The overall impression is of someone a lot more complex, nuanced and, above all, human than the formal posture of a public figure would seem to allow, and infinitely more approachable than the man in Haussmann’s earlier portrait, where his stare is more that of a bland and corpulent politician.m In his right hand Bach holds a page of music – a Canon triplex à 6 voc. – one of fourteen he transcribed at the back of his copy of the Goldberg Variations.
Apart from its intellectually challenging title, the puzzle lies in the way we read its three lines. As Bach presents it to the viewer, we see it as a straightforward three-part fragment written in alto, tenor and bass clefs – pleasant enough but ever so slightly banal. Surely that cannot have been the reason why Bach had himself painted by Haussmann holding this sheet of manuscript? But then we realise that to Bach himself, looking down on it, it reads quite differently – and for us to see it his way we have to turn the manuscript upside down and read the music back to front: starting from the same place as the ‘forward’ version, but changing the clefs to tenor, alto and treble, the lines emerge at the fifth in mirror (upside down, in other words). There is also a double mirror if we reflect the notes along the middle line of each stave. Take the middle voice as an example: we see that the second note written in the tenor clef on the middle line is an A. Put that note in the alto clef, as in ‘Bach’s’ version, and the same note reads as a C.
But if this is a canon in six parts, where are the other three? Bach’s expression seems to say ‘Look more closely: my music doesn’t yield up all its secrets to a single glance.’n The key to solving the puzzle lies in the little signs that appear above bar two, for they show us where the canon must begin. Once all the voices have been realigned, turned upside down, read back to front and played at one bar’s distance in the ‘right way up’ version, suddenly we can see a canon à 6 unfold. The repeat signs over bars two and three and the absence of a final bar tell us that it is on a never-ending loop – a canon perpetuus – so that the music never resolves (as with the last fugue from The Art of Fugue). A further clue to the need for transposition can be detected in the outline of an extra clef just visible on the curious triangular sliver of manuscript that seems to have been added to the rectangular folio on its right-hand margin: the midnight-blue of Bach’s velvet coat shines through it, suggesting that Haussmann (acting on Bach’s instructions) had painted over it as a pentimento (see this page and Plate 19).o
Haussmann’s portrait shows us the importance of going beyond first appearances. The disparities of character that I suggest it displays are supported by the biographical evidence we have been piecing together, and the multiplicities and contradictions we have encountered. The aim all along has been to keep a hold on the critical connectedness of things – to see Bach in the round and not through the parochialism of small-sampling or the microscopic perspective of single issues that some scholars defend with terrier-like tenacity. It has meant balancing musical analysis with broad historical contexts and establishing how his being in a particular time and place located his achievement in the wider development of European culture and currents of thought. It has meant piecing together biographical shards, scrutinising the music and looking out for instances when his personality seems to penetrate the fabric of his notation. Our exploration of the B minor Mass in the previous chapter furnished us with the paradigm of a quest for a perfection attempted despite the most unpromising, piecemeal process of assimilation. Many people remember that when in 1977 the Voyager spacecraft was launched, opinions were canvassed as to what artefacts would be most appropriate to leave in outer space as a signal of man’s cultural achievements on earth. The American astronomer Carl Sagan proposed that ‘if we are to convey something of what humans are about then music has to be a part of it.’ To Sagan’s request for suggestions, the eminent biologist and author Lewis Thomas answered, ‘I would send the complete works of Johann Sebastian Bach.’ After a pause, he added, ‘But that would be boasting.’29
Canon triplex à 6 voci. (illustration credit 55)
Another response might have been: here is what many of us consider the most beautiful and profound manifestation that man is capable of in complex harmonious sounds that capture in an inexplicable way the joys and suffering we encounter in our earthly lives, helping us to access the emotional core of human experience. Yet, perhaps because it is easy to be in awe of Bach’s achievements, there is still a problem for some people in admitting to his shortcomings. In doing so, we do not have to agree with Edward Said that there is ‘something unmistakably demonic and frightening’ about Bach’s fervour, for, as we have seen, expressions of it in the cantatas are nearly always balanced by others where wit, humanity and compassion are uppermost. Where I am almost persuaded by Said is when he suggests that Bach was trying to control something [that was] ‘more exuberant, more hubristic, verging on the blasphemous … something within himself, which his music with its contrapuntal wizardry also communicates’.30 You see it in his obsessive focus on order and structure, and also from that glint in his eye we thought we detected in Haussmann’s portrait, which might be hinting at his struggles to keep chaos in his surrounding – and in his inner-life – at bay.
Although Bach had pulled through in the summer of 1749 after the shock of his sudden illness, the problems with his vision persisted and inconvenienced him to the point when he sought a surgical cure. Carl Philipp Emanuel reported that at this point ‘Not only could he no longer use his eyes, but his whole system, which was otherwise thoroughly healthy, was completely overthrown by the cataract operations and by the addition of harmful medicaments and other things.’ He tells us that his father was ‘almost continuously ill for a full half a year’.31 It must have taken exceptional bravery to submit to Taylor’s two botched cataract operations – a clear sign that he was determined to complete unfinished business. At one stage, while still struggling with The Art of Fugue, he composed a quadruple fugue in which the contrapuntal writing is even more refined than anything he had previously achieved. But after 239 bars it breaks off, shortly after an episode in which he had inscribed his own name in the music. A description of what purports to be his intentions is included in the Nekrolog: it mentions a ‘draft for a fugue’ that ‘was to contain four themes and to have been afterward inverted note for note in all four voices’.32 In performance, when the music tails off, it leaves listeners aghast. Of course it could have been a deliberate move by Bach, as though to say Quaerendo invenietis (the expression he added to his Musical Offering), inviting future generations to search for the solution themselves – literally ‘You’ll find it if you look for it’, or, more poetically (as in the Sermon on the Mount), ‘Seek and ye shall find.’p
One of the books in Bach’s private collection was Heinrich Müller’s Liebes-Kuss (Love’s Kiss) (1732), which advised constant preparation for death, admitting that the expression of grief was a necessary part of coming to terms with death.33 Besides the selection of a few well-chosen Trost-Sprüchlein (‘little words of comfort’), Müller emphasises that ‘music offers not only a glimpse of heavenly life, but a tool with which to focus one’s thoughts about death’,34 and includes an engraving (see opposite) to illustrate the two realms of earth and heaven ‘joined in synchronic concert’. We have seen that in his copy of Calov’s Bible commentary, Bach underlined and marked several passages that speak of carrying out the duties of one’s ‘office’ without regard to the reactions of others or what the future will bring, of the need for patience and endurance of all adversities, of the distinction between worldly and spiritual wisdoms. One in particular stands out, a German proverb: ‘With one’s own thoughts, as with a tautly held cloth, much slides off.’ Could this have been Bach’s own reaction in his last years? Calov comments: ‘Thus stubborn or self-appointed projects seldom turn out well. Also, for me things have never in my life gone according to my plans: I have set a certain plan for myself, but if it had not been God’s word and deed which drew me to the project, the greater
part was left unaccomplished.’35
‘While working on this fugue, in which the name BACH appears in the countersubject, the author died’ (C. P. E. Bach, c. 1780). (illustration credit 56)
All life-long music, and especially the chorale, provided Bach both with a glimpse of heavenly life and with a weapon with which to combat the terror of death. Like his early mentor Dietrich Buxtehude, Bach may have kept alive a dream of joining the angelic choir (or ‘concert’) after death, seen by many at the time as the privileged gateway to heaven for musicians. Buxtehude refers to it in the touching Klag-Lied he composed on the death of his own father, who, like him, had been an organist: Er spielt nun die Freuden-Lieder / Auf des Himmels-Lust-Clavier (‘He is now playing songs of joy / on the heavenly keyboard’). Far from trying to evoke the heavenly music his father was now hearing, Buxtehude’s setting is impregnated with dissonance and a persistent tremulous throb in the strings: it is as though wave after wave of filial love is inspiring him, while inconsolable sorrow buffets him in the act of pinning his music to the page. The effect is far more poignant than that of its companion piece, his setting of Luther’s burial hymn, which consists of four movements in strict invertible counterpoint. Music of this degree of learning and ‘unfathomability’ (die Unergründlichkeit der Musik36) was considered by a small elite of composers to be a way of purifying their best thoughts as death closed in and a vehicle for their safe passage to heaven. For the music sung by the angelic choir was, in Werckmeister’s words, ‘nearly beyond the understanding of men’.37 That never deterred a composer of Bach’s imaginative scope from attempting to replicate it, as we have seen, at several moments in his creative life.q
This second engraving from Heinrich Müller’s Himmlischer Liebes-Kuss (1732) conveys the capability of earthly music to be elevated into angelic song. (illustration credit 57)
Meanwhile the terrestrial music he composed to commemorate the passing of a beloved member of family or on commission, such as the motets we explored in Chapter 12, still has the power to give extraordinary solace to the bereaved and to anyone susceptible to music’s emotive and transformative powers. In the end, no one – absolutely no one – has ever produced such a treasury of consoling music as Bach, and the amazing thing is how early he acquired that gift – as early as the age of twenty-two, when he composed the Actus tragicus.r Intrinsic to this is the sense of certainty we recognise in Bach: his belief that somewhere there exists a path leading to a life of harmonious existence, if not in this world then in the next, one that overrides the endemic stupidity of men and women and all the hypocritical and self-seeking behaviour that blights quotidian social intercourse. Two of Bach’s favourite authors, August Pfeiffer and Heinrich Müller, recognised the role of music in transporting believers to that ideal as part of the ars moriendi.38 There are signs of this in what could well have been Bach’s very last composition.s
Though C. P. E. Bach was not in Leipzig at the time, he reported that his father’s so-called ‘Deathbed’ chorale, BWV 668a, Wenn wir in höchsten Nöten sein, was dictated shortly before his death ‘on the spur of the moment’ (aus dem Stegreif), to an unnamed friend. Taking an ornament-encrusted version of this chorale that he had earlier included in his Orgel-Büchlein, Bach stripped it down to a skeletal form. Having purged it of all sensuality, he now re-expanded it with melodic inversion, diminution and stretto. The relationship between the two versions is not as extreme as in the two Buxtehude examples referred to above. While it could be said to encapsulate the ‘elevated thinking’ of a dying man, 39 that, however, is not the uppermost quality to emerge in performance. The moment the funerary text ‘Vor deinem Thron’ is attached to Bach’s intricate contrapuntal lines, the piece acquires a different kind of lucidity and transcendental quality:
I herewith step before Thy throne,
O God, and humbly beg Thee:
Turn not Thy gracious countenance
From me, a poor sinner.
Bach died on 28 July, a little after 8.15 p.m. Three days later this chorale was sung by his Thomaner at his burial in the churchyard of the Johanneskirche, possibly in addition to the arrangement he had recently made with manifest physical effort (as we can see from the handwriting) of a motet by his older cousin Johann Christoph, Lieber Herr Gott, wecke uns auf (Dear Lord God, awaken us), a prayer with words thought to be by Luther that anticipates life after death. It had been performed at Johann Christoph’s funeral in 1703, and it seems it may also have been sung to mark Bach’s own passing.t Those closest to him would have seen it as the perfect symbol of his sense of family roots and of his touching desire to re-affirm his loyalty to the one he revered as the most noteworthy composer within the family and his spiritual mentor.
All through this final phase of his life, Bach was searching and penetrating musical terra incognita. It has taken generations of composers and performers to explore the equivalent of those blanks on a map cartographers once charmingly described as ‘here-be-dragons’: to re-trace his routes and come to terms with his findings. Two and a half centuries after his passing, no one could claim that the process is complete. Ignored for a time, then patchily revived, misrepresented, inflated, re-orchestrated, then in a puritanical overreaction scaled down, diminished and minimalised – there seems to be no end to the ways that Bach’s music can be manipulated to fit with the prevailing Zeitgeist and commercially exploited or used for political ends.u
All the while his music beckons us to view life through his eyes, the eyes of a consummate artist, as though to imply: this is a way of fully realising the scale and scope of what it is to be human within it. Therefore study and listen to it closely – and not just any performance will do, however well intentioned. In the words of a recent biographer, ‘There is no music so demanding to realise in sound, and so quick to reveal a lack of understanding or lack of integrity in approaching it.’40 For the listener to gain a sense that Bach is exploring all the threads of his music, simultaneously as both composer and performer, his interpreters must strive to do the same. Once again we are drawn to sentiments eloquently conveyed by that great British forerunner of his, William Byrd, who in the preface to his last publication, Psalmes, Songs and Sonnets (1611), wrote:
Only this I desire: that you will be as careful to hear [my songs] well express’d, as I have been both in the composing and the correcting of them. Otherwise the best song that ever was made will seem harsh and unpleasant … Besides, a song that is well and artificially made cannot be well perceived nor understood at the first hearing, but the oftener you shall hear it, the better cause of liking you will discover.
Each time we explore Bach’s music we feel as if we have travelled great distances to, and through, a remote but entrancing soundscape. Every moment that promises to be an arrival is just another station on the way and the springboard for further journeying – for a new engagement and a new engaging with Bach.
It is tantalising how a generation later Johann Gottfried von Herder (1744–1803) seems at times to be articulating some of the processes in which Bach as both composer and performer was involved, but without referring to them directly. Herder grasped the crucial idea that the creative and spiritual activity of man leads to expressions of an individual’s vision of life, to be understood only by sympathetic insight – the ability to ‘feel oneself into’ (sich hineinfühlen) the aspirations and concerns of others. One imagines that he might have understood the supreme value of Bach’s vocal works – not primarily as objects or artefacts, but as individual visions of life and as priceless forms of communication with his fellow man. For this is what is so distinctive when we compare Bach’s legacy to that of his forerunners and successors. Monteverdi gives us the full gamut of human passions in music, the first composer to do so; Beethoven tells us what a terrible struggle it is to transcend human frailties and to aspire to the Godhead; and Mozart shows us the kind of music we might hope to hear in heaven. But it is Bach, making music in the Castle of Heaven, who gives us the voice of God –
in human form. He is the one who blazes a trail, showing us how to overcome our imperfections through the perfections of his music: to make divine things human and human things divine.
* * *
a Given his friendship and close compositional collaboration with his cousin Johann Gottfried Walther, the chances are that Bach would have agreed with him that ‘good Harmony will result not only when it is composed after artistic rules, but above all when it is used in virtuous and God-pleasing practices’ (Praecepta der Musicalischen Composition (1708), Vol. 1, p. 1). Failure to achieve this in practice, and the all too common discrepancy between human ideals and behaviour, is a theme played out in his cantatas (see for example Chapter 12, p. 451).
b For example, he raids BWV 187 for three of the middle movements of the Gloria, all arias; but where one might have predicted he would use the harvest-festival hymn of thanks for the Gratias, no, he uses it for the Domini Fili and instead chooses the rather quirky music (appropriately so in its original context for the disciples’ vacillation ‘What shall we eat, or what shall we drink, or wherewithal shall we be clothed?’) for the Gratias. But the most impressive transplant or re-working is reserved for the Cum sancto concluding chorus. Here he turns to the opening chorus of BWV 187. This colossal canonic (later fugal) movement is shot through with an abundance of invention suited to harvest time (the Gospel text refers to the feeding of the Four Thousand). Motifs which were inspired by the harvest theme – paired oboes in conjunct semiquavers suggesting the waving of corn in the breeze, while the upper strings illustrate the movement of a sickle – seem perfectly at home in their new context of a laudatio to the Holy Spirit.
Bach: Music in the Castle of Heaven Page 74
