The Creators: A History of Heroes of the Imagination

by DANIEL J. BOORSTIN

  Cöthen, where he was not required to compose church music but where his responsibilities were mainly for chamber and orchestral performances, provided Bach the incentive to compose more secular music, including sonatas for violin and clavier, the Brandenburg Concertos (completed at Cöthen but dedicated to the margrave of Brandenburg), his Little Clavier Book, his Well-Tempered Clavier (two books each of twenty-four preludes and fugues), cantatas for festive occasions, and various dance suites and concertos.

  The sudden death of his wife in 1720 had added to Bach’s troubles at Cöthen. But he married again happily in 1721. And he became a model family man—eventually the father of twenty children, half of whom died before they became adult. When the duke of Cöthen married a woman with no interest in music (Bach called her an amusa—enemy of muses), it only confirmed Bach’s determination to move on once more. He applied for the post of organist at St. Jacob’s Church in Hamburg, but could not make the donation that might have assured his appointment. Still, this would have been less onerous than the common requirement that a new organist marry into the former organist’s family.

  In 1723, having passed a test of his Lutheran orthodoxy, he became cantor and musical director of St. Thomas’s Church in Leipzig, a cosmopolitan cultural center, where he would remain till his death in 1750. Besides running a choir school for boys, he had heavy obligations as composer, director, and performer. His varied duties included accompanying the choir at funerals, and providing music for four other churches. His response to these demands created the works that established him as a preeminent religious composer. In the first four years he composed some 150 cantatas for Sundays and the major festivals. But he disturbed the Sunday peace by thrashing the boys for their incompetent performance of difficult solo parts and offended church authorities by ill-tempered disputes over the curriculum. Still, his offerings at Leipzig included some of his masterpieces—the Passion According to Saint John (1723; written in Cöthen) and the Passion According to Saint Matthew (1729), which startled the congregation by its elaborate operatic character.

  Unhappy with his working conditions and the incompetent choir at his disposal, in 1730 he complained to the authorities, who responded with a threat to reduce his salary. Again he began looking for a post elsewhere. A sympathetic new rector at the school temporarily relieved his uneasiness, and his appointment as director of the city’s collegium musicum put him in touch with mature musicians and wider audiences. Now he gave less attention to his cantatas and devoted himself to the keyboard pieces for his Clavier-Übung (four volumes, 1731–42), which included the Italian Concerto, organ pieces, and the Goldberg Variations. New quarrels with the authorities of his school and the collegium had to be settled in the law courts. Meanwhile Bach found other outlets for his talents, visiting Dresden and other cities for organ recitals. He continued revising and enlarging his keyboard works—with a second collection for The Well-Tempered Clavier (1742) and improvements on his earlier chorale preludes.

  In the hope that he would be named court composer Bach put theological scruples aside and created his most famous work. The Mass in B Minor, sometimes called “the greatest piece of Western music ever composed,” he made in the first instance for Augustus III, elector of Saxony, who was a Catholic. The Lutheran service had shortened the Catholic Mass, including only its first two divisions, the Kyrie and the Gloria: it was these that Bach sent to Augustus in 1733. But for some reason Bach was impelled to expand these sections into a complete Catholic Mass. Since it takes three hours to perform, it is not suited for the regular liturgy and nowadays is performed as a “concert Mass.” Bach created it from his earlier compositions—a Sanctus of 1724, a Kyrie and Gloria of 1733, and other items—and it was completed about 1747. The five years he spent putting it together were longer than the time Michelangelo devoted to the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Bach may never have intended it to be offered at a single performance. It was certainly never performed in its entirety in Bach’s lifetime. Nearly a century later his Mass in B Minor had a complete performance, and it has remained a pinnacle of modern religious music.

  Bach’s son Carl Philipp Emanuel was musician at the court of Frederick the Great in Potsdam. In 1747 Frederick invited Bach to his royal apartments at the hour when Frederick usually listened to chamber music. Frederick himself, a witness reported, went to the “forte piano” that stood there, and played “in person and without any preparation, a theme to be executed by Capellmeister Bach in a fugue. This was done so happily by the … Capellmeister that not only his Majesty was pleased to show his satisfaction thereat, but also all those present were seized with astonishment. Mr. Bach has found the subject propounded to him so exceedingly beautiful that he intends to set it down on paper in a regular fugue and have it engraved on copper.” This became Bach’s Musical Offering (1747)—his personal gift to Frederick—in numerous pieces collected around Frederick’s own theme. Bach’s final work, left incomplete, was The Art of the Fugue, a comprehensive survey of the uses of counterpoint in his time.

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  While Bach reached out to secular forms, his remarkable work was both a fulfillment and a by-product of the limitations of churchly music. His inability to settle into a comfortable routine prevented his having a single conventional career for town or court or church. The Protestant reformers had been wary of the arts that flourished in the Roman Church.

  Martin Luther (1483–1546) himself loved music, composed pieces that have survived, and sought to give music a larger role in congregational worship. But he was suspicious of the organ for its “papistical” past. John Calvin (1509–1564), more earnestly than Luther, hoping to root out traces of Catholic liturgy or music, forbade the use of instruments (including organs) even for recreation. English reformers in 1586 demanded the pulling down of churches “where the service of God is grievously abused by piping with organs, singing, ringing, and trowling of Psalms from one side of the church to another, with the squeaking of chanting choristers, disguised in white surplices.” And Protestant enthusiasm in England led to the destruction of many of the best early organs. Organ builders made a living as carpenters, and the pipes of organs were pawned for pots of beer. Still, a few early organs did escape, including that of St. Paul’s Cathedral. Cromwell, a music lover, was rumored to have removed the organ of Magdalen College, Oxford, to Hampton Court for his personal entertainment.

  The place of the organ in Protestant worship enlisted the interest of Albert Schweitzer, the most fervent and learned of Bach’s disciples, who worked to discover, preserve, and restore early organs. Schweitzer himself could have had a career as an organist, but chose to become a medical missionary. And when he went to Africa he took with him an organ zinc-lined for protection against the damp climate. He spent six years (1905–11) on his classic volumes on Bach, and edited Bach’s organ music.

  Luther had found good theological reasons to incorporate vocal music—music of the word—in the Reformed service. In 1546 he described the awesome wonders of contrapuntal polyphony:

  When natural music is heightened and polished by art, there man first beholds and can with great wonder examine to a certain extent, (for it cannot be wholly seized or understood) the great and perfect wisdom of God in His marvellous work of music, in which this is most singular and astonishing, that one man sings a simple tune or tenor (as musicians call it), together with which three, four or five voices also sing, which as it were play and skip delightedly round this simple tune or tenor, and wonderfully grace and adorn the said tune with manifold devices and sounds, performing as it were a heavenly dance, so that those who at all understand it and are moved by it must be greatly amazed, and believe that there is nothing more extraordinary in the world than such a song adorned with many voices.

  When the congregation sang they expressed the priesthood of all believers. The congregational hymns translated worship into the vernacular, from the Latin of Rome into the language of the marketplace. Luther had gone to school in Eisenach, and
it was at nearby Wartburg that he had made his historic translation of the Bible into German (1521–22). Here too he was said to have written “Ein feste Burg is unser Gott,” which Heine called the Marseillaise of the Reformation and on which Bach composed one of his grandest cantatas.

  It is conceivable that the Iconoclasts might have won against music as they nearly had against images a millennium before. The Council of Trent (1545–63), doing the work of the Catholic Counter Reformation, might have inhibited church music by draconian measures, but finally went no further than to condemn everything “impure or lascivious” to preserve the House of God as the House of Prayer. According to a famous legend, the council was about to pass a rule against polyphony. But Giovanni Perluigi de Palestrina (1525?–1594), the leading composer in Rome at the time, composed a Mass for six voices to prove that polyphony was compatible with the reverent spirit and did not prevent an understanding of the sacred text. Palestrina’s Mass was supposed to have defeated a rule against polyphony. But now instead it appears that the legendary Mass (finally published in 1567) was actually written on Pope Marcellus II’s orders to Palestrina to create a decorous Mass in which the text could be understood for Holy Week.

  The Council of Trent reflected the ongoing battle between the music of the word and the music of instruments. The main objection to polyphony had been its disregard for sacred words, and the council finally decreed that future church music must be more simply written so the words could be clearly understood. Palestrina’s genius surely had much to do with preserving music in the Roman Church. Named after the small town near Rome where he was born, Palestrina spent his life in Rome as choirmaster and organist at various churches and finally at the Vatican. He supervised the revision of music in the liturgy following orders of the Council of Trent to purify the chants of their “barbarisms, obscurities, contrarieties, and superfluities” due to the “clumsiness or negligence or even wickedness of the composers, scribes, and printers.”

  Palestrina’s prolific creations for the church included 102 Masses, 450 motets and liturgical compositions, and 56 spiritual madrigals. Still, he “blushed and grieved” that he had written some music for love poems. He brought into being a “Palestinian style,” a counterpoint of voice parts in continuous rhythm with a new melody for each phrase in the text. Probably the best-known composer of Western music before Bach, he was a landmark in the history of Western music as the first musician to become an identified model for later composers. If he was not the Savior of Polyphony, he was the undisputed Prince of Roman Catholic Music.

  While the Protestant Reformation was ambivalent about the organ and the music of instruments, it invigorated the music of the word. The “chorales,” congregational hymns, became the main current of Protestant church music. As Luther explained in 1524, he never intended “that on account of the Gospel all the arts should be crushed out of existence, as some over-religious people pretend, but I would willingly see all the arts, especially music, in the service of Him who has given and created them.” Under Italian influence, the motet, elaborated into the longer and more complex cantata, took on operatic qualities, combining the chorus, solo singers, and even instruments. To precede the sermons in words, these became Bach’s “sermons in music.” Some two hundred of Bach’s creations in this form have survived. Most use a chorus, but some are for solo singers, with recitatives and arias.

  In variety, too, Bach’s brilliant music is unexcelled among modern composers. For instruments he made his own organ trios, in addition to some 170 chorale preludes for the organ, as well as music for the clavier (clavichord or harpsichord). His famous Well-Tempered Clavier consisted of two installments of twenty-four each, in each of the twelve major and minor keys. His numerous clavier suites adapted the French and Italian styles. His six delightful Brandenburg Concertos (1721) and the Goldberg Variations (1742) still charm audiences who do not attend church. All these were noted for their intricate contrapuntal technique in the styles of his time.

  Bach’s vocal music—music of the word—attained a grandeur that might have worried Luther, and has never been excelled in music for the Church. His secular cantatas, which he called dramma per musica, he sometimes adapted to sacred texts. His Passions—settings of the Gospel story in Oratorio form for Easter services—were dramatic triumphs. The Passion based on the Gospel according to Saint John (1724) included fourteen chorales, with added lyrics and some of Bach’s own verses. The Saint Matthew Passion (1729) for double chorus, soloist, double orchestra, and two organs, is an overpowering Christian epic of twenty-four scenes recounting the last days of the Savior. It is narrated by the Evangelist, a tenor part in recitative. Choruses speak for the crowd with frightening realism. In addition, there are minor scenes with devotional chorales supposed to have been sung by the congregation. Although Bach never wrote an opera, there are few operatic feats not found in his Passions—and with a dramatic coherence seldom found in opera.

  Bach the craftsman also did more than his bit to perpetuate his craft by didactic works. While his Well-Tempered Clavier exemplified the range of baroque keyboard compositions, it was intended to be an argument for the tempered scale of equal semitones as against the old “natural scale.”

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  “The more a man belongs to posterity, in other words to humanity in general,” Schopenhauer wrote in his essay on “Fame” (1891), “the more of an alien is he to his contemporaries.… People are more likely to appreciate the man who serves the circumstances of his own brief hour, or the temper of the moment—belonging to it, and living and dying with it.” By Schopenhauer’s test Bach proves his appeal to humanity in general. For his preeminence among modern composers was attained only slowly. His works of “divine mathematics” demonstrated his mastery of the established contrapuntal technique of the preceding age. During the three decades while he was composing in great quantities, musical styles were changing. And by Bach’s late years his early works in Weimar and Cöthen must have seemed old-fashioned. New composers were denouncing counterpoint and producing popular melodies, simplifying the complex structures that Bach had built. Even before his death his music was becoming unpopular. Moreover, he was composing his cantatas, his Passions, and his Mass in an age whose taste was becoming increasingly “enlightened” and secular. The music audiences for the next age would be in ducal and princely courts and then in public concert halls to paying audiences.

  The rise of a “German” consciousness in the early nineteenth century would make it plausible for him to be idolized as a German genius (despite his Hungarian roots!). While he stretched Lutheran and Pietist dogma to the limit with his operatic style, the flamboyance of the Passions, and the Mass in B Minor for a Catholic prince, he still composed to the order of town council, church authorities, or petty prince, or to secure their favor. His Art of the Fugue had sold only thirty copies by 1756, and for some fifty years afterward no complete composition by Bach was separately published. The name of Bach was increasingly associated with his sons and pupils. Bach was admired with nostalgia. Mozart himself in Vienna in 1782 had taken part in Sunday noon concerts at the Baron van Swieten’s house where they played Handel and Bach. He then wrote a prelude and fugue, and when he sent it to his sister (April 20, 1782) explained that he had come to compose it only after a prodding by his wife, Constanze. “Now, since she had heard me frequently improvise fugues, she asked me whether I had never written any down, and when I said ‘No,’ she gave me a proper scolding for not wanting to write the most intricate and beautiful kind of music, and she did not give up begging until I wrote her a fugue, and that is how it came about.” When Mozart visited Leipzig in 1789, he heard Bach’s double-chorus motet, “Sing unto the Lord a New Song,” and was newly shocked into recognition. “What is this?” he exclaimed. “Now there is something one can learn from!”

  Beethoven, too, became a Bach enthusiast. On first coming to Vienna, Beethoven’s virtuoso performance of The Well-Tempered Clavier attracted attention. He continual
ly sought copies of Bach’s works, and planned a benefit concert for Bach’s last surviving daughter. For him Bach was the Father of Harmony, and “not Bach [brook], but Meer [sea] should be his name.” After Goethe had heard a friend play some of Bach’s works on the organ, he recalled, “it is as if the eternal harmony were conversing within itself, as it may have done in the bosom of God just before the Creation of the World.”

  Ironically the historic revival of Bach was a product of the same Enlightenment spirit that was making him seem the outmoded musician of another age. The growing interest in the historical past expressed by Voltaire’s Age of Louis XIV (1751) and Winckelmann’s History of Ancient Art (1764) also awakened the widening community of music lovers. The rediscovery of Bach’s church music was the feat of the twenty-year-old Felix Mendelssohn (1809–1847), a brilliant and precocious composer of Jewish descent. The Saint Matthew Passion, first performed in 1729, was one of Bach’s grandest, most complex and difficult works. The young Mendelssohn enlisted amateur and professional singers and players and the whole music-loving community of Berlin in a centennial performance. Though inexperienced at conducting he managed the numerous rehearsals and the performance was a spectacular success. The worshipers of Bach, Eduard Devrient, one of the professional performers, noted, “must not forget that this new cult of Bach dates from the 11th of March, 1829, and that it was Felix Mendelssohn who gave new vitality to the greatest and most profound of composers.” When the performance produced some unpleasant jealousy in the Berlin musical community, the young composer’s father promptly sent him on his grand tour. Then stirred by Mendelssohn’s example the repeated performances of the Saint Matthew Passion in other cities initiated the uncanny fame of Bach in modern music. It also stimulated the massive program of the Bach-Gesellschaft (sponsored by Robert Schumann and founded in 1850) to publish Bach’s complete works. Johannes Brahms (1833–1897) declared that the two greatest events of his lifetime were the founding of the German Empire and the completion of the Bach-Gesellschaft publications. In 1950, two centuries after Bach’s death, a new Bach Institute was founded in Göttingen to provide a revised edition.