Characterizing Bach’s compositional art in any general way proves an elusive task, but a strikingly passionate attempt was made by his son Carl Philipp Emanuel and Bach’s student Johann Friedrich Agricola in their Obituary of “The World-Famous Organist, Mr. Johann Sebastian Bach”: “If ever a composer showed polyphony in its greatest strength, it was certainly our late lamented Bach. If ever a musician employed the most hidden secrets of harmony with the most skilled artistry, it was certainly our Bach. No one ever showed so many ingenious and unusual ideas as he in elaborate pieces such as ordinarily seem dry exercises in craftsmanship.”11
More often than not, superlatives such as these provoke skepticism, but this statement—though penned under the immediate burden of loss and the pressure of time—presents a remarkably apt summation of Bach’s most important musical accomplishments. It emphasizes that his music truly demonstrates the power of polyphony, an intrinsic harmonic structure, and an imaginative and original approach in the design of complex works. No specific compositions are mentioned, such particulars being deemed unnecessary by the Obituary authors. And indeed, any of the works, whether the B-minor Massor the St. Matthew Passion, The Well-Tempered Clavieror the Orgel-Büchlein, the Brandenburg Concertos or the sonatas and partitas for unaccompanied violin, corroborate and deepen the judgment rendered above.
In the closing section of the Obituary, Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach and Agricola enumerate further talents of Bach’s: his ability to recognize without an instant’s hesitation the intricate developmental potential of a musical subject, his inclination toward a serious style without rejecting the comic, his facility in reading large scores, his fine musical ear, and his skill in conducting. The confident declaration that “Bach was the greatest organist and clavier player that we have ever had” is followed by observations regarding his art of improvisation and his use of “strange, new, expressive, and beautiful ideas,” his “most perfect accuracy in performance,” his invention of a new fingering system, his intimate knowledge of organ construction, his facility in tuning the harpsichord, and the fact that “he knew of no tonalities that, because of impure intonation, one must avoid,” a noteworthy comment in those days when few keyboard performers dared to wander beyond keys with three sharps or flats.
The Obituary also associates Bach’s music with “polyphony in its greatest strength,” with employing “the most hidden secrets of harmony with the most skilled artistry,” and with “ingenious and unusual ideas” pervading “elaborate pieces.” This extremely flattering language must be understood against the background of criticism to which Bach was subjected, most directly in Scheibe’s infamous attack: that he lacked “amenity,” that his style was “turgid and confused” rather than natural, and that he darkened the beauty of his works by applying “an excess of art.”
Birnbaum, in his function as Bach’s mouthpiece articulating the composer’s views on art and nature, elegantly counters Scheibe’s broadside:
The essential aims of true art are to imitate nature, and, where necessary, to aid it. If art imitates nature, then indisputably the natural element must everywhere shine through in works of art. Accordingly it is impossible that art should take away the natural element from those things in which it imitates nature—including music. If art aids nature, then its aim is to preserve it, and to improve its condition; certainly not to destroy it. Many things are delivered to us by nature in the most misshapen states, which, however, acquire the most beautiful appearance when they have been formed by art. Thus art lends nature a beauty it lacks, and increases the beauty it possesses. Now, the greater the art is—that is, the more industriously and painstakingly it works at the improvement of nature—the more brilliantly shines the beauty thus brought into being. Accordingly it is impossible that the greatest art should darken the beauty of a thing.12
Birnbaum’s argument draws in part on Gradus ad Parnassum (Steps to Parnassus), a 1725 counterpoint treatise whose author, Johann Joseph Fux, refers to “art which imitates and perfects nature, but never destroys it.”13 Bach owned a copy of this important Latin treatise14 and may well have directed Birnbaum to emphasize the ancient Aristotelian principle “art imitates nature,” a dictum that lay at the heart of what Bach considered musical science. For Bach, art lay between the reality of the world—nature—and God, who ordered this reality.15 Indeed, Leipzig philosophers subscribed to that relationship, especially when defining beauty and nature. “What is art? An imitation of nature,” writes Bach’s student Lorenz Christoph Mizler in the same year and place as Birnbaum’s defense of Bach.16 It follows, then, that musical structure—harmonia, in the terminology of Bach’s time—ultimately refers to the order of nature and to its divine cause. Or, put more lyrically, “Music is a mixed mathematical science that concerns the origins, attributes, and distinctions of sound, out of which a cultivated and lovely melody and harmony are made, so that God is honored and praised but mankind is moved to devotion, virtue, joy, and sorrow.”17
Strict rules and regulations, however they might be modified by rhetorical devices or by the new doctrine of affects, had largely kept musical composition in check, although Scheibe and other advocates of progressive concepts were charting a course toward a new aesthetic of art that would hold beauty and sensation as paramount. But the environment in which Bach worked and lived was not conducive to such ideas, nor did he seem to take much interest in them. On the other hand, he was surely influenced by the climate of inquiry and search for truth that now defined philosophy as “a science of all things that teaches us how and why they are or can be.”18 No less affected by “the dream of intellectual unity”19 than the leading thinkers of his generation, Bach pursued his own empirical line of inquiry by exploring “the most hidden secrets of harmony with the most skilled artistry”: by expanding—in scope, scale, and detail—the known limits of musical performance and composition.
Bach’s intricate musical art figured in a public literary dispute between Agricola and Filippo Finazzi, an opera singer in Hamburg, that recalls the Scheibe-Birnbaum controversy. In August 1750, just days after Bach’s death, Agricola wrote:
He [Finazzi] denies his [Bach’s] music the effect of pleasure for the listener who would not savor such difficult harmony. Yet, assuming the harmonies [that is, musical structures] of this great man were so complex that they would not always achieve the intended result, they nevertheless serve for the connoisseur’s genuine delight. Not all learned people are able to understand a Newton, but those who have progressed far enough in profound science so they can understand him will find the greater gratification and real benefit in reading his work.20
Here, for the first time, a parallel is drawn between Bach and Isaac Newton—not by constructing analogies between Bach’s music and Newtonian science, but by explaining that Bach’s music is best appreciated by real connoisseurs, just as Newton’s writings are best understood by readers with a deep knowledge of science. Newton, a generation older than Bach, had earned a legendary reputation across Europe by the early eighteenth century, and by 1750 he represented the undisputed paradigm of the scientist as genius.21 “The immortal Newton,”22 as Mizler called him, was especially revered in Leipzig, whose university had in Bach’s time become the center of Newtonianism in Germany.23
Isaac Newton, it is still fair to say today, played the most critical role in the foundation of modern science. In addition to his most spectacular accomplishments—inventing calculus, discovering the laws of motion and the principles of optics, and explaining the concept of universal gravitation—his fundamental contributions covered an astounding range of fields. He studied space, time, heat, and the chemistry and theory of matter; he formulated the basic concepts of mass and dynamics; he invented the gravitational theory of tides; and he helped design such scientific instruments as the reflecting telescope.24 Toward the end of his career, he turned to alchemy, history, chronology, biblical exegesis, and theological issues. Newton’s theoretical and experimental works exemplified a
new kind of scientific method, characterized by a kind of “contrapuntal alternation between mathematical constructs and comparisons with the real world” (in the words of a modern scholar).25 And a traditional element, typical of a pre-Enlightenment outlook, was Newton’s firm belief that his discoveries “pointed to the operations of God.” Unlike later science, which focused solely on understanding nature, the Newtonian search for truth always encompassed both natural and divine principles. Trying to grasp the relationship between God and nature led Newton to explore the boundaries between them, where he ultimately saw the fusion of natural and divine principles.26
Newton’s groundbreaking work, highly respected by his contemporaries,27 represents the pinnacle of the seventeenth-century Scientific Revolution. Bach, on the other hand, created no revolution, but then, the stakes were completely different. In the search for scientific truth, the principle of universal gravity, for example, would have been discovered eventually, if not by Newton then by someone else. By contrast, the search for “artistic truth” cannot be guided by classical logic leading to a true or false result; the element of individuality plays too decisive a role in all artistic endeavors. Yet Bach’s music—his search for truth—was affected more, both subconsciously and consciously, than that of any other contemporary musician by the spreading culture of Newtonianism and by the spirit of discovery that followed the Scientific Revolution, which no bright and keen intellect could escape. And under the umbrella of seventeenth-century Lutheran theology, Bach’s musical discoveries—like Newton’s scientific advances, which Bach almost certainly did not know—took him to areas of the creative mind undreamed of before and ultimately pointed to the operations of God.
If the natural philosophy of Bach’s time defined itself as “a science of all things that teaches us how and why they are or can be,” Bach’s musical philosophy might well be understood analogously: as the science of musical phenomena that teaches us how and why they are or can be, and also how they relate to nature—God’s creation and Newton’s world system.28 The sheer scope and breadth of Newton’s intellectual endeavors, too, find their analogy in the enormous and unparalleled range of interests and enterprises that characterize Bach: the complete, the learned, the perfect musician.
For Bach, schooled in seventeenth-century thought, the concept that music formed a branch of the liberal arts quadrivium was still as valid as it had been for Johannes Kepler, who promoted the view that music mirrored the harmony of the universe.29 Music, then, with its traditional mathematical underpinning, provided an especially rich field of operation for a composer who was increasingly infected with scientific curiosity, totally uninterested in “dry exercises in [musical] craftsmanship,” but thoroughly committed to advancing “true music,” which Bach defined as music that pursued as its “ultimate end or final goal…the honor of God and the recreation of the soul.”30
A list of Bach’s major achievements in musical science testifies to his emphatic and consistent application of the principle of counterpoint, that is, the dynamic discourse of melodically and rhythmically distinct voices resulting in his unique compositional style. Such a list would include the following areas of compositional art, which reflect a process of musical research that uncovers “the most hidden secrets of polyphony,” the application of “ingenious and unusual ideas,” and the employment of “the most skilled artistry” (the works cited below are merely representative):
fugue and canon (The Art of Fugue);
major-minor tonality (The Well-Tempered Clavier);
harmonic expansion (the Chromatic Fantasy and Fugue);
extended polyphony (the unaccompanied violin, cello, and flute pieces);
instrumentation (the Brandenburg Concertos);
instrumental and vocal genres (Bach employed virtually all contemporary models and types—from aria, cantate burlesque, and canzona to oratorio, scherzo, and sinfonia);
small-scale form (the Orgel-Büchlein) and large-scale form (the St. Matthew Passion);
style and compositional technique, from retrospective to modern (the B-minor Mass);
musical affect and meaning (the church cantatas).
Further essential features of Bach’s musicianship comprise his keyboard virtuosity and his development of new manual and pedal techniques, taking into account the ergonomics of posture that carried over to other instrumental and vocal performance; his intense involvement in musical instrument technology, especially in organ building and design (which required considerable experience in mathematics, physics, acoustics, architecture, and mechanical engineering), organ and clavier serving as indispensable pieces of equipment in Bach’s experimental musical laboratory; and his distinctive contributions to understanding the relationships between music, language, rhetoric, poetics, and theology. Finally, of especial importance was Bach’s remarkable ability to synthesize the various components of his musical science in light of his strong sense for unified structures.
Although Bach realized the significance of theoretical discourse and must have encouraged his students to contribute to it, he himself did not.31 He focused instead on “practical elaborations” for the instruction and delight of “those who have a concept of what is possible in art and who desire original thought and its special, unusual elaboration”—as Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach wrote after his father’s death.32 Bach was one of the most active, dedicated, and prolific teachers the world has seen. As a result, many students of his worked to disseminate his music and teachings through their own writings. In fact, soon after 1750, German music theory reoriented itself almost solely because of the prevailing influence of the “Bach School,” and European music theory followed half a century later. If Bach ever came close to creating a “revolution,” it was in his teaching of composition by fully integrating the principles of thorough bass, harmony, and counterpoint, elements that had previously been treated separately. This method was illustrated by two works that were circulated widely from the moment of Bach’s death, first in manuscript and later in printed form: The Well-Tempered Clavier, which defined the principles of free and strict composition, and the collection of 370-plus four-part chorales that charted the course for tonal harmony.33
The Scheibe-Birnbaum controversy had turned out to be a tempest in a teapot. The impact of Bach’s music and teachings was such that when the focus of the music world had clearly shifted to the Vienna of Haydn and Mozart, the musician and critic Christian Friedrich Daniel Schubart could already refer to Bach as “a genius of the highest order” and, as Agricola had done years earlier, rank him on a par with the great scientist-genius: “What Newton was as a philosopher, Bach was as a musician.” In other words, as Newton brought about fundamental changes and established new principles in the world of science, Bach did the same in the world of music, both in composition and in performance.
At the turn of the nineteenth century, Schubart’s appraisal was not only echoed but reinforced in the leading music periodical of the day, to which Beethoven and others subscribed: “The name of Johann Sebastian Bach radiates supremely and sublimely above those of all German composers in the first half of the past century. He embraced with Newton’s spirit everything that has hitherto been thought about harmony [composition] and that has been presented as examples thereof, and he penetrated its depths so completely and felicitously that he must be justly regarded as the lawmaker of genuine harmony, which is valid up to the present day.”34
By 1800, the continuing, indeed permanent relevance of the new foundations that Bach the lawmaker of genuine composition had laid was clearly recognized; these provided the basis for the Romantic concept of “pure music,” defined as “a beautiful play with tones…governed by an aesthetic idea.”35 In 1799, the same periodical had published a diagram in the form of a “sun of composers.” There, at the center, appears the name of Johann Sebastian Bach, surrounded in various layers by the names of other composers, the first layer comprising George Frideric Handel, Carl Heinrich Graun, and Franz Joseph Haydn
(see illustration). And Haydn, whose reputation by that time as Europe’s premier composer was beyond question, is said to have been “not unfavorably impressed by it, nor minded the proximity to Handel and Graun, nor considered it at all wrong that Joh. Seb. Bach was the center of the sun and hence the man from whom all true musical wisdom proceeded.”36
Who is this “man from whom all true musical wisdom proceeded”? In the absence of a true classical model such as we have in literature, art, and architecture going back to antiquity, Bach’s musical science (its beauty and expression included) offers a stable frame of reference even today that neither a Palestrina nor a Monteverdi, a Handel, a Beethoven, nor any other composer can provide. His is the kind of musical wisdom that is experienced alike by the keyboard beginner playing the two-part Inventions and the virtuoso tackling the unaccompanied cello suites, by the beginning harmony student and the mature composer, by the inexperienced listener and the sophisticated concertgoer. Throughout his life, Bach constantly strove to perfect himself in his quest for true musical wisdom. According to his Obituary, he, along with all members of the Bach family, was deemed “to have received a love and aptitude for music as a gift of nature.”37 But he himself reportedly said that “what I have achieved by industry and practice, anyone else with tolerable natural gift and ability can also achieve.”38 This statement would place him, once again, in the vicinity of a Newton: in A Dissertation upon Genius of 1755, William Sharpe attempts to show that “the several instances of distinction, and degrees of superiority in human genius are not, fundamentally, the result of nature, but the effect of acquisition.”39 When and how Johann Sebastian Bach acquired what, cannot be easily determined. At any rate, because Bach’s timeless and global impact is not revealed in the narrow confines of his life story, all the more does understanding the musical science that underlies his works allow us some insight into his intellectual biography.
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