Bach: Music in the Castle of Heaven
Page 72
It is entirely possible that Bach’s growing disenchantment with cantatas in the 1730s arose from a sense that the communality of belief that he had once shared with his congregation was breaking down, and that, for whatever reason, he was now failing to make his mark. We saw earlier how he had set a stage for the cantatas of his first three cycles that was both imposing and intimate, the product of an unusual degree of connectedness between form, text and ideals. Whereas we might marvel at the disparity between the parochiality of the liturgical context and music that shows more and more signs of an almost limitless appeal, that was not how his first listeners saw things. Here would be grounds for Bach turning his back on his life’s ambition, one that by now – he might have told himself – had run its course and that the edification of one’s neighbour was compromised if that neighbour was no longer equipped or inclined to listen to it or grasp what it had to say. The official accusations levelled at him in this decade – that he was in essence ‘working to rule’ – can be interpreted not so much as a sign of any indifference to his responsibilities, let alone as a personal loss of faith, but as a protest at the shabby way the council, the consistory and the school rector were treating him, and his resignation to the likelihood that things would never change as long as he remained in Leipzig. Manifestly this is a municipal musician who continues to meet (and even exceed) the demands of his office but who at a given point decides to pursue his own evolving artistic agenda. Accepting the leadership of the collegium musicum in 1729 was one such step, and a predictable one, as he already had close ties to most of its members. Thereafter, all through the 1730s, Bach oversaw an extensive series of public concerts, and for the first time in Leipzig found himself in the limelight as the genuine Director Musices of the town.
Now Bach the church cantata composer-performer starts to fade out of vision, and for the first time he opens doors to other composers’ works. Churchgoers no longer know, and perhaps do not even care, if he performs works by Telemann, Stölzel or his cousin Johann Ludwig Bach, and the text booklets on sale do not tell them what they are listening to. Compare this to the coffee-house concerts, where the public can see who is in charge at close quarters, even if as part of a throng of enthusiastic listeners they are scattered throughout different interconnected rooms. They are free to get up, move around, stand in the doorways, and comment on the music and the musicians in the style of a genteel academy of cognoscenti. Bach’s role in the mid and late 1730s embraces an increasingly secular world: urban Leipzig on the threshold of the Enlightenment.
On those occasions when he does return to composing church cantatas Bach displays not just his old skills, but also a new sovereign mastery and fluidity of styles. The manifest ease with which, for example, he transforms in 1738 a bipartite serenata (BWV 30a) with a text by Picander into a cantata for the feast-day of St John the Baptist’s day is very telling. Everything about BWV 30, Freue dich, erlöste Schar, is fresh and joyous, from its unusual construction of two eight-bar instrumental strophes, both repeated, to its syncopated theme and its boogieing triplets, and it generates colossal energy and fizz in Bach’s most brilliant, ceremonial manner. In the pick of its four arias we find an enchanting gavotte for alto, flute and muted violins, with pizzicato lower strings. Even to a congregation well used after fifteen years to his habit of weaving gigues and bourrées into his church music, the sheer cheek and cool elegance must have raised eyebrows, and, one hopes, caused his first listeners to smile. It is the perfect riposte to any who might claim that, even for a moment, Bach is heavy or dull.
Throughout the mid to late 1730s he continued to polish his second cycle of cantatas, adding extensive new performance instructions; he also expands his reflections on the life of Christ by composing his (lost) Mark Passion (BWV 247) and three oratorios – for Easter, Christmas and Ascension. Around the same time he wrote four short Masses (BWV 233–6) confined to the Kyrie and Gloria and thus suitable for use in the Lutheran liturgy. In drawing on selected movements from his church cantatas Bach was acknowledging that they had their place there, though the sentiments expressed in them might now constitute a barrier for some listeners. So he recycled them, perhaps hoping that the music could have a wider appeal in this altered form as part of the Eucharist. Conducting the fourth of these Masses (BWV 235 in G minor) reinforced my conviction that the conventional demarcation or separation of genres in Bach’s œuvre is misleading. Beyond simply being thrifty in recycling works that would otherwise be forgotten, Bach shows in the G minor Mass some of the many ways in which his ideas or musical cells can multiply, having grown out of some kind of anterior conception.
One never tires of Bach in this vein: everything is keen, concentrated and indefatigable. When studying this Mass, I found it helpful to have the cantata model of each movement before my eyes, so as to be sure not to miss a single gesture or inflection. But soon I found that it was a mistake to force a discarded expressive pattern on to a newly formed organism: one sees that the new life form takes on its own shapes and, as ever, the task is to perceive, or ‘read’, them. In any case Bach rarely transplants in an obvious way or to an obvious purpose. Since towards the end of his life he was increasingly preoccupied by a search for summative formulations, which entailed perpetual self-correction, it is futile to look for a single meaning in individual works: we should try to follow the full spectrum of meanings that they encompass.b
As official encomiums, the texts of the secular cantatas are generally feeble – even weaker than those of the church cantatas. Of the twenty or so individual secular movements that ended up in the Christmas Oratorio, none shows the brilliance of Bach’s parody technique better than the very first aria, ‘Bereite dich, Zion’ (‘Prepare thyself, Zion, with tender affection’). In the original (a dramma per musica, BWV 213/ix) the mood is indignant, as Hercules berates Lust (‘I shall neither listen to you, nor acknowledge you, Depraved Lust’), whereas in the oratorio, even though the notes are identical (except for different slurring patterns and the addition of an oboe d’amore), they serve to paint a tender, almost erotic piece exhorting Zion to prepare itself for the arrival of the Messiah. They cry out to be played in a totally different way.
The theorist Gottfried Ephraim Scheibel would have us believe that the effect of music on listeners is the same regardless of its provenance, theatre or in church: ‘religious and secular music have no distinctions, as far as the movement of the affections is concerned.’5 Would that it were so simple. Scheibel’s comments refer to emotion rather than to meaning (the two merge, naturally), and there is enough that is distinctive about ‘Bereite dich, Zion’ – changes of words, articulation and an implied style of playing – for it to have a different effect on the listener. The text of course dictates the musical interpretation; but because of its greater familiarity, we can never wholly shed the associations of the Christmas version and be totally objective when listening to the original. As with programme music, once we know that it is supposed to be about x we tend to hear it that way, whereas if we were to hear it innocently and for the first time there would be nothing extraneous to condition our response.
Bach’s word-setting evolved, too, in these later works, in part through his experience of composing Passions. He displays a new reluctance to be tied down to just a single meaning for the words of identically notated formulas; the purpose and mood changed, while remaining technically the same. We have seen how Bach drew on Luther’s fertile coupling of words and melody, and habitually adjusted the harmonic ebb and flow of his chorale arrangements, not just to underscore the verbal stresses, but sometimes deliberately to flout them to allow key words to register with the listener, even if it meant blatantly ignoring the rhythm of others.
All through the Christmas Oratorio we encounter Bach’s fresh ways of handling his chorales. Where his early chorale harmonisations stand out by their strong melodic outline, their steady metric tread and purposeful chord progressions, and later on by a richer harmonic movement and arresting pass
ing dissonances, they now seem to emerge more naturally from the intersection of voices – 2rom voice-leading, in other words – and have an even stronger sense of just proportion and balance. Here, too, one is struck by a greater warmth – as though he had discovered new ways of sculpting four individual lines, each imbued with intrinsic melodic beauty, and of weaving them together to create the most expressive replete harmony. In arriving at the most natural collusion between words, melody and harmony, Bach, one senses, could gladly have endorsed William Byrd’s description of his own relationship to sacred texts: ‘In these words, as I have learned by trial, there is such a concealed and hidden power that to one thinking upon things divine and diligently and earnestly pondering them, all the fittest numbers occur as if of themselves and freely offer themselves to the mind which is not indolent or inert.’6
Bach’s Christmas Oratorio is a compendium of his evolving styles and approaches during the 1730s and 1740s.c In a sense, too, we can see it as a timely rebuttal of Johann Adolph Scheibe’s misleading dichotomies of nature versus art (or art-fulness), and truth versus confusion. Intervening on Bach’s behalf in the dispute with Scheibe (see this page), his former pupil Lorenz Mizler argued that, while Bach’s music was often more carefully worked out than that of other composers, when so inclined he was perfectly equipped to compose ‘in accordance with the latest taste’ (nach dem neusten Geschmack) and that Bach knew perfectly well how ‘to suit himself to his listeners’.7 But that was not really the point, Scheibe might have countered. While it could be said that Bach latterly was showing more amenity (Annehmlichkeit – the very quality Scheibe accused him of lacking) than in the past, the charge remained – that he was still obscuring the beauty of his music with too much artifice. Was he genuinely able to ‘throw off the burden of res severa for the sake of gaudium’ – and do so on a consistent basis?8 If so (and it would be a rash person who underestimated Bach’s ability to adapt) he was not the sort to make a show of it. Something like this must have been behind Forkel’s observation that ‘He [Bach] believed the artist could form the public, but that the public could not form the artist.’
During his last decade, Bach withdrew more and more from the squabbles at the Thomasschule that had marred his previous fifteen years, without ever a hint of accommodation with the rector J. A. Ernesti. Both he and Anna Magdalena had bouts of quite serious illness, but he must have been consoled by the knowledge that his two eldest sons were well on the way to success and fame: they were already known as the ‘Dresden’ Bach (Wilhelm Friedemann) and the ‘Berlin’ Bach (Carl Philipp Emanuel), whereas by now he had become just ‘old Bach’.9 He had taken enormous pains over all his sons’ musical education. Pride and joy at the achievements of the two eldest, however, was offset by the shame brought by the third, Johann Gottfried Bernhard, whom Bach referred to as ‘my (alas! misguided) son’. As organist in Sangerhausen, Bernhard had got himself severely into debt (repeating the same impropriety that had cost him the job at Mühlhausen after little more than a year) and run away. In his distress Bach wrote to the authorities: ‘I must bear my cross in patience, and leave my unruly son to God’s Mercy alone, doubting not that He will hear my sorrowful pleading.’ Somewhat defensively he adds, ‘I am fully confident that you will not impute the evil conduct of my child to me, but accept my assurance that I have done all that a true father, whose children lie very close to his heart, is bound to do to further their welfare.’ Nevertheless, he declined to pay his son’s debts until they could be proven to him.10 Unbeknown to both his father and the town council, Bernhard had enrolled as a law student at the University of Jena, fifty miles to the south. He died there of fever on 27 May 1739 at the age of twenty-four.
We get rare glimpses into the domestic situation of the Bach household in its last years from two sources within the family. Carl Philipp Emanuel told Forkel that, while his father had no time for lengthy correspondence, he had instead ‘more opportunity to talk personally to good people, since his house was like a dovecot [Taubenhaus] and just as full of life. Association with him was pleasant for everyone, and often very edifying. Since he never wrote down anything about his life, the gaps are unavoidable.’11 With Anna Magdalena, Bach kept an open house: ‘no master of music was apt to pass through this place without making my father’s acquaintance and letting himself be heard by him.’12 Guests included several luminaries in contemporary German musical life, among them Jan Dismas Zelenka, Johann Quantz, Franz Benda, Johann Adolph Hasse and his diva wife Faustina Bordoni, and the two Grauns (Johann Gottlieb and Carl Heinrich). Music-making in the home included the returning elder sons: we learn, for example, that in August 1739 Wilhelm Friedemann ‘was here for over four weeks, having made himself heard several times at our house, along with the two famous lutenists Mr Weiss and Mr Kropffgans from Dresden’.13
The source for this information is Johann Elias Bach (1704–55), grandson of Georg Christoph, Sebastian’s father’s elder brother, he of the Concordia cantata (see this page and Plate 6), a thoroughly decent character who acted as Bach’s secretary and live-in tutor to the three youngest boys from 1738 to 1742. It cannot always have been easy for Johann Elias to carry out his employer’s instructions, since it might mean chasing recalcitrant debtors or those who had borrowed, but not returned, music. He was even obliged to refuse Johann Wilhelm Koch on 28 January 1741 the loan of a cantata for bass solo: ‘my cousin regrets he cannot send it; he has lent the parts to the bass singer Büchner, who has not returned them. He won’t allow the score out of his hands, for he has lost several by sending them to other people.’d If he made an exception, Bach was careful to exact the cost of the postage, and requests for printed copies, even from so intimate a relative and friend as Johann Elias himself, were met with a reminder of the published price.14 On another occasion, Johann Elias wrote, ‘I would be glad to have for my honoured cousin a bottle of the brandy made with yeast and a few, nota bene, yellow carnations for our honoured aunt [Anna Magdalena], a great connoisseur of gardening. I know for certain that this would give her great delight and ingratiate me all the more with both, wherefore I beg for this again.’15 Later he acknowledged receipt of ‘six most beautiful carnation plants … she values this unmerited gift more highly than children do their Christmas presents, and tends them with such care as is usually given to children, lest a single one wither.’16 Bach was constantly on the lookout for presents for Anna Magdalena, according to Johann Elias. On a visit to Halle in 1740, he tells us, Bach had been impressed by the ‘agreeable singing’ of a linnet in Cantor Hille’s possession, and since Anna Magdalena was ‘a particular lover of such birds’, Johann Elias was instructed to ask whether he would ‘relinquish the singing bird to her for a reasonable sum’.17
In the late summer of 1741 Johann Elias’s devotion was severely tested when Anna Magdalena fell ill while Bach was away visiting Carl Philipp Emanuel (recently appointed court accompanist to Frederick the Great of Prussia): ‘we are sorry to disturb your holiday with this disagreeable news,’ he wrote, ‘but it would not be right to keep it from you, and we are certain that our dear Herr Papa and cousin will not be angry with us.’ Bach, in fact, was on the point of leaving Potsdam when he received a second, more urgent letter: ‘We are in the deepest anxiety over the growing weakness of our dear Frau Mama. For a fortnight past she has had little more than an hour’s rest at night being unable to either lie down or sit up. Last night she was so ill that I was called to her room, and to our deep sorrow we really thought we must lose her. We therefore feel bound to send on the news with the utmost urgency, so that you may hasten your journey and relieve us all by your return.’18 Fortunately Anna Magdalena rallied and in the following February (1742) she gave birth to their last child, Regine Susanna, who survived into old age.
Revisiting the Class of ’85 in their sixties, we find them in different states of health and creativity. Handel has fruitfully switched from Italian opera seria to dramatic oratorios in English, Rameau from musical theorist to becomi
ng France’s leading opera composer. Domenico Scarlatti, elegant and debonair as ever, is in a private world of his own and still delighting his listeners with the eccentric brilliance of his musical mind. Mattheson is deaf, but unflagging and still polemical, while Telemann just goes on and on and on. Which of them is still writing operas by the middle of the century? Not surprisingly the first to have given up, back in 1718, is Domenico Scarlatti, desperate to distance himself from the genre that defined the world of his father, Alessandro. Mattheson’s last opera dates from 1723, the year in which Bach started as Thomascantor. Telemann (once disparaged by Kuhnau as a mere ‘opera musician’, but to whom all his Leipzig students flocked) still has one more opera in him (his seventeenth, Don Quichotte der Löwenritter, 1761) – although with the Hamburg Opera now closed his musical output has fallen off a little between 1740 and 1755. Aged seventy-four, having given up his hobby of growing geraniums (according to Ulrich Siegele19), he returns to paid musical composition, perhaps to keep his second wife suitably attired, and, finding a new spurt of creativity, he begins to write oratorios and cantatas again.e Telemann is reputed to have composed thirty-one cantata cycles (or 1,043 individual cantatas). They were admired at the time by both Scheibe and Mattheson for their expression and harmony. Deidamia will be Handel’s last opera (his forty-second, composed in 1741). Though his health and his eyes continue to trouble him, he will outlive Bach by nine years. In 1750 he still has two of his greatest dramatic oratorios ahead of him: Theodora (1750) and Jephtha (1752). The Earl of Shaftesbury writes in February 1750 that he has never seen him ‘so cool and well [and] quite easy in his behaviour … pleasing himself in the purchase of several fine pictures, particularly a large Rembrandt, which is indeed excellent.’20A few months later Handel sets off to the Continent for the last time and is injured in a coach accident between The Hague and Haarlem, delaying his arrival in his home town of Halle until a few weeks after Bach’s death, and so the two men never meet.f