Bach: Music in the Castle of Heaven

by Gardiner, John Eliot

  The villain of the piece here was a certain Johann Heinrich Arnold. As cantor of the Michaeliskirche, where Bach sang as a chorister, and as his form master in the tertia, the twelve-year-old boy had unusually close exposure to him. Despite four or five years at university and an unsullied teaching record in Gotha and Erfurt, from the moment he arrived in Ohrdruf, Arnold seems to have been an irascible, heavy-handed disciplinarian given to doling out medieval-style punishments of the sort condemned by school reformers such as Comenius and Reyher.h Worse, there was no effective authority able to rein him in, and in the space of two years he managed to engineer the expulsion of three different headmasters of the Lyceum.22 Luckily the fourth in line, Johann Christian Kiesewetter, seems to have got his measure and managed to stay the course. One of Kiesewetter’s first tasks during Bach’s first full year in Ohrdruf was to remove three pupils from under Arnold’s sadistic sway,23 a highly unusual procedure, yet one he considered imperative: Bach, his cousin from Arnstadt, Johann Ernst, and an unknown third boy were singled out for reprieve on account of ‘the intolerable punishments’ meted out by Cantor Arnold.24

  As an orphan marked by his brother’s alleged authoritarianism, Bach’s year spent under Arnold’s bullying tutelage may have left scars of lasting damage. With all the chaos around him, Bach needed to be exceptionally resilient. The only thing we know for certain is that Kiesewetter was forced eventually to sack Arnold, to whom he referred as pestis scholae, scandalum ecclesiae et carcinoma civitatis (‘the plague of the school, the scandal of the church and the cancer of the city’).25 Even so, not all the disciplinary problems at the Lyceum ended with his dismissal, for in 1698 we find Kiesewetter pleading with the consistory for the installation of a detention room in the school in view of the ‘frequent and strong commotion’.26 The school environment was ugly, and any sign of weakness was calamitous. In these circumstances one might reasonably ask how anything positive or productive could have come from Bach’s formal education in Ohrdruf – with four different headmasters in as many years – or anything that would stand him in good stead when dealing with authority in his future career, let alone help to explain the training of a mind soon capable of making creative constructs of a bewildering complexity.

  Replacing Arnold as cantor was the 23-year-old Elias Herda.i Getting wind of Bach’s plans to move to Lüneburg in 1700, and having spent his own teens at the Michaelisschule, Herda could (and perhaps should) have warned him that membership of the Mettenchor there included more than just daily choir practice and the liturgical singing of an exciting new repertoire in a protected environment: that as likely as not it entailed street-singing or busking that often led to fisticuffs.j During the last third of the seventeenth century, street brawls between the two choir schools in Lüneburg had developed unchecked while the burghers stood by, impotently wringing their hands. It seems the choir prefects planned the pitched battles, dictating the no-go areas and the territorial division of the town between these embryonic Jets and Sharks or Mods and Rockers. The town council passed innumerable protocols and by-laws in its attempt to bring some sort of order into what eventually erupted into gang warfare, an eight-year Sängerkrieg (1655–63). At one point they even contemplated bringing in the army to sort things out.27 No doubt Herda stressed the standard virtues of boy choristers – modestia, pietas et diligentia – and advised Bach to keep out of trouble and set a good example.

  But, as already suggested, there are no grounds for supposing that Bach was such a model boy at any stage during his school years – nor for assuming the same of his mentor Elias Herda. In the Lüneburg town archives there is a document labelled ‘The Investigation and Punishment of the Schoolboy Herda’28 based on the sworn evidence of a respectable citizen. Sometime around 1692 Herda had been spotted with an accomplice in a local hostelry looking for trouble – ‘undoubtedly with the intention of starting a brawl, as they were thoroughly drunk and had [placed] their daggers on the table, and were arguing about nothing other than slashing and stabbing with [their] dirks and hunting knives’. The plaintiff, who had known Herda for the past three years and previously thought well of him, was incensed by his anti-social behaviour. That evening, making his way home, he was accosted by Herda, who called him a ‘rogue, thief and swine’ – a felony which in parts of Germany incurred the legal requirement to make a public apology and a six-week gaol sentence. The citizen now wanted satisfaction and proper assurances from the school authorities that Herda would be suitably punished for ‘such grievous and bare-faced insults’. The incident reveals a different side to the character of someone who has previously been portrayed as Bach’s erstwhile saviour and unofficial godfather, whose motto seems to have been: ‘Do as I say, not as I do.’ With the example of a former gang-leader-turned-respectable before his eyes, Bach may have followed a similar path. There is certainly sufficient circumstantial evidence here to dent the traditional image of Bach as an exemplary youth, on his way to becoming ‘the learned musician’, surviving unscathed the sinister goings-on in the schools he attended. It is just as credible that the bewigged cantor-to-be was the third in a line of delinquent school prefects – a reformed teenage thug.

  We now move forward a few years to an episode in Bach’s first full-time post – to the saga of the recalcitrant bassoon. On one of the few occasions when Bach actually complied with the consistory’s desire for him to compose figural music, he came up with what may have been a first draft of a cantata (BWV 150), or, if not, then something very similar to it, involving a difficult bassoon solo.k Setting the music in front of his raw student ensemble, the twenty-year-old Bach had either seriously miscalculated or was being deliberately provocative. His novice bassoonist, three years his senior, was Johann Heinrich Geyersbach. In rehearsal he evidently made a hash of it, and Bach showed his annoyance. As the son of a municipal music director, Bach would have been familiar with the values shared by Saxony’s instrumentalists, who were always told to be wary of Pfuscher (‘bunglers’), Störer (‘troublemakers’) and Stümpler (‘botchers’).l If this was the result of having done his best to make music with an unruly lot of what would now be called late-maturing students, it merely confirmed all his misgivings.m Geyersbach, for his part, was beleidigt (that superbly expressive German word which signifies both taking offence and feeling hurt), stung by the public dressing down he had received at the hands of a stuck-up young organist, known to be paid exceptionally well for doing remarkably little. The word Stümpler may have crossed Bach’s mind; instead, he called him a Zippel Fagottist. Even in recent biographies this epithet continues to be translated euphemistically as a ‘greenhorn’, a ‘rapscallion’ or a ‘nanny-goat bassoonist’, whereas a literal translation suggests something far stronger: Bach had called Geyersbach ‘a prick of a bassoonist’.

  A few weeks pass but the insult still rankles, and Geyersbach plots his revenge. On the evening of 4 August 1705 he and five of his comrades, well oiled after attending a christening party, sit waiting for Bach in the market square. Bach is on his way home from Neideck Castle. He passes the town hall when Geyersbach accosts him, cudgel in hand, demanding an apology for the insult. Bach is caught completely unawares. Geyersbach strikes out and hits him full in the face. Bach draws his rapier in self-defence. The situation turns ugly, and there is a scuffle broken up by the intervention of the other students. Eventually Bach dusts himself down and continues on his way. Next day he goes straight to the consistory to lodge a complaint. The clerk reports him as saying that, since ‘he did not deserve such treatment and was thus not safe on the streets, he humbly requested that … Geyersbach be duly punished and that he [Bach] be given appropriate satisfaction and accorded respect by the others, so that henceforth they would let him pass without abuse or attack.’29 Ten days go by before Geyersbach is summoned to answer the allegations, together with two of his accomplices. He denies pointblank attacking Bach, claiming that Bach had drawn his rapier first and gone after him with it: Geyersbach has holes in his vest to prov
e it. Five days later Bach is told he must produce a witness. Meanwhile he is admonished for calling Geyersbach a Zippel Fagottist.

  Suddenly the consistory switches tack: Bach already has ‘a reputation for not getting on with the students’, they maintain, ‘and of claiming that he was engaged only for simple chorale music, and not for concerted pieces, which was wrong, for he must help out in all music-making’.30 In effect, Bach’s punishment for successfully defending himself against Geyersbach is an order to make concerted music in church with a bunch of incompetent superannuated students. His reply is laconic – neither an outright refusal nor a dismissive criticism of the students’ musical shortcomings; in future ‘he would not refuse provided there were a Director Musices [present]’. In other words, he is prepared to compose further figural music, but not to direct or conduct, or to play under the direction of a school prefect. This elicits a homily from the consistory: ‘Men must live among imperfecta; he must get along with the students, and they must not make one another’s lives miserable.’31 Two days later, Bach’s cousin Barbara Catharina appears before the consistory and endorses his side of the story, but since neither the superintendent nor any other of the clerics are present, no verdict is reached: Geyersbach walks away with the mildest of reprimands.

  The Arnstadt Consistory had publicly failed to back up their young organist. The end result was a moral victory for Geyersbach and his cronies: they had broken Bach’s authority over them and knew that if they cheeked or even assaulted him a second time they would probably get away with it. By drawing his sword, even in self-defence, Bach may have been sailing closer to the wind than he knew. Perhaps the rapier he was carrying was more a ceremonial sword than a serious weapon; yet he had clearly threatened to use it. The legal punishment for this (later formulated in 1712) was severe: as we saw in Herda’s case, just by verbally insulting Geyersbach, Bach could have been required to make a public apology and sent to prison.32 Four church services a week, a rowdy intractable student choir, an incongruous cultural milieu at court – these were not sufficient to retain Bach in Arnstadt for long. On the other hand, there was the counter-attraction of Maria Barbara with whom he had recently begun a liaison. She was the youngest of three daughters of the organist-composer Michael Bach (his father’s first cousin). Recently orphaned, she was living in Arnstadt in a guesthouse belonging to her godfather Martin Feldhaus, the burgomaster responsible for hiring, and perhaps lodging, Bach.n So the two of them may even have been living under the same roof. Before being able to marry, Bach needed to move to a more secure post, one with less aggravation.

  In the late autumn of 1705 he decided to apply for a month’s leave, and hired his cousin Johann Ernst to deputise for him at the Neukirche while he travelled 260 miles north to Lübeck – ‘on foot’ according to the Nekrolog (a little improbably) – home to the man he then considered to be the greatest living practical musician, Dietrich Buxtehude, then aged seventy. There he witnessed dazzling concerted music on a monumental scale as well as small-scale chamber music of the most intimate, devotional kind. Memories of these – and of Buxtehude’s own special style of playing the organ – would stay with him all his life. His musical imagination had been fired with visions incomprehensible to any petty town official in Arnstadt, as he was to discover on his return there in February 1706. The minutes of his run-in with the Arnstadt Consistory are written in high-sounding jargon peppered with obscure Latin pedantries that may or may not have been understood correctly either by the councillors or by their faithful scribe. Bach’s replies are dismissive and proud, almost monosyllabic. To the perfectly reasonable question as to why he had been absent for four months instead of four weeks, Bach offered the withering riposte ‘in order to comprehend one thing and another about [my] art’.o The consistory, now provoked, took the opportunity to pile on its criticisms. Bach was reprimanded for having made ‘many curious variations in the chorale and mingled many strange tones in it’ so that the congregation were confused. In future, if he wished to introduce a tonus peregrinus he must sustain it and not shift too swiftly on to something else, as had been his habit, even playing a tonus contrarius.33

  Picture the scene: Bach, still high on his return from Lübeck after the most stimulating professional encounter of his life, is suddenly being given a lesson in how to compose and improvise at the organ by worthy councillors who have never taken a harmony lesson in their lives. Desperate to display their erudition, they in fact show their ignorance of even the rudiments of musical theory and its terminology. They then further attack by deploring the absence of figural music in the Neukirche, laying the blame squarely on him for not collaborating with the students. They push him into a corner on this issue. Bach parries: provide him with a competent director (and not a mere prefect) and he would ‘perform well enough [with the students]’. The next episode borders on the farcical. The prefect Rambach is reproved by the consistory for the désordres between the students and the organist. Rambach counter-attacks, accusing Bach of improvising for far too long, then, once corrected, of going to the opposite extreme and playing too little, thereby anticipating their next criticism – that he had gone off to the pub during the sermon, leaving Rambach no time to get back to his post before the start of the next hymn, and then causing mayhem by adding cadenza-like flourishes between the verses.

  During the next six months the situation deteriorated still further. While organists have always seemed to consider it fair sport to confuse the old dears of the parish by introducing strange harmonic progressions during the verses of a hymn, the impasse with the student choir was more serious, as was his extended unauthorised absence in Lübeck. Bach’s final admonition was recorded on 11 November 1706, when, after being asked to declare once again if he was willing to make music with the students as instructed, he said he would give his reply in writing (which was probably never forthcoming). It is easy to see why the Arnstadt authorities, for their part, were so incensed by his attitude, which must have seemed unpardonably arrogant to them. Perhaps they knew that he had been eyeing up another post in Mühlhausen for some time, and it was only the Duke who had given instructions that he should be retained.

  The consistory asked him by what right he had invited a strange, unknown, unmarried young woman (frembde Jungfer) to make music with him in the organ loft. Women were still not allowed to sing in church at this time and we are left wondering whether this was a private assignation – though it cannot have been with his future wife Maria Barbara, since she could hardly be considered a ‘stranger’ in Arnstadt – or a deliberate flouting of authority. Bach replied cryptically that he had already ‘told Magister Uthe about it’. Instructed to provide a cantata, Bach had obliged, composing one for solo soprano (easier to coach than his allotted student ensemble), which he had rehearsed with her in the organ loft. Tongues obviously wagged, but Bach had the perfect (unspoken) rejoinder: ‘You asked for a cantata: here it is!’

  Clearly there was no future for him in this stamping ground of his ancestors. As a parting shot he may have found a way to comply outwardly with the consistory’s demands while also getting even with Geyersbach. In what many scholars consider to be the first of his surviving church cantatas, BWV 150, Nach dir, Herr, verlanget mich, there are three movements which feature an exposed independent part for bassoon, and in one case a fast passage covering a range of two octaves and a minor third – playable by a competent professional but not by a student sight-reading, let alone a Zippel Fagottist. Had Bach placed the perfect banana skin and engineered a final public showdown with his nemesis?p

  A pattern was now beginning to emerge in early adulthood: in his short-fused exchanges with Geyersbach, in his refusal to tolerate slipshod music-making and in his haughty, laconic replies to the consistory (at least as reported), we have evidence of Bach’s propensity to flout – or simply ignore – authority and to disregard the rules of ordered society. In his eyes he would never be guilty, no matter what actually happened: the fault would always lie
with somebody else. We can link this behaviour to the alternative characterisations of his unruly temperament, his susceptibility to peer-group pressure, and his experience of bullying and harassment in childhood and the rough-and-tumble of life in the successive schools he had attended. We notice a deep reluctance to ingratiate himself (again, unlike all the rest of the Class of ’85, who had more worldly success) and a tendency to sulk when confronted by what he saw as bone-headed officialdom. It is almost as if a perverse streak in him was seeking to act out the meretricious side of the music profession as we find it gleefully satirized by novelists of the time like Johann Beer or Daniel Speer.34 To his employers he was already showing signs of being ‘incorrigible’. Small wonder, then, that in later life he should have tried to play down these transgressions in response to questioning by his children. In a letter to his father’s biographer J. N. Forkel, Emanuel Bach wrote: ‘There are many adventurous stories about him. A few of them may be true, and concern useful pranks. The deceased never liked to hear them mentioned, so pray omit these humorous things.’35 Aged twenty-one, Bach seems to have been a man of restive intelligence, heading for a life of more or less perpetual ‘vexation and hindrance’ (his own expression) – of a typical square peg in a round hole.

  By 1 July 1707 Bach was responsible for the music at six services per week in the Blasiuskirche in Mühlhausen, two more than in Arnstadt. He had gone from being organist of the third church in a small town to municipal organist in the main church of a city almost twice its size, the second largest town in Thuringia and, like Lübeck and Hamburg, one of a handful of ‘free imperial cities’ where councillors were answerable directly to the Emperor in Vienna and not to some local princeling. Here he was now de facto music director, occupying the equivalent position to the one Buxtehude had held in Lübeck. Just as in Arnstadt, his new contract made no reference to participation in or responsibility for vocal or concerted music, though, as before, this was evidently expected of him. Yet he had learnt his lesson in Arnstadt, and one gets the feeling that his artistic priorities had shifted too. This time, instead of trying to concern himself exclusively with the organ – its mechanical workings and the challenges it held for him as a virtuoso performer, improviser and composer – he was now actively engaged in writing innovative Kirchenstücke for voices and instruments (see Chapter 4). Having witnessed at first hand what bold musical initiatives an experienced figure like Buxtehude could achieve in such a position, Bach, aged twenty-two, was hoping to be granted the same degree of autonomy to pursue his own similar goals in Mühlhausen.