Delphi Masterworks of Johann Sebastian Bach

by Peter Russell

  A further training in instrumental music was afforded by the post which Bach held for some months after leaving Lueneburg, in 1703, in the band of Prince Johann Ernst at Weimar. But he could not long be content with the limited scope of a court violinist; and a chance visit to Arnstadt, where his grand-uncle Heinrich had founded a tradition of organ playing, but, dying eleven years before, had left no worthy successor, offered to Bach the opportunity of following out his special bent. An organ had recently been built in the new church of the town, but the burghers had not yet succeeded in finding a musician who satisfied their notion of the importance of the post. The man they had engaged they watched so jealously that he was not even trusted with the keys of his loft: one of them was deputed to receive them back from him as soon as playing was over. It is significant of the skill which Bach had already won, that he no sooner tried the organ — it does not appear, as a candidate — than the consistory welcomed in this lad of eighteen the musical heir of their honoured town organist, dismissed the incapable Boerner, and forcibly installed Bach at a triple salary augmented out of the municipal chest. On the 14th August, 1703, he took the solemn pledge of diligence and faithfulness and all that appertaineth to an honourable servant and organist before God and the worshipful Corporation.

  The brilliancy of Bach’s reception at Arnstadt was transient. The New Church was a sort of chapel-of-ease to the principal church of the town; and Bach was only entrusted with the training of a small, partly voluntary, choir. His duties accordingly engrossed but a couple of hours on three days of the week, and the townspeople were well satisfied if he did not fall short in them. In this languid atmosphere he found no incitement to convince the town, by his performances, how far his hopes and ambitions exceeded those of the ordinary organist. He seems in time to have been content with a bare fulfilment of his duties, or hardly that, and to have concentrated himself in his private studies. After two years the respite of a month’s leave enabled him to visit Luebeck, the home of the illustrious organist Buxtehude; and hither a long walk of fifty leagues brought him in November, 1705.

  As Reincke was a Dutchman, so Dietrich Buxtehude, who did as much, on his own lines, to establish the North German school of organists, was a Dane. He had settled in Luebeck in 1660, and the enthusiasm with which his art was attended was such that his influence remained in the town until the present century. One of the causes of his popularity was the custom which he innovated of having concerts, with a full orchestra of uncommon strength, in his church. A deeper reason was his consummate command over the organ and the important advances he made in composition.

  Buxtehude stands apart from the organ composers of the rest of Germany, in the greater technical elaboration of his works. In spirit he has a single point of alliance with the organists of Southern Germany, in his want of sympathy with, his estrangement from, the chorale, in which the music of Middle Germany had its life. The melodic richness which this training in popular music developed in Pachelbel and Johann Christoph Bach was lacking in Buxtehude. His strength lay in pure instrumental music and was displayed specially in fugue-writing, to the development of which he contributed much, both in the combination of several themes in a fugue and in the extended function he assigned to the pedal. The form is conceived with breadth and freedom, the voices are melodiously worked together, and the harmonies are unusual in their originality, often so unusual as to seem merely discordant, harsh, restless. For if the works of Buxtehude strike one first by the massiveness, they strike no less by their inequality, their strange, erratic transitions from a sombre, often tempestuous, mood to one of tenderness and pathos.

  It was at the feet of this rugged genius that Bach sat for three months; and the impress left upon his mind was distinct and durable. His fastidious censorship in later years allowed very little of his Arnstadt work to survive. A single church cantata comes down to us in the shape to which a careful revision at Leipzig reduced it5; but several instrumental works let us see how far he had advanced in composition, and two organ fugues,6 at least, how much he needed the education of these months at Luebeck to complete the studies hitherto influenced by the school of Pachelbel. The subjects in them are ingeniously constructed, but the entire compositions are deficient in relief and coherence. They shew the earnest spirit in which he worked, but also that this earnestness acted as a weight upon the freedom and brightness of the result. Outwardly he retires under the established musical forms of his time, but even now his individuality forces itself into view. An instance of his technical immaturity is afforded by his treatment of the pedal, which, according to the universal custom except in Northern Germany, Bach used merely occasionally, limiting it to the production of sustained notes or at the most of slow progressions.7 Buxtehude, on the other hand, changed it from a capricious accessory into a real support to the manuals and often entrusted it with a brilliant solo part. In this important element of organ composition, his Luebeck visit opened a new road to Bach and a road which he was not slow to follow.8

  The clavichord works that occupied his leisure at Arnstadt seem, to judge from the few specimens that have come down to us,9 to have been chiefly of that sort of free fugue, sometimes with a humorous design, to which it was the custom to give the name of capriccio. In one of them, a sonata (No. 216, p. 12), a fugue of the most melodious conception is followed by a capriccio founded on the cackle of a hen; Thema all’ Imitatio Gallina Cucca is the macaronic title. Another (No. 208, p. 30) portrays the feelings and the circumstances attending the departure of his brother — sopra la lontananza del suo fratello dilettissimo — Johann Jakob, who went as hautboy-player in the Swedish guard of Charles XII. We have the sad gathering of the family, and their recitals of the perils that may befall the traveller in a strange land. They seek in vain to stay him, and, finding him resolute, join in a general lamento — a fine composition, by the way, written upon two ground-basses, and tenderly pathetic — ere they take leave. When the slow fare-*well is ended, the postilion makes his appearance, and the sorrow of the departure is exchanged for the lively bustle of the road, the picture ending gaily with the post-horn deftly worked into a fugue.10 This curiously elementary form of what it is the fashion to call programme-music may appear to have been suggested by the fantastic compositions of Couperin and others, which Bach heard at Celle. But, in this regard at least, the old German Froberger was another Couperin. He is recorded to have written a suite depicting the Journey of the Count of Thurn and the Peril that came to him on the Rhine, plainly delivered before eye and ear. Probably, however, Bach’s immediate reference is to a work that had recently been published by a musician whom in after-life he was to succeed as cantor at Leipzig. Johann Kuhnau’s Biblische Historien are scenes from the history of the children of Israel presented in a series of sonatas for the clavichord. To judge by their contents it is likely that Bach took the idea of this capriccio from them, but it is significant of his insight into the unsatisfying nature of the peculiar style, that he never returned to it, unless indeed we admit a kindred basis in the rare examples of the imitation of outward emotion, which appear in his Passion music.

  When Bach returned home from Luebeck, in February, 1706, his month’s holiday having expanded into three, he not unnaturally encountered the displeasure of the authorities. Summoned before the consistory, he excused himself on the ground that he had been to Luebeck with the intent to perfect himself in certain matters touching his art, and, having provided a substitute for the time, he was under no misgivings as to the discharge of his duties at Arnstadt. But heavier charges lay behind. He was to be rebuked (to quote the pedantry of the official record) for that he hath heretofore made sundry perplexing variations and imported divers strange harmonies, in such wise that the congregation was thereby confounded. In the future, continues the Minute, when he will introduce a tonus peregrinus, he is to sustain the same and not to fall incontinent upon another, or even, as he hath been wont, to play a tonus contrarius. A witness added that the organist Bach hath at the
first played too tediously; howbeit, on notice received from the superintendent, he hath straightway fallen into the other extreme and made the music too short. Evidently he had brought things into a bad way, for the next charge is, that he refused to train the choir. Bach retorted by demanding a conductor. He was allowed time to consider whether he would comply with the order of the Board or leave them to appoint some one to fill his place. Under the circumstances it shows a surprisingly gentle temper in the consistory, possibly a just appreciation of their organist’s great, however capricious, excellence, that they waited near nine months before they repeated, with some severity, the demand for an explanation. Bach agreed to furnish one; but the document has unfortunately not been preserved. It is evident, however, from the indifference with which he treated the consistory, as well as from his unwillingness to fulfil the conditions of his post, that he had already decided to resign it on the first opportunity.

  The opportunity was not long coming: before the end of the year the organist’s place at S. Blasius’ Church, Muehlhausen, fell vacant. A succession of distinguished musicians and the various eminence of the last holder of the post, Johann Georg Ahle — perhaps also the fame of the poet’s crown with which the Emperor had decorated him — made the office an exceptionally coveted one. Among the various candidates, however, it was adjudged apparently without debate to Bach, who was even requested to make his own terms as to the salary he should receive. He modestly stipulated the same sum as he had been allowed at Arnstadt — it was indeed considerably in excess of Ahle’s salary — together with the accustomed dues of corn, wood, and fish, to be delivered without charge at his door. He asked also for a cart to bring his goods to his new house.11 These trifling details are oddly characteristic of the man, and remind us of a letter he wrote long after to a relative, thanking him for a cask of wine, but quoting the expense of carriage, and begging that the costly present might not be repeated. Just at present he had a special reason for thrift. He left Arnstadt by the end of June, 1707; in the following October, the 17th, he was married at a village near Arnstadt, to his cousin Maria Barbara, daughter of the great Gehren organist, Johann Michael Bach. A single year after his appointment he accepted the more ambitious post of organist in the Ducal Chapel at Weimar.

  His short stay at Muehlhausen had been pleasant and useful to him. He entered upon his work, which was purely that of organist, with ardour, and — in contrast with his lax performance of his duties at Arnstadt — even took a share in the training of the choir, although there was a cantor as well. The only drawback was that the pastor of his church was a strenuous pietist, one of those puritans who found, not a spiritual gain, but a worldly intrusion upon the sacredness of divine worship, in those church cantatas which it was Bach’s work to create anew. The organist held to a close friendship with his pastor’s hot antagonist at the Church of S. Mary, and seems to have gone into the neighbouring villages whenever he wished to produce music upon which he could not venture in his own church. This can hardly have been, however, the principal reason of his leaving Muehlhausen so quickly as he did. The charges of married life made his stipend barely a maintenance, even without a family. He had had enough of the subordination of a town organist. But most of all he must have been stimulated by the renown of the music at Weimar, with which he had become acquainted in an inferior capacity four years before, and the wide field it promised for the cultivation of his art in all its departments. On the 25th June, 1708, he respectfully submitted his resignation to the consistory. Their answer, requesting that his departure should not hinder his continuing to supervise the repair of the church organ with which they had entrusted him, is evidence of the good terms on which they separated.

  For the next fifteen years Bach stands in a circle of greater honour, removed from the small troubles of a town official. His return to a burgher’s life in 1723 — and at Leipzig he was never free from the harass of the wiseacres of his consistory — may surprise us, unless we conclude that the experience of his intervening years had taught him that if the delights of life came more liberally in the atmosphere of a court, a great town was after all the place for him who would live laborious days.

  CHAPTER III.

  Passing from Muehlhausen to Weimar was to Bach as the step from school to a university. The nine years of his life there produced works in which almost any other musician might glory as the perfect consummation of his powers; but when we range them beside the performance of Bach’s middle life, we see that all this time was still a period of preparation. Wonderful indeed is this strenuous preparation, carried on with increasing earnestness to his thirty-second year; this prelude to a life-long study — the index of the faithful artist — which was never relaxed until sight and strength forsook him. And no less wonderful is the growth of his genius — when we look back upon his earlier performances — revealed in rapid stages from the beginning of his sojourn at Weimar. But it was not only the years that had come upon him, but also the opportunity they brought with them, that make this change so marked an epoch in his life. Little as we know of the court of Weimar, there are some facts about its condition at this time which let us see that its intellectual atmosphere could not have been without its excitement and inspiration to Bach.

  The Duke, Wilhelm Ernst, was a man of naturally grave and religious character. It is told of him that at eight years old he preached a sermon before his parents and their company; and in later life his chief pleasure and occupation lay in building churches, organizing religious schemes, and founding schools. In the troubles of an unhappy marriage and the approach of a childless age, his serious temper deepened into austerity. But, if always averse from gaiety or the least approach to the wonted dissipations of a court, he was a good friend to arts and letters; and the forty-five years of his rule began the tradition of culture which led up to the historical era in the annals of Weimar a century later. He founded the library, had a collection of coins, and — what is more to our purpose — took a strong and pious delight in hearing and fostering the music in the castle chapel.

  The strict and sombre discipline which the Duke imposed upon his homely court — it went to bed, we are told, at eight in winter, and only an hour later in summer — was relieved by the brighter influence of his brother, Johann Ernst, the prince with whom Bach had taken service as a violinist in 1703. He died in 1707, but his son, also Johann Ernst, inherited his father’s taste for the chamber-music of France and Italy, and showed himself in his short life a composer of promise. The boy liked to be surrounded by musicians, to take lessons from them, and hear his favourite music. At the present time there was a brilliant circle at Weimar, and in this the prominent figures were the town organist Walther, known for his Musical Dictionary, and Bach. A famous story connects the two. Bach, we are told, had boasted of his ability to play anything at first sight, and Walther determined to baffle him. He asked him to breakfast, and, knowing Bach’s habits, laid among the music upon the clavichord a piece of simple and innocent appearance. While the meal was making ready the host leaves the room. Bach comes upon the piece, tries it and halts, begins again, and breaks down. Then he leaves the instrument in exasperation, shouting to his friend, No, one cannot play everything off: the thing is impossible.

  Of the routine of Bach’s life at Weimar we can only gather the outline. He held the double post of organist and musicus in the court. The latter function involved in Bach’s case either taking a fiddle in the orchestra — a band of sixteen performers all attired in a grotesque uniform of Hungarian heyducks — or accompanying from the basso continuo on the harpsichord (cembalo). When after some years he was appointed concertmeister he of course took the place of first violin. He was now required to supply a certain number of church compositions; and the age of the capellmeister often added to his duties the task of conducting. The series of church cantatas written at this time — among which the magnificent one, Ich hatte viel Bekümmerniss, stands preëminent — are sufficient evidence of the energy with which he app
lied himself to his additional duties. If we ask how he lived in his household — and no man lived more than Bach in the life of his home — we are answered by a blank. We have not even a clue as to the manner of woman his wife was. Six of her seven children were born at Weimar, and two, twins, died there in 1713. The names of the sponsors to them show the varied popularity Bach had gained among the different ranks with whom he was thrown. Pages in waiting and a Muehlhausen clergyman appear beside Bach’s kinsfolk or his professional comrades — Telemann is among them — or the humbler associates of his early life at Ohrdruf or Arnstadt. His continually increased salary — it never indeed exceeded some thirty pounds, added to the usual perquisites paid in kind — is one of the many signs of his being valued. More significant is the request he was in as an organist throughout Saxony, and even in a wider circle. He was always being invited to try or inspect organs, to play at different courts and attend musical celebrations, till it came to be a yearly practice with him to break the busy monotony of his Weimar life by a holiday spent in answer to these various calls. Some accounts that remain of these journeys are the more interesting since they are the only record, outside his compositions, of these years.

  In 1713 he was at Halle, and so much attracted by the quality of a new organ then building as to offer himself for the organistship. The consistory eagerly accepted him, and Bach composed a cantata on the spot, and brought it out as a testimonial. The documents of office quickly followed him back to Weimar for signature. But Bach was dissatisfied with the terms, possibly the Duke had persuaded him to stay at the castle; in any case, he wrote a courteous letter asking for some changes in the conditions of the post. The church authorities were indignant, refused to alter a word in the agreement, and hinted, quite falsely, that Bach had merely played with them in order to get an increase of pay at Weimar. Bach wound up the correspondence by a vigorous and dignified defence of his action; and it is pleasant to know that peace was tacitly re-established by Bach’s accepting a flattering invitation to play upon that same organ on its completion in 1716.