Some commentators in the past half-century have claimed that around 1729–30 Bach became disillusioned with the task of church-cantata composition and may have become creatively spent or even suffered some kind of crisis of faith. These claims represent one type of reaction (or overreaction) to the forensic research carried out in the 1950s by Alfred Dürr and Georg von Dadelsen, who between them proposed a radically new chronology of church-cantata composition based on watermark analysis, showing it to have been concentrated in the first three years of Bach’s Leipzig cantorate and to have fallen off over the following two years. ‘A landslide has taken place in the wake of the new chronology,’ proclaimed the German Protestant scholar Friedrich Blume to the International Bach Society in Mainz in June 1962. He dared to ask, ‘Did Bach have a special liking for church work? Was it a spiritual necessity for him? Hardly. There is at any rate no evidence that it was. Bach the supreme cantor, the creative servant of the Word of God, the staunch Lutheran, is a legend. It will have to be buried along with all the other traditional and beloved romantic illusions.’64 That Blume overstated his case is now widely accepted, and must be obvious from the contextual reconstruction and the shards of biographical evidence we have attempted to assemble in previous chapters. Blume was making a laudable attempt to readjust the inherited image of Bach in the light of the new chronology and to warn us against basing our view on only those works to have survived the passage of time. His reasoned corrective to the conventional image of Bach was that ‘he is more down-to-earth, more human … a man bound up with his own age with every fibre of his being, a man who warmly welcomes the trends that point promisingly to the future, but who dutifully devotes all his powers to the traditional office of cantor when it devolves upon him: a man standing on the boundary between two epochs who is aware of the fact.’ It is difficult to argue with that. Nor can he be faulted for suggesting that ‘the Cantor’s resistance to the narrowness of the ecclesiastical regime grew deeper.’65 But there could be other explanations of the falling off in cantata composition besides those he proposed. In the first place, Bach may have felt that by 1729–30 he had provided the main Leipzig churches with a sufficiently rich repertory of cantatas to meet most future needs.
We are now better placed than Blume to trace the strategies Bach developed for stepping off the weekly treadmill of cantata composition.66 During the mid 1730s, for instance, he regularly substituted generally slighter and less demanding cantatas by other composers such as Telemann and his own cousin Johann Ludwig Bach, and in 1735/6 an entire annual cantata cycle, Das Saitenspiel des Herzens, by Gottfried Heinrich Stölzel, having already performed the latter’s Passion oratorio (Ein Lämmlein geht und trägt die Schuld) in 1734. To feature these and other composers’ music in place of his own, while still in fulfilment of his cantor’s duties, must have come as a relief; there may also have been a hint of disgruntlement, as if to say to his congregants, ‘Well, you couldn’t bother to make the effort to listen to my music or give it a modicum of attention, so here is some Gebrauchsmusik by other composers better suited to your tastes and levels of concentration.’
Even without such a hint of defiance, Bach may have begun to sense that the communality of belief and convention he once shared with his congregation was now starting to alter, or even to break down. There probably never was a full consensus about the sacred nature of music per se, neither among the Leipzig clergy (divided, as we have seen) nor among his employers on the council (equally divided as they were), even if a slightly rickety understanding between Bach and (some of) his congregation was negotiated between them, once the more conservative members had got over the initial shock of his cantata style. Bach may have looked differently on his church music of these middle years, placing more and more value on its craftsmanship and inherent musical qualities rather than on its contingent usefulness. This put him still more out of step with theorists, theologians and the new breed of ‘enlightened’ aestheticians who favoured the galant style.
Corroboration for this shift of attitude can be detected in the trilogy of interrelated oratorios he wrote for Christmas, Easter and Ascension during the mid-to-late 1730s, all of them originating in secular drammi per musica. In 1725 Bach had hastily adapted one such dramma recently composed for the Weissenfels Court, BWV 249a, into an Easter cantata: he transposed, not wholly convincingly, four shepherds and shepherdesses from a theatrical Arcadian setting into Christ’s disciples hurrying to the empty tomb. There were no chorales. A decade later his oratorio adaptations take on a different hue and are painted on a much broader canvas. Returning to the same Easter cantata around 1738, the Easter Oratorio (BWV 249) now emerged, a more polished effort, expanded and re-scored, and then subjected to a further revision between 1743 and 1746 (its last performance occurring on 6 April 1749) with the opening duet expanded to a chorus. The earlier identification of the vocal parts with the roles of the two Marys, Peter and John was now virtually expunged. Bach’s intent here was manifestly to eliminate the theatrical flavour of the cruder cantata version and to give a more consistently meditative emphasis to the scriptural narrative, in which the expression of human emotional responses to the Resurrection is paramount.
To base a biblical oratorio celebrating the birth of Christ as ruler of heaven and earth on the story of Hercules, famous in myth as the strongest man in the world – and therefore a flattering encomium for the crown prince of Saxony, for whom it was written in 1733 – was hardly a risk-free strategy. Whether his first listeners spotted (or were the slightest bit concerned by) the wholesale recycling of material from BWV 213, Herkules auf dem Scheidewege, into the Christmas Oratorio, that Bach bridges the secular, divine and mythological worlds so smoothly gives a modern quasi-’Enlightened’ flavour to the transplant that is very much of a piece with the prevailing Zeitgeist.
Another possible explanation for Bach’s decision to switch genres and the forums of his activities during these watershed years could have nothing to do with twentieth-century allegations of a diminished religious fervour, or a loss of complicity with his audience. Instead it might relate to a desire for pastures new (even within Leipzig’s city walls) and a wish for contact with a new group of listeners unencumbered by church protocol. Here were solid reasons for his assuming control of the university collegium musicum in 1729. From this laboratory he could achieve several things: he could reinforce ties to the university musicians and trade favours with them; he could offer his two eldest sons and other leading pupils a platform and valuable experience before they went off to take up positions elsewhere; and he could expand his production of congratulatory cantatas for the Saxon royal family and act as artistic intermediary between them and the university. In addition he could cement ties with the intelligentsia of Leipzig and attempt to meet some of their cultural needs. It seems likely that, in this secular urban culture, Bach also made several other deliberate choices – typical of his curiosity and of those abrupt shifts of compositional genre one comes across at separate stages of his career: to get acquainted with instrumental works by contemporaries such as Benda, Graun and Telemann; to feature works by his own two eldest sons written ‘in an advanced, popular style’;67 and to perform selected Italian cantatas and arias by opera composers such as Porpora, Scarlatti and Handel. These provided him with a fresh critical starting-point and were a spur to his own compositions in the fashionable genres of the day (BWV 203 and 209).
Over the course of his career Bach composed for a variety of listeners – in fulfilment of his official duties, out of a moral obligation to his ‘neighbour’ and, though he would not have put it in such terms, to satisfy his own creative urge. We search for anything, even passing references in diaries and letters from those who attended church services, to bridge the deplorable gaps in our knowledge of how audiences of the day reacted to his music. The euphoria and fervour of response by audiences in our own day – clear signs of how deeply Bach’s music continues to affect people of all ages, religions and backgrounds – is
in itself no guide to how people at the time responded to Bach’s own performances of his music. However, I am convinced that at some stage in the next few years the sharp-eyed sleuths in Leipzig’s Bach-Archiv will alight upon correspondence, perhaps in the more obscure provincial libraries of eastern Germany, and we will then get the direct testimony we have been looking for all along. Bach’s music simply cannot have been passed over with indifference: delight, astonishment, bafflement, even dislike – all of these, but not with a mere shrug of the shoulders.q
Meanwhile it is misleading in the extreme to see Bach exclusively as a composer for the church, switching to secular composition only when circumstances turned against his creative contributions to the liturgy. Indubitably his view of his craft was that it was God-given and secure, as well as vocationally and dynastically preordained (as we saw in Chapters 3 and 5), but there is no reason to suppose that he considered his secular music in any way inferior to his church music. That said, catch him in a certain mood and he might have agreed with his predecessor Johann Kuhnau that in church music ‘the sacred place and text call for every possible artistry, splendour, modestie and devotion; here, in secular works, good pieces may appear next to bad, droll, ridiculous, and melodies may creep in that excessively hop about and transgress the rules of art.’68
That might help to explain Bach’s lack of enthusiasm for conventional opera and the dismissive (or at best ironic) remark about the ‘pretty little ditties’ he witnessed in Dresden, and for his never composing in that genre.r This diffidence extended to the secular chamber cantatas and the congratulatory odes termed drammi per musica that have survived from his first years in Leipzig (BWV 201, 205 and 207), a genre described by Gottsched as ‘little operas or operettas’ which, however, ‘seldom find their way to the stage’. Significantly, in complaining about the bad habits of poets and musicians, Gottsched singles out Hurlebusch and Handel for praise, but not Bach.69
The truth is that, for all their technical accomplishments, Bach’s drammi per musica are a good deal less dramatic than a number of his church cantatas, and it seems to be far harder for us, curiously, to reconstruct a living context for Bach’s congratulatory music than for his church music despite the complications of belief. They evoke the pastoral environs of Leipzig prettily but less vividly than in his unselfconscious transfer of rural imagery to contemplative religious texts. In a predominantly agrarian society like eighteenth-century Saxony, there was a close linking of the seasons to the patterns of everyday life and the concerns of Christianity, and even to Bach’s urban audience there would have been nothing peculiar or quaint in hearing pastoral music as a metaphor for their own Lutheran community watched over by Jesus as the Good Shepherd. Belief is the motor for this pastoral music, Bach’s purpose being to demonstrate that, with Christ’s help, the ‘meadow of heaven’ is not a lost Arcadia but a realistically attainable destination.
There is none of that in the secular cantatas of his Leipzig period.s Rather, we find the equivalent in French Baroque art – painters such as Pater and Lancret struggling to get beyond the pretty conventionalities of form and to reproduce the enchanted world of their master Watteau, whose fêtes galantes often suggest a profound and simple longing for something out of reach and beyond belief. One senses in these and other works that Bach was being sucked further into the world of galant music espoused by his sons than was altogether natural for him. While it was his second son, Carl Philipp Emanuel, who in due course became known as the most celebrated proponent of the aesthetics of Empfindsamkeit (‘sensibility’), Johann Sebastian proved equally adept at forging a direct emotional connection with his listeners when he had the will to do so.
The context for Bach’s public music-making in Leipzig was multilayered, with commercial, political, liturgical and social aspects all vying for inclusion. It illustrates the growing secularisation of German society in the mid eighteenth century – the interweaving of pressing social concerns in a fast-expanding urban community and the grass-root effects of the Aufklärung, or Age of Reason, labels under which we otherwise abstractly subsume the century. In the public ceremonial events given al fresco in the town centre, Bach had a relatively free hand in the choice of musical styles and literary partners, even if he had to adopt a conventional tone when acting as master of musical ceremonies during visits to Leipzig by the Elector and his family (which led eventually to a prestigious and much coveted court title, a counterbalance to his thraldom to the town council). Then the coffee-house collegium concerts exposed him to a broad range of styles which remind us of the protean side of his character. His music was transformative, the galant being just one of many elements he was willing to absorb and embrace in his own work, from which he created a synthesis that transcended all its parts. Additionally he was eager to study the music of others, willing to engage with different kinds of listener and be open-minded in giving opportunities to other composers and performers (not necessarily kindred spirits).
Whereas in his coffee-house rehearsals and concerts he could stake out a degree of autonomy, when we follow him back into church we see that his room for manoeuvre was far more restricted. There he needed to tread a fine path to avoid giving unwitting offence to the doctrinal scruples of the local clergy on the one hand, while satisfying his civic paymasters on the other. For the clergy the role of the cantata was to inspire devotion among the congregation and to provide a calming atmospheric foretaste of the main event – the sermon. What most concerned the town councillors was that church music should avoid causing civil unrest, and then to guarantee a prestigious ‘show’ with which to dazzle visitors to the trade fairs. For Bach, there were artistic standards to defend, often in the face of clerical meddling and councillor opposition, a degree of public indifference and boorish behaviour, as well as squabbles with, and petty criticism from, disaffected ex-pupils to contend with. To assist a diverse congregation coming to church with widely different expectations of the role of music there, Bach had the texts of his cantatas printed and put on sale. Even then there were marked differences in people’s ability to ‘hear’ the music he provided. To a professional critic like Scheibe there were those ‘uncomfortable noises’ that he claimed to be able to identify, spoiling Bach’s polyphony. But these are just as likely to have been occasioned by flaws in execution by Bach’s under-rehearsed ensemble, or by the ambient noise within the church, or indeed by deficiencies in Scheibe’s hearing abilities, as by any faults in the compositions themselves. Bach’s aim, after all, was to write music designed to praise God and to inspirit and captivate his listeners.t He had set out in 1723 with ambitious plans to compose five integrated cycles of cantatas, each with a Passion as its central jewel. It is to these that we now turn.
* * *
a The engraver was Christian Friedrich Boethius (1706–82); the author was Sperontes, the pen name of the poet Johann Sigismund Scholze (1705–50), who settled in Leipzig in the 1720s and wrote plays and Singspiel texts. Three further volumes of his song anthology were to follow in 1742–5, comprising 250 poems that depict scenes and activities from everyday life set as simple galant strophic songs. Bach has been credited (somewhat unconvincingly) with two of them: ‘Ich bin nun wie ich bin’ and ‘Dir zu Liebe, wertes Herze’ (BWV Anh. 11 40, 41).
b Long before it was translated into German by Christian Garve in 1773, Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (1757) had an immediate impact on German aesthetics, influencing important thinkers such as Lessing, Kant and Herder. Lydia Goehr has pointed to the successive changes in aesthetic attitude that led theorists ‘first, to abandon the belief that music should serve an extra-musical, religious, or social end, and then to adopt, in its place, the belief that instrumental music could be a fine and respectable art in service to nothing but itself’ (Lydia Goehr, The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works (2007), pp. 146–7).
c If things had worked out a little differently Bach might theoretically have found h
imself at the head of Leipzig’s troubled opera theatre, which was closed in 1720 and eventually demolished in 1729. His entry into the world of opera was a lot closer than many have suspected, as Michael Maul has shown (‘New Evidence on Thomaskantor Kuhnau’s Operatic Activities; or, Could Bach have been Allowed to Compose an Opera?’, Bach Network UK (2009)).
d One can almost hear his relief in the note he attached to an otherwise routine testimonial: ‘PS. The latest is that the dear Lord has now also provided for honest Mr [Georg Balthasar] Schott [the previous organist of the Neukirche], and bestowed on him the post of Cantor in Gotha; wherefore he will say his farewells next week, as I am willing to take over his collegium’ (BD I, No. 120 / NBR, p. 132).
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