Bach: Music in the Castle of Heaven

by Gardiner, John Eliot

  y Arnstadt was a town with which Christoph had strong links ever since he deputised for a year (1690) for his ailing great-uncle Heinrich. His godfather was Christoph Herthum, who was Heinrich Bach’s successor as court and town organist, and who would have a leading say in the new appointment. Herthum also had a vested interest, seeing that his own son-in-law, Andreas Börner, was currently playing for the services at the Neukirche and thus had a legitimate prior claim. An already complicated situation received another twist in that Herthum was related by marriage to the Bachs (his wife, Maria Catharine, was sister to Christoph of Eisenach).

  z Over the years Sebastian’s eldest brother seems to have feathered his nest very comfortably at Ohrdruf, his career decisions made in the firm expectation of his wife’s inheritance. Already in 1696 he had felt confident enough to turn down the interest shown by the main church of nearby Gotha for him to replace his former teacher Pachelbel. Eleven years later, thanks to his wife, he became the householder of ‘Haus und Hof’ in the Langgassen quarter of the town, which had six meadows and seven acres attached to it.

  4

  The Class of ’85

  Unus homo est quod vult, fit quod lubet, agit quod placet.

  Man alone is whatever he chooses to be. He becomes whatever he desires to become, and does what pleases him.

  – Giambattista Vico, Le orazioni inaugurali, No. 3, Naples, 1700a

  Three musicians of immense future distinction turned eighteen in 1703 – Domenico Scarlatti, Johann Sebastian Bach and the one who later styled himself George Frideric Handel. Born just two years before them was the Frenchman Jean-Philippe Rameau, while the two eldest in this class of six (and the most celebrated in their day), Johann Mattheson and Georg Philipp Telemann, were born in 1681. From our later vantage point what strikes us is the decisive influence at least four of them had – and still have – on the subsequent standard performing repertoire that led to Haydn, Mozart and beyond, and to the first three being accorded posthumous and enduring canonical status in the course of the nineteenth century. That, of course, is not the way others saw them at this time; rather, they appeared as fledgling musicians just emerging into the glare of public scrutiny in varied plumage and in different states of preparedness. While it is not hard to discern a genetic predisposition towards music in the cases of Scarlatti and Bach (as we discussed in Chapter 3), for the others it entailed conscious choice, even when there were clear signs of early aptitude – as with Mattheson – or manifest talent pitted against paternal resolve – in the case of Telemann and, to a lesser extent, with Handel and Rameau. But, in any case, aged eighteen, it was not primarily as ‘composers’ that they announced themselves to the world. At this point we are still a century away from the Romantic cliché of the composer as an isolated creative genius fighting his inner demons in a lonely attic.

  The Class of ’85 were essentially craftsmen and versatile, all-round musicians. They were also brilliant virtuoso performers. Bach, Handel and Scarlatti were on the verge of being recognised as the leading keyboard exponents of their day, with Rameau not far behind. Armed with these qualities of flair, versatility, craftsmanship and keyboard expertise, they had every reason to feel confident in entering the music profession. The division between composers and theorists was nothing like as rigid then as it later became, and the membrane separating composer and performer was non-existent. What marked out the Class of ‘85 from previous generations was almost as much the exceptional potential they demonstrated as the fresh opportunities opening up ahead of them: theirs was the first generation of musicians able to see clear water between themselves and the fading spectre of continuous warfare and devastation – the malaise which through most of the previous century had blighted the struggles of their parents’ and grandparents’ generations to earn a secure living through music. Now, forty years later, in a less precarious environment, Pastor Sebastian Kirchmajer noted that ‘most people love and learn gladly only those arts which adorn and fill the purse, or which otherwise bear profit.’1

  Which, then, of these six musicians were tipped by the pundits of compositional form in 1703 to be the front-runners destined for fame and future glory? The clear favourite was Telemann. Having shown promising early ‘form’, at twenty-two he was already well into his stride. Son of a university-educated deacon in Magdeburg (who died before Telemann reached the age of four), partially self-taught as a musician,b he claimed to have composed his first opera when he was only twelve. In 1701, having deliberately left all but one of his music materials (instruments and compositions) at home, he went to Leipzig with the firm intention – so he tells us – of studying law at its Pauliner College. Stumbling across the lone composition, his roommate soon let it slip that in their midst was a musician of extraordinary proficiency. In rapid succession we find Telemann performing his setting of Psalm 6 the following Sunday at the Thomaskirche; commissioned by the mayor of Leipzig to compose a new church cantata every fortnight for performance there – much to the annoyance of its cantor, Johann Kuhnau; founding the collegium musicum – an accomplished semi-professional orchestra which ‘often assembled up to forty students’ at a time (he clearly had a knack of drawing talented student musicians into his orbit and holding their attention); appointed to the post of first organist and director of music at the Neukirche; and finally nominated, aged twenty-one, as music director of Leipzig’s citizens’ opera house. Within three years he would have at least four operas to his name. No wonder that in his vexation Kuhnau tried to discredit him as a mere ‘opera musician’.c

  Engraving by G. Lichtensteger of Georg Philipp Telemann (1681–1767), the most prolific of Bach’s peers, revered at the time as the leading German composer of the first half of the eighteenth century. (illustration credit 29)

  Much further south, experts of form would have fancied the prospects and rich talent of the Neapolitan thoroughbred, Domenico Scarlatti. He certainly had pedigree: having trained and then worked alongside his father, the distinguished composer Alessandro, he had been appointed organist and composer to the royal chapel in Naples before he had turned sixteen; at eighteen he had just returned to his post in Naples after four months in Florence and was busy composing his first two operas. But, according to Alessandro, neither Naples nor Rome was good enough for his son. Soon he was dispatched to Venice, still the epicentre of opera production, as it had been for a hundred years. With the wisdom of hindsight and in view of Domenico’s subsequent reputation – as a composer not of operas but of brilliant and quirky keyboard sonatas – his father’s vow not to pinion his young ‘eagle’ of a son assumes a poignant and prophetic aspect.

  Jean-Philippe Rameau started as the rank outsider. Though quickwitted at school, his academic results were said to be deplorable, but the seeds of a late-germinating attraction to opera may have been sown at this stage by his Jesuit teachers’ strange initiatives in didactic music-theatre that formed a part of their teaching curriculum. With his mind set on becoming a musician, parental hopes of seeing him enter the law were dashed from the moment his organist father consented to his leaving Dijon at the age of eighteen to study music in Italy. After studying for a few months in Milan, he drifted off to join a troupe of itinerant artistes ‘as first fiddle’, and we know nothing about the extent or quality of his Italian musical training – only that in later life he regretted that it had been so brief. On his return to France he served for a while as organist at Avignon Cathedral and then, from 1703, more permanently at Clermont-Ferrand, where he was already at work on his Premier Livre de pièces de clavecin, published in 1706. Later acknowledged as the leading savant of the science of contemporary music, Rameau, at the age of fifty, would emerge as one of the most distinctive musical voices of the late Baroque, becoming the greatest exponent of tragédie lyrique and opéra-ballet in the history of French opera, though few at this stage could have predicted it.

  Johann Mattheson, son of a prosperous Hamburg tax collector, was a child prodigy. From the age of six he receiv
ed private music tuition, studying the keyboard, a variety of instruments and composition. He was singing treble in various city churches in his own compositions and to his own organ accompaniment at the age of nine, before he could even reach the pedals. Hamburg’s Theater am Gänsemarkt had been launched as a commercial enterprise in 1678 as the first public opera house to open outside Italy. At fifteen Mattheson was treading its boards, taking many of the female leads. At sixteen he had graduated to tenor roles and had begun composing operas. At eighteen he took the title role in his own Die Plejades, oder das Sieben-Gestirne. By his own rarely modest testimony, Mattheson was now the Haupt person – the main man – of the Hamburg Opera, to which he stayed attached until he was twenty-three, since it gave him ‘the best possible opportunity’ as regards composition – far beyond what traditional conservatories might have taught him.2 The goal of composers, he claimed in 1700, should be to write music to generate ‘especially intense, serious, long-lasting and extremely profound emotions’, although, on the evidence of his own Der edelmüthige Porsenna (1702), he fell a long way short of his ambition.d Mattheson was perhaps too clever for his own good; nonetheless the smart money was on this sophisticated and broadly educated polymath. Later on he wrote about music from the vantage point of practical experience, not only as an observer but also as a trained professional. He considered opera houses essential to civic pride, a necessity, like having efficient banks: ‘The latter provide for general security, the former for education and refreshment … where the best banks are, so too are the best opera houses,’ he maintained.3

  Handel’s start in music was almost as promising. His elderly father – surgeon and valet de chambre to the Duke of Saxe-Weissenfels in the city of Halle, which had been badly affected by the Thirty Years War and recently annexed to Prussia – allegedly opposed his son’s joining a profession which he regarded as ‘a sort of peddler’s calling: cheap huckstering when all else failed’. But this most likely belongs to the same category of childhood anecdotes told to family and pupils that we have already encountered with Bach – serving to bolster an image of a disadvantaged childhood and of youthful resolve to pursue a chosen career regardless of obstacles – a recurring theme in musicians’ autobiographies of the time and in the novels of Wolfgang Caspar Printz (in particular his Musicus vexatus … Cotala, 1690). Handel’s musical education in Halle was actually fortunate in a number of ways. As his teacher for keyboard and in composition he was lucky to find Friedrich Wilhelm Zachow, the progressive organist of the Marienkirche and director of the local chorus musicus. Zachow’s expert private tuition was complemented by an exposure to the richly imaginative German and Latin church music of Halle’s vice-Capellmeister, Johann Philipp Krieger, to the music Handel compiled during his Italian travels (sold to the Marienkirche before he moved on to Weissenfels),e and to the dramatic works that gave Handel his first impressions of German court opera. Access to contemporary Italian music in a variety of genres both for church and for opera, just before the Pietist clergy placed a total embargo on Latin-texted church music in Halle, may have instilled in the young Handel an urge to follow Krieger’s footsteps across the Alps and experience it at its source.

  Mezzotint of Johann Mattheson (1681–1764), singer, composer, pundit and music theorist, after a portrait by Johann Salomon Wahl. (illustration credit 30)

  So, in spite of sharing so many elements of basic musical education and a similarly Luther-impregnated outlook with his exact contemporary, Bach, a more cosmopolitan predisposition would have given Handel the edge at this stage. In 1702, at the age of seventeen, he had already matriculated at Halle University, where he ‘must have been aware of the strongly progressive trend in philosophical sciences at the university’ as represented by Christian Thomasius and later (after Handel had left) by Christian Wolff, turning Halle into ‘one of the centres of the German Enlightenment’4 – at a time when Bach did not have the equivalent financial means to extend his formal education beyond his school years in Lüneburg. In the spring of the following year, perhaps counselled by his new friend Telemann, such were his musical ambitions ‘goading him beyond the narrow confines of Halle, with its petty feuds and commercial smugness’, that Handel packed his bags and set off for Hamburg ‘on his own bottom, and chiefly with a view to improvement’, as his first biographer, John Mainwaring, put it.5 Luckily for him, soon after his arrival he fell in with Mattheson (four years his senior), who claimed to have acted as his worldly-wise guide to this city of adventure. ‘Handel came to Hamburg in the summer of 1703 rich only in ability and good intentions,’ Mattheson characteristically wrote later. ‘I was almost the first with whom he made acquaintance. I took him round to all the choirs and organs here, and introduced him to operas and concerts.’6 In August they travelled together to Lübeck – full of camaraderie and bravado, and trying to outsmart each other composing ‘numerous double fugues in the carriage’ – ostensibly to audition for Buxtehude’s post as organist of the Marienkirche. But there was a snag: marriage to the outgoing organist’s mature daughter was apparently part of the deal, and they both shied away, neither feeling ‘the smallest inclination’ in that department. Twice already Handel had been given the chance to become a German church musician as Bach was, and twice he had turned away from it, sensing – and no doubt urged in this by Mattheson – the stronger lure of the magical world of opera.

  The opening of the Theater am Gänsemarkt in Hamburg in the late 1670s acted as a magnet to ambitious north German musicians. Here was the basis for a future career – risky, but with high rewards. Mattheson, Handel and Telemann all found themselves drawn to Hamburg and its opera house at various stages, and, in the case of the first two, it was where they would serve their theatrical apprenticeship under Reinhard Keiser. A brilliant and prolific composer, Keiser seems to have cut a restless and somewhat dissolute figure, greatly admired by his peers – Scheibe, Mattheson and Hasse. His importance in Charles Burney’s eyes was that he displayed ‘all the vigour of a fertile invention and correctness of study and expression’. Bach certainly came to know his music and may have taken a lead from Keiser in his dramatic use of arioso in his Passion music. As for Handel at this stage, we have only Mattheson’s less than reliable testimony that, on his arrival in Hamburg in 1703, ‘he composed long, very long arias, and really interminable cantatas, which had neither the right kind of skill nor of taste, though complete in harmony, but the lofty schooling of opera soon trimmed him into other fashions.’7 Despite its precarious debt-ridden state, its frequent changes of management and its vulnerability to periodic civil unrest, the Hamburg Opera stood as a beacon for opportunity and employment to a budding musician. Constant sniping from an ever-watchful clergy (or ‘biblical police’, as they were occasionally referred to) meant that religious themes were sometimes offered by way of appeasement. Although a peculiar eclecticism prevailed, with recitative in German often linking bravura arias sung in Italian, it offered the chance to learn and to become immersed in the latest Italian and French idioms. According to Mattheson – he can only have been thinking of Hamburg – a civic opera house was a ‘musical university’, a laboratory in which to experiment as both performer and composer.f

  The differing approaches of this Class of ’85 to the world of opera give us an inkling as to the range of their interests, orientations and ambitions. In autobiographical submissions of the time it was considered de rigueur to emphasise diligence in seeking out opera houses on one’s travels. So Telemann feels we should know that he travelled as a youngster all the way to Brunswick and Berlin just to experience opera at first hand, but gained access ‘concealed by friends, since admission was granted to few outsiders’. Opera hung around his throat ‘like a thunderstorm’, he tells us. Now, at twenty-one, he himself is already in charge of an opera-theatre in Leipzig. Handel, with Mattheson at his side, strides boldly into Hamburg’s Theater am Gänsemarkt and gets himself hired on the spot as a violinist in Reinhard Keiser’s orchestra. Domenico Scarlatti, meanw
hile, is doing just the opposite: trying to sidle out of parental reach and the fixed plan to propel him into the world of opera. Rameau – who will prove in the long term to be the most original opera composer of the five – has perhaps not yet given the matter a moment’s thought.g

  Though the Class of ’85 were born into a variety of musical cultures, opera provided them with a common aesthetic or institutional framework. The exception is Bach. As we saw earlier, he had every reason to be drawn to Hamburg at this time. His motives in making several trips from Lüneburg were essentially no different from those of any young provincial organist, like Johann Conrad Rosenbusch, for example, going to Hamburg around this time – ‘to become skilful in the future through keeping the company of other famous artists, and, where possible, to seek out his luck’. Bach’s prowess as a keyboard player may, as Forkel put it, have inclined him ‘to try to do, to see, and to hear everything which, according to the ideas he then entertained, could contribute to his improvement’.8 But there is no evidence to suggest that he confined his visits to its churches, deliberately shunning the theatre as home to ‘the twisted serpent of opera’;h nor that the very opportunities that Handel was soon to seek within its walls, Bach passed over ‘with indifference.’9 Just because the writers of his obituary do not mention the Hamburg opera or any contact with its leading light, Reinhard Keiser, does not mean that Bach ‘at the time had no particular interest in opera’.10 We saw earlier that his Lüneburg teacher, Georg Böhm, who played harpsichord continuo there in the summer season,i had the entrée to Reinhard Keiser and the Gänsemarkt personnel, as well as to Johann Adam Reincken, the doyen of north German organists, at St Catherine’s. Reincken himself was a co-instigator of the opera house and a director of its governing board. Either of these men could easily have accompanied Bach, given him letters of introduction to attend Keiser’s theatre or even arranged for him to participate in any of the twelve operas Keiser composed for Hamburg between 1700 and 1702. We can surmise that his natural musical curiosity drew Bach as a listener into its orbit, even if, once in, what early biographers identified as an innate shyness held him back from the networking needed for success in a pressurised world whose purpose was to satisfy ‘the vanity of [its] individual executants’.11