Meanwhile the way was clear for Sebastian to accept the invitation of Martin Feldhaus, the part-time mayor of Arnstadt, to examine and assess the new church organ. One day in June 1703 a private coach drew up at the castle gates in Weimar to transport the Duke’s lackey twenty-five miles south-west to Arnstadt. Feldhaus had taken a gamble in hiring his wife’s eighteen-year-old cousin to judge whether the 800 florins voted by the town fund for the building of a new organ was good value for money. In the last resort, however, any right of approval of a musical post in Arnstadt lay with the local count, Anthon Günther II of Schwarzburg. He had consistently asked for a Bach, so he should have one – the best available, coming with the highest plaudits and at a very reasonable cost. On his arrival Bach immediately set to work, and for the next couple of days he was called upon to draw on all his technical know-how: measuring the wind-pressure and the thickness of the pipes (checking for example whether Wender had taken the usual short-cut of substituting lead for tin in the out-of-sight pipes); assessing the voicing of the reeds and especially the three big sixteen-foot stops, the quality of the touch and the rebound of the keys. We learn from Emanuel that the first thing his father would habitually do in trying out an organ was to see whether it had ‘good lungs’: ‘To find out, he would draw out every speaking stop, and play in the fullest and richest possible texture. At this the organ builders would often grow quite pale with fright.’48 Eventually he expressed his satisfaction with the new instrument and a fortnight later, now back in Weimar, Bach received his full examiner’s fee and expenses – paid out of the town’s tax on beer – followed by confirmation of an offer of the organist’s post at the Neukirche: a contract was drawn up on 9 August and signed by the Count. It is not clear how Bach managed to extricate himself from Duke Johann Ernst’s employ in Weimar, but on 14 August he gave his acceptance to the Arnstadt Consistory and entered upon his duties at the Neukirche in Arnstadt.
Earlier in that year, just after his eighteenth birthday, the family lost in quick succession, first Maria Elisabeth, the wife of Christoph of Eisenach, and a fortnight later the great Christoph himself. And so this most central figure of the pre-Sebastian Bachs never lived to see his cherished organ project completed, nor did he witness the spectacular creative development of his young cousin – not even the precarious first steps of a career that he may well have helped to nurture and guide. With his death, it was Sebastian Bach who had now demonstrated beyond all cavil that he had the musical gifts to be taken seriously within this most musical family (the Arnstadt appointment was, in a way, proof of it). Thus far he had shown not just a strong natural ability but also a singleness of purpose that enabled him to deal with adversity. There is a popular belief that talent is based on an inborn ability which makes it certain that its possessor will excel; but the story of Bach’s youth indicates just how much the nurturing of his talent depended on chance as well as on planning. Without the inspirational presence of the elder Christoph, Sebastian’s musical upbringing could well have lacked that essential initial spark and turned out far more humdrum. Had he not been apprenticed to his elder brother on the death of his parents, his keyboard ability could have lain dormant for a number of years and he might not have been technically advanced or confident enough to move away from his homeland and apply for tuition from the third of his mentors, Georg Böhm. Without Böhm, entrée to the rich cosmopolitan musical life of Hamburg with its new opera house and its many fine church organs might have proved a lot more difficult. Without the opportunity to observe the great organ-builder Arp Schnitger at close quarters and to hear Böhm’s teacher Johann Adam Reincken play these fine organs, there might have been no consolidation of his talents and no qualification at such a young age to be considered seriously for the Arnstadt post. These are just the first in a series of plausible connections to be made between the established events of Bach’s life, the verifiable circumstances of his childhood and schooling, the works he studied and imitated, and the music he himself would soon begin to compose. Having been made to rely on his inner resources for much of his adolescence as a result of being orphaned, yet driven forwards by a palpable ambition to shine and a voracious musical curiosity, at eighteen Johann Sebastian Bach was ready to stand comparison with his peers – that cluster of composer-musicians of exceptional talent born in, or just before, 1685.
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a This was in extreme contrast to Bach’s struggles to get his music into print. Bach’s admiration for Couperin’s music is well attested, though the letters they are said to have exchanged were used as jam-pot covers later on, or so the story goes.
b Almost the last of the line, Gervais-François (1759–1826), ‘in one of the most bizarre scenes of the Republican aberration (6 November 1799) … found himself playing dinner music on the greatest organ in Paris, at Saint-Sulpice, while Napoleon and a nervous Directory, which was to be overthrown three days later by its guest of honour, consumed an immense banquet in the nave below, watched over by a statue of Victory (herself about to be overthrown) whose temple the church had become’ (David Fuller in New Grove, Vol. 4, p. 873). Somehow one cannot picture any of the Bachs, even at the nadir of their fortunes, undertaking an equivalent gig.
c Perhaps, as John Butt suggests, German composers in particular felt insecure in not having a long, secure cultural hinterland in the way that France and many other countries had (after all, Germany only became a country around 1870). There is a sense that they were always seeking to ground themselves, as it were, in an Old Testament past. In this respect Bach made a convincing Old Testament figure before the ‘New Testament’ of Beethoven.
d A cithrinchen was a form of cittern: bell-shaped with four ranks of metal strings and played with a quill plectrum. As a miller and baker Veit Bach’s fondness for the instrument is mirrored by its popularity in England, where it was traditionally played by cobblers, tailors and barbers.
e Their modern counterparts are The Blue Notes – in the way they fought apartheid in South Africa with their highly individual and searing style of jazz. I remember coming across what Moholo said and writing it down: ‘When people are oppressed, they sing. You see it all over the world and through history. They may be sad, but they sing. It’s like squeezing a lemon – the juice comes out.’
f David Yearsley points to ‘the degree of cooperation, even friendly competition, that existed between the two men’, cultivating ‘almost in tandem’ chorale preludes, canons and the ‘esoterica of learned counterpoint’ (Bach and the Meanings of Counterpoint (2002), pp. 47–8).
g Over the generations various family members seem to have had a hand in copying, revising and adding to this remarkable collection, which was considered lost for fifty years after the ending of the Second World War, until it resurfaced in the Ukraine State Archives in Kiev. Subsequent scholarship suggests that it was initially assembled not as a Bach family document but by the Arnstadt cantor Ernst Dietrich Heindorff for use there, and that from him it went first to the Arnstadt organist Johann Ernst Bach and only on his death in 1739 did much of it pass on to Sebastian (see Peter Wollny, ‘Alte Bach-Funde’, BJb (1998), pp. 137–48). This does not rule out the possibility that he was already familiar – perhaps even from an early age – with many of its contents, in particular the works of his father’s cousins Michael and Christoph, which together form a high proportion of the collection. Ultimately it was thanks to Sebastian, his reverence for the music of his ancestors, and his role in revising, copying and performing several of these works during his Leipzig years and then passing them on to his second son Emanuel that we have this precious evidence of the music of his forebears that, apart from anything else, permits us to gauge the stylistic provenance of his own music.
h There must have been so much more of Johann Christoph’s music – including music known to J. S. Bach – that over the years has succumbed to the ravages of time, fire and neglect than the handful of works we have today. These include two strophic funerary ‘arias’, both set for four
voices, both deceptive in their apparent simplicity, both wonderful examples of ‘hidden’ art in which subliminal complexities of metre and harmony are brought into play. One lives in hope that the brilliant musicological sleuths currently working in the Leipzig Bach-Archiv will soon lay their hands on previously undiscovered treasures.
i The Eisenacher Kantorenbuch, compiled around 1535 by Wolfgang Zeuner and containing the core repertoire of the chorus symphoniacus in Bach’s time, comprised Latin motets by composers such as Josquin, Obrecht, de la Rue, Rener, Galliculus, Johann Walter, Stölzer, Isaak, Senfl, Finck, Rein and Musa. The choir library in Lüneburg, on the other hand, at the time of Bach’s arrival in 1700 was rated as one of the most comprehensive assemblages of contemporary church music in northern Germany. Compiled by successive cantors of the Michaeliskirche, eager to seek out the newest and best of church music circulating in manuscript all over Germany and from south of the Alps and to snap up any modern music from the moment it appeared in print, the library comprised over 1,100 pieces by seventy-five different composers (and several other anonymous ones), ranging from older-style polyphonic motets, to concerted psalm and canticle settings, to Latin hymns, biblical dialogues, or scenas, and the most up-to-date arias and Stücke – prototypes of the future church cantata. All this was lost to posterity when the library went up in flames (see Rekonstruktion der Chorbibliothek von St Michaelis zu Lüneburg, Friedrich Jekutsch (ed.) (2000), p. 200).
j This is the testimony of Emanuel Bach, who must have got it from his father (BD III, No. 666/ NBR, p. 298). As Richard Campbell writes, ‘the adding of parts [layers of melody] to an existing line, to build up texture and define the contours of harmony, is the basis of the polyphonic tradition in Western music, and ideally the “whole” thus created should be greater than the sum of the parts themselves – not only the logic and beauty of the individual lines but the relationships between them have to be heard and considered. The ability to improvise in five real parts, if that is what Emanuel Bach meant by “play”, is a very rare skill indeed, only to be acquired with immense diligence’ (liner notes to SDG 715).
k Jonas de Fletin was town and court cantor in Arnstadt from 1644 to 1665, while Johann Christoph’s father, Heinrich Bach, was the successor as main organist in Arnstadt to another musician with a close link to Schütz, Christoph Klemsee, who had studied alongside Schütz in Venice as a pupil of Giovanni Gabrieli (see Hans-Joachim Schulze, Studien zur Bach-Überlieferung im 18. Jahrhundert (1984), p. 180).
l It is an exact reversal of the procedure he uses in the dialogue Herr, wende dich und sei mir gnädig, where the interventions of the solo bass as Vox Dei (accompanied by violin and viol consort) become gradually more expansive, creating the illusion that the grace of God sought by the four penitent upper voices is distant to start with, but becomes ever-more present in the course of the utterance. This might have lodged in Bach’s memory when years later he took a similar approach to his cousin in BWV 67, Halt im Gedächtnis Jesum Christ: at his fourth attempt to allay the disciples’ fears, the bass representing the risen Christ is accompanied by peaceful strings and winds (see Chapter 9, p. 313).
m Referring to the many examples of this in Bach’s music, the theologian John Drury reflects ‘if one is to think of a central thing about being human, it is the need for a response from some other – a person, or it could be a work of art or music – and the fulfilling joy of getting one. It applies at home and at work, needs urgently to be there when we are born and when we are dying, and really everywhere and always: you take on another (all that other, not just the nice bits), and that other takes on you (all of you). Religion, not least the Christian religion, is deeply aware of this. Sacrifice, so central to the Gospel texts of Bach’s Passions, is such a mutual exchange: pitched beyond morals into the realm of “amazing grace” and its unclenched exchanges. Protestants like Bach found it in those texts – and indeed the whole New Testament is saturated in it. This longed for reciprocity (it has an erotic ache to it) seems to be what makes life worth living’ (private correspondence, Apr. 2013).
n Ambrosius’s house was on the site of the present Lutherstrasse 35 and occupied about 1,500 square feet of living space for between five and eight family members, two to three journeymen, presumably two adults and two younger apprentices and at least one maid (Ulrich Siegele, ‘ “I had to be industrious …”: Thoughts about the Relationship between Bach’s Social and Musical Character’, JRBI, Vol. 22, No. 2 (1991), p. 8).
o It is unlikely, however, that this was a realistic alternative, intriguing as it may at first appear. For a start, Johann Christoph Bach of Eisenach had an extensive family of his own and a far from stable domestic situation: he was obliged to move his family from one rented apartment to another, as we have seen. One wonders at what point in Johann Sebastian’s life he saw parallels between his own situation and that of his elder cousin – particularly as regards those draining battles over turf with recalcitrant town council officials and the need constantly to plead one’s cause on behalf of one’s profession.
p Timothy Garton Ash on the subject of how ‘personal memory is such a slippery customer’ quotes one of Nietzsche’s epigrams: “I did that,” says my memory. “I can’t have done that,” says my pride and remains adamant. In the end – memory gives way.’ Garton Ash continues: ‘The temptation is always to pick and choose your past, just as it is for nations: to remember Shakespeare and Churchill but forget Northern Ireland. But we must take it all, or leave it all, and I must say “I” ’ (The File (1997), p. 37).
q This was standard post-Renaissance practice in which the learning of rules (Preceptum), studying and analysing the examples of recognised masters (Exemplum) and imitating their work (Imitatio) lay at the heart of pedagogy. In 1606 Joachim Burmeister (Musica poetica, p. 74) devoted a whole chapter to the study of Imitatio, which he described as ‘the striving and endeavour dexterously to reflect upon, emulate and construct a musical composition through the analysis of artful example’.
r Christopher Hitchens, when interviewing the writer Philip Pullman (‘Oxford’s Rebel Angel’ in Vanity Fair, Oct. 2002), points out that Pullman’s experiences ‘as part orphan and part stepchild were not wasted on him’. He quotes Pullman: ‘When you are a child your feelings are magnified, because you haven’t any experience with which to compare them … So the smallest hint of injustice prompts you to think – which is itself unfair – that “my real father wouldn’t have treated me like that.” ’
s In the Nekrolog, Emanuel paid tribute to his uncle’s ‘guidance’ in laying ‘the foundations for his [father’s] playing of the clavier’; yet several years later he played down the quality of instruction provided, reporting to Forkel, as we saw earlier, that it ‘may well have been designed for an organist and nothing more’. It is symptomatic of the difficulties the Bach sons had in squaring the evidence with their father’s accounts of his early life.
t In effect they were threatening to leave the school unless the funds were reinstated to help the best ten pupils with their lodging allowance. It was not forthcoming, and seven out of fourteen signatories in the prima left the school within a twelvemonth, several recorded as ob defectum hospitiorum – a phrase intended no doubt by the rector to shame the Count into reconsidering his decision (see Michael Maul, ‘Ob defectum hospitiorum: Bachs Weggang aus Ohrdruf’ in Symposium: Die Musikerfamilie Bach in der Stadtkultur des 17. und 18. Jahrhunderts (Belfast, July 2007)).
u There was also a family connection: Christoph’s father-in-law, Bernhard Vonhoff, a town councillor in Ohrdruf, had attended both the Gymnasium in Gotha and Jena University with Böhm. It is quite likely that as a student in Goldbach and Gotha, Böhm had taken lessons from members of the Bach family; if so, by accepting Sebastian as his pupil, he would have been returning a favour. Christoph had studied with Pachelbel in Erfurt at the same time as Johann Christoph Graf, who journeyed north in 1694 ‘so that he could learn something in the ways of composition from Herr Böhm in Lün
eburg’ (J. G. Walther, Musicalisches Lexicon (1732), p. 288).
v This is borne out by the presence in his library of Reincken’s An Wasserflüssen Babylon from which Bach made his copy – the only surviving contemporary source today. By the end of Bach’s first year at Lüneburg, his first cousin Johann Ernst, who had been at school with him in Ohrdruf, apparently ‘visited Hamburg for half a year at great expense, in order to improve his understanding of the organ’. Did the two make the rounds of the seventeen magnificent new Schnitger instruments in the Hamburg area? If he had still been tied to the Mettenchor and its heavy roster of services, his time to do so would have been severely restricted.
w It seems that it was Johann Effler, the elderly court organist in Weimar, a former colleague of Bach’s father and with close professional ties to the family stretching over thirty years, who negotiated the opening at Weimar for Sebastian after the Sangerhausen débâcle, allowing him to deputise for him now and again in the short time he spent there. He may also have put in a good word for him when the Arnstadt job (see below) loomed into view and facilitated his return to Weimar in 1708 (see Wollny, op. cit.).
x Bach would also have been keen to see and hear for himself how the realisation of his cousin’s great dream was progressing: the construction of a grand, new, fifty-eight stop, four-manual organ with pedals for the Georgenkirche. Bach had known its builder, G. C. Stertzing, from childhood, probably from the moment he was big enough to crawl in and out of the chests of pipes while Stertzing and Christoph Bach together struggled to repair the old instrument, dating from 1576. Later, living under his brother’s roof, in Ohrdruf, he could easily have made visits to Stertzing’s workshop. Now at seventeen he was himself proficient and expert enough to assess Stertzing’s work on the new instrument that Christoph claimed, more in hope than reality, ‘more and more reaches the state of completion’. It was not completed for another four years, by which time Christoph was dead.
Bach: Music in the Castle of Heaven Page 14
