Inconsistency in mood between music and libretto

Question

In Bach's St. Matthew Passion there a bass aria named "Gebt mir meinen Jesum wieder". The situation and the libretto are distressful, but the music doesn't seem to reflect this feeling. What am I missing here?

Answer 1

There are often times that lyrics with a strong emotion are set with music that seems emotionally distanced or mismatched. In Heinrich Biber's cycle of "mystery" or "rosary" sonatas, the music engages in frequent programmatic tone-painting, and indeed "The Crucifixion" is in a minor key and spare texture, but the first of the "sorrowful mysteries," "The Scourging at the Pillar," is in a mild-mannered major:

In fact, in the final movement of the St. Matthew Passion, a work about suffering and tragedy, Bach makes the quite moving decision not to end with an outpouring of dramatic grief, but with "Ruhe sanfte," a quiet, gentle lullaby, a cradle song to a "sleeping" Son. Why? Well, any author can have their own reasons for dramatic decisions, but perhaps because an uninterrupted sequence of pathos, movement after movement, can lose its impact as it goes on, and understatement can allow new emotional impact.

Another point is that the main negative connotation in the text is indignation or anger. As other answers point out, the first line is a demand, and wording like Mörderlohn expresses strong disapproval. This aria shows some qualities of the "rage aria." Such arias are typically at a quick tempo, relatively short, and feature busy melismatic runs. Perhaps the best-known examples are Mozart's "Queen of the Night aria" or, from Handel's Messiah, "Why do the nations" or "Thus saith the Lord" (..."and I will shahahahahahahahahahahahake...").

In the Bach aria we're discussing here, the solo violin gets plenty of quick scalar runs, and the voice gets its share around 2:00 in the video posted. It's hardly the fastest or craziest rage aria, not trying to "out-Herod Herod," but Bach's audience would have recognized it as at least an allusion to the convention.

Answer 2

With a few exceptions (Richard Wagner, see "Gesamtkunstwerk") text and music were written by different persons. Here Picander and J. S. Bach seem to have had different opinions about the aspect they wanted to emphasize. (The arias were written by Picander and so lacked the authority of the biblical passages, so Bach had no need for an exact match.)

P. S. As a German native speaker, I would summarize the mood of the aria text as mostly defiant, and I can't hear an inconsistency to that.

Answer 3

You're not missing anything. The text is rather dark and angry but, for reasons only known to himself, Bach ignores the mood of the text and writes a standard run-of-the-mill baroque aria. There's no tempo or dynamic marking, so conductors do choose wildly different tempi and dynamics: the two versions I have are 90bpm and 68bpm respectively.
How the singer interprets the aria is also a major factor: the singer in the video linked to the question does actually manage to sound like he's angry.

The original text:

Gebt mir meinen Jesum wieder!
Seht das Geld, den Mörderlohn,
Wirft euch der verlorne Sohn
Zu den Füßen nieder!

Translated as:

Give me my Jesus back!
See the money, the murderer’s fee,
tossed at your feet by the
lost son!

Answer 4

The question with this aria is: Who is speaking?

If it’s Judas, then the violin scales might mimic the sound of a rope snapping taut. If that’s the case, this ‘run-of-the-mill’ baroque aria takes on a stomach-turning new dimension as it expresses Judas’ unquenchable regret, tonality be damned.

Answer 5

Read it as a demand rather than a lament. The music is forthright rather than ominous or sad. That fits.