Water is a frequent image in Bach’s music. Placid rivers sing the praises of enlightened monarchs. Other streams rush by, murmuring their eternal truths of earthly life’s fleeting nature. Elsewhere, storms rise up, from strafing Northern rains to tempests on the Sea of Galilea. Bach’s aqueous music can delight and despair, soothe and terrify. It can also sing of the fate of rivers in our time.
Bach was born some seventy years after the Great Thuringian Flood of 1613 when the water rose so high and furious that it swept away the famed gate to the city of Weimar, where Bach, a century later, would later serve as a court musician. The aftermath of the disaster let loose a deluge of angry sermons blaming faithlessness as the cause of the ceaseless rains. A catalog of the damage was assembled soon after the disaster by Abraham Lange, then chief cleric in Weimar. His account of the “The Horrible Storms of the Thuringian Flood of 1613,” lists the destruction to buildings and bridges, tallies the human deaths and the loss of livestock, and recounts harrowing tales of escape and doom.
The calamity was still a topic of moral and meteorological discourse, in print and from pulpits, during Bach’s lifetime. In 1720, one of Lage’s descendants, also a Weimar priest, published a comprehensive, 500-page account of the flood based on surviving documents.
The terror of rivers was real for Bach. He encountered many in his intrepid walks on his way to new musical experiences. On the longest of these adventures, a hike of more than 200 miles in the winter of 1705 from Thuringia in central Germany to Lübeck on the Baltic Sea (and back), he must have come to the mighty Elbe at Artlenburg where there was a ferry (the line was in service for some 700 years until was stopped in the 1960s). Only a few years earlier, Bach would have known of—and perhaps himself copied out and played—a famous keyboard piece from the middle of the 17th century that depicted a near fatal misadventure at just such a place. This evocative, ominous Allemande by the moodily peripatetic Johann Jakob Froberger warned that unpredictable currents could overturn human complacency at any moment, transforming calm into calamity.
Rivers coursed not only through Bach’s long journeys but through his musical imagination.
One of Bach’s earliest surviving autograph manuscripts is a copy he made of an epic organ fantasy on the chorale, An Wasserflüssen Babylon (By the Waters of Babylon), BWV 653, by the Hamburg organist Johann Adam Reincken. As a teenager, Bach would walk the thirty miles, many of them along the Elbe, from the city of Lüneburg to Hamburg to hear Reincken play the organ at the cavernous church of St. Catherine’s. Two decades later, in 1720, Bach played one of history’s most famous recitals on this monumental instrument, improvising on that same hymn tune for half-an-hour. After the performance, the aged Reincken told Bach, “I thought this art was dead, but I see that it lives on in you.” Several versions survive of Bach’s setting of this chorale melody, and even if these don’t contain any of the musical material from that vanished fantasy heard in the 1720 recital, these later chorale preludes inevitably echo that triumph.
The chorale text paraphrases the 137th Psalm: “By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, and wept; when we thought of Zion.” Paradoxically, this chorale, so closely associated with the historic organ heroics of both Reincken and Bach, sings of harp and organ being hung up on riverside willows. The King of Instruments is made to hymn its own silencing. Yet the very act of music making resists, even overcomes, the condition of enslavement which the Psalm laments. The Babylon captors force their captives to sing, and while they do, they dream of vengeance. Like the psalm, the last of the chorale’s five verses ends in tremendous violence conjured against the Babylonian oppressors: “Happy is the one who seizes your infants / and dashes them against the rocks.”
There is no rushing current in Bach’s setting of this chorale. The continual trills evoke the riffling water across the broad, subdued flow of the piece. Other sighing ornaments give vent to despair as unstoppable as a river.
All this plaintive, potential hydro-energy is unleashed in one of Bach’s most kinetic creations, a chorale prelude on Christ, unser Herr, zum Jordan kam (Christ, our Lord, came to the Jordan), BWV 684 published not long before he began making his final revisions to An Wasserflüssen Babylon.
The text of Christ, unser Herr, zum Jordan kam was written by Martin Luther, who believed that his words coupled with melody would engrave his teachings on the sacrament of baptism in the minds of the young and confirm them in those of the old. These waters drown sin and from them the faithful emerge newly born, rescued from death and the devil.
In Bach’s setting of the chorale, the purifying musical stream rips along with exhilarating intensity. The current of sixteenth notes is unceasing, without even the slight pause for a trill at cadences. The revivifying eddies and rapids rush breathlessly all the way to the final chord, which Bach makes sure will be played short by carefully notating a nearly full measure of rests. An ever-renewable life force, this river can never be made to stop. The piece can only peremptorily be ended but that does not stop its message. For Bach, its cleansing power is eternal.
Having heard the tales of the watery devastations of 1613, Bach may well have welcomed subsequent developments in civil engineering and flood-control, but there is never doubt that this music conjures an uncontainable Holy River.
While Bach’s music can be diverted to the realms of aesthetics and theology, this move helps one forget that these works refer to real rivers: increasingly embattled, enslaved, entombed, the “Waters of Babylon” are the Tigris and Euphrates, massively impaired by Turkey’s Southeastern Anatolia Project which, since it got under way in the 1970s, has erected some 22 dams and 19 power plants near the Syrian and Iraqi borers. These have sapped the flow into Iraq from the two rivers by more than 80%. At its end the Jordan is depleted by 95%, reduced to a polluted trickle by hydroelectric and irrigation projects. Environmental groups assert that pollution is so high that baptism in the Jordan is harmful to the health.
Bach’s thrilling depiction of the Jordan stands as a monument to a river that he never visited, although he would have read about it in a volume in his personal library, Heinrich Bünting’s virtual travel guide through Holy Lands, the Itinerarium Sacræ Scripturæ of 1581. There, the Jordan is “pleasant” and “sweet”; it “runneth.” Bünting, who likewise never traveled beyond Germany, mentions the falls near that Jordan’s headwaters, which are perhaps portrayed by Bach in the bounding octave leaps in the left hand that sometimes replace the relentless sixteenths themselves as they jump to another voice higher in the textre.
Bach places the venerable chorale melody of Christ, unser Herr, zum Jordan kam in the pedal where it sounds forth with austere force. The text was attached inextrixably to the tune for Bach and his listeners, so that they would have heard it in their heads even when no one was singing the words out loud: the clarion chorale heralded “waters washing away sin.” Few will now have such unshakeable connections to the poetry, nor welcome the first and last of Luther’s seven verses, drenched as they are in blood.
The straights and oxbows of the tune, composed in 1525 in the early years of the Reformation, trace an ancient course. I don’t hear God’s voice in it, but Nature’s, singing with a truth and timelessness that cannot be silenced by dams, wars, or petrochemicals.
This chorale prelude’s despondent riparian pendant, An Wasserflüssen Babylon, mourns the plight of so many of the world’s great rivers, now reduced to reservoirs of hubris and greed.
(David Yearsley is a long-time contributor to CounterPunch and the Anderson Valley Advertiser. His latest albums, “In the Cabinet of Wonders” and “Handel’s Organ Banquet” are now available from False Azure Records.)
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