Bach: Music in the Castle of Heaven

by Gardiner, John Eliot

  All the while a solution lay at hand to the problem of battle-proof food supplies: the common potato. Originating in the Andes (somewhere in modern-day Peru or Bolivia) and known in Europe since the late 1500s, where it was thought to have aphrodisiac properties, it was inexplicably slow to catch on. As every gardener knows, the potato is a miracle tuber – easy to plant, fast growing, susceptible to blight, yet capable under the right conditions of producing spectacular yields – five times that of any other European crop and ten times that of wheat (slightly less for rye), which more than compensates for its lower calorific value. Crucially important, an army could camp all summer on a potato field without damaging the autumn crop. Antoine-Augustin Parmentier discovered the potato for France as a prisoner of the Prussians during the Seven Years War, but it was not until the 1770s that it was grown extensively as a field-crop in Germany. Even then the burghers of Kolberg complained to Frederick the Great that ‘the things have neither smell nor taste, not even the dogs will eat them, so what are they to us?’ But eventually Kartoffel-mania took hold; so that when, for example, Mr and Mrs Henry Mayhew spent a year in Thuringia (1864), they found that in Bach’s birthplace

  the quantity of potatoes consumed by the people of Eisenach is really incredible, and hence the reason for the universal manure-storing throughout the city. Half an acre of potato land yields upon the average 36–40 sacks of 100 and odd pounds each, or between 3,600 and 4,000 pounds’ weight, and this is what each Eisenach family requires every year for the consumption of their pigs and themselves. In fact, many of the modern Saxons know no other food – living even harder than the poorest Irish do in our country; the members of the family eating no less than 2,000 pounds’ weight of potatoes in the course of the year, which is at the rate of more than 5 pounds a day.7

  Almost certainly, potatoes never formed a significant part of Bach’s staple diet, but, while he manifestly never suffered from malnutrition, successive generations of his ancestors did – and we can only lament that they had no access to the common spud.

  At the time of Bach’s birth, one geophysical feature predominated: the forest. h The Thüringerwald simply was the rural landscape, extending to the very margins of villages and settlements (those that had not simply vanished during the war), and even to sizeable towns such as Eisenach, which had a current population of around 6,000 inhabitants. More serious even than the wartime damage to the standing timber and the biodiversity of the understorey was the loss of practical silvicultural know-how – the care and replenishment of forests. To make matters worse, princely landowners had started to take an interest in the way their forests were managed, the huntsman eclipsing the trained forester (just as today the pheasant and the gamekeeper have more sway than the genuine woodman). Since the ending of the war, all across German lands forests were being felled at unsustainable rates without efforts to tend, restore or replant them, though the preponderant beech stands of the Thüringerwald seem to have escaped the greedy felling for naval timber that took place elsewhere, beech being an unsatisfactory timber for ship building. By 1700 the Saxon mining industry centred on the Erzgebirge (Ore Mountains) had consumed great swathes of forest and the livelihoods of thousands were threatened due to an acute scarcity of timber. When it is not worked regularly, woodland tends to disappear; the idea of sustainability emerges only in times of crisis and scarcity. It was an idea that found its champion in Hans Carl von Carlowitz (1645–1714), a tax accountant and mining administrator from Freiberg in middle Saxony; he was the first to give a clear formulation of the concept of sustainability in forestry: how to foster natural regeneration, collect seeds from seed trees, prepare the soil for planting on bare ground, care for seedlings and saplings, and maintain the varied and subtle ecosystem (not that he called it that) of the coppice cycle.8 Difficult as it is to measure Carlowitz’s influence – the extent to which aristocratic landowners followed his recommendations, and at what pace – there are signs of a slow, painful process of recovery in forest management in Bach’s lifetime.9

  Es spukt hier! – ‘It’s spooky here!’ This seems to have been a common reaction to the war-scarred landscape of central Germany for several generations after the signing of the Peace of Westphalia: the emptiness of the primeval forest with its undertones of demonic power unleashed by the long war. One could argue that it persisted at least until the dawn of the Romantic era, coming to a head in the central scene of Weber’s great opera Der Freischütz (1821) – the furchtbare Waldschlucht (‘The fearsome Wolf’s Glen’), a legendary abyss in the depths of the Urwald, where lurks everything vile, horrifying and evil.10 The idea obtained that lasting damage had been perpetrated not just on the physical features of the landscape, but also on the collective psyche – as though local populations beginning to rebuild their lives had been forced to come to terms with a subtle impairment to their spiritual environment, as well as with the destruction of their houses and holdings. This is of course impossible to describe precisely, being a product of a complex interaction between physical location and what goes on in the minds and the subconscious of local inhabitants, each with his or her own private baggage of beliefs, rituals and superstitions.i Our modern compartmentalised ways of thinking, looking and hearing can shut us off from observing these inner workings of the past. But a cognitive exploration or scanning of these mental ‘fields’ – one which aims to identify features of past consciousness left in the landscape alongside the physical scars – could help us towards a deeper understanding of the cultural and psychological world into which Bach was born. As it is, there is enough circumstantial evidence to suggest that the German heartlands remained in a state of trauma long after the invading armies had retreated from the bloody religious wars, and that an intensely rural area like Thuringia, rich in the archaeology of its landscape – sacred sites, rivers, forests and hills – retreated into a kind of self-imposed provinciality; sealed against the outside world and far removed from the literary and scientific movement we now call the ‘Age of Enlightenment’, it seemed to be awaiting both economic and spiritual renewal.

  Symbolically it was a ducal forester, Johann Georg Koch, who, as one of Bach’s two godfathers, stood next to the baptismal font to witness his baptism. As a young lad Bach had only to step outside the family home in the Fleischgasse and pick his way through the crowds, the pigs, the poultry and the cattle, before he found himself in the dense woodland that encircled the Wartburg, the hilltop castle overlooking the town. Sylvan myths and pagan rituals (such as the fertility festival Sommergewinn, usually celebrated on the third Saturday before Easter) could not easily be suppressed; to the Thuringians, the forest, home to presiding tribal divinities, retained the magic aura of the wilderness, and was a source of ‘natural’ meteorological phenomena – like the violent electrical storms, of which Luther was apparently terrified, convinced that they came from the Devil. So they said prayers in church, roared out their hymns, rang the church bells to ward off hurricanes and tempests, and in wartime took to the woods for refuge.

  A seventeenth-century engraving of Eisenach, with the Wartburg in the distance. (illustration credit 25)

  Even with a powerful layer of Protestant theology added to the inhabitants’ lives, the forest remained both mysterious and threatening, as can be seen in the paintings by Luther’s friend Lucas Cranach, in the woodcuts by Albrecht Dürer, emphasising its engulfing luxuriance, and in the landscape paintings of Albrecht Altdorfer. Music was there to give strength as well as to placate the tutelary sylvan gods. It is surely no accident that in a land of much communal music-making, so many folksongs rich in woodland themes should have survived. The power of song here was perhaps not quite that of the Australian Aboriginals – the principal means by which they marked out their territory and organised their social life – but it did not lag far behind, the thinnest of membranes separating song, creation-myth, landscape and boundaries. One can picture the day on which the fifteen-year-old Bach first set off on foot out of his Thuringian homela
nd with his companion Georg Erdmann, the boys singing to keep up their spirits on their 200-mile tramp northwards along rutted cart tracks to Lüneburg. For the budding choristers, song was both their passport and their meal ticket.j

  Vestiges of this superstitious consciousness prevalent in Thuringia at the time of Bach’s birth coexisted with a vigorous renewal of Lutheranism and, in its wake, religious music. Several of the secular folksongs that Luther had enjoyed as a university student in Erfurt and accompanied on his lute had gradually forced their way into his church, but with new respectable texts: the colourful imagery and bawdy suggestiveness of the originals, together with their substrata of pagan myth and folk-memory, had been sublimated in the sturdy vernacular hymns that Bach sang as a boy and knew by heart. Luther had been determined to make religious experience vivid to his fellow Germans through language that was colloquial, lucid and rhythmic, capable at times of rising to emotional heights with sudden urgent phrases, but also of reinforcing shared identities and absorbing the full mythology of a collective past. He had been concerned that, in participating in liturgical music, people’s hearts and minds should be in harmony with what they were expressing through their mouths: ‘We must take care … lest the people sing only with their lips, like sounding pipes or harps (I Corinthians 14:7), and without understanding,’ he wrote.11 He himself contributed new German texts to sixteen out of the twenty-four hymns printed for the first time in 1524. One of the most stirring of them – ‘Ein’ feste Burg ist unser Gott’ (‘A mighty fortress is our God’) – has music and words by Luther, voicing in an irresistible way the conviction and solidity he had found in God’s protection during his own private struggles with Satan. Singing these chorales and psalms in the vernacular, both in church and at home, became the hallmark of Lutheran Protestants such as the Bach family, united in fervent companionship – rather as the collective chant does on the terraces of football stadiums today. According to the philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803), the chorales retained the moral effectiveness (he called it a ‘treasury of life’) that German folk-poetry and folksong had once possessed but by his day had lost.k

  A century after his death, traces of Luther’s influence were everywhere to be found in Thuringia, not least in its musical life (see Chapter 4). Even the smallest parish church could soon boast its own pipe organ, often with a specially decorated casement and framed by a curved choir gallery from where local craftsmen and farm workers, standing in a group, could sing during the service.l Though these foundations were strong, and though the newly forged links between music, language and the preaching of God’s Word were firmly lodged in the minds of Thuringians, the entire process was severely undermined by the spiralling violence of the Thirty Years War. Fear of death was matched by fear of life itself, which had become tainted through the sustained distress of warfare, malnutrition and disease. With average life expectancy falling to thirty, never had the words from the burial service Mitten wir im Leben sind (‘In the midst of life we are in death’) held such poignancy. Indoctrinated by the message from the pulpits that the war was the scourge of God to punish a sinful people, many of the survivors felt that God had indeed deserted them.12 Old images of the late-medieval Totentanz – those lurid paintings of naked women in the grip of leering and cavorting skeletons that appeared on the walls of many German churches (at least those that had been left un-whitewashed by the Reformation, such as Bernt Notke’s in Lübeck’s Marienkirche, which Bach visited as a twenty-year-old) – acquired a new eerie relevance. Much of the music to emerge from the war years (including that of Bach’s immediate ancestors) now gave a similar topical emphasis to the vanity of human existence. And, while domestic and parochial music-making may have survived furtively, the more sophisticated and innovative ensemble-based music of the towns and ducal courts suffered badly. Typical of German church musicians of the time, Johann Vierdanck (organist in Stralsund, on the Baltic coast) bemoaned the fact that as a result of the war ‘nothing but weeping and wailing is to be heard’ in thousands of places instead of the usual sacred music.13

  The clearest evidence of this malaise comes from the foremost German musician of his day, Heinrich Schütz (1585–1672), who, after two spells of study in Venice, first as a pupil of Giovanni Gabrieli, later conferring with Claudio Monteverdi, spent his thirty-third to sixty-third years in the eye of the war’s storm as Capellmeister to the Dresden Court. (See Plate 4.) His letters convey a picture of widespread depredation and demoralisation, but also the immense courage required to keep alive one’s personal faith – or any artistic outlet for it – in such straitened circumstances. Nonetheless he managed under these stressful conditions to compose music of a persuasive and consoling profundity. Schütz took it as a personal affront that for some years the Dresden Court, which he loyally served, had reneged on its obligations to the musicians on its payroll. With their salaries now frozen, Schütz paid them 300 thalers out of his own pocket, realised from his own ‘securities, paintings and silver’. The case of Georg Kaiser, his favourite bass, caused him particular anguish. Writing to the Elector in person in May 1652, Schütz reported that Kaiser was living ‘like a sow in a pigsty, with no bedding, lying on straw; from poverty he has recently pawned his coat and his jacket and now paces about his house like a beast in the forest … on no account must he be let go … another like him cannot be found’. Schütz’s sense of outrage at this indignity built to a climax: ‘I find it neither praiseworthy nor Christian that in a land so highly esteemed, less than twenty musicians cannot or will not be supported, and I live in a most sublime hope that your Electoral Highness will have a change of heart.’14

  Further west in Thuringia, a similar lot might so easily have befallen the Bach family, and it was uncertain whether they would survive in their chosen profession into the new century. Here the status of craftsmen – and that included musicians – remained precarious. Heavily reliant on the guild system of patronage, they existed from hand to mouth, dependent, like Schütz, on the whims of their employers, easily disrupted by budgetary cuts and subject to illicit undercutting by freelance bierfiedler (‘beer fiddlers’). As skilled professionals they found themselves obliged to maintain an uneasy balance between working at court and for the municipality. Each activity commanded its own system of fees. Eisenach, as the seat since 1672 of an independent duchy, was perhaps more tortunate than many Thuringian towns in having Duke Johann Georg (1665–98), a keen patron of the arts. One moment Bach’s own father, Ambrosius, might have to appear dressed in livery to play for the Duke as part of his private orchestra, the next he might be found trumpeting ‘tower pieces’ outside on the balcony of the town hall, or playing ‘church pieces’ inside to adorn the liturgy. It would take a generation before the benefits of this artistic patronage began to percolate through to all levels of the town’s society.

  It has been suggested that Thuringia was developing into ‘an economically and culturally vigorous region’ so soon after the ending of the war, because it was placed at an ‘important intersection of east–west and north-south Continental trade routes which made the area particularly susceptible to foreign influences … [where] as almost nowhere else to such an extent, the manifold European trends met and merged, generating a unique climate’.15 There is, alas, little evidence for this. On the contrary, most of the townspeople, despite the ducal patronage, found themselves in 1700 ‘in so bad a situation that many of them had no daily bread to consume at home but were too ashamed to go to the alms-houses, especially the many widows’.16 The days when Eisenach had benefited from a flourishing internal trade route, linking Frankfurt, Erfurt and Leipzig and thence to the Baltic ports, were long since past, while the brief period of its cultural flowering still lay a little way in the future, in the period when Telemann made an impact on the music at court as its Capellmeister (1709–12). All through Bach’s childhood, Eisenach was sealed in a provincial time warp.

  To locate the most active centres of German music-making in the years
leading up to Bach’s birth one needs to look not at Thuringia but to the Hanseatic and Baltic ports where commerce had been quickest to revive, or to the musically active courts of Gottorf and Wolfenbüttel in northern Germany. It was there, paradoxically, that the vogue for Italian music was strongest. The influence of Catholic Church music, first via the Venetian composers Monteverdi and Grandi, and later through the Roman Giacomo Carissimi, acted as a blood transfusion to the music of the Lutheran Church. It inspired a whole generation of exceptionally talented composers, all born around the middle years of the seventeenth century, of whom Buxtehude was just the most famous. The names Bruhns, Förtsch, Meder, Theile, Geist, Österreich and Schürmann are little known today (even less than those of the previous generation, Förster, Weckmann, Bernhard, Krieger, Rosenmüller and Tunder), yet all of them had studied in Italy, met Italian musicians in employment in northern Europe, or encountered Italian music by means of the manuscript anthologies that circulated within the musical fraternity. Only a tiny fraction of their output exists in print today, but it is enough to whet one’s appetite for hearing more of it performed.m These composers gave a new creative impetus to the process of grafting Italian styles of church music on to the native rootstock, fusing the vigour of vernacular declamation with the colour and passion of Italian sonorities. Given the bitter feeling between Catholic and Protestant, and the traces which remained of a deep-seated Germanic fear of the corruptive forces of Italian culture – going all the way back via the Renaissance humanist Conrad Celtis to Tacitus – this is remarkable.n But it is typical of the inquisitive yet easy-going pragmatism of creative musicians in all ages that they should wish to source and acquire new techniques regardless of their provenance. In this way three successive generations of German composers, beginning with Schütz, came to acknowledge Italy as die Mutter der edlen Musik (‘The mother of noble music’) – both church and theatre music. Such an exchange of ideas across political and administrative frontiers, and across religious divisions, suggests a parallel with what George Steiner calls the ‘communitas of the sciences … the ideal of a commonwealth of positive, beneficial truths, transcending the bloody, infantile conflicts of religious, dynastic and ethnic hatreds … As Kepler reportedly said, amid the massacres of religious wars, the laws of elliptical motion belong to no man or principality.’17 The same could be said of music.