Magnificat anima mea Dominum
The Visitation of the Blessed Virgin Mary is this Friday! Here’s an early Magnificat-themed special edition of this newsletter.
You may be familiar with with J.S. Bach’s dazzling, deservedly well-known Magnificat in D major. (If not, I would recommend the Helmuth Rilling recording.) I’m not here to sell you on the so-called Latin Magnificat, though, but rather to recommend to you Bach’s lesser-known Magnificat setting (of sorts), “Meine Seel erhebt den Herren,” a chorale cantata he composed for the Visitation.
Lutheran church cantatas were closely linked with the readings for a specific Sunday or feast day, and chorale cantatas were cantatas based on a particular hymn appropriate for the occasion. The hymn, in this case, is Luther’s translation of the Magnificat, which was traditionally sung by Lutherans to the ninth psalm tone, the tonus peregrinus. (In the introit of Mozart’s Requiem, the soprano soloist sings the “Te decet hymnus” verse to the same psalm tone, so you probably already know it.)
Bach uses this psalm tone in every movement where Luther’s translation is set directly (instead of paraphrased), transformed in various ways. In the opening chorale fantasia, it appears as a cantus firmus in the soprano and alto lines, shining through the texture of swirling sixteenth notes in the lower voices and strings and bringing out the canticle’s dignified joy. In the concluding Gloria Patri, the psalm tone gets a nice four-part chorale harmonization, as is standard for these cantatas.
Especially intriguingly, in the movement with the text “He remembers his mercy and helps his servant Israel,” the psalm tone reappears for the first time since the opening movement, as an instrumental cantus firmus in the oboes and trombones. Here, it sounds mysterious and immoveable against the twisty, chromatic figures of the alto-tenor duet. (Bach also gives the tonus peregrinus melody to the oboes in the “Suscepit Israel” movement of the Latin Magnificat, which features the same line of text, in a very similar way.) The return of the austere, archaic psalm tone seems fitting for this line of the canticle, with its invocation of history and the fulfillment of God’s promises, and its reference to God’s mercy and Israel’s status as “servant” which necessitate a sense of humility. It’s a strange little movement that’s grown on me in all the times I’ve listened to it.
I haven’t mentioned the exuberant soprano solo (like a more frenetic “Et exsultavit spiritus meus”) or the imperious bass solo (like a stripped-back “Deposuit potentes”). It’s not fair to just compare this Magnificat to the other one, but something they have in common (along with Bach’s other cantatas) is that they’re made up of a series of astonishingly diverse miniature musical worlds joined into a greater whole, like a string of multicolored gems. In these musical episodes, we get both the serenity and the turbulence in Mary’s prophecy, and above all, the love and joy.
I’ve been intermittently listening to pre-Reformation English sacred music lately, which I don’t know very much about. (Everything I do know about it comes from O Sing unto the Lord by Andrew Gant, which is an excellent book that I think everyone who’s even remotely interested in choral music should read.)
Blue Heron recently released a five-disc set of music from the Peterhouse partbooks, one of the rare music collections we have that survived the Reformation, and it features a wealth of elaborate Marian antiphons, masses, and the like. (Wikipedia mentions that some partbooks from a later set were discovered only in 1926 behind the wall paneling of a library in Peterhouse college, Cambridge, where they’d been stashed in fear of Puritans finding them.)
I haven’t listened to all of it yet, but there’s a beautiful Magnificat by someone named Robert Jones, not to be confused with the Elizabethan lute song composer of the same name. Here’s Blue Heron performing it (incidentally, in a Puritan church).
As always, I welcome your thoughts. Send me your favorite Magnificat settings! See you next time, when I finally get around to writing about everything I heard and saw through the rest of the regular season…hopefully.