Bach: Music in the Castle of Heaven

by Gardiner, John Eliot

  Is Christoph, then, one of the very few credible conduits between that earlier master, Heinrich Schütz, and Sebastian, his own first-cousin-once-removed? German musicologists, intent on establishing a German artistic succession from one master to the other, have for generations struggled to ‘prove’ this influence – of Schütz on J. S. Bach. The problem is that the music tells a different story: one combs through Bach’s music without finding hard evidence that he truly knew, let alone directly emulated, Schütz, and the features of Christoph’s music that seem to resurface in that of Sebastian are by and large not of the Schützian sort. On the other hand there could be more tenuous, metaphysical links between the three: like Schütz before him and Sebastian after, Christoph seems to have been drawn to moral puzzles and the hundreds of ways in which good contends with evil. All three composers, it seems, were willing to probe the darker recesses of the human mind and to proffer solace by means of their music. Perhaps composers of their stature were perplexed (exasperated even, in the case of both Bachs) by the need to explain something so simple and obvious to listeners who refused to see the truth staring them in the face. Indeed, that could be one definition of the role of the composer of the time: to explain the self-evident and, through music, to release the turbulent emotions that rack people’s lives even (or especially) when they try to suppress or deny them. With all three composers we come across instances of the way their contrasting personalities seep through the cracks of their music, humanising them more vividly than the pathos of indignant or pleading letter-writing ever could.

  There is one major exception to such self-revealing music: Christoph Bach’s twenty-two-part setting of words from the Apocalypse, Es erhub sich ein Streit (There arose a dispute in heaven). Creating a magnificent tableau in sound, Christoph portrays the great eschatological battle in which the archangel Michael and his angelic squadrons fought the dragon and snuffed out a mutiny led by Lucifer and the forces of darkness. Emanuel told Forkel how ‘my late father once performed it in church in Leipzig, and everyone was astonished by its effect.’24 But did Sebastian first hear it – or even sing in it – as a boy? Since one of his own St Michael’s Day cantatas begins with these same words describing the war of the worlds, we can make a rare direct comparison of music by the two leading Bachs, both immense in conception and sustained bravura, yet providing very different experiences for the listener. Expanding on to a larger canvas the vivid drama-infused treatments of isolated biblical incidents he might have gleaned from Schütz, Christoph Bach finds superbly graphic musical analogies to the events he is chronicling, without, as Emanuel later commented, ‘any detriment to the purest harmony’. Within the family, Christoph was revered for being ‘strong in the expression of words and in the invention of beautiful ideas’25 – and here is the reason why. The halo of beatific string sounds of the sinfonia soothes the listener up to the moment when two solo basses appear and sing: are these dispatches from the front line or war reporters furtively recording their commentaries in the build-up to battle? Their antiphonal exchanges become steadily rougher, and they start to roar like a couple of meths-drinking tramps. Then almost imperceptibly the drumming begins. One by one four field trumpeters bugle out their alarm calls and the voices start to pile up, while the circling angels size up the dragon and plan their attack. Soon a space opens up between the two five-voiced choirs – two hostile armies at the ready in battle formation – and a column of sound, six octaves tall, has been built up. Far above the fray the archangel Michael, as chief trumpeter, blasts his battle orders in a high clarino register. Up to this point there have been sixty bars seemingly stuck on the common chord of C major – not the least brilliant sign of Christoph making fertile use of limited means (his fanfares being constrained by the series of whole tones playable on his natural trumpets). With the pressure of expectation for a clear victor (or at least for something to change) building to a climax, the harmony swerves abruptly to B with the word verführet (‘tempt’): the effect is to give banner headlines to the cunning ‘deception’ of the Devil.

  The victory celebrations that follow are wholly absent when we turn to Sebastian’s portrayal of the same scene in his Leipzig cantata of 1726 (BWV 19). Here it is the singers who strike out as the main combatants. Like a wind that has blown up into a gale in just a few seconds, they lead the doubling instruments (strings and three oboes) into battle with a ferocious confrontational swagger and impel the trumpets to follow in their wake. It is only when they pause for the first time in thirty-seven bars that the instruments really hit their stride (in a four-bar Nachspiel). But that turns out to be merely the A section of an immense da capo structure such as someone of Christoph’s generation could never have used. The B section starts out with the advantage now tilted in favour of the ‘raging serpent, the infernal dragon’, manifested in seventeen bars of ‘furious vengeance’ dominated by the choir. Then, while the singers catch their breath, the orchestra advances the story. The swinging rhythm of the tell-tale hemiola reveals this to be the turning-point in the battle. Back comes the choir, now on its own and in block harmony, to announce Michael’s victory, while the continuo rumbles on. But the piece does not end there. For the next twenty-five bars Bach shakes his kaleidoscope to give us a gleeful account of the final moments of the battle – the repulse of Satan’s last attack by Michael’s inner guard and a lurid portrayal of Satan’s cruelty (a slow, screeching, chromatic descent in the sopranos) – before the whole battle is relived again from the beginning. One senses that Bach was spurred on by his cousin’s audacity and fired up by his sense of drama. He was also stimulated by the availability of a virtuosic group of trumpeters, the municipal Stadtpfeifer of Leipzig under their ‘Capo’ Gottfried Reiche – just as Berlioz was a century or so later by the newly available military cornets à pistons in his Symphonie fantastique and by the saxhorns to emerge from Adolphe Sax’s workshop when composing his epic opera Les Troyens. Bach uses his high brass in strongly contrasting ways: at one extreme, in the opening chorus, thrusting upon the listener the scale and significance of these apocalyptic encounters; at the other, in the tender E minor aria for tenor (‘Bleibt, ihr Engel’), evoking the ever-watchful protection afforded by the guardian angels as they wheel around in the stratosphere.

  Operating in the dying years of the seventeenth century – that ‘warlike, various and tragical age’26 – Christoph was more of a miniaturist than Sebastian. But even allowing for the obvious generational differences of style, one is struck by basic similarities of outlook and temperament between the two Bachs: by their characteristic predilection for life/death juxtapositions, together with that subtle blend of intense subjectivity and polyphonic distance – a form of objectivity that is one of the hallmarks of Sebastian’s style. We do not know exactly when Sebastian first became aware of Christoph’s music, but it is possible that he was infected at an early age by his cousin’s burning desire to communicate through music. Christoph might have shown him how, even on a small scale, it can be a receptacle in which to pour all of life’s anguishes, one’s faith and one’s passion (a theme to which we shall return in Chapter 5) and act as a proto-Romantic vehicle for self-expression. At moments when one is most aware of the insufficiency of language as a medium for conveying the ineffable, both these Bachs can astonish, each in his own way, with music that reveals intimations of heightened awareness.

  In marked contrast to the extraordinary depth of expression and the recurrent emphasis on hardship that Christoph’s music evinces comes a surprisingly light-hearted side. At over six hundred bars and lasting over twenty minutes, his nuptial dialogue Meine Freundin, du bist schön (My beloved, thou art fair) is his most substantial single work, one that provides a window on to the Bach family at play, revealing their mutual interdependence and interaction. Composed for the marriage feast of his namesake and first cousin, the twin brother of Ambrosius, in Ohrdruf in 1679, it comes down to us in a set of parts copied mainly by Ambrosius himself. Attached to these, also in Ambr
osius’s hand, is a lengthy commentary on the piece (‘Beschreibung dieses Stückes’), comical in its flamboyance and strained in the way he tries to relate the biblical text to the circumstances of this bridal couple. It amounts to an imaginary mise en scène (complete with bullet points and references). Christoph-the-bridegroom was marrying, at the age of thirty-four (unusually late for a Bach), a girl he had been courting for some while. The delay was due to his difficulties in extricating himself from an earlier liaison and an alleged pledge of marriage (see above, this page). Here would be one reason for the furtive tone to the opening exchanges between bridegroom (bass) and bride (soprano), their planned garden assignation, the emphasis on secrecy and, not least, the clever choice of selected verses from the Song of Songs. Christoph-the-composer’s evocative music suggests a far steamier series of encounters than Ambrosius’s rather prim, but perhaps ironic, account would suggest. In an extended chaconne a series of delicately adumbrated variations of foreplay gives way to a gradual build-up of flagrant sexual tension. The carousing becomes ever more explicit – in the fast, ornamented turns that Christoph requires his singers to negotiate in their intoxicated state, in the gurgling sextuplet divisions of the solo violin and the repeated, drone-bass, open-string unisons of the string-players – by which stage, judging by the hockets and hiccups written into their vocal lines, both bride and groom are now decidedly the worse for wear. Here the music is far more than just picturesque: Christoph achieves subtle variations of word-setting, of interplay between the singers and the players, and an inexorable escalation of Rabelaisian debauchery.

  It was a custom for the Bachs to hold annual get-togethers in one of the Thuringian towns. Once assembled they always began by singing a chorale. ‘From this pious commencement they proceeded to drolleries which often made a very great contrast with it,’ Forkel relates.27 The rowdier things got, it seems, the greater the opportunity for extemporary jam singing, with all the brothers, organists, cantors and town musicians competing in the spicing up of popular songs which they transformed as quodlibets with plenty of satirical and sexual innuendo. Sebastian himself left us just two – one as the final variation of his Goldberg Variations (BWV 988), in which he combines the tunes of ‘Ich bin so lang nicht bei dir g’west’ (‘It’s been an age since I last saw you’) and ‘Kraut und Rüben haben mich vertrieben’ (‘Cabbage and turnips have driven me away’), and the fragment of a wedding quodlibet (BWV 524) composed about the time of his own first marriage (1707), which begins with the word Steiß (‘arse’).

  One would of course love to know Sebastian’s reactions when he first came across Christoph’s nuptial cantata, before adding a new title page of his own to the score – ‘Tempore Nuptiarum. Dialogus è Cantic: a 4 Voci Concert … di J. C. Bach’. Was the work revived at family weddings (such as that of his eldest brother, Johann Christoph, in 1694), and did he himself perform it? Though we have burlesques by Sebastian in the form of the Coffee and Peasant cantatas (BWV 211 and 212), and a number of wedding cantatas, as far as we can tell he himself never composed an extended nuptial dialogue quite like this in which the citations from the Song of Songs are treated more or less literally, topically or in the manner of a poetic conceit.

  As we shall see when discussing his cantatas and Passions, his settings of texts from that book’s transparently erotic imagery are invariably allegorical, corralled into the service of the church. They belong to a tradition that goes back to Origen (third century AD), which saw the church accept the male and female lovers as symbols, respectively, of Jesus and the individual Christian soul. So the sponsa with her rapturous swooning represents the soul in its urgent craving for mystical union with Christ. The soprano/bass duet (‘Mein Freund ist mein / und ich bin sein’) from BWV 140, Wachet auf, ruft uns die Stimme, is merely the best known of several of Bach’s cantatas that treat this theme of the bridegroom (Jesus) eager to receive his bride (the Christian anima) in mystic union as part of a musical tradition that goes back to Palestrina and Clemens and thence to Monteverdi, Grandi and Schütz.m His own first attempted ciacona, to a different ostinato bass, comes in the finale to what may have been his very first church cantata, BWV 150, Nach dir, Herr, verlanget mich. Though commissioned by the mayor of Mühlhausen, it could have been composed while he was still in Arnstadt (see this page fn) – birthplace of Christoph (to whom, as we shall shortly see, Sebastian may well have owed his first professional appointment). Perhaps it was a veiled tribute to the most remarkable of all his kinsmen, whose music, as he came to know it, provided Bach with templates of how to balance polyphony and harmony, how to structure musical paragraphs and how to reach a judicious accommodation between words and music and their competing priorities. It looks like a perfect example of nature and nurture conspiring to coalesce in the fruitful germination of such an immense talent. But this still lies some way into the future.

  Now we return briefly to the image we had earlier of Johann Christoph Bach struggling to repair the old Georgenkirche organ in the company of Sebastian, his young cousin, still small enough ‘to crawl behind the organ’s façade and observe what was happening inside; here he would have seen metal and wooden pipes, wind chests, trackers, bellows, and other components of a large-scale mechanical instrument whose complexity was unsurpassed by any other machine in the seventeenth century’.28 (This is pure conjecture; but at least it gives a plausible explanation of the origins of his ‘life-long fascination with [the] design and technology’ of what Nicholas Brady called the ‘wondrous machine’ of his age.) Suddenly the west door of the church is thrown open and somebody shouts out the terrible news that Sebastian’s mother has just died. ‘There is always one moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in,’ according to Graham Greene in The Power and the Glory, and for Bach it was in his ninth year. Tragedy had struck. Within a matter of months he lost first his mother and then his father. The family home was broken up. No trace of it exists today, and the Bachhaus in Eisenach visited by countless pilgrims is a fake, though since 2000 it has been transformed into an impressive museum.n He, together with his thirteen-year-old brother Jacob, was sent away to live in the house of Johann Christoph – not his cousin the organist, but his elder brother of the same name whom he barely knew – in Ohrdruf, thirty miles to the south-east. This was an existential moment. Whatever his previous patterns of instinctive or unthinking childhood behaviour – and, as we shall see, we cannot be certain whether he was temperamentally more inclined at this stage to studious application or to high spirits and a free-range boisterousness – he had been brutally rocked back on to his heels. It was a triple bereavement. ‘Behind the complicated details of the world stand the simplicities: God is good, the grown-up man or woman knows the answer to every question, there is such a thing as truth, and justice is as measured and faultless as a clock.’29 Henceforth Bach’s view of the world would be more circumspect and guarded.

  Ohrdruf in 1695 was a comatose provincial town with 2,500 inhabitants and a bad public-health record. It had no permanent court, no Stadtpfeiferei, and nothing to match the quotidian hive of activity that marked out the parental home in Eisenach as the hub of a comprehensive music-providing business. Bach’s eldest brother had been organist of the Michaeliskirche since he was nineteen, and seems to have decided early on not to overexert himself. Feeling on his own admission ‘a better love towards music than to study’,30 he did his best to escape the nonmusical responsibilities expected of a town organist. The relationship between the two brothers – fourteen years apart – was perhaps strained from the outset. They had never before lived under the same roof, and, if Sebastian had been given a say in his own future, one imagines that he might have preferred to stay in Eisenach, apprenticed to the older Johann Christoph, a familiar and more charismatic role model.o The first time the brothers met face to face may even have been at the elder brother’s wedding in Ohrdruf in October 1694 – one of those legendary gatherings of the Bach clan that even the great Johann Pachelbel (with whom
the bridegroom had studied for three years) attended. Barely a year after getting married, Johann Christoph and his wife Johanna were expecting their first child. Neither had anticipated responsibility for housing, feeding and teaching this pair of younger brothers. Yet the custom of the day was that the eldest would house them as apprentice-pupils until they reached the age of fifteen. While Johann Jacob eased the domestic burden by returning to Eisenach the following year as an apprentice to his father’s successor, Sebastian would later repay this debt to his elder brother by a reciprocal tuition of two of his teenage sons. At all events, at some time after the ten-year-old began his keyboard studies with his eldest brother, there is assumed to have been some friction between the two, the precocity and enviable technical fluency of Sebastian irking his brother – together with all those other irritating personality traits that can act like sandpaper between siblings when forced into an awkward teacher-pupil relationship. Well before his four and a half years in Ohrdruf were up (so goes the story, one first told by Forkel), Sebastian thirsted for technical as well as creative stimulus beyond what his brother could offer him.

  Some biographers have detected a certain heavy-handed authoritarianism in Christoph – conscious that in loco parentis he needed to do his best with this gifted sibling – lurking at the back of the celebrated anecdote first reported in the Nekrolog. This is of the young Bach’s clandestine copying by moonlight of keyboard pieces by Froberger, Kerll and Pachelbel, of his being apprehended and scolded, and of his painstaking efforts being confiscated by a peevish elder brother ‘without mercy’. It smacks of legend – of a story heavily embroidered in the remembering and rehearsing of it. Ask most people what they recall of an incident in their childhood and they will, as likely or not, come up with a version subtly tweaked and dramatised by constant re-telling – especially, as seems likely with Bach, if he wanted his children to know and understand how he had heroically overcome all obstacles set in his path.p It is as though, aged thirteen, he had already grasped that the fastest route to musical proficiency would come by copying out and studying examples of all the best music he could lay his hands on, with or without permission.q The route to prowess for a Baroque composer was not by poetic musing or by waiting for inspiration to strike, but by hard work. As Johann Mattheson put it, ‘Invention requires fire and spirit, the arrangement of it order and proportion; its working out cold blood and calculated reflection.’31 Bach himself is said to have reasoned in later life, ‘that which I have achieved by industry and practice, anyone else with tolerable natural gift and ability can also achieve.’32 We can of course take it at face value and accept that this was genuinely how Bach remembered the incident and wished his children to know about how he conquered resistance and persisted. Then it would fit into part of the wider process of his grieving for his parents: the energetic absorption in the secret copying (lasting six months) which may have been his defence against mourning, the shock not just of being disciplined by his brother (although his parents would surely have done the same for his act of ‘innocent deceit’ as well as being concerned about damage to his eyesight and lack of sleep) and of being deprived of the fruits of his labour, but of being scolded and with no one to speak up for him.r In this romanticised scenario Bach learnt the need for secretiveness and to be utterly self-reliant from then on. But why should we assume that his brother was not complicit in strengthening this desire to master everything there was to know about music?