Bach: Music in the Castle of Heaven

by Gardiner, John Eliot

  j One wonders whether in Bach’s day the word Laub (‘leaves’) still retained its sixteenth-century connotation of tabernacle or holy sanctuary as well as of foliage (see Simon Schama, Landscape and Memory (1995), p. 585, n. 61). It is possible that Thuringian trees were no more to him than simply the fixtures and fittings on the stage-set of his childhood – undeniably there, unremarkable and almost unnoticed, but I doubt it. At all events, my instinct is that, besides any residual religious associations the forest may still have retained, Bach could have learnt lessons about his human limitations and presumptions by observing trees and woods whose lives and timeframes do not conform to tidy human models. Maybe he even learnt the importance of wildness to the human spirit – as an antidote to the rigour and disciplined structure of his Lutheran education. When recounting her travels up the Amazon and witnessing the destruction of the rainforest by the logging companies, the author Jay Griffiths howls, ‘if you take people out of their land, you take them out of their meaning, out of their language’s roots. When wild lands are lost, so is metaphor, allusion and the poetry that arises in the interplay of mind and nature’ (Wild (2007), pp. 25–7). We cannot of course tell whether Bach was aware of, let alone inspired by, ‘the long cyclical rhythms’ by which the forest renewed itself, and of the tension between those concerned with its survival and those who had a stake in its open areas for grazing (the commoners, in other words). Richard Mabey tells us that an acre of old woodland containing, say, thirty 300-year-old beeches can be renewed by just ten new seedlings reaching adulthood every hundred years (Beechcombings (2008), p. 84).

  k Herder deplored what he saw as the separation of words and music – the moment the poet begins to write ‘slowly; in order to be read’, art may be the winner, but there is a loss of magic, of ‘miraculous power’ (Herder’s Sämmtliche Werke, Bernhard Suphan (ed.) (1877–1913), Vol. 8, pp. 412, 390). He spoke of linguistic petrifaction, and of how, in Isaiah Berlin’s words, ‘writing is incapable of that living process of constant adaptation and change, of the constant expression of the unanalysable and unseizable flow of actual experience, which language, if it is to communicate fully, must possess. Language alone makes experience possible, but it also freezes it’ (Isaiah Berlin, Three Critics of the Enlightenment (2000), p. 194). It will be a pervasive theme of this book to show how Bach’s texted music possesses exactly this ‘living process’ and the constant and essential expression of the ‘flow of actual experience’, which, according to Herder, language on its own lacks and petrifies.

  l They still do. Before our cantata concert in Eisenach on Easter Day 2000, the pastor of the Georgenkirche invited me, and members of my choir and orchestra, to lead the singing in the Hauptgottesdienst. In the middle of the Mass we were suddenly joined in the organ gallery by a group of local farmers who sang a short litany in Thuringian dialect and departed.

  m Their music has come down to us thanks to tireless copyists like Gustav Düben and Georg Österreich, and is discussed by Geoffrey Webber, whose stimulating North German Church Music in the Age of Buxtehude (1996) first inspired me to dig a little deeper into untapped treasure and to explore examples of it in the Berlin Staatsbibliothek.

  n Tacitus’ successor and advocate Conrad Celtis (1459–1508) beat the German drum in revolt against Italian culture: ‘To such an extent are we corrupted by Italian sensuality and by fierce cruelty in extracting filthy lucre,’ he maintained, ‘that it would have been far more holy and reverent for us to practice that rude and rustic life of old, living within the bounds of self-control, than to have imported the paraphernalia of sensuality and greed which are never sated, and to have adopted foreign customs’ (quoted in Schama, op. cit., p. 93). Bach’s life is sandwiched between that of Celtis and that of another fervent custodian of German folk-memory, Johann Gottfried Herder. Herder argued ‘for a culture organically rooted in the topography, customs, and communities of the local native tradition … folklore, ballads, fairy tales, and popular poetry’ (op. cit., pp. 102–3). Springing from a clan of musicians, Bach would instinctively have shared Herder’s notion of what it is to belong to a family, a sect, a place, a period, a style, and of the role of music in cementing all of these: ‘Their songs are the archives of their people, the treasury of their science and religion … a picture of their domestic life in joy and in sorrow, by bridal bed and graveside … Here everyone portrays himself and appears as he is’ (translation in Burton Feldman and Robert D. Richardson (eds.), The Rise of Modern Mythology 1680–1860 (2000), pp. 229–30).

  o This was the conclusion of Johann Anastasius Freylinghausen (1670–1739) in introducing his Geistreiches Gesangbuch of 1704, while at the same time admitting the power of song to move sinners. The preface of a Pietist hymnal of 1733 gives specific instructions for its readers and singers to experience the emotions depicted by inspired hymnists so that ‘he seizes all of the Psalms’ powers and motions in himself and begins to sing as if the songs are not strange to him, but rather as if he had composed them himself, as his own prayer produced with the deeper sensations of his heart’ (Wolfgang Schmitt, ‘Die pietistische Kritik der “Künste”: Untersuchung über die Entstehung einer neuen Kunstauffassung im 18. Jahrhundert’, Diss. Köln (1958), p. 54). It was an issue that concerned the Orthodox clergy as much as the Pietists: outward conformity in worship and its music must be considered insufficient if it is not underpinned by an inner spirituality on the part of all worshippers.

  p Although Pietists were vociferous in their condemnation of the kind of luxury and ostentation characteristic of Baroque culture in general, and of a blurring of the boundaries between the secular and the religious, which they held to be incompatible with true Christianity, they themselves were not beyond reproach. They were perceived as subversive and dangerously egalitarian, and an official investigation by the Leipzig authorities in 1689–90 pointed to irregularities in their conventical gatherings (known as collegia pietatis) where free discussion of scriptural interpretation took place beyond the control of the clergy, breaking standard social divisions and allegedly accompanied by sexual impropriety. For example, Elisabeth Karig accused a medical student, Christian Gaulicke, of telling her and another woman that ‘if she wanted to be enlightened, she should undress as if she were going to bed, and tried to explain this to her from the Bible’ (Tanya Kevorkian, Baroque Piety: Religion, Society, and Music in Leipzig 1650–1750 (2007), p. 164). Others complained that the Pietists inspired or partook of sexual orgies – slander, no doubt, but a consequence of the emotional incontinence of the ‘born again’, like members of many subsequent renewal movements. In this respect the German Pietists were different from the English Puritans with whom they seem otherwise to have shared so much. They were forced to go underground in Leipzig soon after 1690.

  q If Bach had been taught at school that man was not the centre of the universe and that the earth rotated around the sun, would his acceptance of the main tenets of Lutheranism, which later fuelled his prodigious output of church music, have received a nasty blow?

  r As we shall see, later in life he certainly shared with Galileo an attachment to ‘irreducible and stubborn facts’, with Spinoza (as proposed by John Butt in Chapter 5 of The Cambridge Companion to Bach (1997)) the belief that ‘the more we understand singular things, the more we understand God’ (Ethics, Part V, 24) and with Leibniz the idea that ‘the means of obtaining as much variety as possible, but with the greatest possible order … is the means of obtaining as much perfection as possible’ (Monadology, paras. 57–8).

  s This responsibility was laid down as early as 1528 in a church ordinance by Luther’s disciple Johann Bugenhagen: ‘It is your particular duty that you teach singing to all children, old and young, learned or less so, to sing together in German and in Latin, moreover also figural music not only as is customary, but also in future in an artistic manner, so that the children learn to understand the voices, the clefs, and whatever else belongs to such music, so that they learn to sing dependably, purely
in tune, etc., etc.’ (Georg Schünemann, Geschichte der Deutschen Schulmusik (1928), p. 83).

  t Johann Walter’s Chorgesangbuch of 1524 was compiled to combine these educational and liturgical targets – songs, Luther explained in his preface, that were ‘arranged in four to five parts to give to the young who should at all costs be trained in music and other fine arts … Nor am I of the opinion that the Gospel should destroy and blight all the arts, as some of the pseudo-religious claim. But I would like to see all the arts, especially music, used in the service of Him who gave and made them’ (LW, Vol. 53, p. 316; WA, Vol. 35, pp. 474–5).

  u These comprised the German ABC, a reading primer, the Catechism, Catechism-primer, the Gospels, the Psalter, a German songbook and a sum book.

  v One of the more original features of Buno’s Historia was his way of selecting ten mnemo-technical illustrations to be absorbed in patterns influenced by late-medieval memory tracts, and all devised to enhance retention. Buno graphically subdivided world history into the four biblical millennia before Christ’s birth and the seventeen centuries after that. As we have seen, these folio-sized illustrations mounted on canvas were for display on classroom walls, each subdivided into ten smaller frames that need to be read in a zigzag pattern for the first five frames, and in an inverted Z-pattern for the second group. Each of the seventeen centuries after Christ’s birth is awarded a separate illustration. Buno’s technique went on being used in German schools well into the 1720s, anticipating the ‘pedagogical realism’ of the late eighteenth century. (See Plate 3b.) As another contemporary saw it, historians, though they declare their intention to follow the path of truth rigorously, are often prone to ‘afflict the world of learning with false annals, which ought rather to be buried in eternal night’ (J. B. Mencken, De charlataneria eruditorum (1715)).

  w The traditional, idyllic portrait of Bach’s first school years relies heavily on two rose-tinted sources: Paullinus’s Annales Isenacenses (1698) and Johann von Bergenelsen’s Das im Jahr 1708 – lebende und schwebende Eisenach. Bergenelsen ends his glowing account of the Lateinschule by extolling the harmonious rapport he claims to have noticed between teachers and their model pupils: ‘So it seems that all the Christian well-educated pupils have a healthy outlook and go about with a bright aura. When one goes into a classroom one notices all the pupils sitting together, rich and poor, boys and girls. All have their own primer in front of them, and while one spells out his ABC, another is learning his capital letters, the third reads aloud, the fourth prays, the fifth makes a pretty speech, the sixth recites his catechism, and all are watched over by a schoolmaster.’ It reads like a piece of modern free school propaganda.

  x Tim Blanning suggests a comparison here with the comment made by Edmund Burke on the British radicals who welcomed the French Revolution at the end of the century: ‘half a dozen grasshoppers under a fern make the field ring with their importunate chink, whilst thousands of great cattle, reposed beneath the shadow of the British oak, chew the cud and are silent’ (The Pursuit of Glory: Europe 1648–1815 (2007), p. 475).

  y Writing to the composer Ludwig Senfl, Luther had claimed ‘the prophets did not make use of any art except music: when setting forth their theology they did it not as geometry, not as arithmetic, not as astronomy, but as music, so that they held theology and music most tightly connected, and proclaimed truth through psalms and songs.’ There was nothing, of course, to have prevented Bach from reconciling this view of music as ‘sounding theology’ with the alternative concept of it as ‘sounding number’, as formulated by Leibniz.

  3

  The Bach Gene

  Thus even in the Bach family a robust mediocrity held sway. Only a few of them achieved anything out of the ordinary … The unusual concentration of musical talent within an area so narrowly enclosed (in family as well as geographically), with Johann Sebastian as a culminating point in an ever-increasing and then suddenly ebbing flood of talent, remains a unique phenomenon.

  – Christoph Wolff1

  In Italy, there were the Scarlattis, in France, the Couperins, in Bohemia, the Bendas. But in Thuringia – the provincial heart of Germany – was to be found the most extensive network of practising musicians in the history of Western music: the Bachs. Such a coincidence of parallel musical dynasties across late-seventeenth-century Europe is odd; and maybe it is no more than that – a coincidence. No literary or artistic lineages lasting more than a couple of generations are recorded for the same period, for example. Somehow one would need to trace the lineal descent of artisans in related trades or crafts to gauge whether the endemic political instability and precariousness of existence might account for the somewhat covert, guild-like passing on of craft-master skills from father to son in the wake of the Thirty Years War. Until well into the eighteenth century this was the initial conduit of learning for most musicians within these dynasties, conscious of pursuing an honourable family trade and increasingly aspiring to respectability as ‘artists’. Employment and survival were what counted here in the first place. If this meant uprooting, as in the case of the Bohemian linen-weaver Jan Jiří Benda, and moving lock, stock and barrel to Potsdam in 1742 with his wife and musically gifted children, so be it. Two of his composer violinist sons, Franz and Johann (Jan Jiří junior), already held positions in the court orchestra of Frederick the Great and were well on the way to careers of distinction. Now two more, Georg and Josef, were to enrol, while the youngest, Anna Franziska, was training as a Kammersängerin. In due course the Benda boys were all to make names for themselves: Franz and, to a lesser extent, Jan Jiří as violinist, teacher and composer, Georg as Capellmeister and composer of German melodramas. With twelve of the next generation entering the music profession, the Bendas were to outlast the Bachs and become the longest dynasty of professional musicians on record. After moving to Brazil during the middle years of the twentieth century they survived into the present century.

  The Scarlattis achieved notoriety as well as fame, but lasted for a couple of generations only. Pietro Scarlatti, a Sicilian who died c. 1678, identified five of his eight children as having musical ability. Speculatively, and no doubt to avoid the famine and political convulsions prevalent in Palermo, he sent two of his sons to study in Naples. In 1672 the twelve-year-old Alessandro, along with his two sisters, Melchiorra and Anna Maria, were sent to Rome. Both girls trained and had some success as opera singers, but their various liaisons and indiscretions – a secret marriage to a priest, affairs with court officials – caused embarrassment to the family and doors to open for their brilliantly gifted younger brother. Soon obliged to leave behind the rich pickings of wealthy patrons in Rome, Alessandro and his sisters headed for Naples, where, as mistress to the viceroy’s secretary, Melchiorra clinched her brother’s appointment as maestro di cappella in 1684. As soon as the viceroy heard of the affair, he dismissed his secretary and two other officials who had been involved with what he called these puttane commedianti. Alessandro’s forty years of fame as a prolific composer of operas, serenatas, oratorios and cantatas were spent shuttling to and fro between Naples and Rome (with shorter, less productive forays to Florence and Venice), trying to satisfy a variety of aristocratic patrons to shield himself from financial ruin and constant worries about his ten children. Of the three who became musicians, it was Domenico, the youngest and exact contemporary of Bach, who showed the most talent. Alessandro referred to him as ‘an eagle whose wings were grown; he must not remain idle in the nest, and I must not hinder his flight’. But interfere he did with the over-solicitous traits of a Sicilian patriarch, to the point that Domenico, aged thirty-two, was forced to resort to the law to secure his independence. To escape this paternal suffocation he resigned his positions in Rome, forsook opera, fled first to Lisbon and then to Madrid. The break, while brutal, was cathartic: free now to experiment in what he modestly called ‘an ingenious jesting with art’, he set about creating that corpus of more than 500 dazzling one-movement keyboard sonatas that has held its place
in the repertory ever since. Standing well outside the contemporary Baroque concepts of sequential and consecutive expansion, the sonatas were also beyond the reach of parental criticism.

  Active in and around Paris and Versailles as organists, harpsichordists, composers and teachers for more than two centuries (c. 1640 to c. 1860), it was the Couperins who, in their own distinctive Gallic fashion, were the most successful and, in career terms, the most exemplary of these Baroque dynasties. Their rise to eminence and fame began with the rapid transition from peasant labourers to farmer-proprietors in the parish of Chaumes, a day’s journey south-east of Paris. The chance patronage of a local dignitary facilitated the initial move of Louis Couperin in 1653 to a stable position as organist at St Gervais in Paris, a job that carried with it guaranteed rent-free accommodation and the right for successive family members to inherit the position and occupy the lodgings – a prerequisite seldom replicated in the case of the Bach family in Thuringia. This was the springboard for the next generation, beginning with François Couperin (known as le grand), and they rose to various prestigious positions in the royal chapel and at court, obtained the valuable royal privilege of printing and selling music,a and even accepted Louis XIV’s offer of ennoblement, an honour which was put in the way of those who were respectably employed and able to pay for the privilege (an early instance of cash for peerages). The Couperins made opportune marriages to worldly-wise spouses with legal or business pedigrees as well as conspicuous musical talent. At least six of the female members of the family achieved public recognition, holding positions in Paris or at court such as ordinaire de la musique de la chambre du roi pour le clavecin. They were able to form a kind of family corporation in the century before the French Revolution, one ensuring that the multiple functions of organ-playing, keyboard lessons and singing in concerts at church were covered by its different members.b