The Nicene Creed’s place in the Mass has contributed to its vast cultural legacy, as the creed has been recited in worship around the world for centuries. The creed is also recited whenever Masses by Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven, and other composers are performed in concert halls. In this music, today’s most secularized audiences continue to hear confessions of Nicene orthodoxy.
J. S. Bach’s Mass in B Minor (BWV 232) is unique in this literature. Many settings of the Mass have emotional and technical power. Bach’s Credo, however, also has rhetorical vitality. In the third movement, “Et in unum dominum,” Bach integrated theological proclamation with musical symbolism to such a degree that the confession of Christ is inescapable to both performers and listeners.
Two features of Bach’s intellect deepen the work’s confessional integrity.
Bach pursued theological learning assiduously. Until the discovery of Bach’s personal copy of the Calov Bible, scholars considered his piety to be merely cultural. The copious annotations throughout this Bible in Bach’s own hand revealed the depth of his devotion. Further, he collected an expensive theological library that went far beyond the needs of a church musician—or even a pastor. Biographer Christoph Wolff wrote that Bach viewed himself “as a biblical interpreter in the succession and company of these eminent theological scholars.”
This sense of calling gave urgency to Bach’s view of musical composition as a kind of rhetoric. Scholar Laurence Dreyfus has documented that the rhetorical term “invention” was significant to Bach’s fellow composers in the 18th century. For rhetoricians, invention was the act of defining a subject for a speech. For composers, an invention was a musical fragment that served as a fruitful subject for discourse, using rhythm, harmony, counterpoint, and instrumentation to explore the invention’s possibilities. Bach entitled a famous series of keyboard pieces Inventions.
Thus, Bach did not approach the creed in his Mass as just another text that could be dramatized with a fitting accompaniment. He knew the significance and intricacies of ancient debates about the divinity of Christ. He understood the centrality of these doctrines to salvation. This text, more than even a sacred cantata libretto, set forth historic truths to be argued musically. Scholar John Butt has analyzed the compositional tools Bach used throughout the Mass to expound concepts and exhort worshipers.
Bach’s “Et in unum dominum” is a musical discourse on the unified divinity and humanity of Christ. The movement presents a simple invention of four notes in one voice echoed in close imitation by another. The two voices sometimes imitate each other in unison, sometimes in perfect intervals, expounding the difference and unity of the Father and the Son. The same invention also exhorts the listener to adore Christ. At the words, “Deum de Deo, lumen de lumine,” the four notes become an ecstatic shout.
The musical rhetoric of Bach still expounds Nicene orthodoxy in rehearsals and concerts nearly 300 years later.