The “hands on” approach Sebastian naturally absorbed became increasingly complemented by academic scholarship, especially theological and linguistic subjects that opened his mind to philosophical issues as well as logic, grammar, and style. This intellectual dimension, which may have received its major impetus at the Ohrdruf Lyceum, set him apart from the previous family tradition as much as it predestined him for the eventual crowning of it. Sebastian’s increasingly inquisitive disposition led him to explore and conquer the available repertoire in all its breadth and depth; it made him eager to learn about the highly advanced mechanical engineering and technology of organ building; and it drove him to discover, in his early compositional activities, how to venture beyond his models and reach for new horizons.
3
Bypassing a Musical Apprenticeship
FROM LÜNEBURG TO WEIMAR, 1700–1703
CHORAL SCHOLAR AT ST. MICHAEL’S IN LÜNEBURG
Shortly before his fifteenth birthday, on March 15, 1700, Johann Sebastian set out for Lüneburg, well over two hundred miles to the north of Ohrdruf. Not only was he embarking on a long trip for such a young lad, he was also leaving the narrower territory that for generations had served as home for the Bach family of musicians. Considering the many connections readily available to him, he could easily have secured a musical apprenticeship in the “Bach territory” bounded by Eisenach, Erfurt, and Schweinfurt. An apprenticeship would have taken care of his financial needs, but accepting one would have meant ending his formal education, and he clearly wanted to find a way to complete Latin school. So Sebastian made a courageous decision that would also further his professional interests: to widen his experience as a senior choral scholar by taking on assignments as vocal soloist (concertist) and to broaden his future options by completing his academic training at an illustrious institution. He would learn to become independent as he had to adjust to an unfamiliar setting in a town four times the size of Ohrdruf and almost twice the size of Eisenach. He would also be in the immediate vicinity of Hamburg, then the largest city in Germany, not only a metropolis much grander than any place he had ever seen, but also one that could claim a great musical tradition and a legendary reputation, especially among organists and organ music devotees. The fabulous large instruments in Hamburg and other north German Hanseatic cities were unmatched anywhere and would have been a major draw for any ambitious young organist. For Bach, they were surely the most exciting prospect of what otherwise must have loomed as a frightening trip into uncertainty.
There is no doubt that both Bach and Georg Erdmann were eagerly awaited in Lüneburg by cantor August Braun, and that the Ohrdruf cantor Elias Herda, a Thuringian from Erdmann’s birthplace Leina, near Gotha, and himself a recent graduate of St. Michael’s School, had paved the way for his students.1 Herda must have learned around Christmas 1699 that cantor Braun was in need of experienced singers, for whom scholarships would be available; he also knew that Thuringian boys were traditionally welcome in Lüneburg because of their solid training in music fundamentals.2 So Herda suggested Erdmann and Bach when he learned that both were losing free board and stipends. Erdmann left the Ohrdruf Lyceum in January, but Bach managed to stay in school until their joint departure for Lüneburg in March, probably through support received from his elder brother. During that time, Bach and Erdmann had to arrange for passports and other necessary travel documents, obtained from St. Michael’s School. Actually, the time difference between Erdmann’s and Bach’s dismissal from the Lyceum must be reduced by eleven days: Protestant Germany, lagging behind the rest of western Europe, finally adopted the Gregorian calendar in 1700, and therefore a leap occurred from February 18 to March 1.
The two boys traveled together,3 and Bach would later expressly refer to Erdmann as his “schoolmate and travel companion.”4 The perils and imponderables of such a long-distance trip made it a virtual necessity that the eighteen-year-old Erdmann would escort the much younger Bach. The students would have had to travel at least part of the way on foot, carrying their belongings with them. The most direct postal route would have led them through Gotha, Sondershausen, Nordhausen, and Brunswick, where Johann Stephan Bach served as cantor at St. Blasius’s Cathedral. Johann Stephan, a distant relative of Sebastian’s and twenty years his senior,5 might have provided the boys with overnight shelter. By whatever means of transportation, the two arrived in Lüneburg well before the end of March, as they were already singing in the choir of St. Michael’s School on April 3, the Saturday before Palm Sunday.6 This arrival date must have been carefully planned, for it coincided with the start of the most active musical period of the entire ecclesiastical year: Good Friday, the three-day church festival at Easter, and the Sundays and feast days through Whitsunday, another three-day festival seven weeks later.
Bach and Erdmann began their active duty as choral scholars at St. Michael’s on Palm Sunday weekend with the Saturday afternoon Vespers service, then took part in the 6:00 A.M. Sunday Matins service, followed by the 7:15 A.M. main service.7 The following week included rehearsals for the music to be performed on Good Friday and Easter, the Good Friday Vespers most likely featuring the performance of a Passion story setting. The St. Michael’s choral library held recent vocal-instrumental settings by Joachim Gerstenbüttel (Telemann’s predecessor in Hamburg) and Augustin Pfleger (court capellmeister at Gottorf), though we don’t know which Passions were selected for 1700 and subsequent years. Bach and Erdmann were accepted into the so-called Matins choir, a select ensemble of fifteen musically experienced, resident scholarship students who formed the core group of the school choir and whose assignment included the daily Matins service. Supplemented by nonresident students, the Matins choir formed the nucleus of the chorus musicus, the vocal-instrumental ensemble whose twenty-five or so members performed at the regular Saturday Vespers and the Sunday main services, and, in particular, in the more elaborate musical programs at the afternoon Vespers services of special Sundays and feast days.8 The special Vespers were the principal occasions for which concerted music was performed (between the sermon and the organ postlude), while the musical repertory of the other services consisted mainly of chant, hymns, and polyphonic motets. Additionally, the chorus musicus also undertook the regular Currende singing throughout the year at street corners around town and performed at weddings, funerals, and other events that provided welcome opportunities for supplementary income.
“Bach, because of his uncommonly fine soprano voice, was well received.” These words from the Obituary suggest that he was not just accepted as a regular chorister but was valued for his ability to handle solo soprano parts. For April and May 1700, their first two months in the choir, Bach and Erdmann each received 12 groschen, the third-highest monthly fee among the singers, yet still half the pay of 1 taler the concertists received. Since subsequent school records and choir lists have not survived, we cannot ascertain what Bach’s actual musical functions were nor what he earned later on.
Bach had now entered an academic and musical environment of considerable distinction. St. Michael’s School at Lüneburg, an early capital of the Guelphs, was established in the fourteenth century and originally formed part of the medieval Benedictine monastery of St. Michael’s, which dated back to 955. When the ancient monastery fell victim to the Reformation and was dissolved in the sixteenth century, the school took over most of its physical space. St. Michael’s School and the Johanneum, the Latin school attached to St. John’s Church, served as the major educational institutions not only for the rapidly growing city of Lüneburg—a salt-trade center, member of the Hansa, and the most important commercial town between Hamburg and Hanover—but also for the entire northern region of the duchy of Brunswick-Lüneburg. The highly selective St. Michael’s School changed greatly in 1656 when, by ducal decree, a residential academy for fifteen to twenty young noblemen, with a separate, well-paid faculty, was added. Students at this Ritter-Academie were taught the regular academic subjects of theology, philosophy, classics, ethics, po
litics, history, mathematics, physics, and French, to which were added riding, fencing, and dancing—a program in keeping with the civil, military, and social obligations of the aristocracy. In contrast, the older St. Michael’s maintained the more traditional curricular structure of a Latin school; its distinguished faculty, led by the erudite M. Johannes Buno, its rector for forty-three years (1653–96) and the author of books on history and geography, helped maintain the highest standards of education in the liberal arts. The school served commoners—mostly nonresident students from the city and the fifteen resident choral scholars from the immediately outlying region, but some, like Bach and Erdmann, from farther away. Official communications between St. Michael’s School and the Ritter-Academie were limited, but the residential scholars at St. Michael’s were housed in a dormitory adjacent to the young aristocrats, creating many points of contact. Moreover, the Matins choir members engaged in joint choral activities with the Ritter-Academie students for Matins and Vespers services. These connections provided frequent opportunities for the choral scholars to be hired as valets or as participants in musical entertainments. As a side benefit, the exposure to French language, etiquette, and style—deliberately cultivated by the Ritter-Academie’s training program for diplomatic service—would have been welcomed by the choral scholars as a free complement to whatever financial rewards they received.
To the young Bach, Lüneburg, with its ten thousand inhabitants, must have seemed very large. The city continued as the secondary residence of the dukes of Brunswick-Lüneburg after the two ducal houses merged in 1569, and its main market square boasted a new ducal castle, built in 1695–98 by Duke Georg Wilhelm, who reigned for forty years from his principal seat in Celle. The castle later served as a dower house for the widowed duchess, Eléonore Desmier d’Olbreuse, a Huguenot who was the main promoter of the prevailing French taste at the Brunswick-Lüneburg court.
Even though he had completed half the first year of the prima at the Ohrdruf Lyceum, whose academic year began in the fall, Bach most likely started over again in the prima at St. Michael’s, where the academic year began at Easter. But while the school transfer may have resulted in some loss of time, he definitely benefited from the new and probably more demanding requirements at St. Michael’s, whose excellent reputation extended well beyond the duchy. The school’s rector, M. Johannes Büsche, served as Bach’s principal teacher in religion, logic, rhetoric, and Latin. According to a syllabus for 1695, rector Büsche used an imposing group of textbooks for his prima classes: Leonhard Hutter’s Compendium locorum theologicorum (Wittenberg, 1610), a reference work on Lutheran theology whose didactic questions and answers Bach had already begun to memorize at the Ohrdruf Lyceum; Christoph Reyher’s Systema logicum (Gotha, 1691), whose first volume (Prolegomena logica de natura logicae) focuses on the definitions of fundamental terms; and Heinrich Tolle’s Rhetorica Gottingensis (Göttingen, 1680), a concise summary of Aristotelian rhetoric. In Latin literature classes, Büsche’s students read Virgil’s Bucolica and Aeneid, book IV, and Cicero’s De Catilina.
During their two years in the prima, students received further instruction in Latin and Greek from the conrector M. Eberhard Joachim Elfeld, son-in-law of the previous cantor at St. Michael’s, Friedrich Emanuel Praetorius, and in arithmetic from the current cantor, August Braun. With Elfeld, they studied the monograph on Alexander the Great by Quintus Curtius Rufus, Cicero’s De officiis, selections from Cicero’s Epistolae, and Horace’s Carmina. Elfeld was also responsible for the instruction of Greek, where the New Testament served as the main textbook; other readings included philosophical and poetic texts by Kebes of Thebes (Cebetis Tabula), Phocylides, Isocrates, and Theognis. Prima students took individual tutorials with rector Büsche and conrector Elfeld in history and geography, in which they were probably guided by the influential writings of Buno, the previous rector, and in genealogy, heraldry, German poetry, mathematics, and physics.
The demanding scholastic requirements strongly emphasized linguistics, theology, and classical literature, without neglecting the more modern academic subjects of history, geography, and physics. The curriculum was designed to prepare students for graduate study at a university in the liberal arts, theology, jurisprudence, or medicine. So by the end of his schooling, Bach was fluent in Latin and well in command of a broad spectrum of subjects. The later career of Bach’s friend Erdmann, who went on to study law and eventually ended up in the Russian diplomatic service, was likely determined by his contacts with young Ritter-Academie noblemen and their educators. Bach profited no less from this experience in his future dealings with the aristocracy. Lüneburg must also have been where he acquired his basic knowledge of French,9 the official language at the Ritter-Academie, and where he taught himself Italian, an essential language for an educated musician.
As a choral scholar, Bach was involved in the varied musical activities at St. Michael’s. These not only took up a considerable amount of time, they also provided welcome further experience and opportunities. As Elias Herda had in Ohrdruf, August Braun provided the young Bach with a role model as a cantor that must have left a deep impression and filled him with respect for and interest in the office. Cantor Braun did not particularly distinguish himself as a composer (only one incomplete mourning aria of his twenty-four inventoried works has survived),10 although he was able to make use of St. Michael’s remarkable music collection, which ranked with that of St. Thomas’s in Leipzig as among the oldest, largest, and richest choir libraries in Germany.11 When the cantorate passed from Friedrich Emanuel Praetorius to Braun in 1695, an inventory recorded 1,102 items that represent a carefully chosen cross section of seventeenth-century music from Germany and Italy, primarily settings of German and Latin texts. The holdings include collections and individual compositions by many leading composers of the time and of bygone days, among them Heinrich Schütz (30 works), Johann Rosenmüller (96), Wolfgang Carl Briegel (26), Sebastian Küpfer (27), Joachim Gerstenbüttel (41), Claudio Monteverdi, Giacomo Carissimi, Gasparo Casati (17), and Marco Giuseppe Peranda (18). Clear emphasis lay on composers of the most recent generation, some of them—in particular, Gerstenbüttel of Hamburg—still active. A cappella motets were balanced by vocal concertos with instrumental accompaniment, including pieces scored for large vocal-instrumental ensembles, among them a thirty-one-part Sanctus by Samuel Capricornus and a twenty-six-part concerto, “Lobe den Herrn, meine Seele,” by the current Leipzig Thomascantor Johann Schelle. It seems unrealistic, however, to imagine the fifteen-or sixteen-year-old Bach roaming around the library and browsing through materials—most of it in partbooks, not scores—for study purposes; his primary musical experience was shaped by actually performing a diversified repertoire of older and newer works for a variety of liturgical, nonliturgical, and secular functions.
The music that was performed during Bach’s Lüneburg years tended to favor composers active in the later seventeenth century, such as the Dresden capellmeister Peranda, the Leipzig Thomascantor Schelle, and the Hamburg Johanneum cantor Gerstenbüttel. Bach most often took part in performances in the traditional genres of motet and concerto—both a cappella and with participating instruments—and his experience did not remain confined to soprano parts. The Obituary reports that fairly soon after his arrival at St. Michael’s, “as he was singing in the choir, and without his knowledge or will, there was once heard, with the soprano tones that he had to execute, the lower octave of the same. He kept this quite new species of voice for eight days, during which he could neither speak nor sing except in octaves. Thereupon he lost his soprano tones and with them his fine voice.”12
Despite this curious mutation and loss of his “fine voice,” Bach the choral scholar remained a member of the select Matins choir, though no longer as a soprano. A shortage of bass singers made him particularly welcome in that section.13 “He had a good penetrating voice of wide range and a good manner of singing,” as Carl Philipp Emanuel later testified.14 Considering the a cappella singing dut
ies of the Matins choir and his status as a scholarship recipient, Bach had few opportunities to take on other assignments.15 Yet his exceptional talents as an instrumentalist, especially as an organist, were doubtless employed in many performances given by the larger vocal-instrumental ensemble, the chorus musicus, and in assisting with service playing or substituting for the official organist.
Forkel relates that Bach’s “inclination to play on the clavier and organ was as ardent at this time as in his more early years and impelled him to try to do, to see, and to hear everything which, according to the ideas he then entertained, could contribute to his improvement.”16 He had at his disposal the school’s keyboard instruments and the organ at St. Michael’s Church, which was, up to that time, by far the largest instrument he had played.17 Harpsichords (including, if one was available, a pedal harpsichord) offered the advantage that he could play them without additional assistance, while for private practice at the organ he always needed to engage a bellows operator at a fee, however modest. Furthermore, the St. Michael’s organ with its three manuals (Oberwerk, Rückpositiv, Brustwerk) and pedal constantly required fixing, so that playing it offered no undiluted pleasure, though it gave him a chance to learn more about the ways of the organ. Another opportunity to further his craft materialized during the summer of 1701, when the experienced and widely traveled organ builder Johann Balthasar Held, who had worked with Buxtehude and others, lodged at St. Michael’s while overhauling the school’s positive organ and enlarging it by one stop.18
BÖHM, REINKEN, AND THE CELLE COURT CAPELLE
Bach’s great interest in the organ and his well-developed skills would have made him useful to the local organists: Friedrich Christoph Morhardt at St. Michael’s; Johann Jacob Löwe von Eisenach at St. Nicholas’s and St. Mary’s; Johann Georg Flor at St. Lamberti;19 and Georg Böhm at St. John’s, Lüneburg’s largest church at the main market square. It is likely that Bach became acquainted with all four of them, if only to gain access to their instruments. Morhardt is not known for any particular musical qualities, but he could have made works by his father, Peter, the distinguished previous organist at St. Michael’s, available to the curious youth. Löwe, an octogenarian, may have welcomed Bach as an occasional assistant or substitute who, in turn, could benefit from the experiences and tales of a seasoned composer well beyond his prime. And Bach’s knowledge of keyboard works by Christian Flor, Johann Georg’s father, could have been prompted by contacts with the son. On the other hand, Bach’s well-documented personal bonds with Georg Böhm were forged on a higher level. The two apparently maintained lifelong contacts: the 1727 publication announcement, for example, of two installments of Bach’s Clavier-Übung (containing the partitas BWV 826–827) refers to “Mr. Böhm, organist at St. John’s in Lüneburg” along with the author himself and professional colleagues in Dresden, Halle, Brunswick, Nuremberg, and Augsburg as distributors of the publications.20
Johann Sebastian Bach Page 11