Johann Sebastian Bach

by Christoph Wolff

  Brother Christoph, who probably composed very little, may have used as instructional material what he had worked on with his own teacher Pachelbel. Fortunately, we can examine an actual instructional notebook of one of Christoph’s fellow students. Johann Valentin Eckelt took up lessons with Pachelbel when he was, like Christoph, fifteen years old;21 he studied with him from 1688 to 1690, the year Pachelbel left Erfurt for Stuttgart. His notebook, written in German keyboard tablature (a combination of letters for pitches and symbols for rhythmic values), represents the last phase of his lessons with Pachelbel and indicates the diversified repertoire selected for study. In the first part of the notebook, we find material provided by the teacher: a series of preludes, fugues, fantasias, capriccios, dance suites, and chorale elaborations, mainly by Pachelbel but interspersed with some by Johann Jacob Froberger, Johann Caspar Kerll, Johann Krieger, Guillaume Gabriel Nivers, Christian Friedrich Witt, and others. Pachelbel clearly offered a broad range of compositional types.

  Noteworthy is a remark Eckelt made in referring to a number of pieces he copied at the end of his study period, just before Pachelbel’s departure: “those I have purchased from him in addition to the chorales.”22 Pachelbel apparently sold his student some of his own music: three fugues, a toccata, and a ciaccona (with his teacher’s permission, Eckelt copied them into his notebook) plus a selection of chorale elaborations (contained in another manuscript that is no longer extant). The music represented a valuable commodity that Pachelbel was interested in protecting—a point that sheds some light on an episode dating to Sebastian’s early teens in Ohrdruf, as reported in the Obituary:

  The love of our little Johann Sebastian for music was uncommonly great even at this tender age. In a short time he had fully mastered all the pieces his brother had voluntarily given him to learn. But his brother possessed a book of clavier pieces by the most famous masters of the day—Froberger, Kerl, Pachelbel—and this, despite all his pleading and for who knows what reason, was denied him. His zeal to improve himself thereupon gave him the idea of practicing the following innocent deceit. This book was kept in a cabinet whose doors consisted only of grillwork. Now, with his little hands he could reach through the grillwork and roll the book up (for it had only a paper cover); accordingly, he would fetch the book out at night, when everyone had gone to bed and, since he was not even possessed of a light, copy it by moonlight. In six months’ time he had these musical spoils in his own hands. Secretly and with extraordinary eagerness he was trying to put it to use, when his brother, to his great dismay, found out about it, and without mercy took away from him the copy he had made with such pains. We may gain a good idea of our little Johann Sebastian’s sorrow over this loss by imagining a miser whose ship, sailing for Peru, has foundered with its cargo of a hundred thousand thaler. He did not recover the book until after the death of this brother.23

  Christoph’s volume presumably contained the same kind of material that he, Eckelt, and other Pachelbel students had acquired from their teacher. In a way, then, Christoph was right to be enraged about the unauthorized copying and the potential loss of value that his collection suffered thereby. He would surely have allowed his brother to learn and perform these pieces, but considering their trade value and what he might have paid for them, he did not want them to be copied without permission. In any case, the incident does not evidence jealousy or any other kind of long-term discord between the two brothers; on the contrary, the connections between Sebastian and his brother remained close, right up to Christoph’s death in 1721.

  The source of the “moonlight manuscript” story can only be Sebastian himself, and he must have told it to his children in more or less the form reported in the Obituary. The metaphorical reference to the shipwreck on the way to Peru may relate incidentally to Sebastian’s study at that time of history and geography at the Ohrdruf Lyceum. There he would have learned that the Spanish vice-royalty of Peru, which until the eighteenth century included most of the South American subcontinent, was the major supplier to Europe of gold and silver. A hundred thousand talers, gold and silver, stood for the immense value these keyboard masterworks had for Sebastian, who apparently could not conquer new repertoire fast enough. Unfortunately, neither Sebastian’s copy nor Christoph’s volume has survived. It seems likely, however, that Christoph returned the copy to Sebastian when the latter left for Lüneburg. (The Obituary actually misreports Christoph’s death as having occurred in 1700, prompting Sebastian’s departure for Lüneburg.)

  All we know about the “moonlight manuscript” are the names of the composers represented there (Froberger, Kerll, Pachelbel). The Eckelt Tablature gives us a better idea of the music Sebastian had available for study. But even more important are two large-scale manuscript anthologies, the so-called Andreas Bach Book and the Möller Manuscript,24 which were compiled by Christoph shortly after 1700—undoubtedly relics of a more extensive library of keyboard music.25 These collections indicate what a broad range of keyboard literature Sebastian had access to: from north, central, and south Germany, Italy, and France, represented by prominent composers such as Georg Böhm, Dieterich Buxtehude, Johann Adam Reinken, Johann Kuhnau, Johann Caspar Ferdinand Fischer, Nicolas-Antoine Lebègue, Jean-Baptiste Lully, Marin Marais, Tomaso Albinoni, and Agostino Steffani. Although this repertoire was copied by Christoph after his younger brother had left his home, the two anthologies help define the catholic orientation and high-quality choices of the Ohrdruf organist, who would later be called optimus artifex (very best artist).26 Christoph, who bore the primary responsibility for exposing Sebastian to what was current in keyboard literature, was able to gather a technically demanding, musically attractive, and stylistically diversified body of materials, and knew how to choose from it. Only a little later, from neighboring Arnstadt, Sebastian himself contributed compositions and materials from his own collection to his brother’s albums. The Andreas Bach Book and the Möller Manuscript today represent the most important extant German manuscript collections of keyboard music from around 1700. They are also among the most prominent sources that illuminate the extraordinarily rich and varied musical culture sustained institutionally by the towns, churches, and courts in seventeenth-and early eighteenth-century Germany, especially Thuringia.

  Manuscript and printed collections originating in south and north Germany and especially those from Italy, France, and England differ fundamentally from Christoph’s albums. They feature largely homogeneous, often parochial pieces, without regard for a broader, let alone “international,” spectrum. The Andreas Bach Book and the Möller Manuscript, on the other hand, present a highly sophisticated, multifaceted, and unbiased keyboard repertoire that offers welcome insight into the musical environment of the young Sebastian. Indeed, the two manuscript sources reveal the composers, genres, and styles that formed his musical background. At the same time, they preserve his immediate response to the challenges of seventeenth-century masters in a number of his own compositions (from his Lüneburg and Arnstadt years), which demonstrate the ability to consolidate influences as well as the foundations of a highly individualized musical language.

  The two Ohrdruf albums belong to the most important sources for Sebastian’s early organ and harpsichord works, though all these works date from after 1700. While they complement the few surviving autograph manuscripts of his early compositions, also from the first decade of the eighteenth century, the two albums offer no clues about the actual beginnings of Sebastian’s compositional activities. Rather, they provide resounding testimony that by 1705, at about age twenty, his works already reflect an unusual degree of experience and sophistication, raising the question about what preceded them.

  The earliest composition we have by one of Sebastian’s own children can be found among the latest entries, from around 1745, in the second Clavier-Büchlein vor Anna Magdalena Bach: a clumsy compositional exercise in the form of an untitled rondo (BWV Anh. 131) by Anna Magdalena’s youngest son, ten-year-old Johann Christian. Nevertheless, t
he piece demonstrates how early musical children with a certain professional background may have started to compose—only the child prodigy Mozart, whose compositions written at age five are preserved in versions heavily edited by his father, provides a more exceptional case. Another ten-year-old, whose father was not a musician but a medical practitioner, is said to have produced astonishing early masterworks: Sebastian’s exact contemporary George Frideric Handel. No autograph of those works has survived, but a remark on an early copy of Handel’s six Trio Sonatas for two oboes and continuo, HWV 380–385, reads: “The first Compositions of Mr. Handel made in 3 Parts, when a School Boy, about Ten Years of Age, before he had any Instructions and then playd on the Hautboye, besides the Harpsichord.”27 Both the dating and authenticity of these works have been doubted by one Handel scholar or another, yet before 1695, under the tutelage of his teacher Friedrich Wilhelm Zachow in Halle, Handel was not only taught to play keyboard instruments (from his eleventh year on, he occasionally substituted for his teacher on the organ) but was gradually introduced to composition as well. According to John Mainwaring’s 1760 Memoirs of the Life of the Late George Frederic Handel, Zachow showed his young student “the different writing manner of the various nations” from his rich collection of German and Italian music, and “he made him copy rare things so that he would not only play them, but also learn how to compose in a similar manner.”28 We know from Handel’s notebook of 1698, which contained works by Zachow, Froberger, Kerll, Krieger, and other keyboard masters (but has, unfortunately, been lost since the mid-nineteenth century), that he received training similar to Sebastian’s at the same time, except that Handel’s came from a more senior and experienced instructor.

  One of the principal Baroque methods of teaching students the fundamentals of languages as well as of music consisted in memorizing and emulating so-called exempla classica, models by eminent masters. In that sense, performance and composition were closely interrelated, and by copying down exemplary works of different kinds, Handel, Bach, and their contemporaries learned the principles of harmony and counterpoint, melody and voice leading, meter and rhythm. Johann Christoph, having left Pachelbel’s school only recently, would have transmitted to his brother the particulars of what he had learned there. How strong an influence Pachelbel had on Christoph is most strikingly reflected in Christoph’s music handwriting, which closely resembles that of his teacher. Thus it would be no surprise if Sebastian’s primary models in beginning composition were the same as his brother’s.

  No autograph manuscripts or other actual documentation of Bach’s earliest compositional exercises (pre-1700) have survived, for two main reasons. First, Bach would have had no wish to recommend his earliest works as models to his own students, let alone to preserve them for archival purposes. He may actually have done with them what his son Carl Philipp Emanuel reported in 1786 about his own youthful compositions: “The most comical thing of all is the gracious precaution of the [English] King, whereby Handel’s youthful works are being preserved to the utmost. I do not compare myself at all with Handel, but I recently burned a ream and more of old works of mine and am glad that they are no more.”29 Second, Bach’s earliest works were presumably not written in staff notation but in German tabulature, the prevailing notational style in central and north Germany before 1700. Later on, Bach made only occasional use of this manner of notation, primarily as a space-saving device or for purposes of proofreading and correcting. Since tabulature notation went out of fashion in the early eighteenth century, tablature manuscripts were rarely preserved.

  There does exist, however, a body of music unequivocally attributed to Johann Sebastian Bach that appears in reliable manuscript sources and that is believed—mainly for reasons of compositional technique and style, but also on philological grounds—to reach back into the Ohrdruf years. The most prominent of these works is found in the so-called Neumeister Collection of chorale preludes, for organ. These thirty-eight pieces, some two dozen of which date from before 1700, are preserved in a late eighteenth-century manuscript whose notation demonstrates not only that it was copied from a lost, much older manuscript, but that most pieces in this older manuscript must have been transcribed from tablature notation. The Neumeister Collection features the utilitarian and popular type of “varied and figurate chorales” for regular church services. The prevailing style model happens to be that of Johann Pachelbel as well as Johann Christoph (13) and Johann Michael Bach (14) and is thus a clear reflection of Sebastian’s musical upbringing.

  One of the chorales, “Christe, der du bist Tag und Licht,” BWV 1096, consists, characteristically, of two sections: measures 1–25 represent a composition by Pachelbel in the form of a concentrated, closely knit fugal elaboration of the first line of the chorale; measures 26–29 of the original Pachelbel setting are replaced by a newly composed transition that leads into a 31-measure nonfugal but polyphonic (“figurate”) elaboration of all four chorale lines. Sebastian apparently extended the Pachelbel piece into a 56–measure work by adding his own stylistically matching conclusion. Another chorale, “Ach Herr, mich armen Sünder,” BWV 742, closely follows the Pachelbel model “Wir glauben all an einen Gott.”30 Both pieces are three-part settings, with the chorale melody presented in highly embellished fashion in the upper voice and sharply contrasting with the homogeneous accompaniment of the two lower voices. Both also specifically require the use of two manuals (Rückpositiv and Oberwerk) with contrasting registration—the type of organ Pachelbel had in the Erfurt Prediger Church and Bach played at St. Michael’s in Ohrdruf (the Arnstadt organ did not have a Rückpositiv).

  The organ chorales of the Neumeister Collection that are based on Pachelbel examples (mainly four-part compositions, most of them with ad libitum pedal, some with pedal cantus firmi) never slavishly imitate their model. What makes them stand out is their deliberate tendency to expand on the model, to go beyond its scope—often cautiously, sometimes daringly—with new forms (migrating chorale tune in the compact “Jesu, meine Freude,” BWV 1105), consistent motivic construction (“Als Jesus Christus in der Nacht,” BWV1108), and chromatically enriched harmonic design (“Herzliebster Jesu,” BWV 1093). Also noteworthy is the unconventional variety of final cadences: every piece ends in a different way.

  Considering the makeup of what is presumably the earliest layer of the Neumeister Collection, these works may date from the later Ohrdruf years, but they hardly represent Bach’s very first compositional exercises. Closer to those may be three short chorale fughettas, transmitted in sources even later than the Neumeister Collection: “Herr Jesu Christ, dich zu uns wend,” BWV 749, “Herr Jesu Christ, meins Lebens Licht,” BWV 750, and “Nun ruhen alle Wälder,” BWV 756. These modest and perfectly fine settings, which extend over nineteen to twenty-four measures, show close adherence to their models (Choräle zum Praeambuliren,31 a collection prepared for publication by Johann Christoph Bach [13], and some works of Pachelbel), carefully observing the contrapuntal rules but lacking the spark of originality—all marks of genuine school exercises.

  Forkel reports that when Bach was later “asked how he had contrived to master the art to such a high degree, he generally answered: ‘I was obliged to be industrious; whoever is equally industrious will succeed equally well.’ He seemed not to lay any stress on his greater natural talents.”32 Without a doubt, Sebastian was brought up from his earliest childhood days to observe the virtues of perseverance and constant hard work. Extreme industriousness is, however, but one side. The musical experiences that shaped Sebastian through his formative years are almost unparalleled in their quality, variety, and extent. Besides being born into a family of musicians that included great-grandfather, grandfather, father, three brothers, and numerous uncles and cousins, and being in the constant company of journeymen, apprentices, and colleagues around his parents’ and uncles’ houses, the thoroughly professional surroundings in which he grew up exposed him to all major facets of musical culture: instrumental and vocal, ensemble and
solo, sacred and secular, performed at home or in town, court, or school. Sebastian had to understand this multifaceted setting as unified—from the more workmanlike making and maintenance of instruments, preparation of performing materials, and commissioning and contracting of deals all the way up to the artistic aspects of performance and the creation of new music, represented most significantly in the person of his uncle Christoph, “the profound composer.” There is hardly a question about the overall quality of the music Sebastian grew up with, a situation comparable to the educational background of his own sons Wilhelm Friedemann and Carl Philipp Emanuel. To the question of why they excelled among his pupils, Bach provided the appropriate answer: “Because they had, from their earliest youth, opportunity in their father’s house to hear good music, and no other. They were therefore accustomed early, and even before they had received any instruction, to what was most excellent in the art.”33