The choruses of Bach’s cantatas would furnish a field for endless study. Nowhere else is his genius more grandly displayed. The only work entitled to be compared with these choruses is found in Händel’s oratorios. In drawing such a parallel, and observing the greater variety of style in Händel, we must remember that Bach’s cantatas are church music. Händel’s oratorios are not. Bach’s cantata texts are not only confined to a single sphere of thought, _viz._, the devotional, but they are also strictly lyric. The church cantata does not admit any suggestion of action or external picture. The oratorio, on the other hand, is practically unlimited in scope, and in Händel’s choruses the style and treatment are given almost unrestrained license in the way of dramatic and epic suggestion. Within the restrictions imposed upon him, however, Bach expends upon his choruses a wealth of invention in design and expression not less wonderful than that exhibited in his organ works. The motet form, the free fantasia and the choral fantasia forms are all employed, and every device known to his art is applied for the illustration of the text. Grace and tenderness, when the cheering assurances of the Gospel are the theme, crushing burdens of gloom when the author’s thought turns to the mysteries of death and judgment, mournfulness in view of sin, the pleading accents of contrition,—every manifestation of emotion which a rigid creed, allied to a racial mysticism which evades positive conceptions, can call forth is projected in tones whose strength and fervor were never attained before in religious music. It is Bach’s organ style which is here in evidence, imparting to the chorus its close-knit structure and majesty of sound, humanized by a melody drawn from the choral and from what was most refined in Italian art.
“One peculiar trait in Bach’s nature,” says Kretzschmar, “is revealed in the cantatas in grand, half-distinct outlines, and this is the longing for death and life with the Lord. This theme is struck in the cantatas more frequently than almost any other. We know him as a giant nature in all situations; great and grandiose is also his joy and cheerfulness. But never, we believe, does his art work with fuller energy and abandonment than when his texts express earth-weariness and the longing for the last hour. The fervor which then displays itself in ever-varying registers, in both calm and stormy regions, has in it something almost demonic.”[74]