Bach: Music in the Castle of Heaven

by Gardiner, John Eliot

  Yet, as can be seen from the Chronology (this page), there are pitifully few incontrovertible facts to support such an idealised view of Bach the man. In adding to them, it seems we must content ourselves with a handful of mostly dull and clumsy letters as the sole indications of his patterns of thought and of his feelings as an individual and as a family man. Much of his writing is pedestrian and opaque, consisting of detailed reports on the workings of church organs and worthy testimonials for his pupils. Then comes an endless stream of complaints to municipal authorities on his working conditions and gripes about his pay. There are also fretful self-justifications and sycophantic dedications to royal personages, always apparently with an eye to the main chance. We sense entrenched attitudes but seldom a beating heart. Even sparring polemical exchanges were conducted at second hand through an intermediary. There is no proof of his having compared notes with his peers, although we may infer that he did do this from time to time (see this page), and little to enlighten us about his approach to composition, his attitude to work or to life in general.a His usual answer (as reported by his first biographer, Johann Nikolaus Forkel) to those who asked him how he had contrived to master the art of music to such a high degree was blunt and unilluminating: ‘I was obliged to be industrious; whoever is equally industrious will succeed equally well.’2

  Faced with this paucity of materials, his biographers from Forkel (1802), Carl Hermann Bitter (1865) and Philipp Spitta (1873) onwards have been driven back to the Nekrolog, the obituary hastily written in 1754 by his second son C. P. E. Bach and his pupil Johann Friedrich Agricola, to the testimony of his other sons, pupils and contemporaries, and to the web of anecdotes, some of which he himself could well have embroidered. Even with these, the picture which emerges is for the most part formal and two-dimensional: that of a musician who insists he was self-taught, of a man discharging his responsibilities with aloof rectitude, and of someone totally immersed in the making of music. Once in a while, when his eyes lifted from the page, we get flashes of anger – a cameo of an artist driven to distraction by the narrow-mindedness and stupidity of his employers and forced to live, in his own words, ‘amid almost continual vexation, envy and persecution’.3 This has opened the floodgates to conjecture – ingenious attempts made by successive biographers to straddle the chasm-like gaps in the sources from which they have squeezed every last drop, and to supplement them with speculation and inference. This is the point where mythology takes hold – of Bach as exemplary Teuton, as a working-class hero-craftsman, as the Fifth Evangelist, or as an intellectual of the calibre of Isaac Newton. We seem to be battling not just with the nineteenth-century bias towards hagiolatry but with peculiarly resistant twentieth-century strains of politically inflected ideology.

  A nagging suspicion grows that many writers, overawed and dazzled by Bach, still tacitly assume a direct correlation between his immense genius and his stature as a person. At best this can make them unusually tolerant of his faults, which are there for all to see: a certain tetchiness, contrariness and self-importance, timidity in meeting intellectual challenges, and a fawning attitude towards royal personages and to authority in general that mixes suspicion with gain-seeking. But why should it be assumed that great music emanates from a great human being? Music may inspire and uplift us, but it does not have to be the manifestation of an inspiring (as opposed to an inspired) individual. In some cases there may be such a correspondence, but we are not obliged to presume that it is so. It is very possible that ‘the teller may be so much slighter or less attractive than the tale.’4 The very fact that Bach’s music was conceived and organised with the brilliance of a great mind does not directly give us any clues as to his personality. Indeed, knowledge of the one can lead to a misplaced knowingness about the other. At least with him there is not the slightest risk, as with so many of the great Romantics (Byron, Berlioz, Heine spring to mind), that we might discover almost too much about him or, as in the case of Richard Wagner, be led to an uncomfortable correlation between the creative and the pathological.

  I see no need for us to stand Bach in a flattering light or to avert our eyes from possible movement in the shadows. Some recent biographies try to put a brave face on his personality and interpret everything in a rosy way, one belied by the surviving sources. To do so is to underestimate the psychological toll that a lifetime, not so much of tireless application, as of bowing and scraping to his intellectual inferiors, could have had on his state of mind and well-being. Any Godlike image that we superimpose on Bach blinds us to his artistic struggles, and from that point on we cease to see him as a musical craftsman par excellence. Just as we are so accustomed to seeing Brahms as a fat old man with a beard, forgetting that he was once young and dashing – ‘a young eagle from the north’ as Schumann described him after their first meeting – so we tend to see Bach as a bewigged, jowly old German Capellmeister and attach that image to his music, in the face of all the youthful exuberance and unparalleled vitality that his music so often conveys. Suppose instead we start to view him as an unlikely rebel: ‘someone who undermined widely acclaimed principles and closely guarded assumptions [about music]’. This, Laurence Dreyfus suggests, ‘can only be good, since it allows us to take those inchoate feelings of awe which many of us feel upon hearing Bach’s works and transform them into a vision of the composer’s courage and daring, thus letting us experience the music anew … Bach and his subversive activities might provide the key to his achievement, which, like all great art, is attuned to the most subtle manipulations and recasting of human experience.’5 Dreyfus’s refreshing and persuasive corrective to the old hagiolatry is in perfect accord with the line of inquiry I will pursue in the central chapters of this book.

  That is just one side of the coin. For, despite all the recent flood of scholarly writing on individual aspects of Bach’s music and the heated controversy over how it was once performed and by whom, Bach as Mensch continues to elude us. Sifting through the same old piles of biographical sand for the umpteenth time, it is easy to assume that by now we have exhausted their potential to yield up fresh nuggets of information. I do not believe this to be the case. In 2000 the American Bach scholar Robert L. Marshall, sensing that a comprehensive reinterpretation of Bach’s life and works was long overdue, claimed that he and his fellow scholars were ‘avoiding this challenge and we knew it’. He was certain that ‘the surviving documents, as recalcitrant as they are, can be made to shed more light on Bach the man than may first appear’.6 Marshall has since been vindicated by the brilliant, indefatigable sleuths working in the Bach-Archiv in Leipzig, even if the exciting new evidence uncovered by them has so far only been partially assimilated. As its research director, Peter Wollny, described it to me, the process is ‘like picking up the odd shard of marble from the foot of a statue: you don’t really know whether it is part of an arm, an elbow or a kneecap, but it is still Bach’s and you need to alter your speculative image of his completed statuary from the new evidence’. Might there, then, be more priceless nuggets still lurking somewhere in the archives? With the opening up of libraries in countries of the former Eastern Bloc and the avalanche of sources suddenly available to scholars via online digital access, the chances of their discovery are higher now than at any time in the last fifty years.b

  There is also the possibility that, by focusing on the familiar sources and desperately trying to add to them, all the time we have been looking in one direction, while missing evidence of the most revealing sort that is right under our noses: the evidence of the music itself. It is the anchor to which we can return again and again, and the principal means of validating or refuting any conclusion about its author. Self-evidently, the more closely you scrutinise the music from the outside as a listener, and the more deeply you get to know it from the inside as a performer, the better are your chances of uncovering the wonders it has to offer – and not only that, but of gaining insight into the man who created it in the first place. At its most monumental and imposing – sa
y, in The Art of Fugue or the ten canons of the Musical Offering – we come up against membranes so impenetrable as to thwart even the most persistent search for the face of its creator. Bach’s keyboard works maintain a tension – born of restraint and obedience to self-set conventions – between form (which we might describe variously as cool, severe, unbending, narrow or complex) and content (passionate or intense) more palpably and obviously than does his texted music.c Many of us can only marvel and retreat, surrendering to seams of thought that run more profoundly and more immutably in their dispassionate spirituality than in almost any other kind of music.

  The moment words are involved the attention is deflected away from form and towards meaning and interpretation. Part of my aim in this book is to show how clearly Bach’s approach in his cantatas, motets, oratorios, Masses and Passions reveals his mind at work, his temperamental preferences (including, where it applies, the very act of choosing one text over another) as well as his wide-ranging philosophical outlook. Bach’s cantatas are of course not literally diary entries, as though he were straightforwardly penning a personal narrative. Entwined in the music and situated behind these pieces’ formal outer shell are the features of this intensely private, multifaceted human being – devout at one moment, rebellious the next, deeply reflective and serious for the most part, but lightened by flashes of humour and empathy. Bach’s voice can sometimes be heard in the music and, even more importantly, in the way traces of his own performance are woven into it. These are the tones of someone attuned to the cycles of nature and the changing seasons, sensitive to the raw physicality of life, but buoyed up by the prospect of a better afterlife spent in the company of angels and angelic musicians. The music gives us shafts of insight into the harrowing experiences he must have suffered as an orphan, as a lone teenager, and as a grieving husband and father. They show us his fierce dislike of hypocrisy and his impatience with falsification of any sort; but they also reveal the profound sympathy he felt towards those who grieve or suffer in one way or another, or who struggle with their consciences or their beliefs. His music exemplifies this, and it is in part what gives it its authenticity and colossal force. But most of all we hear his joy and sense of delight in celebrating the wonders of the universe and the mysteries of existence – as well as in the thrill of his own creative athleticism. You have only to listen to a single Christmas cantata to experience festive elation and jubilation in music on an unprecedented scale, one beyond the reach of any other composer.

  The purpose of this book is rencontrer l’homme en sa création.7 Its aim is therefore very different from that of a traditional biography: to give the reader a real sense of what the act of music-making would have been like for Bach, inhabiting the same experiences, the same sensations. By this I am not proposing a direct correlation between works and personality – more that the musical side is able to refract a broad range of life experiences (many of which may not in essence be so very different from ours), something which is set at an angle to the habitual connection between life and works. Bach’s personality was developed and honed as a direct consequence of his musical thought. The patterns of his actual behaviour were secondary to this, and in some cases can be interpreted as the result of an imbalance between his life as a musician and his everyday domestic life. By looking at the twin processes of composing and performing Bach’s music, we can put the human likeness of the composer himself into relief – an impression that can only be strengthened by the experience of re-creating and re-performing it now.

  I seek to convey what it is like to approach Bach from the position of a performer and conductor standing in front of a vocal and instrumental ensemble, just as he himself habitually did. Naturally I am aware that this is treacherous ground, and that any ‘evidence’ drawn from it can easily be dismissed as subjective and invalid – just ‘an updated version of the romantic view of music as autobiography’, one that claims ‘an impossible authority’ for its speculations.8 It is of course tempting to believe that one can understand a composer’s aims while under the influence of the emotion the music evokes, although this may not be the case at all.d But that does not mean that subjectivity per se is inimical to more objective truth or undermines its conclusions. Ultimately all truths are subjective to one degree or another, except perhaps those of mathematics. In the past Bach scholarship has suffered from the distancing, or in some cases the removal, of the subject (the author) from the object (the composer) of the study. But once an author’s subjectivity is virtually expunged or remains unacknowledged, it follows that facets of Bach’s personality are closed off to investigation. In the introductory chapter I explain the background to, and nature of, my own particular subjectivity. This may be forgiven, I hope, should others, as a result, be encouraged to analyse their own subjective responses to the composer and to consider the extent to which those responses have given rise to the conception that we have of him.

  Writing this book over several years has meant searching for ways in which scholarship and performance can cooperate and be made to coalesce fruitfully. It has entailed delving into the evidence that could shed new light on Bach’s background, piecing together the biographical fragments, re-examining the impact of his orphancy and the circumstances of his schooling, scrutinising the music and keeping a weather-eye out for those instances in performance when his personality seems to rise through the fabric of his notation. Despite the huge debt I owe to the experts and scholars who have guided me and perhaps averted me from disaster, what is presented here is very much one person’s vision. I have set out to provide a straightforward structure (though not always articulated in strictly chronological order): fourteen different approaches, fourteen spokes of a wheel, all connected to a central hub – Bach as man and musician. Each spoke, though it bears a relation to its neighbours and opposites, is there to guide the reader from one point to another within its specific topic. Each of these ‘constellations’ (Walter Benjamin’s description of much the same thing) explores a different facet of his character and each proposes a fresh vantage point from which to view the man and his music.

  In counterpoint to this I have introduced a series of footnotes in the spirit of the biographer Richard Holmes: ‘as a sort of down-stage voice, reflecting on the action as it develops, and suggesting lines of exploration through some of the biographical and critical issues raised’.9 Nevertheless I am not trying to be comprehensive – far from it. If you are looking for an analysis of the monumental works for clavier and organ or for individual solo instruments this is not the place to find it.e My focus is on the music I know best – the music that is linked to words. I hope to show that, because of their connection with words and texts, there are things said in the cantatas, motets, Passions and Masses that are unsurpassed in Bach’s output, things which up to this point no one had ever tried or dared to say, or been able to say, with sounds. I find that the practical familiarity this brings opens the door to fresh views on why and how particular works evolved as they did, on how they are sewn together and on what they seem to tell us about the man who composed them. For me the excitement of rehearsing and performing these works – in effect living inside them over a concentrated span – has lit a fire which has burnt with increasing heat ever since I first encountered them. It is this rich, sonorous world and the delight I take in it, both as a conductor and lifelong student of Bach, that I most want to convey.

  As a listener, critic or scholar you normally have a margin of time in which to measure and reflect on your response to Bach’s music. Analysis of musical structure has its uses, but it gets you only part of the way: it identifies the mechanical bits, and describes the component engineering, but it doesn’t tell you what it is that makes the motor purr and hum. As with many composers, but particularly in Bach’s case, it turns out to be much easier to trace the craftsman-like procedures he used to elaborate and transform musical material than to define or penetrate to the core of his initial inventive formulations. Whereas over the past century
musical analysis has brought us far in comprehending Bach’s craftsmanship, the techniques we habitually use to analyse music when it is joined to verbal expression are of little use. We need a different tool-kit.

  Performance, on the other hand, removes the last possibility of sitting on the fence: you are obliged to commit to a view and an interpretation of a work in order to present it with full belief and conviction. I try to convey what it feels like to be in the middle of it – connected to the motor and dance rhythms of the music, caught up in the sequential harmony and the intricate contrapuntal web of sounds, their spatial relations, the kaleidoscopic colour-changes of voices and instruments (singly and severally as well as in their collisions). This is perhaps the sort of task that astronauts would have faced in describing the moon if we hadn’t actually seen their images on our screens back on earth; or that confronts those who, having taken hallucinogenic drugs, emerge from a dream world with (what I imagine to be) weird sensations whirring around inside them, struggling to convey what it felt like to be in a parallel dimension under their influence.