The stark truth is that, by the time of Bach’s Leipzig appointment in 1723, the best days of the Thomasschule were past. Once considered the pacesetter among choir schools in German-speaking lands, standards and conditions had been heading downwards for at least a generation, since the time when Johann Schelle had been cantor in the 1670s. The old system of pooling resources to create a ‘Concert of forty or fifty voices’ made up of town musicians, choirboys, students and other music-lovers had long ago ceased to function. From around the turn of the century there was a marked dip in the musical quality of the Alumnen, the boys who boarded. Added to this was a shortage of funds sufficient to attract university-student musicians, who helped to plug the gaps in the performing ensemble of Thomaner, when they could very well play at the opera house. A glance at Johann Kuhnau’s petitions to the town council shows us that the problems Bach was about to face – in recruiting and training a musical ensemble capable of tackling his music and rising to its exceptional technical demands (far in excess of Kuhnau’s) – had already bedevilled his predecessor’s musical ambitions for the whole duration of his cantorate (1701–22).c
Engraving of street music performed by Leipzig University students in 1729. (illustration credit 34)
On 4 December 1704 Kuhnau complained to the council that, since Telemann had arrived to take over the music at the Neukirche, music at the Nikolaikirche and the Thomaskirche, the two major city churches, had suffered, ‘especially on feast-days and during the [trade] fairs … when I should be making the best and strongest music’. This, according to Kuhnau, ‘causes the greatest mischief, for the better students, as soon as they have acquired, at the cost of infinite pains to the cantor, sufficient practice, long to find themselves among the Operisten’, participating in the avant-garde activities at the Neukirche, where the music (at this stage under Melchior Hoffmann) ‘had degenerated and become operatic in character, which naturally scandalised those members of the congregation who appreciated and loved the true style of church music’.4 So, while the Neukirche creamed off his best musicians, Kuhnau was left with boys ‘who shouted themselves hoarse outside in the street, or were sickly and crabby, together with some town musicians, apprentices and none-too-competent ad hoc musicians’. The situation deteriorated further all through his cantorate, to the point where Kuhnau could no longer put on ‘full-voiced music’, let alone music for two or more choirs, and had to make do with a cappella motets, since he could not locate ‘a few well-trained students’ to help out at services in the city’s two main churches. He petitioned the council to re-introduce supernumeraries (in effect, four or five extra pupil places) and to ban the students from singing at the Neukirche, but with what success we do not know.5
Kuhnau’s chief bugbear was, of course, Telemann, who in his student days (as we saw in Chapter 4) had been the very epitome of this counterculture. It is faintly ironic therefore that twenty years later he should have expressed interest in succeeding Kuhnau as Thomascantor. Along with two other favoured candidates, Christoph Graupner and Johann Friedrich Fasch (both of whom had been Thomaner in its heyday), he knew at first hand how problematic it would be to navigate the bureaucratic swamps of Leipzig and achieve anything worth while there. Judging from the evidence from Kuhnau’s tenure, one can only conclude that by the early 1720s the cantorate had become something of a poisoned chalice. Sensing this, after weighing up the Leipzig offer, all three men preferred to stay in their current posts – proof that eighteenth-century Capellmeisters often postured like today’s football managers: hoodwinking their current employers and playing on their fears that they were about to leave just in order to lever a raise in salary.
Bach himself was not exempt from this, turning down the offer of an attractive post at Halle in 1713 and gaining himself a boost to his income at the Weimar Court (see below, this page). But when the prospect of the Leipzig post materialised ten years later his first consideration was for loss of status: ‘it did not seem at all proper to me to change my position of Capellmeister for that of Cantor,’ he later reflected.6 Not having been a Thomaner himself and having never previously worked in Leipzig (as far as we know), he had no inside information as to the potential obstacles other than via professional hearsay or gossip. The allure of the Thomaner choir and the quality of its music-making might have been suggested to him by Adam Immanuel Weldig, who had been a prefect in the 1680s under Schelle, when the choir was in its prime, and later became Bach’s landlord and fellow musician at the Weimar Court. If so, this rosy image could have been shattered when Bach and Kuhnau met face to face in April 1716 as joint assessors of a new organ in Halle. We have a detailed menu of the sumptuous dinner that they consumed at the Golden Ring tavern,7 which, together with the lavish quantity of wine and beer set before them, may have been enough to loosen Kuhnau’s tongue as to the pitfalls of the job – the paucity of musical resources, the back-stabbing and the wearisome challenges to his authority.
Then again, a visit to Leipzig itself (a lucrative commission to examine a newly completed organ at the university church in December 1717) may have added a fresh layer of impressions – favourable ones for the most part. Leipzig held the prospect of a prestigious university education for his sons, but its main attraction for Bach was its rich urban life – its thriving book trade, the presence of printers, the network of foreign agents and the cosmopolitan aura the city acquired with the flood of visitors attending its three annual trade fairs. For others it was probably the novelty and exoticism of things on offer: we are told ‘visitors could savour a cup of imported Turkish coffee or purchase an ivory crucifix from Florence, a wool sweater from England or even tobacco from America. They could also expect to encounter street musicians, jugglers, tightrope walkers, fire-eaters, giants and midgets, snake charmers and a great menagerie of animals – elephants, apes, tropical birds etc.’8 No wonder, then, that before deciding to leave Cöthen after five and a half comparatively untroubled years as Capellmeister at the court of Prince Leopold, Bach prevaricated. It was fifteen years since he had last worked as a civic employee, and to walk away from the protected (though at times stifling) environment of courtly life in the provinces to begin working again under public scrutiny suggests that he needed to quell deeply embedded fears – a premonition even – of what a return to municipal employment might entail. ‘I postponed my decision for a quarter of a year,’ he later told his old schoolfriend Georg Erdmann.9 Throwing in his lot with civic employment meant Bach was now leaving behind him a twenty-year pattern of shuttling between church and court, exchanging the uncertainties of aristocratic caprice for a drop in salary and status, and the frustrations of municipal atrophy.d
Meanwhile the long – and, to some councillors, dispiriting – search for Kuhnau’s successor led to months of uncertainty at the Thomasschule and a disruption of its musical functions. Once Bach, after Telemann’s withdrawal the third choice for the cantorate, had finally decided to answer the call, he did so on the basis of reassurances from Burgomaster Gottfried Lange (see Plate 11b), who described the post to him ‘in such favourable terms that finally (particularly since my sons seemed inclined towards [university] studies) I cast my lot, in the name of the Lord, and made the journey to Leipzig.’10 We have no means of knowing what really went on in those discussions. Ten months after Kuhnau’s death, he was duly elected. By the time of his appointment Bach had already been required to pass through several hoops: first, to apply formally and audition for the post (7 February), then to sign an undertaking to take it up within four weeks (19 April). Once elected on 5 May, he was presented to the consistory court three days later and sworn in on the 13 th; the starting date of his salary was set two days later. He and his family were reported to have arrived from Cöthen on the 22nd and, according to a Leipzig chronicle, the Acta Lipsiensium academica, he performed his first music on 30 May in the Nikolaikirche, two days prior to his formal installation, ‘mit guten applausu’.11
Bach would soon have discovered that the days we
re long gone when the presence of a genuinely music-loving burgomaster, together with a headmaster sympathetic towards consolidating the musical standards of the Thomaner, had allowed earlier cantors such as Calvisius, Schein, Knüpfer and Schelle to select the most promising recruits on the basis of a musical entrance exam. That had started to change during Kuhnau’s time, when the city councilmen, divided in their political allegiances, held conflicting views on the way the school should be run. Sometimes clashing with the leading church officials of the city, those with Pietistic leanings now began to question the role of music in church and at baptisms and funerals.e Clear signs of their burying their differences in a pact of silence have recently come to light, showing that they conspired to conceal from Bach the dysfunctional reality he was now expected to deal with.12 At the point when he formally pledged to comply with ‘the School statutes now in effect or to be put into effect’, Bach might reasonably have assumed that he was committing himself to the old regulations – ‘not to take any boys into the School who have not already laid a foundation in music, or are not at least suited to being instructed therein, nor do the same without the prior knowledge and consent of the Honourable Inspectors and Directors’.13 That was not the case, and he had every reason to feel that he had been misled and tricked, since he had no means of knowing at the time of his pledge that the recruitment process had already been tilted away from musical criteria and that his potential earnings from Akzidentien (freelance fees) due to him as cantor had been reduced.
These moves had been discussed in council meetings as early as 1701 and were certainly in the air when a commission and working party were appointed in 1717 to recommend revisions to the school statutes. Although their findings were known to councillors at the time of Bach’s appointment, they were not issued until 13 November 1723 – six months after he had been sworn in.f Besides the points made above they exhibited increasing pressure on the school to match up to the higher academic standards of its nearest rival, the Nikolaischule, while at the same time strengthening its status and image as a charity school with an increased commitment towards the children of the underprivileged and paupers of the city. To further this, a key paragraph was struck from the statutes which had specified, ‘a boy, regardless of [his] social origin, may be admitted as alumnus only if [he is] highly proficient in music.’14 At a stroke serious damage was dealt to the musical standards and prestige of the Thomasschule. Henceforth the specialist musical caucus of the school (the Alumnat), with pupils recruited largely from outside Leipzig, came to be seen almost as an optional appendage – a sop to the musically minded lobby and an irritant to the academics. Inevitably this meant a lowering of the musical quality of the intake at a time when less civic money for beneficia (fees in cash) was available to pay student extras or supernumeraries, who were frequently needed to plug gaps in the Thomaner apparatus.
On the face of it, then, Bach’s dispute with the Leipzig Council was little different from the battles that earlier cantors such as Krieger and Kuhnau had fought with the same town council in defence of their authority to provide good music, and typical of other clashes between cantors or organists and councils in other German cities (still continuing today), except for this new, initially hidden, throttling of the supply of new recruits.g To this extent it was independent of any quirks in Bach’s character. But the more one probes the underlying causes of his sequence of disagreements with the Leipzig Council, the clearer it becomes that after fifteen years’ employment at ducal courts, he was ill-equipped to deal with a situation where his capacity to deliver church music of a high quality was fundamentally compromised by the organisational arrangements with which he was working. Nevertheless his part in exacerbating an already tense situation may be traced back to his ancestry: the Bachs’ traditional view of themselves as a privileged and untouchable guild of musicians on a musical mission. Bach’s Bible reading strengthened his belief in the scripturally sanctioned bond he had been told existed between him, his family and the musicians who served in King David’s Temple, led by Asaph as Capellmeister (as we saw in Chapter 2 and Plates 2a and b). Where modern biblical scholarship views this picture of music in the Temple as idealised and anachronistic, there is every reason to believe that Bach read it as true history.15 He seems to have been drawn to the particular chapter (I Chronicles 25) that deals with the way music was structured in the Temple, how the musicians there were organised in guilds and set apart in their offices, and how they were given specially allocated roles as composers, singers and instrumentalists. In the margin of his copy of Calov’s Bible commentary Bach writes, ‘This chapter is the true foundation of all church music pleasing to God.’ That King David did not think up this plan on a whim, according to Bach, is clear from other additions in the margin: ‘NB. A splendid example, that besides other forms of worship music, too, was especially ordered by God’s spirit through David.’16 It was a brave council, then, that set out to brush aside Bach’s conception of his divinely inspired and divinely appointed office.
We saw earlier how successive generations of Bachs, concerned to prove themselves as virtuous citizens, had often clashed with their civic employers, how they had been resented by other musicians and accused of nepotism; how some, like his father, Ambrosius, learnt to work the system to their advantage, while others, like Christoph of Eisenach, failed, and others still, like Christoph of Ohrdruf, skirted around it, managing for years to get out of ‘toilsome school duties’ in the Lyceum.17 The aggregate of Bach’s provincial roots and his family’s status were both a source of strength and, later on, a hindrance in terms of social advancement, as we can see in his obduracy in contractual negotiations. How far did a certain frame of mind, even a congenital problem with authority, predetermine the long series of clashes in which he was embroiled all through his career? The strong impression one gets is of a man almost constantly at odds with someone or something. It should not surprise us, then, if we find that these lifelong problems with anger and authority were incubated in the unsavoury atmosphere and environment of his early schooling and in childhood traumas.
The picture of lawlessness in the Eisenach Latin School we glimpsed in Chapter 2 left us uncertain which way the eight-year-old Bach faced. Was he a model pupil, holding himself apart and diligently learning his catechism, his musical rudiments and his ten new Latin words each day – the goody-two-shoes of legend – or did he belong to the ‘in’ crowd of playground ruffians who chased the girls, the proto-hooligans who lobbed bricks through windows and whose blather disrupted church services? These are, of course, fictional constructions; yet each in its way is plausible. There is no reason to turn our backs on the plentiful evidence of rowdiness and thuggery which caused the Eisenach Consistory so much concern, stoking its fear of a scandalum publicum,18 nor to take it on trust that Bach was a paragon of rectitude. The side of his upbringing often glossed over is the one in which, like Brer Rabbit in Uncle Remus, he was ‘bred en bawn in a brier-patch’.19
Given what has been unearthed about the school conditions prevailing in Eisenach, the statistics of Bach’s absences take on a different hue. Faced with the hard evidence of von Kirchberg’s and Zeidler’s memoranda (see Chapter 2), we have to ask whether the widely reported disorderliness, even the alleged ‘brutalisation of boys’, had as much to do with these high instances of truancy. In which case, was it Bach or his parents who decided he should regularly miss his school classes? So far the only conclusion one can reach with any degree of certainty is that his less than glittering school record in Eisenach – he came 47th out of 90 in his first year, rising to 14th the next year (his second in the quinta) and then 23rd out of 64 in the quarta – was marginally better than that of his brother Jacob, who came in two places lower in his final year, despite being three years older. When later in life he was asked ‘how he contrived to become such a master in his art’, Bach generally replied, ‘I was obliged to be industrious; whoever is equally industrious will succeed equally well.’20 Such an opaque
statement leaves us none the wiser as to why such industriousness – training himself for duty, striving for craft, expertise and achievement – really took hold.
Suddenly, after the death of his parents and with his move to Ohrdruf, Bach’s school performance improved dramatically. Perhaps there were fewer distractions there – certainly nothing like the hive of musical activity he had been used to in Eisenach as a young boy. Alternatively he may have retreated into himself, simply doing what was required of him – diligence triumphing over adversity. The school records show his grades were excellent: entering the quarta in March 1695, he spent two years in the tertia, where he was placed fourth in 1696 and first in 1697. Then came two years in the seconda, where he was placed fifth in 1698 and second in 1699. The Ohrdruf Lyceum was regarded as one of the better educational establishments in the region. Yet, on closer inspection, the situation within the school – just as it had been in Eisenach – was far from peaceful or conducive to learning: ‘a downright turbulent and disorderly situation [pertaining] in this otherwise respected educational institution’.21 Contemporary sources reveal a comprehensive menu of chastisements, with both physical punishment and the threat of die ewige Verdammnis (‘eternal damnation’) meted out to pupils convicted of misdemeanour or vice of one sort or another, including bullying, sadism and sodomy. Incidence of all these were common enough at the time to justify graphic description and detailed codes of punishment in J. H. Zedler’s Universal-Lexicon (1732–54) as well as in contemporary memoirs.
Bach: Music in the Castle of Heaven Page 24
