(illustration credit 44)
Besides all the other multiple activities involved in teaching at the Thomasschule and overseeing the musical life of the city, Bach most likely devoted the first four or five days of each week to composing a cantata for performance on the following Sunday. The copying of parts may, as we have seen, have started while he was still composing and, in any case, would have needed to be finished by the Saturday. Though in the run-up to the major feasts and at the time of the fairs additional time was allotted in the school curriculum on a Friday for extra rehearsal, Saturday was when the only full rehearsal took place and when everything came together in executio. With rehearsal time so tight, in practice this meant that a great deal of information needed to be contained in the notation, as we have seen, so that Bach’s performers could grasp all the essentials while sight-reading; all the rest had to be transmitted by gesture or whispered instruction in the heat of performance. We have one precious eyewitness account of Bach the conductor by someone who, as headmaster of the Thomasschule in the early 1730s, had the opportunity to watch him at close quarters on many occasions. Johann Matthias Gesner contrasts ‘the self-sufficiency of the organ and organist with the fragile interdependence of orchestra and chorus with their conductor, who must not only discharge his continuo function, but also fill holes in the music by singing, signalling, or playing missing parts when his musicians have gone astray.’29
If you could see Bach … singing with one voice and playing his own parts, but watching over everything and bringing back to the rhythm and the beat, out of thirty or even forty musicians, the one with a nod, another by tapping with his foot, the third with a warning finger, giving the right note to one from the top of his voice, to another from the bottom, and to a third from the middle of it – all alone, in the midst of the greatest din made by all the participants, and although he is executing the most difficult parts himself, noticing at once whenever and wherever a mistake occurs, holding everyone together, taking precautions everywhere, and repairing any unsteadiness, full of rhythm in every part of his body – this one man taking in all these harmonies with his keen ear and emitting with his voice alone the tone of all the voices …30
Gesner’s description has sometimes been dismissed as a personal eulogy to a colleague and friend. But its legitimacy is supported by a handwritten commentary on school regulations he made in the mid 1730s specifying the cantor’s duties in performance: ‘It is sometimes necessary for the cantor to delegate the giving of the beat to a prefect, to give him the freedom to move around from one section of the ensemble to another to make sure everything is in good order.’ This is backed up by another of Bach’s pupils, Johann Christian Kittel, who described the unnerving experience of having Bach loom up behind him when he was playing harpsichord continuo: ‘You always had to be prepared to have Bach’s hands and fingers intervene among [your] hands and fingers … and, without getting in the way … furnish the accompaniment with masses of harmonies that made an even greater impression than the unsuspected close proximity of the teacher.’31 Being on the inside of a Bach-directed performance, like the co-authors of his obituary, C. P. E. Bach and Johann Friedrich Agricola, had a similar effect:
His constant practice in the working out of polyphonic pieces had given his eye such facility that even in the largest scores he could take in all the simultaneously sounding parts at a glance. His hearing was so fine that he was able to detect the slightest error even in the largest ensembles. It is but a pity that it was only seldom he had the good fortune of finding a body of such performers as could have spared him unpleasant discoveries of this nature. In conducting he was very accurate, and of the tempo, which he took very lively, he was uncommonly sure.32
Somehow you would expect Johann Adolph Scheibe, as a professional critic, to comment on those ‘uncomfortable noises’ that he claimed to be able to identify, things that spoilt Bach’s polyphony in performance. But, rather than being due to any ‘faults’ in the compositions, they are just as likely to have been occasioned by flaws in execution by his under-rehearsed ensemble, or by the background noise within the church, or indeed by deficiencies in Scheibe’s own hearing. A sign that things did not always go according to plan comes in Birnbaum’s rebuttal to Scheibe, its rather defensive tone suggesting that this is Bach who is speaking:
Now, when all this is performed as it should be, there is nothing more beautiful than this harmony. If, however, the clumsiness or negligence of the instrumentalists or the singers brings about confusion, it is truly very tasteless to attribute such mistakes to the composer. In music, anyway, everything depends on performance … a piece in whose composition one can see the most beautiful harmony and melody can certainly not please the ear if those who are to perform it are unable and unwilling to fulfil their obligations.33
These contemporaneous accounts help us to appreciate not only the diversity of Bach’s musical gifts but the evident frustrations he experienced when errors crept into the performance of his works. At another stage Birnbaum (or, rather, Bach putting words in his mouth) expresses his annoyance: ‘It is true that there are difficulties, but that does not mean that they are insurmountable.’ A system of quite harsh fines was enshrined in the school statutes – ‘everyone must be attentive to the signs and beat of the praecentor. He who makes a slip or a noticeable mistake in the music will be fined 1 groschen [the equivalent of four pints of beer], but someone who makes a deliberate, mischievous error will be fined 3 groschen.’34
After Bach’s death there was considerable discussion by the authorities, led by the school chairman Dr Carl Gottfried Winckler, on how best to reduce the extra rehearsal time on a Friday allocated to the cantor in times past for preparing ‘Passion music’ and works for other red-letter days in the church calendar. The implication is quite clear that, with Bach no longer making such intense musical demands on the student choir and orchestra, a new regularisation of everything within the ordinary curriculum of the Thomasschule was desirable, so that a single rehearsal on the Saturday afternoon should suffice for a normal Sunday, as it had in the past.35 We simply do not know how Bach used this ‘stolen’ rehearsal time, or how in general he surmounted the constraints of time and the fallibility of his performers. One obvious way would have been to take principal singers and players aside and rehearse the most technically challenging passages privately, such as long arias with elaborate obbligati. In this, the school statutes are not especially illuminating beyond noting obligatory singing lessons in class, and we are left to fill in the gaps and to intuit what strategies other music directors have recourse to in similar situations.
This rehearsal pattern basically accords with that which we adopted for the Bach Cantata Pilgrimage in 2000. Each week we were confronted by a new clutch of cantatas, and, unlike Bach’s regular forces, so used and attuned to his style of music and performing under his direction, it was a repertoire new to most people in the group, never previously having crossed their horizons. It was of course a daunting task, given the sheer quantity of music to assimilate and perform, the fact that the sources are incomplete in many cases, and above all the physical absence of the central figure, the composer as oracle, fons et origo, though he was very much present to us in the musical notation. To cope with the constraint of having only two or three days in which to rehearse a full programme of three or four cantatas, we divided up the ensemble into sections. I started rehearsals with just the solo singers (Concertisten) with the continuo and obbligato instruments, then moved on to separate sessions, first with choir and then with orchestra, and sometimes to subdivisions such as all the violins rehearsing with their leader. Sectional rehearsals function in a similar way to arranging pieces of a jigsaw puzzle before locking them together: corner pieces here, border pieces over there, sky-blue here, grass-green there, and so on. Eventually comes the tutti rehearsal and nearly always there is an exciting additional charge of energy as choir and orchestra perform together for the first time. This is the test of
whether the earlier sectional rehearsing, when everyone was working independently, but along parallel lines, has been effective. There is the thrill of the totality now being so much greater than the sum of its individual parts.
This is where the really creative chemistry begins, and the process is similar to baking a cake. It begins with sieving and weighing all the constituent elements (flour, butter, sugar, etc.); but, their human equivalents being alive, you need to ensure that they all react organically to one another, taking responsibility for their respective roles and tasks. Because every musician is responding primarily to a single printed line of music that contains only his or her part, it is also the moment when each needs to switch on their aural radar and establish lateral awareness so that they find out rapidly how their line fits into the overall fabric. We know from Emanuel Bach that ‘the placing of an orchestra he [Bach] understood perfectly: he made good use of any space.’36 An intelligent spatial disposition and layout of both vocal and instrumental components can indeed help enormously in creating little cells of aural complicity, between, say, an obbligato player and a singer, or between larger sectional units such as violins and sopranos, where the meshing of decorative lines is critical. For every instrumentalist needs to know not only what the words of the singers mean but also what they sound like, so that they, in accompanying them, can match their shape, colour and expressive inflection, or, as Dreyfus points out about the ritornellos to arias: ‘only once the words become known … will the rhetoric of persuasion become operative.’37 The process is part cerebral, part physical and sensual, in some ways visual, but mostly, of course, aural. It is a ‘freeing up’, lifting eyes and ears away from the printed line or score, and responding to the different (almost electrical) impulses that are there to be given and exchanged.
It is at this stage, or thereabouts, that a new process begins. First, there is the gradual coming into focus for all performers of features that previously had been flattened out, or hitherto absent: intersections or collisions of music and text, variations of mood, passing associations with totally different modes of music. These occur only once all the other component elements are fully in place – tempo, balance and cohesive ensemble, close identification with the text and with all the quirks of the music. Then there is that other indefinable process whereby everyone’s awareness of all the component elements becomes so acute (the way they differ from one another and yet cohere) that they seem to have gained an enhanced sense of clarity and understanding – or, as Philip Pullman describes it in His Dark Materials, ‘going so deep you cannot see the bottom, but clear all the way down’. This is a process that cannot be forced. It is associated with the very special type of calm, concentrated attention musicians give and owe to the music. It allows all the many layers of meaning to become clear to the point where you can sense all the intricate connections between them. It is at this stage that you can gain a sense of naturalness or rightness about the way the music should unfold – that way and no other. (Tomorrow it may be quite different.) One defining feature of this experience is, of course, the human one: the atmosphere and vibrations set off by separate personalities within the performing group, the sum of various individual and collective initiatives which influence the interpretation and so have a bearing on the ‘live’ experience of the music (so different from one’s detached reading of the score in the initial period of private study, although notation can also remind you of an experience you once had and be almost Pavlovian in its effect). Often it can come down to a single moment, one in which a potentially negative atmospheric charge can be switched in an instant to a positive one. It is like the legendary placement of a single pebble that can redirect the flow of even the strongest river. For if one can feel a connectedness of Bach’s music to this degree and intensity when experiencing it at only stage three (executio), imagine, then, the force and potency of what it must have been like to experience the music in the hands of the person who created it and realised it first.
* * *
a An exact comparison between the pace of production in Cöthen and Leipzig is impossible, since so many of the instrumental and chamber works he composed in Cöthen have vanished, and dating the remainder with utter certainty is problematic. Judging from the few autograph materials and original performance parts we have from these years, Bach, even there, composed under the pressure of time – either because he was in the habit of leaving things to the last moment (when an event or deadline was approaching fast) or because he mulled over a piece for a long time before making the initial step to set it down in notation. Generally accepted by modern scholarship as ‘Cöthen works’ are the autograph scores of: the Clavier-Büchlein for Wilhelm Friedemann (1720), Vol. 1 of Das Wohltemperierte Clavier (1722), the Clavier-Büchlein for Anna Magdalena (1722), eventually to grow into the set of six French Suites (BWV 812–17), the fifteen Inventions and fifteen Sinfonias grouped together as Aufrichtige Anleitung (1723) and the forty-five organ chorales begun in Weimar that made up the unfinished Orgel-Büchlein. To this list can be added the solo and ensemble works: the six Partitas and Sonatas for Solo Violin, the six Suites for Cello and the six Brandenburg Concertos. Autograph scores for only two (BWV 134a and 173a) of a dozen occasional secular cantatas composed for New Year’s Day and Prince Leopold’s birthday have survived, plus one original and incomplete set of parts (for BWV 134a): the sources for the rest are either incomplete or lost, but were later to re-surface as ‘parodies’ in several of his Leipzig church cantatas.
b At any one time Bach only had to deal with two of the clergy with respect to his cantatas: Salomon Deyling, superintendent and pastor of the Nikolaikirche, and, until 1736, Christian Weiss I, pastor of the Thomaskirche. After 1736 there was a sequence of four Thomaskirche pastors: Schütz (1737–9), Sieber (1739–41), Gaudlitz (1741–45) and Teller (1745–50).
c This is reflected in the regulations (Ordnung) of the Thomasschule in 1634, which instruct teachers to ‘awaken pleasure and enjoyment in learning’ and to avoid unfriendliness and tyrannical gestures – though whether this was inserted as a reaction to the evidence of a heavy-handed approach by teachers, which we encountered in the Ohrdruf school of Bach’s time (see Chapter 6), is hard to say.
d In his pre-Leipzig cantatas it seems Bach experienced few problems finding his opening ideas and more difficulty in working them out (elaboratio), whereas in Leipzig, when he was under greater pressure of time, the situation was exactly the opposite (see Robert L. Marshall, The Compositional Process of J. S. Bach (1972), Vol. 1, pp. 237–8).
e Birnbaum refers rather enigmatically to Bach’s melodic style as ‘chromatic and dissonant’ and to his ‘dissonant wealth’ (BD II, Nos. 300, 354/NBR, p. 342).
f The English composer Hugh Wood describes the moment when ideas come into focus: ‘You know this is a very valuable moment, and you feel attached to it; where you are presented with donnée – something “given” – and you don’t know where it has come from. Then the work begins, but without being given something the piece is probably not really alive’ (private correspondence).
g This is undoubtedly true in the case of Bach’s most complex instrumental music, such as the Well-Tempered Clavier, The Art of Fugue and so on, whose surviving autograph material consists only of fair or revision copies, whereas relatively few preliminary drafts have survived for most of his cantatas composed under enormous pressure of time (see Marshall, op. cit., Vol. 1, p. 240).
h Robert L. Marshall has found examples of Bach turning the sheet round and starting to write again, or temporarily laying it aside. In this way, a rejected version of a movement can suddenly appear in a much later portion of the same manuscript (as in the case of BWV 1171) or even in the manuscript of another work (The Music of J. S. Bach: The Sources, the Style, the Significance (1989), p. This was the situation as regards Bach’s revision copies and fair copies, but it definitely was not the norm for the majority of his cantata autographs – certainly not for the vast majority of Leipzig composing sc
ores from the high-intensity period of 1723–7. For those, he (or his assistant) pre-ruled a stockpile of paper in advance clearly before Bach had a definite notion of the specific layout of the work. Marshall refers to this as the ‘non-calligraphic principle’ in The Compositional Process of J. S. Bach (Vol. 1, p. 43, also pp. 47–54).
i Peter Wollny has drawn my attention to the following examples of draft opening movements of Bach’s cantatas:
1. in pencil: a fugal exposition (alto, tenor) in the final movement of BWV 68, found on the last page (upside down) of the autograph score of BWV 59.
2. in pencil: a fugue subject for a chorus to the words Meine Hülfe kommt vom Herrn, der Himmel und Erde gemacht hat (apparently never realised) found on fol. 13r of the autograph score of BWV 49.
3. in ink and unrelated to the work in which it is found: the beginning of an opening chorus for BWV 149, Man singet mit Freuden vom Sieg, an instrumental ritornello (fourteen bars), and the initial entry of the bass voice (only one note and one word – ‘Man’), found in the autograph score of BWV 201.
4. in ink and unrelated to the work in which it is found: the beginning of cantata BWV 183 (seven bars assigned to two oboes, two oboes da caccia, basso continuo plus bass solo); the opening of an aria in D major in (also possibly for BWV 183), both found in the autograph score of BWV 79.
j As we can see from the numerous changes Bach made to the duet from BWV 134a, Die Zeit, die Tag und Jahre macht, this was a laborious process. First he wrote out the opening ritornello (bars 1–19) notated in minims (time signature: C), and then worked on the shape of the inner parts. The natural flow of the alto and tenor voices is also the result of hard work. Initially the alto moved in quavers (E | E − F − G − E − F − G − E − | F − G − A − F). The first climax is reached in bars 21–9, where the strings play almost the entire ritornello superimposed over the voices. Bach achieved this by first entering the strings into his score and then by adding the vocal lines. Double counterpoint comes into play in bars 34 onwards: here Bach simply swapped the alto and tenor parts from bars 29 onwards (transposed by a fifth) and then restored the ritornello, now in B. A similar process can be observed in the second vocal section, where the alto and tenor again exchange lines in bars 59–65 and 66–72. The concluding ritornello of the first part of this da capo aria is now no longer a problem for Bach: he simply added it into his score for the empty bars 74–88. The insertion of the entire ritornello within the two vocal sections of the A section provided coherence and balance and, by exchanging the two voices via double counterpoint, the beautiful proportions of this duet were achieved. I am grateful to Peter Wollny for drawing my attention to the compositional process involved in this work.
Bach: Music in the Castle of Heaven Page 33
