Bach: Music in the Castle of Heaven

by Gardiner, John Eliot

  On the shelves of his studio, therefore, we could expect to find the scores of serenades, birthday cantatas and New Year odes – works that, as a result of his bifocal vision as to the possible destination of his music (the church or the salon), could be plundered for future ‘parodied’ church cantatas. Next to these was a stack of manuscript paper ready for use: heavier than ordinary writing paper and more expensive, since the sheets needed to stay upright and rigid on the music stands. Sometimes he waited until he had planned the layout of a fresh composition and estimated the space he would need on each sheet, before ruling out the staves. This he did with a special five-nibbed pen called a rastrum. With frequent use his rastra were liable to spread or distort, so that the spaces between the five lines became uneven and led to confusion as to the intended notation (as in the case of the fifth Brandenburg Concerto, where the outer, lowest prong was virtually broken). Occasionally, as in this work, he used rastra of different sizes even on the same page, so as to give extra prominence to the harpsichord part. A quick glance at his composing scores is all that is needed to appreciate how economical Bach was in his use of the page, squeezing new material into the margins wherever practicable. On his desk were inkpots filled with black, sepia and red tints and a supply of copper-gallic ink powder ready for mixing with water. It was the acidity in this ink that was eventually responsible for its bleeding through the manuscript pages and, over time, severely damaging the paper on which he wrote. Also there were quills, lead pencils, knives for sharpening pens and for correcting mistakes once the ink had dried and a straight ruler for inscribing long bar-lines in fair-copy scores. Finally, there was a box of fine sand to blot the ink, though this, as we shall see, was not reliable enough to allow Bach to turn the page and to continue composing without a wait.

  Before he could put pen to paper Bach needed to consider a wide range of issues and there were crucial decisions to be made. First came the delicate issue of negotiating with a literary partner, someone whose poetic text lent itself to musical treatment – and, more than that, someone whose poetic imagery would stimulate his creative imagination. He was then required to submit his choice to the senior clergy for approval before composition could legitimately begin.b There is a lot of uncertainty here. We do not know if he assembled any of the texts himself, like his contemporary Gottfried Heinrich Stölzel, an accomplished German stylist who is known to have written a good many of the poetic texts for his vocal works. We cannot tell whether potential librettists were suggested to, or even imposed on, Bach by the consistory, or what happened if he contested their choice. Collaborating with the same (usually anonymous) writer over a number of weeks could have meant that they were able to plan ahead together and submit their texts on a monthly basis. Once these were approved, they prepared booklets for publication, each of which contained around six cantata texts, and put them on sale for the benefit of the congregation.

  Next, having determined an overall structure for his cantata, Bach needed to decide whether to apportion its consecutive movements exactly as suggested by the librettist – here a chorus, there a recitative and aria (da capo or otherwise) – or according to a separate scheme of his own devising. Thereafter the choice and positioning of the chorale was critical. Normally it came at the end, like the final couplet in a Shakespearean sonnet where, after three quatrains in iambic pentameter, the focus narrows in a funnel-shaped conclusion. Bach needed to give similar prominence to the moment when doctrine, exposition and persuasive musical oratory had run their course and could give way to a communal prayer. This was a vital gathering point in the service, just prior to the sermon. Having set out the stages of his argument, Bach could bind the threads together and thereby create a resolution to lift his listeners into the ‘now’ of collective singing, drawing on their sense of shared existence and values they held in common.

  There was also the make-up of his performing ensemble to consider, its particular strengths and weaknesses: who happened to be sick or unavailable that week, who could be trusted for a particularly demanding solo or obbligato – a perennial dilemma for a music director – a promising alto, a flautist or even a budding exponent of the newly invented violoncello piccolo. Always conscious of the shape of the seasonal and liturgical calendar, Bach gave great importance to the cluster of feast-days at the main turning-points of the year and to the three annual Leipzig trade fairs, when his regular congregation swelled with international visitors whom the city elders were keen to impress. These were festive occasions that cried out for trumpets and drums. But incorporating the Stadtpfeifer into his young band of students was not always straightforward: like brass players before and ever since they operated differently from other musicians, ruled by their own tariffs and following their own arcane practices. Like one of today’s football managers, Bach also had to anticipate which members of his regular pool of hard-pressed singers and players might need to rest after the intense pressure of back-to-back feast-days – factors that led to a more modest instrumentation and a reduced choral participation in certain cantatas. In this he may have been responding to notions of the pupil’s psychology and stamina. These had became gradually more important in the course of the previous century, thanks to educational reformers such as Jan Amos Comenius (see this page). Comenius had urged the cultivation of a more favourable environment for learning and closer attention to the pupil’s ability for self-evaluation within the various stages of instruction1 – strategies that may have made Bach’s demands for virtuosity possible in the first place.c

  While it would be futile to imagine that we can trace with any degree of certainty the sequence of Bach’s thought processes that led to composition, there are encouraging things we can glean from studying his composing scores, from sketches, and from descriptions of his procedures left by his sons and pupils. Unpicking the constituent parts of a musical composition can bring us closer to seeing the composer at work, following him as he makes decisions, choosing to go this way or that. There is the element of surprise (because he may have turned a corner in a way you weren’t expecting) and the continual wonder (at how he has managed to get from A to Z). We inch forwards in trying to unravel what is by its nature a mysterious, unfathomable process and, crucially, in describing its overall impact on us. It is obvious how much hinged on Bach’s powers of inventio – his capacity to find the germ or creative spark that would, in large measure, determine the content of a piece. For someone with his great natural gifts and thorough training – surrounded by music from the very beginning and in regular touch with the copying and performing of it – it is reasonable to suppose that for him the invention of ideas was a matter of daily experience. Like Shakespeare, he must have expected to find things to write, themes to compose. The presence of an ensemble of singers and instrumentalists or a company of players, a congregation or a theatre audience – these were all external factors capable of forming an armature both of expectation and of reassurance. Alexander Gerard, in his Essay on Genius (1774), confirms what most people assume: that ‘genius is properly the faculty of invention’, by which he meant what we mean when we talk about creativity. ‘Genius’ in Gerard’s sense barely pertained in Bach’s background, yet inventio was important enough to persist under the later model. Bach alludes to invention as ‘a strong foretaste of composition’.2 He was presumably describing the formation of embryonic ideas that rise to the surface of the mind before being captured in notation. His first biographer, Forkel, relates how he obliged his pupils to master thoroughbass and voice-leading in four-part chorales before attempting inventions of their own. Emanuel Bach, who should have known, affirmed that his father considered invention a talent that manifests itself early on in the training of young musicians: ‘As for the invention of ideas, my late father demanded this ability from the very beginning, and whoever had none he advised to stay away from composition altogether.’3 Interestingly, this very ability, the trigger that fired his imagination and set the creative act in motion, does not always appear
to have come naturally or fluently to Bach himself. d For him invention was an uncovering of possibilities that are already there, rather than something truly original – hence his view that anyone could do as well, provided they were as industrious. God is still the only true creator.

  When he was most under pressure, composing to a tight weekly deadline as with the church cantatas of his first Leipzig years, ‘the astonishing mass of [his] unusual and well-developed ideas’ might have become choked by the limitations of time – not that they show any lack of fantasy.e This is Johann Abraham Birnbaum, Bach’s spokesman, who is talking, and since he is no musician himself these remarks must have originated with Bach. It was a matter of pride for him to fill every available liturgical slot for music and to compose cantatas for every single feast-day in his first three years. Normally his imaginative range was so vast that it disguised the fact that he was drawing on a common stock of material from which to choose. Just occasionally he gets caught out and miscalculates the initial structuring process. When composing only the second of his Leipzig cantatas, BWV 76, Die Himmel erzählen die Ehre Gottes, he sketched his first idea for an opening ritornello on the two uppermost staves, but soon realised that its imitative figuration was too formulaic, too short (only six bars before the first choral entry) and leading nowhere. So he struck it through and began again, this time holding back fugal treatment until the second phrase: ‘There is no speech nor language, where their voice is not heard.’4 On the other hand, his knowledge of harmony was so profound that it was practically mathematical in effect. He knew how every single note and key related to each other, what could be done with every chord and with every change of direction. As Emanuel tells us, ‘He worked them out completely and dovetailed them into a large and beautiful whole that combined diversity and the greatness of simplicity.’5

  Most composers need sketchpads, if only to jot down a theme, not necessarily an original one, but one that looks promising.f Very few of Bach’s sketches have survived, yet Robert L. Marshall, one of the first scholars to have combed through all the sources, is convinced that Bach worked from preliminary drafts that have subsequently been lost or destroyed.g With music we do not have the luxury of spectrographic images preserved just underneath the surface that reveal the early stages in a masterpiece. Fortunately there are still intriguing thematic fragments that Marshall has been able to recover: sometimes in pencil, sometimes in ink and sometimes tagged on to an unrelated composition. These reveal false starts and Bach’s efforts to get back on course. There are two intriguing sightings of Bach at his workbench in the lead-up to the pressurised Christmas period in 1724. For his Christmas Day offering Bach is well launched in composing the opening chorus of BWV 91, Gelobet seist du, Jesu Christ, with a festive instrumentation of three separate ‘choirs’ of horns, oboes and strings. At the bottom of the first page of his composing score Bach has made sketches of movements 1, 3 and 5 – clearly he has given careful thought to the succession of movements from the outset and the cyclical structure of the work. He decides to assign the third movement to a tenor and starts to sketch possible themes in triple metre and in dotted rhythms. It turns out that none of these will eventually be used; but somehow you cannot imagine him formulating dozens of beginnings and then, like Schubert, rejecting them with a cryptic remark: Gilt nicht (‘Won’t do!’). On a separate occasion, poised to compose BWV 133, Ich freue mich in dir, he comes across an existing melody evidently new to him that he sketches in at the foot of a separate score – that of BWV 232iii, the Sanctus, also composed for Christmas in 1724 – simply using the available space as a notepad as he tries to fit it to the words of the hymn that he intends to use as the basis of this cantata (see overleaf). Then, on the same page, just above the chorale tune, there is a separate instance of his putting a theme to the test – in this case, that for the Pleni sunt coeli fugato we recognise from the B minor Mass – and underneath it (added later) a reminder to himself that he will need to make a new set of parts since the originals ‘are in Bohemia with Count Sporck’.6

  Whatever went on in his mind in terms of pre-composition or was first jotted down in sketches, Bach’s working scores show us how concentrated and economical he was when actually composing. Among twentieth-century composers Shostakovich is reported to have composed his symphonies straight into full score, bypassing even particells, on the basis that he didn’t have time to make errors: he simply couldn’t afford the luxury of making mistakes. Bach was much the same. We can see this from the composing score of BWV 135, Ach Herr, mich armen Sünder, a cantata from his second cycle. Here he is composing directly into score on consecutive folded sheets of a fascicule of ruled paper. At this point he still doesn’t know how it will develop or how much space or paper he is going to need. Arriving at the foot of a page he is in full flow. Now he has a dilemma: manuscript paper being so expensive, he cannot just use a spare sheet to notate the continuation of his thought,h so he has to wait for the ink to dry (blotting paper had not yet been invented and sand was not a reliable way of drying ink). It may be as long as five or six minutes before he can safely continue – time perhaps for a coffee with Anna Magdalena, but perhaps also long enough to risk the train of thought (and inventio) being broken. His solution is there at the foot of the page: a little mnemonic in tablature – an aide-mémoire, squeezed into the bottom-right-hand corner of the page, the immediate sequel of the aria he is composing.

  Bach’s MS of the Sanctus, BWV 232iii with a sketched melody for BWV 133. (illustration credit 39)

  (illustration credit 40)

  Other than organists, there were not many composers then left who used (or knew how to use) tablature; but for Bach it was an effective type of shorthand for capturing his creative thoughts before they flew off the page.i

  This is a classic example of Bach being caught up in the process of elaboratio, the second stage in the fleshing out of a musical composition as defined by Christoph Bernhard. In his Tractatus compositionis augmentatus (c. 1657), widely circulated in manuscript during the second half of the seventeenth century, Bernhard brought Cicero’s five divisions of rhetoric up to date and in applying them to music reduced them to three: inventio, elaboratio and executio. First, Bach crafts a workable idea (inventio), one that opens the door to creative embellishment (elaboratio), and then puts it to the test in performance (executio). These concepts are complementary and vital. The first two require intense mental activity, but there is a crucial difference between them: whereas invention is work, elaboration is play. Laurence Dreyfus expands on this: ‘while invention requires foresight, planning, consistency, savvy, and seriousness of purpose, elaboration is content with elegance, an associative logic, and an eye for similarities.’7 The latter allowed Bach to explore dormant qualities in composition that most composers of his day would have missed. The hallmark of Bach’s skill in elaboratio lies in the intricacy and connectedness of his methods, such as variation and parody: these come across as far more refined and distinctive than those of his contemporaries, who, as Dreyfus observes, tend to treat elaboration in a more casual manner. But we are liable to be disappointed and may be trivialising the creative process if we expect to find all the germs of a new work neatly contained in its beginnings and then elaborated in logical progression. At certain times this does happen; at others Bach introduces new thematic material that involves discarding or cutting short the trajectory of an opening theme, but in such a way that we would probably not notice that anything was amiss, so accomplished is he at papering over the joins and bringing things to a natural-seeming conclusion. Dreyfus points to the formal oddity of an immensely popular piece, the opening movement of Bach’s second Brandenburg Concerto, to illustrate how the formation of its two competing ritornellos is incomplete and in a sense defective. Bach seems to acknowledge the fact by his inability to repeat both of them intact at the end of the movement.8 Yet the listener is probably not in the least disturbed by the irrationality of its construction, delighting instead in its playfu
lness, wit and brilliance. What is most valuable about this sort of approach is that Bach could be shown to be at his most creative when his chosen inventive material falls short in some way, or when some sort of irregularity gives rise to ideas that he probably would not otherwise have had. What Dreyfus reveals is that there is a real human intelligence operative here, not some detached Godlike figure who just creates ex nihilo.j

  Once launched, Bach’s concerns revolved around harmony. Zedler defined universal harmony as ‘the conformity and harmony of all things, for everything in the world acts together in respect to both cause and effect’. Bach himself had this to say: ‘The thorough-bass is the most perfect foundation of music … that results in a well-sounding Harmonie to the Honour of God and the permissible delight of the soul.’ Emanuel Bach described this preoccupation in similar terms: the defining aspect of his father’s engagement with harmony was its Vollstimmigkeit (its ‘full-voicedness’) – in other words, the way it incorporated counterpoint. Here is quite literally the crux of the matter: the crossing of vertical and horizontal planes of sound. Certainly no one before Bach (and only a handful of composers since) had used this point of intersection so fruitfully: melody underpinned by rhythm, enriched by counterpoint and coalescing to create harmony, itself a composite of consonance and dissonance that register in the listener’s ear.k Looked at another way, it is astonishing how the harmonic motion seems to carry the full freight of melodic ideas on its shoulders. All this is of course highly symbolic from a theological viewpoint and draws attention to the fact that the word Vollkommenheit, besides meaning perfection, has an undercurrent of ‘completeness’. It was a concept that bemused the most vociferous of Bach’s critics, Johann Adolph Scheibe, who thought the aim of a modern composer was ‘merely to place accompanying voices under a melody’.9 Perfection for Bach entailed knowledge of ‘the most hidden secrets of harmony’. His skill in discovering them was a passion – almost an obsession – and ‘no one was able to arrive at so many inventive and unfamiliar thoughts from otherwise seemingly dry artifices as he was.’10 The steps to his acquiring these skills can be traced back to the various comments scattered in Emanuel Bach’s writings about his father. In essence Emanuel is telling us not so much what produced the initial spark (the inventio) in his father’s mind as the profusion of ways he expanded it (elaboratio):