Bach: Music in the Castle of Heaven

by Gardiner, John Eliot

  Perhaps, too, there were insights to be gained by replicating the rhythms of Bach’s own practice. We set about constructing a journey that he himself theoretically could have made (though of course in actual fact he travelled far less than, for example, Handel). It would need to begin in Thuringia and Saxony, where he spent his working life, and encompass those places and churches where we know that he sang, played and performed, and then fan out north, west and east, following the dissemination of the Reformation and retracing the old trade routes of the merchant adventurers and the Hanseatic League. Out of this choice came the idea to perform only in churches of exceptional architectural beauty, often in venues lying well off the beaten concert track, and to take the music to communities showing a particular enthusiasm for Bach’s music, with whom we could connect by inviting them to sing in the closing chorales of the cantatas. By visiting some of Europe’s most ancient places of worship – like the abbey of Iona off the west coast of Scotland, or Santiago de Compostela in northern Spain, or the once-pagan temple that became Santa Maria sopra Minerva in Rome – the journey could be construed as a musical pilgrimage.

  And so, eventually, the Bach Cantata Pilgrimage was born. Though originating in earlier concert tours with the Monteverdi Choir, and informed by the same mindset, the BCP was on a different scale from anything we – or perhaps any other musical organisation – had previously undertaken. In its scope and in the way it was realised it broke all conventional rules of concert-tour organisation. It was an epic endeavour, fraught with logistical problems and beset from the start by financial constraints, yet one that seemed to resonate within the imaginations of the participants more and more as the year wore on. None of us had ever undertaken a year-long journey or a musical enterprise confined to a single composer before. It was an entirely new experience to have all one’s thoughts and efforts directed towards its implementation and guided by its onward momentum. Following Bach’s seasonal and cyclical arrangement of cantatas for an entire year provided us with a graphic musical image of the revolving wheel of time to which we are all bound. Here, at last, was one way of solving the enigma of how this music brimming over with vigour and fantasy could have emerged from beneath the wig of that impassive-looking cantor, whose portrait had dominated my view of him as a man ever since I was a child.

  Since the completion of the BCP my approach to conducting Bach’s more celebrated choral works – his two Passions, the Christmas Oratorio and the B minor Mass – has been affected by that deep immersion in the cantatas. From the moment one sees these great works as belonging to the same world as the cantatas, as emanations from the same inventive mind, they no longer feel quite so intimidating, and begin to reveal more of their creator’s character. By working through my own reactions to them and development as a musician, my engagement with Bach has deepened – an attachment that has run in parallel with the independent research I have carried out in preparation for this book. Over the past twenty years I have been absorbing the riveting material that has become newly available since the opening out of archives in the former GDR, and using these rich findings to delve into the origins and the historical context for the coming into being of Bach’s music.

  One of the underlying premises of the BCP was a feeling I found I shared with several other musicians: that our need to study, listen to and grapple with Bach’s music is perhaps greater today than at any time in the past. Many of us also hoped that by emphasising this particular manifestation of our common cultural heritage, it would raise the spirits of those who came to hear us, no matter whether they were listening to it, or whether we were playing it, for the first, second or twenty-second time.

  Milan Kundera once described the intrinsic elusiveness of the present moment:

  There would seem to be nothing more obvious, more tangible and palpable than the present moment. And yet it eludes us completely. All the sadness of life lies in that fact. In the course of a single second, our senses of sight, of hearing, of smell, register (knowingly or not) a swarm of events and a parade of sensations and ideas passes through our head. Each instant represents a little universe, irrevocably forgotten in the next instant.3

  The miracle of music is that it allows us to step aside momentarily from Kundera’s temporal evanescence. A musical work such as a Bach cantata is manifestly a journey from a beginning, through a middle, and to an end, and yet at that end the light it casts in the memory on all that has gone before creates the feeling that we are constantly in a state of arrival – leading to a sense of being aware of, and thus valuing, our own consciousness, both now and in what went before. And, if we accept that one part of the human psyche searches for a spiritual outlet (and, indeed, a spiritual input), then however materialistic our society may have become, however agnostic the Zeitgeist, for those who have the ears to hear it, the confident and overwhelmingly affirmative music of Bach can go a long way towards meeting this need. For Bach is of the very front rank of composers since 1700 whose entire work was geared, one way or another, towards the spiritual and the metaphysical – celebrating life, but also befriending and exorcising death. He saw both the essence and practice of music as religious, and understood that the more perfectly a composition is realised, both conceptually and through performance, the more God is immanent in the music. ‘NB’, he wrote in the margin of his copy of Abraham Calov’s Bible commentary: ‘Where there is devotional music, God with his grace is always present.’4 (See Plate 13.) This strikes me as a tenet that many of us as musicians automatically hold and aspire to whenever we meet to play music, regardless of whatever ‘God’ we happen to believe in.

  So, at a time when the churches have long since lost their drawing power in the West, our choice to perform the cantatas of Bach in churches merely underscored the once-living context of this music. The course of the Bach Cantata Pilgrimage is a story for another place and another time; but we were to ask ourselves several times in the course of that year whether Bach’s original purpose (and perhaps also its effect), besides meeting an urgent need for inspiration and solace, was to jolt his first listeners out of their complacency and to spotlight meretricious aspects of their lives and conduct. Bach, the supreme artisan, disdained by some of Leipzig’s intelligentsia for his lack of university training, and conscious of his place in his family’s history, honed his skills to the point where his craftsmanship, his imaginative gift and his human empathy were in perfect balance. The rest was up to God.

  * * *

  a This is the slightly later and much better preserved of Elias Gottlob Haussmann’s two Bach portraits (1746 and 1748, see Plates 18 and 19) showing the bewigged composer holding a copy of his six-part canon BWV 1076 (see Chapter 14, p. 546). Since 1950 it has been in the William H. Scheide Library in Princeton, New Jersey.

  b These, along with many other scores and parts transcribed by Nadia Boulanger and left to me in her will, are now on permanent loan to the Royal Academy of Music in London.

  c At a time when a fashion for the virtues of ‘under-interpretation’ was beginning to take hold in England among certain early-music practitioners, Taruskin was also one of the first to question what he called the ‘naive assumption that re-creating all the external conditions that obtained in the original performance of a piece will thus re-create the composer’s inner experience of the piece and allow him to “speak for himself”, that is, unimpeded by that base intruder, the performer’s subjectivity’. He also identified a danger in an over-reverential attitude to the concept of Werktreue (‘truth to the work’), one that inflicts ‘a truly stifling regimen by radically hardening and patrolling what had formerly been a fluid, easily crossed boundary between the performing and composing roles’ (Richard Taruskin, Text and Act (1995), pp. 93, 10). More recently John Butt has given a brilliant disquisition on the two worlds of performance and scholarship in Playing with History: The Historical Approach to Musical Performance (2002).

  d The trigger may have been a chance reading in a record magazine of an announ
cement that I was due to record all 200 of them for Deutsche Grammophon. As at the time I was recording about one cantata CD per year, I calculated that with three cantatas per CD, at that rate I would need to reach the grand old age of 120 before the job was done.

  2

  Germany on the Brink of Enlightenment

  Without language we would have no reason, without reason no religion, and without these three essential aspects of our nature, neither mind nor bond of society.

  – Johann Georg Hamann1

  The ‘Germany’ in which Bach was born in 1685 was a peculiar political jigsaw – a multitude of independent duchies, principalities and imperial ‘free’ cities. If you were to turn the individual pieces over blank-side up you would probably have no difficulty in fitting them back together again, so random were the sizes of the separate Länder, so quirky their geographical shapes. The Holy Roman Empire, itself territorially and structurally subdivided, had shrunk during the past century to a mere shadow of its former self. In Auerbach’s Tavern in Leipzig the song went up:

  The Holy Roman Empire, we all love it so;

  But how it holds together, that we do not know.2

  The German jurist and political philosopher Samuel von Pufendorf observed wryly in 1667 that, being neither a ‘regular kingdom’ nor a republic, ‘we are therefore left with calling a [political] body “German” that conforms to no rule and resembles a monster.’3 Did Bach ever even think of himself, first and foremost, as a German, as opposed to a Thuringian or a Saxon? He was born in Eisenach, in the heart of the Thuringian Forest, the youngest son of the town piper, and his dialect was probably strong enough to make him seem a foreigner to his exact contemporary Georg Friederich Händel, born only forty miles away in a former corner of Saxony that had recently become part of Prussia. Neither of these future musical giants, therefore, was likely to have been concerned or terrorised by Pufendorf’s monster.

  At the time of their birth, the Electorate of Saxony was still the dominant force in northern Germany, thanks to its wealth and to its Elector’s position as the leader of the Protestant body, the Corpus Evangelicorum.a But when Friedrich Wilhelm (1620–88) acceded as Elector of Brandenburg and Duke of Prussia in 1640, dynastic power began to shift inexorably from the imperial Habsburgs in Austria and Bohemia to the Hohenzollerns further north – and was solidified the moment his son Friedrich III overruled the advice of his closest counsellors and crowned himself King Frederick I of Prussia in 1701. Meanwhile, despite its obvious absurdities and disparate nature, the Empire survived, thanks to the skill with which the Habsburgs managed to blur the division between state and civil society, drawing the several layers of the German-speaking world into the political process.

  Immediately bound to the Emperor were the ‘Imperial Knights’ – the heads of around 350 noble landowning families who exercised administrative responsibility for about 1,500 estates covering almost 5,000 square miles. More powerful still – and considerably less biddable – were the landed and urban elites right across the Empire who had won a say for themselves through representation in the legislative body, the Reichstag. Pufendorf commented ‘the Estates of Germany … have a considerable share of the sovereignty over their subjects … a main obstacle to the Emperor making himself absolute.’ A double layer of institutions thus restricted the Emperor’s untrammelled sovereignty – the Reichstag itself, which from 1663 on was in permanent session in Regensburg, and the 300 or so Reichsstände, those constituent principalities with a direct or indirect vote in the Reichstag. Their most powerful constitutional weapon was the electoral pact known as the Wahlkapitulation, which a Prince-Elector swore to abide by prior to his coronation and was obliged to sign as a condition of his election.

  Forming a second layer of authority within each Reichsstand were the Landstände,b each with its own local legislative body known as the Landschaft, noted for its elaborate protocols. Pufendorf concluded, ‘Though it is certain that Germany within itself is so potent, that it might be formidable to all its neighbours if its strength was well united and rightly employed; nevertheless this strong body also has its infirmities which weaken its strength and slacken its vigour, its irregular constitution of government being one of the chief causes of its distemper.’ One of its ‘infirmities’ was caused by the fact that most of the Landschaft proceedings between the several factions and lobbies were conducted in writing – an administrative hindrance. In electoral Saxony, it was precisely this ‘irregular constitution’ – and the continual tension between those loyal to the Elector (the ruling or Absolutist Party) on one side, and those nobles and urban middle-class burghers who had formed an uneasy alliance to curb his power (the Estates Party) on the other – that was a constant factor all through Bach’s working life in Leipzig.

  Imperial power was weakened still further by the fifty or so ‘free’ cities, or Reichstädte, the richest of them (which included Hamburg and Frankfurt am Main) forming self-governing enclaves brooking no outside interference and with total control over their own trade. In his early twenties Bach was to work as a municipal musician in one of these ‘free’ cities (Mühlhausen) and to visit several others. Parallel to this, a complex imperial system of legal regulations had accreted over the centuries, throttling, if not altogether paralysing, the channels of trade and physical communication (barges on the Rhine, for instance, were required to pay frontier tolls on average every six miles). From the administration and interaction of these principalities, the German bureaucratic mentality was born, and with it the defining protocols and stultifying niceties of rank that were a constant in Bach’s life and a bone of contention in his disputes with employers.c

  Suppose we were able to travel back in time to this curious patchwork that constituted Germany at the time Bach was born. What would be the things to strike us most forcefully: evidence of vigorous urban renewal, signs of a predominantly rural society beginning to mend, or the still-visible scars of war? The Thirty Years War had been the longest, bloodiest and most destructive to be fought on German soil and retained that reputation until the late twentieth century. The Silesian poet Andreas Gryphius (1616–64) witnessed it all at first hand and wrote of the pointlessness of human existence. One of his sonnets, ‘Menschliches Elende’ (‘Human Misery’), from his Kirchhofs-Gedanken (Cemetery Thoughts) of 1656, begins:

  What then is man? A house of grim pain,

  A ball of false hopes, a madness of this time,

  A theatre of bitter fear filled with keen sorrow,

  A soon melting snow, a burnt-out candle.d

  Now, almost forty years since the Peace of Westphalia (1648) had brought it to a close, the war’s horrors were still present in everyone’s memory.

  The nearest we have to a contemporary war diary, full of atrocity and lurid details, are two novels by Hans Jakob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen – Der abenteuerliche Simplicissimus (1669) and Trutz Simplex (1670), the latter a ‘detailed and miraculous account of the life of the arch-swindler and renegade Courage’. Based on his first-hand experiences as a stable boy in the Imperial Army and later as a regimental clerk, they provide a catalogue of wanton murder, rape and cannibalism. But, even allowing for the degree of fictitious reportage that stoked the persistent pathos-laden portrayal of the war by nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century German historians, the general impression is still a bleak one: with countless villages and hamlets flattened by the invading armies, Germany’s medieval towns pillaged and burnt beyond recognition, whole regions depopulated by military action, families decimated and the survivors’ lives turned upside down. Inevitably the countryside suffered more than most towns, because that was where the battles were fought, Thuringia being one of the worst affected areas. Wherever Wallenstein or the invading Danes and Swedes trod – particularly along the older trade routes that linked the main commercial towns – the process of economic recovery was painfully slow.

  Wave after wave of plague followed in the wake of war: weakened by hunger, victims’ bodies pro
vided easy prey for the pathogens spread by the armies. Plague was responsible for a higher death toll than the conflict itself. Roughly one third of Saxony’s population, and half of Thuringia’s, had been wiped out. But we should be wary: these demographic losses – whether due to slaughter, malnutrition or disease – may have been exaggerated in the surviving sources.4 Local officials had an interest in massaging the figures upwards, hoping thereby to qualify for tax relief or an increased share of government restoration funds. Take the case of a major commercial centre like Leipzig. During the war years it had suffered three epidemics – in 1626, 1636 and 1643 – and still continued with its biennial trade fairs. Yet, more than thirty years after the ending of the war and well on the way towards recovery, the city was sent reeling again by a fresh outbreak in 1680, which, according to the diary kept by Rektor Jakob Thomasius, took away 2,200 souls in five months – far more than the sum of all the previous epidemics and more than 10 per cent of the entire citizenry.e

  From our twenty-first-century perspective it is easy to exaggerate and over-dramatise the effects of the Thirty Years War on Germany as a whole – if only because the impact of this prolonged conflict was so varied and localised. In the past, German historians were inclined to blame the war for the economic malaise, whereas it can now been seen to be part of a longer trend of overall decline and shifting patterns of commerce which had begun years before. The lucrative trade with Italy, once plied by great entrepreneurs such as the Fuggers of Augsburg, was now reduced to a trickle.f Europe’s demographic centre of gravity was moving northwards, and in parallel motion its commercial future was heading to the Hanseatic ports along the Atlantic seaboard. Trade and manufacture were generally slower to rally than the population, with recovery more rapid in the towns, more gradual in the countryside. It needs little imagination to envisage the vast amounts of grain and beef required to feed successive marauding armies living like locusts off the land. The rural community survived gnawing hunger, living, like Grimmelshausen’s ‘strange vagabond’, on buckwheat, beechnuts, acorns, frogs, snails and whatever vegetables could be salvaged.5 Now things were getting back to normal; but it would be another ninety years before the enlightened despot Frederick the Great recognised that ‘agriculture comes first among human activities. Without it there would be no merchants, no courtiers, no kings, no poets and no philosophers. The only true form of wealth is that produced by the soil.’6g