Bach: Music in the Castle of Heaven
Page 28
Lying on Bach’s desk in the first week of February 1727 was the text of a cantata (BWV 84) waiting to be set to music: Ich bin vergnügt mit meinem Stande, / Den mir der liebe Gott beschert – ‘I am content with the office the dear God has allotted to me’. By contrast, in a novel of the time, Johannes Riemer observed that ‘nobody is content with his status or honour: even the most humble man seeks to elevate his title.’61 Bach was no different. As the son of a town piper and in common with many municipal musicians of the day, Bach was engrossed with issues of status. At every stage in his career he was alert to the going rate before putting his signature on a new contract and, ever afterwards, quick to defend each clause at every opportunity. Given his recurrent dissatisfaction with the offices in which he found himself, the insufficient respect accorded to him that came to the surface in pay disputes and other perceived slights to his authority, we might expect him to have found the homily of this cantata’s text hard to swallow. It was not often, as far as we can tell, that he intervened to change the texts he was due to set. But here he did so: all it took was the alteration of a single word in the libretto – from Stande to Glücke – from one’s ‘office’ to one’s ‘lot in life’ – and he changed the whole polemical thrust of the homily, which now focuses on the ‘good fortune the Lord confers on me’.dd Even with this shift of emphasis, to look for an unequivocal portrayal of equanimity in the long opening E minor aria for solo soprano, oboe and strings would underestimate the ambivalence and complexity of music – especially Bach’s music – as a medium capable of giving nuanced depictions of mood. Contentment is in any case a rather static state of mind, whereas Bach’s music here suggests something dynamic and fluctuating. The florid intertwining of voice and oboe, the prevalent lilting dotted rhythms and expressive syncopations, the way the opening ritornello returns again and again in various guises, while the soprano initiates fresh motifs – all these contribute to the enchantment of the music and its elusive moods: wistful, resigned, even momentarily elegiac.
All that we have managed to glean so far from Bach’s troubled cantorate suggests a constant struggle between the desire to do his job conscientiously and to the utmost of his abilities, on the one hand (to the glory of God and the betterment of his neighbour, as he would have put it), and, on the other hand, the bother of having to put up with ‘almost continual vexation, envy and persecution’ (as he described it in a letter to a friend62). Music such as this aria helps us to find out how he dealt with these extremes. He differed from his contemporaries – Telemann, in particular, who managed to arrive at some sort of stress-free accommodation with the demands of earning his keep – and in some ways he was temperamentally closer to the Romantics. Despite being both a product of the prevailing absolutism and acquiescent in accepting the hierarchical system of his time,ee Bach was a natural dissident – almost a proto-Bee-thovenian rebel avant la lettre. One thinks of Beethoven composing ‘between tears and mourning’ (Op. 69) or Berlioz’s self-description: ‘I have found only one way of completely satisfying this immense appetite for emotion, and that’s music … I live only for music, it’s the only thing that carries me over this abyss of miseries of every kind.’63
In his copy of Calov’s commentary we encounter a passage (which Bach underlined and flagged up with a marginal ‘NB’) in which Luther makes a distinction between illicit shows of anger and those that are justifiable: ‘Of course, as we have said, anger is sometimes necessary and proper, but be sure that you use it correctly. You are commanded to get angry not on your own behalf, but on behalf of your office and of God; you must not confuse the two, your person and your office. As far as your person is concerned, you must not get angry with anyone regardless of the injury he may have done you. But where your office requires it, there you must get angry, even though no injury has been done to you personally … But if your brother has done something against you and angered you, and then begs your pardon, your anger too should disappear. Where does the secret spite come from which you continue to keep in your heart?’ 64 In other words, if you are attacked it is not for you to retaliate if it is personal; but if the attack is on your vocation or profession you are duty-bound to defend yourself or get someone to do it for you – exactly what Bach did by hiring Magister Birnbaum to represent him in the Scheibe dispute (see this page). An account by one of his earliest biographers, Carl Ludwig Hilgenfeldt (with connections going back to C. P. E. Bach), confirms this vital distinction:
Peaceful, quiet, and even-tempered though Bach was whenever he encountered unpleasantness at the hands of third persons so long as it concerned only his own personality, he was however quite another man when, no matter in what form, anyone slighted art, which was sacred to him. In such cases it doubtless happened at times that he donned his armour and gave expression to his wrath in the strongest ways. The organist of St Thomas’s, who was in general a worthy artist, once so enraged him by a mistake on the organ during the rehearsal of a cantata that he tore the wig from his head and, with the thundering exclamation, ‘You should have been a cobbler!’ threw it at the organist’s head.65
We have now clearly seen how prone Bach was in his dealings with municipal authorities to leap to defend his professional rights, even if the impression one gets from the dry responses reported by the clerk is more of a detached hauteur than of choleric outbursts. Additionally, as one of his modern biographers put it, ‘Just as his composer’s brain never loses track of a thought once it has occurred to him, his conscience seems to keep a tally throughout his life of his rights and the injustices he has suffered.’66 One comes across individual movements in the cantatas that show what kind of things made him angry and how he dealt with them in his music. Such a work is BWV 178, Wo Gott der Herr nicht bei uns hält, with its dire, sibyl-like mood of warning against hypocrites and prophets (‘wicked men … conceiving their artful plots with the serpent’s guile’). It exhibits such sustained defiance that one asks whether there is a submerged story here – of Bach operating in a hostile environment, of his ongoing conflict with the Leipzig authorities suddenly reaching boiling point, or of a more personal falling-out with one of the resident clergy. How much more satisfying, then, for him to channel all that frustration and vituperative energy into his music, and then to watch as it rained down from the choir loft on to his chosen targets below. There is an equivalent vehemence to the first three movements of BWV 179, Siehe zu, dass deine Gottesfurcht – an action in itself, violent and brooding – and in the bass aria (Weicht, all’ihr Übeltäter/‘Begone, all you evildoers!’) from BWV 135 with its violins behaving like virtuoso storm petrels. This is superb, angry music executed with a palpable fury, with Bach fuming at delinquent malefactors. One can picture the city elders, sitting in the best pews, listening to these post-Trinitarian harangues, registering their intent and starting to feel increasingly uncomfortable as these shockingly direct words – and Bach’s still more strident and abrasive music – hit home. In a Lenten cantata, BWV 144, Nimm, was dein ist, und gehe hin, Bach’s librettist draws the moral from the parable of the labourers in the vineyard: accept and be satisfied with your lot, however unfair it may seem at the time. Bach had found an eloquent but annoying way of fixing in the minds of his listeners the perils of what Germans describe as meckern und motzen (‘bleating and bellyaching’) – the grumblings of dissatisfied labour. As they would have known, behind the mutterings of the aggrieved vineyard workers stands St Paul’s injunction to the Corinthians, ‘Neither murmur ye, as some of them also murmured, and were destroyed of the destroyer’ (I Corinthians 10:10), and, further back, the God of the Old Testament, exasperated beyond endurance by the moaning of the ungrateful Israelites whom He had safely shepherded out of captivity in Egypt: ‘How long shall I bear with this evil congregation, which murmur against me?’ (Numbers 14:27).
At the start of this chapter we saw how vexed the councillors had become by 1730 at Bach’s failure to carry out his teaching duties and to obey the school authorities. The situatio
n was to deteriorate further with the appointment four years later of J. A. Ernesti as school rector. Bach’s junior by twenty-two years, the first thing we hear of him is complaining that Bach was not rehearsing the boys adequately – almost as though the new headmaster felt it was down to him to monitor musical standards in church services. Demarcation of areas of responsibility and the rapidly entrenched positions of two strong-willed men, both laudably concerned to maintain standards in their respective fields – of music and the humanities – lay at the core of their dispute, one that rumbled on for months and then years, and left a long paper trail in the council records. It ended up in a complete breakdown in their personal relations and brought out the worst in both men: stubbornness, self-importance, the overriding need to appear to be in the right; and it led to accusations of insubordination, lying, malice, deceit and vindictiveness. Their successive disputes turned initially on an interpretation of the old and new school regulations bearing on the right to appoint school prefects – crucial assistants to the cantor in the supervision of rehearsals and the three ensembles that needed to be on parade in different churches each Sunday or when he was absent. Farcically both men appointed boys with the name Krause – Bach’s boy had been sanctioned for some irregularity and disappeared from sight; Ernesti’s choice as a replacement was musically ‘incompetent’. It became progressively both sillier (the prefects turning up to serve at the ‘wrong’ church), more public (with no one competent to direct the motet during Holy Office) and more sordid as Bach hit below the belt with his innuendo that the rector had always had a ‘particular liking for the said Krause’.67 The dispute was never fully resolved.
Of the thirteen boy altos who auditioned in 1729, Bach reported: one ‘has a strong voice and is a pretty good prefect’; another has ‘a passable voice, but is still fairly weak as a prefect’; while the eleven others are ‘not presentable in music’. (illustration credit 37)
Bach’s scheme for distributing the forty-four ‘necessary singers’ (out of a theoretical maximum of fifty-five alumni) to make up the four choirs needed to serve in five city churches. (illustration credit 38)
One of Bach’s defining impulses, as we have seen, was a reverence for authority (although it could disappear in a matter of seconds). But now he began to show obsequiousness, a rebarbative toadyism in regard to royalty that was extreme even by the standards of the day. Using his new title at the Dresden Court by appealing directly to the Prince-Elector in October 1737, he played what he thought was his trump card, pulling rank and accusing Ernesti of ‘effrontery’. It backfired, the Prince deciding to leave the dispute to the Leipzig authorities to sort out. No more than many distinguished figures who work in the arts and sciences both then and now, Bach was prone to exceptional sagacity in his field of expertise and to exceptional pettiness in his daily social and professional relations whenever he felt unjustly treated, wrangling over minor matters and never letting the matter rest until he could be sure his opponent had fully grasped his point. With his tendency to be irascible and prickly whenever he felt his own authority as musician and chosen servant of the Lord was being challenged, and his in-built shyness holding him back from the network needed for success, it is remarkable that Bach managed to work the system at all, and for as long as he did, in pursuit of his artistic goals. Ever since Peter Shaffer’s play Amadeus (1979), we have gradually got used to the idea of a disassociation (albeit conjectural) between a puerile jokester in a state of arrested development and the ‘divine’ musician we revere as Mozart. However much his doting admirers genuflect before Richard Wagner as a composer, even they, sooner or later, have to come to terms with the inconvenient evidence that he was an abominable human being. Similarly, we should debunk once and for all the idea that Bach in his personal and professional life was some kind of paragon, the Fifth Evangelist of his nineteenth-century compatriots, the living embodiment of the intense religious faith and ‘real presence’ that his music seemed to transmit.68 Acknowledging Bach’s frailties and imperfections, far less heinous than those of Mozart or Wagner, not only makes him more interesting as a person than the old paragon of mythology, but also allows us to see his humanity filtering through into the music, which is far more compelling when we understand that it was composed by someone who, like all human beings, experienced grief, anger and doubt at first hand. This is one of the recurrent features that confer supreme authority on his music.
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a In 1729 he had, on his own admission (NBR, p. 132), been absent for three weeks in Feb., possibly commissioned to compose and perform a birthday cantata for Duke Christian of Weissenfels. This was followed the next month by his visit with Anna Magdalena and Wilhelm Friedemann to Cöthen to perform a large-scale funerary ode (BWV 244a) containing seven arias and two choruses recycled from his Matthew Passion at a memorial service for his former patron, Prince Leopold, on 23–4. Mar.
b The Lübeck cantor, Caspar Rüetz, who looked somewhat longingly at Leipzig as being one of the few cantorates in Germany ‘where one can make an ample livelihood only through music’, deplored the way things were going: ‘cantors are [stuck] in the school and are buried for ever under [a mountain] of school work’ (Michael Maul, ‘Director musices’…Zur ‘Cantor-Materie’ im 18. Jahrhundert (2010), pp. 17–18).
c Kuhnau himself may unwittingly have contributed to this problem. Shortly before his appointment as cantor, Councillor Johann Alexander Christ, commissioner for the Thomaskirche, pronounced that the coffers of the two main churches could no longer stretch to so many handouts for student helpers in church music as previously. As a result, Kuhnau undertook (or was obliged to undertake) that in future he would exchange tuition to students in return for their participation in church services. In other words, it was a cost-saving device compounded by the fact that in the following years the number of churches in Leipzig doubled and the musical competence of the students could suddenly no longer be taken for granted; further, Telemann had far greater pulling power over students at the Neukirche and in the opera house. On top of this, the new form of the cantata, which Kuhnau went on to compose – Bach still more so – entailed a larger choir and a more varied orchestra. In essence, by 1700 the system by which the Thomaner had previously functioned had broken down. (Michael Maul, ‘Dero berühmbter Chor’: Die Leipziger Thomasschule und ihre Kantoren 1212–1804 (2012), pp. 97–8, 129–32, 149–50).
d Johann Beer (the novelist and quondam singer and concertmaster at the Weissenfels Court) devotes a whole chapter of his Musicalische Discurse to the dilemma that confronted professional musicians of the time. In answer to the question: ‘What advantages did republics or city states have over courts in organising good music-making?’ Beer makes the following points:
i. Aristocratic love of sensual pleasure means that courts are normally likely to support the personnel and infrastructure for music to a much higher level than in towns. ‘It is known that music in its pure form flourishes more at court,’ so the financial rewards are accordingly better.
ii. Court life has its own disadvantages, however. Many musicians prefer municipal to court employment, since dukes, princes and counts tend to be very capricious, and one’s standing is therefore much more precarious. Also, life there is frenetic, with everything geared to satisfying princely pleasure. Those who value stability choose to work in cities where an urban code of honour prevails. [Perhaps that is what Bach hoped for – and failed to find.]
iii. Though the pay is better at courts, in cities one has better chances of finding stipends for one’s children.
iv. At court, rivalries between musicians for princely favour lead to strategies to block one another’s progress and careers. This problem is particularly acute for those with exceptional talent.
Beer’s Musicalische Discurse was written in 1690 but not published until 1719 (reprinted in his Sämtliche Werke, Vol. 12, Parts 1 and 2 (2005), pp. 305–6).
e The school’s teachers, and foremost Johann Heinrich Ernesti, the elderly h
eadmaster, may unwittingly have done more damage than good by their stubborn opposition to the proposed new statutes as well as by the deep fissures that had opened up between upper and lower teachers in the school over the apportionment of salaries. The reputation of this, the first of two co-rectors bearing the name Ernesti, was further damaged by the fact that his authority in the school had eroded almost completely and by the criticism he incurred for holding down a university teaching post as well.
f As we shall see later in this chapter all of this came to a head at the time of his dispute with Johann August Ernesti (headmaster of the Thomasschule) in 1737 when Bach made a direct appeal to the consistory for protection against the application of the 1723 school regulations: these, he argued, were invalid, having never been ratified by the consistory, and were greatly disadvantageous to him ‘in the discharge of my office as well as in the fees accruing to me’ (BD I, No. 40/NBR, pp. 194, 192).