It is important to grasp that Bach’s life, including his creative life, centered on the organ. Indeed, to appreciate his power fully, you need to know exactly how an eighteenth-century organ works, as well as how to play one—knowledge I do not possess. The reed is the oldest of all musical instruments—human beings learned to play on reeds at the time artists were painting the caves at Lascaux and Altamira—and mechanical reed players or organs go back at least to the early first millennium BC (in Greece). By Roman times, whether worked by water or by wind, organs were becoming sophisticated; there is a fascinating reconstruction of one organ, based on a surviving fragment, in the Budapest Museum. Organs continued to evolve throughout the Dark Ages, Middle Ages, and the early modern period, becoming larger and more intricate. Until the industrial revolution at the end of the eighteenth century, they were by far the most complex machines ever made—watches and clocks were sometimes as elaborate, but much smaller. Organs were, however, machines, not instruments—that is, the quality of the sound was produced not by human skill in manipulating keys or stops or covering holes with greater or lesser pressure, or by wielding bows with varying strength. All the organist and the keyboard can do is signal to the machine what note to play. The machine does the rest, and the quality of the note depends on how it is made and set. (A harpsichord has much the same mechanical character, but not a pianoforte, in which the pianist’s hands are fully in control of the musical quality.) The second point about the organ as a machine is that it deals in sound power, not music. Some early medieval organs could produce enormous sounds, but they tended to be noise rather than music. We know of one organ that required two players and seventy blowers, operating bellows, which produced a noise “like thunder.” This might have some useful role in the liturgy or a service, but not a musical one. How to turn wind power into art is the central problem of playing the organ and composing for the organ, and I suspect it is one that will never be finally solved. Operating an organ is, and always has been, a source of great anger. A twelfth-century English drawing shows two organists, at a keyboard, shouting at fan bellows blowers and wagging furious fingers at them. These blowers may have been lazy, producing too little air power; or they may have been overzealous, producing too much—so that the sound emitted from the pipes horrified the players. We do not know. Even harder to portray in line is the continual warfare between those who play the organ and those who make organs. Since the eighteenth century, when the art of organ building began to mature, the builders have exercised enormous amounts of time, ingenuity, money, and creative energy on making organs capable of emitting the widest possible ranges of sound and every gradation of volume. They regard the organist as a constitutionally ungrateful creature for not showing the gratitude they feel they deserve. But organists are not so much ungrateful as angry at what they regard as the aural insensitivity of the makers, who construct machines that are impossible to play in a musical manner. I cite as an example of this anger the article on organ playing in the old Grove’s Dictionary of Music, written by the great organist Dr. Percy Buck. He points out that inconsiderate, unmusical organ construction can produce horrible noises, which “all but the most hardened organ-players find insupportable”; or sounds which, while enjoyed by an uninstructed public, are distasteful to musicians. The article is written in a tone of despair. Buck makes five practical suggestions for improving the musicality of the organ, but he admits that the builders will take no notice: it is of no use for people like himself to give advice—“organ-builders with one accord seem to have set their faces against it.” 9
Bach himself was well aware of the tension between performers and builders, being personally involved in the design, building, rebuilding, testing, and repair of dozens of major organs in Germany. By his day the organ was a bewildering and often monstrous instrument. Often, a single instrument consisted of five distinct organs: great, swell, choir, solo, and pedal, sometimes with an echo, celestial, and altar organ as well. The pipes would be numbered in hundreds, sometimes thousands, with, for instance, nine different pipes to produce the same C: rohrflöte, quintadena, gedackt, Lieblich gedackt, flute dolce, spillflöte, nachthorn, salicet, and normprinzipal. All organs had four main parts: first, the mechanism for collecting and distributing wind, that is, the bellows, wind trunk, wind chest, and soundboard grooves; second, the key action or Klavier and key movement, which the organist controlled directly; these were supplemented, third, by the draw-stop action, controlling the type or types of pipes the organist was using; and fourth, the couplers and pedals, which created or refined composed sounds. The last three are the concern of the organist, and it was regarding the functioning of these controls, and the sounds they produced, that Bach chiefly dealt with the builders. During his day, and especially in the last twenty-five years of his life, magnificent organs were built all over Europe, particularly the great organs of Naumburg, Dresden, Breslau, Potsdam, Uppsala, Pisa, Tours, Paris, Gouda, Weingarten, Herzogenburg, and Haarlem. Bach saw and played on only two of these, but he was familiar with some great German organs built from 1700 to 1750, which were of comparable size and quality. No performer or composer of his age, perhaps of any age, knew more about organs than he did. His problem was how to use the vast resources of the eighteenth-century organ to produce the maximum quality and flexibility of sound in performance, and how to write organ music for such performances.
To do this, he mastered, refined, and expanded the musical science peculiar to organ playing (and, to a limited degree, to the harpsichord) known as registration. On an organ, the registers, or separate stops, control the “on” and “off” positions for the pipes, and so determine the entire tonal capacity of the instrument. By deciding which stops he uses, the organist settles the nature of the sound produced, as opposed to the note, which he picks through the keyboard. Organ registration as a science consists partly of the advice tendered by the builders about the optimum use of the stops, singly or in combination, to produce particular tones; and partly by the markings of composers or master organists in the scores of particular works. Bach spent much of his life working on registration, both in general terms and for particular organs. His son Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach wrote: “No one understood registration as well as he. Organ builders were terrified when he sat down to play one of their organs and drew the stops in his own manner, for they thought the effect would not be as good as they were planning. Then they heard an effect that astounded them.”10 This skill, never surpassed before or since, was the result of long experience, familiarity with numerous fine organs, and experiments on their mechanisms acquired in building and rebuilding them—much scrambling about in organ lofts. Bach trained pupils to use his methods and acquire his instinctive sense of registration when confronted with a new score. Hence he seldom wrote down in his organ works his advice on registration, but it must be understood to constitute a dimension of the scoring in addition to the melodic line and the harmonics. He did put names of stops in the Concerto in D Minor (after Vivaldi, the composer he most admired) and two choral preludes. Four chorale preludes have pitch levels, and in some large choral works he put such marks as forte, piano, Rückpositiv, Oberwerk, and organo plenoso.
Bach composed for the organ all his life; but, unlike his predecessors, he rarely put together works that could be played on either organ or harpsichord. For the harpsichord, he worked on systematic groups of pieces to be used both in teaching keyboard skills and in composing. The works known as the Well-Tempered Clavier, twenty-four preludes and fugues (Book 1 of Forty-Eight Preludes and Fugues), the Goldberg Variations, and The Art of Fugue constitute a didactic survey and exploration of the keyboard types, fashions, and opportunities of his day. These works have never been equaled, and experts can—and sometimes do—spend an entire lifetime exploring them. The Art of Fugue, which exists in autograph, takes the performer through simple fugues to counterfugues, double fugues, and triple fugues, culminating in a mirror fugue, fugues with interpolated canons, and a quadruple fu
gue. What is so notable about these exercises is not only the pedagogic skill, which reflected Bach’s phenomenal success as a teacher, but the thematic and harmonic variety, and the sheer creative ingenuity with which Bach honors the keyboard.
A keyboard instrument usually needs to be tempered because the concords of triadic music—octaves, fifths, and thirds—are often incommensurate in their pure form. The scale has to be tuned to make most concords improve so that none or few sound definitely wrong. Despite the existence of the Well-Tempered Clavier, it is not known whether Bach favored equal tempering, but this is certainly the method his son Carl Philipp Emanuel preferred. Today equal tempering is used universally for modern works, but in the twentieth century it became fashionable to temper instruments unequally for early music, including Bach’s. Controversy rages over the issue and will continue to do so. As Bach knew, and often made clear, music is a complex business because of the natural imperfections of the sonic scale and the inadequacy of man-made instruments. Perfect solutions were impossible, and standards, including his own, had to be personal. We do not know whether Bach, writing for the instruments then available, would have wished to hear his keyboard work transcribed and played on the modern piano (though we do know that he looked forward to and worked toward such an instrument). Nor do we know whether performances of his organ work on the vast organs built in the nineteenth century (let alone the high-technology monstrosities of the twentieth and twenty-first) would have pleased or irritated him. Albert Schweitzer, the most passionate of Bach scholars, was quite sure Bach would have approved of technical advances: “What a joy it is [to play Bach] on the beautiful Walcker organs [built c. 1870–1875],” and “How happy Bach would have been to have had a fine piano on his third manual by the Venetian shutter-swell.” This is true, in general terms: Bach was too strong (and therefore generous) a creative personality to resist innovation in any form on principle. But it is evident from his record with new organs that he would have inspected the nineteenth-century and modern monster organs with a highly critical eye, and would have insisted on many modifications before using them. These organs would of course have inspired fresh compositions to stretch their powers to the utmost. Bach would also, almost certainly, have taken up a third, personal position—as opposed to those who insist on special instrumentation and arrangements for his music to get an “authentic” sound and those who consider such practices pedantic. Bach was not only a creative genius. He was also, like Shakespeare, a “sensible man.” He was judicious, a great musical judge, articulating the laws of music from the bottomless well of his knowledge and from his wholesome gift for right and righteousness. This characteristic comes out well in the only authentic image of him, now at Princeton. The big broad face and head radiate sense and wisdom as well as virtuosity.
Bach’s work for orchestra was composed on the eve of the sonata-form revolution of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven, which created the modern symphony and its orchestra. That he would have embraced the symphony with joy we cannot doubt. As it was, he pushed the concerto form to its limits, as in the six concerti grossi for varying combinations of instruments that he wrote in 1711–1720 and dedicated to the margrave of Brandenburg: it is not surprising that these Brandenburg Concertos are his most frequently performed and widely enjoyed works. What is remarkable in Bach is that his ear for the nuances and possibilities of keyboards was matched by his gift for using all the tonalities and graces of stringed instruments. We see this in the exquisite sonatas and partitas for solo violin, and still more in the unaccompanied cello suites. The way he combines captivating rhythms, the most refined harmonies, and breathtaking counterpoint, perfectly adapted to the strengths (and weaknesses) of these two instruments, is something, perhaps, no other composer could have achieved. Often in his chamber music he was breaking new ground: he emancipated the harpsichord from its supporting role as a continuo instrument and made it a full partner in his sonatas for violin, viola da gamba, and flute (a wind instrument he understood perfectly). And no one before had written for solo cello, or believed such music possible.
Being judicious, Bach was not so much a revolutionary as an improver, reformer, and systematic innovator. He did not abandon any form, but changed and rarefied it. His Mass in B Minor was not a statement—“I shall write such a mass as no one has ever heard before!”—but a patchwork of bits and pieces assembled over a long period and then polished into a unity of overwhelming power. As in many of Shakespeare’s plays, there was an element of chance and haphazard opportunities in Bach’s music. It exemplifies a point I have come across again and again in studying the history of great works of creation: a deliberate plan is not always necessary for the highest art; it emerges. (Consider, for instance, Michelangelo’s work in the Sistine Chapel, Dickens’s Pickwick Papers, Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, and Verdi’s Rigoletto.) A book could be written about the great Mass in B Minor, which transformed the genre and now ranks with Beethoven’s Missa Solemis and the requiems of Mozart and Verdi—all three unified compositions. The B Minor Mass emerged over twenty years: the Sanctus was written in 1724 and the Credo not long before Bach’s death. He seems to have put together a series of large-scale movements to serve as models, rather than create an unprecedented masterpiece on a stupendous scale. But in effect the latter is what he did, and no one today notices the joins or the chronology, or cares tuppence about the work’s prehistory.
The St. Matthew Passion, on the other hand, was conceived as a unity, with notable links between the chorales and systematic tonalities, and virtually all the movements are connected with one another. Moreover, Bach introduced a number of striking innovations in this 300-year-old form of church music for Holy Week, which give this Passion its unique power. Evidently he knew what he was doing—composing a masterpiece on the grandest scale. Being, as always, businesslike, he did it for a particular occasion in 1727 or 1729 (there is dispute over the date); and there were two more performances of a revised version in 1736. Then came silence for more than ninety years. Between 1750, when Bach died, and 1800, no complete work by him was printed. He was regarded as an out-of-date musical pedant. There was then a muted revival, but even by 1820 little of his music was in print—it was impossible, for instance, to get hold of scores of the Brandenburgs, or the Art of Fugue or the “Forty-Eight.” Mendelssohn, a musical prodigy with a deep regard for the old masters, first heard of this stupendous, forgotten Passion from his great-aunt Sara Levy. He then met the music director Carl Friedrich Zelter, who had a complete score. Zelter thought the St. Matthew Passion too big and difficult to perform. He changed his mind, however, when Mendelssohn arranged a private performance in his own home in the winter of 1827. Mendelssohn, then age twenty, worked on the vast score with the comic actor Edouard Derrient, who was also a musicologist, and remarked: “To think that it took a comedian and a ‘Jew-boy’ to revive the greatest Christian music ever written.” Mendelssohn engaged and trained the musicians and singers and conducted the first concert hall performance in Berlin on 11 March 1829. The word had got around that a great musical event was taking place, and the hall was packed, the reception enthusiastic, and the Bach rebirth a fact. Afterward, at Zelter’s house, there was a grand dinner of the Berlin intellectual elite. Frau Derrient whispered to Mendelssohn: “Who is the stupid fellow sitting next to me?” Mendelssohn (behind his napkin): “The stupid fellow next to you is the great philosopher Friedrich Hegel!”
Bach never sought fame, only perfection. He had his sense of worth, but his real interest was in creating and revising musical works of the highest quality, for all types and combinations of instruments and in all forms. When not creating (or playing, often a form of creation in itself ), he was revising his scores. He was never wealthy and often had difficulty accommodating his vast family in comfort. When he died, he left some cash, bonds, silver vessels, furniture, and instruments, including a spinet, eight harpsichords, two lute-harpsichords, ten stringed instruments (among them a Steiner violin of some value), and
a lute. They were valued, all together, at 122 thalers and 22 groschen, probably more than Bach had ever earned in a single year. But this legacy had to be divided between nine surviving children and his widow, Anna Magdalena. There were also his scores, and these were divided too. His widow gave her share to the Thomasschule, and died poor ten years after her husband. How their sons allowed this to happen is a mystery. But then there are many mysteries about Bach, not least how one man’s brains and fingers could have created so much to delight and uplift the human race as long as it endures.
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