The Musical Offering (BWV 1079) is probably the best-known example of Bach rising to a special occasion and drawing on all his inventive and interpretive resources – of elaboratio leading to executio. In May 1747 Frederick the Great set him an awkward, chromatic theme (Bach politely called it an ‘excellent theme’) on which to extemporise, first in three, then in six parts. It became a further test of his skill once he had left Potsdam, where his and King Frederick’s views on the purpose of music may have clashed dramatically, since he would have to resubmit. It gave him the chance to reflect and pin down any notational improvements – and further brainteasers – to what had originated as a command performance jeu d’esprit. In the end he came up with a puzzling miscellany comprising a trio sonata, ten canons and two very different fugues (Bach called them ‘ricercars’): a free one in three parts and a strict one in six parts. In the copy he sent to King Frederick he arranged for the inside page to be inscribed with the words Regis Iussu Cantio Et Reliqua Canonica Arte Resoluta (‘At the King’s Command, the Song and Remainder Resolved with Canonic Art’). Bach was making a pun on the word canonica – his way of showing that his ‘canons’ had been fashioned ‘in the best possible way’ for the King’s amusement. Did Frederick even bother to look at them? Did he realise that the initial capitals of Bach’s dedication spelt ricercar(e), meaning ‘to search out’ and that Bach had deliberately refrained from writing the canons out in full, leaving them for him to discover? Having experienced the dazzling high-wire act of those first impromptu performances, when everyone was ‘seized with astonishment’, there was no incentive whatsoever for the King to scrutinise the written-out versions of the three main movements or to solve the attached canonic puzzles.t
All the various avenues to composition we have been pursuing – strands of pre-composition, inventio, elaboratio, word-setting – come together the moment we view them from a hermeneutical angle. Early on in Bach’s Leipzig cantatas can be found a striking example: BWV 181, Leichtgesinnte Flattergeister. The title refers to the ‘frivolous flibbertigibbets’ – those fickle and superficial folk who, like the fowls of the air in the Parable of the Sower (Luke 8:4–15), devour the seed that ‘fell by the wayside’. It makes them prey to the Devil, who ‘taketh away the word out of their hearts, lest they should believe and be saved’. A decision Bach made at the outset was to set the Gospel words not as the usual chorus but as an aria for bass. For its opening ritornello he fashions a fragmented melodic line peppered with trills, then breaks up its rhythmic outline by means of angular little figures that clash with the symmetrical approach to the first cadence. By calling for light, staccato articulation in vivace tempo, by the third bar he has already done enough to establish the idea of nervy fluttering movements in the listener’s mind and created an image of predatory flapping wings. This is how Albert Schweitzer describes the scene: ‘we instinctively see a swarm of crows descending upon a field with beating wings and wide-stretched feet’ – an image graphic enough to disturb the sleep of the anxious arable farmer.24 When he came to revive the cantata circa 1743/6,25 Bach added a flute and oboe to play in unison with the first violins. It might seem a minor adjustment, but their inclusion gives a fresh glint to the upper line: it reinforces the jerky movements of the avian seed-steal-ers as they vie in their greed for the fallen grain.
In these few brushstrokes Bach has brought together French airiness in the quirky manner of Rameau with hints of the galant style now coming into vogue. It is not until bar thirty-five that the link between the first theme and the devouring fowls of the air is connected to ‘Belial with his brood’. Instantly the mood changes. Bach sets this B section unconventionally within the thematic web of the surrounding material. Then what sets out as a modified da capo of the A section seems to lose its way after only four bars and is abruptly transformed into a modified repeat of B. This is not just highly unusual; it is also destabilising to the listener expecting a normal da capo. In place of the tripartite A-B-A structure we now have a four-part structure: B (with elements of A) – A (truncated) – B (modified), and in place of the anticipated return of the opening words, back comes Belial mit seinen Kindern (‘Belial with his brood’) with more force than before. This is one of the relatively few cantatas of which the original libretto has survived, and it is obvious that it was Bach, not his anonymous poet, who was responsible for these structural anomalies. Perhaps in the heat of the moment Bach could not resist a further chance to depict this Miltonic Prince of Darkness, demon of lies and guilt. It enabled him to push home the point that it was Belial, a fallen angel, who effectively sabotaged God’s plan to make the Word be ‘of service’ and to underline to anyone who wasn’t paying proper attention that the devouring fowls are none other than Satan and his cronies. So what started out as a witty evocation, irresistible in its imagery and skill in word-setting, has by now acquired a sinister Hitchcockian edge.u Yet purely as a piece of mood music it is so atmospheric that in a different context it could serve as the soundtrack to a film of a gaggle of flighty, giggly teenage girls being bundled out of a nightclub by Belial the bouncer.
The moral is now drawn: the seed that falls on stony ground, the alto tells us, is like the hard-hearted unbelievers who die and are dispatched below to await Christ’s last word, the time when the doors will burst apart and the graves open. The recitative ends with a playful descent in the continuo to describe the absurd ease with which the angel rolled back Christ’s tombstone (Look, no hands!) and to ask the rhetorical question ‘Would you, O heart, be harder still?’ A relatively uneventful soprano recitative then turns the listener’s attention from the wasted seeds to those that fell on fertile ground. It is God’s Word that prepares fruitful soil in the heart of the believer. Bach celebrates this not in the conventional way, with a chorale, but in a concluding movement that unites choir, flute, oboe, strings and, for the first time in the cantata, a trumpet. Despite this festive instrumentation the vocal writing has a madrigalian lightness and delicacy perfectly attuned to the joyous message of the text, suggesting perhaps that this movement borrows from a lost secular ode of Bach’s Cöthen years. In this regard it neatly illustrates a point made by Ludwig Finscher when referring to the ‘multi-potentiality’ of Bach’s writing and the ‘excess’ of musical thought beyond the mere setting of text.26 They come together perfectly here, as they do in so many of his cantatas. Bach knew, as Shakespeare and later John Dryden did, that ‘a continued gravity keeps the spirit too much bent; we must refresh it sometimes, as we bait upon a journey, that we may go on with greater ease.’27 The degree of workmanship, of formal production, in Bach as a professional composer and performer is sometimes difficult to grasp. There is a two-fold time-specificity to a piece like this: it enacts a duration specific to itself, but it also encompasses the relations between the metronome, the acoustic properties of the building, the complex web that connects the composer to his performing ensemble and to his listeners and the element of recall – a combination that differs with each performance.
Indeed, the process of elaboration seems never to be wholly complete in Bach’s work – sustained by his quest for perfection but never free from an entanglement with performance. Peter Wollny (the curator of the manuscript and rare books collection in the Bach-Archiv Leipzig and since 2013 its director) is gathering evidence from the manuscript parts of Bach’s chorale cantata cycle that reveal layer after layer of alteration in the successive revisions he made in 1732, in the early 1740s and, for a last time, in the late 1740s. Inexplicably many of these multiple revisions were passed over by various editors of the Neue Bach-Ausgabe, with one of two results: either they remain undifferentiated or they are subsumed in a putative, but often spurious, Ur-text. Yet it is clear that there was never any uniformity to Bach’s practice spanning these decades. The existence of these revisions raises several questions: whether, for example, the changes of verbal text Bach introduced were suggested to him, were linked to changing tastes in religious literature as the Enlightenment
took a firmer hold in Leipzig in the 1740s, or were made entirely of his own volition. Similarly, one longs to know whether the changes in articulation that he now introduced – the slurs, staccato patterns, ornamentsv and dynamics that he successively added – were the expression of an initial dissatisfaction with the way things had turned out in 1724/5 in the stressful rush to rehearse and perform them, or an indication of his changing aesthetics, or even a bit of both. This, in turn, raises the question of quite how much performing instruction Bach could initially have imparted to his ensemble by verbal or gestural means just before or even during the performance. Based on contemporary descriptions of his very active conducting (see below) I suspect quite a lot. I believe it is significant that Bach arranged to leave the performing material of this cycle to the Thomasschule, an act showing that he felt this to be his core repertoire; representing the very best of his cantata output, it was the music most closely associated with the Leipzig liturgy (and less exportable, therefore), and the local congregation might in time respond to it with more or the same enthusiasm in the future.
Where other cantors of the Thomaskirche on taking office had followed the custom of having the council pay the widows of their predecessors to allow them to continue to use their works, Bach had no such intention. Somehow he managed to convince the officials that the money was better spent on hiring two professional scribes – a signal of his ambitions to provide consecutive works of his own for all the feast-days in the liturgical calendar. The pressure on these two paid copyists, Johann Andreas Kuhnau (nephew of his predecessor) and Christian Gottlob Meissner, must have been intense, just as it was on countless pupils and family members dragooned into the process.w The privacy of Bach’s composing studio was not quite the ivory tower of popular Romantic imagination. In all likelihood Kuhnau and Meissner sat with the master in the Componirstube, copying frenetically from his scores and under the closest scrutiny. Only these two were allowed to touch the scores: once they had copied the individual parts they passed them on to junior scribes, who were possibly seated in an adjoining room, for making doubletten (the doubling parts). For much of the time and all through Bach’s two and a half years things proceeded fairly smoothly. Even though Meissner was prone to making careless mistakes, his hand was so like his master’s that it was enough to fool later analysts. Kuhnau, by far the more consistent of the two, also had an impressively clear hand. Working alongside Bach, they were able to convey an instantly legible and comprehensible imprint of the notation to the sight-reading performer – a huge boon to Bach, given the pressure of rehearsal time (there is nothing musicians like better than to bring a rehearsal to a standstill with questions to the conductor like ‘Sorry, but I can’t make out whether I am to play a B or B in bar 27, and, by the way, is that a dotted crotchet or a minim?’). Kuhnau had the wit to look for the best moments to arrange page-turns – wherever possible to coincide with bars’ rest, regardless of the number of players present, so as to avoid holes in performance. Lesser copyists (and that includes those of some reputable publishers today) would simply not have bothered. He was not infallible, however. Once, when setting out the title page of BWV 135, Ach Herr, mich armen Sünder, in a moment’s aberration he misspells the composer’s name and writes Bacch. Clearly not amused, Bach must have given his errant copyist a sharp smack: a black smudge appears right across the page – Kuhnau’s pen following the trajectory of the chastising biff (see opposite).
But how Bach must have rued his decision to lay Kuhnau off when his contract was due for renewal at the end of 1725. Family loyalties clashed with professional etiquette and the smooth running of the copying laboratory from February 1724 with the arrival in Leipzig of Bach’s nephew Johann Heinrich (1707–83), the fourth son of Bach’s eldest brother, Johann Christoph, who had recently died. In return for the favour he had received as a ten-year-old orphan when he was taken in by his brother, Bach now accepted the eighteen-year-old Johann Heinrich as a live-in apprentice. After a while, in order to justify his nephew’s food, lodging and tuition, Bach dismissed his best copyist and set Johann Heinrich to work in his stead. Things immediately started to go awry. The surviving parts of a cantata for the first Sunday after Easter, BWV 42, Am Abend aber desselbigen Sabbats, tell a story that is not hard to interpret. Johann Heinrich is instructed to begin by copying out the second violin part. Perhaps his progress is too slow for the Cantor’s liking, for after just three and a half bars Bach summons his fourteen-year-old son, Wilhelm Friedemann, to take over. Friedemann manages to copy out the entire sinfonia accurately enough (including the tacet indication for movement 2); but again the pace is too slow for his father, who decides to take over himself for the alto aria. That done, he turns back to Johann Heinrich and gives him a second chance – the simple one of copying out the final chorale. Even this is beyond him, it seems: Heinrich wrongly inserts the first violin melody in the concluding chorale, realises his mistake and crosses it out. Now crippled by nerves, he starts again, this time to copy the correct second violin part. Exasperated to find that he has made similar errors here and in other parts, Bach pushes him aside and enters the correct notes.x
(illustration credit 42)
On an earlier occasion, when copying BWV 127, Herr Jesu Christ, wahr’ Mensch und Gott, Wilhelm Friedemann, jittery under parental scrutiny, gets the first note wrong – he is transposing the first violin part into the standard treble clef from a score written in the soprano clef (C on the lowest line) – but after the initial blip he corrects himself. The same happens with the viola part: he makes an initial error in transposing from the tenor clef down a third to the viola clef, but then manages to complete it smoothly and creditably. Meanwhile Bach decides to take over copying the continuo part for the bass arioso himself. He is now really pressed for time. This is a dramatic movement, virtually a prototype of the hurricane (‘Sind Blitze’) chorus from the Matthew Passion. Caught up in the creative frenzy and elation of the moment, Bach has to rush to finish. He cannot risk the snail’s pace of his son’s progress. Perhaps the orchestra was already tuning up. Gone are the elegant curved beams he normally arches over the notes: in their place, scratchy vertical strokes tilting forwards like a forest of bamboos in a force-eight gale.
(illustration credit 43)
Several years later, and we find that things have not changed fundamentally. Gerhard Herz selects a late cantata, BWV 140, Wachet auf, ruft uns die Stimme, first performed in 1731, to re-create the process. He suggests that in this instance Bach entrusted the copying of parts to one of his star pupils, Johann Ludwig Krebs, instructing him to begin copying ‘so that the singers might be able to start learning the extended opening chorus’ even before the autograph score was complete, perhaps indicating that there were pre-rehearsals. Private coaching of the week’s soloists, sectional rehearsals ahead of the Saturday read-through, any of the time-saving strategies music directors resort to when pressed for time – all this would have made eminently good sense to a resourceful Capellmeister of Bach’s experience. At this stage three other copyists are recruited. Bach himself gets involved later as mistakes start to be made through haste. ‘Copyist 3 decided to do more than he was supposed to … not realising that thereby he bestowed the first violin part upon the viola player. Krebs caught this mistake, scratched out these two wrong lines (with what good Saxon oaths we can only imagine) and wrote out the correct viola recitative himself. Bach then seems to have been drawn into this squabble … he took the part away from Krebs and wrote out the final chorale himself, squeezing it on to this page only by the addition of a hand-drawn staff at the very bottom.’28 (See below.) Taken together, these examples expose the degree of manic activity, of potential error and tension in the quotidian background of Bach’s cantata production – not dissimilar to the backstage activities on a TV or film set today.
Bach: Music in the Castle of Heaven Page 32