Bach: Music in the Castle of Heaven

by Gardiner, John Eliot

  All in all 1717 was a turbulent year in Bach’s life. It saw the first printed evidence of his rise to famex and ended in official disgrace at the Weimar Court. In between, his production of cantatas seems to have come to a standstill – either from choice or, after a show of dissent, because the senior duke had silenced him. Then there were extensive travels: to Gotha to fill in for a sick colleague and compose music at Passiontide; to Cöthen to clinch his new contract; and to Dresden in October where he had been billed as the challenger in a celebrated (much hyped, but never independently documented) bout with the French keyboard virtuoso Louis Marchand. With his opponent scratching at the last moment, Bach returned to Weimar in a black mood, smarting from the non-contest, the affront to his pride and the loss of 500 thalers in prize money somehow embezzled at source. Very possibly he lashed out in some way that broke with protocol enough to incur the wrath of Wilhelm Ernst.49

  On 6th November [1717], the quondam concertmaster and court organist Bach was arrested and held at the County Magistrate’s house of detention for obstinate testimony and forcing the issue of his dismissal, and finally on 2nd December was informed by the Court Secretary of his unfavourable discharge and simultaneously freed from arrest.50

  Bach’s four-week incarceration or house arrest raises uncomfortable questions over his moral probity. Had there been an ulterior motive to his visit to Dresden – an attempt to go over Wilhelm Ernst’s head to win royal support for his transfer to Ernst August? Or was he even making an early bid for a post at the electoral court in Dresden itself? Had he been playing fast and loose with his Weimar employers, taking double pay for a few months?y Then there is the issue of the missing music, if it ever existed – at least there is no trace today of the fifteen or more church cantatas that Bach had been contracted to compose in Weimar. If he had taken them with him to Cöthen (but with no chance of performing them there), he would surely have found ways to revive or recycle them later in Leipzig, and we would know about them. Possibly, like the ‘musical works composed during the tenure of office’ by his successor, Johann Pfeiffer,51 Bach was instructed to leave all his compositions in the organ loft of the Himmelsburg, where they were locked away, and what he regarded as his intellectual property returned with the key to the Duke.z Taken together, these incidents seem to indicate that, when provoked, Bach’s sense of propriety fell away. Suddenly, he saw those in authority who lorded it over him merely as his equals, or even as his inferiors. If music was God’s gift and he was the master of delivering it, that put him above others.

  The perilous events of Bach’s final year in Weimar, and the tangled issues of his brushes with authority, now recede into the background. During his next five years at the Calvinist court in Cöthen he appears to have enjoyed a complicit and harmonious relationship with his employer, Prince Leopold. This was the first time in his life that he had left the profession of church organist behind him to operate within an almost exclusively secular environment. He was given generous facilities towards realising Leopold’s dream of making his Capelle one of the leading ensembles of the day. Bach repaid this trust by concentrating his compositional activity on mainly instrumental works. Besides the first volume of the Well-Tempered Clavier some of the most celebrated of his collections were assembled here in sixes: the Brandenburg Concertos, the sonatas and partitas for unaccompanied violin, the sonatas for violin and obbligato harpsichord, the suites for solo cello, and the four Ouvertures for orchestra. As a gift to his nine-year-old son Wilhelm Friedemann, Bach filled the pages of a little book with two- and three-part Inventions – simple enough for him to play for pleasure yet each with a distinctive character, providing an open door to the mysterious world of counterpoint.

  Then came a dual bereavement. Bach travelled to Berlin to buy a new harpsichord for the Prince’s household, leaving Maria Barbara, his wife of twelve years, at home and pregnant with their fifth child. The boy, born in November 1718, was named Leopold after the Prince, who stood godfather to him. He died ten months later. Then, on one of his few excursions outside his homeland, Bach left Cöthen with his prince in May 1720 for Carlsbad, a spa town 130 miles to the south. Here for the next two months he led the musical entertainment in what has been described as conceivably ‘the earliest summer festival of the performing arts’.52 While he was away, Maria Barbara suddenly died and was buried on 7 July. Their son Carl Philipp Emanuel, who was six at the time, later described his father’s experience of returning home and ‘finding her dead and buried, although he had left her hale and hearty on his departure. The news that she had been ill and died reached him only when he entered his own house.’ As far as we can tell, theirs had been a close and harmonious marriage (‘blissful’, according to Emanuel), and she had been both a link to his family roots and a stabilising influence during his unsettled years of employment in Arnstadt, Mühlhausen and Weimar. Within two months of her death, Bach’s thoughts were turning towards re-locating to a major city. There was an opening at the Jacobikirche in Hamburg, one which offered him challenges the small Calvinist court in the provinces could not match. Bach played his cards shrewdly – a successful display of his performing and compositional skills, a tactful improvisation on a theme by, and in the presence of, the 97-year-old Hamburg master Adam Reincken – only withdrawing once it transpired that as the successful candidate he was expected to pay a covert bribe of 10,000 marks into the church’s coffers.

  With four young children to raise, Bach, like his father before him, lost no time in finding a new wife. Aged twenty, Anna Magdalena Wilcke was a professional singer employed at the court of Saxe-Weissenfels and came from musical stock. Their wedding was held ‘at home, by command of the Prince’, midweek in December 1721, to allow the musicians to get back to their posts in time for their Sunday services after imbibing the copious wine that Bach had ordered at the cost of nearly two months’ salary. Other than the fact that Anna Magdalena was fond of gardening (and especially of yellow carnations) and of birds (especially linnets), we know pitifully little about her. Eight days after the wedding Prince Leopold also married – to the Princess of Anhalt-Berenburg, someone who disliked music and was later referred to by Bach as being an amusa – a bit of an airhead.53 The long-term prospects in Cöthen were beginning to look shaky. With a new wife and children to educate, Bach was on the lookout for a new opening. We are coming full circle back to his Leipzig appointment.

  On 15 February 1723 a press report appeared in the Hamburg Relationscourier: ‘On the past Sunday [7 February] in the forenoon the princely Capellmeister of Cöthen, Mr Bach, gave an audition here [in Leipzig] in the Church of St Thomas in respect of the still vacant post of the cantor, and the music he made on that occasion was highly praised by all those who judge such things.’54 Some three months later the special correspondent of another Hamburg paper reported, ‘This past Sunday at noon, four wagons loaded with household goods and furniture arrived here from Cöthen, belonging to the former princely Capellmeister there, now called to Leipzig as Cantor Figuralis. At 2 o’clock he himself arrived with his family in two carriages and moved into the newly renovated apartment in the Thomasschule.’55 Recently the spicy suggestion has been made that the ‘special correspondent’ could have been Bach himself.56 If so, its emphasis on indicators of status and authority – his being ‘called’ to the Leipzig post, the number of carriages required for his chattels and family, pride in the fact his lodgings had been freshly renovated – must make it one of the earliest recorded examples of ‘spin’. These were not trivial matters and they would have weighed with him, as would the opportunities Leipzig offered to his growing sons as a university city.

  Bach saw the Leipzig post as his best chance of setting new musical standards in what he hoped was an orderly civic environment and of replicating the levels of performance he had become used to his last two positions. He intended to introduce a new style of church music to a large urban congregation – one evolved from his Weimar years and therefore both more modern and more
sophisticated than anything Johann Kuhnau had composed. On the face of it this was the best chance he had yet had of realising that Endzweck that had been three times frustrated: in Mühlhausen (not yet recovered from the fire of 1707), Weimar (where he had been passed over in the succession) and Cöthen (with its Calvinist court).

  But even now it was not a straightforward move. From the moment he set foot in Leipzig, Bach found himself caught in the crossfire between rival political factions within the council, a microcosm of an enduring struggle within Saxony itself between the Elector in Dresden, bidding for increased autonomy – in particular the power to raise taxes to finance his foreign policy – and the Estates, made up of the nobility and the cities, determined to hold the Elector in check.57 Music – since it carried with it a strong element of cultural prestige – formed part of these inbuilt contradictions and tensions between the Estates’ city party and the nominees of the absolutist court on the Leipzig council loyal to the Elector. Having started out as their sixth choice as cantor, Bach became the eventual nominee of the latter, led by Burgomaster Gottfried Lange. They were his natural allies, keen to invest his title of Director Musices with the authority of a modern Capellmeister so as to fulfil their ambitions for Leipzig as an international city of the arts. On the other side were the councillors belonging to the Estates’ city party, who were opposed to anything so radical in aim and independence. They wanted a traditional cantor tied into the school system that they themselves could control. So long as Telemann had been in the running they had been prepared to compromise over teaching duties, because of his reputation, credentials and earlier success in Leipzig.aa But Bach, without Telemann’s academic qualifications or links to the university and its church, could expect no such favours. They insisted on defining his role as cantor as narrowly as possible by setting restrictive terms on his teaching obligations. Bach’s last-minute concession in agreeing to this condition appears out of character when we consider how he had acted in the past, and perhaps suggests an element of desperation. Herein lay the seeds of future discord. A compromise was eventually struck: Bach was elected to fulfil what could be described as an absolutist mandate, yet within a municipal structure that sought to call him to heel. There was no possibility that he could stand apart from the local and political conflicts of the time, though (as we have seen) Lange may have taken him aside and told him privately that as long as he followed the court party’s mandate he could count on their support, freeing him from the more onerous teaching and administrative duties of a cantor.bb

  Although after months of delay he was voted unanimously into office in 1723, irregularities of protocol at his official inauguration threw up a fresh bone of contention between the council and the consistory: which of these bodies had the authority to install Bach as cantor. The situation was almost Ruritanian: teachers and pupils arrived in the school’s upper auditorium expecting to greet the new cantor and see him installed, and sing him a welcome song. It was normally the chief town clerk who officiated on such occasions, but no sooner had Herr Menser proclaimed Bach as cantor ‘in the name of the Holy Trinity’, adding that ‘the new Cantor was admonished faithfully and industriously to discharge the duties of his office’, than the pastor of the Thomaskirche piped up, brandishing a decree issued by the consistory to the effect that the cantor ‘was presented to the School and [so] installed … adding an admonition to the Cantor to the faithful observance of his office, and a good wish’. In eighteenth-century German lands, where protocol was at a premium, this was all highly irregular. It seems, then, that Bach was doubly installed as cantor. A public confrontation had somehow been averted, but it would hardly be surprising if, at this point, he was a little confused. Having made concessions to the council in the terms of his contract, here he was caught in the secondary crossfire – a dispute for precedence between the lay and the church authorities. On this occasion he responded graciously, thanking the council for conferring on him ‘this office, with the promise that he would serve the same with all fidelity and zeal’.58

  Bach had won a single point: the right to turn over some of his teaching duties (five hours per week of Latin grammar, Luther’s catechism and Corderius’s colloquia scholastica) to the tertius for fifty thalers per year. That still left him with musical classes and individual lessons to teach, and other less specific pedagogical duties. There is no shortage of sources documenting the chaotic situation within the Thomasschule and the illicit goings-on within its four walls (see footnote on this page). In the new school charter (Schulordnungen) of 1723 were rules (restricting the cantor’s attendance at theatres, public houses, etc.) and new guidelines for the distribution of incidental fees among teachers and pupils that reduced his income. The cantor’s living quarters were situated right next to those of the headmaster and those of the fifty-five boarding students of a ‘schola pauperum endowed to serve the best interests of the poor’. As a teacher Bach was required to act in loco parentis to the pupils ‘and show each of them paternal affection, love, and solicitude, and be forbearing toward their mistakes and weaknesses while nonetheless expecting self-discipline, order, and obedience’. In reflecting on how well Bach was equipped to provide these functions, one can imagine him musing on the principal figures in his own childhood and the treatment he himself received. Did the shadow of Cantor Arnold, the old sadist from his Ohrdruf past, loom into view?cc Certainly there appears to be a continuation in the pattern of bullying we have encountered so far – mostly of younger boys suffering at the hands of older ones. In 1701 a complaint against the older students asserted that they burnt mice over a candle and left the remains on the teacher’s chair, that they spilt water on the floor and tables, smashed windows, ripped the blackboards off the wall and swore roundly at the teachers.59 In 1717, the teacher-assistant Carl Friedrich Pezold complained about rats and mice darting to and fro on the staircases in broad daylight. In 1733 Christoph Nichelmann, then about sixteen, found conditions too rough for someone of his ‘gentle and peace-loving nature’ and ran away from the Thomasschule, later to become a respected composer and harpsichordist.60

  After only a few weeks of living at such close quarters to the din and disorder of a boys’ boarding school, particularly after the tranquillity of court life in Cöthen, Bach might have felt inclined to do the same. Five years into the job the situation had deteriorated still further: the school was described as being ‘in a deplorable condition’, with ‘the beds ruined and the pupils ill-fed’ and the teachers’ authority severely undermined. A further report coinciding with the appointment of Burgomaster Stieglitz as school inspector in January 1729 speaks of finding the school ‘in great disorder’ with three classes amalgamated in the dining room, and the dormitory beds shared by two boys at a time. Under such conditions how, we might ask, was Bach expected to set the boys the example of ‘a discreet life’? We can only guess at how he managed to protect his family (indeed to have a family life at all) and, amid all his duties both at school and across town, to find both the time and the calm to compose at the speed and intensity necessary to keep pace with his self-appointed weekly schedule of cantata production.

  Extract from Chapter 6 of the new Schulordnung (school regulations) for the Thomaskirche, ‘concerning the recruitment and dismissal of pupils’, with marginal commentary by Johann Job, attorney to the town council. (illustration credit 36)

  The significant point about the Endzweck is that it was an ideal, not a manifesto: a model framework within which Bach felt he could operate most productively and create orderly church music in conformity with the way the God-inspired Temple music was organised in the time of King David. The orderly framework had so far eluded him – in Arnstadt (short of the basic human resources), in Mühlhausen (conflict and inadequate musical forces), in Weimar (where he was never accorded the necessary authority to carry it out except on an ad hoc basis) and in Cöthen (with no Lutheran liturgy with music at its core). Now that the best opportunity for realising it presented itself in Leipz
ig in 1723, he showed he was ready to sacrifice status, salary, family and comfort in order to achieve it. For the next three (or, at most, five) years he threw all his energies into the realisation of that dream. His creativity in this field – in the three cantata cycles and two Passions he now composed – was almost profligate and far outstripped in conception, design and quality anything that any other composer of the time was attempting. It is all the more astonishing for having been carried out in a climate of innate conservatism, artistic indifference and discord, while he operated within a creaky structure, undermanned and underfunded.

  But then Bach was a misfit in Leipzig from the start. As we shall see (in Chapters 9 and 12) the type of concerted music he would go on to compose on a regular basis was so much richer, more complex and more demanding than what Kuhnau had offered to his congregation, not to mention the easy-listening cantatas of his peer group, the three favourites for his job, Telemann, Graupner and Fasch. Bach’s church music requires enormous concentration on the part of both performer and listener: you have to hold the emotion as you play or listen, channelling it, controlling it and letting it loose in the same second. Lest we forget, all this was produced and performed by a heterogeneous medley of musical forces that could rarely have met the technical and interpretative demands of his music; and, as far as we can tell, it was met with a depressing lack of discrimination but with general consternation by clerics and city fathers alike. The increase in the number of musically incompetent children admitted to the Thomasschule, growing from 5 per cent in Schelle’s time to more than 15 per cent in Bach’s early years, is another indicator of a worsening situation. In 1730 Bach was to report in his ‘Entwurff’ that of the current alumni only 17 were usable, 20 were not yet usable and 17 were unfit. In such crippling circumstances, we cannot be sure whom he could count on in Leipzig as unequivocal supporters of his musical ambitions, and the choice of godparents for his children clouds the picture still further: Senior Burgomaster Gottfried Lange, both of the two co-rectors of the Thomasschule with the surname Ernesti (Johann Heinrich, the elder, and Johann August, with whom Bach seemed to have got on reasonably well at first before the ‘Prefects’ War’ turned them into implacable enemies), the wife of Burgomaster C. G. Küstner, C. F. Romanus, J. E. Kriegel and the wife of G. L. Baudis. How dependable or effective any of these would turn out to be in support of his musical ambitions is open to doubt.