Surprisingly, the little canon turns out to offer a profound lesson in music theory, composition, philosophy, theology, and above all in the unity of knowledge. What may initially look and sound like a primitive piece of music reveals its sophisticated construction as a true mirror of the well-ordered universe, illustrating how counterpoint generates harmony and rhythm and how the abstract philosophical concepts of space and time coalesce in a concrete musical subject to create the trias harmonica naturalis, the C-major triad, which is the only truly perfect chordal harmony. The same triad, not coincidentally, stands at the head of The Well-Tempered Clavier, which introduces for the first time in history the complete spectrum of the twenty-four keys, defining tonalities well beyond the ancient hexachord system. Even more important, it is this sound that symbolized the dogma of the Holy Trinity. Like no other combination of tones, the natural triad could make audible and believable the trias perfectionis et similitudinis (the triad of perfection and [God-] likeness), the abstract “image of divine perfection,”97 and, at the same time, the essential identity between the Creator and the universe.
Resembling the model of seventeenth-century scientific inquiry, Bach’s musical inquiry demonstrates its results as it proceeds. His musical knowledge is invariably tied to his musical experience, as his compositions so amply manifest, whether canon, concerto, cantata, or anything else. And fully aware that Bach’s music always invites one to discover “polyphony in its greatest strength” and “the most hidden secrets of harmony,” Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach issued the warning that only “those who have a concept of what is possible in art and who desire original thought and its special, unusual elaboration will receive from it full satisfaction.”98 Showing what is possible in art, however, meant for Bach much more than demonstrating a mere philosophical theorem.99 Too full-blooded a performing musician, Bach would not have been interested in pursuing an abstract goal. Yet he definitely wanted his musical science understood as a means of gaining “insight into the depths of the wisdom of the world” (according to Birnbaum’s statement on Bach’s behalf),100 reflecting a metaphysical dimension in his musical thought. Considering the general intellectual climate in which Bach moved, metaphysics would not have been too obscure or remote a subject, especially as it pertained to his theological concerns and Lutheran beliefs.
In the precious few recorded statements about his own theoretical, theological, and philosophical thinking, Bach only once used the term “demonstration” (Beweis), so central in the philosophical-scientific methodology of his day. Some time after 1733, he annotated in his study Bible Abraham Calov’s commentary on 1 Chronicles 29:21, a passage that deals with King David’s exemplary role for the divine service. There he wrote to himself in the margin: “NB. A splendid demonstration that…music has been mandated by God’s spirit.” Bach would have known that the notion of music ordered or decreed by the divine spirit was not susceptible of strict empirical proof, yet even scientists of his time, including Newton and German Newtonians such as Johann Heinrich Winckler of Leipzig, believed that theological principles were capable of empirical demonstration and saw no conflict between science and Christianity. For in their view, the works of God they had studied only magnified the glory of God.101 And the “Soli Deo Gloria” at the end of Bach’s scores provides vivid testimony to his own stand in this respect. He, too, would see the directing hand of the world’s Creator in the branch of science he knew best and probably better than anyone else in his day.
How deeply and to what end would musical science in the form of composition let Bach penetrate the wisdom of the world? How and where would he find traces of the invisible? As he understood the basic materials of music to be directly related to the physical design of the universe, he also grasped the metaphysical dimension of music, as we can deduce from another marginal comment in his Calov Bible. A section of 2 Chronicles 5, titled by Calov “As the glory of the Lord appeared upon the beautiful music,” deals with the presence of the invisible God at the divine service in the Temple. Verse 13 ends with the words “when they lifted up their voice with the trumpets and cymbals and instruments of music, and praised the Lord…then the house was filled with a cloud.” It is at this very point where Bach added his own comment: “NB. With devotional music, God is always present in his grace.” Music prompted the appearance of the glory of God in the cloud, and the cloud demonstrated God’s presence. Bach picked up the Hebrew notion of the presence of the invisible prompted by a physical phenomenon, the sound of music, but for the Lutheran theologian Bach, the metaphysical presence of God’s grace replaced the visible proof of the physical cloud. Yet the presence of God’s grace was to him no less manifest than the actual sound of music that would bring it about, if it were only devotional and attentive, directed toward one subject.102
Bach’s concentrated approach to his work, to reach what was possible in art, pertained to all aspects of music, from theory to composition and from performance to physiology and the technology of instruments. In the final analysis, this approach provides the key to understanding his never-ending musical empiricism, which deliberately tied theoretical knowledge to practical experience. Most notably, Bach’s compositions, as the exceedingly careful musical elaborations that they are, may epitomize nothing less than the difficult task of finding for himself an argument for the existence of God—perhaps the ultimate goal of his musical science.
10
Traversing Conventional Boundaries
SPECIAL ENGAGEMENTS: THE 1730s
AT A CROSSROADS
More than any stretch of time since Bach had moved to Leipzig, the years 1729–30 brought about a series of significant events that influenced his working conditions. March 1729 saw Bach assume the directorship of the city’s most prestigious Collegium Musicum, a decision that considerably broadened the scope of his overall musical activities. Traditionally linked with the organist post at the New Church, the Collegium leadership became available when its longtime director, Georg Balthasar Schott, left his New Church post for a cantorate in Gotha. Bach seized the moment and secured the Collegium for himself, placing his protégé, Carl Gotthelf Gerlach, as organist at the New Church—a shrewd maneuver that, with its spillover effect on the organists’ scene at St. Thomas’s and St. Nicholas’s (see Table 8.2), consolidated Bach’s firm grip on Leipzig’s principal musical institutions.
The new Collegium directorship complemented not only his full-time commitment to the St. Thomas cantorate but also his continuing function as nonresident court capellmeister. Although his low-profile Cöthen capellmeistership formally terminated on March 23–24, 1729, with the funeral ceremonies for Prince Leopold, Bach managed in good time to procure a similar appointment at the court of Duke Christian of Saxe-Weissenfels so that he could hold the title of court capellmeister without interruption. Connections to the Weissenfels court and its capelle extended back to 1713, but they were renewed and strengthened by Bach’s marriage to Anna Magdalena, daughter of a Weissenfels court trumpeter. Then, when the Duke of Weissenfels paid a visit to the 1729 New Year’s Fair in Leipzig, Bach performed for him (on January 12) the homage cantata “O angenehme Melodei,” BWV 210a. Less than six weeks later, Bach spent several days in Weissenfels for guest performances at the duke’s birthday festivities,1 most likely the occasion at which he was awarded the honorary post;2 he was now capellmeister to a ducal court that was politically more prestigious than the principality of Anhalt-Cöthen, musically more richly endowed,3 and, at just over twenty miles from Leipzig, even closer than Cöthen.
An event in July 1729 with multiple repercussions for the Saxon-Thuringian music world, if not for Bach himself, was the death of Johann David Heinichen, court capellmeister in Dresden. Formerly choral scholar at St. Thomas’s under Johann Kuhnau, a graduate of Leipzig University, and two years Bach’s senior, Heinichen had headed the most important musical establishment in German lands. Only months before his death, the Leipzig newspapers had announced that his voluminous treatise Der Gen
eral-Bass in der Composition, published the previous year, was available from Bach in Leipzig—one of the many signs of Bach’s close ties with his esteemed colleague from the Dresden court capelle, an institution he now regarded with even greater envy, realizing that his lack of background in Italian opera rendered him ineligible for that capellmeistership. Yet whoever did succeed Heinichen in nearby Dresden, Bach knew that the appointment would have more than a ripple effect on the wider surroundings.
Another death, however, occurred much closer to home. Professor Johann Heinrich Ernesti passed away that October at age seventy-seven, and the resulting vacancy of the St. Thomas rectorate lasted over eleven months, ending only with the arrival of Johann Matthias Gesner. The unanimous election of the new rector by the city council on June 8, 1730, prompted councillor Höltzel to remark that he “wished that it would be better than with the cantor.”4 This grievance by a single council member remained unspecific, but it could only have referred to Bach’s “capellmeisterly” conduct of the cantorate. Indeed, the accumulation of activities undertaken by the St. Thomas senior faculty beyond the school service proper, with the cantor apparently up front, motivated a clause in the contract with Gesner. Contrary to long-standing tradition, the agreement prevented him from accepting a university office—the very point that soon led to the premature departure from Leipzig of this extraordinary scholar and pedagogue and a condition that was then conspicuously not applied to his successor.5 On the other hand, Gesner’s rectorate was greeted with much enthusiasm and high expectations, as his arrival signaled a promising new beginning that was to be visibly underscored by a sweeping renovation of the St. Thomas School building in 1731–32. Bach himself, foremost among those who welcomed the new rector and may even have helped lure him to Leipzig, would benefit from the construction project like nobody else. It seems all the more puzzling, then, that despite these mostly favorable developments, Bach seemed to find himself at a crossroads, as he makes clear in a letter of October 28, 1730, to his classmate from Latin school days, Georg Erdmann:
This post was described to me in such favorable terms that finally (particularly since my sons seemed inclined toward [university] studies) I cast my lot, in the name of the Lord, and made my journey to Leipzig, took my examination, and then made the change of position. Here, by God’s will, I am still in service. But since (1) I find that the post is by no means so lucrative as it was described to me; (2) I have failed to obtain many of the fees pertaining to the office; (3) the place is very expensive; and (4) the authorities are odd and little interested in music, so that I must live amid almost continual vexation, envy, and persecution; accordingly I shall be forced, with God’s help, to seek my fortune elsewhere. Should Your Honor know or find a suitable post in your city for an old and faithful servant, I beg you most humbly to put in a most gracious word of recommendation for me—I shall not fail to do my best to give satisfaction and justify your most gracious intercession in my behalf. My present post amounts to about 700 talers, and when there are rather more funerals than usual, the fees rise in proportion; but when a healthy wind blows, they fall accordingly, as for example last year, when I lost fees that would ordinarily come in from funerals to an amount of more than 100 talers. In Thuringia I could get along better on 400 talers than here with twice that many, because of the excessively high cost of living.6
This is a set of extraordinarily honest statements made in a private letter by a frustrated man who had never failed to do his best but had waited in vain for official recognition of his accomplishments over seven years as composer and performer of an unparalleled repertoire of music for Leipzig’s main churches. Bach now painfully realized that his regular income as cantor depended in part on soft money and that, for example, the “more than 100 talers” from funeral fees could not be counted on. In addition, he now understood much better the cost of living in a large commercial city ten times the size of a small princely residential town. He also saw the discrepancy between a fixed salary of 400 talers and the misleading—even outright false—promises of “favorable terms” (1,000–1,200 talers) described to him in 1723 when he applied for the cantorate. In his calculations, Bach omitted earnings from his new Collegium Musicum commitments and from other activities such as giving private instruction, performing recitals, and examining organs, but such additional income would also have counted separately from a fixed salary.
Why did Bach reveal his dissatisfaction to Erdmann? The two had last exchanged letters in 1726,7 but it is clear from the opening of Bach’s 1730 letter that he wanted to respond to a request from his old friend to provide “some news of what had happened to [him].” So writing the letter gave Bach, above all, an opportunity to let off steam. It is unlikely that he contacted Erdmann about any specific position in faraway Danzig, a city about whose musical scene he would hardly have known anything except by hearsay. The only position of some distinction was held by Maximilian Dietrich Freißlich, capellmeister at St. Mary’s Church, a Thuringian by birth who was approaching the age of seventy. If Bach had heard a rumor about Freißlich’s frail health (indeed, he would die on April 10, 1731), he would have been informed only incompletely, because Freißlich’s stepbrother Johann Balthasar Christian, the former court capellmeister at Schwarzburg-Sondershausen (with close ties to Arnstadt), had already moved to Danzig in 1729–30 to prepare for the succession at St. Mary’s.8 Moreover, the musical conditions and the pay would definitely have been less attractive than those in Leipzig, and Danzig could not offer comparable schooling opportunities for his sons. For all these reasons, it is hard to imagine that Bach seriously speculated about St. Mary’s in Danzig.
At the time he wrote to Erdmann, Bach could look forward to a collaborative relationship with a new rector and to new ventures involving the Collegium Musicum. At the same time, though, he must have felt locked into his Leipzig post and its disappointing financial setting, which paled in comparison to the prestigious, truly lucrative, and altogether attractive capellmeister opening at Dresden, previously held by a St. Thomas graduate. But Bach knew full well that the Dresden court was on the lookout for someone to reestablish its Italian opera company, which had collapsed a decade earlier in the wake of Antonio Lotti’s departure (Johann Adolph Hasse would be invited in 1731, but not formally appointed until December 1, 1733). Nevertheless, Dresden played a role in Bach’s thinking when he reevaluated his situation in Leipzig. He would need more than the rector’s support. The immediate context for the fourth point raised in the Erdmann letter—“the authorities are odd and little interested in music”—may be garnered from the memorandum Bach had sent two months earlier, on August 23, to the Leipzig city council and to which he had not yet received a reply (which never materialized; perhaps the Erdmann letter was even prompted by a verbal notification that there would be no reply). In this memorandum, which he titled “Short but Most Necessary Draft for a Well-Appointed Church Music,” Bach outlined his concept for significant improvements and demanded better pay for his instrumentalists, who, for worry about bread, “cannot think of improving.” And here he drew a direct comparison with the musical conditions in the Saxon capital, clearly in the hope that the city fathers, always wary about Dresden’s dominance, would feel challenged: “To illustrate this statement with an example one need only go to Dresden and see how the musicians there are paid by his Royal Majesty. It cannot fail, since the musicians there are relieved of all concern for their living, free from chagrin and obliged each to master but a single instrument; it must be something choice and excellent to hear.”9
From Bach’s perspective, it was indeed an odd government that expected him to bring luster to the city by mounting regular performances of the finest conceivable church music with essentially the same setting and budget that Kuhnau had had at his disposal. How could they expect him to attract and inspire the university students with stipends that “should have been increased rather than diminished”? The authorities were indeed showing little interest in music if they would
not even agree with his concept, let alone meet his demands. From their own penny-pinching perspective, however, it was hard to understand why the cantor needed more money. To their ears, the performances went well, and they were surely impressed with a work of such unprecedented proportions and size of performing forces as the St. Matthew Passion. They thought the cantor was doing very well, raising funds for his projects by selling text booklets and by other means, and even enlarging his pool of musicians by drawing the Collegium Musicum from the New Church into the musical establishment of St. Thomas’s and St. Nicholas’s. If he was able to attract the best musicians in town, why spend more money? But the authorities did not understand how much Bach struggled; they did not see that he was weary of asking his musicians to play for very little or nothing, and that these musicians were forced by circumstances to accept money-making engagements for weddings and other private events rather than take the time to practice and rehearse Bach’s challenging works. Most of the city fathers thus failed to understand Bach’s primary concern, namely “that the state of music is quite different from what it was, since our artistry has increased very much, and [as] the taste has changed astonishingly, and accordingly the former style of music no longer seems to please our ears, considerable help is therefore all the more needed to choose and appoint such musicians as will satisfy the present musical taste, master the new kinds of music, and thus be in a position to do justice to the composer and his work.” The intent of Bach’s memorandum could not have been more to the point, but the council apparently lacked the political will to respond positively; and the long-standing skepticism about the ambitious capellmeister-cantor among councillors who wanted to see more of a modest schoolmaster-cantor did not help. These people would have viewed Bach’s declaration pitting the “different state of music,” “increased artistry,” and “changed taste” against the “former style of music” primarily as self-serving. Why such opulent instrumentation, why such difficult technical demands on the musicians if a scaled-down version would do just as well? Why not hold the person creating these excessive needs responsible for meeting the demand rather than have the state pay for it? If the cantor could mount an extravaganza like the St. Matthew Passion in two presentations, 1727 and 1729, requiring twice as many forces as a normal cantata, his persuasive skills could have known few bounds.
Johann Sebastian Bach Page 49