The Creators: A History of Heroes of the Imagination

by DANIEL J. BOORSTIN

  The composition, too, expressed the order of nature, with a tension between giving and taking, passive and aggressive, host and guest. In a group of trees, the “host” tree will be bent with spread branches, and the guest tree slim and straight. If a third tree is added, it must not be exactly parallel. Such a group of trees can itself be a host in relation to another “guest” group in another part of the painting. “Mark well the way the branches dispose themselves, the yin and yang of them; those in front and those in the back, those on the left and those on the right; mark well the tensions created by some branches pushing forward while others seem to withdraw.” The host-guest principle of tree to tree can be equally well applied to the relation of rock to rock, mountain to mountain, or man to man.

  The inward emphasis of Chinese painting is expressed also in its peculiar form of perspective. While the West developed central perspective, the vanishing point of Brunelleschi and Alberti, the Chinese did not. Instead, the Chinese captured space in their painting by an invisible linear perspective that diminished objects in the distance, and by aerial perspective that made more distant objects increasingly indistinct. The Chinese developed and classified three personal points of view, all related to ways of viewing landscape: the “level distance” perspective, where the spectator looks down from a high vantage point; the “deep distance” perspective, where the spectator’s vision seems to penetrate into the landscape; and the “high distance” perspective, where the spectator looks up. This helps explain why the Western observer feels strange when looking at a Chinese painting. And also why Chinese paintings seem to need no frame. For the painter’s point of view has already provided a kind of frame. The Chinese painter wishes to avoid what would pretend to be a complete or finite statement, like that implied in a vanishing point. “All landscapes,” the eleventh-century critic Shen Kua declared, “have to be viewed from the angle of totality … to see more than one layer of the mountain at one time.… see the totality of its unending ranges.”

  The Chinese painter’s subject matter, too, is quite different from the Western painter’s. Western painters have exploited the sufferings of Christ on the Cross, the travail of Mary, the tortures of the martyr saints, and the scenes of battle. But Chinese painters, for the most part, stayed with their tradition of refreshing images of nature in familiar categories. To the Chinese painter of the Sung dynasty, Western painting might have seemed like the garish decorations of Buddhist temples done by skilled craftsmen. Landscape painting, which in Europe seemed less significant than figure painting, in China was not a mere background for historic events, ritual drama or national sentiment. The role of explicit religious, historical, or mythological themes in the West was played by the landscape itself (its trees, rocks, rivers, mountains, and birds) in China. Tradition made the familiar theme universal, and engaged both painter and public. The fact that great and famous masters have handled the same theme in their own way, the poet-historian Laurence Binyon (1869–1943) explains, “tests [the painter’s] originality far more severely … than if he had set out on a road of his own in the deliberate quest of originality.” The artist is like a skilled performer giving his own expression to a long-respected work of music.

  The Chinese kind of Impressionism was based not as in the West on the science of sight but in the soul of the painter. When the Chinese ranked works of art by class denoting their quality, and used terms translated as “divine class” or “marvelous class,” they did not mean by “divine” what is meant in the West, since the Chinese did not acknowledge any supreme divinity. For them “genius” did not mean “touched by God” (as in the “divine Michelangelo”) but rather an innate quality of spirit revealing superior individual capacities (what a man was endowed with by heaven or Nature), fulfilled by personal cultivation. What they meant by “individual achievement” was different from what we think of as “originality.” Yet the Abstract Expressionists in the West, in the works of Mark Tobey, Morris Graves, and Franz Kline, seem to have learned from the calligraphic expressionism of the Chinese.

  While the tie to calligraphy excluded the unlettered from the scholar-painter’s craft, it invited gentlemen amateurs. An artist’s bohemia was inconceivable. And Chinese painting was a realm of rich paradox as the painter seeking to forget the self found his very own way of reconciling past and present in a “revolutionary archaism.” “The greater the aesthetic and technical achievement,” F. W. Mote observes, “the more the creative individual was thought to be in command of the past, or under command of the past—for they were the same thing.” Chinese artists tended to follow the style of one of the great masters of an earlier period, and sometimes copied them stroke by stroke. “Forgery” acquired a new ambiguity. The Chinese artists’ proverbial talent for copying leads reputable art dealers nowadays to be wary of offering “authentic” old Chinese paintings. Seeking constant touch with the past and the works of great masters by hanging pictures on the wall in rotation according to the seasons or festivals, the Chinese created a continuing demand that supported workshops for mass production by professional painters. These artists following the Tao showed remarkable skill in making both new originals and copies of copies.

  While Western painters had set out on the bold and sometimes reckless passage from artisan to artist, the Chinese found originality in their many ways of revering nature and their past. Their paths led neither toward Leonardo’s Sovereign of the Visible World where man had the power to re-create nature nor toward Picasso’s effort to transcend nature. Rather to acquiesce and share the awe of Confucius, who declared himself the inheritor rather than the progenitor. “I transmit rather than create, I believe in and love the ancients.”

  The inspiration of nature and past masters gave a special kind of continuity, originality, and inwardness to painters in the Tao tradition. They brought together past and present, nature and art, poetry and painting, in a way beautifully illustrated in the work of the late master Shih T’ao (1641-c.1717). Suddenly moved to make a series of drawings transposing twelve poems that Su Shih (Su Tung-p’o, 1036–1101), six centuries before, had written about the different seasons of the year, Shih T’ao recalled (as translated by Chang Chung-yuan):

  This album had been on my desk for about a year and never once did I touch it. One day, when a snow storm was blowing outside, I thought of Tung-p’o’s poems describing twelve scenes and became so inspired that I took up my brush and started painting each of the scenes in the poems. At the top of each picture I copied the original poem. When I chant them the spirit that gave them life emerges spontaneously from my paintings.

  PART NINE

  COMPOSING

  FOR THE

  COMMUNITY

  All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music.

  —WALTER PATER (1873)

  Music is another planet.

  —ALPHONSE DAUDET (c. 1890)

  47

  A Protestant Music

  IT is not surprising that Johann Sebastian Bach (1685–1750), the first colossus of music in an age that idolized the artist genius, insisted that the composer was essentially a craftsman. For centuries in Europe other crafts had been handed down in families, and often—like the Carpenters, Shoemakers, Smiths, and Wagners—they took their family name from their craft. Vividly aware that he descended from seven generations of musicians, he composed his own “Genealogy of the Musical Bachs,” and saw himself as heir of a craft tradition. The idea was abroad in that Enlightened Age that right reason industriously applied would produce a harvest of science. Why not of the arts too? “Genius,” observed the French biologist Buffon, “is nothing but a great aptitude for patience.” Bach put it his own way. “I have had to work hard; anyone who works just as hard will get just as far.”

  There was, he believed, a right way for composing any piece of music, even for what was called a “free fantasy.” When Bach heard the beginning of a fugue, his son Carl Philipp Emanuel (1714–1788) reported, he would state “what contrapuntal
devices it would be possible to apply, and which of them the composer by rights ought to apply.” The composer’s satisfaction came, not from bold original plunges, but from producing what was properly expected.

  By his own teaching Bach demonstrated his belief that composing could be taught. He was instructing his pupils in a spiritual craft, not just an instrumental technique. And to emphasize this he would not allow his pupils to compose at the instrument. He himself had the rules so clearly in mind that the manuscripts of his works were remarkably clean and uncorrected. If his pupils followed the rules for polyphony, he promised them, their compositions would be like “persons who conversed together as if in select company.” He had no patience with the quixotic “knights of the keyboard” who went off on their own. And he offered guidance to his sons and other novice composers with his Little Organ Book, his Well-Tempered Clavier and his Art of the Fugue.

  Bach’s elaborations of contrapuntal technique seemed to justify the fears of “wordless” music expressed by Saint Augustine, Pope Gregory the Great, and others. They had rightly suspected that when music became wordless it could easily become an icon. A form of creation all its own, music would be the messenger of musical charms in place of Heavenly Truths. Audiences would then be moved not with “the thing sung,” but with “the singing.” The fear of images that had almost prevailed against visual art in the Church long survived against the arts of music.

  The rise of the arts of music in the West would be a dual story—of the liberation from fear of instruments and also of the elaboration of vocal music. From antiquity to the Middle Ages, we have seen, “music” had a career of narrowing meaning—from the Pythagorean music of the spheres to the Gregorian music of the word. But pious efforts to keep the creators of music on this strait track inevitably failed. The Roman Catholic Church itself found ways to admit the music of instruments, and the Protestant churches followed the lead, while adding popular new forms of music of the word. In modern times as music became an expanding realm of creation it became more and more secularized. Churchly music would be only a narrow current of the widening torrents of composition and performance.

  Johann Sebastian Bach was qualified by his talents and by his personal strengths and weaknesses not only to celebrate the possibilities of churchly music, but also to induct church music into the concert hall, for Bach, as Albert Schweitzer explained in his classic study of 1908, was the very model of the “objective” artists who “are wholly of their own time, and work only with the forms and the ideas that their time proffers them … and feel no inner compulsion to open out to new paths.” Contrary are the “subjective” artists, like Schweitzer’s contemporary Richard Wagner, who are “a law unto themselves, they place themselves in opposition to their epoch and originate new forms for the expression of their ideas.” While Bach was the last great composer to create mostly church music, he has also been acclaimed as the first great figure of modern music—a living bridge between the music of the word and the music of instruments.

  In his time, Bach was admired more as an organist and expert on organs than as a composer. And it was the organ that overcame the taboo and brought instrumental music into the Christian churches. The organ was an ancient instrument, known in Hellenistic Alexandria (third century B.C.) and across the Roman Empire. Alexandrian technicians had devised a clever machine called the hydraulus that used a piston pump and wooden sliders to make a sound in the pipes. This complicated system was displaced about the eighth century by pneumatic bellows. In the age of Charlemagne, organ pipes of copper or bronze joined in acclamation of the emperor. By the ninth century the organ was known in churches, and monks in German monasteries were building organs. The grand Winchester Cathedral organ built about 950 is said to have had some four hundred pipes and twenty-six bellows, and required two players and many men to operate the bellows. The organ played an increasing part in the Mass, the canonical hours, and other rituals. But some clerics complained that the wheeze of bellows and the clank of machinery made the organ at Canterbury sound “more like thunder than sweet music.”

  By the thirteenth century the cumbersome old sliding levers were displaced by a modern keyboard with mechanical linkages to direct the access of air. And the organ came into wider use. In “The Nun’s Priest’s Tale” Chaucer noted that “His vois was merrier than the mery organ. On masse-dayes that in the churches gon.” Scruples against instrumental music were overwhelmed by the grandeur, volume, and playful refinements of the unique organ timbre that “penetrated beyond the church doors.” The organ, too, was peculiarly suited to the architecture of churches. For the effect depended on live acoustics and reverberation, preferably with a line-of-sight path to the listeners. Organ music sounded best with masonry walls and floors that reflected the sound, and in large spaces that were high, long, and narrow.

  The seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, the age of Bach, was the golden age of the organ, and some of the best organs were being built in northern and central Germany. These baroque organs, ideally suited also for the polyphonic music of the time, have never been excelled. Reputedly the greatest organ builder of all time, Gottfried Silbermann (1683–1753) did his work in Dresden, a city Bach repeatedly visited, and on whose organs he played. The decline in the organ builder’s craft in the nineteenth century marked the decline of the organ in European music.

  Born in 1685 into a musical family in Eisenach in Thuringia, next door to Silbermann’s Saxony, Johann Sebastian Bach naturally made his debut with the organ. The first musical Bach was a baker who probably came from Hungary. Legend has him taking his guitar to the flour mill to play while his corn was being ground, untroubled by the racket of the machinery, or perhaps keeping time to it. In Eisenach the family name became synonymous with their art. The town musicians continued to be known as “The Bachs” (die Baache) long after the last Bach had served them. The family was firmly Lutheran, and significantly, the last of the great musical Bachs, Johann Christian (1738–1782; “the English Bach”), was also the first to become a Roman Catholic. He converted to be eligible to be organist in the cathedral of Milan.

  Johann Sebastian’s father was a musician serving the town and the ducal court of Eisenach. His mother died and then his father, leaving him an orphan at the age of ten. By 1695 he was sent to live his eldest brother, Johann Christoph (1671–1721), a pupil of the famous organist and composer Johann Pachelbel (1653–1706), organist at the village of Ordruff, who gave him his first lessons on the keyboard. When Bach became impatient with the slow pace of instruction, he secretly secured the text of more advanced clavier composers, which he copied at night. This brother secured Bach a place in the choir of St. Michael’s Church at Lüneburg, where he was kept on, even after his voice broke, because of his aptitude with several instruments. He was only eighteen when he was asked to test the new organ at the Neukirche in Arnstadt, and was then appointed church organist.

  But his passion for the organ soon got him into trouble. In October 1705 he secured a month’s leave of absence to walk the two hundred miles to Lübeck and hear the organ playing of his idol, Dietrich Buxtehude (1637–1707), then considered the most eminent organist in North Germany. Bach was so engrossed by what he heard that he stayed for three months, returning to Arnstadt in January 1706. Overstaying his leave added to the grievances of his Arnstadt employers, who were already irked by his free harmonizing of hymns that made it impossible for the congregation to sing to his organ accompaniment. He quarreled with the singers and the players of other instruments who did not come up to his standards. His offensive words to one of the choristers had led to a street fracas in which Bach had drawn his sword. He was also accused of having “made music” in the church with a “stranger maiden.” At the time women were not allowed to sing in church.

  A clash with the Arnstadt church council, whom he offended, and the congregation, who did not like his liturgical innovations, led him to move on to Mühlhausen in 1707. There he married his cousin, whose father also
was an organist. She seems to have been the “stranger maiden” in the church in Arnstadt. During his brief stay at Mühlhausen, he began applying his keyboard skills. Even before he was twenty-three he had created his Toccata and Fugue in D Minor, his Prelude and Fugue in D Major, and his Passacaglia in C Minor, some of his most famous organ works. And he composed a cantata (Gott ist mein König, God is my King), his first work to be published. Within two years, however, after complaining of his salary and being entangled in theological disputes, he resigned his post.

  Bach’s move to Weimar in 1708 was more productive, but hardly trouble-free. As organist and court musician to the imperious Duke Wilhelm Ernst, he had wider duties. He continued to compose toccatas, fugues, and fantasias for the organ, especially enjoying the thirty-two-inch pedal of the Weimar organ and he was finally promoted to concertmaster in 1714. Now it was his duty to compose a new cantata each month. For in those days the church musician, like the court musician, was expected not merely to perform the music of others but to present music of his own, and Bach began composing some of his most brilliant vocal music, a vast body of Lutheran cantatas, of which some two hundred survive. Into his sacred vocal music he incorporated recitatives and arias in a quasi-operatic style—things he had heard in the works of Vivaldi and others—and gave a lesser role to the chorus.

  Despite repeated raises in salary at Weimar, Bach remained disgruntled. When he received an invitation to be director of music to Prince Leopold of Cöthen, the duke of Weimar’s brother-in-law, the outraged duke jailed him for a month, then ordered his dismissal in disgrace. Yet, at Weimar, before the age of thirty-two, he had already created a body of music that would have brought immortality to a lesser composer. These included his Little Organ Book, seventeen of his eighteen “Great” chorale preludes, and most of his organ preludes and fugues.