From the time that he moved to Eisenach, Ambrosius proved to be conspicuously clever at living within his means – a yearly payment of forty florins plus free lodging for the first three years of his stay there. Yet, over twenty-four years there, he and his wife succeeded not only in cramming their household with eight of their own offspring, her mother, his slow-witted sister and, for a couple of years, an eleven-year-old second cousin, but also in feeding two apprentices and two journeyman assistants. That Ambrosius was no easy touch is clear from the petition he wrote to the Eisenach Council in 1684, the year before his youngest son Sebastian was born, in which he listed his various hardships. It seems that he had ingratiated himself with his employers too well, for when, after thirteen years’ unblemished service, he asked permission to move back to Erfurt, he was turned down flat. (Given Erfurt’s extreme susceptibility to plague, this was perhaps just as well.) An improvement in his situation at the Eisenach Court began with the return of Daniel Eberlin to take charge of the princely bands, and an annulment of a cut in his courtly salary. Added to this was his satisfaction as a father in seeing his eldest son Johann Christoph safely posted off to Erfurt to study with the famous teacher Johann Pachelbel (1653–1706) and later of guiding (or at least witnessing) the first musical steps of his youngest son, Johann Sebastian.
Ambrosius’s musical versatility, his single-minded attachment to his craft and his pursuit of regimens of technical self-improvement seem to have been typical of the post-war generation of Bach brothers and cousins, united by a fierce clannish loyalty and a determination to protect their privileged right to trade as professional musicians wherever they saw fit. Their creative gifts are displayed in the Alt-Bachisches Archiv, a collection of vocal music by several members of the family (not always clearly differentiated or attributed).g Providing us with a priceless treasury of music composed by, and circulating within, the family in the latter half of the seventeenth century, it also opens tantalising windows on the social life of the Bachs. For example, it includes a cantata by the elder brother, Georg, written for the three of them when Christoph and Ambrosius visited him in Schweinfurt in 1689 to celebrate his forty-sixth birthday. The title page portrays not simply the concordia that existed between the three brothers but its attributes: florens (‘flourishing’), in the form of a three-leaf clover; firma (‘firm’), shown as a padlock binding three chains; and suavis (‘sweet’), illustrated by a triangle with three jingling rings attached. In a process not unlike Euclid’s superimposition of triangles, the triple symbolism is carried through systematically even into the way the music is composed. (See Plate 6.) Scored for three voices (two tenors and bass) and three violas da gamba, the cantata has three themes that are ingeniously developed, each subject entering three times and so on – its almost wearisome consistency and thoroughness ultimately detracting from the inventiveness of an otherwise charming piece.
In marked contrast to Ambrosius and his two brothers, none of them principally a composer, were their first cousins, Michael (1648–94), Christoph (1642–1703) and Günther (1653–83). All three boys had been trained by their father, Heinrich, himself ‘a good composer and of lively disposition’, according to C. P. E. Bach. While Günther, the youngest, ‘was a good musician and a skilful builder of various newly-invented musical instruments’, the two elder sons were to emerge as composers of distinction. Michael was considered to be ein habiler Componist (an ‘able’ or ‘handy’ composer) by his future son-in-law, Sebastian – a judgement borne out by the concerted motets and dialogues preserved in the Alt-Bachisches Archiv. They show him to have had a solid technical command, a natural facility and a characteristic Italianate fluency and euphony; those of his organ chorales that can be identified in the Neumeister Collection bear a similarity to ones by Sebastian (BWV 1090–120). Yet for sheer quality and individuality the vocal compositions of Christoph Bach leap out from the Archiv as being of a totally different order.h It is the sense of vision his music displays that is so impressive, and his ability to match vivid verbal imagery with the kinds of arresting sonorities that few other composers of the time dared to explore. It comes as no surprise, then, to find Sebastian singling out Christoph for special mention: he was ein profonder Componist (‘a profound composer’). To this Emanuel appended the claim, ‘This is the great and expressive composer.’14 With these compositions garnered from the Alt-Bachisches Archiv we have at last something with which to measure the creative achievements of these first three generations of Bachs and a benchmark against which we can assess the emergence of Sebastian as a creative artist. As the main scholar of the Alt-Bachisches Archiv concludes, ‘they meant more to [him] than merely family keepsakes – they clearly helped him to establish his own historical and artistic position. He measured his skill against them.’15
Having reached indubitably the most brilliant and fêted composer in the family thus far, one is tempted to seize gleefully on the impact his music might have made upon Sebastian at the expense of all other plausible influences. A distinguished line of biographers beginning with Forkel and Spitta have used Bach’s lineage to infer that first and foremost he was the product of his ancestry; but the issue is so much more complex than this. Born to the most musically dominant family in the region and into a society where music permeated so many aspects of life – at home, in school, in rituals of play and worship – there is a prima facie case for nature and nurture being in propitious accord; so much is obvious. Yet, inconveniently for his biographers, Sebastian, the acknowledged musical genius of the family, did not carry the DNA of the more creative family line and of Christoph in particular (though his first two sons, Wilhelm Friedemann and Carl Philipp Emanuel, did, their mother being the daughter of Johann Michael Bach). The evidence we have for the emergence of Sebastian’s creative talent is so slender, while the uncertainties and details of his development and its timing are so numerous. We cannot even be sure of the exact role that his parents played in his earliest musical experiences – whether, for example, the very first musical sounds that registered with him were of his mother singing to him, or the degree to which his father – or the great organist-composer Christoph – moulded his earliest musical education.
Ultimately the responsibility for a child’s musical education lay with the local cantor. It was his job to select the best voices, to teach boys to sing and to prepare them for the Sunday services of the town’s three main churches. In the three towns where Bach acquired the rudiments of his musical education – Eisenach, Ohdruf, and Lüneburg – he encountered four cantors. The first was Andreas Christian Dedekind, who was also his form master in the quarta of the Latin School in Eisenach. Sebastian would have had to pass an audition before Dedekind to become a member of the chorus symphoniacus (founded in 1629 in order ‘to foster finer musical instruction of the Latin School pupils’).16 The choir statutes of Eisenach’s Georgenkirche demanded that pupils should not only ‘understand clefs, time signatures and rests’ but should be able to sing at sight ‘a fugue, motet and concerto’. Then, in Ohrdruf, his cantor was the infamous bully Johann Heinrich Arnold (see Chapter 6) and later Elias Herda, who as a former chorister himself could have facilitated Bach’s move to Lüneburg in 1700, where the cantor was August Braun, about whom next to nothing is known. As a member of Braun’s Mettenchor (Matins Choir), an elite chamber choir of fifteen voices, he would have been expected to sing fluently in canon and to be able to read at sight polyphonic motets of the Renaissance as well as the more complex music by recent and modern composers.i But no sooner had Bach arrived there, aged fifteen, than ‘his uncommonly fine soprano voice’ split in two: ‘He kept this quite new species of voice for eight days, during which he could neither speak nor sing except in octaves’ – before having to admit defeat (at quite an age by the norms of the day).17 All the vocal training he had acquired to this point – breath control and the agility needed for rapid passagework and trills and the many demands of part-singing – was of inestimable value the moment he himself, ag
ed eighteen, was put in charge of his first choir and began composing figural music.
Yet many pieces in the musical jigsaw of Bach’s early training are still missing. It is often assumed that, in addition to his singing in church, Bach, like Luther, was a Currender, a member of those street-busking choirs in Eisenach, Ohrdruf and Lüneburg which collected charitable money; but exactly what he sang, where he sang and with whom he sang – these are questions for which we have no definite answers. Bach himself would have us believe that he was to all intents and purposes self-taught. That, too, was the line maintained within the family and in the Nekrolog’s reference to his mastery ‘learned chiefly by the observation of the works of the most famous and proficient composers of his day and by the fruits of his own reflection upon them’.18 So that in identifying three individuals who might have figured prominently in shaping his overall musical development, we are fighting an element of official denial: Johann Christoph of Eisenach (no mention of any formal teaching role here); Johann Christoph, his eldest brother (his instruction being ‘designed for an organist and nothing more’);19 and that other organist-composer, Georg Böhm (where the words ‘his teacher’ are crossed out by C. P. E. Bach, perhaps recalling a paternal rebuke).20 Scholars have of course been on the trail of all three for some time, particularly that of Böhm, the easiest to identify as a credible teacher and a composer with palpable stylistic affinities to Bach. So far attempts to establish an exact teaching role for either of the two Johann Christoph Bachs have proved rather more elusive – the elder cousin because he inhabited a different aesthetic milieu, the brother because of his alleged heavy-handedness in loco parentis. We need to re-examine them in sequence.
One suspects that if his surname had been anything but Bach, or if the world had never heard of Johann Sebastian, the fame of Johann Christoph of Eisenach would be secure today and that we would value his music entirely on its own terms. Christoph stood out from the pattern of a family of musicians in which ‘a robust mediocrity held sway’.21 There can be little doubt that he was the most exciting and innovative musician in the musical landscape of Sebastian’s early childhood and the one most likely to have been reponsible for the boy’s first impressions of organ music. Forkel tells us that ‘he is said never to have played on the organ in fewer than five real parts’,22 which must have been magical to a musical child of eight or nine.j A fascination for the mechanics and inner workings of church organs originated during the hours the two could have spent together, we might speculate, with Christoph trying to coax life out of the old three-manual organ of the Georgenkirche while his young cousin looked on.
Ever since the mid 1660s, after he had moved from Arnstadt to the town of Eisenach to play and care for the organ of its main church and to play harpsichord at the Duke’s newly established court, Christoph Bach had had more than his fair share of financial set-backs and health concerns. Unlike the more prosperous Ambrosius Bachs, Christoph and his family were constantly obliged to change rented lodgings, some of them plague-contaminated, as the town refused to provide a house for its long-serving organist. After twenty years as town organist he started to look for a way out of Eisenach – and almost found one in 1686, after a promising audition for the same post in Schweinfurt, only to be pipped to the post by a successful colleague from Eisenach (galling enough) and thwarted by the Duke’s refusal to let him go because of his debts. Thereafter his social situation gradually deteriorated, and he ended his thirty-eight years in Eisenach disillusioned and impoverished. The most poignant of his letters, written in October 1694, was addressed to the Duke in person: ‘Here in my wretched, pitiable situation, my house is filled with so many invalids it looks like a field hospital. God has laid this heavy cross upon me and I am unable to obtain the necessary food and medicines for my sick wife and children. My severe penury has so exhausted and drained me I have not got a penny left. And so I am compelled in my wretched state to seek mercy in the arms of my saviour … and beg from your most gracious hands that I, a miserable servant, may be given some corn for my poor wife and children, and whatever else your Highness might be pleased to confer on me.’
From the barrage of complaints to a tight-fisted, uncooperative town council, which called him a querulant und halsstarriges Subjekt (‘a querulous and stubborn fellow’), the abiding impression we get of Christoph Bach is of a feisty, combative individual, cantankerous and insecure, father to an overcrowded household, prone to constant domestic upheavals, sickness and incipient penury. But his letters may also be read as the calculated strategy of a proud musician prepared to enter the fray and stand up for himself (and in this respect, he is very like what we know of Monteverdi). They show that he was willing to work the system to his best advantage, and that he was neither shy of giving his employers detailed practical recommendations on how to redress his wrongs, nor of playing them off against each other. His complaints about his miserable domestic circumstances need to be balanced against the evidence of his unselfish tenacity in campaigning over many years for a fine new organ for the Georgenkirche (and obtaining it posthumously), the trouble he took to draw up extensive technical specifications for it, and not least his ensuring that the organ-builder, G. C. Stertzing, was paid a deposit, enough for him and his workers to feed themselves while occupied in building it. Christoph was presumably the chief motor behind the organ-fund appeal that eventually reached a figure of over 3,000 thalers, far exceeding the actual costs. The overall impression we have is of an utterly devoted single-minded professional musician, wedded to his chosen instrument and to the craft of composition. In his embattled state a strong sense of self-worth could easily lead to feelings of being persecuted and, like his young cousin Sebastian in times to come, to incomprehension at the doltish attitude of the philistine authorities and their failure to provide rewards commensurate with his expertise and his artistic standing.
Once we put aside the letters of complaint, manipulative or otherwise, and turn to his music, we gain a more nuanced and rounded picture – of a man of many moods. Part of his distinctive expressive armoury as a composer of vocal music is the skill he shows in replicating lifelike mood-swings within a single work, rejecting beauty in favour of emotional truth. Time and again we find him drawing on every available element – a gradual build-up of voices or instruments, abrupt switches of tessitura, harmony and rhythmic activity – to vary the momentum, to lead to, and recede from, climaxes in a persuasive and organic way. The music reveals a passionate temperament: a man capable of high spirits, mellowness as well as misanthropy, and many subtler intermediate gradations. While it is true that the majority of his chosen texts are all of a piece with his letters, mostly in the language of the day, überschwemmt mit Sorgen (‘flooded with worries’), his music goes a long way beyond merely matching phrases such as ‘I am overcome with wretchedness’, ‘my body is pathetic and suffering’, ‘my days are gone like a shadow’ and ‘I wither like a weed, and my sinews are crushed into shards’. Christoph finds room for drama as well as pathos. He can also counter these variations on the theme of woe with sober reflections such as ob’s oft geht hart, im Rosengart’ kann man nicht allzeit sitzen (in essence, ‘The going is often tough, but life is not just a bed of roses’). Indeed, his life may have been one of toil and misery (mein Leid ist aus, es ist vollbracht/‘my suffering is at an end; it is finished’), but it is also one ‘which has given me so much goodness’ and which leads to a future paradise. Here is a man evidently struggling to keep his faith burning and his hopes alive, when despair must have seemed the easier, indeed the inescapable, option.
In this respect he reminds me strongly of Heinrich Schütz. The moment you begin to study and fall under the spell of Christoph’s solo arias and laments23 you cannot fail to notice how they are couched in a highly sophisticated declamatory style, with the characteristic speech-rhythmic inflections that Schütz pioneered two generations earlier, but here controlled less austerely and within a still bolder harmonic framework. Beyond this Christ
oph exhibits a sureness of design in the balancing contrasts he achieves in motet and aria form, between sections in triple and common time (another Schützian trait), homophony with polyphony. Indeed, unequivocally Schützian features are plentiful and audible in Christoph’s music and substantiated by a link, albeit at one remove – the lessons he took in his youth from Jonas de Fletin, who had studied with Schütz in Dresden.k At the deeply affecting conclusion of his five-voiced motet, Fürchte dich nicht, he reverses the convention of assigning the voice of God to a single voice (or to twin voices, as in Schütz’s Resurrection Oratorio of 1623): Isaiah’s comforting message takes the form of a solo quartet addressed to the (as yet silent) penitent, apparently on the verge of expiry.l This concludes with the words du bist mein set to the most intricate polyphony. When the soprano finally enters with O Jesu, du mein Hilf (from a funeral hymn by Johann Rist), there is a momentary intertwining of the two common words du and mein – as though a halting contact has just been made from one world to the next. This can be heart-stopping in performance, especially if the sound of the soprano reaches the listener at some remove (say, from a church’s distant gallery), as though she is already set on her final journey.
Bach: Music in the Castle of Heaven Page 11