Rameau, on the other hand, by 1750 is only just past the midpoint in his operatic career: fourteen composing years, two major works (Les Paladins and Les Boréades) and thirteen individual actes de ballet are still to come. Of the Class of ’85, only Rameau shows an eagerness comparable to Bach’s to assert his independence within accepted conventions. With Rameau this is sometimes considered to be a matter of new wine in old bottles – the spirit of modernity set in the stiff structures of French tragédie lyrique, but tempered by fresh tactility of line and extreme suppleness and fluidity of rhythm. The music is light and lithe, brimful of vitality and transparency, and a counterpoise to the sheer density of the musical étoffe. That does not begin to account for the startling originality of his musical language, nor for the chasm between the notation and the actual sounds it represents – including notes inégales and twiddles galore, things known to baffle even the most accomplished musicians when they encounter them for the first time. Another feature is the psychologically penetrating and acutely observed way Rameau explores human emotion from within the starchy series of operatic conventions. Measure him against Lully or Gluck (one representing the past, the other the future), and he is out of their reach in terms of musical substance and scintillating interest. Remove his music from its stage context (a godsend, some might feel) and it can still come alive, imparting theatrical gesture and movement in the mind of the listener even in a concert hall. This is not dissimilar to the way Bach’s Passions can conjure up a multiplicity of theatrical imagery when presented in imaginatively deployed performances in churches or concert halls. They have the capacity to enthral us by the personalisation of the human drama. Ironically it is Bach, still more than Rameau or Handel, who anticipated the ways music-drama could break free of stultifying operatic protocol and so inhabit the same air in which Mozart was soon to breathe.g
Signs of mental strength and tenacity are to be found everywhere in the music of Bach’s last two decades: in the energy he expended in seeing his best keyboard works through to publication, such as the third and fourth volumes of his Clavier-Übung, and in the laborious gestation of the work he may have intended as its fifth volume, The Art of Fugue. We should not be lulled by any of the late signs of meticulous revision and dismiss them as a kind of musical housekeeping, let alone as a proof of fading creativity. Far from it. The hours of reclusive work spent correcting tiny details of counterpoint (while ensuring that it could all be played by two hands on a keyboard) continued even when engraving was already under way. According to his pupil Johann Philipp Kirnberger, Bach was in the habit of saying ‘It ought to be possible to do everything’ (es muss alles möglich zu machen seyn).21
There was to come a time, however, when it became almost impossible for him to do anything. In the spring of 1749, about a year after he had sat for the second Haussmann portrait, we can see signs of deterioration in his handwriting. Suffering from an undiagnosed illness, perhaps a long-standing diabetic condition connected to eye pains, the only hard evidence we have comes in the deterioration of his handwriting around this time. Word soon got out. Whether as a precautionary measure, or as a piece of underhand skulduggery, the Leipzig burgomaster Jacob Born reported Bach’s illness to Count von Brühl, the Saxon prime minister, who saw an opportunity to promote – or, more accurately, to be shot of – his Dresden music director, Gottlob Harrer. Following von Brühl’s ‘recommendation’ to the Leipzig Town Council – little short of an order from the Dresden Court – Harrer travelled to Leipzig, was auditioned behind closed doors in the concert room of The Three Swans, applauded and returned to Dresden with the documentation requested by von Brühl, assuring him ‘that in the said eventuality [of Bach’s death] he will not be passed over’.22 Even if it was the custom and considered acceptable to sound out successors during the lifetime of an incumbent, Bach must have felt he had been flayed alive. Then, after a while, he rallied. He was robust enough to respond to the slight by performing, on 25 August, BWV 29, Wir danken dir, Gott, one of the grandest of his commemorative cantatas for the annual city council elections, perhaps playing the virtuosic organ part in its opening sinfonia himself. Not only was he giving thanks for his recovery from his recent illness but publicly proclaiming God’s authority above any worldly pretensions. It was a worthy response to the recent snub and a superbly defiant demonstration to the assembled council officials and Dresden Court representatives that he was still in full command of his artistic faculties.
Yet about the same time, when he was still at his most vulnerable, Bach risked sabotaging his own peace of mind by reacting to an unrelated incident in an impulsive way. A less edifying side to his character re-surfaces from that battle within himself, one that we have traced from his childhood onwards: feistiness in defence of his professional standing and a tendency to overreact and to resort to underhand behaviour. Twelve years after his initial public spat with Ernesti (see this page), Bach was still chuntering on (the tension between the two men never really abated) and he now manoeuvred himself into a position of fresh disgruntlement. Late in 1749 he allowed himself to be sucked into a similar dispute fifty miles away in Freiberg – between a former pupil (J. H. Doles, later to be his successor but one as Thomascantor) and J. G. Biedermann (rector of the gymnasium). Biedermann, in the Ernesti role, had gone into print deriding music as a corrupting distraction for youth and an unwelcome interloper in the school syllabus. Tactlessly, he aimed his fire at musicians in general, attacking their moral character and quoting Horace, who classified them with ‘bayadères, quacks and beggarly priests’.23 This caused quite a stir in the German musical world. Mattheson was roused to write no fewer than five essays denouncing Biedermann as ‘a wrong-headed teacher, a sad opponent and godless defiler of musical art’.
At this point, his old wounds festering, Bach made an ill-considered intervention from the sidelines. His eyesight no longer up to writing full-length polemical letters, he persuaded a former pupil, C. G. Schröter, to speak out on his behalf, just as Magister Birnbaum had done during the Scheibe dispute in 1738–9. Schröter complied and sent his rebuttal to Bach, leaving him to have it printed. But it seems that Bach connived with the publisher to modify and spice up Schröter’s article (to the latter’s considerable annoyance) in the hope, as he wrote, that ‘the rector’s dirty ear [Dreck-ohr, punning with Rec-dor as spoken in the Saxon dialect] will be cleansed and made more fit to listen to music.’24 For Mattheson this was going too far: Bach had used ‘a base and disgusting expression, unworthy of a Capellmeister; a poor allusion to the word Rector’.25 Though the reference was to Rector Biedermann, few in the small world of church music would have missed the implied association with Ernesti. Bach’s attack backfired. Did he kick himself when he recalled a passage he had underlined in Calov: ‘Why cause yourself irritation? … Such people will not hear you and if you fight your way through with ranting you may make it even worse.’26
Even now, when his disenchantment with the weekly grind at the Thomasschule was pushing him to the edge, Bach was not giving up – continuing as best he could (despite his failing sight) to explore new worlds of sound and the last reaches of counterpoint. We have so few reliable facts to go on, but it would only take the chance discovery of new documents to dent the provisional image we might have formed in our imaginations of Bach’s final years and activities. A recently found letter, dated 27 February 1751, from a former Thomaner, Gottfried Benjamin Fleckeisen, is an example. Hoping to be nominated cantor of Döbeln, a small town midway between Leipzig and Dresden, Fleckeisen refers to his nine years as an Alumnus of the Thomasschule and four years as a prefect of the Chorus musicus. He claims that ‘for two whole years’ he found himself ‘having to perform at services in the two main churches of St Thomas and St Nicholas and obliged to conduct in place of the Capellmeister, and without glory, but always carried out honourably’.27 Before drawing solid conclusions from this startling claim, we need to establish which two years Fleckeisen is referring to (sometime between 1742 and
1746, but possibly later still?) and, for example, whether he had fallen out with Bach (it is strange that he doesn’t mention him by name). If Bach had really handed over the reins to him and been absent for such a period, was it because he was away on his travels, disenchanted or too sick to continue – or a combination of all three? Alternatively, was it Ernesti as rector or perhaps the school inspector, exasperated by Bach’s erratic behaviour, who put Fleckeisen in charge? If his claim has any substance, it would show the council’s premature decision to audition Harrer for Bach’s job in a rather different light.
The comparison made in the previous chapter between Bach and Rembrandt highlighted an important difference in the way each might be considered to have held up his art as a mirror to his own personality. By portraying himself centrally, as though he were the one about to start the lynching of St Stephen, Rembrandt insists that we notice him – as a rueful participant, maybe, yet manifestly privy to the crime. In those early self-portraits, when he is giving a deceptively positive spin to his social respectability and wealth, Rembrandt is painting himself in various guises for all the world to see. Even then he never places himself centre-stage quite as ostentatiously as Dürer did in his third and most daring self-portrait (1500). There the frontal gaze and idealised facial symmetry are both immensely striking and slightly disquieting. The thing that saves it from hubris and blasphemy in its instantly identifiable likeness to Christ is the idea (based on Genesis 1:26) that, since man is made in God’s image (Ebenbildlichkeit), it is fitting that there should be instantly recognisable similarities between the two. The German-born theologian Nicholas of Cusa (1401–64) had turned the old scholastic teaching about the imago Deus on its head by suggesting that the artist, who owes his gift to God, can legitimately attempt to replicate God’s work and share in divine creativity, and that the artist’s creations are enacted in the image of the prime Maker. God, in turn, acts like a painter in the way He generates living self-portraits in the form of men. This was an idea that gave legitimacy to Dürer’s conception of his creative acts as those of a Deus artifex, in the tradition of Classical rhetorical imitation. By using the basic materials of pigment on a wooden board, the painter could set himself up as a secundus Deus, a second God.28 The inscription Dürer placed on the front of his picture right next to his eyes stated that he, Albrecht Dürer from Nürnberg, had depicted himself aged twenty-eight, ‘with appropriate or imperishable [the Latin expression propriis coloribus allows both readings] colours’.h The claim, then, was that these pigments would last – and, since they have already done so for the last 500 years, Dürer’s was not an empty boast.
Dürer’s self-conscious and innovative concept of artistry found expression two centuries later in the life and works of Bach. He, too, we might say, is constantly asking the question Quis ut Deus? (‘Who is like God?’). Yet, in his case, the results – the durability, posthumous fame and degree of universality – are if anything still more striking. But when we look for explicit self-portraiture in Bach, this proves harder to discern, initially at least.
Some classical composers, Gustav Mahler for example, manage to inscribe in their music a kind of self-portraiture, which encompasses their personalities in all their vicissitudes; this in turn lodges in the imagination of the listener. Despite Bach’s repeated insertion of his name in musical tones in the latter part of his life, this comes over as self-referring, rather than self-revealing. However, on several occasions in the course of this book I have pointed to times when Bach allows the mask to slip and his personality to come through in his music, times when we sense his many moods: his intense grieving, his passionate beliefs, but also his tussles with faith, his bursts of anger, his rebellious subversive streak, his delight in nature or his unbridled joy in God’s creation. Of course we must allow that he was supreme at creating a wide spectrum of Affekts, and it is therefore perfectly legitimate to ask whether the mood is merely simulated: is it a true reflection of what he might have been feeling at that moment (or stored up or enduring from an earlier time) when conjuring it up in sound, and is it genuinely a means for us to detect and define his personality? This is harder to determine because of the extraordinarily high degree of clearly audible artifice and the prominent way Bach’s music exposes its own brilliance and complexity, rather than being subservient to an external code such as the ‘doctrine of the passions’ (Affektenlehre), which recognised the expression of only one unified and ‘rationalised’ Affekt per movement of a composition.i Because the emotional world of his music is so rich in comparison with, for example, the milk-and-water affectations of Telemann and the absence of purposeful harmonic drive, we have a much stronger sense of Bach’s own nature imprinted in the music, with a three-dimensional character which we take to be his own.
These are tantalising areas, arising from a world of subjective feeling and ultimately unprovable. Yet, treated cautiously, they provide us with a bridge – spanning the traces of Bach’s personality we think we can detect embedded in his music and such historical truths as we can establish about the nature of his character. Then again, just as any Godlike image that we might superimpose on Bach blinds us to his artistic struggles, so we should also be wary of dismissing out of hand the anecdotal stories about his losing his rag with musicians, ripping off his wig and stamping on it, for these may certainly be things his own sons witnessed in the pressure-cooker of Thomaner rehearsals of the weekly cantatas.
One would not expect such episodes to feature in the version of his early life that Bach handed on to his children – and by them to Forkel, his first biographer – edited to give the most favourable slant to his character.j Besides, some of his recollections were perhaps too painful to recall, yet they are all of a piece with the irascibility his music – joined with its text – sometimes exposes. Bach lived with indelible memories of his early childhood and surely brooded on the meaning of its events; but it is unlikely he passed much of this on to his children or else we would surely have heard about it. Like Mark Twain, who experienced similar early sufferings – a father dying, a dead sister, two dead brothers and sermons on Sunday ‘made up almost exclusively of fire and brimstone’ – Bach may have intended to steer clear of probing deep waters in an identifiably personal way.k
Despite the dominance of the family and the clan, the overwhelming impression we get of Bach is of an essentially private person, turned in on himself, pouring his energy, after the death of his parents, first into his schoolwork and then into his music. The persistent presence of death in his life – of parents, siblings, his first wife and then so many of his own children – may have led to an emotional reclusiveness or wariness based on his experience that loving intrinsically carries the risk of losing. On the other hand one could argue that for posterity and even for him, the death of his father, Ambrosius, however shattering at the time, may have been the best thing that ever happened to Bach. It brought him under the wing of his talented eldest brother (who seems to have been a more sophisticated musician than their Stadtpfeifer father), and it paved the way for his far less parochial education in the north of Germany, an opportunity that would have been denied him had he ended up apprenticed to his father in Eisenach.
In acknowledging Bach’s humanity we begin to see how similar to us he was. If we forgo attempts to explain his genius (as a divine gift, or the result of genetics or nurture) we gain something richer – a sense of connection as well as a more nuanced, ‘grainier’ idea of how his music is put together and a clue as to why it should have such a deep emotional affect on us. Perhaps music gave Bach what real life in many respects could not: order and adventure, pleasure and satisfaction, a greater reliability than could be found in his everyday life. It was also there to complete those experiences that otherwise might have existed only in his imagination – part-compensation for those stimulating adventures denied to him but not to Handel, whose travels to Italy provided him with such a fertile source of inspiration. Bach found security in sticking to a regular struct
ure, to proportion and numbers, and to the calendar. It was a trait that took a particular shape, gaining impetus, in his fifties through his almost obsessive absorption with genealogy and family trees.
How much of all this did Haussmann succeed in conveying when he painted his second, formal, portrait of Bach in 1748? (See Plate 19.) We search for signs of the animation we find in the music: we want Bach to leap out at us, a fiery, seething man whose creative exploits pressed music into new territory while he brushed off or skirted round the trivial obstacles of his employment. I don’t recall getting an inkling of that in my childhood: my memory is of the Cantor looking out with a stern, impassive and slightly forbidding gaze. Yet, seeing the portrait again in Princeton after almost sixty years, I was struck by how astutely Haussmann had captured opposed facets of his sitter’s character: the serious and the sensual. One is always directed to the eyes to find the most reliable and pertinent information. The moment you divide Bach’s face horizontally, say at the bridge of the nose, you notice a high, slightly receding (but smooth) forehead and the look of a man etched with life’s travails – beetle-browed, with shallow eye sockets, asymmetrical eyes and slightly droopy eyelids.l
(illustration credit 54)
His gaze is intense but far livelier than I remembered it. (Another feature I had never noticed before is that his eyebrows appear to grow or are brushed in the wrong direction – towards the bridge of his nose.) In the lower half of his face one’s attention is drawn to the flared right nostril, the distinctive shape of his mouth creased at the corners, the fleshy lips and jowls that suggest a fondness for food and wine, as the records imply.
Bach: Music in the Castle of Heaven Page 73
