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. . . in [Bach’s] Saint
Matthew Passion . . . the voice of Jesus is
heard [“Verily I say to you: One of you shall
betray me.”] . . . Then there follows one of the
most dramatic moments
of the whole work, as the disciples’ voices tumble over one another in
the fearful, anxious question: “Lord, is
it I?” . . . There is a fascinating
sidelight to this little chorus. It turns out that the phrase “Lord, is
it I?” is repeated exactly eleven times, once for each of the disciples
except Judas, who is understandably silent. But this is not only a dramatic
device. It reflects Bach’s tremendous preoccupation with numbers as
symbols.
Bach was a mystic, for all his plain, provincial, Lutheran simplicity;
and one aspect of this mysticism was his interest in numerology. He was
fond of that Talmudic trick of substituting numbers for letters of the alphabet
and deriving mystical conclusions from the results.
For example, on the principle that A equals 1, B equals 2, etc., the name of Bach adds up to 14. For him, this became a mystic number. The first digit, 1, is the most holy of all numbers, and the second, 4, represents the four gospels. Furthermore, 1 subtracted from 4 is 3, the Trinity. 1 and 4 added are 5, the five books of Moses. The factors of 14 are 2 and 7, both ancient mystic symbols. But, luckiest of all, the whole name of Johann Sebastian Bach [J S Bach] adds up to 41 (in the old German alphabet) [where J is 9 and S is 18], which is the exact inversion of 14 (the sum of B-A-C-H); and that, to a contrapuntal mind, must have been a miraculous sign. In fact, in the very last piece he wrote before he died (the chorale-fantasia Vor deinen Thron tret’ ich allhier), the first phrase contains exactly 14 notes, and the whole melody contains 41 notes.
Leonard Bernstein
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