Listening today: Johann Sebastian Bach – Erbarm dich mein, or Herre Gott, BWV 721
by Marialuisa Veneziano
Before you start music
There are words that we pronounce easily.
Thank you. Goodbye. See you tomorrow.
Others, on the other hand, seem to have to cross a whole life before reaching lips.
Forgive me.
We don't always have the courage to say that. We don't always know who to turn. And sometimes, when we finally find the words, the person we would have wanted to deliver them is no longer before us.
This Sunday, one of our readers leads us right there: in the fragile place where a human being stops defending himself and finds the courage to ask for mercy.
He does it through Johann Sebastian Bach and the organ choral Erbarm dich mein, or Herre Gott, BWV 721.
The title means: «Have mercy on me, O Lord God».
A request.
Not a triumphant declaration of faith. Not a demonstration of strength. Not an attempt to convince someone of their innocence.
Only a voice that asks to be heard.
The song probably belongs to the young years of Bach, around 1704. It is an organ page with unusual writing: a slow melody, placed in the upper voice, supported by a plot of chords.
Very few elements.
Yet, listening to them, we will have the impression that something continues to breathe even when it does not find the words.
Perhaps because mercy, even before being a theological concept, responds to a profoundly human need: to be looked at without being reduced to our error.
🎧 Open listening. Then he keeps reading
This page is designed to be read with music next door.
(click on the black arrow to make the listening appear)
Start listening.
Don't look for the melody now.
Listen to what happens around her.
Because in this page pain is not only entrusted to the voice that sings.
It is hidden even in what keeps cleaning under her.
Inside the score
An ancient melody and a heart that continues to beat
To understand this coral you have to go back, even before Bach.
In 1524 Erhart Hegenwalt published Erbarm dich mein, or Herre Gott, a paraphrase of Psalm 51, the Miserere. The melody, also documented in 1524, is often linked to Johann Walter, but its attribution is not certain.
We are in the world of Lutheran coral: a tradition in which community singing becomes a fundamental part of religious experience.
The text comes from repentance. But be careful: he does not simply tell the guilt.
He asks that the last word does not belong to the fault.
And that's where the music gets interesting.
Bach takes the melody of the coral and places it in the upper part, entrusting them with long, mainly minimal values.
Below, however, has agreements of four and five voices, repeated in chromes.
Sounds like a basic solution.
A slow voice. Regular accompaniment.
Yet this difference produces expression.
The melody proceeds with gravity, almost looking for the courage to complete each sentence.
The agreements, however, continue.
They come back.
They insist.
I'm not a second melody competing with the first. They are a harmonic pulsation, a movement that sustains and together restless.
Of course, Bach did not write next to the agreements «heartbeat».
This is a possible expressive reading, not an indication of the score.
But their movement really possesses something of the breath: a physical continuity that seems to prevent the sentence from abandoning itself completely.
And here we meet a beautiful thought.
When someone suffers, we often imagine that what he needs is an answer.
An explanation.
A solution.
Bach seems to suggest musically another possibility.
Sometimes what sustains a voice is not another voice that answers it. It's something that keeps beside her.
The trembling of mercy
There is something deeply human in the way Bach builds this coral.
The melody proceeds slowly, almost looking for the courage to pronounce every word.
Under her, the debated agreements continue to clean.
It's a movement that doesn't allow a truce. It does not necessarily represent a heart that beats: Bach did not leave such an indication. But it is difficult to listen to this page without feeling a form of restlessness, a tremor that crosses music from within.
It's not the tremor of those who are about to fall. That's who finally found the courage to ask for help.
In the interpretation of Ton Koopman, the choral voices through the historical organ built by Hans Heinrich Bader between 1639 and 1643, in the St. Walburgiskerk of Zutphen, in the Netherlands.
Listen to how the arrangement movement accompanies the melody without immediately melting the tension.
The upper voice seems to look for an answer.
The accompaniment continues to support it.
And in this so essential relationship one of the most moving insights of the page is manifested.
The organ, an instrument capable of filling a cathedral, does not need to unfold all its power.
She can be intimate.
It can leave room for fragility.
It can become the place where a supplication finally finds the possibility of being pronounced.
And maybe this is Bach's secret.
He does not make us listen to a man who has already received mercy. It makes us listen to a man who still finds the courage to ask.
🎧 Listen to this.
Try now to listen to the song by following three details.
1. The distance between melody and accompaniment. The upper voice proceeds slowly; the underlying chords repeat with a much thicker regularity. Try to listen simultaneously to the two different ways of living time.
2. Harmonic tensions. Not all successions produce the same feeling of rest. Some passages introduce a more pronounced restlessness, even through chromatic inflexions. Pay attention to how harmony changes the emotional meaning of melody.
3. The conclusion. The song is in fa diesis minor, but ends on a fa diesis agreement greater. The final passage therefore introduces a color change: not a light explosion, rather a discrete extension.
You do not need to know tonal harmony to feel it.
Just listen to the last sentence and ask yourself:
Is it really identical, emotionally, to what we heard at first?
The answer should not be immediate.
Let your ear find it.
The note remains
Perhaps mercy begins when someone allows us to be fragile without asking us to stop immediately.
In everyday language we often use the word for forgiveness as if it designates an instant gesture.
A pronounced phrase.
A tense hand.
A closed matter.
But human experience is generally less ordered.
There are mistakes we keep remembering even when others have forgotten them.
There are wounds that do not disappear because someone has pronounced the right words.
And there are absences before which the desire to be forgiven mixes with that, equally impossible, of being able to go back.
The coral gives us a different image.
The melody is not taken away from its gravity.
Accompaniment does not stop cleaning to give her immediate relief.
Harmony passes through its tensions before finding a point of arrival.
It is a musical form that allows to think mercy not as a cancellation of the past, but as a possibility not to remain eternally prisoners.
And maybe we should remember in human relationships.
How often do we ask others to be strong, instead of asking ourselves if they do not simply need to be welcomed?
How easily do we make a mistake in the identity of who has committed it?
How difficult can we give ourselves the understanding that, sometimes, we can offer others?
There are no questions a coral can answer.
Music is not a court.
Fortunately, it is not even an office where you have to fill out the correct form to get a little compassion.
It is a space in which these questions can finally be heard.
And in Bach, sometimes listening itself takes the form of tenderness.
🔎 One thing to know
A coral so simple that it seems impossible?
The BWV 721 occupies a particular position in the organ repertoire attributed to Bach.
His writing is so different from the great counterpoints of the composer who, in the early 20th century, Albert Schweitzer also expressed doubts about his authenticity.
Today the song is generally attributed to Bach, while remaining a stylistically singular page. We do not own the autograph: its transmission depends on a handwritten copy of the first eighteenth century linked to Johann Gottfried Walther.
The story is also interesting from the musicological point of view.
For a long time we were accustomed to recognizing genius especially through complexity.
But here complexity is not manifested in the proliferation of lines.
It focuses on the relationship between a few elements.
A melody.
Repeated agreements.
A harmonious path.
And a question that never loses its character of supplication.
Perhaps simplicity is not what remains when you have nothing to say. It is what remains when we have finally found the essential.
Take him with you
When the last agreement has vanished, do not immediately start the day.
Let the room slowly return to its noises.
Maybe you'll hear the traffic.
Someone who speaks in another room.
The phone that demands attention with the usual conviction of being the center of the universe.
The world will continue.
Like he always did.
But for a few minutes we will have heard something that our time seems to have forgotten.
The possibility of not having to be continuously impeccable.
Not knowing all the answers.
That we can't always explain what we feel.
To be able to ask for help without turning that request into a defeat.
A man from the 16th century wrote words of mercy.
A young musician, many years later, gave her to an organ.
A contemporary interpreter resounded them.
And today one of our readers has given them to this column.
Music has crossed the centuries without losing its question.
Perhaps because, beyond the differences of language, faith and culture, we all know at least one moment in which we would have wanted someone to tell us:
You can stop defending yourself. I'm listening.
This Sunday Bach does not give us a certainty.
It gives us a voice.
And something that continues to support her.
Because tenderness is not always a pronounced word.
Sometimes it is simply the presence of who, while we seek the courage to speak, remains.
And he's not leaving.
🎧 One last listening
Now let the coral go.
This time do not try to distinguish voices, tensions or resolutions.
Just listen to what happens inside you.
Because a listening guide can accompany you to the threshold of music.
But the last step always belongs to those who listen.
Leave a comment