Bach's St. John Passion

The video shown below contains the beginning of J. S. Bach's St. John Passion, a very baroque piece of music. I am not asking you to watch it all, there's a lot of repetition in it.

This post isn't really about music. It is about certain ideas that can be expressed through music.

To be perfectly honest, this beginning chorus scares me. Of course, the music is meant to be somewhat creepy, what with the restless, quick dancing of the strings and the dissonant woodwind melodies. The music effectively creates a certain mood, but there's much more to it than that. Let's have a look at the text(1):

Herr, unser Herrscher, dessen Ruhm
In allen Landen herrlich ist! Lord, our ruler, whose glory
is magnificent everywhere!

So basically(2), we are dealing with some kind of disembodied “lord” who is evidently, judging by the way the composer stresses the word „Herr”/“lord”, rather important. In fact, he is being completely and utterly glorified. Obviously, they(3) love him a lot. However, if we just glance back at the mood the music creates, that sinister, dark, mood, we must conclude that something doesn't quite fit. This disembodied “lord” person can't be all that great and lovely. If he were, the music would certainly be cheerful.

Now, I happen to know that this music, or at least the fact that is is so sinister, is all about the death of a certain Jesus (as the name is popularly transliterated from Hebrew to Latin via ancient Greek) of Nazareth (Palestine). Depending on how you interpret this, you could conclude that either they are glorifying death, glorifying and worshipping a dead guy, or glorifying some kind of “lord” that made sure aforementioned Jesus was murdered.

Anyway, what we can see is a great amount of glorification and love of some kind of “lord” that has a profound connexion to death, and I think we can agree that death is, in general, not a very nice thing. Natural, yes, but we do, as a culture, or as a species, have a certain amount of dislike for it. All of that is perfectly okay. A bit strange, maybe, but, in essence, okay. But then they start calling this “lord” a “ruler”. To recap, they love him, they might be a little afraid of him,death connexion and all, they hold him to be fabulously glorious (just listen to that melisma...), and they might do just about anything for him, this lord-ruler.

Of course, “lord” refers to a deity also known as “God”, or, more precisely, one deity that be three deities all at once, actually worshipped all around the planet. This deity is supposed to be all-powerful (no wonder they sound a bit scared), all-loving (no wonder they love him?), and glorious (umn, yeah). Also, even when this deity is around, at least two thirds of him tend to be invisible. All of this story sounds rather unlikely, and in fact, there is (you guessed it), not so much as a scrap of scientific evidence around to support any of it.

Yet, it appears that there are still people who glorify this “lord”, would do anything for him. The fact that he almost certainly doesn't exist doesn't help a whole lot here: there are plenty of people that claim to be his representatives. Or representatives of his representative. (a well-known claimant is Joseph Ratzinger, who styles himself Benedict XIV, which sounds like something a mediæval lord might be called) The thing is, they (or at least a number of them), the people glorifying this fantastic “lord” tend to believe some of the people claiming to represent that same lord-ruler. It would appear they have quite a devoted army behind them. Dangerously devoted. Dangerously devoted to somebody who (almost certainly) doesn't exist.

Does that not scare you ?