Johann Sebastian Bach

by Christoph Wolff

  Throughout the second half of the eighteenth century—the most decisive period for Bach’s reception—no one, not even his own sons, had a real grasp of the size of Bach’s oeuvre, let alone comprehensive insight into the materials. Not counting potential losses prior to 1750, the corpus of Bach’s creative output as a unit was destroyed with the division of the estate, and its structure was distorted once and for all. However, the limited knowledge of the works that were available after 1750 only magnified the effect of individual compositions as their musical essence and compositional makeup were contemplated. Bach’s music immediately established new benchmarks of compositional artistry and technical perfection. Its exemplary value was recognized, as each work soon became a touchstone for performers, composers, and theorists alike—a distinction the pieces hold to this day. After Bach, music was no longer the same. A paradigm shift had taken place and gradually took hold, comparable to what happened in philosophy (which included mathematics and physics) as a result of Newton’s work. Certainly by coincidence but exactly a month after Bach’s death, in an article dated August 28, 1750, Bach’s former student Johann Friedrich Agricola, who had become a respected composer, performer, and theorist in Berlin, drew an analogy for the first time between Newton and Bach, pointing out their deep involvement with the “profound science” of their respective fields. And it appears utterly appropriate to see Bach’s musical advances in the light of Newton’s philosophical achievements. The two men reached pinnacles of a very different kind, but they lived, thought, and worked in the same intellectual climate of scientific discovery and empirical testing of fundamental principles.

  Just as no one in 1728 could know Newton in toto, no one in 1750 knew all of Bach, but the main ideas for which their life’s work stood were clearly present, even already at work. Therefore, the unfortunate fate of Bach’s musical estate had virtually no effect on his musical legacy, either in the 1750s and 1760s or later. Surely, any lost work of Bach’s would, if retrieved, significantly broaden the scope of the surviving repertoire and add new facets as well. At the same time, such a find would in no way alter our perception of the principled nature of Bach’s compositional art—principled yet moving, scientific yet human—the true core of his musical legacy.

  Even before 1750, that legacy had begun to spread, slowly but steadily and irreversibly, primarily through his students and his sons, and first and foremost in circles of professional musicians. But knowledgeable admirers of Bach’s art could be found outside German lands as well. A representative voice in this regard is that of the composer and theorist Padre Giovanni Battista Martini in Bologna, who wrote to a German colleague in April 1750, more than three months before Bach’s death: “I consider it superfluous to describe the singular merit of Sig. Bach, for he is thoroughly known and admired not only in Germany but throughout our Italy. I will say only that I think it would be difficult to find someone in the profession who could surpass him, since these days he could rightfully claim to be among the first in Europe.”115 Martini’s words demonstrate the growth of Bach’s influence far away from his geographic home. Leipzig, however, continued to play a prominent role in the further dissemination of his music, especially as a result of the manuscript-copying services of the Breitkopf firm throughout the second half of the eighteenth century.

  As for the St. Thomas School, so long Bach’s principal place of operation, Gottlob Harrer’s cantorate was solid if uneventful. He composed a great deal of music for the Leipzig churches but also paid considerable attention to other composers’ music. He cultivated in particular the Masses of Palestrina and the chorale cantatas of his immediate predecessor, using the original performance materials for the latter.116 However, after holding the office for less than five years, Harrer died on July 9, 1755. The council then proceeded to elect Johann Friedrich Doles,117 who had been thoroughly trained by Bach and who occupied the office for thirty-three years, from 1756 to 1789—even longer than his teacher. It was also Doles who laid the cornerstone of what can be called a Leipzig Bach tradition. In 1789, when Mozart traveled from Vienna to Leipzig and, on the initiative of Doles, visited the St. Thomas School,

  the choir surprised Mozart with the performance of the double chorus motet Singet dem Herrn ein neues Liedby Sebastian Bach. Mozart knew this master more by hearsay than by his works, which had become quite rare; at least his motets, which had never been printed, were completely unknown to him. Hardly had the choir sung a few measures when Mozart sat up, startled; a few measures more and he called out “What is this?” And now his whole soul seemed to be in his ears. When the singing was finished he cried out, full of joy: “Now there is something one can learn from!”118

  Epilogue

  Bach and the Idea of “Musical Perfection”

  Bach must have derived considerable satisfaction on reading, in January 1738, the defense against the attack on him that Johann Adolph Scheibe had launched the previous year. The essay, written by Magister Johann Abraham Birnbaum (doubtless with Bach’s assistance),1 replaces Scheibe’s image of Bach the music maker with that of Bach the virtuoso. The article also refers to Bach consistently as “the Hon. Court Composer”—a formulaic reverential gesture, to be sure, but an appellation that emphasizes the significance of Bach the composer.2 Since, however, Birnbaum deliberately appealed to a discriminating audience, in particular to the “real connoisseur of true musical perfections,” he placed the bar as high as possible in addressing the “remarkable perfections that indisputably belong to the Hon. Court Composer alone.” Here Birnbaum revealed himself as a true and resourceful threesome—rhetorician, legal scholar, and philosopher—and overpowered his opponent by introducing into the discussion the concept of “musical perfection,” a notion as abstract as it is irrefutable.

  While perfection had traditionally been considered the exclusive property of God and His creation, the perfectibility of man became an idea of the Enlightenment that was able to cross the newly lowered theological barriers. Therefore, Birnbaum’s attribution of “remarkable perfections” to Bach could no longer be considered blasphemous, even though the remark that these perfections “indisputably” belonged to him brought Birnbaum dangerously close to declaring Bach godlike, surely an unintended comparison. Yet Birnbaum clearly meant to place Bach on a pedestal of uniqueness, a judgment Bach could comfortably accept and a view later echoed in the Obituary statement that Bach’s music resembled that of “no other composer.” This appraisal resulted neither from blunt arrogance nor from unreasonable exaggeration, since the principal subject of the debate, musical composition—referred to by its ancient Greek synonym harmonia—had prompted discussion of the term “perfection” in the first place.

  According to both Pythagorean philosophical doctrine and medieval theology, the harmony of the spheres produced consonant (if hidden) music, which reflected the perfection of the celestial world—a view that neither Kepler nor Newton disputed, leaving it one of the few fundamental truths still upheld by both philosophers and theologians of Bach’s time. Not surprisingly, all-encompassing philosophical concepts from Marin Mersenne’s “universal harmony” to Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz’s “prestabilized harmony” invariably draw on this genuinely musical term because of its fundamental implications. As Georg Venzky, like Bach a member of Lorenz Christoph Mizler’s Society of Musical Science, put it, “God is a harmonic being. All harmony originates from his wise order and organization…Where there is no conformity, there is also no order, no beauty, and no perfection. For beauty and perfection consists in the conformity of diversity.”3

  The principle of unity in diversity, derived from the theocentric concept of the harmony of the spheres, provided the basis for Birnbaum’s definition of musical perfection:

  Now the idea that the melody must always be in the upper voice and that the constant collaboration of the other voices is a fault, is one for which I have been able to find no sufficient grounds. Rather it is the exact opposite that flows from the very nature of music. For
music consists of harmony, and harmony becomes far more complete if all the voices collaborate to form it. Accordingly this is not a failing but rather a musical perfection…. The author need only look into the works of Palestrina, among the old composers, or Lotti among the more modern ones, and he will find not only that the voices are continuously at work but also that each one has a melody of its own that harmonizes quite well with the others.4

  For Birnbaum and Bach, two points were of particular importance: the nature of music and the continuity of its history. As to first, the issue of art versus nature, Birnbaum explains at a later point in greater detail:

  The essential aims of true art are to imitate Nature, and, where necessary, to aid it. If art imitates Nature, then indisputably the natural element must everywhere shine through in works of art…. Now, the greater the art is—that is, the more industriously and painstakingly it works at the improvement of Nature—the more brilliantly shines the beauty thus brought into being. Accordingly, it is impossible that the greatest art should darken the beauty of a thing. Can it be possible, then, that the Hon. Court Composer, even by the use of the greatest art he applies in the working out of his musical compositions, could take away from them the natural element and darken its beauty?”5

  The concept of nature to which Birnbaum and Bach adhered owed a large debt to seventeenth-and early eighteenth-century thinking; it was as far removed from later thought as a French Baroque garden with its formality and decor (that is, its need for artful “improvement of nature”) was from the later eighteenth-century English garden with its naturalistic landscape. Regarding the second point, Birnbaum’s references to older masters stress the importance to Bach of an unbroken tradition of the art of counterpoint, according to the notion that “natural and cogent thoughts maintain their worth in all times and places.”6 At the same time, both Palestrina and Lotti, along with de Grigny’s and Du Mage’s Livres d’orgue (cited by Birnbaum elsewhere in the essay), were composers and works represented in Bach’s library, confirming his direct input in building the argument for the validity of contrapuntal style.

  Birnbaum’s description of harmony as accumulated counterpoint goes well beyond mere functionality when, in one of the most thoughtful and poetic descriptions of the inner workings of Bach’s harmonious polyphony, he addresses the essential aesthetic aspects of a contrapuntally conceived harmonic structure:

  Where the rules of composition are most strictly preserved, there without fail order must reign…. It is certain…that the voices in the works of this great master of music work wonderfully in and about one another, but without the slightest confusion. They move along together or in opposition, as necessary. They part company, and yet all meet again at the proper time. Each voice distinguishes itself clearly from the others by a particular variation, although they often imitate each other. They now flee, now follow one another without one’s noticing the slightest irregularity in their efforts to outdo one another. Now when all this is performed as it should be, there is nothing more beautiful than this harmony.7

  Birnbaum then poses a whole series of questions pointing to the uniquely high degree of individuality exhibited by Bach’s musical language: “Why does he [Scheibe] not praise the astonishing mass of unusual and well-developed ideas? the development of a single subject through the keys with the most agreeable variations? the quite special adroitness, even at the greatest speed, in bringing out all the tones clearly and with uninterrupted evenness? the uncommon fluency with which he plays in the most difficult keys just as quickly and accurately as in the simplest? and in general an amenity that is everywhere joined with art?”8

  From a modern perspective, it is not difficult to assign Bach a special place in his time. It is most unusual, however, that Bach’s contemporaries recognized and articulated that his music was distinctly different. “No one ever showed so many ingenious and unusual ideas as he in elaborate pieces such as ordinarily seem dry exercises in craftsmanship,” reads the Obituary, which continues even more explicitly: “His melodies were strange, but always varied, rich in invention, and resembling those of no other composer.”9 Indeed, the quality of originality in Bach’s music was identified early, much earlier than is generally assumed, and culminated in Christian Friedrich Daniel Schubart’s 1784–85 pronouncement: “Johann Sebastian Bach was a genius of the highest degree; his spirit is so unique and individual, so immense that it will require centuries to really reach him…. The original genius of Bach is readily recognizable.”10

  The term “original genius” became fashionable only after Bach’s lifetime. The triumph of individual spontaneity over codified rules cannot be properly applied to him, even though by the end of the eighteenth century Bach frequently served as the model of original genius in German aesthetics, much as Shakespeare did in England.11 But Schubart formulated in the nomenclature of his day (thirty-five years after Bach’s death) only what both the Obituary and Birnbaum had anticipated in stressing the phenomena of individuality and uniqueness. And neither Schubart nor the others saw any incongruity between the two images of Bach, as someone strictly adhering to the established rules of composition and as someone setting his own rules. Indeed, they understood his art as a paradigm for reconciling what would ordinarily be conflicting stances. And when the authors of the Obituary speak of Bach’s “ingenious and unusual ideas” on the one hand and his extraordinary command of the “hidden secrets of harmony” on the other, they identify an essential element in Bach’s approach to musical composition: the tension between protecting objective precepts and pursuing subjective goals. Bach, for whom the “invention of ideas” constituted a fundamental requirement (“anyone who had none he advised to stay away from composition altogether,” as his son later recounted),12 understood the elaboration of musical ideas not as an act of free creation but rather as a process of imaginative research into the harmonic implications of the chosen subject matter.

  The “astonishing mass of unusual and well-developed ideas” praised by Birnbaum depends little on the traditional art of devising motifs and themes based on rhetorical models. Instead, Bach’s “strange” melodies move strongly in the direction of original though not unbridled creation. Just as he conceives of harmony as a nature-given essence whose secrets are to be explored, his invention is always derived from given premises, expanding on which he accepts as a challenge. In this connection, a report from a certain M. Theodor Pitschel of Leipzig, dated 1741, seems particularly illuminating, for Bach’s art of improvising and composing is always determined by concrete points of references:

  The famous man who has the greatest praise in our town in music, and the greatest admiration of connoisseurs, does not get into condition, as the expression goes, to delight others with the mingling of his tones until he has played something from the printed or written page, and has thus set his powers of imagination in motion…. The able man…usually has to play something from a page which is inferior to his own ideas. And yet his superior ideas are the consequences of those inferior ones.13

  Characteristic of Bach’s manner of composing is a way of elaborating the musical ideas so as to penetrate the material deeply and exhaustively. As Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach points out, the approach taken by his father never reflected the tensed-up, arduous, and compulsive attitude of a fanatic but served, instead, to provide him with fun and, often, a playful intellectual pastime: “Thanks to his greatness in harmony, he accompanied trios on more than one occasion on the spur of the moment and, being in good humor,…converted them into complete quartets…. When he listened to a rich and many-voiced fugue, he could soon say, after the first entries of the subjects, what contrapuntal devices would be possible to apply and which of them the composer by rights ought to apply.”14

  So it appears that uncovering secrets implicated in harmony was a veritable passion that had its roots in the youth of this essentially self-taught composer, whose “own study and reflection alone” made him such a “pure and strong fugue writer.”15 From t
he outset, the contrapuntal elaboration of a theme held his intense interest, and given his phenomenal gift of combination, it became immaterial whether the theme was his own or that of another composer. In every instance, the theme presented a challenge to uncover its latent harmonic qualities so that in the final setting, all parts worked “wonderfully in and about one another, but without the slightest confusion” and, therefore, truly represented unity in diversity, or musical perfection.

  In striving for musical perfection, the principle of elaboration is an integral factor, whatever the genre, and this principle determines like nothing else Bach’s art and personal style. Elaboration takes many forms, as it involves counterpoint, variation, and basic components of musical design such as melody, harmony, and rhythm. Elaboration affects all aspects of the compositional process and the continuing search for improved or alternate solutions, from sketch, draft, harmonization, and orchestration to correction, revision, and parody. Elaboration requires the concrete application of musical science, that is, the knowledge of all possible implications held by a musical idea, as well as how and why they are possible. The most important aspect of elaboration, however, is that it provides a method for working “industriously and painstakingly…at the improvement of nature”16—for seeking, in other words, musical perfection.