Bach: Music in the Castle of Heaven

by Gardiner, John Eliot

  But something serious must have upset him there, for before the first full year of his contract was up, Bach had bowed out. At this stage he seems to be conforming to the stereotypical itinerant musician as described in Daniel Speer’s novel Ungarischer oder Dacianischer Simplicissimus (1683), somehow at odds with a hostile society and constantly obliged to ‘travel onwards, against his own will’.36 The traditional explanation is that he was caught in the crossfire between the representatives of the two wings of Lutheranism – Orthodox and Pietist – yet Bach made no mention of this in his letter requesting his release to the burgomaster and parochial conventus (church council). Instead he focused on two other bones of contention: pay and conditions. Having thanked the mayor for his ‘graciousness in permitting me to enjoy a better living’ in Mühlhausen, he went on to say it was simply not enough: ‘However frugal my manner of living,’ he claimed, ‘I have not enough to live on, having regard to my rental and other really necessary expenses.’ At no time in his career was Bach shy in bargaining for more pay and was always keen to negotiate the best possible terms for himself and his family, as much as a measure of self-worth as from economic necessity. Now newly married, he had extra responsibilities, as Maria Barbara was expecting their first child. The lure of a raise from 85 to 150 florins (plus benefits), which was what he would receive in his next position at the Weimar Court, represented a hefty (77 per cent!) improvement in his circumstances, and he had found it irresistible.

  This was only half the story. The other half concerned the conditions of work in Mühlhausen. In his letter he referred, without going into any detail, to the ‘hindrance’ he had experienced to his music-making. After the earlier set-back in Arnstadt, in Mühlhausen, Bach had started out with goodwill, determined to improve musical standards and to establish a forward-looking musical regime – and been thwarted. All that had been made available to him – and then only at irregular intervals – was ‘an unholy mix of school choirs, non-professional helpers, student instrumentalists, and town musicians’.37 This is surely the point of his spelling out somewhat tactlessly to the councillors that he had ‘received the gracious admission of His Serene Highness of Saxe-Weimar into his Court Chapel and Chamber Music’38 – meaning a better quality of musical performer than he was ever likely to find in Mühlhausen. Bach could not resist having a parting swipe at the councillors for the low standard of the music-making at the Blasiuskirche by comparing it to that in almost all the surrounding ‘villages, where church music is flourishing … and often better than the harmony fashioned in this placed’.9 One sees what a colossal disappointment this would have been for him. Looking back over the last four or five years, he might have found it ironic that the figural music he had been unwilling to provide in Arnstadt (because of inadequate resources) he had been happy, eager even, to compose and perform in Mühlhausen – but he had been prevented from accomplishing anything worth while by conditions there.q

  It is against this background, and in his request to the church council of the Blasiuskirche for his release from Mühlhausen, that Bach defined for the first time an Endzweck (artistic goal) – ‘namely, a well-regulated or orderly church music to the Glory of God and in conformity to your wishes’.

  (illustration credit 35)

  This was the pipe dream that was to become a lifelong obsession – something, he claimed, it had not been possible to accomplish in Mühlhausen ‘without opposition’. By moving to Weimar, he explains to the city elders, he now hopes to be able to pursue ‘the object which concerns me most, the betterment of church music, free from the opposition and vexation encountered here.’40 Bach, at twenty-three, had shown himself, on this occasion at least, cooperative and just about polite to his employers, from whom he now parted on reasonable terms. ‘Since he could not be made to stay,’ they reasoned, ‘consent must doubtless be given to his dismissal.’41 Bach had a burgeoning desire for the freedom and means to make music – but under orderly and regulated conditions that he fully expected to find on his return to the Weimar Court. His move illustrates an uncrushable sense of his own worth as a craftsman and his growing certainty as an artist.

  For the next fifteen years Bach operated in a cultural milieu beyond the arm of civic power and church control. Working within the confines of a provincial middle-German court and in the semi-feudal employ of capricious musically minded aristocrats, while risky and at times combustible, seems to have suited him – at least for quite a while. True, he was moving from a situation where he had been the undisputed leader of civic musical life in a ‘free imperial city’ to a position at court in provincial Weimar, where, despite an exceptionally favourable salary and a fancy title – Cammer Musico and Hofforganist42 – he started off next to last in the professional hierarchy of the court Capelle, which was headed by Johann Samuel Drese as Capellmeister and his son Johann Wilhelm as his deputy. But on the face of it so much was propitious – his young family, the ‘better living’ he had referred to in his resignation letter to the Mühlhausen Council, the support and enthusiasm of two music-loving dukes, and the clear favour they showed him in his regular increases in salary and in accommodating him within the strict pecking order of court musicians. It would nevertheless require powers of diplomacy, hitherto not much in evidence, to carve out a fulfilling niche for his musical activities within this rigidly stratified and tightly circumscribed milieu. At least it fitted with his deeply embedded sense of hierarchical authority: God first, then His closest representative on earth – King, Prince or Duke.

  But what if there were two? Ever since an imperial law of 1629 the Duchy of Saxe-Weimar operated under a constitution that vested executive authority jointly in twin rulers. At the time of Bach’s earlier employment in Weimar five years before, it was the younger of the two brothers, Duke Johann Ernst III, to whom he had been directly answerable; it was he who had pieced together the court Capelle after its dissolution twenty years earlier and who had made all the main appointments. Bedridden for the past two years (during which his elder brother neither visited nor inquired after him), his decline and loss of appetite accelerated, according to his wife, by tobacco and strong wine (der starcke Sect und tabac), he died in 1707 – just a year before Bach’s return to Weimar as court organist. The elder brother, Wilhelm Ernst, had been highly impressed by Bach’s organ-playing at his audition in June 1708, and it was his decision (as sole ruler momentarily) to hire him on the spot. In his mind, Bach was now his man. But friction was inevitable in this feudal edifice from the moment the 21-year-old Ernst August stepped up as co-regent in 1709 and occupied the Rote Schloss (‘Red Palace’)(see Plates 7a and b). He and his 45-year-old uncle, Wilhelm Ernst, who lived in the adjoining castle, the Wilhelmsburg, were permanently at loggerheads. The uncle arrested his nephew’s advisers and decreed that members of the court Capelle could make music over the road in the Rote Schloss only with his express permission or on pain of a stiff fine and even imprisonment; the nephew threatened reprisals if they complied.

  How were these ‘joint servants’ of both ducal establishments supposed to behave? Initially Bach’s situation appeared safe, being a clear favourite of both uncle and nephew, each making separate demands of his time and talents. To the uncle he was a musical trophy – his private court organist to be heard twice weekly up in the Himmelsburg,r and in special organ recitals, and to be paraded abroad on diplomatic missions. For the nephew he was primarily a chamber musician and a composer of the highest calibre, fit to consort with his half-brother the prince, Johann Ernst (himself a talented composer), and to impart to him the fruits of his erudition and skill. How was he to satisfy both masters (given the explosive tension between them), to survive the rigid court protocols, rankings and intrigues with the ever-present risk of being flogged if found playing for the ‘wrong’ duke – which was the fate of the horn-player Adam Andreas Reichardt, who, each time he asked to be relieved of his post, received a hundred blows and a prison sentence? That was the challenge. Having eventually made his g
etaway, Reichardt was branded an outlaw by Duke Ernst August and hanged in effigy as a lesson to other would-be transgressors.43

  In the productive years that followed one might expect all Bach’s musical activities and the compositions they engendered to be subject to the whims and different musical preferences of these two autocratic paymasters, and to a degree this was the case. The religious-minded Wilhelm Ernst provided serious and discriminating support for Bach’s sacred music: according to the Nekrolog, ‘His gracious lord’s delight in his playing fired him up to attempt everything possible in the art of how to treat the organ.’ In effect he stood as patron of fully half of Bach’s extant organ music – the fraction, that is, to have survived in written form (the majority being the improvisations that emanated from Bach’s creative mind, which disappeared instantly into the celestial ether of the Himmelsburg). Over in the Rote Schloss, other priorities ruled. There the younger Ernst August, with whom Bach came to enjoy a far warmer relationship, was known for his enthusiasm for modern secular music, and the excitement he showed when his younger brother Johann Ernst returned from Holland in 1713 with a trunk load of new concertos by Corelli, Vivaldi and others to show to members of the Capelle is reason enough to suppose that Johann Ernst’s teacher J. G. Walther and the court keyboardist Bach ‘soon had them on their music desks, ready to play’.44

  Princely courts were reputed by some commentators of the day to be full of scheming ‘foxes and wolves’, and the life of a court servant no better than that of ‘a caged bird’, yet at this stage Bach could have reflected that as a rule his family tended to fare better under aristocratic than civic patronage – and that had also been his experience till now.45 Yet, no matter how much the two dukes admired his skills, at some stage Bach must have realised that the route to full responsibility for the music at court – the way it was organized and the free rein it would give for his creative urgings – was barred to him in Weimar by the presence of the Dreses, père et fils. The flow of church cantatas that had burgeoned so promisingly in Mühlhausen was stemmed for some five years, by which time his artistic and stylistic priorities had started to shift. This may help to explain why he toyed with the idea of accepting the invitation to ‘present himself’ for the town organist’s post at the Marienkirche in Halle in 1713, and once elected (after a two-week visit) why it took him so long to sign. Much to the chagrin of the church elders, who felt that he had led them a dance, he eventually turned them down. Bach, predictably denying accusations of skulduggery, put his decision down to their uncompetitive offer of a salary with built-in incidental fees that were impossible to predict, but one cannot help but suspect tactical manoeuvring.

  The truth is that the opportunity Halle had offered him – to compose and perform cantatas once a month – was exactly what was lacking in Weimar and was then promptly rectified there. The new title of Concertmeister, conferred on him in 1714 (at his own ‘most humble request’), and with the equivalent of a Capellmeister’s salary to boot, marked a shift in the balance of power at court, giving him increased authority in so far that from now on ‘the musicians of the Capelle are required to appear upon his demand.’46 But not even that could disguise the fact that both Drese as Capellmeister and his son as deputy still stood higher up the professional ladder, as Bach knew full well. When Drese senior died on 1 December 1716, Bach’s immediate reaction was to assume full control and – possibly as a bid to be confirmed in the now vacant post – to come up with three first-rate cantatas for three consecutive Sundays in Advent (BWV 70a, 186a and 147a), well beyond his contractual obligation to provide one a month. Tantalisingly the autograph score of the third of these cantatas breaks off abruptly in mid-flow – though whether from sudden illness, pique, disenchantment or Drese junior pulling rank (he was confirmed as court Capellmeister in October 1717), we cannot tell.s

  At times when Bach sensed that he might be losing the argument with a higher authority, as now, he had potential recourse to inserting a sliver of mild subversion into his music, which, provided it stayed reasonably subtle, could always be denied and never be proven – neither by the intended target, nor of course by us. A windbag of a preacher was a fair target, for example. Duke Wilhelm Ernst had given his first sermon as a boy of seven, and was given to preaching to his entire entourage at the Weimar Court and to holding spot-check catechisms and interrogations of his staff to see if they had been paying attention to what he had said. The closing aria of Bach’s cantata BWV 185, Barmherziges Herze der ewigen Liebe, for bass and a continuo strings opens with the words ‘This is the Christian’s art’ and then proceeds to list his various obligations and injunctions. Bach comes up with ingenious ways to overcome the banality of the text by mimicking the rhetorical displays of eloquence of a typically pompous preacher – repeating almost ad nauseam the same words with little mitigating musical variety. Whether or not this was an ambivalent piece of mild satire at the Duke’s expense, the relationship between them was about to deteriorate rapidly. The final movement of his Christmas cantata BWV 63, Christen, ätzet diesen Tag, opens with a one-bar fanfare for four trumpets and kettle drums – ostensibly to announce the portentous arrival on earth of the baby Jesus as King, but it could equally serve as a ceremonial greeting to some dignitary, even Duke Wilhelm Ernst himself. Hard on the heels of this stylised bugle call comes a flippant fragmentary response – a sort of irreverent tittering by the three oboes, then passing like Chinese whispers from them to the upper strings (had he tripped or was his wig askew?).t It points the way to the infinitely more elaborate and cryptic ambiguities of Shostakovich, who once made an impassioned plea, ‘I want to fight for the legitimate right of laughter in “serious” music.’47 Bach might have gone along with that; but even if he found it therapeutic now and again to vent his disgruntlement on an unsuspecting victim, it would be wrong to see him as a full-blown dissident encoding antiestablishment messages in his scores.

  Mild satire was one thing; facetiousness was another matter. Performed at the birthday celebrations of Duke Christian of Weissenfels on 23 February 1713, BWV 208, Was mir behagt, ist nur die muntre Jagd!, allowed Bach for the first time to adopt wholesale the conventions of Italian opera and the secular chamber cantata and to step aside from the contemporary fuss over just how theatrical a piece of church music was entitled to be.u It was a chance to experiment with recitative without fear of censure, yet in a liberated style far removed from the formalism of all his contemporaries except Handel. After only four bars the rhythmic pulse of free recitation shoots off into a fluctuating arioso over continuous semiquavers in the continuo. Bach saw an opportunity to depict in quick succession the flight of the goddess Diana’s arrow (in implied allegro), her momentary delight at the prospect of a catch (adagio) and the swiftness with which she pursues her prey (presto). Here, in a pastoral allegory stretched over fifteen mostly short movements, he could pretend for an instant that he was a Handel or a Scarlatti. Fresh and bucolic, it is a rougher and less charming equivalent to Handel’s Acis and Galatea. Perhaps this is what recent commentators intend when describing it as a ‘pathbreaking work’ and ‘a milestone in Bach’s creative development’.48 Salomo Franck’s text for BWV 208 is frankly banal. The stock Classical allegorical characters he introduces (besides Diana these are Pales, Endymion and Pan) are little more than cardboard cut-outs. The ‘dramatic’ plot is simplicity itself. Diana praises hunting as the sport of gods and heroes, to the chagrin of her lover Endymion, who deplores her hunting fixation and the company she is keeping. Once she has explained to him that it is all in a good cause – to mark the birthday of the ‘most esteemed Christian, the Pan of the woods’ – he agrees to join her in paying homage to the Duke. That leaves ten numbers still to come, all on the same oleaginous theme. The whole thing is a pretext for extolling the attributes of the good governance of Duke Christian, and as such it might have elicited titters and some eye-rolling by the courtiers. There was a glaring discrepancy between this fawning tribute to a solicitous ruler and
the Duke’s general mismanagement of his lands, which obliged the Elector to set up a royal commission to administer his finances and only a few years later got him hauled up before the Reichsgericht (Imperial High Court).v Could Franck and Bach have known any of this at the time? Do they imply any irony? Secular rulers were considered to be God’s viceroys, ruling on earth in His name and by His grace to preserve the true faith. What today we might consider toadyism was then a generally accepted way of paying tribute to a reigning prince.

  At the start of 1716 Bach had provided the music for Duke Ernst August’s marriage to the sister of the young Prince Leopold of Anhalt-Cöthen. Deeply impressed, the Prince at some point offered Bach exactly what he had been denied at the Wilhelmsburg: the coveted title of Capellmeister and, as ‘director of our chamber music’, control of all the music at the court and its newly formed hand-picked ensemble, at a salary of 400 thalers – nearly twice his current earnings and with an advance payment of fifty thalers. Bach was about to discover that it was far harder as a highly prized artist to obtain release from a princely ruler than from a town council. Unlike his application for the Halle job, which seems if anything to have enhanced his standing at Weimar, there seems to have been no response from Duke Wilhelm Ernst, convinced of seeing his nephew’s hand in the affair.w