Bach: Music in the Castle of Heaven

by Gardiner, John Eliot

  k Glenn Gould put it this way: ‘The prerequisite of contrapuntal art, more conspicuous in the work of Bach than in that of any other composer, is an ability to conceive a priori of melodic identities which when transposed, inverted, made retrograde, or transformed rhythmically will yet exhibit, in conjunction with the original subject matter, some entirely new but completely harmonious profile’ (‘So You Want to Write a Fugue’, Glenn Gould Reader, Tim Page (ed.) (1990), p. 240).

  l The most blatant and, in some ways, most baffling example of this practice occurs in his great oratorio Israel in Egypt (1737). Of its thirty-nine numbers no fewer than sixteen owe a melodic motif (and sometimes a lot more besides) to four other composers – Alessandro Stradella, Johann Kaspar Kerll and two rather obscure Italian composers, Dionigi Erba and Francesco Antonio Urio. Some of their material clashes with Handel’s style, while some of it is frankly banal; but it seems to have acted like a trigger, detonating Handel’s creative processes. In every case he enriches and surpasses his models. The overall result is one of the most original and dramatically gripping sequences of choral/orchestral writing to have survived from the middle years of the eighteenth century.

  m This intellectual daughter of the Burgomaster Romanus is described by a contemporary ‘as yet a young widow, who, however, on account of a multitude of circumstances, will hardly marry again. Among other things, her conduite is almost excessively womanly, and her spirit far too lively to submit to common male expectations. Her outward aspect is not ugly, but she has rather large bones, a squat figure, a flattish face, a smooth brow, lovely eyes, and she is healthy and rather brown in colouration’(Christian Gabriel Fischer, quoted by H.-J. Schulze in Christoph Wolff (ed.), Die Welt der Bach-Kantaten (1998), Vol. 3, p. 118).

  n Eric Chafe has this to say by way of explanation: ‘Bach’s melodic lines, often jagged, even distorted-sounding at times, do not permit the sense that they go down like a raw oyster, that they might just as well be disregarded from the musical standpoint, or that projecting a sense of “naturalism” is of foremost importance. They arise from the harmony, of course, and that harmony is often considerably more complex and original than that of any of his contemporaries … The complexity of Bach’s harmonic thought converges with that of the theological ideas: he must have welcomed the opportunities to unpack the astonishing array of text-musical correspondences we find in virtually every work’ (J. S. Bach’s Johannine Theology: The St John Passion and the Cantatas for Spring 1725, forthcoming).

  o For Laurence Dreyfus, ‘Bach’s music can be said to have savaged the intentions of the poetic text.’ Yet, by dividing up some of his stanzas into two numbers, it could be said that Bach was doing Gottsched a good turn by disguising the rhythmic monotony of his nine consecutive stanzas. In doing so, he fell foul of the style police, who expected him to adjust his melodic invention and slavishly follow the strophic divisions, contours and punctuation of Gottsched’s verses.

  p Scheibe’s Christmas cantata Der Engel des Herrn, for example, is like a pale, student copy of a Bach cantata – a series of fragmentary ideas that run out of steam almost instantly. The impression is of a caged gerbil puffing on its wheel.

  q C. P. E. Bach justified it to Forkel in this way: ‘With his many activities he hardly had time for the most necessary correspondence, and accordingly would not indulge in lengthy written exchanges’ (BD III, No. 308/NBR, p. 400). His most extensive letters are those to his schoolfriend Georg Erdmann (see pp. 163, 198) and those that relate to his third son, Johann Gottfried Bernhard, and his misdemeanours (see Chapter 14, p. 534).

  r This may have been what Beethoven had in mind when he described Bach as the ‘progenitor of harmony’, agreeing with Johann Friedrich Reichardt that the violin sonatas were ‘perhaps the greatest example in any art form of a master’s ability to move with freedom and assurance, even in chains’ (Jenaische Allgemeine Literaturzeitung, No. 282 (Nov. 1805)).

  s One might object to this view of notation as the ideal embodiment of a piece and suggest that, as a static object, it is ultimately stultifying – to which you could legitimately counter, in Birnbaum’s words, ‘It is true, one does not judge a composition principally and predominantly by the impression of its performance. But if such judgement, which indeed may be deceiving, is not to be considered, I see no other way of judging than to view the work as it has been set down in notes’ (BD II, No. 41, p. 355; and Christoph Wolff, Bach: Essays on His Life and Music (1991), p. 397).

  t The ten canons in the Musical Offering are among the most complicated Bach ever wrote; yet the idea behind them is the same: of a single motif being played against itself, shared between equal voices who imitate the first voice note for note, as in a round. For it to work, each note has to be part of a melody and to be capable of harmonising with each separate occurrence of that melody. One of the most ingenious is the ‘Canon a 2 per Tonos’, in which the upper line inscribes a variant of the royal theme, while the two lower voices give a canonic harmonisation of a second motif. What makes this canon stand out from the others is that it modulates step-wise in minor keys: from C – D – E – F – G (= A) to its conclusion, all in the space of forty-nine bars. Though the piece may be broken off at any point, as the voices arrive at an octave higher than they were at the beginning, theoretically it can modulate upwards ad infinitum. This explains Bach’s note in the margin ‘as the notes ascend, so may the glory of the King.’ According to Eric Chafe, ‘Bach seems here to underscore in a baroque manner what Benjamin called “the disproportion between the unlimited hierarchical dignity with which [the monarch] is divinely invested and the humble estate of his humanity” ’ (Tonal Allegory in the Vocal Music of J. S. Bach (1991), p. 23; Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama (1977), p. 70). Douglas R. Hofstadter, on the other hand, sees this as the first example of what he calls ‘Strange Loops’. He traces its re-occurrence in the work of the Dutch graphic artist M. C. Escher (1902–72), emphasising a clash between the finite and the infinite, and in the mathematical discoveries of Kurt Gödel (1906–78) – his Incompleteness Theorem: ‘All consistent axiomatic formulations of number theory include undecidable propositions’ (Douglas R. Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (1979), pp. 8–17). Take your pick.

  u Alfred Hitchcock’s horror movie The Birds (1963) does not have a conventional incidental score, of course. His usual musical collaborator, Bernard Herrmann, reduced to ‘sound consultant’ on this occasion, used sparse electronic sounds in counterpoint to calculated silences.

  v John Butt suggests that, whereas Bach ‘may have been brought up to ornament profusely, if not somewhat indiscriminately’, he seems to have ‘become increasingly prescriptive, frequently adding ornaments to the instrumental and vocal parts of his cantatas’ (The Sacred Choral Music of J. S. Bach: A Handbook (1997), pp. 52–3).

  w There are many other instances of Bach enlisting, besides his regular copyists, the help of the family and of apprentices in a kind of cottage industry, and later of his establishing his own private hire library. It was illegal to use the copyists on the Thomasschule payroll for the hire library, so the family and pupils had to step in to help out. In the case of BWV 41, Jesu, nun sei gepreiset, for New Year, there must have been a demand for an out-of-town performance for which an extra set of parts was needed. That would explain why one of the first violin parts is in Anna Magdalena’s hand, while the cello piccolo part is in Bach’s own matchless hand.

  x There is an intriguing sequel to this family anecdote, proving that Bach continued to take an interest in his sons’ musical development and even the problems they faced as adult composers. Were we momentarily to fast-forward by some twelve years, by entering some hostelry in central Dresden, we might find two adults engrossed in conversation and poring over a musical document. This happens to be the sketch of a never completed trio sonata by Wilhelm Friedemann Bach, now twenty-six, the organist of the Sophienkirche in Dresden. Discovered in Kiev in 1999, the sketch shows signs
of regular interventions in a second hand which Peter Wollny identified as that of J. S. Bach. What this represents, then, is less a tutorial between father and son, and more a dialogue between two professional colleagues, both absorbed by the technical challenges of composing in invertible counterpoint, settling down to work out their different solutions, which cover three dense pages of thirty-stave manuscript paper and representing probably a whole evening’s work. Friedemann starts off by showing his working sketches to his father, who makes counter-proposals and suggests fresh approaches to the problems his son is facing. Their exchanges are initially couched in contemporary style, but then move on to passages in stilo antico, which at that time was a living concern of Sebastian’s (see Chapter 13). We see him outlining different models, Friedemann struggling to produce acceptable themes and counter-themes, and his father responding with an exemplary alternative that shows how it can work in inversion, and then how it lends itself to a treatment using parallel thirds. The full extent of these exchanges, plus Wollny’s realisations of them in modern notation, are published in the supplement volume to the NBA (BA 5291) (2011), pp. 67–80.

  8

  Cantatas or Coffee?

  It is but a pity that in such a famous place [Leipzig], where the Muses have taken up their seat, there are at the same time so few connoisseurs and lovers of true music.

  – Lorenz Christoph Mizler (1747)

  Res severa est verum gaudium: ‘True pleasure is a serious matter’ – certainly to the Germans. Seneca’s motto was adopted thirty years after Bach’s death by Leipzig’s famous orchestra and emblazoned on the walls of their Gewandhaus Concert Hall at its opening in 1781. Several rebuildings later it is still up there in capital letters, reminding audiences that listening to music requires giving it due attention. Whether it already applied in Bach’s time – sufficient to quell the congenital in-attentiveness and rowdiness of his male listeners in the first tier gallery as they gazed down at the ladies walking late into church – it undoubtedly reflected the intricate meshing of the secular and the sacred in his urban world. We see this epitomised in the frontispiece of a popular-song collection published in 1736. At first glance Singende Muse an der Pleisse is a portrayal of an elegant social gathering set against a panorama of Leipzig with views across its main river and some of the prominent buildings of the city’s skyline. The ambivalence of location – a composite of coffee-house, inner salon and pleasure garden – is no doubt deliberate, designed to show how each is an appropriate and fashionable setting for music, itself a sign of civic wealth. In the middle distance we can pick out Schellhafers Haus,a an upmarket tavern in the Catharinenstrasse where weekly concerts were held in wintertime, and opposite it, across the river, Apel’s sumptuous gardens, later to delight the eye of Goethe (‘glorious … the first time I saw them I thought I was in the Elysian Fields’1). But most prominent is the looming presence of the Thomaskirche, not the main city church (that was the Nikolai), but the symbol of its Orthodox Lutheran faith, with the richest musical tradition of any church within the German-speaking world.

  Singende Muse an der Pleisse. In the foreground two allegorical figures are busy making music together. Nearby, a lady plays the virginals while a gentleman appears to listen attentively; other couples are playing cards or billiards. (illustration credit 45)

  Boethius’s panorama depicts three of the main venues for public music-making in Leipzig – the church, the coffee-house and the pleasure gardens – leaving us to imagine the fourth – the market square and town centre where Bach, as the city’s music director, put on grand displays of ceremonial music whenever the Elector or members of the royal family came to town and to which the whole city thronged. All in all, it suggests that citizens of Leipzig, like townspeople elsewhere in Europe, were (in the words of one social historian) ‘caught between the imperative of appearing galant in a newly cosmopolitan world, and an older, still vigorously preached view that luxury and many secular activities were sins that invited divine punishment’.2 This was the backdrop to the leisure activities of a burgeoning middle class, an urban society in the throes of re-adjusting its religion, intellect, taste, social customs and expectations. Young men of today, some complained, paid only lip service to Christianity and had trouble combining traditional values while cutting a galant and worldly figure.3

  A short publication called The Well-Designed and Abridged Housekeeping Magazine appeared in Leipzig in 1730.4 It aimed to give advice to those who aspired to improve their living conditions and to hoist them into conformity with the new cultural norms of the city. Beginning with the etiquette of serving lavish gourmet meals and the postprandial rituals of drinking coffee and pipe smoking, its author, called simply Bornemann, goes on to discuss appropriate household furnishings. He even selects suitable first-aid kits. Then, without any intended incongruity, he outlines what might constitute a well-stocked library to meet every conceivable material and spiritual need, such as ‘for refreshing the spirit’, ‘for repentance, confession and Communion’, ‘for thorough extermination of all evils and fortification of the true faith’.5 The recommended books include many by the same authors that are known to have been in Bach’s private library, and show us how he attempted to keep pace with current literary fashions. Literature both serious and diversionary rubbed shoulders in such collections with volumes such as the Serious-Humorous and Satirical Poems by Picander, Bach’s regular literary partner.6

  Coinciding with the crisis caused by the deteriorating relationship with his employers on the town council (see Chapter 6) came a conspicuous switch of forum for Bach’s most prominent musical activities: from the church to the coffee-house (in winter) and its gardens (in summer). To comprehend the social, liturgical and performance background for his public music-making in his Leipzig years, we need to explore these two parallel worlds of music, one sacred, one secular, and these two public meeting places, one over 500 years old, the other relatively new. How well did Bach adjust to these competing environments, how was his music received, and how did his profile change, both on arriving in Leipzig and after a few years in office? To answer these questions we should take into account signs of the Aufklärung that were now beginning to impinge on the urban intelligentsia of Leipzig, converging unexpectedly with the late surge in Lutheran Orthodoxy that was affecting all sections of society. Hegel may have stumbled on a truth when he observed that the German version of the Enlightenment was ‘on the side of theology’ – certainly as it applied to the performing arts.7 In Bach’s day the arts were still expected to impart some explicit moral, religious or rational meaning. It was not until the second half of the century that aesthetic concepts such as ‘the Beautiful’ and ‘the Sublime’ began to uncouple the artistic from the scientific and the moral.b

  The ease with which music crosses frontiers meant that, even without the heavy investment in star performers that typified the Dresden Court (inclining first towards French, then, on a change of electoral whim, switching to Italian styles in the 1730s), in Leipzig it could aspire to true cosmopolitan status. Music bolstered the city’s image as ‘Athens on the Pleisse’, its reputation as fashionable ‘Little Paris’ (as Goethe called it) and even, according to Lessing, as ‘a place where one can see the whole world in microcosm’.8 The city’s ability to boast an active opera house gave credence to these cultural pretensions, but with its collapse in 1720 – due as much to disputes over rental arrangements as to its huge operating debts – they were harder to justify. Though the Dresden Court was in favour of preserving it, as was a swathe of Leipzig’s intelligentsia, its attractions were not enough to save it. For that to happen, the city’s financiers would have needed to pool their resources, apply for a licence from the electoral court, surmount numerous bureaucratic hurdles and appoint a charismatic musical director such as Telemann, able to attract students.c The fact is that, for all its mercantile wealth and cultural aspirations, Leipzig in the middle years of the eighteenth century was no match for thriving, genuinely oper
a-minded cities like Dresden, Hamburg or London.

  In Chapter 6 we saw how, thanks to the peculiarities of local government in Leipzig – entailing, for example, the alternation of mayors and their respective political affiliations – Bach as a municipal servant had to operate in a complex, intensely hierarchical urban environment, and struggle to force a path through the tangle of the city’s dense bureaucratic and ecclesiastical regulations for at least the first six years. The city has been compared to an octopus: ‘If one wriggles free of one arm, one is promptly seized by another.’9 To Bach, the title ‘Thomascantor’ implied a socially inferior position, restricting his musical authority to within the church and school. He, but not the council, favoured the appellation ‘Director Musices Lipsiensis’. But it was not until six years after taking up office that Bach could begin to substantiate his claim to the title of main director of the city’s musical activities. This was partly a matter of protocol and partly from necessity, because he was devoting all his energies to composing church cantatas and Passions. In 1729, by taking over leadership of the collegium musicum (an independent, not a civic institution), Bach was signalling his bid to free himself from the council’s control and to establish a solid independent basis for his activities as Director Musices of the city. The coffee-house and the church were its twin temples, and he could – and would – serve in both.d It was no accident that this move occurred just after an acrimonious altercation with the assistant deacon of the Thomaskirche over the right to choose the hymns for the vesper service, the customary prerogative of the cantor. Behind the councillors’ dark warnings of a showdown that we encountered in Chapter 6, it is not difficult to imagine their displeasure at his latest bid for artistic autonomy and their contrary resolve to keep him in his place.