Bach: Music in the Castle of Heaven

by Gardiner, John Eliot

  We saw at the outset that in Bach’s case so much biographical research consists in sifting for shards of evidence at the foot of an incomplete statue. A breakthrough came in 2005 with the discovery in Weimar of four music fascicles improbably catalogued under theological manuscripts and, as such, providentially preserved in the vaults of a library that had been heavily damaged by fire the previous year.33 Two of these were transcriptions – in what was rapidly confirmed as Bach’s teenage handwriting – of works by Dietrich Buxtehude and Johann Adam Reincken in German organ tablature. (See Plates 5a and b.) Written on just one damaged piece of paper, the Buxtehude chorale fantasia Nun freut euch, lieben Christen gmein seems to have been copied by Bach while he was still under his brother’s tutelage in Ohrdruf.34 This gives a completely new twist to the ‘Moonlight’ incident. It demolishes the traditional interpretation: that Christoph gave his industrious brother music to study but jealously withheld access to the more challenging works in his collection. The fresh evidence of this Buxtehude transcription points to an authorised (‘Daylight’) copying under Christoph’s scrupulous supervision in which Sebastian’s handwriting even looks similar to examples of his elder brother’s hand. Given that the process of transcription in tablature was only the first stage before studying how to play the work, it also points to the likelihood that under his brother’s tutelage he had acquired virtuoso keyboard skills to a much higher standard than what he had led his sons to believe in later life.s Besides the impressive technical strides he had made while in Ohrdruf, this transcription is testimony to his determination to master – again with his brother’s help – one of the most complex and ambitious pieces of the contemporary north German organ literature: a work for cognoscenti, not for inclusion as part of the standard liturgy. We are now obliged to reconsider the role of Christoph Bach in the musical development of his much younger brother. Suddenly the esteem in which he was held locally as optimus artifex – ‘a very artistic man’ – takes on a completely different air.

  After just over four years living with his brother, whose custodial responsibilities had now been fulfilled, Bach’s abrupt departure from Ohrdruf mid-term was officially recorded as ob defectum hospitiorum Luneburgum concessit. Scholars have argued over the precise meaning of this phrase,35 but in essence it indicates the withdrawal of the free board granted him and others by well-to-do citizens of the town. Hitherto the costs of his food and lodging had been underwritten by a trust set up in 1622 by the Count of Obergleichen (the last of his line) intended as an incentive to keep the best local boys at the school and so to qualify for places at Jena University; but we do not know why Bach’s name is not at the foot of the pleading letter of protest (signed by fifteen pupils, including his friend and travelling companion Georg Erdmann) sent in February 1699 to the new absentee Graf von Hohenlohe complaining that the fund had run dry.t Bach’s exit from Ohrdruf had less to do with the withdrawal of his stipend, or the increasingly cramped living quarters in his brother’s house due to his expanding family, or the worsening economic situation due to the billeting of troops in the town, and more to do with his having made other plans.36 He was now nearly aged fifteen, already well qualified academically and more or less at the top of his class. Faced with the choice of either bailing out of school altogether or of leaving ‘home’ and continuing his higher education elsewhere, Sebastian seems to have made up his mind to follow the example of Elias Herda, his cantor in Ohrdruf, and apply for a choral scholarship in northern Germany. For candidates applying to the Michaelisschule in Lüneburg, there were two prerequisites: (1) they must be children of poor people with no other means at their disposal; (2) they must have good voices so as to be of use singing in the choir and at church.37 Bach qualified on both counts. As we know from the Nekrolog, at this age he had an ‘uncommonly fine soprano voice’. The traditional narrative links Bach’s move to Lüneburg, with Herda’s supposed help, to the pipeline of Thuringian boy trebles supplying the Mettenchor at the Michaelisschule, and then comes to a full stop, or rather a question mark, at the point where Bach’s voice breaks. But it now appears that the procedures for accepting choral scholars at the Michaelisschule were far more complicated and tedious than previously assumed – the issuing of a passport and the other travel formalities alone occupying several months and ultimately controlled more by the ducal chancery in Celle than by the authorities at the Michaelisschule.38

  The Ohrdruf school register makes an intriguing distinction, stating that, whereas Georg Erdmann simply left (abiit), Bach ‘took himself off’ (Luneburgum concessit) a week before his fifteenth birthday. Leaving Ohrdruf in the throes of some kind of epidemic, the two boys set off on foot on their 200-mile journey northwards. There are raindrops on the manuscript of Bach’s Buxtehude transcription that indicate it may have travelled in his rucksack. Arriving in Lüneburg in time for the busy Holy Week and Easter services of 1700, they threaded their way through to the former Benedictine monastery on the western wall and the fourteenth-century abbatial Michaeliskirche. They promptly enrolled at the Latin Grammar School at the start of the school year. Already by the Saturday before Palm Sunday in 1700, both boys were singing in the Mettenchor of the Michaelisschule. Proof of Bach’s presence in the school in Lüneburg is confined to just two receipts relating to the distribution of proceeds from busking (Mettengeld) in 1700 – in other words for just a couple of semesters.39 It has been assumed that he stayed on at least until 1702 in the prima, but there is no solid evidence for this, nor once his voice had broken that he was able to maintain his choral bursary. That does not rule out the possibility that, like Cantor Braun before him, he may have been offered the position of Regalist or Positivschläger (a keyboard role sometimes assigned to former trebles at that time) and switched to accompanying the choral performances and retaining his right to free tuition and board at the Michaelisschule, though not to lodging.

  Given the degree of cooperation and cordial relations that existed between Sebastian and his eldest brother in later life, it is quite plausible that the idea that the youngest sibling should leave Ohrdruf for Lüneburg at the age of fifteen was part of a plan hatched by them a year or even two years earlier. The choral scholarship was a temporary measure – a sideshow. The main target was the celebrated organ virtuoso and composer Georg Böhm, Thuringian by birthu and currently organist of the Johanneskirche on the other side of town. By this stage Sebastian might already have set his sights on becoming a virtuoso organist, having shown that he was willing to work hard to realise that ambition while under his brother’s tutelage. During his adolescence Christoph had studied with Johann Pachelbel and brought back to the family base his knowledge of the middle German organ school together with manuscript examples of the repertoire – so there would have been no point in paying again for the same repertoire that Christoph, or more likely Ambrosius, had already purchased. If, at the same age, Sebastian were to move to Lüneburg and study with Georg Böhm, the family could eventually acquire a fresh and valuable repertoire and mastery of the techniques of the influential northern German school of organ composition.

  With the discovery in 2005 of the oldest known manuscripts in Bach’s handwriting, the earliest dating from when he was thirteen (referred to above), the cloud of doubt that has hovered over his teenage years and the fog of mythology that has gathered around the anecdotes surrounding his time in Ohrdruf and Lüneburg begin to lift. It now seems fairly likely that, from the moment that his voice broke, Bach went to live in Georg Böhm’s house as his pupil and possibly as his amanuensis. The second transcription in tablature ends with a Latin inscription in Böhm’s hand – Il Fine â Dom. Georg: Böhme descriptum ao. 1700 Lunaburgi (see Plate 5b) (though some might quibble that this in itself proves neither tutelage nor domicile). Certainly Bach was copying music from Böhm’s library on Dutch paper exclusively reserved for the master and his handwriting had at this stage become very similar to that of Böhm. Here is enough to contradict the enigmatic crossing out of the crucial wor
d – ‘his [Lüneburg] teacher Böhm’ – by Emanuel in his letter to Forkel (to which we already referred) as a sign of the second son’s loyalty to his father in insisting that he never had an official teacher and owed everything to his own strict regimen of autodidactism.

  On the basis of the new evidence it is now likely that at fifteen Sebastian Bach could play the most difficult organ literature of the day and that in Böhm he had a powerful advocate, one who was well able to introduce him to his Hamburg teacher, Reincken (see Plate 5b).v Reincken’s playing was characterised by its flamboyance, its dramatic power, and by those abrupt and wild flights of fantasy that distinguished the northern artistic lineage from the style of Pachelbel and the Thuringian organ schooling Bach had received from his elder brother. Reincken’s influence spilt over into Bach’s own earliest pieces, in which stern essays in fugal writing alternate with fantasy-full improvisatory episodes and a peppering of dissonance almost as extreme as in the vocal music of Monteverdi and his German imitators. From the Nekrolog we hear how twenty years later Bach himself returned to play the organ in the Catherinenkirche for two hours at a stretch in the presence of Reincken, ‘who at that time was nearly a hundred years old’ and who ‘listened to him with particular pleasure’.40 Bach chose ‘at the request of those present’ to improvise on none other than the old master’s chorale variations on An Wasserflüssen Babylon – ‘at great length (for almost half an hour) and in different ways’ that no doubt included allusions to, and interpolations from, Reincken’s work. For this he was shown ‘much courtesy’ by the old composer. To have been told ‘I thought that this art was dead, but I see that in you it still lives’41 must have moved Bach deeply.

  But of the two, it was Böhm who was ultimately the more influential teacher and composer. His fine Geistreicher Lieder (‘songs full of wit or conceit’) were published in the year Bach began his studies, and many of his chorale settings re-surface in the anthologies that Sebastian and his eldest brother were soon to collate. We can readily believe that Bach ‘loved and studied Böhm’s work’, as C. P. E. Bach wrote to Forkel, pieces such as the ornate and emotionally charged chorale variations on Vater unser im Himmelreich.42 Here, under Böhm’s guidance, he was exposed for the first time to the ‘French taste’ in music of which Böhm was an expert and which was to play such a fertile role in his musical universe. Later on, Bach’s style of organ-playing was characterised by its idiosyncratic approach to registration (‘in his own way’, wrote Emanuel, ‘astounding other organists’), derived perhaps from the French timbre-conscious approach to combining organ stops that Böhm may have taught him. Böhm’s influence can be heard in Bach’s later organ chorales, BWV 718, 1102 and 1114, and in a more tangible form if we can believe that the chorale partitas BWV 766, 767, 768 and 770 ‘were probably worked out in Lüneburg under Böhm’s watchful eye’.43 No doubt it was also thanks to Böhm that Bach experienced a French-style orchestra at first hand whenever the Capelle of the Duke of Celle visited Lüneburg. Long after his departure from Böhm’s house, the two men remained in close contact.

  The end of his formal schooling was a pivotal moment for Bach. He did not have the parental support or the money to move on to university or even to continue his lessons with Böhm. So far he had taken the bold step of leaving home for two years of intensive study. Now, aged seventeen, came the crucial choices: to take the fashionable (risky but usually lucrative) course of applying to join the Hamburg opera company, using it, as Handel did, as a springboard to fame abroad and greater breadth of experience; or to commit to a career for which he was now expertly trained – as an organist and church musician. Here Böhm was perfectly placed to give counsel, having worked regularly as a continuo player in the Hamburg opera orchestra until 1698 and part time since then. When asked by Forkel what took his father from Lüneburg to Weimar (in 1702), Emanuel replied simply, Nescio – ‘I do not know.’44 We, on the other hand, know that in July 1702 Bach applied successfully for the organist’s job in Sangerhausen, only for the church authorities to be overruled in November by the Duke of Weissenfels, who favoured another, more experienced candidate. By Christmas or shortly afterwards he was in Weimar and listed as a lackey (payments due to ‘Dem Laquey Baachen’ are recorded) to the junior duke, Johann Ernst. This was hardly the position he was hoping for and he needed further guidance.w Bach himself later described his position as that of HoffMusicus (court musician) and more grandly still as Fürstlich Sächsischer HoffOrganiste zu Weimar (court organist to the Saxon Prince in Weimar).45 The best source of advice would have been back where he started, in Eisenach, in the person of his father’s cousin Johann Christoph, who had just turned sixty and was now the unofficial head of the Bach clan. We do not know for sure whether Bach returned to his Thuringian roots, but there were strong grounds for doing so.

  News would have reached him that Christoph, after years of struggling to provide for his ailing wife and seven children, was now in very poor health. After the excitement of his formative training in Lüneburg and the organ visits to Hamburg, Sebastian would surely have been bursting to display his new skills, his powers of improvisation and perhaps even a few compositions he might have been bold enough to show to such ‘a profound composer’.46x It would not have been surprising for him to have consulted Christoph over his career prospects here in the family heartland, and to make sure that his candidature for any future opening did not conflict with the aspirations of his siblings or cousins (he had attended school in Eisenach with the two youngest of Christoph’s sons) or indeed with those of any of the more senior members of the family. Re-encountering this former urchin, now almost a grown man, Christoph would have taken immediate pride and pleasure in his dazzling talents and been happy to advise.

  No one was more qualified to evaluate Sebastian’s skills than Christoph Bach or better placed to plan with him how to secure a position. Conveniently, Christoph’s brother-in-law, the Arnstadt burgomaster Martin Feldhaus, was responsible for supervising the work of J. F. Wender in building a new organ at the Neukirche in Arnstadt, one which would soon need professional assessment. Having witnessed Sebastian’s virtuosic skills as a performer, and then his technical skill in appraising the incomplete Stertzing organ in Eisenach (and how it stood comparison with the magnificent Schnitger instruments he had recently heard and possibly played in northern Germany), Christoph would have been perfectly confident about recommending Sebastian for both Arnstadt jobs – as ‘assessor’ of the Wender organ, and, since the post had fallen vacant, as organist of the Neukirche. Besides Sebastian, there were probably ten other Bachs qualified to fill such a vacancy, four of them Christoph’s own sons, with Sebastian’s own brother and former organ-teacher, Christoph of Ohrdruf, probably the strongest and most experienced candidate of all.y Sebastian had good cause, then, to travel on from Eisenach to Ohrdruf during the summer of 1702. His eldest brother would likely have made it immediately clear that he was well settled in Ohrdruf and would not stand in Sebastian’s way should he be offered the chance to assess the brand-new instrument at the Neukirche or to become its full-time organist.z Sebastian would also have been able to hand over to his brother valuable keyboard manuscripts that included eleven works by his teacher Georg Böhm, together with some by his predecessor, Christian Flor, and a group of pieces by leading French composers of the day – all as a way of discharging the obligations he owed to his brother for his earlier training and for Christoph’s acquiescence in the move to Lüneburg. This was just the first of many future exchanges of manuscript material for two new anthologies of contemporary music on which the brothers were to collaborate over the next few years.47