Bach: Music in the Castle of Heaven

by Gardiner, John Eliot

  Even history was taught from the same partial and parochial Lutheran point of view. Here the recommended textbook was the Historia universalis (1672) of the same Johannes Buno whose illustrated sequence of mythological creatures we noticed on the classroom walls earlier.30 Buno took extraordinary liberties in selecting just those bits of the Classical past that could most easily be made to fit into his providential view of history, and ignoring all the rest. Conveniently for him, James Ussher (Anglican Archbishop of Armagh and Primate of All Ireland between 1625 and 1656) had recently established beyond doubt, through a complicated correlation of Middle Eastern histories and Holy Writ, that the Creation occurred on the evening preceding Sunday, 23 October 4004 BC.31 Adam lived till he was 930 years old. ‘Nothing happened’, Buno states categorically, in either the sixth or the tenth century. And Historia nihil repraesentat quod Christianus (‘History is nothing but the demonstration of Christian truth’). So, naturally enough, Church history predominates: the saints – Augustine, Basil, Gregory and Ambrose – are praised for their ‘glorious writings’, while the sinners – the Manichaeans, the Montanists, the Pelagians and the Arians – are pilloried for their ‘errors’ as heretics, along with the prophet Muhammad and a succession of errant popes. The figure of Louis XIV just manages an appearance before Buno winds up his quick trot through history in 1672.

  It is easy to ridicule Buno’s approach, vivid and attractive as it was in creating a pictorial narrative in pupil’s minds, and weaving together sacred and secular history in a single quilt.v His naivety was of the sort that Descartes no doubt had in mind when he concluded that the study of history, like travel, while harmless enough as a form of entertainment – one composed of ‘memorable events’ which might conceivably ‘elevate the mind’ or ‘help to form the judgement’ – was hardly an occupation for anyone seriously concerned with increasing knowledge.32 In Buno’s hotchpotch of fables, travellers’ tales and facts, cherry-picked and adjusted to the credulity of his readers, Descartes would have found no trace of a coherent methodology. Faced with this sort of genial tosh, intended of course to underpin the basic institutions of society in general and of the Lutheran Church in particular, there were no clear-cut rules or premises from which valid conclusions could be deduced, no material amenable to reasonable standards of proof.

  In addition to Buno, the little ancient history that was taught in the Latin Schools of the day came in the shape of Flavius Josephus (AD c. 37–95), whose writings on Hebrew history and theology were seized upon by the Protestant clergy as supporting evidence to account for the fall of the Temple of Jerusalem as predicted by Jesus. A short list of Classical authors, chosen not for their quality as literature but for their mastery of Latin grammar and syntax, was headed by Cicero – his letters De officiis and De inventione and his anti-Catiline orations – texts perfectly judged to sharpen the dialectic wits of future defenders of the faith. The list also included works by Horace, Terence and Virgil, as well as Curtius Rufus’ gripping life of Alexander the Great – complete with mouth-watering tales of heroic bravery, exotic oriental customs and romantic attachments. The New Testament, not surprisingly, was used as the chief textbook for the learning of Greek.

  Despite such occasional yarns and the various musical diversions, overall one senses an unremitting joylessness emanating from this syllabus. In the classrooms of the more unimaginative and pedantic schoolmasters, it may have amounted to little more than drudgery. Elsewhere, in schools where teachers had come under the influence of the Moravian reformer Jan Amos Comenius (1592–1670), shafts of sunlight were theoretically able to penetrate. The Klosterschule in Ohrdruf (previously a monastic school) to which Bach moved from Eisenach after his parents’ death and attended for four and a half years, is alleged to have been just such a place, famous in the district for having adopted Comenius’s curricular reforms. His method stressed the importance of cultivating a favourable environment for learning, of encouraging pleasure as well as moral instruction through study, and of helping pupils to learn progressively from concrete examples, stage by stage – from a knowledge of things (including songs and pictures) rather than through words alone. This was a contemporary restatement of St Augustine’s contention that ‘to enjoy is to cleave fast in the love of a thing for its own sake’. Beyond that, Comenius advocated teaching in the vernacular, his Latin primer, for instance, providing simultaneous training in German and Latin, with the texts arranged in parallel columns.33 So, instead of splitting up the disciplines, he deliberately searched for points of contact between them and tried to bring all branches of knowledge into one consistent scheme of sapientia universalis.

  Like so many laudable endeavours by successive educationalists over the centuries, there was a chasm here between aspiration and reality. Even with a partial application of Comenius’s reforms, there is every reason to doubt whether conditions within the Eisenach and Ohrdruf classrooms were as conducive to acquiring sapientia universalis, let alone ‘enlightenment’, as many of Bach’s biographers would have us believe. It all depends on what sources you read.w Christoph Wolff, for instance, claims that such was the ‘excellent leadership and high reputation’ of Eisenach’s Latin School that it ‘attracted students from a wide region’,34 and Martin Petzoldt resolutely insists on the ‘essential stability and quality of the school’ in Bach’s time there, ‘guaranteed’ by the amicable triumvirate of Rektor (i.e., headmaster), Ephorus (i.e., school inspector) and Kantor.35 However, research begun in the 1930s in the town archives by Hermann Helmbold, and in the 1990s by Rainer Kaiser, paints a very different picture, suggesting that the Eisenach boys of the time were typical ruffians: rowdy, subversive, thuggish, beer- and wine-loving, girl-chasing, known for breaking windows and brandishing their daggers to impress.36 The problem was not new. Back in 1678 Georg von Kirchberg reported an overall ‘slackness and contempt for good discipline’ to the Eisenach Consistory.37 More disquieting were rumours of a ‘brutalisation of the boys’ linked to evidence that many parents kept their children at home – not because they were sick but for fear of what went on in or outside school. This forced the consistory to issue a rule making it compulsory for all children over the age of five to attend any one of the eight German (primary) schools before moving on to the Latin School. Offending parents henceforth faced a stiff fine or even imprisonment. Bach’s frequent absences from the Latin School in Eisenach – 96 days absent in his first year, 59 in his second and 103 in his third – are traditionally attributed to his mother’s illness, to his unofficial apprenticeship to his father, requiring him to help with a plethora of activities – from restringing fiddles and polishing brass instruments to watching and helping his father copy out his cousin’s compositions – and to his attending the frequent family musical assemblies which must have seemed almost like a convocation of guild members. This is not altogether convincing, and there could be alternative, more disquieting explanations.

  By 1688 – three years after Bach’s birth – prevalent conditions in the Latin School had reached a nadir, the consistory claiming that the school had fallen ‘into an altogether great decline’.38 Another five years passed before they got round to appointing the deputy head, Christian Zeidler, as a substitute for the ailing headmaster, Heinrich Borstelmann, and to drawing up a memorandum with his recommendations for improving this situation. This was the very year in which Bach enrolled in the quinta. One of Zeidler’s main concerns seems to have been the turmoil prevailing in the separate classrooms, caused, first, by an overall shortage of books; by the simultaneous use of different grammars and lexicons as textbooks; and, finally, by serious overcrowding. This became so acute that by Bach’s second year there were 339 boys enrolled in the school (without, apparently, any form of playground in which to let off steam). In church the boys were crammed together up in the choir loft or sat on correctional benches (Schwitzbäncken). They contributed so much to the general hubbub that parishioners complained they were distracted from attending to the sermon. Zeid
ler came up with a number of practical but fairly unimaginative remedies, including a system whereby each teacher took direct responsibility for his class both in school and at church. Pupils were encouraged to sing along in the chorales from their hymnals. The younger children in the quinta were allowed to leave after the set Gospel and Epistle readings. He advocated the enlargement of the choir loft – though this had to be deferred for several years. Looking for a ‘suitable recreation’ to keep the boys occupied, in 1693, against the rector’s advice, he even wrote the text for a school nativity play intended as an edifying piece of music-theatre (‘eine erbauliche Comoedia’).39 Regrettably the music for this play – perhaps by Cantor Dedekind or the organist Johann Christoph Bach – has not survived, and we will never know whether young Sebastian Bach was inside church taking part, or outside with his mates creating mayhem.

  Of one thing we can be quite certain: there is no hint of a spirit of empirical scientific inquiry in Bach’s curriculum and no notion of what Copernicus, Kepler and Galileo had propounded or achieved. Where Lutheran teachers may have been prepared to give up the flat-earth implications of the Scriptures and to adopt the spherical system of Ptolemy in its place, it is doubtful whether many were yet aware of Kepler’s study of the orbits of the planets (1609), which in turn had led to Newton’s law of gravity (1687), or ready to abandon the idea of a rigid, rotating firmament. Newton formalised Galileo’s discoveries in his first law of motion: ‘every body continues in its state of rest or of uniform motion in a straight line except in so far as it may be compelled by force to change that state.’ This contained the repudiation of a belief that had blocked the progress of physics for the past 2,000 years and continued to do so in the Latin School system throughout Bach’s school years.

  Clearly, the philosophical debates of the late seventeenth century, which turned on the question of whether the universe consisted of observable phenomena governed by eternal mathematical principles, were utterly remote from the teaching methods current in the schools Bach attended. The extremes of abstract thought and what Jonathan Israel has called that ‘vast turbulence in every sphere of knowledge and belief which shook European civilisation to its foundations’ seem to have left large parts of Germany in a state of comatose indifference.x It is hard to find any evidence to support the case that a ‘Crisis of the European Conscience’ (the title of a book by the French historian of ideas Paul Hazard, written in 1935) made any sort of impact on what was taught in the German classrooms of the 1690s, or indeed what was taught for the next fifty or sixty years. In the upper echelons of German academic life the expulsion of the Professor of Philosophy, Christian Wolff, from the University of Halle in November 1723 – accused by his colleague Joachim Lange of teaching a doctrine of the ‘absolute necessity of things’, akin to Spinozism, and later by Johann Franz Buddeus of trying as a mathematician ‘to explain everything in a mechanistic way’ – marked a watershed of a significant kind, because ‘virtually the whole of German academe now slid into bitter wrangling and acrimony’.40 But even then, in the 1720s and 1730s, the chances were that unless you had been to university, you would have been blissfully untouched by Galileo, Newton or Leibniz, and completely unaware of the attack on Cartesian reductionism by the brilliant Neapolitan professor of rhetoric Giambattista Vico (1668–1744), whose fame began to spread only during the Counter-Enlightenment of the 1820s.

  By and large the fizz and turmoil of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century philosophical discourse were situated somewhere high in the intellectual stratosphere, far too remote to make an impact on the lives and attitudes of ordinary German citizens. This is not to claim that Bach, as a provincial Thuringian, could not have developed a powerful, far-seeing intellect; on the contrary, as many have claimed, his music points to a degree of sophistication of thought not dissimilar to that of any of the leading mathematicians or philosophers of the day. The point here is that the quasi-scientific thoroughness with which he later constructed his music cannot have been imbued in him as a schoolboy by anything approaching a Rationalist or an Enlightened education. Nevertheless herein may lie something that could conceivably help to explain the exceptionally advanced perception of proportion that he later manifested in his compositions: the very fact that numeracy was not taught as a separate discipline in Bach’s school years may have freed him to make the sort of spontaneous interconnections which so easily disappear from a child’s instinctive feel for numbers once it is taught in isolation. Vico recognised this when he wrote: ‘This faculty is mother wit, the creative power through which man is capable of recognising likenesses and making them himself. We see it in children, in whom nature is more integral and less corrupted by convictions and prejudices, that the first faculty to emerge is that of seeing similarities.’41 God, Bach may have thought, worked with and through numbers, and he may have concluded, quite instinctively, that music followed the natural manifestations of mathematical law – a perfect example of His creative power. It was one of the great avatars of the Enlightenment, Gottfried Leibniz, who famously said, ‘Music is the hidden arithmetical exercise of a mind unconscious that it is calculating.’42y

  The purpose here has not been to mock the ignorance of German society, nor the backwardness of the Latin School system, so much as to emphasise that Christianity – in its revisionist Lutheran Orthodox form – still occupied centre-stage in the school curriculum and, as a result, informed and influenced the patterns of thought of the overwhelming majority of German citizens. As Tim Blanning has argued, the eighteenth century has as much claim to be called the Age of Religion as the Age of Reason. All the churches – Catholic, Calvinist and Lutheran (both Orthodox and Pietist) – were flourishing, with public and private discourse both dominated by religion (substantially more so in the first half of the century than in the second). And it was in this respect that music had a vital role to play, though often in an atmosphere of mistrust, discord and only partial effectiveness. It would take more than a musician of genius to buck that trend.

  * * *

  a Formally organised in 1653 to provide the civil administration and security of German Protestants, its presidency stayed permanently attached to Saxony even after August the Strong converted to Catholicism in order to win election as King of Poland in 1697. With the advantage of hindsight we can see August’s decision as a terrible mistake, but to many contemporaries the addition of Poland’s quantity to Saxony’s quality seemed to confirm the latter’s status as the chief rival to the Habsburgs.

  b For example, the Electorate of Bavaria was a Reichsstand, but within its boundaries there were Landstände, representing the church and the nobility. The mix varied from one Reichsstand to another: in some the church was not represented, in others the nobles were not.

  c Coincidentally, in the year of Bach’s birth, Louis XIV revoked the Edict of Nantes (1598) and with it the limited degree of toleration accorded to French Protestants. Suddenly there was a flood of Huguenot refugees spreading north to Holland and England but also east across the Rhine. In welcoming around 14,000 of them to settle in his territories, the Elector Frederick William of Brandenburg set a trend for further waves of immigration by refugees of conscience – from Bohemia and Austria as well as from France – a Peuplierungspolitik which was soon to have an impact both in repopulating rural areas decimated by plague and in augmenting the skilled labour force of the towns, so providing Prussia and the other Länder which followed its lead with a significant economic edge over the old Empire.

  d Was sind wir Menschen doch? Ein Wohnhaus grimmer Schmerzen,

  Ein Ball des falschen Glücks, ein Irrlicht dieser Zeit,

  Ein Schauplatz herber Angst, besetzt mit scharfem Leid,

  Ein bald verschmelzter Schnee und abgebrannte Kerzen.

  e Yet, for a short time, when famine and sickness blighted the Saxon countryside during the 1630s, it seems the population of Leipzig actually increased by as much as a third (see Geoffrey Parker (ed.), The Thirty Years’ War (second editio
n, 1997), p. 189).

  f Recent climatic changes had made the Alpine passes more arduous; yet German travellers were still drawn to Italy like moths to a light – not so much to trade as to admire Italian art of the past and music very much of the present.

  g Farmers have always known this, as well as being the first to acknowledge – and to complain – that the growing of crops is a hazardous enterprise bedevilled by the usual vagaries of weather and common rights of grazing. For everyone else its centrality to existence was taken completely for granted – that is ignored, in 1685 and for ever after.

  h Arriving there from Wessex in southern England in the eighth century, St Boniface came across a Thuringian tribe worshipping a Norse deity in the form of a huge oak tree. Legend has it that he removed his shirt, grabbed hold of an axe, and without a word hacked down the six-foot-wide wooden god. Thereupon Boniface stood on the trunk and challenged the tribal chieftains: ‘Now, how stands your mighty god? My God is stronger than he!’ The crowd’s reaction was mixed, but the first conversions had begun. It was slow progress and it took until the twelfth century for the Cistercians to cement the process. The monks also knew intuitively that soils in which timber trees flourished so impressively were also well suited to the growing of domestic crops, so beginning a process of self-sufficiency which eventually led to the characteristic mosaic of arable fields and woodland in Thuringia we recognise today.

  i According to Peter H. Wilson, ‘The war nonetheless left people traumatized. Though patchy, there is evidence of what today would be called post-traumatic stress disorder’ (Europe’s Tragedy (2009), p. 849). and of a parallel emphasis on penance and piety in the Lutheran apocalyptical response to the war (see Thomas Kaufmann, Dreißigjähriger Krieg und westfälischer Friede. Kirchengeschichtliche Studien zur lutherischen Konfessionskultur (1998), pp. 34–6, 76, 101, 106).