Remembering the Drama of Easter
Five hundred years ago, the life of music in churches was transformed radically. In 1524, at least three separate books of hymns—intended to nourish the young Reformation movement—were made available to eager Germans. Printed in Nuremberg, Erfurt, and Wittenberg, these small booklets (containing between eight and 32 hymns each) were soon encouraging singing throughout Europe. Not surprisingly, Martin Luther had a hand in the production of all three collections and in the production of the texts and tunes included.
Two of the hymnbooks presented only the melody line and the stanzas of the hymns, while the third included harmonizations—in three, four, or five parts—composed by Luther’s colleague Johann Walter, an experienced singer and composer. That third book, Eyn geystlich Gesangk Buchleyn (“A spiritual song booklet”), also included a foreword by Luther, which provided authorization and rationale:
That it is good, and pleasing to God, for us to sing spiritual songs is, I think, a truth whereof no Christian can be ignorant. . . . These songs have been set in four parts . . . because I wished to provide our young people (who both will and ought to be instructed in music and other sciences) with something by which they might rid themselves of amorous and carnal songs, and so apply themselves to what is good with pleasure, as becometh the young.
Luther’s Hymn
Among the hymns included in Eyn geystlich Gesangk Buchleyn (and in one of the other 1524 hymnbooks) was Luther’s dramatic seven-stanza Easter hymn, Christ lag in Todesbanden, “Christ lay in death’s bonds.” Luther’s text borrowed imagery from two venerable predecessors: the Latin medieval sequence Victimae paschali laudes(“Praises to the Paschal victim”), attributed to the eleventh-century Wipo of Burgundy, and a German liturgical song from about the same period, Christ ist erstanden (“Christ is risen”).
In Victimae paschali laudes, Christ is depicted both as a sacrificial lamb and as a triumphant warrior whose courageous struggle with death has given us life. “Death and life contended in a spectacular battle: the dead leader of life reigns alive.” Luther combined this account of spiritual combat with allusions to many biblical passages. He heightened the story of the drama of Redemption by beginning this Easter hymn on Good Friday (or Holy Saturday) with the crucified Christ still held captive by death. And while the hymn’s opening stanza announces the fact of the Resurrection—evoking in its last line Easter’s characteristic Hallelujah!—its second stanza travels back in time, before Christ’s birth, to remind us how dark the human condition was before that triumph: “Nobody could restrain death, among all the children of humankind; our sin made all that so; no innocence was to be found. As a result, death came immediately and seized power over us, held us imprisoned in its realm.”
The third and fourth stanzas recount the great victory of the Son of God as his death swallowed up death; the fifth stanza—with horrible, shocking imagery—details the cost of that conquest: “Here is the proper Easter lamb—God has commanded of it—which is, up on the cross’s trunk, roasted in ardent love” (in heisser Lieb gebraten).
Bach’s Cantata
The tune Luther stipulated for singing this Easter hymn is a conflation of the melody to which Victimae paschali laudeshad been chanted for centuries and the Gregorian Easter Alleluia, Christus resurgent ex mortis. In the early eighteenth century, when Johann Sebastian Bach began composing church cantatas, this tune and text were a familiar feature of Lutheran worship on Resurrection Day. So when he set out to compose what became his most powerful musical statement about Christ’s victory over death, Bach decided to present all seven stanzas of Luther’s hymn in seven consecutive movements, all in the same key, and all using the melody that Luther had made public in 1524.
We don’t know exactly when Bach wrote Christ lag in Todes Banden (BWV 4) or when or where it was first sung. The composing probably happened in 1707 or 1708, while Bach was organist in Mühlhausen. What we know for sure is that the cantata was sung in Leipzig on Easter Sunday in 1724, just after Bach completed his first year as cantor at Thomaskirche.
Bach accentuates Luther’s decision to remember the reality of sin and death while celebrating the life secured by Christ. The cantata opens with a brief, solemn instrumental sinfonia; “The intention is that of depicting the Savior captured by death, mourned and adored,” observes musicologist André Pirro. And the musical device Bach introduces here—a succinct motif that pervades the entire work—is the simplest of melodic gestures: a descending half step. Play an A on a keyboard, followed by a G-sharp. It’s the tightest of intervals possible in Western music, but that short descending sigh becomes, in Bach’s development of Luther’s hymn, an emblem of death.
In the melody of Luther’s hymn, the first two notes are a descending whole step, from A down to G. That’s how generations of Lutherans had heard and sung the opening notes of this hymn. It’s the interval borrowed from the chant on which the melody is based, and then heard in dozens of compositions for choir and for organ based on this tune. Bach had the musical-theological shrewdness to recognize in this slight (but radical) alteration in the melody a musical resource that would enable him to more powerfully convey both Passion and Resurrection.
For example, Bach uses this two-note motif to express the gloomy mood of the hymn’s second verse, which begins with the two syllables den Tod, “Death.” Bach sets this verse as an austere duet between soprano and alto; conductor John Eliot Gardiner writes: “Bach uses his falling semi-tone in two-note fragments—segmented and desolate—as an exchange between soprano and alto in a grief-laden, rocking motion. . . . The music is spellbinding. It conjures up humanity in the grip of death, helpless and paralyzed.” The verse ends with an Easter Hallelujah, but here the mood is “elegiac and unremittingly sad, as though to convey the idea that God must be praised even at the moment of death.”
I’ve only provided the briefest of introductions here, but be assured: Christ lag in Todes Banden merits repeated listening and study. I sang the work as a teenager, and now in my seventies continue to discover depths of expression for which I am grateful. The defeat of death is certain in Bach’s celebration of the Resurrection. But the price paid by the Victor is not forgotten. In the words of the hymn’s sixth verse, “the night of sin is over.” Yet until Christ returns, we are still shadowed by lingering patches of darkness. Christ’s victory was and is decisive, but his dazzling body still bears the dear tokens of his Passion.
Ken Myers is the host and producer of the Mars Hill Audio Journal. Formerly an arts editor with National Public Radio, he also serves as music director at All Saints Anglican Church in Ivy, Virginia. He is a contributing editor for Touchstone.
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