Bach’s Greatest Moment: An Audio-Visual Essay

by Daniel Brown

Trying to rank great moments in Bach is like trying to rank miracles in order of impossibility. That said, I sometimes catch myself feeling that a moment in the second Kyrie of the B-Minor Mass is his greatest of all.

This Kyrie is a fugal chorus in the stile antico, or “old style:” the Baroque’s reconceiving of the smooth vocal polyphony of the Renaissance. Its graceful subject is distinguished (as no Renaissance subject would dream of being) by the otherworldly interval of a diminished third (click on the wedge symbol in the upper left of the example to play):

Bach’s exposition of this subject unfolds in steady, textbook fashion.

Beneath these proceedings, however, something momentous is quietly coming to birth. The process begins, in fact, with a kind of conception. Have another look at the subject; note that it ends with a descending scale fragment:

The first time this fragment occurs, the cellos support it with a syncopated figure: