Sound thinking
The infinity of beauty in Bach
by Ken Myers
“Bach is the greatest of Christian theologians, the most inspired witness to the ordo amoris in the fabric of being; not only is no other composer capable of more freely developing lines or of more elaborate structures of tonal mediation (wheresoever the line goes, Bach is there also), but no one as compellingly demonstrates that the infinite is beauty and that beauty is infinite. It is in Bach’s music, as nowhere else, that the potential boundlessness of thematic development becomes manifest: how a theme can unfold inexorably through difference, while remaining continuous in each moment of repetition, upon a potentially infinite surface of varied repetition. And it is a very particular kind of infinity that is at issue, for which there is really no other adequate aesthetic model: Wagner’s ‘infinite’ melody (so called) consists not in unmasterable variations but in the governing logic of motivic recurrences; Wagner’s greatest achievements might almost be said to make audible a quintessentially Hegelian logic, in a music pervaded by the most voluptuous and luxuriant kind of metaphysical nostalgia, the ‘infinity’ of its unbroken melodic flow being of the most synthetic variety, rationalized (or sublated) by an abstractable system of leitmotivs. Is any music more fated than that magnificent arch spanning the course from Siegfried’s funeral processional to Brünnhilde’s immolation and the conflagration of the gods in Götterdlimmerung? In Bach’s music, though, motion is absolute, and all thematic content is submitted to the irreducible disseminations that fill it out: each note is an unforced, unnecessary, and yet wholly fitting supplement, even when the fittingness is deferred across massive dissonances by way of the most intricate contrapuntal mediations. Nor are dissonances final, or ever tragic: they are birthpangs, awaiting the glory to be disclosed in their reconciliations — their stretti and recapitulations. Bach’s is the ultimate Christian music; it reflects as no other human artifact ever has or could the Christian vision of creation. Take for example the Goldberg Variations, in which a simple aria from the Anna Magdalena Notenbüchlein is stated, only to be displaced by a majestic sequence of thirty variations composed not upon it, but upon its bass line (a simple descent from the tonic to the dominant, G to D, scarcely material sufficient for a lesser talent), and in which every third variation is a perfect canon (the canonic refrain being lengthened at each juncture, so that the final two are canons upon the octave and upon the ninth). When at the end of this glittering, shifting, and varied series the aria is restated, it can no longer be heard apart from the memory of all the variations in which it has been reimagined: it has acquired a richness, an untold profundity, of light and darkness, joy and melancholy, levity and gravity; it is all its ornamentation and change. Or consider the massive, shatteringly profound Ciaccona at the end of the second Unaccompanied Violin Partita, whose initial theme is no more than four bars long, a bass phrase of absolute simplicity that is successively reborn in sixty-four variations, passing from the minor, through the major, and back to the minor again, arriving at a restatement (with a few chromatic adornments at the end) that, again, contains all the motion, variety, and grandeur of what has gone before. One could imagine no better illustration of the nature of creation’s ‘theme.’
“Creation’s form — a departing theme, submitted to innumerable variations and then restored, immeasurably enriched — is too splendid and lively to be reduced to the helotry in which, for instance, the Hegelian epic of Geist would confine it: no ideal and accomplished music, no final resolution beyond the ‘negations’ of music, brings creation to a ‘fulfilled’ silence; Christian eschatology promises only more and greater harmony, whose developments, embellishments, and movement never end and never ‘return’ to a state more original than music. The analogy between God’s and Bach’s handiworks is audible chiefly in Bach’s limitless capacity to develop separate lines into extraordinary intricacies of contrapuntal complication, without ever sacrificing the ‘peace,’ the measures of accord, by which the music is governed. This is especially evident, of course, in the great fugues, particularly of the later years: a double, triple, or even quadruple fugue is never too dense for Bach’s invention to comprise, to open up into ever more unexpected resolutions, nor does a plurality of subjects ever prove resistant to augmented, diminished, or inverted combinations. Perhaps the most exquisite examples of this inventiveness are to be found in the second book of the Well-Tempered Clavier and in the Art of the Fugue, but one might look anywhere in his oeuvre: the very lovely Fugue in F Major (BMV 540), for instance, in which the two contrasted subjects come together in a third part where they appear together in five different intervals, until they arrive at the magnificent conclusion in which the treble restates the fugue's original motif; or, to take an example particularly appropriate to theological concerns, the great Prelude and Fugue in E-flat Major, Bach's ‘trinitarian’ fugue, which is actually constructed from three fugues on three different subjects and in three different time signatures, the first (the ‘paternal’) fugue’s subject appearing in each of the other two in a rhythmically varied form, ‘generating’ the second fugue and crossing, by way of a stretto, to the third. This is the pneumatological dynamism in Bach’s music, so to speak, the grace that always finds measures of reconciliation that preserve variety; and so this is how it offers an aesthetic analogy to the work of the Spirit in creation, his power to unfold the theme God imparts in creation into ever more profuse and elaborate developments, and to overcome every discordant series.
— from David Bentley Hart, The Beauty of the Infinite: The Aesthetics of Christian Truth (Eerdmans, 2003)
