Parish Mass for Maundy Thursday

Please join us in person or online for our Parish Service for Maundy Thursday. To connect online click on the image below, or search for ‘St Pauls Wokingham’ on YouTube. Organ meditation begins at 7:45.

Passacaglia & Fugue in C minor (BWV 582)                 Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750)

Bach’s music is often described as ‘monumental’, which is such an appropriate term to describe the work heard at the start of today’s service. Monuments are often intended to call us to remembrance. They remind us of the life and faith of someone who has gone before us; they cause us to pause momentarily and look at ourselves in the shadow of someone or something greater. On this Maundy Thursday, we particularly recall the last supper and ‘eat and drink in remembrance’ of our Lord and Saviour – a Eucharistic act repeated so often and so familiar to Christians, yet at the same time so special in this holiest of weeks.

Bach’s Passacaglia and Fugue in C minor is one of his most profound works for organ, and also one of his earliest. The first known copy was made between 1706 and 1713 by Bach’s elder brother Johann Christoph. In 1705, Bach had travelled over 400km, most likely on foot, on an extended visit from Arnstadt to Lübeck to meet and learn from one of the great organist of his day, Dietrich Buxtehude, who had composed a similar though much shorter work which still survives. Bach’s Passacaglia is likely to have been composed as a tribute to his older musical mentor shortly after returning to his post at Arnstadt.

The Passacaglia takes as its basis a haunting, ostinato (‘repeated’) eight-bar pedal theme upon which a set of twenty complex variations are based. This far surpasses the usual four-bar themes of most Baroque passacaglias, which might be repeated perhaps up to eight times. The key of C minor has been commonly used throughout history to convey sadness, tragedy and heroicism. The double fugue based on the same poignant theme evokes the inevitability of the Passion as it builds to a crescendo of full organ, but the work finally ends on a majestic major rather than minor chord, promising the joy and light of Easter.

The practice of repeating a phrase is central to the Christian meditative practice of the litany. What is your litany at this most solemn time of the Church’s year? The repeated and familiar pattern of each day, week, month and year marks our temporal state, trapped as we are by the passing of time. So, as with the ticking of a clock, repetition can carry with it a sense of inevitability. The familiar Gospel story of Jesus’s temptation, trial and Passion is retold each year. We know how it ended over two thousand years ago, but it is only through faith that we escape our temporal existence for the promise of Eternal life. What does your faith mean to you at your stage in life’s journey?

At the end of his musical manuscripts, Bach would frequently add the words ‘Soli Deo gloria’ which means glory to God alone. Whatever your age, through the music heard tonight, the young, twenty-something Bach invites you on a journey to the glory of God – a journey which will end in a celebration of God’s Easter victory.

Maudy Thursday Order of Service