The Age of Voltaire

by Will Durant

  Germany produced in this age one operatic composer of the first rank, Johann Adolf Hasse, but he too wooed Italy. For ten years he studied there with Alessandro Scarlatti and Niccolò Porpora; he married the Italian singer Faustina Bordoni (1730); he wrote the music for Italian librettos by Apostolo Zeno, Metastasio, and others. His early operas were so enthusiastically received in Naples and Venice that Italy called him “il caro Sassone” the lovable Saxon. When he returned to Germany he passionately defended Italian opera. Most Germans agreed with him, and honored him above the absent Handel and far above the obscure Bach; Burney ranked him and Gluck as the Raphael and Michelangelo of music in German lands.36 No one, not even the Italians, equaled the richness of his hundred operas in melodic or dramatic invention. In 1731 he and his wife, the greatest diva of her time, were invited to Dresden by Augustus the Strong; Faustina captured the capital with her voice, Hasse with his compositions. In 1760 he lost most of his property, including his collected manuscripts, in the bombardment of Dresden by Frederick the Great. The ruined city gave up opera, and Hasse and his wife moved to Vienna, where, by now seventy-four, he competed with Gluck. In 1771, at the marriage of the Archduke Ferdinand in Milan, he shared the musical program with the fourteen-year-old Mozart. “This boy,” he is reported to have said, “will throw us all into the shade.”37 Soon afterward he and Faustina went to spend their remaining years in Venice. There they both died in 1783, he aged eighty-four, she ninety. The harmony of their lives surpassed the melody of their songs.

  While Italian music triumphed in the opera houses of Germany, church music flourished despite Frederick’s ridicule of it as “old-fashioned” and “debased.”38 We shall see Catholic music prospering in Vienna; and in the north the surviving fervor of Protestantism inspired a multitude of cantatas, chorales, and Passions, as if a hundred composers were preparing the way and the forms for Bach. Organ music predominated, but many church orchestras included violins and violoncellos. The influence of opera appeared not only in the enlargement of church orchestras and choirs, but also in the increasingly dramatic character of church compositions.

  The most famous composer of religious music in Bach’s Germany was Georg Philipp Telemann, who was born four years before Bach (1681) and died seventeen years after him (1767). Mattheson considered Telemann superior to all his German contemporaries in musical composition; Bach, with one exception, may have agreed, for he transcribed whole cantatas by his rival. Telemann was a child prodigy. At an early age he learned Latin and Greek, the violin and the flute; at eleven he began to compose; at twelve he wrote an opera, which was performed in a theater with himself singing one of the roles. At twelve he composed a cantata, and conducted it standing on a bench so that the players could see him.

  He grew into a robust and jolly Teuton, bubbling with humor and melody. In 1701, passing through Halle, he met the sixteen-year-old Handel, and loved him at first sight. He went on to Leipzig to study law, but relapsed into music as organist for the Neuekirche (1704). A year later he accepted the post of Kapellmeister in Sorau; then to Eisenach, where he met Bach; in 1714 he served as godfather to Johann Sebastian’s son Karl Philipp Emanuel. In 1711 his young wife died, taking his heart with her, he said; but three years later he married again. In 1721 he advanced to Hamburg, where he served as Kapellmeister for six churches, directed musical instruction in the Gymnasium, took charge of the Hamburg Opera, edited a journal of music, and organized a series of public concerts which continued into our own time. Everything prospered with Telemann, except that his wife preferred Swedish officers.

  His productivity rivaled any man’s in that age of musical giants. For all the Sundays and feast days of thirty-nine years he composed sacred music-Passions, cantatas, oratorios, anthems and motets; he added operas, comic operas, concertos, trios, serenades; Handel said that Telemann could compose a motet in eight parts as quickly as one writes a letter.39 He took his style from France, as Hasse took his from Italy, but he added his own peculiar verve. In 1765, aged eighty-four, he wrote a cantata, Ino, which Ro-main Rolland thought equal to the similar productions of Handel, Gluck, and Beethoven. But Telemann was the victim of his own fertility. He composed too rapidly for perfection, and did not have the patience to revise, or the courage to destroy, the imperfect products of his genius; a critic accused him of “incredible immoderation.”40 Today he is almost forgotten; but now and then he comes to us as a disembodied spirit through the air, and we find all his resurrected utterances beautiful.41

  Frederick was not alone in preferring Karl Heinrich Graun to Telemann and Bach. Karl first reached fame by his soprano voice; this failing, he turned to composition, and at the age of fifteen he wrote a Grosse Passionskantata (1716) which was performed in the Kreuzschule at Dresden. After a period as Kapellmeister at Brunswick he was engaged by Frederick (1735) to direct music at Rheinsberg. He continued during his remaining fourteen years to serve the Prussian court, for even his religious music pleased the skeptical King. Der Tod Jesu, a Passion first performed the Berlin cathedral in 1755, achieved a renown in Germany rivaled only by that of Handel’s Messiah in England and Ireland; it was repeated annually in Holy Week till our own time. All Protestant Germany joined Frederick in mourning Graun’s comparatively early death.

  Meanwhile half a hundred Bachs had laid the seed and scene for their most famous heir. Johann Sebastian himself drew up his family tree in Ur-sprung der musikalisch Bachischen Familie, which reached print in 1917; the meticulous Spitta has devoted 180 pages to charting that Orphean stream. The towns of Thuringia were sprinkled with Bachs, traceable as far back as 1509. The oldest musikalischer Bach, with whom Johann Sebastian began his list, was his great-great-grandfather Veit Bach (d. 1619). From him descended four lines of Bachs, many of them prominent as musicians; these were so numerous that they formed a kind of guild, which met periodically to exchange notes. One of them, Johann Ambrosius Bach, received from his father the violin technique which he transmitted to his children. In 1671 he succeeded his cousin as Hofmusikus, court musician, at Eisenach. In 1668 he had married Elisabeth Lammerhirt, daughter of a furrier who became a town councilor. By her he had two daughters and six sons. The oldest son, Johann Christoph Bach, rose to be organist at Ohrdruf. Another, Johann Jakob Bach, joined the Swedish army as oboist. The youngest was

  V. JOHANN SEBASTIAN BACH: 1685–1750

  1. Chronology

  He was born on March 21, 1685, at Eisenach, in the duchy of Saxe-Weimar. In the Cottahaus on the Lutherplatz the great reformer had lived as a boy; on a hill overlooking the town stood the Wartburg, the castle where Luther hid from Charles V (1521) and translated the New Testament; Bach’s works are the Reformation put to music.

  His mother died when he was nine; his father died eight months later; Johann Sebastian and his brother Johann Jakob were taken into the family of their brother Johann Christoph. In the Gymnasium at Eisenach Sebastian learned much catechism and some Latin; in the Lyceum at neighboring Ohrdruf he studied Latin, Greek, history, and music. He stood high in his classes, and was rapidly advanced. His father had taught him the violin, his brother Christoph taught him the clavier. He took eagerly to these musical studies, as if music ran in his blood. He copied note for note a large number of musical compositions not regulary available to him; so, some think, began the impairment of his sight.

  At the age of fifteen, to relieve the pressure on Johann Christoph’s growing family, Sebastian set forth to earn his own living. He found employment as a soprano singer in the school of the Convent of St. Michael at Lüneburg; when his voice changed he was kept as a violinist in the orchestra. From Lüneburg he visited Hamburg, twenty-eight miles away, perhaps to attend the opera, certainly to hear the recitals of Johann Adam Reinken, the seventy-seven-year-old organist of the Katharinenkirche. Opera did not attract him, but the art of the organ appealed to his robust spirit; in that towering instrument he felt a challenge to all his energy and skill. By 1703 he was already so accomplished that the Neuekirche at Arn
stadt (near Erfurt) engaged him to play, three times a week, the great organ recently installed there, which continued in service till 1863. Free to use the instrument for his studies, he now composed his first significant works.

  Ambition kept him always alert to improve his art. He knew that at Lübeck, fifty miles away, the most renowned organist in Germany, Dietrich Buxtehude, would give a series of recitals between Martinmas and Christmas in the Marienkirche. He asked his church’s consistory for a month’s leave of absence; it was granted; he delegated his duties and fees to his cousin Johann Ernst, and set out on foot (October, 1705) for Lübeck. We have seen Handel and Mattheson making a similar pilgrimage. Bach was not tempted to marry Buxtehude’s daughter as the price of inheriting his post; he wanted only to study the master’s organ technique. This or something else must have fascinated him, for he did not get back to Arnstadt till the middle of February. On February 21, 1706, the consistory reproved him for extending his leave, and for introducing “many wunderliche variations” in his preludes to the congregational hymns. On November 11 he was admonished for failure to train the choir adequately, and for privately allowing “a stranger maiden to sing in the church.” (Women were not yet permitted to sing in church.) The alien lass was Maria Barbara Bach, his cousin. He made what excuses he could, but in June, 1707, he resigned, and accepted the post of organist in the Church of St. Blasius at Mühlhausen. His yearly salary, exceptionally good for the time and place, was to be eighty-five gulden, thirteen bushels of corn, two cords of wood, six trusses of brushwood, and three pounds of fish.42 On October 17 he made Maria Barbara his wife.

  But Mühlhausen proved as uncomfortable as Arnstadt. Part of the city had burned down; the harassed citizens were in no mood for wonderful variations; the congregation was torn between orthodox Lutherans who loved to sing and Pietists who thought that music was next to godlessness. The choir was in chaos, and Bach could transform chaos into order only with notes, not with men. When he received an invitation to become organist and director of the orchestra at the court of Duke Wilhelm Ernst of Saxe-Weimar he humbly begged his Mühlhausen employers to dismiss him.43 In June, 1708, he moved to his new post.

  At Weimar he was well paid—156 gulden a year, raised to 225 in 1713; now he could feed the brood that Maria Barbara was hatching. He was not quite content, for he was subordinate to a Kapellmeister, Johann Drese; but he profited from the friendship of Johann Gottfried Walther, organist in the town church, author of the first German dictionary of music (1732), and composer of chorales hardly inferior to Bach’s. Perhaps through the learned Walther he undertook now a careful study of French and Italian music. He liked Frescobaldi and Corelli, but was especially charmed by the violin concertos of Vivaldi; he transcribed nine of these for other instruments. Sometimes he incorporated bits of the transcriptions into his own compositions. We can feel the influence of Vivaldi in the Brandenburg Concertos, but we feel in them, too, a deeper spirit and richer art.

  His chief duty at Weimar was to serve as organist in the Schlosskirche, or Castle Church. There he had at his disposal an organ small but fully equipped. For that instrument he composed many of his greatest organ pieces: the Passacaglia and Fugue in C Minor, the best of the toccatas, most of the major preludes and fugues, and the Orgelbüchlein, or Little Book for the Organ. His fame thus far was as an organist, not as a composer. Observers, including the critical Mattheson, marveled at his agility with keys, pedals, and stops; one declared that Bach’s feet “flew over the pedal board as if they had wings.”44 He was invited to perform in Halle, Cassel, and other cities. At Cassel (1714) the future Frederick I of Sweden was so impressed that he took from his finger a diamond ring and gave it to Bach. In 1717, at Dresden, Bach met Jean Louis Marchand, who as organist to Louis XV had achieved an international renown. Someone proposed a contest between the two. They agreed to meet in the home of Count von Flemming; each was to play at sight any organ composition placed before him. Bach appeared at the appointed hour; Marchand, for reasons now unknown, left Dresden before that time, giving Bach an unpleasant victory by default.

  Despite his industry and his growing fame, he was passed over when the Weimar Kapellmeister died; the office was transmitted to the dead man’s son. Bach was in a mood to try another court. Prince Leopold of Anhalt-Cöthen offered him the post of Kapellmeister. The new Duke of Saxe-Weimar, Wilhelm Augustus, refused to let his organist go; Bach insisted; the Duke imprisoned him (April 6, 1717); Bach persisted; the Duke released him (December 2); Bach hurried with his family to Cöthen. As Prince Leopold was a Calvinist, and disapproved of church music, Bach’s function was to direct the court orchestra, in which the Prince himself played the viola da gamba. Consequently it was in this period (1717–23) that Bach composed much of his chamber music, including the French and English suites. In 1721 he dispatched to Margrave Christian Ludwig of Brandenburg the concertos that bear that name.

  Those were mostly happy years, for Prince Leopold loved him, took him along on various journeys, proudly displayed Bach’s talent, and remained his friend when history parted their ways. But on July 7, 1720, Maria Barbara died, after giving Bach seven children, of whom four survived. He mourned her for seventeen months; then he took as his second wife Anna Magdalena Wülcken, daughter of a trumpeter in his orchestra. He was now thirty-six, she was only twenty; yet she acquitted herself well of the task assigned to her—to be a faithful mother to his children. Moreover she knew music, aided him in his composition, copied his manuscripts, and sang for him in what he called “a very clear soprano.”45 She bore him thirteen children, but seven died before reaching the age of five; there were many heartbreaks in that wonderful family. As his children grew in number and years, the problem of their education disturbed him. He was a hearty Lutheran; he disliked the gloomy Calvinism that reigned in Cöthen; he refused to send his offspring to the local school, which taught the Calvinist creed. Besides, his beloved Prince married (1721) a young princess whose demands upon Leopold lessened his interest in music. Once again Bach thought it time for a change. He was a restless spirit, but his restlessness made him; if he had remained at Cöthen we should never have heard of him.

  In June, 1722, Johann Kuhnau died, after filling for twenty years the post of cantor in the Thomasschule at Leipzig. This was a public school with seven grades and eight teachers, giving instruction especially in Latin, music, and Lutheran theology. The students and graduates, under the direction of the cantor, were expected to provide the music for the churches of the city. The cantor was subject to the rector of the school and to the municipal council, which paid the salaries.

  The council asked Telemann to take the vacated post, for it favored the Italian style which characterized Telemann’s compositions, but Telemann declined. It then offered the place to Christoph Graupner, Kappellmeister at Darmstadt, but Graupner’s employer refused to release him from his contract. On February 7, 1723, Bach presented himself as a candidate, and submitted to various tests of his competence. No one doubted his ability as an organist, but some members of the council thought the style of his compositions unduly conservative.46 One proposed that “as the best musicians are not available, we must take a man of moderate ability.”47 Bach was engaged (April 22, 1723) on condition that he would teach Latin as well as music, that he would lead a modest and retired (eingezogen) life, subscribe to the Lutheran doctrine, show the council “all due respect and obedience,” and never leave the city without the burgomaster’s permission. On May 30 he was installed with his family in the residential wing of the school, and began his official tasks. He stayed at that burdensome post till his death.

  Henceforth most of his compositions, except the Mass in B Minor, were composed for use in the two main churches of Leipzig—St. Thomas’ and St. Nicholas’. Church services on Sunday began at 7 A.M. with an organ prelude; then the minister intoned the Introit, the choir sang the Kyrie, the minister and the choir—and sometimes the congregation—sang the Gloria in German, the worshipers sang a hymn, t
he minister chanted the Gospel and the Credo, the organist “preludized,” the choir sang a cantata, the congregation sang the hymn “Wir glauben all’ in einem Gott” (We All Believe in One God); the minister preached for an hour, prayed, and blessed; there followed Holy Communion, and another hymn. This service concluded at ten in winter, at eleven in summer. At eleven the students and faculty ate dinner in the school. At 1:15 P.M. the choir returned to the church for vespers, prayers, hymns, a sermon, and the German form of the Magnificat. On Good Friday the choir sang the Passion. To perform the music for all these services Bach trained two choirs, each of some twelve members, and an orchestra of some eighteen pieces. Soloists were part of the choir, and sang with it before and after their arias and recitatives.

  For his complex services at Leipzig Bach received a salary averaging seven hundred thalers per year. This included his share of the students’ tuition fees, and his honorariums for providing music at weddings and funerals. The year 1729, which gave us The Passion according to St. Matthew, was reckoned by Bach as a bad year, for the weather was so good that there was a dearth of deaths.48 Occasionally he earned some extra thalers by conducting public concerts for the Collegium Musicum. He tried to improve his income by claiming control over the music in the Paulinerkirche attached to the University of Leipzig; some competitors objected, and for two years he carried on a controversy with the university authorities, achieving at last a compromise unsatisfactory to everybody concerned.