Delphi Masterworks of Johann Sebastian Bach (Illustrated) (Delphi Great Composers Book 3)

by Peter Russell

  The secular post which Bach also held at Leipzig gave a wide opening for compositions specially in this style. The purpose of musical clubs, said his predecessor Kuhnau, in his Musicalischer Quack-Salber, written in 1700, is for musicians ever to exercise themselves farther in their noble calling, and withal from the pleasant harmony to establish among themselves so like a sweet-sounding agreement of tempers, as oftentimes is mainly lacking in their conversation. We may think of Bach as realising this description, as he presided over the amateur gatherings held on winter-nights in a coffee-*house in the Katharinenstrasse, or in summer of an afternoon in a garden outside the town in the Windmühlengasse. These informal concerts lasted two hours, and took place weekly, or twice a week during the great popular festivals of Leipzig, the quarterly fairs.

  We have no express evidence of what purely instrumental compositions Bach wrote for the society. No doubt he revived the chamber-music he had composed at Coethen; and the bulk of his concertos dating from Leipzig would probably be performed at its meetings. The works which are known to have been produced there are chiefly a string of secular cantatas — perhaps we should rather say serenatas, though the actual title is specifically Dramma per Musica. To these we may add the other compositions which are described simply as for the university students in general, with whom from the first he was in constant request at times of rejoicing, birthdays of favourite teachers, their election as professors, and a multitude of festive occasions prompted by the accustomed loyalty of undergraduates. These pieces are commonly distinguished as dramatic chamber-music; but it must be borne in mind that, although hardly ever acted in costume, they were often presented, not in a room, but with the natural scenery, for instance, of a garden. Bach rarely spent his best work on such ephemeral displays — they mostly had to be got ready in a few days — and whenever he found afterwards that he had included in them anything in his judgment worth preserving, he incorporated it in a church cantata or some more lasting composition. In this way nearly the whole of a drama, written for the Queen’s birthday in 1733, came subsequently to form part of the Christmas oratorio. But we must guard against the inference that Bach was careless of the relation between music and words. On the contrary, we have the distinct statement of a friend, himself a teacher of rhetoric at Leipzig, that Bach’s mastery over the qualities and the excellencies which music has in common with rhetoric is such as not only to add unfailing pleasure to his discourses upon the likeness and correspondency between them, but also to move our admiration at the skilful use of his principles in his works. So wrote Magister Birnbaum in 1739; and the importance which Agricola, who was Bach’s pupil for three years, attaches to the study of rhetoric by musicians, was probably caught from his teacher. The truth is that Bach was before all things a sacred composer, and when he adopts in a sacred work that which had once belonged to something secular, it is not from haste, indifference, or a want of fertility, but purely because the piece would find its proper home in a sacred setting. It does not surprise us, therefore, to find that he habitually brought up old compositions, with new words, for the festivities for which he was called upon to provide, and that many of them have entirely perished, their existence being only known from the circulated programme.

  The following seven cantatas are all that remain: — 1. In honour of Dr. Mueller,39 3rd August, 1725. 2. On the Promotion of Professor G. Kortte,40 11th December, 1726. 3. The Contest of Phœus and Pan,41 1731. 4. Hercules at the Boundary,42 5th September, 1733. 5. At the Queen’s Birthday, 8th December, 1733. 6. At a Royal Visit to Leipzig, 5th October, 1734. 7. At the King’s Birthday,43 7th October, 1734.

  Of these the third alone can claim more than a limited appreciation; and this has a novel interest outside the music, in certain satirical allusions, under the character of Midas, to one Scheibe, a poor musician, whom Bach had rejected as candidate for an organistship, and who never lost an opportunity of showing his ill-will against the too rhadamanthyne judge.44

  This satire connects the student-cantatas with two works of a professed humourous character. One is the so-called Coffee-cantata, which turns upon the comparatively modern rage for coffee, supplanting all human joys and interests. Comic pieces of this sort were not unknown in Bach’s time. His cousin Nikolaus had written one called the Tapster of Jena, and in a kindred vein Bach inserted a most sympathetic ditty upon his tobacco-pipe in one of the books he wrote for his wife.45 But the genial side of Bach’s temper is best reflected in his Cantate en Burlesque, known as the Peasant’s Cantata.46 It was composed in 1742 for a feast-day in a village near Leipzig to celebrate the coming of a new landlord, and is full of a frolicsome gaiety that looks like the freshness of a young man’s work; only we know, for instance, from the Winter’s Tale, that such may often shew the mellowed spirit of older years. The libretto is made up of badinage, more or less clumsy, between the countrymen, who like their own old fashion of doing honour to their lord, and the upstarts who try to introduce a new-*fangled courtly style. The genuine swains get the better of it, and have a great deal to say for themselves in a rough way, starting in the true Saxon brogue, and breaking out into popular songs which were in every one’s mouth at the time. The music, which is never vulgar, is certainly the lightest that Bach wrote; but the volkslieder do not stand alone in his works. Two such songs he has wrought with inimitable art and charm into the Quodlibet which closes his thirty variations in G.

  The list of Bach’s secular cantatas is completed by some wedding-music,47 and by the pieces he wrote for state occasions. Three of the latter, all birthday cantatas, remain.48 One was composed in 1716 for the Duke of Saxe-Weissenfels, when the event was celebrated by a great hunt;49 the second is a serenade for the Prince of Coethen, perhaps in 1717;50 and the third, for his second consort, in 1726.51 Of far greater importance must have been the Dirges which Bach composed for mourning solemnities, and which are indeed only distinguished from the rest of his church music by the personal reference. The music he wrote in 1729 on the death of his patron is lost; but it is supposed to have been to a great extent built upon the S. Matthew Passion. That which he composed, however, two years earlier, for the Queen of Poland remains to us, and apparently was subsequently re-*erected into the (now lost) Passion according to S. Mark.52 On these occasions the appointed mourning did not begin for some months, and Bach had therefore time to devote thought to them such as he was not able to give in the hurried seasons of rejoicing. In itself, the more weighty occasion stirred him to deeper reflexion, and the Dirge for Queen Christine Eberhardine is of more value than all his secular cantatas put together. It shows Bach to us in his native sphere, that of a church composer, and leads naturally to the consideration of his work as such in its wider manifestations.

  His church cantatas are among the earliest and the most mature of Bach’s productions; but the bulk of them were written while he was cantor at Leipzig. Barely thirty can be assigned to an earlier period, while from 1723 onwards he set himself to compose a complete cycle for five church years — near 300 cantatas — in which of course he inserted his younger works, though never without a scrupulous revision. Of this marvellous series about two hundred remain. Musicians owe an incalculable debt to Dr. Spitta for the exhaustive scrutiny to which he has subjected every individual number; and although his results, which will be found tabulated at the end of this volume, are in a certain degree tentative, yet their general accuracy can hardly fail to be accepted. In comparatively few cases does the doubt as the chronological place of a cantata extend over more than four years; and the student is therefore for the first time enabled to place each one with security in its proper setting in the total list of Bach’s works.

  But it is not the number, but the wonderful variety, individual character, and consummate workmanship, of the church cantatas, that make them an absolutely unique phænomenon in music. It is hardly necessary to say that they have nothing in common with the Italian cantata, which was a mere operatic scena for solo voices.53 The church cantata may be
roughly called a short oratorio. Its component parts are one or more choruses and chorales with recitatives and solo airs; but the form is as elastic as that of the modern sonata, and one at least of the elements may often be absent. In Bach’s hands the type was enlarged in more than one direction, especially under the influence of the instrumental music of Italy. His first preserved cantata, dating perhaps from 1704, shows how he was abandoning the purely polyphonic treatment, which the Germans had adopted but never been at ease with, and creating for himself his own manipulation of voices in an instrumental manner. When at Weimar he pursued his studies through the entire range of Italian chamber-music accessible to him, the effect was not to make him in any sense imitate them. His chamber-music is almost wholly of later date. What he did was to apply the forms of the sonata and concerto to the clavichord, the organ, and above all to the church cantata. In this way he brought to perfection his art of writing solo-arias, of which the earlier examples are so complete and mature as to leave no room for future improvement. Here accordingly he made little change in the course of his later composing; and the same holds good for his treatment of the recitative, arioso, and simple chorale. The variety he threw into the structure of the cantata is infinite. Sometimes a whole cantata takes the shape of a concerto, or of an orchestral partie; sometimes its second division is opened by a regular chamber-sonata. An overture in French style is combined with a freely-imagined chorus, even with a chorale. Dance-measures, the passacaglia, even the jig, are not excluded; and a chorale has its counterpoint in a siciliano. Everywhere instrumental forms are applied, in a way hitherto unsuspected, to the development of church-music. Now a chorale is played by the orchestra in the midst of a recitative, as though to set a bound to its unmeasured phrases: now the recitative appears as a personal application of the thought between the lines of a chorale. But the influences of the master’s boyhood are not forgotten: except in the arias, the organ is the main basis of his cantata-style; and Pachelbel, Boehm, Buxtehude, have still their reminiscence, in a more glorious apparel. The old forms are broadened, and combined, with inconceivable fancy, with one another and with the new forms which Bach devised for himself.

  It is in the choruses, however, that the Leipzig cantatas rise above the works of Bach’s earlier time. The great choruses which he wrote at Weimar, for instance, the splendid one that opens Ich hatte viel Bekümmerniss, are indeed models of his instrumental treatment. The difference between his early and later writing is rather the uniform massiveness and magnificence of the latter — the more complete absorption in them of the organ-style. Though generally formed on a figured subject, they are wrought with far greater freedom and force. The choruses, based upon the melody of a chorale, are unmatched in depth and grandeur, and it was to these, the rich embodiment of his strenuous religious sense, that Bach turned with peculiar affection in his later years; a long series of cantatas in which they take the chief place were written by him from 1735 onwards.

  Yet, it must be confessed that the church cantatas suffer exceedingly from the poverty of the texts to which they are written. Unless Bach draws directly from the Bible or from the old chorale-hymns — for the chorales have a mine of poetry within their rough mass — there are few places in which one is not repelled by the tastelessness of the rhymes he had to use. Bach himself seems at one time to have been conscious of their inadequacy and to have returned to the nervous religious poetry of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. One cannot but suspect that the finer judgment of Gesner — they all bear traces of having been composed during his stay at Leipzig — had something to do with the improved choice of subject. But commonly the texts are derived from three contemporary poetasters, Franck and Neumeister of Weimar and Picander of Leipzig. The last was a neighbour of Bach’s and a docile follower. In fact we cannot, where he was concerned, exculpate Bach from a certain responsibility for the texts. Certainly Picander wrote as he was bid, and would alter as Bach told him. But probably the musician felt that he could do no better than employ so convenient a hack, and it would be going beyond all we know of his life to assume that the artistic sensibility which swayed him in matters musical extended also into the domain of letters. He was content if the meaning of the words agreed with the music.

  It remains to add that all the church cantatas are written for orchestra, but for an orchestra of very varying compass, ranging from the simple bass, which accompanies the recitative, to dimensions scarcely inferior to those of modern times; only Bach seldom employed the whole available body at once. He liked to have a reserve, to prevent the music of one Sunday being exactly like its neighbour; and he was specially fond of keeping an instrument to come out prominently as the obbligato accompaniment of an aria.

  Among the cantatas there stands a composition of a partly different character. This is the Ascension Oratorio, which connects itself by its title with the two more important works of the same sort which Bach has left, namely, the Easter and Christmas Oratorios, written respectively in 1734 and 1736. The second has the nearest resemblance of the three to what we know as oratorios elsewhere: the last, by far the greatest, is divided into six parts, for performance on Christmas and the two days following, New Year’s Day, the first Sunday in the year, and the Epiphany. It has, however, a unity of feeling running through it, which stamps it as a single work. We have already noticed and explained the presence here of much that had previously formed part of secular cantatas; but it may be added that there is the less incongruity in the case when we consider how largely the rejoicing of Christmastide was mixed up with social festivities. That Bach, however, was careful lest the deeper meaning of the incarnation should be forgotten, is shown by the employment of the melody of a well-known Passion chorale — his favourite O Haupt voll Blut und Wunden — which occurs twice, the second time with an exuberance of instrumental accompaniment to close the work. The Oratorio has by this time become so familiar in England that it is perhaps unnecessary to describe its structure. Nothing of Bach surpasses it in the warm life of its choruses or the delicate charm of its airs — the purity of one alto song, Bereite dich, Zion, or the idyllic beauty of another, Schlafe, mein Liebster, than which no lovelier lullaby has ever been written.

  Before noticing the mysteries which Bach consecrated to the history of the Passion — works by the side of which the Christmas Oratorio takes a worthy place, rather by virtue of its great compass and masterly performance, than by any close affinity of scheme — we may complete the summary of his German works by a brief mention of the Motets.

  The motet may be described as a sacred madrigal: in other words, it is written in several parts, commonly four, five, six, or eight; it does not require an instrumental accompaniment; and it is set to a text from the Bible, or a verse from a church hymn. It was a style of composition entirely polyphonic, which had gradually declined in popularity as instrumental music and especially solo singing came into vogue. And it is one of Bach’s great services to church-music to have revived it, so that in the present day the weekly motet-singing in his own Church at Leipzig remains one of the most popular institutions of the town. Contrary, however, to the custom now, Bach seems to have had the motets accompanied, apparently on the organ; and this fact indicates their principal distinction from the older style. They are in fact based upon an organ treatment, and have precise parallels in several chorale-movements in the church cantatas. Few, however, have survived the carelessness of Bach’s successors at the Thomasschule, though their melodious figuration and religious sublimity might, one would have thought, have secured their unintermitted performance there. When Mozart came to Leipzig in 1789, and heard one of them (No. 5) he exclaimed, Here is a new thing from which I may learn, and, finding that the piece existed only in parts, he ranged them round the room until he had mastered their structure. The following are all that remain, not included in the body of church cantatas: —

  1. Lobet den Herrn54 for four voices;

  2. Nun danket alle Gott for five;

  3. Jesu,
meine Freude, also for five;

  4. Der Geist hilft unsrer Schwachheit auf;

  5. Singet den Herrn ein neues Lied;

  6. Fürchte dich nicht;

  7. Komm, Jesu, komm; the last four for a double chorus of eight voices.

  CHAPTER VII.

  Bach is stated to have written a Passion music in five different shapes. Two of these are the familiar Passions according to S. Matthew and S. John, which are the truest reflexion of the master’s genius in his ripest years. The other three were long supposed to have been lost, unless a S. Luke Passion, which exists in Bach’s autograph, might possibly be claimed as his work. Lately, however, the acute study of Dr. Rust has discovered part of a S. Mark Passion to lie hid under the guise of the Dirge for the Queen of Poland, Bach having sought in this way to give permanence to a work of which the original motive was merely fugitive;55 and Professor Spitta has made it probable that Bach also wrote the music to a Passion following the text of no single evangelist, which was produced at the Thomaskirche in 1725.56 He further offers an elaborate and conclusive defence of the genuineness of the S. Luke Passion, which he places without hesitation in the early years of Bach’s residence at Weimar.57