisch-phi-
losophisch curieux und lustigen Sachen in Compagnie discuriren können, daß die Zeit
vergehet und der Mensch mit Commodität ins Alter rücket und seine Jahre vergißt.” Pref-
ace to Angenehmer Zeitvertreib Des grossen und mannigfaltigen Vergnügens Auf dem weltbekannten
Lust-Saale Des so genannten Brandtvorwergs (Leipzig, 1745).
example 2. Georg Philipp Telemann, Der geduldige Socrates, act 1, scene 3,

“Weg, weg, Müßiggang,” mm. 6–15
6

Vln. I/II
all’ unisono

Alcibiades
8
Weg, weg, Mü - ßig - gang, weg, weg, weg,

Xenophon
8
Weg, weg, Mü - ßig - gang, weg,

Pitho
8

Plato

Socrates

170
Vc. & Basso

8

8
weg, weg, weg. weg. Mü - ßig- gang, weg,

8
weg, weg, weg, weg,

8

Weg, weg, Mü - ßig - gang, weg, weg, weg,

var wig
example 2. (continued)

10

8
weg, weg, weg, weg,

8
weg, weg, Mü - ßig- gang, weg, weg, weg, weg,

8

Weg,

weg, weg, weg, weg, Mü - ßig -

Weg, weg, Mü - ßig -
171

12

8
weg, Mü - ˚ig -gang, weg, weg, Mü - ˚ig - gang, weg,

8

Mü - ˚ig - gang, weg, weg, Mü - ˚ig - gang, weg, weg,

8

weg, weg, Mü - ˚ig - gang, weg, weg, Mü - ˚ig - gang,

gang, weg, weg, Mü - ˚ig - gang, weg, weg, Mü - ˚ig -

gang, weg, weg, weg, Mü - ˚ig -


14

8
weg, Mü - ßig- gang, weg, Mü - ßig - gang, weg,

8

Mü - ßig- gang, weg, weg, Mü - ßig - gang, weg,

8

weg, weg, weg, weg,

gang, weg, weg, Mü - ßig - gang, weg,

gang, weg, weg,
172

It is much too boring to entertain oneself with prayer and hymn books,
and anyway one in ten people does not have a voice and throws the
congregation off the melody. Moreover, while one is at church, one’s
home affairs are neglected, and sometimes it is so cold, sometimes so
hot, that an honest fellow cannot stand it.59
As is evident from the frontispiece to this pamphlet (fig. 4), music

formed a key component of the Brandvorwerk amusement program: “In
the hall a select group of the best musicians presents itself . . . playing
artfully composed and melodious concertos, overtures, arias, marches,
minuets, and all the other new foreign dances continually one after the
other”; according to the author, this went on until ten or eleven o’clock
in the evening.60 At that point, citizens could return to their homes by
59 “Aus Gebet und Lieder-Büchern sich zu vergnügen / ist viel zu weitläufftig / und
der Zehende hat keine Stimme, und schreyt die Gemeinde nur aus der Melodie / und in
der Kirche versäumet man sein Hauß-Wesen / bisweilen ist es auch so kalt, bisweilen zu
heiß / daß es ein ehrlicher Kerl nicht ausstehen kan.” Ibid.
60 “Auf dem Saale präsentirt sich eine auserlesene Bande derer besten Musicorum
. . . welche durch künstlich gesetzte und wohlklingende Concerte, Ouverturen, Arien,

Marche, Menueten und alle andere neue ausländische Täntze, so unaufhörlich en Suite
nacheinander exerciret und gespielet werden.” Ibid., 46–47, 133.
var wig
figure 4. Angenehmer Zeitvertreib Des grossen und mannigfaltigen Vergnügens

Auf dem weltbekannten Lust-Saale Des so genannten Brandtvorwergs
(Leipzig, 1745). Sächsische Landesbibliothek – Staats- und
Universitätsbibliothek Dresden, Hist.Sax.H.1324,misc.1
173
the glow of recently installed oil lamps that made the hours of the night
newly available for social activity.61
Bach’s participation in this Leipzig culture of entertainment, with his
Collegium musicum performances at Zimmermann’s coffee house, is a
well-known if sometimes sidelined aspect of his career.62 The title pages
to his four volumes of Clavier-Übung, each bearing the inscription “zur
61 See Carol Baron, “Tumultuous Philosophers, Pious Rebels, Revolutionary Teach-
ers, Pedantic Clerics, Vengeful Bureaucrats, Threatened Tyrants, Worldly Mystics: The Re-
ligious World Bach Inherited,” in Bach’s Changing World: Voices in the Community, ed. Carol
Baron (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2006), 35–85, esp. 58-60.
62 See Burkhard Schwalbach, “Eighteenth-Century Coffee-House Culture: A New
Context for Bach’s Music?” Understanding Bach 3 (2008): 105–8; and Katherine R. Good-
man, “From Salon to Kaffeekranz: Gender Wars and the Coffee Cantata in Bach’s Leipzig,” in
Bach’s Changing World, 190–218. On the Collegium musicum, see also Andreas Glöckner,
“Bachs Leipziger Collegium musicum und seine Vorgeschichte,” in Die Welt der Bach-Kantaten,
ed. Christoph Wolff and Ton Koopman, vol. 2, Johann Sebastian Bachs weltliche Kantaten
(Stuttgart: Metzler, 1997), 105–17.
Gemüths-Ergötzung,” closely echo some of the Zeitvertreib publications

listed above, and the Wohltemperiertes Clavier was explicitly dedicated “zum
besonderen Zeitvertreib” (a special way of passing the time). Elsewhere,
Bach famously borrowed a formulation by Friedrich Erhard Niedt to
describe the figured bass—the “most complete foundation of music”—as
intended “for the honor of God and the permissible delight of the spirit”
(zulässige Ergötzung des Gemüths), revealing that the idea of music as
a means of sanctioned recreation formed the foundation of all his musi-
cal endeavors, whether sacred or secular.63 In a theological context, this
concept of recreation was closely tied to the believer’s prime task of prais-
ing God, since the “renewed energies of the mind” could be used “all the
more vigorously for the honor of God.”64 Already in the preceding centu-
ry, music making had been considered a more worthy recreational activity
than card games or gambling, as evident in Martin Geier’s funeral sermon
for Heinrich Schütz (1672): “When others, in current parlance, relieved
their boredom by seeking out board games, cards and other such enter-
tainments, [the biblical King] David . . . always contented himself with
sacred songs and edifying music.”65 Telemann, too, in a secular cantata of
1723, famously called music “the noblest of pastimes.”66
174 Certain musical pursuits, such as dancing or singing lewd popular
songs, raised suspicions in some quarters, however. Zeitfuchs’s Promtuarium
disallowed “feasting, drinking, gambling, playing dice, dancing, ballet,
etc.” as time-wasting indulgences, and Gottfried Vockerodt lamented the
vogue for “playing and dancing” to satisfy only the desires of the flesh.67
The use of elaborate music in sacred contexts formed the subject of heated
debates among Protestant theologians as well, due to its status as a “middle
thing” in Lutheran worship that was neither essential nor forbidden.68
Bach’s frequently cited pledge from 1723, in which he promised to refrain
63 David and Mendel eds., The New Bach Reader, 16.
64 “Eine Ergetzung aber darff sich ein Christ wohl machen, nur . . . d) daß man die
Absicht habe, die durch solche Recreation erlangte Kräffte des Gemüths und Leibes desto
ungehinderter Gott zu Ehren hernach anzuwenden.” Zeitfuchs, Promtuarium, 1507.
65 “Wen andere / nach heutiger art zu reden / ihnen die lange weile zu kürtzen /
das bretspiel / karten / oder andere ergötzung herfür suchten / so ließ David . . . ihm an
geistlichen liedern und erbaulicher music begnügen.” Martin Geier, Die köstlichste Arbeit aus
dem 119. Psalm v. 54, Deine Rechte sind mein Lied in meinem Hause (Dresden: Bergen, 1672), n.p.
66 Text in Christian Friedrich Weichmann, Poesie der Nieder-Sachsen, 3 vols. (Hamburg:
Kißner, 1726), 3:287.

67 “Müßig gehen muß man nicht, auch nicht die Zeit verderben mit Lüsten, Fresserey,
Säufferey, Spielen, Doppeln, Tantzen, Balletten, Assambleen etc.”; Zeitfuchs, Promtuarium, 1507.
“Mit Vocal- und Instrumental-Music aufwarten bey üppigen Mummereyen, Fastnachts-Täntzen,
oder, wo man sonst . . . zur Fleisches-Lust nach der Völlerey spielet und tantzet.” Gottfried Vo
ckerodt, Mißbrauch der freyen Künste / insonderheit Der Music (Frankfurt: Zunner, 1697), 30.
68 See for instance Christian Gerber’s Pietist pamphlet Die Unerkannten Sünden der Welt: Aus
Gottes Wort (Dresden: Hekel, 1690); and the response by Georg Motz, Die Vertheidigte Kirchen-Music
(s.l., 1703). See also Joyce Irwin, Neither Voice nor Heart Alone: German Lutheran Theology of Music in
the Age of the Baroque (New York: Lang, 1993), 11–18; and Kevorkian, Baroque Piety, 136–41.
var wig
from composing music for Leipzig’s churches that was too long or made
“an operatic impression,” reflects this ambivalence, as do the widespread
complaints at the time about excessive music making during the service.69
Zeitfuchs’s Promtuarium stipulated that ecclesiastical adiaphora should be
kept “simple, decent, and solemn, not theatrical,” and music should not
“turn into an empty diversion” but be used “in moderation, so that we do
not end up spending all our time with it, especially on high feast days,
since the congregation gets to hear nothing more than extraneous and
indistinct sounds.”70 Although the power of ecclesiastical music making to
enhance devotion was widely recognized, the pleasant aural stimulation
always simultaneously threatened to seduce or distract those who listened.
It would be naive to infer from all this that Bach’s audience regard-
ed the Good Friday Passion performance primarily as another form of
diversion or recreation. But the unusual length of the St. Matthew Passion
alone arguably overstepped the boundaries of acceptable music for use
during worship. Moreover, as Daniel Melamed has discussed, the prox-
imity of some of the work’s formal and expressive features to those of
contemporary opera is certainly suggestive, especially because the closure
of the Leipzig opera house in 1721 had left churches as the main ven-
ue where such extended musical performances could still take place.71 175
Christian Gerber’s much-cited description of a Passion performance he
attended, “sung with many kinds of instruments in the most elaborate
fashion,” corroborates this overlap: “[W]hen this theatrical music began,
people were thrown into the greatest bewilderment. . . . It’s just as if one
were at an Opera Comedy.”72 Karol Berger warns his readers that treat-
ing the St. Matthew Passion merely as an object of “aesthetic delectation”
would amount to “an attitude of refined barbarism,” and he convincingly
elucidates the differences between the Passion’s context and an operatic
event—among them the presence of the Evangelist as narrator, the chang-
ing roles of the chorus, and the shifting temporal planes of the story.73 Nev-
ertheless, some version of the “aesthetic” had always formed an important,
70 “Wie sollen Adiaphora ecclesiastica oder Ceremonien in der Kirche beschaffen
seyn? . . . 4) nützlich, daß sie a) zum Wohlstande dienen, schlecht, ehrbar und gravitaetisch
(nicht theatralisch) seyn. . . . Man muß aber nicht mehr auf die Kunst, als Andacht sehen,
damit die Music nicht zu einem leeren Spiel und Ceremonie werde. . . . Soll also die Music
gebrauchet werden . . . 4) mässig, daß man nicht die gantze Zeit, sonderlich an hohen Fest-
Tagen, damit zubringe, wovon die Gemeine nichts, als den blossen äusserlichen Klang und
undeutlichen Thon vernehmen kan.” Zeitfuchs, Promtuarium, 63, 1083, 1084.
71 Daniel Melamed, Hearing Bach’s Passions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005),
13. On the overlap between the operatic and the sacred in Leipzig worship, see also Kev-
orkian, Baroque Piety, 39; and my article “Life and Death in J. S. Bach’s Cantata 82,” Journal
of the Royal Musical Association 135, no. 2 (2010): 315–56, esp. 324–34.
if embattled, part of the Lutheran view of music, ever since Luther himself
described music as belonging to the “wonder of creation.”74 Even if the da
capo arias in the Passion call for a different listening attitude than those
found in an opera, they would still have offered a recognizable aria expe-
rience to the Leipzig congregation—an experience that may have been
not dissimilar to hearing certain movements of Bach’s secular cantatas at
Zimmerman’s or the songs presented on the Brandvorwerk programs.75
Whether this experience would have been a distinctly circular one,
as Berger suggests, is more difficult to ascertain. Apart from the fact that
the repeated portions of an aria would presumably have sounded more
or less transformed through ornamentation, most theorists did not as-
cribe specifically circular qualities to the genre. Both Johann Mattheson
and Johann Gottfried Walther stated that an aria was commonly divided
into two parts (rather than three), with the return at the end being a
strictly optional feature: “Aria . . . is a well-constructed song with its own
specific key and meter, usually divided into two parts, which concisely
expresses a great motion of the affections. Sometimes it closes with a
repeat of the first part, sometimes not; in the former case it is called
da capo.”76 Fugues—another Bachian genre discussed by Berger—were
176 also not usually considered inherently circular. Walther’s description
comes closer to outlining a continuous process:
A fugue is an artful piece in which one voice chases the other. . . . In
treating a fugue subject well, it is necessary to seek out with particular
diligence how and in which ways it can be joined together, interwoven,
redoubled, in regular or inverted form, arranged in an orderly, artful,
and pleasant manner and thus lead through to the end.77
The only genre that consistently attracted the metaphor of the circle
was the canon, which already Seth Calvisius in 1592 had called a “fuga in
74 See Joyce Irwin, “Music and the Doctrine of Adiaphora in Orthodox Lutheran
Theology,” Sixteenth Century Journal 14, no. 2 (1983): 157–72, esp. 158.
75 Mattheson describes the difference as one of performance practice, with church
arias being sung from a score, while operatic arias were sung from memory. See his Kern
melodischer Wissenschaft (Hamburg: Herold, 1737), 98.
76 “Aria . . . ein wohleingerichteter Gesang, der seine gewisse Ton-Art und Zeitmaasse
hat, sich gemeiniglich in zween Theile scheidet und in einem kurtzen Begriff eine grosse
Gemüths-Bewegung ausdruckt. Bisweilen wird mit Wiederholung des ersten Theils, biswei-
len auch ohne dieselbe geschlossen. Im ersten Fall heist es Da capo.” Johann Mattheson,
Der vollkommene Capellmeister (Hamburg: Herold, 1739; facs. Kassel: Bärenreiter, 1954), 212.
77 “Fuga ist ein künstl. Gesang, da eine Stimme die andere jaget. . . . Dieweilen in
tractirung einer guten fuga mit sonderbahrem Fleiß und Nachdencken aus allen Winckeln
zusammen gesuchet werden muß, wie und auf mancherley Art dieselbe in einander gefüget,
geflochten, dupliret, per modum rectum und contrarium, ordentlich künstlich und anmuthig
gesetzet, und biß zum Ende hinaus geführet werden könne.” Johann Gottfried Walther, Prae-
cepta der musicalischen Composition, ed. Peter Benary (Leipzig: Breitkopf and Härtel, 1955), 47.
var wig
orbem” (fugue in a circle).78 Walther confirmed that an “infinite canon”

was also called “circolare” because “it moves from beginning to end, and
from the end back to the beginning, just like a circle.”79 As David Years-
ley has shown, this kind of endless strict counterpoint was often associ-
ated specifically with the heavenly cycles of eternity.80 Nevertheless, most
writers struggled to imagine even this music of the afterlife in genuinely
circular or atemporal terms. Martin Heinrich Fuhrmann asserted merely
that the angelic “Halleluja” would be sung “figuraliter in the eternity
of eternities.”81 A seventeenth-century treatise by the Saxon theolo-
gian Johann Matthäus Meyfart instead reached for a vision of perpetual
renewal in the present. The heavenly choirs, he conjectured,
sing a new song without end, and yet without boredom; without end,
and yet without repetition. . . . They will continually intone a new song,
which will, however, never be finished. While here on earth we tire of
even the most beautiful songs when they are sung too often . . . in the
heavenly Jerusalem new pieces will continually be composed, and will
be sung and played without end.82
*** 177
Proponents of a more “archaeologically” inclined historiography may

contend here that my reading of the evidence is too literal, and that these
writers simply failed to articulate some of their fundamental assump-
tions about the shapes of time. As Butt has proposed, “specifically artistic
modes of expression could give insights that are not otherwise available
or even conceivable” in theological or philosophical discourse.83 Yet the
extant descriptions, however incomplete, do raise the question of what
78 Cited in Paul Walker, Theories of Fugue from the Age of Josquin to the Age of Bach (Roch-
ester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2000), 90.

79 “Er wird auch Circolare, oder ein Creiß Canon genennet, weil er vom Anfange
zum Ende, und vom Ende wiederum zum Anfange, gleich als ein Circul gehet.” Walther,
Praecepta, 189.
80 David Yearsley, Bach and the Meanings of Counterpoint (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, 2002), 24–31.

81 “Da alle Christliche Musici . . . das grosse Halleluja, so sie im untern Chor auf
Erden nur choraliter musiciret, dort im obern Chor figuraliter in die Ewigkeit der Ewig-
keiten werden erschallen lassen.” Martin Heinrich Fuhrmann, Die an der Kirchen Gottes
gebauete Satans-Capelle (Cologne, 1729), 19–20.
82 “Die Außerwehlten singen ein newes Lied / ohne Auffhörung / und doch ohne
Verdriessung: Ohne Auffhörung / und doch ohne Wiederholung . . . Zumahl / weil allezeit
das newe Lied angestimmet / und doch nimmermehr außgesungen wird. Allhier wird man
auch der allerschönsten Lieder überdrüssig / wenn dieselbige gar zu offt practiciret und
gemein worden. . . . Aber in dem Jerusalem werden allezeit newe Stück von den heiligsten
Componisten gedichtet / ohn auffhören gesungen und Instrumentiret.” Johann Matthäus
Meyfart, Das Erste Buch Von Dem Himlischen Jerusalem (Nuremberg: Endtner, 1633), 448–50.
83 Butt, Bach’s Dialogue with Modernity, 127–28.
exactly it might mean for music to be thought of as “circular” or “cycli-

cal”; whether any manner of repetition, be it in a strophic chorale or a
da capo structure, denoted a circular rendering of time; and if so, why
the da capo aria emerged as a favored genre only around 1700, when
earlier composers of an arguably more “circular” disposition could have
made much better use of it. If such questions appear unduly facetious,
they nevertheless highlight the pitfalls associated with reading musical
forms or styles as being representative of larger intellectual trends. The
seductive potential of such metaphors—however revealing as a tool of
historical explication—could easily lead the susceptible historian to start
seeing circles elsewhere, too: perhaps in Johann David Heinichen’s cir-
cle of fifths, published in 1711 (although this device would instead end
up serving as one of the driving forces of musical directionality); or in
Mattheson’s mechanistic explication of how sound travels through the
air: “Just as, when a stone is thrown into water, a circle immediately forms
. . . thus it happens with sound in the air, which allows the same kind of
circle as the water.”84 The appeal of the circle metaphor, in particular,
might well stem from a certain kind of modern nostalgia, a “rebellion
against the modern idea of time, the time of history and progress,” and
178 an associated longing for an age of premodern contentedness, when
peasants worked the fields in the annual cycle of the seasons.85
Berger’s analysis of Bach’s opening chorus in the St. Matthew Passion
takes a slightly different turn, in any case. Although reliant on the da capo
convention, and explicitly labeled “aria” in the libretto, the piece’s final
section significantly modifies the layout of the opening material. As Berg-
er astutely explains, Bach compressed the opening instrumental and vocal
statements into one hybrid phrase, while at the same time joining them
with a partially new text plus the closing portion of the chorale melody
that runs through the movement. According to Berger, this “telescop-
ing” process turns the piece into an even more compelling evocation of
divine eternity, by replacing an expected literal return with a move that
“abolishes the flow of time in favor of the eternal Now.” The effect is “not
one of impatient abbreviation or acceleration but, rather, of synthesizing
culmination.”86 In light of Meyfart’s commentary on the nature of eter-
nal music, it is indeed plausible that some of Bach’s listeners, and even
Bach himself, could have understood the movement in this way. Yet based
on the heterogeneous conceptions of time reported above, perhaps for
84 See Johann David Heinichen, Neu erfundene und gründliche Anweisung zu vollkom-
mener Erlernung des General-Basses (Hamburg: Schiller, 1711; facs. Kassel: Bärenreiter, 2000),
261. “Gleichwie nun, wenn ein Stein ins Wasser geworffen wird, augenblicklich ein Circkel
entstehet . . . also gehet es auch mit dem Klange in der Lufft zu, die eben einen solchen
Circkel zuläßt”; Mattheson, Der vollkommene Capellmeister, 11.
85 Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (New York: Basic Books, 2001), xv.
var wig
others the effect of these modifications would have appeared rather more
directional, reliant on a temporally experienced process of shaping and
reshaping musical materials. Any such correlations between analytical de-
tail and broader ideas will remain at some level speculative, and certainly
no reactions of anyone present at the performances have come down to
us. But some contemporary evidence exists, and at least for someone like
Mattheson, it was less the idea of repetition than such elements of altera-
tion and surprise that were central to a convincing aria design. In consid-
ering the da capo convention, he concluded:
It has become customary that we end our arias with almost the same
passages and sounds with which we began. . . . Yet a skilled composer
can often even here surprise his listeners effectively . . . by introduc-
ing utterly unexpected modifications, which have a pleasant effect, and
from which arise completely unique affections; and this is the true pur-
pose of a peroration.87
The rhetorical term “peroration” here gives away the origins of Mat-
theson’s conception of formal processes. His attempts to relate ideas
from the realm of rhetoric directly to music have been much maligned, 179
in particular his infamous analysis of an aria by Benedetto Marcello.88
But if we look beyond Mattheson’s unwieldy imposition of the parts of
an oration onto his model aria, his approach offers an intriguing per-
spective on early eighteenth-century strategies of temporal disposition.
In particular, Mattheson’s linking of rhetoric and music draws atten-
tion to their shared reliance on a set of compositional operations, such
as variation, extension, contraction, and fragmentation, to generate a
compelling argumentative structure. It was Laurence Dreyfus’s ground-
breaking work on Bach’s compositional patterns that first opened up
a way to discuss such musical operations without insisting on clumsy,
direct analogies with rhetoric, and Berger builds on these insights to
frame his own analysis of Bach’s inventive procedures.89 Like Dreyfus,
however, Berger subordinates the associated task of disposition firmly
to the category of invention, a hierarchy that supports his thesis regard-
ing Bach’s indifference toward temporal progression. Yet the potency of
rhetoric for conceptualizing musical processes arguably resides exactly
87 “Die Gewohnheit aber hat es so eingeführet, daß wir in den Arien fast eben mit
den Gängen und Klängen schliessen, darin wir angefangen haben. . . . Doch kan ein ge-
scheuter Setzer auch offt hierin seine Zuhörer artig überraschen . . . unvermuthete Verän-
derungen anbringen, die einen angenehmen Eindruck hinter sich lassen, daraus gantz
eigene Bewegungen entstehen: und das ist die eigentliche Natur der perorationis.” Mat-
theson, Kern melodischer Wissenschaft, 130.
88 See ibid., 130–34.
89 Dreyfus, Bach and the Patterns of Invention, 3–10; and Berger, Bach’s Cycle, Mozart’s
Arrow, 99.
in the productive tension it generates between an atemporal collection

of inventive possibilities and the temporal span they end up inhabiting.
Mattheson, for one, clearly recognized the importance of both sides of
this process, and many theorists before him had already offered perti-
nent advice on the temporal layout of musical works. As early as 1613,
Johannes Nucius recommended that the rhetorical device of “climax”
(transposed repetition) should be used toward the end of a piece, to
“delay the point of arrival as it is avidly expected by the listener.”90
Crucially, Mattheson’s procedural method does not result in fixed for-
mal patterns but instead offers a flexible catalog of options for generating
individual musical designs. Hence he points out that the devices in Mar-
cello’s aria “do not necessarily all recur in the same order” in other pieces.91
At least for Mattheson, though, this flexibility does not result in an indiffer-
ent stance toward issues of disposition. Perhaps it did for Bach—we clearly
should not presume that Bach’s outlook was somehow directly informed
by Mattheson’s often evidently progressive ideas. Yet the theorist’s rhetori-
cal approach in fact relied upon a long-standing and pervasive feature of
German musical thought. And, at least in some cases, Bach’s exploitation
of these variation and amplification procedures can appear quite carefully
180 gauged toward their effectiveness over the course of a piece’s temporal tra-
jectory. This can be shown in a small-scale example from the A section of the
opening chorus of the St. Matthew Passion. In measure 6, the bass moves
away from its low E pedal for the first time by way of a continuous upward
scale that spans almost two octaves to middle C (ex. 3a). The motive thereby
literally “raises the pitch,” overshooting to the flat sixth degree before fall-
ing back to B for the first internal cadence on the dominant B major. The
same happens in the vocal restatement of that material in measure 23 (ex.
3b), but now reinforced by the choral basses. The vocal section is itself then
repeated in a condensed form, amplified by the first phrase of the chorale;
and when the scalar passage returns in this context, right before the end
of the A section (ex. 3c), it is heard twice, first transposed up a third to
heighten the tension yet further, and then in its original version, leading
to the now familiar closing phrase. The repeated reworking of this motive
over the course of the opening section thereby instills a sense of increasing
urgency, while delaying and strengthening the moment of sectional arrival.
Analogous strategies of temporal disposition take place over larg-
er spans of formal organization as well, including, one might say, the
90 Johannes Nucius, chapter 7 in Musices poeticae, sive De compositione cantus (Neisse,
1613; facs. ed. Leipzig: Zentralantiquariat der DDR, 1976). For a more detailed discussion,
see my article “One More Time: Bach and Seventeenth-Century Traditions of Rhetoric,”
Eighteenth-Century Music 5, no. 2 (2008): 179–208.
91 “Denn, ob gleich die erwehnten Stücke sich eben nicht allemal in derselben Rei-
he befinden, oder auf einander folgen; so werden sie doch, in guten Melodien, fast alle
anzutreffen seyn.” Mattheson, Kern melodischer Wissenschaft, 131.
var wig
example 3a. J. S. Bach, St. Matthew Passion, “Kommt, ihr Töchter,” mm.
4–7 (without chorus and orchestra 1)

4
Fl. I, Ob. I

Fl. II, Ob. II

Vln. I

Vln. II

Vla.
7
8 7 6 7

4 4 5 6 4
2 2 4 2
Cont., Org.
181

6

7

8 6

3 7 7 7 6 4

“telescoping” procedure at the end of the movement. In an extended

process of intensification, the final section reconfigures the opening
into a climactic merging of forces and materials, a process gradually
built up over the piece’s entire duration. “Synthesizing culmination” it
example 3b. “Kommt, ihr Töchter,” mm. 22–24

22

Fl. I, II

Ob. I

Ob. II

Vln. I

Vln. II

Vla.

182 Sop.

- - - - - -

Alto

- - - - - -

Tenor

8

helft mir kla - - -

Bass
- gen, kommt, ihr Töch - ter, helft mir
6
4

9 8 2 6
Cont., Org.

may be, therefore, but one that—for listeners attuned to a sense of the
inevitably quickening course of time—could potentially be experienced
as overwhelmingly linear. Berger adjures us not to be distracted by the
“irrelevancies” of ambiguity, but the intricacies of the surrounding his-
torical picture strongly point toward the potential coexistence of such
conflicting readings.92 As Emil Platen has noted, the opening chorus
var wig
example 3b. (continued)

23

183
- - - - -

- - - - - - - -

8
- - - - - gen, helft mir kla -

kla - - - - - gen, kommt, ihr Töch - ter, helft mir

6

7 7 7 7 6 4

presents “a complex edifice that allows varying interpretations of struc-

ture, and thus different forms of listening comprehension”—and, one
might add, of temporal experience.93
93 “So ist ein komplexes Gebilde entstanden, das verschiedene Interpretationen der
Struktur und damit unterschiedliche Formen hörenden Erfassens zuläßt.” Emil Platen, Die
Matthäus-Passion von Johann Sebastian Bach: Entstehung, Werkbeschreibung, Rezeption (Kassel:
Bärenreiter, 1991), 104.
example 3c. “Kommt, ihr Töchter,” mm. 37–40 (without chorus and

orchestra 2)

37

Sop. ripieno

Fl. I, II

Ob. I

Ob. II

Vln. I

Vln. II

184

Vla.

Sop.

gam, seht ihn als wie ein Lamm!

Alto


Tenor

8


Bass
6

4 6 5

2 4 3 77 7

Cont., Org.

var wig
example 3c. (continued)

39

185

8

7
6

7 7 77 6 4

Ultimately, however, all such interpretations necessarily end up rely-

ing on a leap of faith, since, despite the recourse to historical detail, my
alternative reading of “Kommt, ihr Töchter” also eventually falls back on
a strategy that translates the notes on the page more or less directly into
an imagined aural effect. If this gap between score and history can never
be fully closed (however exhaustive the study of either), this is in part due
to the absence of reliable data regarding the dimension of performance,
to which neither Berger nor Butt grant much space in their accounts.
Recordings over the past century amply demonstrate that Bach’s music
can be played with the precision of a mechanical clock or drawn out until
time seems to grind to a halt, reminding us that no single version of tem-
porality is written into his pieces. Finding a sense of transcendent pres-
entness in the St. Matthew Passion may have little to do with the way the
piece initially came across, and whether such presentness would reveal a
modern or premodern disposition is equally ambiguous. Dean Sutcliffe’s
analytical exploration of Domenico Scarlatti’s keyboard sonatas credits
them with a prevailing sense of “present-tenseness” in their kaleidoscopic
juxtaposition of motivic fragments, but that very moment-to-moment
quality for Sutcliffe heralds a fractured and ever accelerating modernity.94
Many German listeners in the early 1700s, meanwhile, would most
likely have identified more closely with the music of that prolific record
holder Telemann, whose immensely popular Passion settings should
arguably be taken at least as seriously as Bach’s in the attempt to un-
derstand how music reflected prevalent attitudes to time. The present
article is, of course, equally implicated in the tendency to focus on Bach
instead of Telemann. I could have turned, for instance, to the “Solilo-
quium” of Jesus from Telemann’s Brockes Passion (ex. 4), the key scene
186 at Gethsemane in which Jesus implores his father to avert his fate:95
Mein Vater! Schau, wie ich mich quäle,

Erbarme dich, erbarme dich ob meiner Not!
Mein Herze bricht, und meine Seele
Betrübet sich bis an den Tod!
[My father, see how I suffer! Have mercy upon my distress! My heart is
breaking, and my soul is sorrowful unto death!]
The aria displays—in Berger’s terms—a striking melding of linear

and circular elements, pointing toward the limited usefulness of these
binary categories for evaluating eighteenth-century musical realities.
The opening section of this da capo design (mm. 1–9) is streamlined for
its repeat into three measures of instrumental ritornello (mm. 17–19),
creating a sense of temporal compression, or abbreviation; yet the move-
ment as a whole is then reiterated in full, with a different text, after an
intervening recitative, thereby emphasizing the cyclical action of Jesus’
repeated return to prayer. Meanwhile, the solo tenor voice is juxtaposed
with an uncannily independent viola line in perpetual sixteenth notes
94 Dean Sutcliffe, The Keyboard Sonatas of Domenico Scarlatti and Eighteenth-Century Musi-
cal Style (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 215–16.

95 On the widespread popularity of this work, see Georg Philipp Telemann, Der für
die Sünde der Welt leidende und sterbende Jesus: Passionsoratorium von Barthold Heinrich Brockes,
TVWV 5:1, ed. Carsten Lange (Kassel: Bärenreiter, 2008), xii–xiii.
var wig
example 4. Georg Philipp Telemann, Brockes Passion, “Mein Vater,”

mm. 1–9

Violetta
all’ unisono
Violetta I, II, III

Jesus
6 6
6
5

Continuo
3

1. Mein Va - ter, mein Va - ter!

6
4
5 6

187

5

Schau, wie ich mich quä - - le, er - bar - me

6

7 4 3 4

2

7

dich, er - bar - - me dich ob mei - ner

6

6

9

Not.

6 6

that generates a vivid impression of a modern split subjectivity, as the

inner agitation of the pleading subject seems to become audible along-
side the outward-directed verbal utterance.96 This unrelenting second
“voice,” distinctly unvocal in its continuous phrasing, with only three
brief gaps across the piece, could conceivably be heard as combining
certain arrow- and cycle-like qualities—the opening bars circling around
a central D but carried along by the directional pull of a chromatically
188 descending bass. Yet the tenacious, fatiguing effect of this voice is per-
haps more aptly captured in Johann Georg Hamann’s other time-related
metaphor, that of the “rust that wears down everything.” The singing
voice, by contrast, hardly manages to sustain a coherent line. After an
opening two-measure statement, the phrasing in the remainder of the
movement disintegrates into shorter outbursts between a half and one-
and-a-half measures in length, with erratically shifting contours. This au-
ral depiction of a struggling human figure faltering in the face of inevi-
table divine destiny is given poetic expression in a further excerpt cited
in Hamann’s dictionary entry on “time”:
We have set out to divide what is indivisible, and have given the name
time to what appears to be a portion of this obscure eternity, which,
however, endures forever undivided and in which we all find ourselves
suspended. This time seems to pass . . . and yet, anyone who investigates
the nature of time properly will have to admit that it is not time but only
creatures that pass away.97
96 See Anthony Cascardi, The Subject of Modernity (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1992), esp. 7–8.

97 “Wir haben, was untheilbar ist, zu theilen unterwunden, und gleichsam einem
Theil der dunckeln Ewigkeit, die unzertrennlich währt, worinn wir alle schweben, den
Nahmen Zeit, die zu vergehen scheint, da wir vergehn, gegeben. . . . Da ieder doch, wenn
er der Zeit Beschaffenheit gebührend untersucht, gewiß gestehet, daß bloß die Creatur
und keine Zeit vergehet.” Hamann, Poetisches Lexicon, 915. The author of this passage, inci-
dentally, was Telemann’s librettist Barthold Heinrich Brockes.
var wig
The omnipresent “other” voice in this movement, then, could be

heard to open up perspectives both inward to the afflicted soul and out-
ward to the immutable eternal realm. Although in this instance, too,
any claims about music as actively shaping contemporary conceptions
of time can be formulated only as tentative suggestions, perhaps the no-
table double presence in Telemann’s monologue aria indeed held the
power to instill in its listeners a novel sense of self-consciousness—of
their own fragile, subjective temporality set against the unremitting on-
ward march of the rational world, or against a distant and impregnable
celestial order. The fact that the work’s first performance, in Frankfurt
on 2 and 3 April 1716, took place in the sacred space of the Lutheran
Barfüßerkirche, but was billed as a concert for a paying public (with pro-
ceeds going to charity), further complicates the question of what kinds of
temporal and social experiences Telemann’s audience may have found
in this retelling of the Passion narrative. Did it serve as a fashionable
means of filling their spare time, comparable to other kinds of public
entertainment such as theatre or opera, or as a devotional exercise of-
fering a nostalgic moment of escape from the rush of secular urban life
outside?98 As Keith Chapin has discussed, Telemann in his own writings
often explicitly positioned himself as a progressive galant homme, who 189
nonetheless remained beholden to key aspects of ancient tradition—
another trait that may well render him a more informative subject for
understanding early eighteenth-century musical modernity than his gen-
erally less articulate Leipzig colleague.99
Yet my argument here is not ultimately geared toward the conclusion
that musicologists should avoid talking about Bach. If certain inherited
aesthetic predilections—a preference for Bach over Telemann, say—
remain written into most current accounts of eighteenth-century Western
art music, this does not necessarily pose a problem, as long as the desire to
find yet more ways to discuss the same beloved repertory is acknowledged
somewhere as a driving force. As Butt explains in his introduction, his
project primarily aimed at working out why Bach’s Passions have occu-
pied such an exalted position for so long, and how they can continue to
be relevant to what Hans Blumenberg has called the “belated listeners”
of today.100 But when it comes to the challenge of writing a kind of music
history that takes on the complexities of specific times and places of the
past, some of these engrained hierarchies may well have to be revised
98 On the circumstances of the first performance, see Carsten Lange, “Zur Auffüh-
rung von Telemanns ‘Brockes-Passionsoratorium’ in Frankfurt am Main,” in Telemann in

Frankfurt, ed. Cahn, 142–62, esp. 148–50.
99 Keith Chapin, “Counterpoint: From the Bees or for the Birds? Telemann and Early
Eighteenth-Century Quarrels with Tradition,” Music and Letters 92, no. 3 (2011): 377–409.
100 Butt, Bach’s Dialogue with Modernity, 1–4; and Hans Blumenberg, Matthäuspassion
(Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1988), 8.
more radically. Such a process of revision would involve adopting a less

patronizing stance toward those eighteenth-century listeners who suppos-
edly could only gain an “incomplete” appreciation of Bach’s music, and
instead engaging fully with the nuances and contradictions of earlier pat-
terns of thought.101 Music’s inherent ambiguities make it a particularly
tempting place to seek validation of our current constructions of West-
ern identity, but they also invite us to delve deeper into the bewildering
richness of one particular temporal reality.
King’s College London
ABSTRACT
Narratives of music and modernity have been prominent in musico-
logical writings of the past decade, and the place of Johann Sebastian Bach
within these narratives has formed the subject of stimulating debates.
Recent studies by Karol Berger and John Butt have aimed to integrate
Bach’s Passion compositions into broadly conceived philosophical frame-
works, in Berger’s case focusing specifically on changing perceptions of
time from a premodern sense of circular stasis to a modern linear idea of
190
progress. This article proposes an alternative model of historical inquiry
into these issues by presenting a detailed look at attitudes to time in early
eighteenth-century Protestant Leipzig. My approach reveals a complex
constellation of conflicting ideas and metaphors that encompass notions
of time as both circular and linear and evince a particular concern for the
question of how to fill the time of one’s earthly existence productively.
In this light, pieces like Bach’s St. Matthew Passion and Georg Philipp
Telemann’s Brockes Passion can be understood to have offered a range
of different temporal experiences, which depended on individual listen-
ing attitudes, performance decisions, and surrounding social conven-
tions. I argue that only through paying close attention to these fluid and
often incongruous discourses can we gain a sufficiently nuanced picture
of how music may have reflected and shaped early eighteenth-century
conceptions of time, history, and eternity.
Keywords: Johann Sebastian Bach, St. Matthew Passion, modernity,

recreation, Georg Philipp Telemann, time
101 John Butt, “Bach’s Metaphysics of Music,” in The Cambridge Companion to Bach, ed.
John Butt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 59.

Article - Metaphors of Time and Modernity in Bach

Uploaded by

Document Information

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Article - Metaphors of Time and Modernity in Bach

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Metaphors of Time and Modernity in Bach

Author(s): Bettina Varwig

D efining a place for Johann Sebastian Bach in

versity Press, 2005), 2:234.

to Taruskin’s volume runs to two densely packed columns, whereas Bach’s

4 Ibid., 2:240, 260.

Norton, 2003), xxi.

Century Music 1 (2004): 47–60, esp. 59.

Press, 2007), 83.

transformation at greater length and in the process manages to outline a

Origins of Musical Modernity, Hopkins Review 2, no. 2 (Spring 2009): 306.

(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 16, 179.

Tribe (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985), 9–10, 37.

tradition about to be obliterated by the political and intellectual forces

15 Berger, Bach’s Cycle, Mozart’s Arrow, 102, 117.

is not intended, then, to argue about moving an imaginary boundary

In many popular theological and literary writings of the period, circular

Lexicon of 1726, the concept of “inner” or human time, as opposed to the

formulated in the preceding century by Isaac Newton, held that time

time is not a movement or measurement, but it is measured according

A similar notion of continuous renewal is outlined in the text for the

Die Zeit, so niemand zählen kann,

This idea of a perpetual Now, which also features in Berger’s account of

Anything that cannot be counted among the current Now has to be

figure 1. Andreas Bretschneider, Pratum emblematicum (Leipzig, 1617),

The premeasured duration of a human life simply became shorter with

figure 2. Johann Baptist Homann, Neu inventirte Geographische Universal-

composed by Bach—for their sense of time.36 As John Butt has pointed

of a mechanically ticking bass and continually circulating violins, which

tenberg: Zimmermann, 1710), 80.

Hundert tausend Eitelkeiten

Deutscher Tonkunst (Leipzig: Breitkopf and Härtel, 1909), 81.

Ergetzung aufgesetzet (s.l., 1723).

most clearly communicated in English translation in the metaphorical expression “killing

3015. On Müßiggang, see also Kessel, Langeweile, 26–29.

figure 3. Kurtzweiliger Zeit-Vertreiber, wider die Melancholie (Leipzig,

a musical memento of the benefits of disciplined labor. Yet the pedantic

Friedrich Hunold (Halle, 1720), 5.

example 2. Georg Philipp Telemann, Der geduldige Socrates, act 1, scene 3,

As is evident from the frontispiece to this pamphlet (fig. 4), music

. . . welche durch künstlich gesetzte und wohlklingende Concerte, Ouverturen, Arien,

figure 4. Angenehmer Zeitvertreib Des grossen und mannigfaltigen Vergnügens

Gemüths-Ergötzung,” closely echo some of the Zeitvertreib publications

Kißner, 1726), 3:287.

orbem” (fugue in a circle).78 Walther confirmed that an “infinite canon”

Proponents of a more “archaeologically” inclined historiography may

ester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2000), 90.

versity Press, 2002), 24–31.

exactly it might mean for music to be thought of as “circular” or “cycli-

in the productive tension it generates between an atemporal collection

“telescoping” procedure at the end of the movement. In an extended

example 3b. “Kommt, ihr Töchter,” mm. 22–24

presents “a complex edifice that allows varying interpretations of struc-

example 3c. “Kommt, ihr Töchter,” mm. 37–40 (without chorus and

Ultimately, however, all such interpretations necessarily end up rely-

Mein Vater! Schau, wie ich mich quäle,

The aria displays—in Berger’s terms—a striking melding of linear

cal Style (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 215–16.

example 4. Georg Philipp Telemann, Brockes Passion, “Mein Vater,”

that generates a vivid impression of a modern split subjectivity, as the

Press, 1992), esp. 7–8.

The omnipresent “other” voice in this movement, then, could be

rung von Telemanns ‘Brockes-Passionsoratorium’ in Frankfurt am Main,” in Telemann in

(Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1988), 8.

figure 1. Andreas Bretschneider, Pratum emblematicum (Leipzig, 1617),

figure 2. Johann Baptist Homann, Neu inventirte Geographische Universal-

figure 3. Kurtzweiliger Zeit-Vertreiber, wider die Melancholie (Leipzig,

example 2. Georg Philipp Telemann, Der geduldige Socrates, act 1, scene 3,

figure 4. Angenehmer Zeitvertreib Des grossen und mannigfaltigen Vergnügens

example 3b. “Kommt, ihr Töchter,” mm. 22–24

example 3c. “Kommt, ihr Töchter,” mm. 37–40 (without chorus and

example 4. Georg Philipp Telemann, Brockes Passion, “Mein Vater,”