Johann Sebastian Bach

A Very Brief History

Andrew Gant

• Publisher: SPCK Publishing
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780281079575
• eBook ISBN: 9780281079599
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music Biographies

His name and his music are internationally known, but with only one verifiably authentic portrait of Johann Sebastian Bach, has history painted him as something that he's not?In this brief historical introduction, Andrew Gant explores the social, political and religious factors that shaped Bach's life and work, and traces how his legacy went from a composer who nearly faded into obscurity to one of the most central figures of classical music today.Travel back to the eighteenth century with this Very Brief History and discover the man behind the music.

1

Hinterland

The Bach family and their world

Thuringia is a pleasant region of wooded hills, stern castles, cobbled streets and tall church towers soaring over wide market squares in handsome medieval towns. Luther was born here – he and Bach attended the same school in Eisenach two hundred years apart – and his teaching and example dominated the corporate, civic, domestic, educational and musical life of the region, as much as its worshipping life, from his own day through to the time of Bach and beyond. Music was part of that life, and the well-trained and well-behaved musician could find himself employment in a wide variety of capacities: as organist; as cantor in a school or church; as regimental bandsman; as a town musician (Stadtmusiker or Hausmann); best of all as a member of the musical staff at one of the many princely and ducal courts, where resources and opportun­ities would vary according to the taste and pocket of the princely proprietor.

This was the musical world colonized by the Bach family in the two hundred or so years before Johann Sebastian. There are a great many of these ‘cheerful Thuringians’,1 as Forkel calls them. They are usually traced back to a singing baker called Veit Bach, who had left Hungary for religious reasons in the sixteenth century, and include working musicians of all sorts and conditions, including a ‘drunken organist’,2 called Johann Friedrich, and some accomplished composers, notably Johann Christoph, the first cousin of Johann Sebastian’s father, Johann Ambrosius. Ambrosius was a Hausmann or town musician in Eisenach. He was one half of several pairs of twins in the family, and according to family legend was so like his brother that ‘even their wives were unable to tell them apart’.3 Several Bachs drew up genealogies or family trees, including Johann Sebastian himself in 1735. He lists 53 of his relations, with short notes describing their musical employments, going back to his great-great-grandfather Veit and ahead to the generation of his own children. Of the people on his list 42 are called Johann. They are distinguished by their middle name, but even here there is a good deal of duplication: there are nine Johann Christophs, including two sets of first cousins. We should probably pass by without comment the fact that Bach only felt it necessary to list the male members of his family, but may perhaps note in the context of duplication of names that he had two female cousins who were born within a few months of each other and lived close together in the same town, both called Barbara Catharina.

The spaces and places where these Bachs plied their musical trade included the vertiginous balconies of the towers and long galleries of the Rathaus and the city walls, the schoolroom and domestic hearth, the coffee shops and meeting places of convivial clubs and societies, the front steps of a merchant’s house, the town square, the public rooms of the princely palace or ducal Schloss, and above all the churches and chapels of town and court. These were light, spacious places, relatively unadorned, with high windows and flagged floors, the Commandments and Lord’s Prayer hung in hectoring Gothic script on the white walls. Many had galleries running round both sides and the west end, providing extra space for musicians and congregation (and helping to keep men and women seated separately). The organ would usually be in one of these galleries. German and Dutch organs were typically large and sophisticated, often with a wide range of stops and a full-compass pedalboard. Like many other musical instruments at the time, they were also things of lavish beauty. Several striking examples survive. A number of churches known to Bach, including the Neue Kirche in Arnstadt and St Wenceslas in Naumburg, had multiple tiers of galleries. The ultimate example is the now vanished chapel of the Himmelsburg in Weimar, where the organ sat perched high up in the third gallery, glimpsed through a sort of cupola above the main ceiling, as if the music was tumbling down from the skies, already halfway to heaven.

This was the world into which Bach was born.

2

A musician’s life

Spaces, places, colleagues and competitors

J. S. Bach was orphaned in 1695, aged not quite ten. As was the custom, he and his 13-year-old brother Jacob went to live and study with their adult brother Johann Christoph, organist of the Michaeliskirche in Ohrdruf.

Bach’s musical activities during his student years included detailed study of the works of older German organ composers like Buxtehude, Froberger and Pachelbel, French music, and Italians like Vivaldi, from whom (according to Forkel) he learnt ‘order, connection and proportion’.1 Like all music students of a now vanished age, he learnt much by copying and arranging other composers’ music. Surviving examples in his hand include an Italian cantata by Antonio Biffi, and some famous organ pieces by Buxtehude and Reincken which he copied using an efficient and enduringly popular form of tablature (much to the puzzlement of a later librarian, who filed them away under ‘Monastic Literature’).2 In 1700 he travelled north to attend the Michaelisschule in Lüneburg with a classmate, Georg Erdmann, who plays a role later in the story. Bach’s ‘fine treble voice’3 was much admired in the ranks of the Lüneburg choir until it broke in a rather unusual way. For just over a week he found himself singing and speaking in octaves, his changing voice producing both treble and bass tones at the same time. Musical trips allowed him to hear Reincken in Hamburg and the celebrated band maintained by the Duke of Celle, specialists in French music.

Shortly after his eighteenth birthday he got his first job, a now rather vague but not very exalted position as court musician or ‘lackey’ in Weimar. Weimar didn’t keep him long. In July 1703 he was asked to test and assess the new organ (a task which was to become a regular and lucrative part of his working life) in the rebuilt Neue Kirche (or Bonifatiuskirche) in Arnstadt. He also gave the opening recital. Shortly afterwards he was offered the post of organist there, seemingly without the usual probe, or audition.

He clearly already had a fine reputation as a player; he soon added a less welcome reputation as a sometimes difficult colleague. He was impatient with the bad behaviour and lax standards of the music students at the school in Arnstadt (some of whom were older than he was); the consistory ticked him off for playing over-elaborate introductions to the congregational chorales and for neglecting his contractual obligation to provide concerted music in church, telling him firmly that ‘if he did not wish to do so, he should but state the fact categorice so that other arrangements could be made and someone engaged who would’,4 the choir leader complained that Bach made his organ pieces too long: Bach responded by deliberately making them too short. He got into a fight in the town square for insulting a bassoonist. Worst of all, he asked permission to travel north to Lübeck for four weeks but stayed away four months, airily remarking to his superiors that he had ‘been to Lübeck in order to comprehend one thing and another about his art’.5 There is a not entirely agreeable sense of a young man who has bags of talent, and knows it.

Later accounts state that he walked the 260 miles to Lübeck and back (which may explain why the round trip took rather longer than the allotted four weeks). The purpose of the visit was to hear and learn from the cele­brated organist and composer Dietrich Buxtehude, and possibly to investigate the idea of succeeding him at the Marienkirche with its fine organ (though the requirement to marry Buxtehude’s apparently unprepossessing daughter in order to get the job – a delight also passed up by a number of other possible candidates – may have been a factor in things going no further).

The next job was a promotion. Mühlhausen was a much bigger city, the Blasiuskirche, where Bach was appointed organist following his probe at Easter in 1707, one of its biggest and most important churches. The pattern continues: each move brought better resources and more money; his duties took in other churches besides his main place of employment; he provided both concerted and congregational music, working with a variety of musicians from town and school; he supervised the enlargement of the organ; frustration and vexation followed him, this time incorporating a couple of incompatible clergymen. Two events stand out. In October 1707, aged 22, he marri...

Table of contents

• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Chronology
• Prologue
• Part 1 THE HISTORY
• 1 Hinterland: The Bach family and their world
• 2 A musician’s life: Spaces, places, colleagues and competitors
• 3 The music in context: Bach’s works by genre
• 4 The learned musician: Some technical aspects
• Part 2 THE LEGACY
• 5 The roots of the legacy: Bach’s reputation in his own day
• 6 ‘Compared with him, we all remain children’:Custodians of the legacy
• 7 Evangelists: Supporters and performers into the nineteenth century
• 8 Bach reheard: The twentieth century and beyond
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Further reading
• Index