Why Didn't Bach Ever Write An Opera?

"Among the odd assortment of Festival opera this year, no production is more curious than that billed as Johann Sebastian Bach's Actus tragicus. After all, the greatest ever Lutheran church composer never actually wrote an opera.

Closer inspection, however, reveals this to be a modern assemblage of six of Bach's sacred cantatas, fused together as a stage presentation by the late opera director Herbert Wernicke in 2000, now about to see life again in Staatsoper Stuttgart's 2006 restaging. The title is taken from the nickname attached to the composer's famous funeral cantata.

The idea has obvious novelty value. The common theme – approaching death – is viewed through the cross-section of an apartment block in which numerous individuals act out their lonely existences. But Actus tragicus – together with a connected, fortnight-long early-evening series of Bach Cantatas at Greyfriars Kirk, featuring a variety of international ensembles – does raise one of the most tantalising questions about Bach. Why did he never turn his genius to the opera stage?

Was he too busy fulfilling his church duties during the apogee of his career in Leipzig, where he was cantor of St Thomas's Church from 1723 to his death in 1750, and where he churned out new cantatas on a weekly basis, not to mention full-length Passions, the Mass in B minor and everything else the musically rich Lutheran liturgy demanded of him?

Such an assumption is too simplistic and misleading, argues Glasgow University music professor John Butt, a notable Bach scholar and, as artistic director of the Dunedin Consort, about to play an active part in the Festival's Greyfriars series.

Could the dogmatic spiritualism of church music ever truly compensate for the lush vagaries of opera? Butt is convinced that the civic leaders knew exactly what they were doing when they appointed Bach. They could have picked Telemann, who was the safe favourite of the conservative lobby, but in the end, through some good fortune (Telemann tuned them down for a better offer), the progressives got their way and appointed Bach the modernist, knowing he would shake up the musical life of the largely Protestant city.

In doing so, Bach took a lead from opera, but not without recognising the deep sensitivities of the liturgy and the underlying philosophy of Lutheranism.

"As a Lutheran, the worst thing you could do was to die and not have your faith," Butt explains. "So it was the job of the preacher to ensure the weekly regeneration of that faith among those in the pews." Bach's cantatas were designed to reinforce that message. And there's little doubt that opera, which Bach knew well enough from his regular visits to nearby opera hot-spot Dresden, provided him with the tools to address that.

There's a temptation to suggest that Bach essentially wrote opera for the church. Butt, whose latest book, Bach's Dialogue with Modernity, deals with new interpretational slants on Bach's Passions, offers a caveat to that argument in delightfully modern domestic terms. "Opera is like a vacuum cleaner, sucking the audience out of their seats and into its midst on the stage," says Butt. "Bach, in his cantatas, uses the tools of opera but reverses the cleaner mechanism and blows the experience out to the man in the pew."

Which begs the question: do we approach Actus tragicus – the opera – as something to escape into, or something to inhale for private contemplation? As a dramatised tapestry of Bach cantatas, the dichotomy is fascinating. And the unquestionable thrill of Bach's music might just make it work."