Bridging the gap

Huw Williams | 19:54, Friday 24 April 2015 | Turin, Italy

Two large pieces of music have been holding my attention recently - Bach's St John Passion and Mahler's Third Symphony. In some ways these two pieces make strange bedfellows, holding their positions very close to the high-tide mark of Baroque and Romantic music respectively. And the differences are striking; Bach's meditation on the passion narratives of John's gospel is the longer of the two works, with brisk performances lasting a full two hours, while the Mahler would typically only take an hour and forty minutes. But interestingly the Bach is the more compact and economical of the two pieces in terms of the musical language, the Mahler is a much more sprawling and heavily-scored work. The message of the Bach Passion is very clear, while the message of the Mahler is deliberately ambiguous.

And yet what unites these two works is even more interesting. Both works concern themselves with the divide between earth and heaven, man and God, sin and forgiveness, pain and joy, and how the void can be bridged. And ultimately perhaps, both find the same answer in their different ways. I much prefer Bach's Luther-leaning theology to Mahler's Nietzsche, but even for Mahler, it is Jesus who holds the final answer.

The heavenly joy is a blessed city,
the heavenly joy that has no end!
The heavenly joy was granted to Peter
through Jesus, and to all mankind for eternal bliss.