On the other hand, the Mass was definitely performed at the Saxon capital in July 1733, as evidenced by the extant Dresden performing parts67 and by the inscription on the title wrapper in which the set was offered to the court after the performance: “To His Royal Majesty and Electoral Highness of Saxony, demonstrated with the enclosed Mass—for 21 [voices], 3 violins, 2 sopranos, alto, tenor, bass, 3 trumpets, timpani, 1 hunting horn, 2 transverse flutes, 2 oboes, 2 bassoons, violoncello, and continuo—his most humble devotion, the author, J. S. Bach.”68 The phrasing here emulates the pattern known from the dedicatory libretto of cantata BWV 210a, performed on January 12, 1729, as an homage to the duke of Weissenfels.69 The word “demonstrated” suggests an anticipated or past performance—in the case of the Mass, perhaps even two past performances: one back in April in Leipzig, in the presence of His Royal Highness, and one that had taken place recently in the capital, in all likelihood not attended by the elector. Although we have no direct information about the Dresden performance, the following three facts help us deduce its date, location, and participants.
First, on June 22, 1733, Wilhelm Friedemann Bach was elected organist at St. Sophia’s Church in Dresden, succeeding the deceased court organist Christian Petzold. Thus, as of July 11, the day on which Wilhelm Friedemann was given keys to the church, Bach had a real foothold in the Saxon capital. St. Sophia’s must therefore be considered the most likely performance site for the Mass. Moreover, its organ, the best church instrument in Dresden, was tuned to chamber pitch (a whole tone lower than the choir pitch of the organs at St. Thomas’s and St. Nicholas’s in Leipzig) and matched the notation of the organ part of the Dresden set.
Second, the preparation of the Dresden performing parts included no Thomana copyists but was carried out almost exclusively by family members. The composer himself wrote most of the parts; he was assisted by his wife, Anna Magdalena, their sons Friedemann and Carl, and one unidentified hand, probably that of a private student. All four Bachs may also have participated in the performance, perhaps jointly with Dresden court musicians, whose involvement seems to be confirmed by the curious fact that the title wrapper of the set was not written out by the composer but by Gottfried Rausch of Dresden, a scribe frequently engaged by the court church composer and interim head of the court musicians, Jan Dismas Zelenka. In other words, the performance took place with Zelenka’s support, which in turn implied the general support of the court capelle.
Third, the set of parts for the Mass was dedicated along with a letter by Bach dated Dresden, July 27—a Monday. This suggests a performance at St. Sophia’s on the previous day, the eighth Sunday after Trinity,70 probably as a special afternoon concert comparable to the organ recitals Bach had given there before.
The letter accompanying the Mass indicates a motive for dedicating the work to the elector and prospective king:71 Bach was applying for a court title as protection against further injuries inflicted by the Leipzig authorities. Such an appeal had to be submitted to the Dresden court personally. Even if Bach could have approached a high court official with his petition immediately after the Leipzig fealty service on April 21, he would have been taking a big risk—and given the great commotion that day and the need for a ranking intermediary, the opportunity would not likely have materialized anyway. The whole matter would have seriously backfired if the following petition had fallen into the hands of a Leipzig official:
My Most Gracious Lord, Most Serene Elector, Most Gracious Lord!
To Your Royal Highness I submit in deepest devotion the present small work of that science which I have achieved in musique, with the most wholly submissive prayer that Your Highness will look upon it with Most Gracious Eyes, according to Your Highness’s World-Famous Clemency and not according to the poor composition; and thus deign to take me under Your Most Mighty Protection. For some years and up to the present moment, I have had the Directorium of the Music in the two principal churches in Leipzig, but have innocently had to suffer one injury or another, and on occasion also a diminution of the fees accruing to me in this office; but these injuries would disappear altogether if Your Royal Highness would grant me the favor of conferring upon me a title of Your Highness’s Court Capelle and would let Your High Command for the issuing of such document go forth to the proper place. Such most gracious fulfillment of my most humble prayer will bind me to unending devotion, and I offer myself in most indebted obedience to show at all times, upon Your Royal Highness’s Most Gracious Desire, my untiring zeal in the composition of music for the church as well as for the orchestra, and to devote my entire forces to the service of Your Highness, remaining in unceasing fidelity Your Royal Highness’s most humble and most obedient servant,
Johann Sebastian Bach72
We do not know in what form Bach submitted the petition or the Mass to the court, but we can assume that the overall approach, from the performance of the Mass to its formal presentation, was well prepared and, in particular, that Bach had secured in advance the support of influential colleagues from the Dresden court capelle and of prominent court officials. At any rate, the petition was indeed forwarded to higher administrative levels of the court, according to a presentation entry of August 19, 1733,73 but then it apparently got stuck—for a long time and for reasons not immediately apparent, but perhaps related to the interim situation of the court music before the arrival of the new capellmeister, Johann Adolph Hasse, in December 1733. We can assume that Bach was both puzzled and disappointed by the court’s nonreaction, considering the many performances given from 1732 by Bach’s Leipzig Collegium Musicum in honor of the electoral-royal family. If gestures like these failed to remind Dresden of the outstanding petition, what else would? Finally, perhaps after consulting with a confidant such as Count Hermann Carl von Keyserlingk, Russian ambassador to the Dresden court from 1733 and a patron and friend, Bach decided to renew the petition. On September 27, 1736, the Dresden cabinet minutes recorded that Bach “asks for the title of Compositeur of the Royal Court Capelle.”74 From then on, things moved expediently, and after more than three years since the original petition, a certificate that “conferred upon Johann Sebastian Bach, on the latter’s most humble entreaty and because of this ability, the title of Compositeur to the Royal Court Capelle” (Electoral Saxon and Royal Polish Court Compositeur) was issued on November 19.75 The document was initialed by the king, certified by Prime Minister Heinrich von Brühl, to be personally handed over to Bach in Dresden by von Keyserlingk.
Less than two weeks later, Bach traveled to Dresden for a recital on the brand-new organ in the newly erected Our Lady’s Church to express his appreciation for the court appointment. The large three-manual instrument, built by Gottfried Silbermann, the Saxon court organ maker, had been dedicated only on November 25, 1736. Then, on the Saturday before the first Sunday in Advent, December 1, according to the Dresden newspapers,
the famous Capellmeister to the Prince of Saxe-Weissenfels and Director Musices at Leipzig, Mr. Johann Sebastian Bach, made himself heard from 2 to 4 o’clock on the new organ in the church of Our Lady, in the presence of the Russian Ambassador, von Keyserlingk, and many persons of rank, also a large attendance of other persons and artists, with particular admiration, wherefore also His Royal Majesty most graciously named the same, because of his great ability in composing, to be His Majesty’s Composer.”76
From 1738 to 1750, Bach’s name regularly appeared in the listings of the Dresden court calendar in the section on the royal court and chamber music as “church composer.” However, whether Bach’s offer to provide “music for the church as well as for the orchestra” resulted in any official commissions remains very much in doubt. Beyond the Kyrie-Gloria Mass in B minor, BWV 232I, the old Dresden court music library does not seem to have held much by the Leipzig composer; traceable is only the autograph of the keyboard Fantasia in C minor, BWV 906.77 On the other hand, contacts maintained by “Capellmeister Bach and other friends of music in Leipzig with the virtuosos of the royal capelle i
n Dresden” were so close that they permitted a nearly daily exchange of musical news,78 and the frequent visits to Leipzig by Dresden colleagues Hasse, Faustina Bordoni, Silvius Leopold Weiss, and others reflect a reciprocal interest in the connection. Friedemann Bach’s presence in Dresden until 1746 must also have contributed to his father’s maintaining closer ties with the capital and to making appearances at court as performer and composer, perhaps also jointly with his son. Such a possibility is suggested, for example, by the performing parts for Wilhelm Friedemann Bach’s Concerto in F major for two harpsichords, Fk 10 (BWV Anh. 188), prepared around 1742 by Johann Sebastian. Activities like these notwithstanding, the Dresden court title seems to have had its desired effect of protecting Bach from further unpleasantness in Leipzig. It apparently helped resolve the prefect dispute with the St. Thomas rector, which had smoldered from the summer of 1736 to early 1738; since that year, no further complaints from either side are on record, suggesting either that the conflicting parties quietly resigned themselves to the inevitable fact of their working together or that Bach’s court appointment indeed made him nearly invulnerable—none of his superiors or colleagues could boast a similar mark of distinction. And none of the city councillors, clergy, or St. Thomas or university faculties achieved comparable name recognition beyond the borders of Leipzig; none of their obituaries would carry the epithet “world-famous.”
By the mid-1730s, Bach had been able to consolidate and anchor his position in Leipzig in both sociopolitical and musical terms. And no document affirms his musical position more tangibly than the calligraphic fair copy he prepared in 1736 of his “great Passion”—the revised and expanded version of the St. Matthew Passion—a personal statement made by the fifty-one-year-old composer that the work truly represented the pinnacle of his career and was, in general, an unequaled musical monument. But this truly unique composition was surrounded and complemented by similarly ambitious, innovative, and unmatched works within a broad spectrum of genres: sacred and secular cantatas, oratorios and Latin works, concertos and sonatas, and, especially, the most sophisticated and challenging keyboard music ever written. Bach knew better than anyone else that these works, taken together or considered individually, had raised not only the technical standards of composition and performance but the depth of musical content and the level of aesthetic claims.
THE CLAVIER-ÜBUNG PROJECT
Throughout the 1730s, the Collegium Musicum stood at the center of Bach’s weekly activities, a situation that not only fostered his cultivation of church music but also encouraged him to compose and perform keyboard music. The concert series likely included Bach’s most recent solo keyboard works together with sonatas and concertos featuring prominent harpsichord parts, usually played by the composer himself and sometimes by his sons and students. We cannot overestimate the astonishment and awe that must have met Bach when he mounted the first performances of concertos starring the harpsichord as the single solo instrument rather than part of a concertino group (flute, violin, and harpsichord), as in the Brandenburg Concerto No. 5. Bach here put himself in the forefront of a new genre that, within the next half century, would transform the European landscape of public concert life and become the quintessential domain of composing virtuosos such as Mozart and Beethoven. The impact of Bach’s novel approach79 was compounded in three ways: first, he created an impressive series of harpsichord concertos (six such works have survived) that firmly established the clavier concerto as a viable genre; second, he added several concertos for two, three, and four harpsichords, strings, and continuo that helped broaden the general concept of the keyboard concerto; and third, he motivated his four sons and students like Christoph Nichelmann to contribute to the genre, further expand on it, and spread the concept by putting many of their concertos into print.
Of all Bach’s keyboard activities from the 1720s and 1730s, the clavier concertos generated the most spectacular effect, by their innovative approach and compelling virtuosity. Even so, they represent only a fraction of his keyboard compositions, which, taken together, demonstrate not only how well he kept pace with such luminaries on the greater European scene as Domenico Scarlatti, François Couperin, Jean-Philippe Rameau, and George Frideric Handel, but also how decisively he kept the lead in advanced playing technique and refined compositional art. The Fantasia and Fugue in C minor, BWV 906—the Fantasia being Bach’s most “Scarlattian” piece and the fragmentary Fugue one of his most daring explorations of chromatic counterpoint—present a particular case in point, and two autograph fair copies Bach made of the Fantasia in the late 1730s signal the importance he attached to it. He also decided to add a second part to the Cöthen Well-Tempered Clavier, in many ways his most revolutionary keyboard work so far. The composition of this sequel, which included reworkings and transpositions of some extant preludes and fugues, took place during the late 1730s. The so-called London Autograph, the most complete original source we have, belongs to the years 1738–42, but it neither constitutes the earliest trace of the work nor does it mark the endpoint of Bach’s pursuit of this project. In its external dimensions, part II exceeds its forerunner of two decades earlier by about a quarter, and in its stylistic orientation, it reflects a rapprochement with the preferences and needs of a younger musical generation.
But as extensive as Bach’s manuscript repertoire of new keyboard music from the 1730s may be, it was clearly overshadowed by a commanding project: the Clavier-Übung series (Table 10.7). By publishing, between 1731 and 1741, this comprehensive “keyboard practice” in four parts, Bach provided the most convincing evidence not only of his intent to renew an emphasis on his accustomed métier as clavier and organ virtuoso (despite the fact that he had not held a formal post as organist since 1717) but also of his desire to put a public face on his activities as a keyboard artist. The overall content of the series indicates Bach’s pragmatic approach. He selected genres and compositional types with broad appeal, though he did not compromise in the degree of compositional elaboration or performing standards.
Curiously, Leipzig’s lively publishing business and book trade had never paid much attention to publishing music. Even a long-established German music-publishing center like Nuremberg never really recovered from the Thirty Years’ War and remained, in the early eighteenth century, technologically and commercially far behind the corresponding enterprises in Amsterdam, London, and Paris. By 1800, however, largely through the activities of the Breitkopf firm, then Hoffmeister and Kühnel (later C. F. Peters) and others, Leipzig was well on the way to becoming the unrivaled leader in music publishing. Bernhard Christoph Breitkopf, who had invested considerably in the technology of scientific publishing and whose Biblia Hebraica of 1725 marked, in Gottsched’s words, the beginning of a “new epoch of German book printing,” moved slowly into music publishing, mainly after 1756.80 The initial steps were actually connected with Bach and modestly foreshadowed a major collaboration with his son Carl Philipp Emanuel. In 1736, Breitkopf published as his very first music item the Musicalisches Gesangbuch, edited by George Christian Schemelli; according to its preface, “the melodies to be found in this musical songbook have been in part quite newly composed and in part improved in the thoroughbass by the most noble Mr. Johann Sebastian Bach.”81 Bach had most texts of his secular cantatas in the later 1730s printed by Breitkopf (who specialized in movable type) and, later on, the front matter for the Musical Offering and The Art of Fugue as well, but for the Clavier-Übung he turned initially to the Leipzig engraving shop of Johann Gottfried Krügner and later to the Nuremberg music publisher Christoph Weigel, Jr., and his successor, Balthasar Schmid.82
Bach’s Opus 1, a collection of six partitas, appeared in 1731 under the title Clavier-Übung, one that had also served his predecessor, Johann Kuhnau, for two sets of keyboard partitas published in 1689 and 1692. Although not yet designated as Opus 1, Bach’s collection had previously been issued in single installments of the six partitas. The first came out in the fall of 1726, along with the fo
llowing announcement: “The Capellmeister to the Prince of Anhalt-Cöthen and Director Chori Musici Lipsiensis, Herr Johann Sebastian Bach, intends to publish a collection of clavier suites of which the first Partita has already been issued, and, by and by, they will continue to come to light until the work is complete, and as such will be made known to amateurs of the clavier. Let it be known that the author is himself the publisher of his work.”83 As the publisher, Bach acted at his own financial risk, so it was prudent for him to invest in the project gradually so that expenses would largely be recovered by sales; after the first installment of 1726, the other five were issued over the next four years. For distribution, Bach recruited six colleagues in well-chosen locations who agreed, on a commission basis, to serve as sales agents in their areas: Christian Petzold of Dresden, organist at St. Sophia’s and royal chamber musician; Johann Gotthilf Ziegler of Halle, organist at St. Ulrich’s; Georg Böhm of Lüneburg, organist at St. John’s; Georg Heinrich Ludwig Schwanenberger of Brunswick, violinist at the court capelle of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel; Gabriel Fischer of Nuremberg, member of the town music company; and Johann Michael Roth of Augsburg, also member of the town music company. When Bach had tested the market and determined that the individual partitas sold well, he arranged to reprint all six partitas in one volume.
The numbering of the Clavier-Übung as Opus 1 indicates that further publications would follow. The concept of an ambitious series of sequels perhaps coalesced in light of similar undertakings by Georg Philipp Telemann, who began in 1728 to bring out a series of works under the title Der Getreue Musik-Meister (The True Music Master),
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