So long as Ernesti lived, there was little prospect of reform. But, after his death, in October 1729, Bach made vigorous representations to the Town Council. Already he had remonstrated with the Council for presenting to foundation scholarships boys who lacked musical aptitude. The Council retaliated by accusing Bach of neglecting his singing classes, absenting himself without leave, and of other irregularities. He was declared to be “incorrigible” and it was resolved (August 2, 1730) to sequestrate the Cantor’s income, in other words, to withhold from him the perquisites to which he was entitled for the conduct of the Church services.114
Bach was not deterred from offering, three weeks later (August 23, 1730), a “sketch of what constitutes well-appointed Church music, with a few impartial reflections on its present state of decay” in Leipzig. The document reveals the conditions amid which Bach worked. Its representations may be summarised:
The foundation scholars of St. Thomas’ are of four classes: Trebles, Altos, Tenors, Basses.
A choir needs from four to eight “concertists” ( solo singers) and at least two “ripienists” to each chorus part, i.e. a minimum of twelve voices.
The foundation scholars number fifty-five, by whom the choirs of the four Churches, St. Thomas’, St. Nicolas’, St. Peter’s, and the New Church are provided. For the instrumental accompaniments at least twenty players are required: viz., 2 or 3 first Violins, 2 or 3 second Violins, 4 Violas, 2 Violoncelli, 1 Contrabasso, 2 or more Flutes, 2 or 3 Oboi, 1 or 2 Fagotti, 3 Trombe, 1 Timpani. To fill these places there are eight Town Musicians, and at the moment there are no players available for third Tromba, Timpani, Viola, Violoncello, Contrabasso, third Oboe (or Taille).
To augment the Town Musicians the Cantor has been wont in the past to employ University students and instrumental players in the School. Upon the former “at all times” he relies for Viola, Violoncello, and Contrabasso, and “generally” for the second Violins. But the Council, by its recent resolution, no longer affords the Cantor the means to employ them. To place the scholars in the orchestra weakens the choir, to which they naturally belong.
By presenting to foundation scholarships boys unskilled and ignorant of music, the resources at the Cantor’s disposal are still farther lessened.
Hence, Bach concludes, “in ceasing to receive my perquisites I am deprived of the power of putting the music into a better condition.”
No answer was made to Bach’s memorial, and he contemplated resigning his position. But with the advent of Johann Matthias Gesner as Rector in September 1730 a happier period dawned upon the “incorrigible” Cantor. In 1732 Gesner procured the withdrawal of the Council’s ban on Bach’s perquisites. The fallen fortunes of the School revived, and Bach did not again make an effort to leave Leipzig. In 1736 the grant of the post of Hof-Componist to the Saxon Court gave him at length a title which compelled the deference of his civic masters.
Bach’s early misunderstanding with the University cut him off from association with the most dignified, if not the most important, institution in Leipzig, and deprived him of opportunity to display his genius beyond the radius of his Church duties. The situation changed in 1729, when he became director of the University Society, and he held the post for about ten years. The Society gave weekly concerts on Fridays, from 8 to 10, and an extra concert, during the Fair season, on Thursdays at the same hour. It performed vocal and instrumental music and was the medium through which Bach presented his secular Cantatas, Clavier and Violin Concertos, and Orchestral Suites to the public. The proficiency of his elder sons and pupils, and his wife’s talent as a singer, were a farther source of strength to the Society, whose direction undoubtedly made these years the happiest in Bach’s life. He took his rightful place in the musical life of the city, and relegated to a position of inferiority the smaller fry, such as Görner, who had presumed on Bach’s aloofness from the University and Municipality to insinuate themselves. His increasing reputation as an organist, gained in his annual autumn tours, also enlightened his fellow-townsmen regarding the superlative worth of one whom at the outset they were disposed to treat as a subordinate official.
The Leipzig of Bach’s day offered various opportunities for musical celebration; official events in the University, “gratulations” or “ovations” of favourite professors by their students, as well as patriotic occasions in which town and gown participated. The recognised fee for piecès d’occasion of a public character was fifty thalers. Bach’s conductorship of the University Society enabled him to perform festival works with the resources they required, and to augment the band and chorus needed for their adequate performance.
Even before he undertook the direction of the University Society, Bach more than once provided the music for University celebrations. On August 3, 1725, his secular Cantata, Der zufried-engestellte Aeolus, was performed at the students’ celebration of Doctor August Friedrich Müller’s name-day. In 1726 he revived an old Cantata115 to celebrate the birthday of another of the Leipzig teachers. In the same year the appointment of Dr. Gottlieb Kortte as Professor of Roman Law was celebrated by Bach’s Cantata Vereinigte Zwietracht der wechselnden Saiten. In 1733 the birthday of another Professor was marked by the performance of the Cöthen Cantata to yet another text (Die Freude reget sich). On November 21, 1734, the lost Cantata Thomana sass annoch betrübt was sung at the induction of Gesner’s successor, Johann August Ernesti, as Rector of St. Thomas’ School.
But Bach’s activity as a secular composer at Leipzig was chiefly expended on patriotic celebrations. His compositions of this character are particularly numerous during the years 1733-36, while he was seeking from the Dresden Court the post of Hof-Componist. The first of these celebrations took place on May 12, 1727, the birthday of Augustus II. of Poland-Saxony, when Bach’s Cantata, Entfernet euch, ihr heitern Sterne, was performed in the Market Place by the University Society. The King was present and listened to the performance from a convenient window. The music is lost. Six years elapsed before Bach was invited to collaborate in another celebration of the royal House. On September 5, 1733, less than two months after his application for the post of Hof-Componist, the University Society celebrated the eleventh birthday of the Electoral Prince by performing Bach’s dramma per musica, Die Wahl des Herkules, or Herkules auf dem Scheidewege. Barely three months later, on December 8, 1733, Bach produced another Cantata in honour of the royal family, Tönet, ihr Pauken, erschallet Trompeten, of which he was both author and composer. On no less than three occasions in 1734 Bach did homage to his unheeding sovereign. In January the University Society, under Bach’s direction, performed his Cantata Blast Larmen, ihr Feinde to celebrate the coronation of Augustus III. The music had already done duty in Dr. Müller’s honour in 1725. On the following October 5, 1734, when the King visited Leipzig, Bach’s hurriedly written Cantata, Preise dein Glücke, gesegnetes Sachsen, whose first chorus became the Osanna of the B minor Mass, was performed in the Market Place. Two days later, on October 7, 1734, the King’s birthday was celebrated by another Bach Cantata, Schleicht spielende Wellen, performed by the Collegium Musicum. In 1738, having received the coveted title of Hof-Componist in the interval (1736), Bach performed a work — Willkommen, ihr herrschenden Götter der Erden — now lost, in honour of the marriage of the Princess Maria Amalia of Saxony to Charles of Sicily, afterwards Charles III. of Spain.
Apart from his musical activities and the house in which he lived there is little that permits us to picture Bach’s life at Leipzig. Association with his friends Johann Christian Hoffmann, Musical Instrument Maker to the Court, Marianne von Ziegler, J. C. Gottsched and his musical wife, Johann Abraham Birnbaum, among the Professoriate, Picander and Christian Weiss, Bach’s regular librettists, suggests the amenities of an academic and literary circle. But the claims of his art and the care of his large family had the first call upon Bach’s interest. And few men had a happier home life. While his elder sons were at home the family concerts were among his most agreeable experiences. As his fame inc
reased, his house became the resort of many seeking to know and hear the famous organist. Late in the thirties he resigned his directorship of the University Society. His sons were already off his hands and out of his house, and he turned again to the Organ works of his Weimar period. Their revision occupied the last decade of his life, and the hitherto constant flow of Church Cantatas ceased. Pupils resorted to him and filled his empty house, to one of whom, Altnikol, he gave a daughter in marriage.
A man of rigid uprightness, sincerely religious; steeped in his art, earnest and grave, yet not lacking naive humour; ever hospitable and generous, and yet shrewd and cautious; pugnacious when his art was slighted or his rights were infringed; generous in the extreme to his wife and children, and eager to give the latter advantages which he had never known himself; a lover of sound theology, and of a piety as deep as it was unpretentious — such were the qualities of one who towers above all other masters of music in moral grandeur.
Four, perhaps only three, contemporary portraits of Bach are known. One is in the possession of the firm of Peters at Leipzig and once belonged to Carl Philipp Emmanuel’s daughter, who with inherited impiety sold it to a Leipzig flute player. The second hung in St. Thomas’ School and is reproduced at p. 48 of this volume. It was painted in 1746 and restored in 1913. Both portraits are by Elias Gottlieb Haussmann, Court Painter at Dresden. The third portrait belonged to Bach’s last pupil, Kittel, and used to hang on the Organ at Erfurt, whence it disappeared after 1809, during the Napoleonic wars. Recently Professor Fritz Volbach of Mainz has discovered a fourth portrait, which is printed at p. 92 of the present volume. He supposes it to be none other than the Erfurt portrait, as indeed it well may be, since it represents a man of some sixty years, austere in countenance, but of a dignity that is not so apparent in Haussmann’s portraiture.116
Bach left no will. In consequence his widow, Anna Magdalena, burdened with the charge of a step-daughter and two daughters, was entitled to only one-third of her husband’s estate. Neither Carl Philipp Emmanuel nor Wilhelm Friedemann was her own child. But the fact cannot excuse gross neglect of their father’s widow. Her own sons were in a position to make such a contribution to her income as would at least have kept want from her door. In fact she was permitted to become dependent on public charity, and died, an alms-woman, on February 27, 1760, nearly ten years after her great husband. The three daughters survived her. One died in 1774, the second in 1781. The third, Regine Susanna, survived them, her want relieved by gifts from a public that at last was awakening to the grandeur of her father. Beethoven contributed generously. Regine Susanna died in December 1809, the last of Bach’s children. In 1845 her nephew, Johann Christoph Friedrich’s son, also died. With him the line of Johann Sebastian Bach expired.
Johann Sebastian Bach, circa 1746. From the picture by Haussmann.
CHAPTER III. BACH AS A CLAVIER PLAYER
As a Clavier player Bach was admired by all who had the good fortune to hear him and was the envy of the virtuosi of his day. His method greatly differed from that of his contemporaries and predecessors, but so far no one has attempted to explain in what the difference consisted. The same piece of music played by ten different performers equally intelligent and competent will produce a different effect in each case. Each player will emphasise this or that detail. This or that note will stand out with differing emphasis, and the general effect will vary consequently. And yet, if all the players are equally competent, ought not their performances to be uniform? The fact that they are not so is due to difference of touch, a quality which to the Clavier stands as enunciation to human speech. Distinctness is essential for the enunciation of vowels and consonants, and not less so for the articulation of a musical phrase. But there are gradations of distinctness. If a sound is emitted indistinctly it is comprehensible only with effort, which occasions us to lose much of the pleasure we should otherwise experience. On the other hand, over-emphasis of words or notes is to be avoided. Otherwise the hearer’s attention will be diverted from the tout ensemble. To permit the general effect to be appreciated every note and every vowel must be sounded with balanced distinctness.
I have often wondered why Carl Philipp Emmanuel Bach’s Essay on the Right Manner of playing the Clavier117 does not elucidate the qualities that constitute a good touch. For he possessed in high degree the technique that made his father pre-eminent as a player. True, in his chapter on “Style in Performance,” he writes, “Some persons play as if their fingers were glued together; their touch is so deliberate, and they keep the keys down too long; while others, attempting to avoid this defect, play too crisply, as if the keys burnt their fingers. The right method lies between the two extremes.” But it would have been more useful had he told us how to reach this middle path. As he has not done so, I must try to make the matter as clear as is possible in words.
Bach placed his hand on the finger-board so that his fingers were bent and their extremities poised perpendicularly over the keys in a plane parallel to them.118 Consequently none of his fingers was remote from the note it was intended to strike, and was ready instantly to execute every command. Observe the consequences of this position. First of all, the fingers cannot fall or (as so often happens) be thrown upon the notes, but are placed upon them in full control of the force they may be called on to exert. In the second place, since the force communicated to the note needs to be maintained with uniform pressure, the finger should not be released perpendicularly from the key, but can be withdrawn gently and gradually towards the palm of the hand. In the third place, when passing from one note to another, a sliding action instinctively instructs the next finger regarding the amount of force exerted by its predecessor, so that the tone is equally regulated and the notes are equally distinct. In other words, the touch is neither too long nor too short, as Carl Philipp Emmanuel complains, but is just what it ought to be.119 Many advantages arise from holding the hand in Bach’s position and from adopting his touch, on the Clavichord and Harpsichord,120 and on the Organ as well. I point out merely the most important of them. To begin with, if the fingers are bent, their movements are free. The notes are struck without effort and with less risk of missing or hitting too hard, a frequent fault with people who play with their fingers elongated or insufficiently bent. In the second place, the sliding finger-tip, and the consequently rapid transmission of regulated force from one finger to another, tend to bring out each note clearly and to make every passage sound uniformly brilliant and distinct to the hearer without exertion. In the third place, stroking the note with uniform pressure permits the string to vibrate freely, improves and prolongs the tone, and though the Clavichord is poor in quality, allows the player to sustain long notes upon it. And the method has this advantage: it prevents over-expenditure of strength and excessive movement of the hand. We gather that the action of Bach’s fingers was so slight as to be barely perceptible. Only the top joint seemed to move. His hand preserved its rounded shape even in the most intricate passages. His fingers rested closely upon the keys, very much in the position required for a “shake.” An unemployed finger remained in a position of repose. It is hardly necessary to say that that other limbs of his body took no part in his performance, as is the case with many whose hands lack the requisite agility.121
A man may possess all these qualities, however, and remain an indifferent performer on the Clavier, just as clear and agreeable enunciation does not necessarily make a good speaker. To be a first-rate performer many other qualities are needed, and Bach possessed them all in a notable degree.
Some fingers are longer and stronger than others. Hence players are frequently seduced to use the stronger whenever they can readily do so. Consequently successive notes become unequal in tone, and passages which leave no choice as to the finger to be used may become impossible to play. Bach recognised this fact very early in his career. To get over the difficulty he invented exercises for his own use in which the fingers of both hands were made to practise passages in every conceivable position
. By this means every finger on both hands equally became strong and serviceable, so that he could play a rapid succession of chords, single and double “shakes,” and running passages with the utmost finish and delicacy, and was equally fluent in passages where some fingers play a “shake” while the others on the same hand continue the melody.
Besides these improvements, Bach invented a new system of fingering.122 Before his time, and even in his early years, it was usual for the player to pay attention to harmony rather than counterpoint. Even so it was not customary to use every one of the twenty-four major and minor keys. The Clavichord was still what we term “gebunden”; that is, several keys struck the same string, which, therefore, could not be accurately tuned.123 Consequently it was usual to employ only those keys whose notes were tuned with some approximation to accuracy. Again, good players in those days hardly ever used the thumb, except when a large interval had to be stretched. But when Bach began to melodise harmony so that his middle parts not merely filled in but had a tune of their own, when, too, he began to deviate from the Church modes then in general vogue in secular music, using the diatonic and chromatic scales indifferently, and tuning the Clavier in all the twenty-four keys, he found himself compelled to introduce a system of fingering better adapted to his innovations than that in use, and in particular, to challenge the convention which condemned the thumb to inactivity. It is held by some writers that Couperin forestalled Bach’s method of fingering, in his L’Art de toucher le Clavecin, published in 1716. But that is not the case. In the first place, Bach was above thirty years old in 1716, and had already developed a distinctive method of his own. And in the second place, Couperin’s system differs materially from Bach’s, though both made more frequent use of the thumb than was so far customary. When I say “more frequent use” I do so advisedly; for whereas in Bach’s system the thumb is the principal finger — for the difficult keys, as they are called, are unplayable without it — it is not equally indispensable with Couperin, whose thematic material was not so intricate as Bach’s, nor did he compose or play in such difficult keys. Consequently Couperin had not an equally urgent need to use the thumb. We need only compare Couperin’s with Bach’s system of fingering, as Carl Philipp Emmanuel explains it,124 to discover that Bach’s permits every passage, however intricate and polyphonic, to be played with ease, whereas Couperin’s is hardly effective even for his own compositions. Bach was acquainted with Couperin’s works and highly esteemed them,125 as he did those of other French Clavier composers, for their finish and brilliance. But he considered them affected in their excessive use of ornaments, scarcely a single note being free from them. He held them, also, superficial in matter.
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