There is a category of classical music that is easy to look down on. This is the repertoire that often appears on compilation CDs with titles that indicate a mood or occasion or season, rather than composers or performers. The pieces themselves are referred to not by opus numbers or as sonatas or symphonies, but with quaint names that have stuck with them over time: Air on a G String, Pachelbel’s Canon, the word “moonlight” in various languages. They’re often extracts from larger works. These pieces tend to function as background music, and are played so often that they, as well as their titles, seem to us like mental wallpaper: at best, too familiar to be noticed, at worst, trite. This is the unjust fate met by the Bach chorale from the BWV 147 cantata, usually called “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring” in the English-speaking world—doomed to be the stuff of weddings and funerals, and always dragging along with it a title denuded of meaning. Fortunately, I have found that it does not take much effort to revest this piece with meaning, and make it seem again appealingly unfamiliar.

That title was first appended to the tune in 1926, when the English pianist Myra Hess published her transcription of the chorale for piano solo. She borrowed the title from a poem by Robert Bridges, whose formal experiments in verse are not as well known today as his role in rescuing the work of Hopkins from oblivion. Bridges’s poem is a sort of loose rendering of the sentiments of the German hymn from which Bach drew his chorale tune. Hess’s transcription is more than a loose rendering of sentiments; however, it is emphatically not a Baroque keyboard work. It vaunts a post-Romantic, post-Debussy pianism totally alien to the harpsichord. It cannot be played without damper pedal, and includes notation indicating additional harmonic notes the pianist can sound or not sound at his choosing. And yet, it is truly Bach. Without belaboring the point or engaging in anti-HIP polemic, I would submit that this is the way tradition ought to work: Each generation must in its own way reimagine the cultural patrimony passed down to it, or else it risks letting it become no more than a meticulously preserved museum piece. In any case, in an age when gathering around the piano was still a popular way to pass the time, Hess’s transcription made her a household name in England.

Bach’s cantata from which this chorale was taken, Herz und Mund und Tat und Leben, was originally intended for the feast of the Visitation, one of the few Marian feasts the Lutheran church celebrated. The Visitation commemorates the unborn John the Baptist leaping in the womb of St. Elizabeth at the approach of Christ, and the chorale, as it appears at the end of the cantata, is about that same sort of eager longing and desire for God. The German text reads:

Jesus bleibet meine Freude,
meines Herzens Trost und Saft,
Jesus wehret allem Leide,
er ist meines Lebens Kraft,
meiner Augen Lust und Sonne,
meiner Seele Schatz und Wonne;
darum laß' ich Jesum nicht
aus dem Herzen und Gesicht

Of course the German word Lust in the fifth line means more than our English “lust”: pleasure, delight, desire. It is redolent of the physicality of Psalm LXII (Sitivit in te anima mea; quam multipliciter tibi caro mea!; “For thee my soul hath thirsted; for thee my flesh, O how many ways!”) and CXXII (sicut oculi ancillae in manibus dominae suae; “As the eyes of the handmaid are on the hands of her mistress”) and that most holy text of Christian contemplation, the Song of Songs. Bach’s evangelical pietism is ultimately erotic, in the truest sense that is a mark of authentic Christianity. Ours is a mad religion, of virgins and martyrs and virgin martyrs; of fasts and feasts and vigils; of sacrifices and processions. Its good works are impelled by desire for the Lamb, not by disinterested Kantian duty.

Bach is able to communicate this holy longing in the music of the chorale, not just the words. He takes the simple chorale melody and transforms it into the energetic triplet figure that everybody knows. The triplet figure, played by oboes and strings, breathlessly gallops before and behind and around the choir’s stately melody, from which it takes its being. The old chorale is at rest, but its younger counterpart is restless. The triplet figure resembles an ever-ascending ladder, a spiral one that has its twists and turns, to use an image especially resonant with the Christian mystical tradition.

In her piano transcription, Hess illuminates the relationship between the two themes. The motion of the triplet figure is given to the right hand, but the chorale melody, when it sounds at the same time as the triplets, is mostly given to both left and right thumbs, or the middle part of the hands, producing a subdued voice within all that ceaseless motion, a voice that is almost an illusion. (If you listen to multiple recordings of “Jesu Joy of Man’s Desiring,” you’ll notice that pianists resort to various tricks in order to make these notes between the hands sound like a melody.) So we have these two voices going on at the same time. One that longs, that is in a state of constant pursuit, but not yet in possession of the beloved. Quaesivi illum, et non inveni. “I sought him, and I found him not.” And then there is an inner voice, that is at unity with itself, that lacks nothing, that is content. Ego dilecto meo et dilectus meus mihi, qui pascitur inter lilia. “I to my beloved, and my beloved to me, who feedeth among the lilies.” Bach’s and Hess’s music on its own communicates the meaning of the Christian dispensation, in which it does “not yet appear what we shall be” but still we hope to “see Him as He is.” 

Music is always mimesis. It always communicates, always conveys meaning. Composers engage with reality using a set of conventional or personal symbols. Although past ages may have indulged in a shallow programmaticism, from which we get the “Moonlight” title appended to Beethoven’s Op. 27 sonata, it does not follow that we must approach music with a dull formalism, or treat it as a mere mechanism for producing pleasant sensations, and in doing so clamp down what it is trying to say to us. We have to approach music as communication if we want to hear familiar pieces anew, with ears’ lust.