Bach

The Great Composers

Michael Steen

• Publisher: Icon Books
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781848318007
• Topic: Medios de comunicación y artes escénicas
• Subtopic: Música

Welcome to The Independent's new ebook series The Great Composers, covering fourteen of the giants of Western classical music. Extracted from Michael Steen's book The Lives and Times of the Great Composers, these concise guides, selected by The Independent's editorial team, explore the lives of composers as diverse as Mozart and Puccini, reaching from Bach to Brahms, set against the social, historical and political forces which affected them, to give a rounded portrait of what it was like to be alive and working as a musician at that time.Indisputably the greatest composer before Mozart, and for many, the greatest composer ever, Johann Sebastian Bach lived out his life in relative obscurity. It may seem incredible to us now, but during his own lifetime he was recognised primarily as an organ virtuoso, rather than a composer of genius. Fewer than a dozen of his compositions were published while he lived and, had not Mendelssohn started the revival of his music in the 19th century, his transcendently beautiful music might easily have been lost to us for ever.At the end of each of his cantata scores, Bach appended the initials SDG: Soli Deo Gloria, to the Glory of God alone. For him 'the aim and final end of all music should be none other than the glory of God and the refreshment of the soul'. Michael Steen follows the profoundly religious Bach through his tough upbringing, to his years of growing fame, replaced by gradual neglect as different fashions overtook his music. Bach's progress as a jobbing musician through the world of small 18th-century German territories was frequently hard and he often found himself out of step with the authorities. Steen explains the background of petty squabbles and the crushing workload against which Bach was to compose polyphony which fused absolute mathematics and absolute poetry; in Wagner's words, 'the most stupendous miracle in all music'.

BACH

A FEW DAYS after Handel was born, less than 100 miles away, Maria Elizabeth Bach gave birth to Johann Sebastian, the latest in a large family and a long line of musicians. Several Bachs had been town musicians in the area, calling the hours, acting as lookouts for troops and for fires. The family was so involved with music that the words ‘musician’ and ‘Bach’ were almost interchangeable.

Eisenach, where Bach was born, is in Thuringia, sandwiched between the forest to the south and the Harz Mountains to the north, in a beautiful yet out-of-the-way part of Saxony, which borders on Hesse. Bach’s father was in charge of music for the town council, responsible for twice-daily performances from the balcony of the town hall and for performing at services in St George’s Church.¹

Bach’s background was socially and geographically very different from Handel’s. This goes some way to explaining the difference in their careers, output and subsequent reputation. Bach, ‘parsimonious and prudent’ and with a reputation for being obstinate, immersed himself in narrow-minded Lutheran Saxony.² Handel, the Italian-trained extrovert, became a risk-taking entrepreneur on an international scale.

Bach is sometimes criticised as ‘an unintelligible musical arithmetician’,³ composing ‘more for the eye than the ear’.⁴ Indeed, this is how he was often viewed at the end of the 18th century by the small number of people who knew the very few works then in circulation. A century and a half later, Fauré, although an admirer, said that some of his fugues were ‘utterly boring’. 5 Debussy put it more graphically: ‘When the old Saxon Cantor hasn’t any ideas, he starts out from any old thing and is truly pitiless. In fact he’s only bearable when he’s admirable … If he’d had a friend – a publisher perhaps – who could have told him to take a day off every week, perhaps, then we’d have been spared several hundreds of pages in which you have to walk between rows of mercilessly regulated and joyless bars, each one with its rascally little “subject” and “countersubject”.’*⁸

Often, Bach may give much more pleasure to the performer who will be fascinated by his art, than to the audience disconcerted by his complexity. However, with a little patience, most of his works are totally absorbing and, to some people, he provides almost daily pleasure. Some of his works, the St Matthew Passion being the obvious example, are almost Wonders of the World.

We shall start with Bach’s tough upbringing. After his education, he became organist and choirmaster in two staunchly Protestant towns near his birthplace, first in Arnstadt and then very briefly in Mühlhausen. He then spent nearly ten years working at Weimar, an almost pantomime court. By the time Bach was 30, Handel’s friend Mattheson was talking about ‘der berühmte Bach’, the famous Bach.⁹ For a short time, he worked in the Frenchified court at Cöthen, away from church music. But church music was his vocation, so he returned to the Lutheran baroque as ‘Cantor’ of St Thomas’ Church in Leipzig. Here, he spent his last three decades, living comfortably, but up a backwater and greatly unappreciated. It is no wonder that he showed signs of having a large chip on his shoulder.

Bach’s achievement was to synthesise laborious German part-writing with the styles of the light French dances and the Italian concertos and sonatas. His works represent a culmination: by the time he was finished, there was musically nothing more anyone could do in his style, except to write exercises and answer examination questions; he had taken it to the limit.¹⁰

The music which we have been fortunate to inherit is awesomely beautiful. By the time of his death, however, tastes had changed. For royalty and the aristocrats who led taste and fashion, solid oak furniture had long given way to ormolu, thin veneer and chinoiserie.

BACH’S YOUTH IN THURINGIA AND NORTH GERMANY

Johann Ambrosius Bach, an identical twin, had married the daughter of a furrier and a municipal councillor in Erfurt, where he worked. By the time their son Johann Sebastian was born on 21 March 1685, they had moved to Eisenach, 30 miles away. This part of Germany is steeped in history, particularly Lutheran. Above Eisenach is the Wartburg, the castle where Martin Luther had taken refuge after being declared a heretic at the Diet of Worms. In it, disguised as ‘Junker Georg’ (Squire George), Luther began to translate the New Testament into German; and, as legend has it, he threw an inkpot at the Devil who was attempting to weaken his resolve.¹¹ Long before, in the Middle Ages, there had been a song contest at the Wartburg between the Minnesinger, or poet-musician, ‘Der Tanuser’ and ‘Her Wolveram’, the writer of Parzival; this was immortalised for those who enjoy music by Wagner.¹²

The Wartburg is so high above Eisenach that one doubts if the young Bach would ever have been allowed to climb up to its ruins. Now restored, the visitor can ponder that here in 1817 was held the first student protest, against the repressive regime of the Habsburg chancellor, Prince Metternich; the visitor can also look at the murals painted by Schubert’s friend Moritz von Schwind; and imagine Franz Liszt conducting the St Elisabeth Oratorio with which he celebrated the Wartburg’s 800th anniversary.

As with all children at the time, Johann Sebastian was lucky to be alive. Half of all babies born in the 17th century died within twelve months of birth. With both disease and war ever present, the average life expectancy was 22 years, with the wealthy and well-fed perhaps living until their early 50s.¹³ There were exceptions, of course: Jan Reinken, the organist at Hamburg, died only five months short of his 100th birthday.¹⁴

Bach’s great-grandfather died of plague in 1626. Eighteen months before Bach was born, plague struck the wife and baby son of the family friend and teacher Johann Pachelbel, who is known to us for the Canon.¹⁵ A bad harvest, leading to famine, could be another cause of devastation. Only in Britain, with its increasing and productive agriculture, its great merchant marine and foreign trade, and growth in industry, could the population feel reasonably safe from famine.¹⁶

The Thirty Years War had ended less than 40 years before Bach’s birth. So, stories of bloodshed, rape, robbery, torture and famine abounded at the time. Had he been older, he might have heard of the Thuringian father who sought justice against a soldier who had raped and killed his daughter: the father was heartlessly and crudely told that the girl would still be alive, had she not been so reluctant. The Bachs might have associated the nearby city of Weimar with Duke Bernard, one of the Protestant generals, who, when on campaign, burnt everything around him.¹⁷

The staunchly Protestant Bachs would probably have looked back to that war as a religious war, a righteous one, Protestant fighting Roman Catholic. In reality, these wars were about power. The Continent’s royal families were quite happy to change their religion when it suited their purpose. At a high level, it was usually possible to be flexible.*

To the Bachs, the Lutheran hymns (chorales), such as ‘Wenn wir in höchsten Nöthen sein’, ‘When in the hour of utmost need, we know not where to look for aid … and cry, O faithful God, to Thee’, would have had a deep significance. However, life was not all doom and gloom, as we can hear from the sheer joy expressed in other chorales such as ‘Jesu meine Freude’, ‘Jesu my joy, my priceless pearl and treasure, Sunshine of my heart!’¹⁹

Bach benefited from the education which in most of Lutheran Germany was compulsory for children between five and twelve years old.²⁰ He learnt the catechism, the psalms, the Bible, history, writing and Latin. Literacy levels in that part of Germany were far higher than those elsewhere: in England, for example, even in the middle of the next century, about a third of men and two thirds of women were unable even to sign their own name.²¹

He studied music with his father and played with the two journeymen musicians and two apprentices who lived in the house. He also studied with his distinguished cousin, the most successful Bach so far, Johann Christoph, town organist and harpsichordist in the court of the Duke of Eisenach.

When Bach was nine, his mother died. This was not particularly unusual. In the second half of the 18th century, it was normal for children aged fourteen to have lost one or both parents.*²² Since the family was the basis of society, it was crucial to remarry quickly. So, six months later, Bach’s father married the already twice-widowed daughter of the burgomaster of nearby Arnstadt, a town where many of the family had been employed as musicians. But, the marriage did not last long: three months later, his father died. The family was broken up; while his sisters remained with their stepmother, Johann Sebastian and his elder brother travelled the 22 miles along the edge of the Thuringian Forest to Ohrdruf to live with his eldest brother Christoph, a past pupil of the family friend, Johann Pachelbel.**

The Ohrdruf school, close to the stream that flows fast through the town, had 300 pupils and 6 masters. It boasted that peasants were better educated there than noblemen elsewhere. Bach, despite his sorrow at losing his mother, was resilient and determined. He did well at his studies. He is also supposed to have copied, by moonlight, a book of clavier† pieces.²⁴

Although Johann Sebastian would have been paid for singing in the choir, and contributed to his keep, Christoph’s own family was expanding. There was no room; the adolescent had to move on. He could have just become an apprentice, but he chose instead to go to St Michael’s Church, at Lüneburg, about 30 miles from Hamburg, and join its distinguished Matins Choir.

So, aged fifteen, with his classmate Georg, Bach made his way 200 miles northwards to Brunswick and on to Lüneburg. The first leg of their journey would have necessitated bypassing the sombre Harz mountains, which lie in the way. The densely forested Harz was then infested with robbers, and even today25 it is a forbidding place during early March, the time when they travelled: the temperature even at midday is sometimes only 6–7°C; mist swirls ominously through the dripping, creaking trees; the melting snow freezes hard at night; any wagon would have slipped on the ice or got stuck in the mud. It was an arduous journey however they went, whether on foot, or by hitching a lift; unfortunately, there was no navigable river to provide a more comfortable and faster means of transport.

Their conversation, as they went, might have touched on the extra -ordinary changes being made to the calendar: in a year when anyway the century had changed, the dates between 18 February and 1 March had simply disappeared.*

When these country bumpkins got to Lüneburg, they must have been astonished by the size of St Michael’s, and its mighty organ. The church towered over the small houses in their crooked streets. Bach continued his academic studies, Latin, Greek, Hebrew, arithmetic and probably some French and Italian as well. He also studied all the leading composers by copying, the traditional mode of learning; and he had organ lessons from Georg Böhm, one of the three leading organists in Germany at the time, the others being the Swedish-born Buxtehude in Lübeck and Pachelbel, who by now was based in Nuremberg.²⁶

The choristers might have gossiped about a scandal, about five years earlier, involving the daughter and heiress of the ruling Duke of Brunswick-Lüneburg-Celle. Her lover, a count, was found murdered.**²⁷ But, even if they had heard of this, Bach, being a serious boy, will surely have been more interested in the potential for visiting nearby Celle, a minor Versailles, and for going to Hamburg.

In summer 1701, he walked the 30 miles to Hamburg.²⁸ Whereas Handel had been attracted by the opera, Bach wanted to hear Jan Reinken, then the youthful 80-year-old organist of the 13th-century St Catherine’s Church down by the inner harbour. When he approached the church for the first time, Bach must have been astonished at the bustling activity with lighters unloading the big sea-going ships on the Elbe.

In August 1702, Bach left school and returned southwards to apply for jobs. He was turned down for one, and possibly may have filled in time as a farm hand. On Easter Day 1703, he was enrolled as a violinist in the service of the younger brother of the Duke of Weimar, whom we shall meet later.²⁹

JOBSIN ARNSTADT AND MÜHLHAUSEN

He did not stay long in Weimar, on this occasion. A new organ was being built for the Church of St Boniface, near the market place in Arnstadt, about twenty miles from Ohrdruf. Bach was asked to be one of the inspectors, so he must already have acquired a considerable knowledge of organ construction. After the public inauguration, in August 1703, the eighteen-year-old was appointed to the well-paid job of organist to this church, which had a capacity for over 1,000 people.³⁰ He was certainly young for the job, but he had good connections in the town, and the castle organist was married to a cousin.

Arnstadt was a small walled town, populated with tanners, cloth-makers, brewers and potters. It had a castle occupied by a local count. It could be a jolly and festive place, for example, when the schoolboys put on their plays at Carnival time.³¹ Bach was now in charge of an excellent organ.* He could spend time composing for it.

At this early stage, the young Bach showed a trait shared, it seems, with his successful cousin at the court in Eisenach: he was pedantic about what he was employed to do. He claimed that he was only appointed for accompanying chorales on the organ and not for the more elaborate orchestral and choral (‘concerted’ or ‘figural’) music-making, such as the performance of cantatas.³³ This attitude seems somewhat perverse as the church authorities were critical of his embellished accompaniments, so obviously he enjoyed elaboration. Also, we begin to see signs of Bach’s poor interpersonal relations. In 1705, he was criticised by the authorities for being involved in a brawl with a student who had thrashed him in the market place in the presence of his girlfriend.³⁴ Bach, superior and highly educated, had referred, idiomatically and unwisely, to the bleating noise his attacker made when attempting to play the bassoon.

In 1705, he was granted four weeks’ leave of absence and set off again 300 miles to the north to ...

Table of contents

• INTRODUCTION
• BACH’S YOUTH IN THURINGIA AND NORTH GERMANY
• NOTES
• Other Books in the Series