Bach: Music in the Castle of Heaven
Page 7
More remarkable still was the way these composers somehow managed to skirt around the ideological tensions that had built up between the two competing strands of Lutheranism – Orthodoxy and Pietism, the latter emerging strongly as a movement of renewed spirituality within the Lutheran Church in the wake of the Thirty Years War. Their music displayed enough rhetorical vigour to win the approval of the Orthodox clergy, while their setting of devotional texts managed to find favour with some Pietists. At a superficial level the Pietists could be seen as ‘anti-musical’ in so far as they disapproved of concerted music in church as a matter of principle – of anything except for the plainest of congregational hymn-singing and a rather bland, sentimental type of ‘spiritual song’, and, even then, they debated hotly whether to restrict hymns to singers who shared the emotional tenor of the text, or even to abolish the use of Christian songs in open assemblies.o Gottfried Vockerodt, headmaster of a school in Gotha, encapsulated their position. Claiming that the first Christians knew only music that honoured God, he insisted that it should inspire devotion and be performed from the heart, not for worldly pleasure or ostentation. Pointing to the example of several dissipated Roman emperors (Nero, Claudius and Caligula), he warned that ‘the misuse of music … is a most dangerous reef, along which many a young soul, as if called by Sirens … falls into dissoluteness and ungodliness.’18 This was part of a pamphlet war between him and Johann Beer, a prolific novelist who was also concertmaster and librarian at the Weissenfels Court. Poking fun in his Ursus murmurat (The Bear Growls) and Ursus vulpinatur (The Bear Turned Fox) at Vockerodt’s arguments, Beer insisted on the validity of music-making as a purely secular activity and as a suitable recreation for princes, arguing that musicians should be judged not on their behaviour or religious beliefs but purely on their musical achievements.19
Whenever their influence was in the ascendant, the Pietist clergy generally saw off any newfangled experiments that gave a prominent role to instruments in embellishing liturgical music. In their eyes this distracted the congregation from becoming more deeply involved and from focusing on God’s Word. They were intensely loyal to the emotional core of Lutheranism, which, after all, issued from the psychological crisis of one profoundly neurotic monk who found peace in the surrender of his problem to Christ (the ‘lion of Judah’ who ‘ends his victorious fight’ over all the enemies of full humanity), enabling him to recover his own humanity. This psychological and emotional core to Lutheranism was what distinguished it from Calvinism, which from its inception was systematic and intellectual (its founder being a lawyer), and the Pietists stayed with the old lambent naivety of the Luther of his conversion, convinced as they were that Orthodoxy had lost touch with the needs of ordinary Lutherans. One might expect them to have favoured English Puritan literature, yet ironically their emphasis on meditative forms of worship made them the natural allies of the very sort of Latin mystical poetry that was being revived by their arch-enemies, the Jesuits, in the Counter-Reformation countries of the south – authors such as St Bernard of Clairvaux and Thomas à Kempis, as well as the erotically saturated Song of Songs from the Old Testament. By this route composers such as Buxtehude or Bruhns managed to legitimise their powerfully expressive settings of sacred texts – introduced by the back door, as it were.
It took considerable ingenuity to placate the emphatic Pietist commitment to sober spiritual edification, all the while composing to an Orthodox agenda – one that saw concerted music as an indispensable part of worship, vigorously defending Article V of the Augsburg Confession (1530), which stated that faith comes through the preaching of the Gospel and the administration of the sacraments, and not through some independent inspiration of the Holy Spirit.20p A musical cauldron had been heated in the most unpromising and frigid of climates. It would be misleading to present the musical achievements of these composers as merely the necessary prelude to those of Bach – as part of a teleological ‘advance’ – but they certainly form the backcloth to his arrival on the musical stage of northern Germany.
Meanwhile this new lease of religious life in Germany clashed so noisily with the simultaneous birth and rapid progress of modern science, one suspects that they were permanently at cross-purposes – a little like Galileo and his adversaries. In his Dialogues on the Two Chief Systems of the World, Galileo insists on how things happen, while his opponent Simplicius counters with a ready-made theory as to why things occur. Galileo’s supreme achievement was, of course, to elaborate and build on Copernicus’s discovery that the sun was the centre of the universe and the earth and planets rotated around it. From the moment when the seven cardinals who made up the Inquisition tribunal examining Galileo in 1633 stated unequivocally that ‘the proposition that the sun is the centre of the world and immovable from its place is absurd, philosophically false, and formally heretical because it is expressly contrary to Holy Scriptures’, the Catholic Church confirmed itself as a reactionary bastion against scientific investigation. Protestants, too, railed against Copernicus, leading Erasmus to comment that the sciences fell into ruin wherever Lutheranism prevailed. But this is not entirely fair, seeing that the Protestant world, despite its divisions, allowed natural philosophy a degree of room to manoeuvre denied to it by the Catholic Church. A generation after Galileo, Isaac Newton could still firmly believe as an Anglican that his discoveries ‘pointed to the operations of God’, while both Gottfried Leibniz (1646–1716) and his pupil Christian Wolff (1679–1754) gave a valuable boost to Orthodox Lutheranism by seeking to convince Germany’s princes and intellectuals that the mechanistic laws of the new science were compatible with the ‘moral necessity’ of a God who consciously and eternally chooses the maximum degree of perfection.
Among the most teasing questions that arise the moment one tries to establish a cultural and intellectual context for Bach’s appearance on the musical scene of Europe is the extent to which he, or any of his peers, was aware of the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century.q Yet, in Bach’s case, a capacity for dealing with abstractions and for eliciting from them clear-cut demonstrative trains of reasoning was to provide the springboard for his imaginative thought as a composer.r Isaac Newton was born the year after Galileo died (1642), exactly one hundred years after Copernicus had published his De revolutionibus. From these foundations a coherent scheme of scientific thought emerged, one formulated by mathematicians for use by mathematicians, with Isaac Newton as its spearhead. In his Philosophiae naturalis principia mathematica (1687) Newton showed how his principle of universal gravitation accounted for the motions of heavenly bodies and of falling bodies on earth: every piece of matter attracts every other piece with a force proportional to the product of their masses and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them. He prepared the way for a mechanisation of heaven and earth, for, although God might still have His place in a post-Newtonian universe, it was only as the original creator of the mechanism that then operated to a simple natural law requiring no continuous application of force. Initially Newton’s ideas were accepted only by an intellectual elite, and it took at least a generation before they acquired sufficient currency for Alexander Pope to be able to write the following epitaph intended for Newton’s tombstone in Westminster Abbey:
Nature and Nature’s laws lay hid in night;
God said, Let Newton be! and all was light.
In such a mechanistic view of the universe there was no legitimate place for superstition; yet belief in witchcraft and magic [manifestly] persisted in Europe all through the Middle Ages, beyond the Reformation and throughout the seventeenth century. There is a certain irony here in that Newton and his contemporary Robert Boyle, besides their empirical scientific work, which undermined the very foundations of witchcraft and all other forms of magic, were also themselves alchemists. Newton wrote two million words on theology and alchemy, and took a keen interest in astrology. Boyle challenged traditional chemistry in Sceptical Chymist; or, Chymico-Physical Doubts and Paradoxes in 1661
but also practised alchemy and could never abandon his belief in miracles. Despite the dissemination of empirical knowledge, witches were still being accused, tortured and executed in parts of Germany well into the eighteenth century. In and around Leipzig there were ten documented trials for witchcraft between 1650 and 1750.21 Bach himself could have witnessed the cases brought in 1730 against two women by a Leipzig physician on charges of quackery and the practice of magic. This shows how superstition and ‘enlightenment’ continued to coexist even in a university town, and how slowly a heliocentric and mechanistic view of the universe impinged on ordinary citizens, on Saxon society as a whole and, as we are about to see, on the teaching in schools.
If it were possible to peer into the classrooms of a typical Latin School in Thuringia at the turn of the seventeenth to eighteenth century and to eavesdrop on the way lessons were taught, what would we notice? Our eye might first be drawn to ten pictures pinned to the walls – of fantastical animals including a dragon, a griffin and a Cerberus, each creature standing allegorically for a different millennium or century and arranged alphabetically. This was not school artwork, but part of an ingenious method recently developed by the Lüneburg theologian and pedagogue Johannes Buno (1617–97) to jog pupils’ memory through a simultaneous interconnection between animals, letters, numbers, and specific historical figures or epochs. (See Plate 3b.) Then we could not fail to be struck by the sheer amount of music in class. In his famous poem entitled ‘Frau Musica’, Luther had personified music and singing as a lady who ‘gives God more joy and mirth / than all the pleasures of the earth’.22 More valuable even than ‘the precious nightingale’, Music was created by God to be His true songstress and mistress, one who tirelessly offers Him thanks:
For she sings and dances day and night
Never tiring [of singing] His praise.
Singing became the main element in musical tuition within the Lutheran school system of the day. Morning school began at 6 a.m. in summer and at 7 a.m. in midwinter, and started with the collective chanting of the Katechismuslied, its six basic tenets apportioned to each of the six weekdays, set to music by sixteenth-century composers such as Vulpius, Calvisius, Gesius and, later, by J. H. Schein, who was cantor of the Thomaskirche in Leipzig. Group singing practice was scheduled to take place five times a week in the first hour after the midday meal (presumably on the advice of German physicians, who believed that singing aided digestion).23 The local cantor was seen primarily as a schoolteacher.s ‘What is music?’ he might challenge the assembled pupils. ‘A science of singing’ was the answer they were expected to chorus in reply.24
Five-part circular canon by Johann Hermann Schein (1586–1630) of the kind used to train schoolchildren to sing polyphony. (illustration credit 26)
As Luther said, ‘A schoolmaster must be able to sing; otherwise I won’t acknowledge him.’25 Besides the cantor, other members of a Latin School staff were often expected to be proficient in music. In an updated version of the medieval trivium, music in Lutheran schools was considered an adjunct to the study of grammar, logic and rhetoric, while singing was valued as a proven way of helping pupils to commit things to memory.26 They were taught the practical rudiments of music – rules for clefs, rests and intervals, sight-reading and part-singing – mostly by singing in canon. The beauty of canon-singing lay in its simplicity of means. All it took was just a single line of music, either distributed to the class or sung by the teacher. The first voice or group began, then, at a given point, the second entered with the same melody, and so on – enough to reveal independence of voice lines and, through their combination, the ability to create polyphony. A fully fledged piece of harmony, formed by the layering and spacing out of melodic entries, emerged miraculously – neatly illustrating the way music could be regarded, as one seventeenth-century theorist proposed, as ‘a Godly act … its song and sound … a heart-bell, which penetrates every little vein of the heart and its Affects (be a man a very Stoic or an immovable trunk)’.27 It was also a vivid aural replica of the Pythagorean harmony of the spheres and of man’s place within the universe.
Theology, too, seemed to permeate every lesson and every subject. Luther’s close collaborator Philipp Melanchthon had defined the basic curriculum back in 1522, warning, ‘If theology is not the beginning, the middle and the end of life, we cease being men – we return to the animal state.’28 Everything therefore had to be directed towards ‘the practice of God-fearing’ (die Übung der Gottesfurcht) and memorising the official articles of the Lutheran Church, the so-called Formula of Concord. These had to be recited again and again until they were perfectly remembered. Luther continually emphasised the need for the physical and the spiritual to be joined together. In his Table Talk (of which Bach later had at least one copy) he said, ‘Music is a conspicuous gift of God and next [in importance] to theology. I would not want to give up my slight knowledge of music for a great consideration. And youth should be taught this art; for it makes fine, skilful people.’ So, instead of abolishing Latin Schools like the one he himself had attended in Eisenach between the ages of fourteen and eighteen, he and Melanchthon went on to reconstitute them, placing music at the very centre of the curriculum. Luther reasoned that if children were taught the new music in school – his music (and that of his colleague Johann Waltert), set to his words – they would be able to lead the congregations in the new hymnody and sing polyphonic settings of these melodies in alternation with the congregational unison. How widely successful he was in this is hard to establish.
Six-part retrograde cruciform canon by Adam Gumpelzhaimer (1559–1625), from the Compendium musicae latino-germanicum (1625). (illustration credit 27)
Sixteen hour-long lessons were assigned each week to the study of around 200 closely printed pages of Hutter’s Compendium locorum theologicorum (1610), said to encapsulate the essence of Lutheran theology. Thirty-four articles defining key doctrinal points were presented in a question-and-answer format that needed to be studied and recited by rote. The articles were calibrated in order of difficulty – beginning with the Scriptures as the source of truth, through Christ and the Trinity, Providence, Original Sin, predestination, freewill, justification, good works, the nature of the sacraments, and finally the conceptions of the Last Judgement and eternal life. Once again music was used to help memorise these crucial tenets of theology and so-called facts of the world: if you sang them and repeated them enough, they were sure to stick in the memory. It is also striking how closely their arrangement mirrored the construction of the Lutheran liturgical year. (See Chapter 9 and Plate 14.) Bach’s fluent way of connecting to them, and the underlying seasonal rhythms in his cantatas, may well have been implanted from the moment, aged ten, that he began to learn Hutter’s Compendium by heart in the Klosterschule at Ohrdruf.
With music and theology together accounting for almost half the curriculum and taught by the same master, we would not be surprised to find the three ‘R’s relegated to third place, with physics, Latin, Greek and history limping behind and making up the rest. Laid out according to the precepts of Andreas Reyher, rector of the Gymnasium in nearby Gotha, this became Bach’s syllabus in Ohrdruf. According to Reyher, only eight textbooks were ever needed,u while his recommended texts for reading exercises were the fourth book of Moses and Chapter 11 of St Matthew’s Gospel. From these Reyher claimed, ‘a boy can learn all his letters’. Selective Classical authors were taught alongside the basic skills of reading and writing, logic and rhetoric, all presented from the same theological perspective, reflecting what has been called Luther’s ‘passionately anti-rational position’29 Even numeracy was taught in connection with the Bible, by means of Caspar Heunisch’s Hauptschlüssel über die hohe Offenbarung S. Johannis (The Main Key to the Revelation of St John, of which Bach later owned a copy). In practice it does not seem as though the instruction of arithmetic had progressed much beyond the basic ability to count, add, subtract and calculate simple fractions during the previous two hundred years. In so
far as the natural sciences in their most primitive form featured at all within this syllabus, they were taught from a selective Lutheran perspective adhering to a post-Aristotelian model. Writers such as Pythagoras, Euclid, Galen, Ptolemy and Boethius were still considered to speak authoritatively on cosmology, physics and mathematics, even though their once-stable foundations of scientific knowledge had recently been demolished.