CLAVIER VIRTUOSO AND ORGAN EXPERT
In a 1752 reminiscence, the distinguished Berlin court musician Johann Joachim Quantz discusses the state of instrumental music and the development of musical taste in the late seventeenth century. He singles out “the art of organ playing, which had to a great extent been learned from the Netherlanders,” and emphasizes that it “was already at this time in a high state of advancement, thanks to [Froberger, Reinken, Buxtehude, Pachelbel, Nicolaus Bruhns] and some other able men. Finally, the admirable Johann Sebastian Bach brought it to its greatest perfection in recent times.”41 In Quantz’s view, the art of organ playing included both performance and composition. Himself a flute virtuoso and composer for his instrument, the interdependence for Quantz of playing technique on the one hand and compositional ideas on the other was an essential concept for any performer-composer, as it clearly was for Bach. Bach’s instrumental orientation and vocal background from childhood days complemented one another, as his keyboard skills were supplemented by his string experience and augmented by a compositional focus that eventually took in the widest possible spectrum of musical instruments and human voices; all this was supported by a deep knowledge and keen awareness of technological and physiological details and balanced by intellectual discipline and temperamental sensitivity.
The foundations for Bach’s systematic approach to virtually all his musical undertakings were laid well before he entered professional life. Yet the Arnstadt, Mühlhausen, and early Weimar years—with their fairly limited obligations and their considerable personal latitude and economic security—presented the enormously gifted, highly motivated musician with ideal opportunities for exploration, experimentation, and training. Nor should it be forgotten that early on he received much support from influential political figures such as Councillor Klemm of Sangerhausen, Burgomaster Feldhaus of Arnstadt, Consul Meckbach of Mühlhausen, and Duke Ernst August of Saxe-Weimar. He likewise won encouragement and esteem from eminent senior colleagues like Böhm, Reinken, Effler, and the organ builder Wender, not to mention other members of the Bach clan.
As an organist and keyboard player, Bach had studied everything he could lay his hands on, from very old repertoires—his library eventually contained three copies of Elias Nicolaus Ammerbach’s Orgel oder Instrument Tabulatur of 1571 and a manuscript copy of Frescobaldi’s Fiori musicali—to works of German, French, and Italian masters from the previous generation, to compositions by his own contemporaries.42 By around 1714, Bach had explored virtually all genres of organ and clavier music, meeting a variety of musical challenges in most categories of keyboard composition common to both organ and harpsichord, but also in the more harpsichord-specific repertoire. By the time Bach turned twenty-five in 1710, he had reached the peak of his technical facility at the keyboard, which he would then, of course, strive to refine further. However, he also had to learn to acknowledge that limits did exist. In conjunction with Bach’s “admirable facility in reading and executing the compositions of others (which, indeed, were all easier than his own),” Forkel relates a revealing anecdote, the source of which could only have been Bach himself, who probably taught his children a lesson about pride going before a fall:
He once said to an acquaintance, while he lived at Weimar, that he really believed he could play everything, without hesitating, at the first sight. He was, however, mistaken; and the friend [perhaps Johann Gottfried Walther] to whom he had thus expressed his opinion convinced him of it before the week was passed. He invited him one morning to breakfast and laid upon the desk of his instrument, among other pieces, one which at the first glance appeared to be very trifling. Bach came and, according to his custom, went immediately to the instrument, partly to play, partly to look over the music that lay on the desk. While he was perusing them and playing them through, his host went into the next room to prepare breakfast. In a few minutes Bach got to the piece which was destined for his conversion and began to play it. But he had not proceeded far when he came to a passage at which he stopped. He looked at it, began anew, and again stopped at the same passage. “No,” he called out to his friend, who was laughing to himself in the next room, and at the same time went away from the instrument, “one cannot play everything at first sight; it is not possible.”43
Forkel, largely on the basis of reports from the two oldest Bach sons and partly on the basis of published eyewitness accounts,44 provides particularly useful information about Bach’s keyboard technique and its physiological underpinnings. He also gives a chronological sense of how Bach’s fingering system developed when he refers to the new mode of fingering—including use of the thumb—in François Couperin’s L’Art de toucher le Clavecin of 1716 and expressly states that “Bach was at that time above 30 years old and had long made use of this manner of fingering.” He then continues:
Bach was, however, acquainted with Couperin’s works and esteemed them, as well as the works of several other French composers for the harpsichord of that period, because a pretty and elegant mode of playing may be learned from them. But on the other hand he considered them as too affected in their frequent use of graces, which goes so far that scarcely a note is free from embellishment. The ideas they contained were, besides, too flimsy for him.
Without drawing a parallel with the famous priority dispute between Newton and Leibniz about the invention of calculus, Forkel recognizes the revolutionary impact of the seemingly simple method of making the thumb a “principal finger,”45 acknowledges that Couperin and Bach reached their conclusions independently of each other, stresses Bach’s far more comprehensive approach, and summarizes its principal features:
According to Sebastian Bach’s manner of placing the hand on the keyboard the five fingers are bent so that their points come into a straight line, and fit the keys, which lie in a plane surface under them, that no single finger has to be drawn nearer when it is wanted, but every one is ready over the key which it may have to press down. What follows from this manner of holding the hand is:
(1) That no finger must fall upon its key, or (as also often happens) be thrown on it, but only needs to be placed upon it with a certain consciousness of the internal power and command over the motion.
(2) The impulse thus given to the keys, or the quantity of pressure, must be maintained in equal strength, and that in such a manner that the finger be not raised perpendicularly from the key, but that it glide off the forepart of the key, by gradually drawing back the tip of the finger towards the palm of the hand.
(3) In the transition from one key to another, this gliding off causes the quantity of force of pressure with which the first tone has been kept up to be transferred with the greatest rapidity to the next finger, so that the two tones are neither disjoined from each other nor blended together. The touch is therefore, as C. Ph. Emanuel Bach says, neither too long nor too short, but just what it ought to be.
The advantages of such a position of the hand and of such a touch are very various, not only on the clavichord, but also on the pianoforte and the organ. I will here mention only the most important.
(1) The holding of the fingers bent renders all their motions easy. There can therefore be none of the scrambling, thumping, and stumbling which is so common in persons who play with their fingers stretched out, or not sufficiently bent.
(2) The drawing back of the tips of the fingers and the rapid communication, thereby effected, of the force of one finger to that following it produces the highest degree of clearness in the expression of the single tones, so that every passage performed in this manner sounds brilliant, rolling, and round, as if each tone were a pearl. It does not cost the hearer the least exertion of attention to understand a passage so performed.
(3) By the gliding of the tip of the finger upon the key with an equable pressure, sufficient time is given to the string to vibrate; the tone, therefore, is not only improved, but also prolonged, and we are thus enabled to play in a singing style and with proper connection, even on an instrument so poor in
tone as the clavichord is….
The natural difference between the fingers in size as well as strength frequently seduces performers, wherever it can be done, to use only the stronger fingers and neglect the weaker ones…. Bach was soon sensible of this; and, to obviate so greata defect, wrote for himself particular pieces, in which all the fingers of both hands must necessarily be employed in the most various positions in order to perform them properly and distinctly. By this exercise he rendered all his fingers, of both hands, equally strong and serviceable, so that he was able to execute not only chords and all running passages, but also single and double shakes in which, while some fingers perform a shake, the others, on the same hand, have to continue the melody….
When Bach began to unite melody and harmony so that even his middle parts did not merely accompany, but had a melody of their own, when he extended the use of the keys, partly by deviating from the ancient modes of church music, which were then very common even in secular music, partly by mixing the diatonic and chromatic scales, and learned to tune his instrument so that it could be played upon in all the 24 keys, he was at the same time obliged to contrive another mode of fingering, better adapted to his new methods, and particularly to use the thumb in a manner different from that hitherto employed….
From the easy, unconstrained motion of the fingers, from the beautiful touch, from the clearness and precision in connecting the successive tones, from the advantages of the new mode of fingering, from the equal development and practice of all the fingers of both hands, and, lastly, from the great variety of his figures of melody, which were employed in every piece in a new and uncommon manner, Sebastian Bach at length acquired such a high degree of facility and, we may almost say, unlimited power over his instrument in all the keys that difficulties almost ceased to exist for him.46
Forkel, who was born in 1749 and was of Mozart’s generation, paid special attention to Bach’s importance for the clavier—that is, harpsichord, clavichord, and fortepiano—just at a time when playing of the clavier, particularly the fortepiano, was spreading among a broad constituency of bourgeois society. And at a time when organ playing and organ music had assumed more of a peripheral role, Forkel realized the central position of the organ in Bach’s life and works, especially in his formative years. Though himself not an accomplished organist, he discusses the subject matter with remarkable insight and, noting the close interrelationship of performance and composition, underscores Bach’s idiomatic treatment of the instrument. Although he points out that many of the principles of Bach’s clavier playing “may also be applied, in general, to his playing on the organ,” he recognizes that “the style and mode of managing both instruments [that is, instrument types] are as different as their respective purposes.” Apart from the technical makeup, placement, and function of the organ as a typical church instrument, he discusses the distribution of voices and the effect of “open harmony” (in which the voices are spread out from high to low) and explains: “By this means, a chorus, as it were, of four or five vocal parts, in their whole natural compass, is transferred to the organ.”
The vocal spacing of lines that Forkel brings up here is intimately connected with Bach’s early attempts at creating a truly idiomatic organ texture. Two kinds of deceptive cadences that are closely related yet different in terms of their successful realization provide a case in point. In the early D-minor Toccata, BWV 565, Bach seems unperturbed by the narrowly spread fermata chord (Ex. 5.1), whereas the later Passacaglia, BWV 582, shows a mature approach in well-spaced “vocal” textural design (Ex. 5.2).
Forkel continues:
In this manner, Bach always played the organ; and employed, besides, the obbligato pedal, of the true use of which few organists have any knowledge. He produced with the pedal not only the fundamental notes, or those for which common organists use the little finger of the left hand, but he played a real bass melody with his feet, which was often of such a nature that many a performer would hardly have been able to produce it with his five fingers….
To all this was added the peculiar manner in which he combined the different stops of the organ with each other, or his mode of registration. It was so uncommon that many organ builders and organists were frightened when they saw him draw the stops. They believed that such a combination of stops could never sound well, but were much surprised when they afterwards perceived that the organ sounded best just so, and had now something peculiar and uncommon, which never could be produced by their mode of registration.
This peculiar manner of using the stops was the consequence of his minute knowledge of the construction of the organ and of all the single stops. He had early accustomed himself to give to each and every stop a melody suited to its qualities, and this led him to new combinations which, otherwise, would never have occurred to him. In general, his penetrating mind did not fail to notice anything which had any kind of relation to his art and could be used for the discovery of new artistic advantages. His attention to the effect of big musical compositions in places of varying character; his very practiced ear, by which he could discover the smallest error, in music of the fullest harmony and richest execution; his art of perfectly tuning an instrument, in so easy a manner—all may serve as proofs of the penetration and comprehension of this great man….
His profound knowledge of harmony, his endeavor to give all the thoughts an uncommon turn and not to let them have the smallest resemblance with the musical ideas usual out of the church, his entire command over his instrument, both with hand and foot, which correspond with the richest, the most copious, and uninterrupted flow of fancy, his infallible and rapid judgment by which he knew how to choose, among the overflow of ideas which constantly poured in upon him, those only which were adapted to the present object—in a word, his great genius, which comprehended everything and united everything requisite to the perfection of one of the most inexhaustible arts, brought the art of the organ, too, to a degree of perfection which it never attained before his time and will hardly ever again attain.47
In the chapters on “Bach the Clavier Player” and “Bach the Organist,” Forkel presents a most instructive, well-founded, and, in the last analysis, indispensable commentary on what the Obituary had previously conveyed in much less explicit terms, in the declarative sentence “Bach was the greatest organist and clavier player that we have ever had.” Moreover, by declaring that “his great genius…comprehended everything and united everything,” he draws the quintessence and proper conclusion out of a largely technical discussion that helps explain Bach’s notion of musical science, a concept that also included a thorough knowledge of organ construction. According to the Obituary, Bach “not only understood the art of playing the organ, of combining the various stops of that instrument in the most skillful manner, and of displaying each stop according to its character in the greatest perfection, but he also knew the construction of organs from one end to the other…. No one could draw up or judge dispositions for new organs better than he.”48
We must keep in mind that the organ represented one of the most complicated—and in the case of the Dutch and north German instrument types, also the largest—“machines” in existence from the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries. The sound-producing miracle behind an ornamental and symmetrical facade of glistening metal pipes embodied the science of mechanical engineering, physics (acoustics), chemistry (metallurgy), and mathematics as well as architecture and the handicraft of carpentry and plumbing. It comprised a myriad of individual parts using all sorts of metal, wood, leather, ivory, cloth, and other materials. Its combination of wind chests, bellows, ranks of pipes, and keyboards was capable of producing colorful sonorities of different dynamic ranges, whose spectrum and volume depended on the size of the instrument.
Bach’s hands-on experience, self-directed study, natural curiosity, and frequent contact with skillful organ builders made him an organ expert of the first rank whose indisputable competence was recognized early on and put to use by hi
mself and others throughout his professional life. The importance of his involvement in various organ designs, rebuildings, and repairs must not be underestimated; the documented cases (Table 5.3) can only be considered representative. And what began as a virtually exclusive focus on organ building later expanded to include numerous other types of keyboard, woodwind, and string instruments in whose design, construction, and sonorities he became keenly interested (see Chapter 11).
Bach’s written examination reports demonstrate an impressive thoroughness; he missed hardly any minutiae. Forkel gives us some idea of how Bach tested the instrument from its console: “The first thing he did in trying out an organ was to draw out all the stops and to play with the full organ. He used to say in jest that he must first of all know whether the instrument had good lungs. He then proceeded to examine the single parts.”49 The Mühlhausen project, for which we have Bach’s first surviving report, shows the high degree of importance he attached to the configuration, character, and balance of stops within the organ. He cared in particular about the gravitas of the instrument, granted ideally by a new Untersatz, a thirty-two-foot stop, but he thought of improving it also by changing the shallots and enlarging the resonators for the existing Posaune, a sixteen-foot reed stop. He proposed the exchange of the Gemshorn stop for “a Violdigamba 8 foot, which would concord admirably with the 4-foot Salicional.” He then differentiated between pipe materials, requested “good 14-ounce tin” for the three Principalia in the facade of “the new little Brustpositiv,” and asked that the “Stillgedackt 8´, which accords perfectly with concerted music,” be made of “good wood” because that would sound “much better than a metal Gedackt.”50
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