Subject to Death & Life
Paul Celan’s Todesfuge, J. S. Bach & the Passion of Christ
by Timothy A. Smith
Death is the intractable problem of the human condition, yet remedied by means of death, that is, the life-giving death of Christ. In his Confessions, Augustine writes:
How hast thou loved us, O good Father, that hast not spared thine only son, but hast delivered him unto death . . . even the death of the cross? He that was alone free among the dead, that had power to lay down his life, and power to take it up again: for us was he unto thee both the Victor and the Victim, and therefore Victor, because the Victim: for us was he unto thee both the Priest and the Sacrifice, and therefore the Priest, because the Sacrifice.
Death, victim, and sacrifice—these are the subjects from which arise life, victory, and Christ’s saving priesthood.
There is a musical expression for such an arrangement of subject and, if you will, countersubject: the fugue. Death was the underlying subject of “fugues” by two very different men—Johann Sebastian Bach, “master of the fugue,” and Paul Celan, the premiere German-language post–World War II poet. A careful study and comparison of the “fugal responses” of Bach and Celan to suffering and death will deepen our appreciation of the Passion of Christ. We begin with Celan.
Death in Germany
Paul Celan’s Todesfuge ( Death Fugue) haunts the literature of the twentieth century. His most famous phrase, “Death is a Master from Germany,” comes from this most disquieting poem. Its driving dactylic meter, punctuated by staccato repetitions of trinken (“drink”), conveys the physical and spiritual horrors of a concentration camp:
Black milk of daybreak we drink it at evening
we drink it at midday and morning
we drink it at night
we drink and we drink
we shovel a grave in the air . . .
Born in 1920 in Romania to Jewish parents, Celan’s real name was Paul Antschel. In 1942, his parents were sent to a concentration camp in
Timothy A. Smith is a professor of music theory at Northern Arizona University and the author of the Canons and Fugues of J. S. Bach website. He lives with his wife and the youngest of their three daughters in Flagstaff, where they are members of the Episcopal Church of the Epiphany.
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