Johann Sebastian Bach

by Christoph Wolff

  Forkel does not exaggerate. Although he provides no examples, there are numerous instances where indeed the change of a single note makes a tremendous difference. One need only compare the initial melodic contour of the principal theme of the “Confiteor” fugal movement from the B-minor Mass, BWV 232/20, as notated in the autograph score with its final shape (Ex. 10.1). Here Bach changed the third note in order to avoid undue emphasis on the third syllable “confiteor,” thereby also mollifying the melodic flow of the subject. A revision like this is not driven by any other than a purely musical consideration, and illustrates Bach’s fine sensitivity. It shows the degree of attention he paid to the most subtle details of his scores, increasingly with advanced age and growing experience as a teacher-composer.96

  In sheer compositional prowess, Bach moved at the highest levels of artistic achievement beginning in the later Arnstadt years, gradually conquering technique after technique, genre after genre, and quickly gaining complete control over the material he tackled. We can, however, observe a noticeable change in his attitude that emerged in the late 1720s and prevailed from the 1730s on. This change seems related to, or may even have been prompted by, Bach’s having a large repertoire of vocal and instrumental compositions on hand for reuse and repeat performances. Now his composing and performing of new works stood side by side with re-performances of older works, primarily church compositions and keyboard music—a situation by no means typical of other composers, who for the most part opted for composing more new works. Thus, Telemann wrote over a thousand sacred cantatas, and Johann Friedrich Fasch and Gottfried Heinrich Stölzel produced no fewer, but neither of them taught to the extent Bach did. Regularly turning to The Well-Tempered Clavier, for example, sharpened his eye and ear for compositional choices that are reflected in his continued revisions—a steady stream of minor and major changes made in the autograph score or entered into student copies. It is futile in this case, as in most of his keyboard works, to differentiate between distinct layers or versions because the situation cannot be compared with the careful revisions he undertook, for example, in the St. John Passion. In the pieces he tended to use for teaching purposes, Bach’s never-ending review process was more haphazard than systematic, often affecting only a short passage or a single detail (see Ex. 10.2)—perhaps one flaw detected and “corrected” on the spot in the course of a lesson.

  Considering Bach’s immense facility at the organ and clavier, it may come as a surprise to learn that he ordinarily composed away from the keyboard, as son Carl testified in 1775: “If I exclude some (but, nota bene not all) of his clavier pieces, particularly those for which he took the material from improvisations on the clavier, he composed everything else without instrument, but later tried it out on one.”97 Many initial corrections may have resulted from Bach’s checking his scores at the keyboard or—depending on the kind of work or passage—on the violin or some other instrument. The essential work, however, took place at the desk in his studio, which provided him with all he needed: stacks of paper; black (or dark-brown) and red ink pots and a supply of copper-gallic ink powder to be mixed with water;98 raven quills and a knife for preparing and sharpening quill pens (the same knife was used also for erasing mistakes after the ink had dried); single and double rastrals for ruling individual five-line staves or double (keyboard) staves; a straight ruler for drawing long bar lines in fair-copy scores; a box of fine sand to blot the ink; and (though rarely used) lead pencils. Bach clearly preferred to plan the layout of a page according to the structural needs of the music, so he avoided pre-ruled music paper. In this way, he also saved on the expensive commodity of paper suitable for music, which had to be more opaque than that used for correspondence and printing, and heavier because the sheets had to hold up on music stands. Bach’s autograph scores invariably reflect the composer’s space-saving efforts—for example, running a two-stave recitative underneath a multiline chorus score.

  The 1730s prompted from Bach an unusually large number of works, although their texts usually made specific references to this king’s name day or that prince’s birthday, rendering them unsuitable for repeat performances. Since these works invariably required considerable effort on the part of the composer, Bach had an understandable interest in rescuing the music he created for unique occasions and granting it a permanent place in the repertoire, albeit with a different text. More often than not, this meant converting secular works to church music. Since the Renaissance era, parody techniques had been widely employed for the adaptation, with new text underlay, of secular works for sacred music, and, like his contemporaries, Bach made use of the practice: as when, for example, he integrated Cöthen serenades into the first cycle of Leipzig church cantatas in 1724.

  The parody process involved not only careful fitting of a new text to the old music, but also close attention to the relationship between the meaning of the words and the affect and character of the music. Other considerations, such as scoring and key changes, also played a role when a single movement was placed in a new context (rarely could a complete work be transformed into another complete work; BWV 173 of 1724 is one such rare instance). As a case in point, the Christmas Oratorio, BWV 248, one of the principal works to benefit from the availability of recent adaptable secular music, demonstrates Bach’s imaginative musical selection and technical manipulation. His reuse of his own composition was motivated not by any intention of cutting corners—that is, turning to existing music out of convenience—but by rescuing important material for a more durable purpose. Hence, virtually all choruses and arias from the congratulatory birthday cantatas, the drammi per musica BWV 213–214 of September and December 1733, were adopted in late 1734 for the oratorio; only recitatives and chorales had to be newly composed, and Bach used these to create fresh and compelling connections between movements that had originally known a different sequence of textual content and musical ideas.

  Nothing made more sense to Bach than to use the birthday music for a royal family as music to celebrate the nativity of Christ, the king of heaven. The common themes of praise and rejoicing readily applied to both events. Likewise, as the treatment of allegorical and mythological figures did not in principle differ from that of biblical characters, the lullaby for a son of the gods from the Hercules Cantata BWV 213 could address the Christ child equally well. As the musical forms and idioms of secular and sacred cantatas were generally identical, the broader palette of musical affects and expressive devices matched as well. But in order to write new poetry for existing music, the meter and rhyme of the verse and the lyrical form had to correspond, as shown by the opening chorus of the Christmas Oratorio and its model, where dactylic meter (long, short, short), weak and strong line endings (ws-ws-ww), rhyme scheme (ab-ab-cc), and da capo structure (A-B-A) completely conform:

  While the overall character of praise determines the content of both the original poem and its parody, Bach’s score translates the opening phrase of the secular poem (“Sound, ye drums! Ring out, trumpets! Resonant strings, fill the air!”) literally into music: the timpani start the piece, trumpets follow suit, then the strings enter. This detail is lost in the musical parody, as Bach generally—and in his sacred music especially—stresses “the sense of the whole” over punctuation on individual words. Carl Philipp Emanuel explained to Forkel in 1774: “As to the church works of the deceased, it may be mentioned that he worked devoutly, governing himself by the content of the text, without any strange misplacing of the words, and without elaborating on the individual words at the expense of the sense of the whole, as a result of which ridiculous thoughts often appear, such as sometime arouse the admiration of people who claim to be connoisseurs and are not.”99

  More complex compositional concerns were reflected in the internal musical logic of the “new” work, as Bach’s key organization, transpositions, and scoring changes make clear (see Table 10.8). In the secular cantata BWV 213, in F major, Bach uses the sequence of its arias most effectively to contrast flat and sharp keys, t
hereby supporting the theme of this dramatic cantata, Hercules at the Crossroads, by means of musical allegory (Table 10.8B). He alters this scheme, which would be entirely unsuitable for the Christmas Oratorio, by transposing all the arias into a completely new tonal design that gives the six-part oratorio its own, internally coherent key structures and scoring devices. This coherence is displayed, for example, in the symmetry of parts I–III, to be performed on the three days of Christmas, with identical brass scoring and home keys (D major) for the framing parts. Part IV, then, marks New Year’s Day with both a new key and the introduction of horns in the orchestral ensemble; part V, for the lesser feast on the Sunday after New Year’s, tones down the instrumental scoring but counterbalances the subdominant G-major key of part II (with its pastoral woodwind ensemble) with the dominant A major of the main key, D major, which returns, along with trumpets and timpani, in the concluding part VI for the glorious feast of Epiphany.

  From the eloquent musical architecture of the Christmas Oratorio, we can see that the parody projects that engaged Bach during the 1730s involved multidimensional tasks, of which the mere process of musical transcription was usually the least important. Going back to a piece of music written earlier was invariably turned by Bach into an opportunity to carefully review the work and revise and improve the score. This was especially the case when, rather than adopting a secular occasional piece for the sacred repertoire, he converted a movement from a church cantata into another sacred work. Examples can be found in the Kyrie-Gloria Masses, which are based prevailingly on sacred compositions. For all five Masses, Bach selected cantata movements of particularly refined and sublime qualities. A different parody technique was required, since the asymmetric Latin prose of the Mass text was fundamentally different from German metrical poetry. A striking example of Bach’s enhancing a movement already possessed of extraordinary quality occurs in the “Qui tollis” movement of the Mass in F major, BWV 233, which is based on an aria from the cantata “Herr, deine Augen sehen nach dem Glauben,” BWV 102, of 1726:

  Cantata, BWV 102/3

  Mass, BWV 233/4

  Weh der Seele, die den Schaden

  Qui tollis peccata mundi,

  Nicht mehr kennt.

  Miserere nobis.

  Und, die Straf auf sich zu laden

  Störrig rennt,

  Ja, von ihres Gottes Gnaden

  Selbst sich trennt.

  The expressive qualities of the entire cantata movement concentrate in the initial outcry “woe” (“Weh”), translated by Bach into a wailing oboe solo that, with its parallel vocal response, serves the image of suffering in the “Qui tollis” Mass section equally well (Ex. 10.3). Bach has much less text to distribute under the vocal part of the Mass movement, which is kept at exactly the same length. But the declamatory style of the instrumental and vocal gestures are modified in order to generate a more intense expressive rhetoric and, at the same time, greater textural transparency, notably by means of a delicately withdrawn continuo line. The result is a simpler and airier trio in a stylistically more forward-looking setting, typical of Bach’s music throughout the 1730s. The composer was constantly adjusting to influences and challenges from outside, especially within the context of an ongoing public concert series that featured modern instrumental and vocal works, including novel, freshly imported Italian solo cantatas by Nicola Porpora.100 But while the signs of growth and development in his music from the 1730s were an outcome of his exposure to new music of other composers, they were equally the result of an abiding confrontation with his own creative efforts.

  It is the combination of external influences and constant refinement, compounded by his sustained teaching activities, that raised the level of Bach’s compositional art by yet another noticeable margin. Nowhere is this elevation more immediately perceptible than in his four-part chorales. Bach’s chorale style in his first dozen Leipzig years cogently documents the changes in his principles of composition. If we view his chorale settings in their original context as part of the cantata repertoire, we cannot help but discern a line of development that culminates in the Christmas Oratorio of 1734–35. Having harmonized over the decades hundreds of chorales and having taught the skill to scores of students, Bach still found it possible to break through even his own conventions. For the chorale settings of the Christmas Oratorio reveal a new degree of polyphonic sophistication, elegance of voice leading, and immediacy of expression. A comparison between the first chorale of the oratorio and a setting of the same tune from the first Leipzig cantata cycle underscores the difference (Ex. 10.4). Note-against-note style has virtually disappeared, as the melodic-rhythmic profiles of all four actively participating voices—with a balanced distribution of passing tones, suspensions, and syncopation—join in an even flow whose musical message both encapsulates and highlights the textual meaning of the whole stanza.

  Bach, predisposed from the very beginning toward traversing conventional boundaries, nevertheless preferred to work within a given framework and accept the challenges it posed. He never tired of exploring the material at hand on yet a deeper level—whether it was a melody from a hymnbook, music written by someone else, or one of his own compositions. Multiple examples exist for all three:

  (1) Clavier-Übung III demonstrates Bach’s abiding interest in elaborating the classic hymn melodies, inventing suitable counterpoints for compact or extended settings, and probing various techniques of cantus firmus treatment in different voice ranges, stylistic configurations, or canonic imitation. His affinity for polyphonic complexities enticed him to apply contrapuntal designs even where they had no natural home. He thus managed to enhance a perfect cantabile-style melody such as that of the Air in the orchestral Suite in D major, BWV 1068—not by repressing the second violin and viola parts but by activating them contrapuntally against the first violin, which carries the melody. Similarly, he gives greater weight to the leading upper voice (transverse flute doubled by violin I) of the Sarabande in the orchestral Suite in B minor, BWV 1067, by running a strict canonic imitation of it in the basso continuo, at the distance of one measure and the interval of a fifth (a canon that is, incidentally, so smoothly conceived that even a well-trained ear can easily miss it).

  (2) Bach’s copies of a Magnificat by Antonio Caldara and of the Stabat Mater by Giovanni Battista Pergolesi reveal his curiosity in finding out whether certain sections might be improved, from his perspective at least, by creating a denser texture resulting from added voices. Caldara’s “Suscepit Israel” for four voices and continuo, for example, is supplied with two violin parts in Bach’s arrangement, BWV 1082, of 1739–42, which significantly expands the polyphonic texture of the setting; yet it does so without affecting the compositional substance of the score, because the new parts are derived from the substance of the old. Likewise, Bach supplements the essentially three-part texture in Pergolesi’s instrumental score by inserting a contrapuntal viola part at certain sections in his arrangement, BWV 1083 (from the same period). Here, Bach is exercising constructive criticism on the Italian’s (unquestionably deliberate) lightening of the instrumental accompaniment by leading the viola part parallel to the continuo. Bach clearly enjoyed toying with other composers’ scores; as Carl Philipp Emanuel reported in 1774 about his father, “He accompanied trios on more than one occasion on the spur of the moment and, being in a good humor and knowing that the composer would not take it amiss, and on the basis of a sparsely figured continuo part just set before him, converted them into complete quartets, astounding the composer of the trios.”101 The Trio for violin and harpsichord in A major, BWV 1025, from around 1740, is a good example. Here Bach expands on a lute suite by Silvius Leopold Weiss of the Dresden court capelle by adding a contrapuntal line to the original lute part that alternates between the violin and the right hand of the keyboard.

  (3) Beyond the more conventional processes of transcribing an existing concerto for a different medium, revising and improving a keyboard, vocal, or instrumental score, or pa
rodying a secular or sacred cantata, Bach’s rewriting of his own music often resulted in a thorough and complete transformation of the original. One of the most remarkable examples of this kind is represented by the sinfonia to cantata BWV 29, for concertato organ, 3 trumpets, timpani, 2 oboes, strings, and continuo, first performed at the annual city council election service on August 27, 1731. The work, based on the opening Preludio of Partita No. 3 in E major for unaccompanied violin, BWV 1006, is a brilliant and complete transformation of a piece originally conceived for a single instrument and notated on a single staff into a fully scored ten-part ensemble work. As Bach was well aware that the original solo composition represented the most advanced kind of violin writing, he made sure that he would not lose that quality in the cantata sinfonia by adding the obbligato organ, an equally novel idea.102 The cantata sinfonia belongs in the wider context of Bach’s keyboard concerto writing that flourished throughout the 1730s and that paved the way for the clavier concertos produced by the generation of his sons and students. Thought out at the composer’s desk, but with the results tested on the keyboard itself, a work like the Harpsichord Concerto in E major, BWV 1053, impressively demonstrates the emancipation of the left hand; we need only compare the rewritten bass part with its model, the sinfonia of cantata BWV 169 (Ex. 10.5 a and b). The many figurative refinements of the original continuo part take on the qualities of wholly idiomatic keyboard writing, something indeed “not yet heard.”