If forced by some tyrannical demon to choose one piece of music to be preserved while all others ever created were destroyed, I would be inclined to pick Bach's Mass in B Minor. I get the feeling Bach would have picked it too.
In design and accomplishment, it comes as close to perfection as anything made by man: the Taj Mahal, the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, the collected works of Shakespeare.
This isn't just my point of view. Music writers often seem to stumble as they try to describe it, maybe because they've already used up all their superlatives on lesser works, like the "St. Matthew Passion" or Beethoven's "Ode to Joy." The recourse is personal accolades like this from Dan Coren, Jewish chorister, writing in the Broad Street Review: "I'm grateful to live in a universe where religion makes people write music like this."
Yet it's seldom heard in live performance. For one thing, it's intimidating, extremely complex with no room for errors. The Anchorage Concert Chorus has presented more difficult scores, but if you blow a passage while shouting the notes of "Belshazzar's Feast," few in the audience will care.
On the other hand, flub even one interval in Bach's logical progression of clear pitches and even the chairs in the theater will notice.
So the chorus, orchestra members and director Grant Cochran have been working like mad for the past several weeks to get it right.
The obstacle for listeners is the fact that this is not entertainment. It's intended to edify and purge like a Sophoclean drama while offering a manifestation of the most profound propositions of Christian doctrine, mysteries that centuries of venerated theologians have struggled to express -- generally with far less success than the humble choir master of Leipzig.
The B Minor Mass itself is something of a mystery. No one's sure why Bach wrote it. The official story goes that he wanted out of his weekly grind at Leipzig's St. Thomas Church so badly that he put in for the church composer job with the king of Poland; the Mass was intended as a job application.
That explains the array of styles that ingeniously nestle with one another in the score: Formal fugues of the sort popular in Bach's day, heavily ornamented Italian-style arias and duets, references to Gregorian chant, Lutheran hymns and old forms of church music that would have been antique even in the 1720s, stretches of sustained clouds of mysterious wonder, glorious jubilations involving high baroque trumpets.
Long papers have been written about how the world's most famous composer of Protestant church music leaped into the most important text in the Catholic liturgy with evident enthusiasm.
Examinations of how each sentence and even individual words were dealt with abound. (If you've attended any of David Hagen's mini-lectures at the Alaska Chamber Singers' concerts of Bach cantatas, you'll have some idea of how seriously the composer approached his religious texts and themes.)
Other scholars have traced how Bach recycled much of the material from his earlier cantatas -- intended for one-time performances -- and rolled them into this more permanent format.
It was almost as if he was self-selecting a catalogue of what he considered his best work over the years.
These things reward study, but here we have only room to describe a couple of summits in this Chugach of music. The first is the opening chord, belted out by chorus without any lead-in music. Talk about courage, the words "Kyrie eleison" -- "Lord have mercy" -- are seldom uttered with more earnestness than by 200 singers knowing that their first note must be loud and right on pitch.
In a superb feat of compression, the next few bars hint at everything that will follow in the course of the next 90 minutes.
It's followed by as fine a fugue as Bach ever wrote, entirely on those first two words. In fact, it takes about 12 minutes to get to the third word in the text, but there's not a wasted note.
The "Gloria" opens with those wild trumpets piercing the stratosphere as the chorus exults.
In contrast, the setting of the words "We give Thee thanks" is set to a smoothly ascending and layered theme elegantly expressing humanity's heartfelt appreciation for creation.
The "Credo" presents a minefield for a reformed gentleman seeking a post in a Catholic court at a time when even a little religious tolerance might get you killed in some places.
Happily not in the circles that Bach ran in, however. He marches through even the most specific doctrinal and controversial of the words with supreme confidence, often using the musical language of Lutheran chorales. He dwells longest on the aspects where diverse denominations find the most agreement -- the incarnation, crucifixion, resurrection. These same parts also provide him with the opportunity for his most colorful tone painting.
The "Sanctus" again showcases the trumpets playing in the celestial part of their range. The repetition of the "Osanna" section is customary, and this one makes you want to dance in the aisles. But it feels to me like the one place where Bach cut corners. (I'm something of a minority in that opinion.)
In the concluding "Agnus Dei" the alto soloist pleads mournfully as if all musical inspiration is finally exhausted. But then comes the chorus with the final "Grant us peace."
It's the same music of thanksgiving first heard in the "Gloria," one of the most brilliant moves in musical literature, a deeply satisfying ending to a work of art that is almost as divine as the subject it honors.
Bach didn't receive a reply on his application to the Polish court, by the way. But if he really composed the Mass as his resume for position of choirmaster in heaven, surely he got the job.
Find Mike Dunham online at adn.com/contact/mdunham or call 257-4332.
By MIKE DUNHAM
mdunham@adn.com