Johann Sebastian Bach

by Christoph Wolff

  Bach’s librettist for BWV 198, Anh. 13 and Anh. 196, he wrote in 1728 that “in Saxony, Capellmeister Bach is head and shoulders above his peers” and later made other favorable references to Bach in several of his publications.53 Gottsched, himself son of a Lutheran pastor, regularly attended services at St. Thomas’s and had in common with Bach two father confessors, deacon Teller and then archdeacon Wolle.54 Louise Adelgunde Victoria Kulmus, a harpsichordist and lutenist, wrote in 1732 to Gottsched, to whom she was engaged and who had mailed her the newly published Clavier-Übung, part I: “The clavier pieces by Bach that you sent and the lute works by [Johann Christian] Weihrauch are as beautiful as they are difficult. After I played them ten times, I still felt like a beginner. Of these two great masters, I appreciate anything more than their caprices; these are unfathomably difficult.”55

  Friedrich Mentz, from 1711 assessor in the Faculty of Philosophy, from 1725 professor of logic, from 1730 professor of poetics (Johann Heinrich Ernesti’s successor), and from 1739 until his death in 1749 professor of physics; served two terms as rector, 1735–36 and 1743–44. Published on Plato and other subjects.

  Mentz, a book collector, owned a sixteenth-century manuscript album amicorum that contained a musical entry, dated April 27, 1597, by the composer Teodoro Riccio, in the form of an enigmatic canon. Around 1740, Mentz showed the canon to Bach and apparently asked him to resolve the riddle notation. Bach wrote out the “Resolutio Canonis Ricciani”—a rare example of an augmentation canon, where the note values of the canonic part are doubled—on a separate leaf, which Mentz then added to the album.56 Gottfried Leonhard Baudis, member of the Leipzig town council from 1715 to

  1735 and professor of law from 1734 until his death in 1739; served as counsel to the Leipzig appellate court, from 1736–37 as rector, and published numerous philosophical, legal, and historical books. Baudis’s wife, Magdalena Sibylla, was godmother of Bach’s son Ernestus Andreas (b. 1727).

  Andreas Florens Rivinus, professor of law from 1725 and rector magnificus for two terms, 1729–30 and 1735–36; left in 1739 for Wittenberg University. Author of many books on historical and contemporary legal problems. He was godfather of Bach’s son Ernestus Andreas (b. 1727). His brother, Johann Florens Rivinus, also a lawyer and judge at the Leipzig superior court, was Johann Christian Bach’s godfather.

  Bach composed the cantata “Die Freude reget sich,” BWV 36b, for a member of the Rivinus family, most likely for the inauguration of Andreas Florens Rivinus as rector in 1735. An earlier version of this work, “Schwingt freudig euch empor,” BWV 36c, was originally commissioned as a congratulatory piece for an older professor whose identity remains unknown, and may have been re-performed on the birthday of St. Thomas rector Gesner, on April 9, 1731.

  Gottlieb Kortte (Corte), professor of law from 1726 until his death in 1731 (at age thirty-three); author of numerous legal and historical works. The cantata “Vereinigte Zwietracht der wechselnden Saiten,” BWV 207, was commissioned from Bach as a congratulatory piece to be performed in conjunction with Kortte’s appointment to a professorship in December 1726.

  August Friedrich Müller, professor of philosophy and law from 1731 and rector for two terms, 1733–34 and 1743–44; published numerous legal treatises. The dramma per musica, Der zufriedengestellte Aeolus, BWV 205, with a text by Picander, was commissioned for a performance on Müller’s name day, August 3, 1725.

  While there is evidence linking all of the above-named persons in some way to Bach, the information is superficial and based entirely on external data that provide no clues to the character and content of the relationships. Moreover, the professoriate represented but one constituency of the academic community, the circles of which also included Johann Abraham Birnbaum, who obtained a master’s degree in 1721 at age nineteen and immediately began teaching rhetoric at the university on a part-time basis, and whose later connections with Bach are amply documented. Similarly, Bach and his wife, Anna Magdalena, frequented the house of the affluent and influential merchant Georg Heinrich Bose, a music lover and next-door neighbor on St. Thomas Square.57 Indeed, close ties of friendship connected the Bach family with the Boses, whose son taught as professor of physics at Wittenberg University. One of their daughters married D. Friedrich Heinrich Graff, judge at the Leipzig superior court and a relative of the Rivinus family of legal scholars. Graff stood godfather to the Bach children Gottfried Heinrich (b. 1724) and Regina Susanna (b. 1742) and in 1750 assisted the family in settling the Bach estate; a copy of the Clavier-Übung I in Graff’s possession provides evidence of his musical interests.58 All the details of Bach’s relationships with these prominent Leipzig citizens do not tell a coherent story, but they demonstrate unmistakably the extent to which Bach moved in an academic atmosphere. Whether performing in churches or other surroundings, his audience likely exerted considerable influence on the conduct of his office, the direction of his musical goals, and conceptual aspects of his composing activities.

  As Thomana faculty and students attended services at the church adjacent to their school, they were joined by faculty members and students from the university, including the above-mentioned Birnbaum, Gottsched, Kapp, Ludovici, Müller, Rivinus, and Winckler, all of whom regularly worshipped at St. Thomas’s. The academic and academically trained constituency of the congregation was substantial—Leipzig boasted by far the largest university in the German-speaking countries, with forty-four full professors,59 a good number of associate professors, many assessors and part-time lecturers, and a student enrollment averaging 280 in the winter semester and 125 in the summer semester.60 Even the city council was unusually well equipped with highly educated people; for example, of the twenty-eight councillors who elected Bach in 1723, fourteen held doctorates. Burgomasters Dr. Lange and Dr. Born worshipped at St. Thomas’s, while the majority of the council attended St. Nicholas’s, the traditional “council’s church,” whose makeup was similar—the St. Nicholas School faculty and students and a share of the university community. Although these constituencies made up little more than 10 percent of the regular Sunday churchgoers, they were joined by other segments of the city’s intellectual elite: attorneys, physicians, and scholars and editors attracted by Leipzig’s book-publishing industry. To all this we may add the extended community of wealthy merchant families, scattered aristocracy, and a strong contingent throughout the year of visitors from out of town.

  The overwhelmingly well-educated and well-to-do congregation members, who rented seats in their preferred pews,61 correlated with the erudite, professorial style of preaching that obtained in the city’s main churches, following the level and tone set by superintendent D. Deyling, professor primarius of the Theological Faculty, who delivered the regular Sunday morning sermon at St. Nicholas’s throughout Bach’s tenure.62 A comparison here might be as inappropriate as it is unavoidable, but the poetic, theological, and musical depth as well as the style and virtuosic execution of the “cantata sermon” from the choir loft clearly aimed at matching the forceful and virtuoso performance from the pulpit, even though the time allotted to the cantor was less than half of that taken by the preacher. Both catered to the same audience, with remarkably little regard for the simple folk and the less well educated attending the same services.63

  While many of Bach’s regular listeners would have been moved by his music and appreciated its artful design and impassioned performance, very few possessed a close understanding of its internal structure. Most of those who did and were fascinated by it, or who wanted to learn more about it, were to be found among the performers. Next to the most musically accomplished—privately instructed St. Thomas alumni and the top players of the town music company—Bach could rely on a solid group of musicians with professional ambitions who were studying at the university, mostly in the Faculties of Law, Philosophy, and Theology, and wanted to prepare themselves for careers as cantors, court musicians (with secondary expertise in legal or diplomatic service), and the like. They took private lessons wit
h Bach, and many probably paid for them by participating as vocalists or instrumentalists in the regular cantata performances or assisting in other tasks. Those who paid for lessons generally showed “themselves willing to do this in the hope that one or the other would in time receive some kind of reward and perhaps be favored with a stipendium or honorarium,” as Bach wrote in 1730,64 but the expected benefits were not easy to come by, and the cantor had to fight hard for them with the city council or find supplementary sources of income—for example, through the sale of text booklets.

  Nevertheless, Bach had a steady supply of gifted and versatile university students who received private lessons from him.65 Some sixty such senior students—not including Thomana alumni who chose not to enter Leipzig University—can be confirmed,66 though the actual number may be well above a hundred. By a conservative estimate, four to six professional-caliber students were working closely with Bach at any given time in Leipzig. Numerous testimonials Bach wrote for his best students demonstrate the comprehensive experience they gained under his tutelage. As a case in point, we read in a 1730 letter of reference for Johann Christian Weyrauch, candidate of laws, “that he not only masters various instruments but can also well afford to make himself heard vocaliter, has given many examples of his skill, and also can show on request what he has done in the art of composition.”67 A testimonial from 1748 for Johann Christoph Altnickol, candidate of theology but provided by Bach with the self-styled academic title of “candidate in music,” relates that its bearer “not only did…act for four years diligently as assistant for our Chorus Musicus, but he also has shown, in addition to his vocal performance, such outstanding work on various instruments as one could desire from an accomplished musician. A number of fine church compositions of his have found no less ample approval in our town.”68

  The wealth of performance activities introduced Bach’s students to many of the basics any musical leader had to master, from the right way to position ensembles in different performing spaces to the design of instruments, their technology, and their proper use. Here they benefited from Bach’s own hands-on experience, as son Carl Philipp Emanuel recalled in 1775:

  As a result of frequent large-scale performances of music in churches, at court, and often in the open air, in strange and inconvenient places, he learned the placing of the orchestra, without any systematic study of acoustics. He knew how to make good use of this experience, together with his native understanding of building design so far as it concerns sound; and these were supplemented in turn by his special insight into the proper design of an organ, the disposition of stops, and the placing of the same.

  Bach always stressed the practical side of music, if only to confront his students with the results of their efforts, so he kept them away from purely speculative matters. Again, Carl Philipp Emanuel underscored that his father “like myself or any true musician, was no lover of dry, mathematical stuff.” Even when he taught musical composition, Bach disregarded neutral writing exercises and trained his students directly on the basis of keyboard practice, introduced them to the principles of thoroughbass as the foundation of music, and had them conceptualize chorale harmonization as the interplay of polyphonic voices:

  Since he himself had composed the most instructive pieces for the clavier, he brought up his pupils on them. In composition he started his pupils right in with what was practical, and omitted all the dry species of counterpoint that are given in Fux and others. His pupils had to begin their studies by learning pure four-part thoroughbass. From this he went to chorales; first he added the basses to them himself, and they had to invent the alto and tenor. Then he taught them to devise the basses themselves.69 Bach’s students apparently copied out their teacher’s own chorale settings from his cantatas and oratorios. One such compilation from the mid-1730s survives; written in the hand of Thomana alumnus Johann Ludwig Dietel, later cantor in Frankenhain,70 it underscores the central pedagogical role Bach assigned to the writing of chorales—further affirmed by Bach’s contribution to the Schemelli Gesang-Buch of 1736, BWV 439–507—and suggests that Bach may have planned to publish an edition of his chorales, as Graupner had in 1728 and Telemann in 1731.71 At any rate, Carl Philipp Emanuel’s first two-volume edition of Bach chorales of 1765/69 may have been motivated as much by his father’s teaching methods as by his own plans to compile and publish models of “the art of writing” that drew “appropriate attention to the quite special arrangement of the harmony and the natural flow of the inner voices and the bass.”72

  The methodical approach of Bach’s teaching was special in every respect but truly unique in the sophisticated and challenging materials he provided. His approach is brought to life in an illuminating account given in 1790 by Ernst Ludwig Gerber, author of the first comprehensive biographical dictionary in music. There he reports on the education that his own father, Heinrich Nicolaus Gerber, received when, at age twenty-two, he

  went to Leipzig, partly to study law and partly to study music with the great Sebast. Bach…. In the first half year, as he arranged his courses, he had heard much excellent church music and many a concert under Bach’s direction; but he had still lacked any opportunity that would have given him courage enough to reveal his desires to this great man; until at last he revealed his wish to a friend, named [Friedrich Gottlieb] Wild,73 later organist in St. Petersburg, who introduced him to Bach.

  Bach accepted him with particular kindness because he came from [the Thuringian county of] Schwarzburg, and always thereafter called him Landsmann[compatriot]. He promised to give him the instruction he desired and asked at once whether he had industriously played fugues. At the first lesson he set his Inventions before him. When he had studied these through to Bach’s satisfaction, there followed a series of suites, then The Well-Tempered Clavier. The latter work Bach played altogether three times through for him with his unmatchable art, and my father counted these among his happiest hours, when Bach, under the pretext of not feeling in the mood to teach, sat himself at one of his fine instruments and thus turned these hours into minutes. The conclusion of the instruction was thoroughbass, for which Bach chose the Albinoni violin solos; and I must admit I have never heard anything better than the style in which my father executed these basses according to Bach’s fashion, particularly in the singing of the voices. This accompaniment was in itself so beautiful that no principal voice could have added to the pleasure it gave me.74

  While in Bach’s tutelage, Heinrich Nicolaus Gerber copied the materials he was given to study, signed the finished volumes, and added to his name “L[itterarum] L[iberalium] S[tudiosus] ac M[usicae] C[ultor]” (student of liberal letters and devotee of music). The manuscripts Gerber assembled from late 1724 to 1726 corroborate the information in the biographical report, even in terms of their chronological sequence:75 at the beginning, we find the Aufrichtige Anleitung (Gerber copied all fifteen inventions and fifteen sinfonias), then eight French and seven English Suites (copied from a larger collection of suites with and without preludes)76 and twenty-one movements from the partitas that were published in 1731 as Clavier-Übung, part I, and finally, The Well-Tempered Clavier77 and the realization of the Albinoni figured bass (including Bach’s corrections)78—a truly demanding course of study for only two years.

  Heinrich Nicolaus Gerber, later court organist at Schwarzburg-Sondershausen, was one of a large and impressive group of composers who received their training from Bach and that included, apart from Bach’s own sons, Carl Friedrich Abel, royal court musician in London; nephew Johann Ernst Bach, court capellmeister in Eisenach; Johann Friedrich Doles, Bach’s second successor in Leipzig; Gottfried August Homilius, cantor at Holy Cross in Dresden; Johann Ludwig Krebs, court organist in Altenburg; Johann Christian Kittel, town organist in Erfurt; Johann Gottfried Müthel, city organist in Riga; and Johann Trier, organist of St. John’s in Zittau. A substantial number of Bach students also actively engaged in literary contributions and theoretical writings on music; aside from Wilhelm Friedemann79
and Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, the most prominent were the following:

  Christoph Nichelmann, pupil of Bach’s at the St. Thomas School and from 1739 active as a composer and harpsichordist in Berlin; published in 1755 a major treatise on the controversy over the merits of the French and Italian styles, Die Melodie nach ihrem Wesen sowohl, als nach ihren Eigenschaften.

  Lorenz Christoph Mizler, who wrote his thesis on musical art as a part of philosophical erudition (Dissertatio quod musica ars sit pars eruditionis philosophicae) at Leipzig University and taught there from 1737 to 1743. He dedicated the published thesis (1734) to Johann Mattheson, Georg Heinrich Bümler, and Johann Sebastian Bach and acknowledged in its preface, “Your instruction in musica practica, most celebrated Bach, have I used with great profit, and I regret that it is not possible for me to enjoy it further.”80 He edited the Musikalische Bibliothek (1736–54), translated and annotated Fux’s Gradus ad Parnassum (1742), and published several musical treatises.

  Johann Friedrich Agricola, who attended Leipzig University from 1738 to 1741, studied with Bach during that period. He later became capellmeister at the Prussian court in Berlin, where he played an influential role as a composer and prolific writer on music; he also translated and annotated Pier Francesco Tosi’s Opinioni de’ cantori antichi e moderni (1723) under the title Anleitung zur Singekunst.

  Johann Philipp Kirnberger, whose studies in Leipzig closely overlapped with Agricola’s, also ended up in Berlin, as capellmeister to Princess Amalia, sister of King Friedrich II. Of all of Bach’s students, he most deliberately transmitted his teacher’s concepts and methods in musical composition, particularly in his major two-volume treatise Die Kunst des reinen Satzes in der Music (1771), in which he focuses like Bach on both principles and practical examples. In 1784–87, he collaborated with Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach on a new, four-volume edition of the four-part chorales, Johann Sebastian Bachs vierstimmige Choral-Gesänge.