As if to underline this, Bach created (but did not complete) a collection of mind-bogglingly complex fugues, Die Kunst der Fuge (The Art of the Fugue) towards the end of his life. The fourteen fugues he did finish all start with the same relatively straightforward tune but then explore different options and techniques. As a whole it is a vast, miraculous musical jigsaw, never since matched by any composer. Bach could layer three, four, five or even six simultaneous parts on top of each other, all using variants of the basic theme. Die Kunst der Fuge includes such showpieces as ‘mirror’ fugues, which invert their first-half laws during the second half of the piece, and which could operate on up to six different levels: the original melody (which Bach called rectus – ‘straight’) would have its backwards variant (inversus) laid on top of it in the second half; the home of the melody would reverse the relationship between its voices, so that five notes higher became five notes lower; the key movements would likewise switch, so that a modulation (change of key) in the first half moved in the opposite direction in the second; the order of voice entry would be reversed, from, say, bass – tenor – alto – soprano to soprano – alto – tenor – bass; the chord sequences would run in the opposite direction during the second half; and finally the cadences (coming-to-a-rest chords) would be approached from opposite directions in the reflected mirror of the piece.
Constructing musical scaffolding as complex as these fugues would be hard enough to achieve with the whole map of it laid out in front of the composer on the manuscript page, like an empty crossword to be slowly and painstakingly filled in. The staggering fact is that Bach could improvise fugues like this at the keyboard, and often did. There’s a story about Bach as an old man being summoned to the court of the young King Frederick the Great of Prussia, a major patron of the arts and a trained musician himself, to show off his skill at counterpoint, by then deemed an old-fashioned and largely redundant skill. The king had his court musicians, one of whom was Bach’s son Carl Philipp Emanuel, devise a tune specially, one they mischievously knew was practically impossible to turn into a fugue without creating horrible dissonances.
Bach sat down at the keyboard (one of Frederick’s brand-new Silbermann pianos) and improvised, on the spot, a three-voice fugue to this apparently impossible theme. The king, his guests (including the music-loving Russian ambassador), and his in-house musicians were flabbergasted. But not as amazed as when the king received, a few weeks later, a written-out fugue, or ricercar, based on the supposedly impossible theme, this time in six parts. The Italian term ricercar means, appropriately, ‘to seek again’, and Bach even titled his Musical Offering (Das musikalische Opfer) with an acrostic: Regis Iussu Cantio Et Reliqua Canonica Arte Resoluta (Theme Issued by the King, with Additions, Resolved in the Canonic Style). This six-part ricercar is still, to this day, considered by musicians and composers the greatest, most complex feat of counterpoint of all time.
Bach’s interest in counterpoint, though, was not about putting haughty monarchs in their place, nor about solving puzzles and codes for the sake of it. He believed what he was doing was the musical embodiment of God’s master plan for humankind, a recognition of the intricate mathematical beauty of the natural order as ordained by the Almighty. Counterpoint was a manifestation of Lutheran Pietism in music. In the towering achievements of his career – his sacred settings of the trial, crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth – he brought to fruition every piece of the musical toolkit then available to him to address what was to him the deepest and most powerful mystery of all. Two of these epic settings survive: the Passions according to St John (1724) and St Matthew (1729).
The St Matthew Passion, a work divided into sixty-eight movements, for orchestra, choir and soloists, and which lasts over three hours (probably four hours in Bach’s time), is one of the crowning creative achievements in all European culture. At its heart lies one supreme government: the Lutheran hymn-chorale, with its simple, memorable tunes for the congregation – another of the central pillars of Pietist doctrine. At the climax of its monumental opening chorus, with two adult choirs and a double-sized orchestra already in full sway, Bach introduces a new, majestically slower tune on top of the entire structure. Like a phalanx of trumpets announcing the arrival of a mighty ruler, it is a children’s choir, singing a hymn-chorale, ‘O Lamm Gottes, unschuldig’ (O innocent lamb of God). There are few moments in all music as dramatic, as unexpected and as moving. For Bach, this breathtaking moment of musical shock and awe is not music for music’s sake; it is a manifestation of divine intervention.
But for all this, Bach’s Passions do not feel like the beginning of some new movement. He was no pioneer, despite his brilliance; that mantle fell to his sons, Carl Philipp Emanuel and Johann Christian, who broke new ground and paved the way for Mozart’s generation. Bach senior instead synthesised all the musical styles around him to create his huge cathedrals of sound – from the music of Lully and François Couperin at Louis XIV’s court in France, to Italian concertos and oratorios, and the church music of his north German predecessors, such as Heinrich Schütz and Dietrich Buxtehude. Composers at the very cutting-edge of change are rarely the ones whose music lasts longest. Posterity eventually rewards those, like Bach and Handel, who can absorb and repackage the currents and fashions of their times, giving the resulting collage a distinctive voice of their own along the way.
For the first hundred years after his death, though, Bach was a forgotten, unperformed composer. If he had written operas rather than church music, it might have been a different story. Opera composers have always attracted more immediate fame (or notoriety) than church composers. Luckily for his great contemporary George Frideric Handel, opera was his thing – to start with, at least.
Bach and Handel, the two musical giants of the eighteenth century, were born just eighty miles and four weeks apart and yet they never met. Though there are similarities in their idioms, particularly when it came to sacred music, they chose quite different career paths, which inevitably transformed their styles. Bach stayed firmly grounded, throughout his life, within the Lutheran tradition and the region of Thuringia-Saxony where he had grown up. Handel was the more adventurous pan-European traveller, learning his craft in Italy and then, in his twenties, settling for good in England, where he was to create the great body of his masterpieces. Indeed, his arrival in London in 1710 coincided with the completion of Christopher Wren’s St Paul’s Cathedral and Thomas Newcomen’s invention of the steam engine in Dartmouth, potent omens of Britain’s coming status as a world power.
That a recently arrived talent like Handel should find himself plunged into composing for royal occasions of great pomp and prestige was impressive enough. His birthday ode for Queen Anne, ‘Eternal Source of Light Divine’ (1713), manages to sound regal, ethereal and gracious all at once, whereas the utterly thrilling coronation anthem ‘Zadok the Priest’, fourteen years later, cracked superpower pomp in one master stroke, proving Handel had adapted to the indigenous choral style, as epitomised by Henry Purcell, as if he had been born, like Purcell, under the very shadow of Westminster Abbey.
Handel’s significance in music history is that he was the first composer we can call truly international. Whereas Bach undoubtedly absorbed Italian and French flavours of style, he was nevertheless inescapably a north German composer whose music would take a century to be reintroduced into the mainstream. (By Mendelssohn, incidentally, who in 1829 conducted and arranged– from a manuscript copy – the first performance of Bach’s St Matthew Passion since its composer’s death, triggering a widespread reassessment of his music.) Likewise, his formidable French contemporary Jean-Philippe Rameau, for all his understanding of Italian opera, carved out a reputation through his determination to put French opera and French musical pedagogy on the map, which he did with great flair. In England, the tragically short career of Henry Purcell (1659–95) was – though brilliant – a local success story, remaining so until the twentieth century. Over in Italy, the composers who
followed Vivaldi were fixated on the lucrative but non-progressive business of Italian opera, both at home and abroad. Handel, though, not only represented a musical amalgam of European styles during his lifetime; he also bequeathed to the next generation of composers a non-parochial, universal idiom that was venerated and built upon. Thus Mozart, an Austrian writing largely Italian-flavoured music, thought of himself as a natural successor to Handel, a German trained in Italy who settled in Britain. To this day, Handel’s music is cherished with unqualified, familial warmth by all Western musicians, belonging not to one nation’s musical history but to all.
He had two reasons for coming to the newly unified kingdom of Great Britain. One was to promote his brand of Italian-style operas on the London stage, which he did with considerable success, at least initially, and the other was as resident composer for his former employer, George, Elector of Hanover, who acceded to the British throne as George I in 1714. Though never accorded any official title, Handel contributed grand anthems and orchestral suites for the Hanover Georges, from the Water Music to the Music for the Royal Fireworks, for the rest of his life.
Handel composed thirty-nine operas for the London stage between 1711 and 1741, cashing in on a Europe-wide hysteria for Italian opera among the nobility and richer merchant classes that raged throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The form that Monteverdi had nursed to life in the early 1600s had settled into a format, thanks to his pupil Cavalli, Vivaldi and others, that took stories from classical legend and ancient history and manipulated them to provide as many opportunities as possible for solo arias with big tunes for star singers. You cannot describe this style, dubbed bel canto (lovely singing), as edge-of-the-seat drama, even if it was often tragic, emotionally charged and full of pathos. But an aria like Handel’s ‘Lascia ch’io pianga’ from Rinaldo could leave an audience hoarse with cheering as well as weak with emotion, depending on which heart-throb singer was delivering it.
The biggest stars of the day, paid outrageous fees and treated like royalty, were castrati. The practice of castrating young boys so that they could continue to sing soprano for the rest of their adult lives was promoted in the sixteenth century by the Vatican, envious of Protestant church choirs that had young women singing a soaring top line. Women were forbidden to sing in Catholic churches so the competitive cardinals chose instead to mutilate children. It is estimated that, by Handel’s time, around four thousand boys a year were being castrated in Italy in the hope of singing stardom – a procedure undertaken without any form of sterilisation – often while being administered near-fatal doses of narcotics or being strangled to restrict blood flow and render them unconscious.
In Handel’s London, the vogue for adult soloist castrati was short-lived, and Italian-style opera itself soon came up against stiff competition in the shape of what we would today call jukebox musicals. John Gay’s Beggar’s Opera of 1728 was one of a crop of satirical pseudo-operas in which popular and familiar tunes, sixty-nine of them, including a couple by Handel, were given new words to fit a bawdy story lampooning the injustices of contemporary society. It was the musical-theatre equivalent of the satirical engravings of William Hogarth (who painted its leading actors, as it happens), set in a grubby Soho underworld of losers, dodgers and ne’er-do-wells. Songs like ‘How happy could I be with either’ and ‘At the Tree I shall suffer’ would have been known to every Londoner of the day, absolutely regardless of status or wealth. Gay’s Beggar’s Opera was produced by the impresario John Rich, so the saying around town was that the venture had ‘made Rich gay and Gay rich’.
That there was a thriving theatre audience of Londoners of lower rank is in itself a significant fact. Audiences had first started paying for tickets and enjoying live performances of opera in Venice, in the 1630s, but at that time only a tiny percentage of people, the super wealthy, could afford such a night out. When the first commercial public concerts started taking place in London the net widened to include merchants and tradespeople, a development in which England very much led the way. The first known concerts for a paying audience were presented by violinist John Banister on Fleet Street in 1672 and the world’s first purpose-built concert hall was built eight years later at York Buildings on Villiers Street in London. The oldest surviving purpose-built concert hall in Europe is the Holywell Music Room in Oxford, built in 1748. To put England’s advance in context, it would be over a century before music-mad Vienna had similarly open-to-all, ticketed public concerts.
Notwithstanding the novelty of public concert-going, music-making in the British Isles had had a more democratic profile since the temporary fall of the monarchy during the 1650s, at the end of the Civil War. Far and away the most successful musical publication of the age was John Playford’s compendium of dancing tunes, The English Dancing Master (1651). The popularity of Playford’s collection of dance tunes for fiddlers and dancers the length and breadth of Oliver Cromwell’s Commonwealth was all about short, catchy numbers that anyone could join in, most of the contents being regional folk songs and dances collated together in one, later two, volumes. It is still in print today.
The rise of a middle class – and a growing, wage-earning working class, as London’s industry expanded – was to have a greater effect on changing musical tastes in Britain than the whims of aristocratic patrons. The populist ballad-operas that came in the wake of The Beggar’s Opera had an impact throughout British culture – The Beggar’s Opera undoubtedly influenced Hogarth’s A Harlot’s Progress, for example – leading even the ‘proper’ opera audiences to wonder why the operas they attended at enormous expense were not also written in English, or why they didn’t have fully developed men and women playing leading roles. (One of the leading actresses of the day was Lavinia Fenton, who as Polly Peachum in The Beggar’s Opera was the focus of the song ‘Our Polly is a sad slut’. Fenton became the most desired woman in London, and the Duchess of Bolton as a result, so it is hardly surprising that castrated Italians were finding it hard to attract the same degree of public attention.)
In the 1730s, in some part because of John Gay’s anti-opera, Handel’s golden touch with Italian opera seemed to desert him; semi-bankrupt, he abandoned opera in 1741, along with most of his fellow Britons. Luckily, he had another ace up his sleeve.
As well as banning women from singing in church, the Church authorities in Rome in the early seventeenth century had issued a prohibition on opera. In some years it was a total ban while in others it was just during Lent. Opera, the Vatican thought, was likely to incite immoral behaviour. So seventeenth-century Roman composers, led by the Jesuit Priest Giacomo Carissimi, had concocted a form of opera that did without costumes, or women, or lewd plots, or comedy, or scenery, or acted-out action, and drew its subject matter from the venerated Old Testament. Performers just stood there and sang it.
Carissimi’s oratorios, particularly Jephta, which was composed some time in the 1640s, attracted great fame among European musicians. Carissimi was probably the most respected composer of the century in his own time, and the great English oratorios that Handel created when his luck with Italian opera began to ebb owe a huge debt to his style. Handel even quotes from Carissimi’s Rorate Filii, Israel in his own oratorio Samson, composed a hundred years later. Before long, Handel’s English-language oratorios even featured home-grown English singer-soloists, too, fulfilling contemporary actor-playwright and Poet Laureate Colley Cibber’s aspiration to ‘reconcile Musick to the English Tongue’. It was an inspired move.
Handel’s first English oratorio was Esther in 1732, performed in the King’s Theatre in London’s Haymarket. The public immediately took to his new form; indeed, he hurriedly produced two more within twelve months and performances of all three at the Sheldonian Theatre in Oxford in 1633 prompted some students there to sell their furniture in order to afford the precious five-shilling tickets. The musical fame of the Sheldonian Theatre (completed in 1668) can be attributed in large part to the early attention drawn to it by H
andel performances.
After Esther Handel presented a further twenty-one oratorios in London. His iconic Messiah, though, was uniquely premiered in Dublin – then Britain’s second-largest city – in 1742. It was to be the one most applauded by posterity, justifiably so, although it was not the most enthusiastically received at the time; there are at least half a dozen other, equally top-drawer masterpieces among the collection, including Saul, Solomon, Judas Maccabaeus, Theodora and the magnificent Israel in Egypt, which has the distinction of being the oldest (surviving) piece of recorded classical music, from a performance at the Crystal Palace in London in June 1888, on to a paraffin cylinder recording disc.
There are a number of reasons why Handel’s mostly Old Testament musical stories should be such a perfect fit with the public of the 1740s and ’50s, who greeted the oratorios with immediate and sustained rapture. The significance of audience approval is paramount in assessing Handel’s oratorios since, unlike Carissimi or, for that matter, his contemporary Bach, who composed for congregations who would have been in church anyway, Handel had to court his public: they were expected to choose to come to the theatre and then pay for the privilege of hearing his work.
The Story of Music: From Babylon to the Beatles: How Music Has Shaped Civilization Page 12