The main Sunday service was structured in such a way as to involve the public at all the traditional points, such as the move to the altar for the Communion, the cue to stand for congregational hymns and the passing round of the collection bags with jingling bells attached – a suggestive and perhaps effective way to prise coins from pockets and purses. The quality of congregational hymn-singing seems to have varied from the sublime (Ulm in 1629) to the really deplorable (Bautzen in 1637). In 1703, according to one contemporary source, ‘it is frequently in utter disarray: some sing quickly, some slowly; some pull the pitch upwards, some downwards. Some sing at the second, others at the fourth, this one at the fifth, that one at the octave, each according to his own pleasure. There is no order, no rhythm, no harmony, no grace, but for the most part pure confusion.’41 By the time that first Kuhnau and then Bach were at the helm in Leipzig, standards there were probably well above average; but we cannot be sure. What remained of the old Pietist mantra: that elaborate figural music shut worshippers out, turning them into passive bystanders so that their minds wandered, whereas congregational singing made them active participants and therefore more devout? Some still turned back to St Augustine for support: ‘When it happens that the singing entertains me more than what is sung moves me, then I am culpable and would much rather never have heard the song.’42 Modern advocates of figural music could not refute this outright: its purpose, they maintained, was ‘to instruct the audience in a genteel and agreeable manner’ (Bokemeyer), ‘to edify the audience’ (Scheibe) and to move their emotions (Mattheson). In 1721 Gottfried Ephraim Scheibel put the case for stylistic unity succinctly: ‘The musical tone which gives pleasure in the opera can do the same in the church, just with a different object of the pleasure’43 – a view by no means universally shared. The vast majority needed to be enticed to come to church – and here, Scheibel insisted, was one effective inducement. Further objections – not necessarily by Pietists – to the intrusion of styles of music linked to popular entertainment seeping into church can be found all through the 1720s. The Berlin-based cantor Martin Heinrich Fuhrmann fulminated against composers ‘who pour Italian operatic “soft cheese” [nonsense, in other words] into church music’. He likened the resulting pieces to ‘pork-veal roasts’ and ‘Italian spiritual cervelas sausages’ made of rotten donkey or mule meat in order to poison the German Protestant church.44
This reconstruction of the seating arrangements shows rectangular blocks of debenture pews and the wide bays allocated to the choristers (Nos. 70–73). (From Arnold Schering, Johann Sebastian Bachs Leipziger Kirchenmusik, Studien und Wege zu ihrer Erkenntnis, Breitkopf & Härtel, 1954. Reproduced by permission.) (illustration credit 49)
More problematic still was the widespread habit of congregants arriving late and leaving early. The Leipzig churches were ‘quite empty’ at the start of the service, Johann Friedrich Leibniz noted in 1694, and, according to Christian Gerber, this was still the case nearly forty years later right across Saxony. To combat this, church ordinances were issued; ushers were appointed to stop people from rushing out ‘like cattle’ after the sermon; and preachers were instructed to admonish those who failed to enter church in time for the singing and hung about outside until the signal was given that the preacher was about to mount his pulpit. It seems that the more chic members of the municipal elite of Leipzig – especially its womenfolk – took pride in arriving anything up to an hour late. According to Gerber, this was because they were too lazy to get out of bed earlier and, unlike the ‘common people’ who did their work before going to church, these ladies spent too much time dressing, grooming themselves and drinking coffee.45l Making their ostentatious entrance just in time for the sermon and under the full gaze of the men seated in the galleries inevitably led to elaborate attendant rituals of greeting – hat-removal, bowing, hand-shaking, etc. The consequent hullabaloo coincided exactly with the performance of the Predigtmusik, the Sunday cantata specially composed by Bach.
Gottsched satirises a young woman taking snuff and offering it to her male admirers from her pew,46 while von Rohr scolds the young bucks for the way they parade their ill manners: they too arrive late, talk, sleep, disturb their neighbours by groaning and sighing during prayers, reading their letters or newspapers – behaviour they themselves would abhor in the opera house.47 Congregants were in the habit of talking during the music, with the large population of soldiers and day labourers standing at the back of the church on any given Sunday taking most of the blame (as ‘transients’ they were forbidden by law from renting pews). There are visual parallels here in the paintings by Dutch artists such as Emanuel de Witte and Hendrick van Vliet, who portrayed dogs urinating in the whitewashed Oude Kerk in Delft. Against this background of people-gazing and running commentary, paper darts and other objects being thrown from the gallery on to the women seated below, the ogling of eligible young ladies and even the presence of dogs running amok in church, one might think that the music stood little chance of being heard.m
Of the many different shock techniques Bach developed in his church cantatas to grab the attention of his unsuspecting listeners while all this was going on, two instances stand out. Sunday, 15 October 1724, saw the first outing of BWV 5, Wo soll ich fliehen hin? A robust aria for bass with a ferociously demanding trumpet obbligato set against the rest of the orchestra, it describes measures intended to repel the ‘hordes of hell’ (Höllenheer). Bach might have reckoned that this assertion of liberation and triumph, with its repeated injunctions of Verstumme! Verstumme! (‘Be silent!’), would be enough to arrest any late-comers engaged in making a grand entrance or going through the rituals of greeting their neighbours. Six months later he gave a more subtle twist in the tail to an elaborate double-chorale fugue that concludes the Whit Monday cantata BWV 68, Also hat Gott die Welt geliebt. Following St John’s bald division of the world into believers and sceptics, Bach’s contrapuntal working-out is full of pent-up energy and invention. Towards its conclusion he suddenly assigns the first musical subject to a new text: ‘because he hath not believed in the name of the only begotten Son of God’ – sung once loud, once soft. This abrupt ending seems calculated to give a sharp jolt to any congregation expecting, but not getting, the traditional chorale to round things off and to bring them comfortably back to earth after a stern homiletic reproof. Bach had delivered a sucker punch.
To the authorities the insertion of ‘the music’ into the service carried with it the fear that if it were too long (or in the eyes of the clergy too entertaining, too frivolous or too ‘operatic’) it could be a distraction from God’s Word and provide a pretext for disorder and unruly behaviour of one kind or another. Further evidence of this fear of a breakdown in civil order comes from the official decree that on all Sundays and feast-days the city gates were to be kept closed throughout the day, thus bringing wheeled traffic to a standstill and restricting comings and goings to pedestrians. As late as 1799 we hear that ‘during the service iron chains in the streets and alleys close the approaches to the churches in order to prevent all disturbance’48 – though it is not clear whether this was ostensibly to ensure a peaceful ambience during the service itself and to ‘promote devotion’49 on those official ‘days of fasting, penitence and prayer’ or from fear of public disorder stirred up by those who were unable (or unwilling) to attend church. Was Bach being sly when he wrote in 1728 to the council, ‘It may be added that when, in addition to the concerted music [i.e., the cantata], very long hymns are sung, the divine service is held up, and all sorts of disorder would have to be reckoned with’50 – first, pandering to their known dislike of long services prolonged by music, and, second, to their fear of crowd disturbance?n
Our modern patterns of concert hall listening and of church service decorum inherited from nineteenth-century conventions are of no help in evaluating the way Bach’s music was received at the time. They give us a false perspective on the customs of Bach’s Leipzig congregation, for whom neither punctuality nor silent
listening was considered de rigueur. Yet the founder of their brand of Christianity, Martin Luther, had unequivocally sanctified the listening process: the Word of God was not text, he insisted, but sound, or, rather, voice – to be heard and listened to: Vox est anima verbi (‘The voice is the soul of the Word’). But, he regretted, ‘we do not listen, even when the whole world and all creatures cry out to us, and God is addressing us with His promises.’51 He was equally critical of those who just ‘sing along or read the psalms as though they had no business with us; rather we should read them and sing them in such a way that we are thereby bettered, our faith is strengthened and our conscience is consoled in all sorts of trouble.’52 Genuine listening is therefore a sacramental activity and brings us in touch with divine grace: ‘in listening to a piece of music, we listen not only to the musicians, but also to the sound of our own body resonance, as a way of responding to the spirit of the piece and its truth that claims and seeks to transform us.’53 One wonders whether the clergy of Bach’s day were equally emphatic on the subject. To anyone in their congregation spotted paying more attention to the cantata than to the sermon, the pastors, one suspects, might have replied that the preaching of the Word was the summit of religious activity, whereas music, though it was to be welcomed, was its (not always biddable) handmaiden.
As a composer addressing a captive audience, Bach appears to have stretched every imaginative muscle in his body to engage with his listeners. Counting on their active participation, he must have found signs of inattention desperately frustrating. From his own experiences Mattheson wrote, ‘Most musical listeners are uninformed people with respect to art. What a great deed I have done when I know how to disguise an art-piece [Kunst-Stück] from their ears, so that when they hear it they don’t even notice at all. What a miracle! – just as when a peasant-farmer unknowingly swallows along with his sauerkraut a roasted canary that cost him six thaler, and, having done it, he would far rather have stuffed himself with roast pork!’54 To use artifice because of contempt for his listeners was not Bach’s way. Unlike Mattheson, he was probably not especially concerned if they were able to perceive the complex workings of his music just so long as they were not distracted from its content. And he was perfectly capable, when so minded, of providing his congregation with music that was easy on their ears, as certain of his cantatas show us.
There is a strange irony here. Keen listeners and music-lovers, one might suppose, as well as serious believers, would have been irked by the general rowdiness of the church service, their enjoyment further quelled by disapproving looks from those of the clergy with a Pietist outlook. In the coffee-house, however, a secular and, some might argue, morally questionable environment, a more select and discerning audience listened and paid attention to music.o It might also be the case that the coffee-house concert gave birth to the strand of secular German morality encapsulated by Seneca’s aphorism and later adopted by the Gewandhaus Orchestra. From the protocol of other collegium concerts in nearby Delitzsch, we know that listeners were expected to ‘remember (and without special admonition) that good manners demand that they refrain from playing cards or pursuing other pleasures that might disturb the collegium’.55 A student at the University of Jena was most concerned lest his pleasure at hearing his friends play in the local collegium musicum would be compromised by ‘giving room for inhuman boozing, which always produces total disgust in me’.56 Listeners there could expect to be treated to ‘the most pleasant moments’ in which ‘Music sounds sweetly in the stillness. / Here rules a silenced will, / Quietness often imposes itself.’57 There is a further irony in that Bach’s music has almost always been appreciated within a secular concert environment that has posthumously co-opted some of the trappings of religion. This includes the halo of religious reverence accorded by German listeners to Bach’s music ever since the nineteenth century, both in and out of church (and at organ recitals even to this day).
Clearly there is no simple distinction in contemporary listening habits to be made here, then, between ‘absorption’ (in church) and ‘amusement’ (in coffee-houses), or between inattention and attentiveness. The well-established concept of Affektenlehre, the doctrine that the role of music is to stir the feelings of composer, performer and audience alike, held regardless of venue.58 Just because attendance at musical performances was sociable, it does not necessarily follow that the listening was shallow;59 nor, since many were connoisseurs (Kenner), was there automatically a high degree of holy attentiveness (though some who attended may have assumed that this was the appropriate attitude). There was a bit of this and a bit of that, as we learn from Johann Andreas Cramer’s account after attending a performance of Leipzig’s Großes Concert founded by ‘sixteen persons, some noble and some bourgeois’ on 11 March 1743:
This society gathers together once per week in the winter, and once every fourteen days in the summer. The decorations in the room in which their meetings take place are so tasteful, that the eyes are pleased without being distracted, and an equal degree of care is taken in every other way to make sure that participants feel at ease. According to connoisseurs, the society does itself honour both in the selection of its members, who further the delight of the group with their musical strengths, and in the selection of pieces to perform, which are composed by the most famous and greatest masters. Though the organization does not allow the entire city to participate in their events, good manners and politesse are welcome, and the way in which one allows them to take part is as selfless as it is galant.
The attentiveness to music that pervades society gatherings deserves mention here. All arts, which appeal through the beauties of harmony, and arouse various passions of the heart, require attentiveness, so that their effects are not disturbed. Only silence during musical performances can satisfy those who have ambitions as listeners. To a connoisseur whose musical ear does not wish to miss a single bowstroke from [Carl Gotthelf] Gerlach’s violin, every noise – however small it may be – is intolerable. In a masterpiece there are no tones or sounds that are unimportant, and a single measure misheard can rob one of a large part of the pleasure intended by its composer. I am so offended by people asking me questions while I am listening it is as though they are mocking me, and I mercilessly judge those who are inattentive to music as lacking sensitivity and taste.
I could not hide the annoyance aroused in me by my neighbour at a recent concert, and I cannot forgive him even though (without recognizing me) he has praised my writing in other contexts. His having shared distracting thoughts while the music was playing destroyed all of my confidence in his praise. I sat there listening like one whose entire soul had been brought to order by music, so that pleasure could find a totally open path, and crawl into every crevice of my being. A solo, which Mr Landvogt played on the flute, put me in an enraptured state of mind, and I was poised to be completely intoxicated with the music, to be lost in joy, when this immodest neighbour suddenly moved over and got close to my ear, putting the gentle and ingratiating tones to flight, and asked me with a knowing expression: ‘Have you heard that Bochetta has once again been taken, and the Turks are expected to gather together in the European provinces?’ Furious that my quiet rapture had been disturbed, my answer probably gave him a poor impression of my knowledge of political science. I said to him with as much haste as possible: ‘No!’60
Cramer’s account, tendentious as it is, is just the kind of thing we lack for Bach’s church music and the way it was received at the time. But at least it serves to remind us that music is ultimately dependent on a degree of silence and the capacity of the listener to hear. John Butt divides listening into three interlocking categories. The first exemplifies the ‘general hearer-orientated nature of virtually all music’; the second ‘the many types of music that are specifically listener-orientated’; while the third relates to ‘the type of listener who creates a specific sense of self over the duration of the listening experience’. Cramer clearly fell into this category. Though more elusive, cont
entious and harder to define, this third category points to ‘the notion of an “internal” or “implicit” listener, someone latent in the way the music seems to have been put together’.p This seems particularly true of Bach and the impact he may have had on some of his listeners at the time and ever since. ‘Most aspects of Lutheran worship,’ Butt maintains, ‘were designed to dispose the listener not only to a direct experience of the biblical events, stories or doctrines appropriate for the day, but also to make connections and to take to heart specific lessons learnt from Christ’s sacrifice.’ The music, as we saw earlier, seems ‘tailored to a sense of the listener’s presence’.61
It took many decades following Bach’s death before the habit of the devout enjoyment of music moved from the church (if indeed it had ever existed there with any degree of consistency) to the concert hall. Before Goethe and others taught audiences what we would think of as good musical manners and habits of silent inwardness (what Peter Gay calls ‘the nineteenth-century ideal of self-control for the sake of the exquisite, if postponed, psychological rewards’), composers as different as Gluck, Mozart, Rossini and Spohr all had to learn to put up with the flow of talk, card games and the slurping of sorbets, as well as frequent comings and goings while their music was being played. Meanwhile much aristocratic scorn was poured on the bourgeois habit of earnestly attending musical events to listen, nothing being ‘so damnable as listening to a work like a street merchant or some provincial just off the boat’, as one French author wrote at the time.62 Is it entirely natural to sit stock still when listening to music, or does the practice of giving ‘undivided silent attention to a musical performance [do] violence to basic human impulses’ – the sublimation ‘of the urge to become actively involved’? Gay maintains that ‘listening awakens the urge to mimic marked rhythms, march-like sonorities, stirring crescendos.’63 One can very well imagine the varied types of inward struggle going on among Bach’s first listeners between conflicting urges – to listen intently, pass comment, beat time, hum along with it, or to ignore it completely.
Bach: Music in the Castle of Heaven Page 37
