The Age of Voltaire

by Will Durant

  He fought another long battle with the municipal council, which appointed students to the Thomasschule; the councilors tended to send him scholars chosen through political influence rather than for musical capacity; he could make neither treble nor bass out of such newcomers, and on August 23, 1730, he lodged a formal protest with the council. It retorted that he was an incompetent teacher and a poor disciplinarian, that he lost his temper in scolding the students, that disorder was rife in the choirs and the school.49 Bach wrote to a friend at Lüneburg for help in finding another post. None being open to him, he appealed (July 27, 1733) to Augustus III, the new King of Poland, to give him a court position and title that might shield him from the “undeserved affronts” that he received. Augustus took three years to comply; finally (November 19, 1736) he conferred upon Bach the title of königlicher Hofkomponist— composer for the royal court. Meanwhile the new director of the Tomasschule, Johann August Ernesti, contested with Bach the right to appoint, discipline, and flog the choir prefects. The dispute dragged on for months; Bach twice ejected Ernesti’s appointee from the organ gallery; at last the King confirmed Bach’s authority.

  So his life as cantor in Leipzig was not a happy one. His spirit and energy were absorbed in his compositions and their performance; little remained for pedagogy or diplomacy. He found some consolation in his spreading fame as composer and organist. He accepted invitations to play at Weimar, Cassel, Naumburg, and Dresden; he received fees for these incidental performances, and for testing organs. In 1740 his son Karl Philipp Emanuel was engaged as cembalist in the chapel orchestra of Frederick the Great; in 1741 Bach visited Berlin; in 1747 Frederick invited him to come and try the pianofortes recently bought from Gottfried Silbermann. The King was astonished by “old Bach’s” improvisations; he challenged him to extemporize a fugue in six parts, and was delighted with the response. Returning to Leipzig, Bach composed a trio for flute, violin, and clavier, and sent it, with some other pieces, as a Musical Offering—Musikalisches Opfer— dedicated to the royal flutist as “a sovereign admired in music as in all other sciences of war and peace.”50 Aside from such exciting interludes, he gave himself with exhausting devotion to his duties as cantor, to his love for his wife and children, and to the expression of his art and soul in his works.

  2. Compositions

  a. Instrumental

  How shall we be excused for venturing, without professional competence, to survey the magnitude and variety of Bach’s production? Nothing is possible here except a catalogue graced with affection.

  First of all, then, the organ works, for the organ remained his abiding love; there he was unmatched except by Handel, who was lost beyond the seas. Sometimes Bach would pull out all its stops, just to test its lungs and feel its power. On it he disported himself as with an instrument completely under his control, subject to all his fantasies. But in his imperious fashion he set a limit to the willfulness of performers by specifying, through underlying numerals, the chords to be used with the written bass notes; this is the “figured” or “thorough” bass that indicated the continuo by which the organ or harpsichord should accompany other instruments or the voice.

  During his stay at Weimar Bach prepared for his oldest son and other students a “little organ book”—Orgelbüchlein— composed of forty-five chorale preludes and dedicated “to the Highest God alone for His honor, and to my neighbor that he may teach himself thereby.” The function of a chorale prelude was to serve as an instrumental preface to a congregational hymn, to outline its theme and set its mood. The preludes were arranged to form fit sequences for Christmas, Passion Week, and Easter; these events of the ecclesiastical year remained to the end the proccupation of Bach’s organ and vocal music. And here at the outset, in the chorale “Alle Menschen müssen sterben”—All Men Must Die—we meet one of Bach’s recurrent subjects, always tempered with the resolution to face death with faith in Christ’s resurrection as a promise of our own. Years later we shall hear the same note in the somber chorale “Komm, süsser Tod”—Come, Sweet Death. Along with this enveloping piety there is in these preludes, and generally in Bach’s instrumental compositions, a healthy humor; sometimes he runs friskily over the keys in a merriment of variations that recalls the complaints of the Arnstadt Consistory.

  Altogether Bach left 143 chorale preludes, which students of music rank the most characteristic and technically perfect of his works. They are his lyrics, as the Masses and Passions are his epics. He ran the gamut of musical forms, omitting opera as alien to his place, his temperament, and his conception of music as primarily an offering to God. To give his art freer range he added a fugue to the prelude, letting a theme in the bass run after the same theme in the treble, or vice versa, in an intricate game that delighted his contrapuntal soul. So the Prelude and Fugue in E Minor begins with inviting simplicity, then soars to an almost frightening complexity of richness and power. The Prelude and Fugue in D Minor is already Bach at his best in structure, technical workmanship, thematic development, imaginative exuberance, and massive force. Perhaps finer still is the Passacaglia and Fugue in C Minor. The Spaniards gave the name pasacalle to a tune played by a musician “passing along a street”; in Italy it became a dance form; in Bach it is a majestic flow of harmony, at once simple, meditative, and profound.

  For the organ or the clavichord Bach wrote a dozen toccatas—i.e., pieces that could exercise the “touch” of a performer. Usually they included rapid runs over the keyboard, brave fortissimi, delicate pianissimi, and a fugue of notes playfully treading upon one another’s heels. In this group the Toccata and Fugue in D Minor has won the widest audience, partly through orchestral transcriptions more congenial than the organ to the modern unecclesiastical ear. Of the seven toccatas for clavichord or harpsichord, the Toccata in C Minor is again Bach in all his confident mastery of technique—a frolic of counterpoint followed by an adagio of serene and stately loveliness.

  It is difficult for us, with underprivileged fingers and half-illiterate ears, to appreciate the pleasure that Bach took and gave in his compositions for the clavier—which for him usually meant the clavichord. First of all, we should have to understand the principles of structure that he followed in developing a few notes of theme or motive into a complex but orderly elaboration—like the arabesque which, in a Persian carpet or a mosque mihrab, wanders from its base in seeming abandon, yet always with a logic that adds an intellectual satisfaction to the sensual enjoyment of the form. And again, we should have to borrow Bach’s manual magic, for he invented a playing technique that called for the full use of all the fingers (including the thumb) of each hand, whereas his predecessors had seldom used or required more than the middle three in their compositions for the clavier. Even in the position of the hand he caused a revolution. Players had tended to keep the hand flat in striking the keys; Bach taught his pupils to curve the hand, so that all the finger tips would strike the keys at the same level. Without that technique Liszt would have been impossible.

  Finally, adopting a system proposed by Andreas Werckmeister in 1691, Bach demanded that the strings in the instruments be tuned to equal “temperament”—i.e., that the octave be divided into twelve exactly equal semitones, so that no dissonance might occur in modulation. In many cases he insisted on himself tuning the clavichord that he was to play.51 So he wrote Das wohltemperirte Klavier, or The Well-tempered [properly tuned] Clavichord (Part I, 1722; Part II, 1744): forty-eight preludes and fugues-two for each major and minor key—“for the use and practice of young musicians who desire to learn, as well as for those who are already skilled in this study, by way of amusement’” as the original title read. The pieces are of great technical interest to musicians, but many of them, too, can convey to us Bach’s gay caprice or meditative feeling; so Gounod adopted the Prelude in C Major, in a corrupted form, as the obbligato for his “Ave Maria.” Some profound spirits, like Albert Schweitzer, have found in these preludes and fugues a “world of peace” amid the turmoil of human strife.52<
br />
  Endless in fertility, Bach issued in 1731 the first part of the Klavierübung, which he described as “exercises consisting of preludes, allemandes, courantes, sarabands, gigues, minuets, and other galanteries, composed for the mental recreation of art lovers.”53 In later years he added three further installments, so that this Clavier Practice finally included several of his most famous compositions: “inventions,” “partitas,” sinfonie, the “Goldberg Variations,” the “Italian Concerto,” and some new chorale preludes for the organ. The “inventions,” said the manuscript, were offered as “an honest guide by which lovers of the clavier … are shown a plain way … not only to acquire good ideas (inventiones), but also to work them out themselves, … to acquire a cantabile style of playing, and … to gain a strong predilection for composition.”54 By these examples the student could see how a theme or motive, once found, might be elaborated, usually by counterpoint, through a logical development to a unifying conclusion. Bach played with his themes like a jolly juggler, throwing them into the air, turning them inside out, tumbling them upside down, then setting them soundly on their feet again. Notes and themes were not only his meat and drink and atmosphere, they were also his relaxation and his holidays.

  The partitas were similar diversions. The Italians had applied the term partita to a dance composition in several diverse parts. So the Partitas in D Minor and B Major used five dance forms: the allemande, or German dance, the French courante, the saraband, the minuet, and the gigue. The influence of Italian performers appears here, even to the crossing of hands, a favorite device with Domenico Scarlatti. These pieces seem slight to us now; we must remember that they were composed not for the mighty pianoforte but for the frail clavichord; if we do not ask too much of them they can still give us a unique delight.

  More difficult of digestion are the “Goldberg Variations.” Johann Theophilus Goldberg was clavichord player for Count Hermann Kayserling, the Russian envoy at the Dresden court. When the Count visited Leipzig he brought Goldberg along to soothe him to sleep with music. On these occasions Goldberg cultivated the acquaintance of Bach, eager to learn his keyboard technique. Kayserling expressed the wish that Bach would write some clavichord pieces of a character “that would brighten him up a little on his sleepless nights.”55 Bach obliged with the “Aria with Thirty Variations,” which has proved to be a specific for insomnia. Kayserling rewarded him with a golden goblet containing a hundred louis d’or. It was probably he who secured for Bach the appointment as court composer to the Saxon Elector-King.

  Bach’s art was in these variations, but hardly his heart. With more feeling and pleasure he dedicated to the clavier seven toccatas, many sonatas, a wonderfully lively and lovely “Chromatic Fantasy and Fugue” in D minor, and an “Italian Concerto” in which, with amazing vitality and spirit, he tried to transfer to the keyboard the effects of a small orchestra.

  One form found its way into nearly all his orchestral compositions—the fugue. The fugue, like most musical forms, had come from Italy; the Germans followed it with an impassioned pursuit that dominated their music till Haydn. Bach experimented with it in Die Kunst der Fuge: he took a single theme and built from it fourteen fugues and four canons in a contrapuntal labyrinth illustrating every type of fugal technique. He left the manuscript unfinished at his death; his son Karl Philipp Emanuel published it (1752); only thirty copies were sold. The age of polyphony and the fugue was dying with its greatest master; counterpoint was giving place to harmony.

  He was not as fond of the violin as of the organ and clavichord. He had begun as a violinist, and he sometimes played the viola in the ensembles that he at the same time conducted; but as no contemporary and no son mention his violin playing, we may assume that he was not at his best on that instrument. Yet he must have been proficient, since he composed for the violin and the viola music of extreme difficulty, which presumably he was ready to play himself. All the Western musical world knows the chaconne with which he concluded a Partita in D Minor for solo violin; it is a tour de technique that every violinist used to look to as his supreme challenge. To some of us it is distasteful showmanship of prestidigitation—a horse torturing a cat at several removes. To Bach it was a daring attempt to achieve on the violin the polyphonic depth and force of the organ. When Busoni transcribed the piece for the piano the polyphony became more natural, and the result was magnificent. (We must not be supercilious about transcriptions, for then we should have to condemn Bach himself.)

  When we come to Bach’s compositions for his dainty orchestras, even the unprofessional ear finds a dozen odes to joy. The Musikalisches Opfer must have delighted Frederick the Great with its sparkling melodies, and startled him with its meditative, half-Oriental strains. In addition to the partitas or suites in the Klavierübung Bach wrote fifteen suites for dances. Six were called English, for reasons now unknown; six were more understandably called French, since they followed French models and used French terms, including suite itself. In some of them technique predominates; then even the string instruments emit chiefly wind. Yet the simplest soul amongst us can feel the solemn beauty of the famous “Arioso,” or “Air for G String,” which forms the second movement of Suite No. 3. These compositions were almost forgotten after Bach’s death, until Mendelssohn played parts of them to Goethe in 1830, and persuaded the Gewandhaus Orchestra of Leipzig to revive them in 1838.

  Bach adopted the concerto form as practiced by Vivaldi, and used it in a dozen varieties of instrumental combinations. For one who was born andante the stately slow movement makes the violin Concerto in D Minor particularly pleasant, and it is again the adagio of the violin Concerto No. 2 in E that moves us with its somber depth and meditative tenderness. Perhaps the most delectable of these pieces is the Concerto in D Minor for Two Violins; the vivace is all design without color, like a winter elm; but the largo is an ethereal snatch of pure beauty—beauty standing in its own right, without “program” or any intellectual alloy.

  The Brandenburg Concertos have their own special history. On March 23, 1721, Bach sent them to an otherwise forgotten prince with the following letter in French, phrased in the manner of the time:

  To HIS ROYAL HIGHNESS, CHRISTIAN LUDWIG, MARGRAVE OF BRANDENBURG:

  MONSEIGNEUR:

  As I had the honor of playing before your Royal Highness a couple of years ago, and as I observed that you took some pleasure in the small talent that Heaven had given me for music, and in taking leave of me your Royal Highness honored me with a command to send you some pieces of my composition, I now, according to your gracious orders, take the liberty of presenting my very humble respects to your Royal Highness, with the present concertos, … humbly praying you not to judge their imperfection by the severity of the fine and delicate taste that everyone knows you to have for music, but rather to consider benignly the profound respect and very humble obedience to which they are meant to testify. For the rest, Monseigneur, I very humbly beg your Royal Highness to have the goodness to continue your graces toward me, and to be convinced that I have nothing so much at heart as the wish to be employed in matters more worthy of you and your service, for, with zeal unequaled, Monseigneur, I am your Royal Highness’s most humble and most obedient servant,

  JEAN SEBASTIEN BACH.56

  We do not know whether the Margrave acknowledged or rewarded the gift; probably he did, for he was devoted to music, and maintained an excellent orchestra. At his death (1734) the six concertos, in Bach’s most careful and elegant hand, were listed among 127 concertos in an inventory found by Spitta in the royal archives at Berlin. In the inventory each of the 12 7 concertos was valued at four groschen ($1.60?).

  The Brandenburg Concertos follow the form of the Italian concerto grosso— compositions in several movements, played by a small group of predominating instruments (the concertino) accompanied by and contrasted with an orchestra of strings (the ripieno or tutti). Handel and the Italians used two violins and a violoncello for the concertino; Bach varied this with his usual a
udacity, putting forward a violin, an oboe, a trumpet, and a flute as the leading instruments in the second concerto, a violin and two flutes in the fourth, and a clavichord, a violin, and a flute in the fifth; and he developed the structure into a complex interplay of concertino with ripieno in a lively debate—of separation, opposition, interpenetration, union—whose art and logic only the professional musician can understand and enjoy. The rest of us may find some passages wearisomely repetitious, reminiscent of a village orchestra beating time for a dance; but even we can feel the charm and delicacy of the dialogue, and find in the slow movements a calming peace more congenial to aging hearts and laggard feet than in the vivacious roulette of the allegros. And yet the second concerto begins with a captivating allegro; the fourth is made delightful by a frolicsome flute; and the fifth is Bach in excelsis.

  b. Vocal

  When Bach composed for the voice he could not lay aside all the arts and legerdemain that he had developed on the keyboard, or the tantalizing feats that he demanded of his orchestras; he wrote for voices as if they were instruments of almost limitless dexterity and range, and he made only a grudging concession to the singer’s desire to breathe. He followed the custom of his time in stretching one syllable over half a dozen notes (“Kyrie ele-e-e-e-e-eison”); such proliferation is no longer in style. Nevertheless it is through his production for the voice that Bach achieved his present repute as the greatest composer in history.

  His trustful faith in the Lutheran creed gave him as warm an inspiration as any that Palestrina had found in the Catholic Mass. He wrote some twenty-four hymns and six motets; it was in hearing one of these six—“Singet dem Herrn”—that Mozart first felt the depth of Bach. For the congregations and his choirs he wrote powerful chorales that would have rejoiced Luther’s kindred heart: “An Wasserflüssen Babylons” (By the Waters of Babylon), “Wenn wir in höchsten Nöten sind” (When we Are in Direst Need), “Schmücke dich, o liebe Seele” (Make Yourself Beautiful, Beloved Soul); this last so affected Mendelssohn that he told Schumann, “If life were to deprive me of hope and faith, this one chorale would bring them back.”57