Bach: Music in the Castle of Heaven

by Gardiner, John Eliot

  g Luther’s creed of music and theology, having been at the very heart of his and Melanchthon’s ideas for schooling, is now less sustainable as church music becomes more complex and specialised, to the point where music can no longer be situated at the core of the curriculum. A chasm starts to open between a composer/cantor’s needs for a high quality of boy trebles with good voices and all-round musical ability and the academic teachers who consider they have a prior call on the boys’ education. Bach arrives in Leipzig thinking that (at last) he should have access to a competent body of musical boys, only to find his hopes dashed and that the recruitment process has been surreptitiously tilted against him. He soon finds himself in the middle of someone else’s argument – and that there are some people (like J. A. Ernesti) who, incomprehensibly, simply don’t like music. As the organist and choirmaster Robert Quinney has suggested to me, the situation is aptly parallel to what is going on currently in Oxbridge colleges, where choral trials now take place only after academic selection.

  h Medieval theologians considered children capable of mortal sin at the age of six or seven (see Steven Ozment, When Fathers Ruled: Family Life in Reformation Europe (1983), pp. 133, 144, 147, 148) – the age when fathers were expected to discipline their children. Luther himself said that too much whipping broke a child’s spirit, implying that his parents had almost broken his. The German attitude was that children were beasts to be tamed, an attitude common both at home and at school. ‘ “Some teachers are as cruel as hangmen,” he said. “I was once beaten fifteen times before noon, without any fault of mine, because I was expected to decline and conjugate although I had not yet been taught this.” Yet late in life when a child relative of his stole a trifle, Luther recommended that she be beaten until the blood came’ (Richard Marius, Martin Luther: The Christian between God and Death (2000), pp. 22–3).

  i Herda (1674–1728), a farrier’s son from near Gotha where he went to school, went on to spend two years in northern Germany as one of those Thuringian boys much sought after ‘for their musical skills’ and recruited for the Mettenchor of the Michaeliskirche in Lüneburg. He subsequently trained for the priesthood at the University of Jena and was about to be ordained in Gotha when the call came for him in Jan. 1698 to audition for the cantor’s job in Ohrdruf in succession to the disgraced Arnold.

  j The larger twenty-strong chorus symphoniacus was one of only two Lüneburg choirs (the other being attached to the Johannesschule) which took part in frequent street-singing in front of well-to-do burghers’ houses, hopeful of charity – or, if we are to believe one commentator, ‘thriving on chance charity passed from the windows to put an end to what was frequently an irritating noise’. Busking in Lüneburg was initially popular – obviously with the choristers as a desirable perk – in fact it was one of the best sources of supplementary income, though Bach himself started in May 1700 in ninth place with a mere twelve groschen. Initially the citizens welcomed it, too. But what began as harmless rivalry between the two Currende choirs soon acquired a nasty competitive edge as they fought over turf, each seeking out the wealthier streets and the most lucrative front doors, reserving the best times of day and squabbling over the distribution of rewards. On one occasion the cantor of the Michaeliskirche himself became embroiled and was pelted with stones by the opposition, the Ratsschüler. On another occasion, the rival Michaelissänger were led by a particularly autocratic prefect called Ferber, who seems to have banned some choristers from the chance to busk and to have dealt blows left, right and centre – even to his own team – before retiring to the nearest hostelry, or Weinstube, for hours on end. Yet only a few years on and the same Georg Ferber would re-surface in the respectable role of cantor in Husum and Schleswig.

  k Georg Österreich had already begun writing prominent parts for what he called ‘bassono obligato’ before his move in 1702 to the court in Wolfenbüttel (ninety-three miles to the north of Arnstadt), which housed the largest library north of the Alps. It is possible, though fairly unlikely, that Bach could have come across Österreich’s motet Weise mir, Herr, deinen Weg (1695) or his Alle Menschen müssen sterben (1701), which contains parts for two obbligato bassoons. In all likelihood Österreich had the more versatile, jointed French bassoon in mind, rather than the German Fagott, and, even though neither instrument resembled a bundle of sticks, it is likely that Geyersbach, Bach’s student Fagottist, would have shown up with a primitive prototype – more like a dulcian – consisting of a single yard-long shaft of wood, oval in section, drilled with two bores connected at the bottom so as to form one continuous conical tube – indelicate in tone and a treacherous instrument to master.

  l To defend the honour and morality of their profession 107 instrumentalists from 43 towns in Saxony had joined together to form their own guild, the Instrumental-Musicalisches Collegium, in 1653, submitting their statutes to the Emperor Ferdinand III for ratification, and having them printed and distributed (Spitta, The Life of Bach, Clara Bell and J. A. Fuller Maitland (trs.) (1899 edn), Vol. 1, pp. 144–153; Stephen Rose, The Musician in Literature in the Age of Bach (2011), pp. 79–81).

  m Mostly a year or two older than Bach, as the sons of well-to-do craftsmen and town merchants, these students probably had little musical motivation, unlike the Mettenchoristen Bach was used to from his Lüneburg days. Once again the local archives reveal a picture of endemic student lawlessness. A complaint from the town council to the consistory, dated 16 Apr. 1706, reads: ‘They have no fear of their teachers, they fight even in their presence and talk back to them in the most offensive manner. They wear their rapiers not just in the streets but in school too; they play ball during church services and in class, and run about in disreputable places’ (Uhlworm, Beiträge zur Geschichte des Gymnasiums zu Arnstadt, Part 3, pp. 7–9, quoted in Spitta, op. cit., Vol. 1, pp. 314–15).

  n A well-to-do merchant, Feldhaus had been responsible for negotiating a special bonus due to Bach amounting to thirty thalers (= thirty-four florins or guilders and six groschen) for board and lodging payable in cash from St George’s Hospital fund – a richly endowed old people’s home of which he was the administrator. The hospital accounts show annual living expenses of thirty-four florins and six groschen reimbursed to Bach on 1 Aug. 1704 and 1705; then suddenly an invoice submitted by Feldhaus for the same amount for the year 1706/7, claiming direct reimbursement for Bach’s ‘food, bed and quarters’ (BD II, No. 26). Was Bach living in an apartment belonging to Feldhaus from the start – passing on the full bonus to his landlord – or had he moved in only in the last year (once his relations with his fiancée Maria Barbara were intensifying), leaving the way for Feldhaus to claim the full amount from the hospital fund and to redirect it into his own pocket? In the fullness of time, Feldhaus’s questionable business dealings were brought into the open, for in 1709/10 he was summoned to stand trial for ‘much incorrectness and embezzlement’, demoted as mayor and stripped of all his offices (Andreas Glöckner, ‘Stages of Bach’s Life and Activities’, in The World of the Bach Cantatas, Christoph Wolff (ed.) (1997), Vol. 1, p. 52).

  o This could also have been his way to forestall any attempt by the consistory to impute a covert motive for his visit – to ingratiate himself with Buxtehude as his potential successor – an unlikely scenario, given that it was conditional on his marrying Buxtehude’s thirty-year-old daughter, Anna Margreta.

  p Possibly hearing on the family grapevine (Bellstedt, the town scribe in Arnstadt and related by marriage to the Bachs, had a brother who occupied the same position in Mühlhausen) that there was soon to be an opening at the Blasiuskirche in Mühlhausen (whose ailing organist, J. G. Ahle, was to die in early Dec. 1706) and that two figural works would be required from candidates (as we know from J. G. Walther, himself a candidate who later withdrew), Bach may have spent his last months in Arnstadt composing BWV 150 and BWV 4. He might have felt that there was no harm in flattering the mayor of the new town in the first of these cantatas by means of an acrostic that spells out the na
me DOKTOR (Movement 3), CONRAD (5) MECKBACH (7) (see Hans-Joachim Schulze, ‘Rätselhafte Auftragswerke: Johann Sebastian Bachs. Anmerkungen zu einigen Kantatentexten’, BJb (2010), pp. 69–74) and trying it out first in Arnstadt before his trial at Easter 1707.

  q Perhaps the situation in Mühlhausen was irredeemable. Just a few years later, according to one of Bach’s pupils, Heinrich Nicolaus Gerber, while the quality of its schooling was high, ‘only in music did darkness still cover the earth there’ (NBR, p. 321).

  r Short for Weg zur Himmelsburg (‘The way to the castle of Heaven’), this referred to the painted cupola depicting the open heavens in the palace church in the Wilhelmsburg, the centre of Duke Wilhelm Ernst’s devotions. Destroyed along with the court music library in the great fire of 1774, it was of unusual design – a tall, three storeyed structure with a balustraded music and organ gallery (just thirteen by ten feet, and sixty-five feet above floor level) from which ‘heavenly’ sounds would float down upon members of the ducal families, courtiers and guests (see Plate 8). Probably the nearest equivalent in the area today is the Schlosscapelle in Weissenfels built around the same time, though larger.

  s That was it as far as further cantatas composed by Bach in Weimar go. Not even a major celebration such as the second centenary of the Reformation on 31 October 1717 (the day after Duke Wilhelm Ernst’s birthday, on which he had declared a new fund to endow the members of his Capelle) elicited a commemorative cantata from Bach.

  t Later in the same movement Bach inserts a preposterous collective trill extended on a diminished seventh chord on the word quälen (‘to torture’) intended to describe the futility of Satan’s attempt to torment us, but graphic enough to cause a shudder in listeners familiar with the Duke’s recourse to dictatorial punishments.

  u This is corroborated by the discovery of a copy in his hand of an Italian chamber cantata by the Venetian composer Antonio Biffi (Peter Wollny, ‘Neue Bach-Funde’, BJb (1997), pp. 7–50).

  v Michael Maul has found source material showing that the Duke lived far beyond his means, had no grip on his dukedom’s finances and was often drunk. His handwriting is crude and barely legible. How much attention he actually gave to the music must be questionable (private correspondence).

  w This was indeed very likely the case, as was the strategy to circumvent the old Duke’s intention to promote Drese junior by tempting Telemann (unsuccessfully) to accept a kind of ‘super-Capellmeistership’ of all three Saxe-Thuringian courts – Weimar, Gotha and Eisenach (see Telemann’s account of this approach in Mattheson’s Grundlage einer Ehren-Pforte (1740), p. 364).

  x Johann Mattheson, the most widely read music critic of the day, claimed to have ‘seen things by the famous organist of Weimar, Herr. Joh. Sebastian Bach, both for the church and for the hand [i.e., keyboard pieces] that are certainly so constituted that one must greatly esteem the man’ (Das beschützte Orchestre (1717), p. 222).

  y There are at least two mitigating instances of Wilhelm Ernst’s decency and show of compassion to senior court musicians – Johann Effler and Johann Samuel Drese (Andreas Glöckner, ‘Von seinen moralischen Character’ in Über Leben, Kunst und Kunstwerke: Aspekte musikalischer Biographie, Christoph Wolff (ed.) 1999, pp. 124–5).

  z Meanwhile, according to a report by E. L. Gerber, the son of a former pupil, the Well-Tempered Clavier was conceived during his period of incarceration when he was fed up and without access to any musical instrument (BD III, No. 468).

  aa Before he declined the Leipzig post in November 1722, Telemann had first made sure that he would also be allowed to resume being director at the university church (just as he had been twenty years earlier) – which, with its close links to the collegium musicum, was the main recruiting ground for student musicians. By the time Bach was appointed that position had already been filled.

  bb Just where things were hotting up in the council deliberations, in Apr. 1723 the minutes unfortunately break off (BD II, No. 127/NBR 3 p. 101). With none of three finalists (Bach, Schott and Kauffmann) allegedly ‘able to teach’, the spokesman for the Estates Party, Councillor Platz, made his much touted remark: ‘since the best could not be obtained, mediocre ones would have to be accepted.’ This is less the woeful misjudgement of Bach’s qualifications that has stung his biographers than a last-minute political bid for hiring a solid schoolmaster as cantor. Having come so far, Bach was not willing to see the chance slip from his grasp. Starting at the back of the field, he had made the best impression at his trial on 7 Feb., and with all the Estates Party candidates out of the running, he had leapfrogged into pole position and was now able to negotiate. Did he? What we cannot know, of course, is what took place behind closed doors. Ulrich Siegele no doubt comes close to the mark in suggesting that a deal was struck between the rival coteries on the council: the Absolutist Party eventually got their man but were ‘unable to carry out the public and legal act of redefining the office’ (“I Had to be Industrious …”: Thoughts about the Relationship between Bach’s Social and Musical Character”, JRBI, Vol. 22, No. 2 (1991), p. 25) – the high price exacted by the conservative wing of the Estates Party. Bach had accepted an absolutist mandate but one hedged around with restrictions imposed by the Estates Party. Its leader, the appeals judge Platz, voted him in ‘most especially because he had declared himself willing to instruct the boys not only in music but also regularly in the school’. Cryptically, he added, ‘it would remain to be seen how he would accomplish this last’ (BD II, No. 130). By the time he took the pledge to the council on 5 May, Bach promised ‘faithfully to attend to the instruction of the school and whatever else it befits me to do; and if I cannot undertake this myself, arrange that it be done by some other capable person without expense to the Honourable and Most Wise Council or to the School’ (BD I, No. 92/NBR, p. 105).

  cc It is just possible that Arnold was among the people who came to Bach’s mind years later as he was reading Abraham Calov’s Bible commentary. Bach underlined a passage from Deuteronomy (23:4) describing how the Ammonites and Moabites had not been raised to a position of authority because of their hostility towards the Israelites, from which Calov concluded that no one should be raised to a position of authority who has demonstrated his hatred for those he would rule. Furthermore, as Robert L. Marshall points out (‘Toward a Twenty-First-Century Bach Biography’, MQ, Vol. 84, No. 3 (Fall 2000), p. 525), Calov concludes that ‘no one should accept as his leader anyone who has demonstrated such hatred’ – a sentiment no doubt shared by Bach, with his constitutional distrust of authority.

  dd It is of course just possible that Bach was not modifying, but quoting from an earlier version of Picander’s text than the one published in 1728/9.

  ee In Bach’s view God’s authority seeps down into secular authority (the princely autocrat being God’s representative on earth, as exemplified by the bass aria ‘Großer Herr’ from the Christmas Oratorio), order being simultaneously ‘natural’ and ‘artificial’. Absolutism is surely artificial, yet for Bach it was natural.

  7

  Bach at His Workbench

  Mon cher Jacques,

  Never correct J. S. Bach’s accompanied violin sonatas on a rainy Sunday … ! I’ve just finished revising the above and I can feel the rain inside me …

  When the old Saxon Cantor hasn’t any ideas he starts out from any old thing and is truly pitiless. In fact he’s only bearable when he’s admirable. Which, you’ll say, is still something!

  All the same, if he’d had a friend – a publisher perhaps – who could have told him to take a day off every week, perhaps, then we’d have been spared several hundreds of pages in which you have to walk between rows of mercilessly regulated and joyless bars, each one with its rascally little ‘subject’ and ‘countersubject’.

  Sometimes – often indeed – his prodigious technical skill (which is, after all, only his individual form of gymnastics) is not enough to fill the terrible void created by his insistence on developing a mediocre idea no matter what the
cost!

  – Claude Debussy to Jacques Durand,

  15 April 1917

  In the Bach-Archiv in Leipzig is a scale model of the Thomasschule based on an engraving made by Johann Gottfried Krügner in 1723, from which it is clear that, as cantor, Bach and his extended family had to live cheek by jowl with the school, with direct access to its classrooms and dormitories on three of its four floors. The Bachs’ marital bedroom was separated from one of the dormitories by a thin party wall. Bach’s composing room (Componirstube) was directly adjacent to the quinta classroom. The noise at times must have been deafening, impossible to screen out even for someone with his formidable powers of concentration. This was the crucible in which all the stupendous compositions of his last twenty-seven years were to be forged. What concerns us most closely are the two Passions and the back-to-back annual cycles of cantatas composed at breakneck speed in a kind of creative fury during the first three years of his cantorship and in the shabby and run-down cantor’s quarters before the renovation of the Thomasschule in 1731–2. The contrast in pace here with the previous five and a half years he had spent in the provincial backwater of Cöthen was enormous. Had Bach had the luxury of time we associate with a composer of the Romantic era like Beethoven, he would have had the chance to assemble and experiment with a large number of ideas from which he would ultimately have chosen the best. Any possibility of that disappeared with his arrival in Leipzig. From now on Bach had to formulate, or, as he might have said, ‘invent’, his ideas quickly. Robert L. Marshall, who led the scholarly investigation of Bach’s compositional processes in the 1970s, wrote drily, ‘the hectic pace of production obviously did not tolerate passive reliance on the unpredictable arrival of Inspiration.’a