The Project Gutenberg eBook of John Sebastian Bach, by Reginald Lane Poole.

By REGINALD LANE POOLE, M.A.
BALLIOL COLLEGE, OXFORD
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF LEIPZIG

LONDON
SAMPSON LOW, MARSTON & COMPANY
Limited St. Dunstan’s House Fetter Lane, Fleet Street, E.C.

PREFACE.

No one will expect a life of Bach to be amusing, but it will be my own fault if the present Essay does not offer an interest of a high and varied character. If it labours under a disadvantage, as the first biography of the master written in this country, on the other hand it is only now that, thanks to the devotion of Professor Spitta, we can congratulate ourselves on the possession of absolutely all the attainable facts. Hitherto, three translations or abridgements of German works have appeared in England; and the first is one of those books which, however incomplete, can never really be superseded. It is a translation of the “Life” of J. N. Forkel, published at Leipzig in 1802, and in London in 1820. Forkel was not only pre-eminent among the learned musicians of the end of the last century, but also the friend and scholar of Bach’s sons Friedemann and Emanuel. He presents us, therefore, with more than a masterly criticism of Bach’s science, knowing, it should seem, little beyond the organ and clavichord works: he is full of anecdotes and reminiscences of the master, all the more valuable, because told with a naïveté and freshness that stamp them at once as genuine and uncoloured.

The translation of Forkel was followed after a long interval by a volume based partly upon it, partly upon a sketch written by Hilgenfeldt as a centenary memorial in 1850. Though presumably edited by the late Mr. Rimbault, whose initials are appended to the preface, the abstract is so unfaithful and illiterate as to be practically without value. The third biography to which I have alluded is of a different character; it is a plain and conscientious abridgement of the work of C. H. Bitter, now minister of finance in Berlin, and only to be laid aside in view of the more complete materials which have been made accessible to us by Professor Spitta, and in the later publications of the Bach-Gesellschaft.

Dr. Spitta’s “Johann Sebastian Bach,” published at Leipzig in two volumes in 1873 and 1880, represents the many years’ study of a professed musician. For all the facts of Bach’s life, and all the obtainable data relative to his works, it is a final and exhaustive treasure-house. Nothing can be more scientific and workmanlike than the method with which he has exhumed and collected every detail from every source that might possibly bear upon his subject, and nothing more admirable than the warm enthusiasm which lights up his work. Practically he has left hardly anything for further research, nothing certainly that could be made use of in a short sketch like the present. When, however, I state that my facts are mainly due to him, I do not wish to imply his responsibility for a single word not covered by this admission. In criticism I give exclusively the results of an independent study of Bach’s works, which I have pursued for a number of years. Nor am I sure that Dr. Spitta would invariably approve of my arrangement of his facts, and especially of the extent to which I have drawn from the personal narrative of Forkel. In many respects, a small book demands a different treatment from a large one, and I have not restricted my freedom of choice in a sketch that can never by possibility enter into competition with Dr. Spitta’s work. My best wishes for it are that it may serve the modest aim of preparing a worthy reception for his English translation which is shortly to appear.

It would be affectation to conceal the great help in the composition of this volume which I have had from my wife, not merely in the selection of material, but even more in the judgment and taste with which she has controlled my writing.

CONTENTS.

CHAPTER I.

It is never without interest to seek out the beginnings of genius in a great man’s forefathers. The mere tracking of pedigrees has an attraction for more than will willingly confess to what is reputed mainly an innocent weakness of old age. The pursuit, however, gains in dignity when it is not only the kinship but also the intellectual growth of the family, not only the blood but also the soul, with which we have to do. In no family, perhaps, is it of greater moment than in that of Sebastian Bach, wherein his special tastes and powers all have their prophecy and preparation in a tradition where everything is musical.

From the first years of the sixteenth century—so soon, in other words, as the arising of a national religion has revealed to us the life of the German people—we have already traces of Bachs scattered among the valleys of Thuringia. There are Bachs near Arnstadt, in Erfurt, and Gotha, and Wechmar, places hereafter to be remembered in the musicalPg 2 vocations of their descendants. The ancestor of Sebastian appears, a little later, as a baker of Wechmar. This Veit Bach († 1619), named from Saint Vitus, the patron of the church there, is related to have passed some years in Hungary, and to have gone back to his home when the rigour of dominant Jesuitism made living in Hungary hard and perilous. We may here note the sole basis for the common story that the family of Bach was of Hungarian descent. Veit sold his goods and set up as a baker, and then as a miller, in his native village. He had—so Sebastian tells the tale—his chief delight in a little cithara (Cythringen), which he would take with him into his mill and play thereon while the corn was grinding. They must have sounded merrily together! Howbeit, so he learnt the sense of time; and in this wise music first came into his house. But music had already a professor among the Bachs, and it was to Caspar Bach, the town piper of Gotha, that Veit entrusted his son Hans.

Hans Bach, player and carpet-weaver, whose portrait was taken with a fiddle and a brave beard1 and ornamented with a fool’s cap, returned from his apprenticeship in his double craft, to settle at Wechmar, where he lived until 1626, when the plague killed him, with many of his kinsfolk, in middle life. His was a blithe personality, in great request in all Pg 3the places round, as much, it seems, for his hearty goodfellowship as for the help he gave the town musicians wherever he went. To three of his large family, which included apparently three Hanses and certainly two Heinrichs, he handed down, with a part of his open generous nature, that musical inheritance which in their hands grew into an artistic possession rich with the promise of greater fruit. It is worth while to stay a moment at this point to observe how deep roots music had struck into the family of Bach. For it seems that Hans had a brother whose three sons shewed sufficient excellence for the Count of Schwarzburg-Arnstadt to send them into Italy that they might complete their artistic training. Another son became the ancestor of a continuous succession of musicians, the last of whom, fourth of his line holding office in the ducal court of Meiningen, died organist there in 1846. Among this branch Johann Christian, distinguished as Clavier-Bach, a music-master at Halle, deserves commemoration from his friendship with Wilhelm Friedemann, the son of Sebastian, if only to illustrate the bond which held together the most remotely connected members of the family.

The household at Wechmar was broken up at the death of Hans, and the three brothers, Johann, Christoph, and Heinrich, separated to form new homes in other parts of Thuringia. But the intercourse of themselves and of their children was never in the least relaxed. They married into the same families, helped one another in sickness or poverty; the younger members were apprenticed to their elderPg 4 kinsfolk and often succeeded to their posts when they died; and the yearly gatherings of the entire family held their ground for a century. The closeness of this attachment merits insisting upon especially, when we consider the troubled times on which the family was thrown at its first dispersion. For the thirty years’ war in its wearisome progress makes the outward history of Germany, in the second quarter of the seventeenth century, little more than a record of battles and sieges, with scant breathing-spaces of peace, not long enough for the towns to recover from exhausting occupations of foreign troops. In this age of continued misery the foundations of German society seemed to be gradually undermined. A struggle, which added to the confusion of civil war the passion of religious hatred, threatened to dissolve the natural bonds of the family and of the race. Men sank into a blind and listless state, abandoning themselves to any vice or excess that seemed to deaden the thought of the morrow. It was therefore amid every circumstance of adversity that the Bach family grew to its full stature; and it is the more noteworthy that the latest, most learned, and most laborious biographer of Sebastian is unable to furnish a single evidence, in the entire records of his kindred, of the least deflection from the straitest paths of virtue.2

Johann Bach, the eldest of Hans’s family with whom we have to do, was apprenticed to the town piper of Pg 5Suhl, whose daughter he afterwards married, and whose son he came in time to welcome as a pupil and a kinsman in his house. He became organist at Schweinfurt, and ultimately director of the town musicians at Erfurt. It was a hard time, this of war, for musicians; but they had their meed of glory—and profit—when any peace festivities came. And Johann Bach seems to have made himself indispensable, like his father, in all the musical affairs of the place. He began, in fact, a line of musicians so indissolubly bound up with the life of the town, that more than a century later, when all the house was extinct, the town musicians of Erfurt still retained the generic title of "the Bachs." Adding to the duties of town musician those of organist to the Dominican church, he becomes a prominent forerunner in the two paths in which the genius of his family was to reach its climax. His home, also, lying equally accessible to Arnstadt and Eisenach, remained for long the centre of the greater family of the Bachs in general. It was in Johann that his youngest brother, Heinrich, found a guardian, when he was left an orphan in his twelfth year. Heinrich was not only the greatest musician of his generation, but also specially his father’s son in that kindliness and merry temper which made him as much the delight of his family as he had been of his father in his boyish days. He played in the Erfurt band until he gained the post for which nature and training had fitted him, as organist at Arnstadt, a post which he retained with increasing honour and distinction for above half a century. Of his organ works littlePg 6 remains, but we have the accordant testimony of his contemporaries to place him among the greatest organists of his time. An equal agreement acknowledges his genial lovable nature, in all its freshness and childlike gaiety, which it was beyond the power of adversity to embitter or to corrupt.

Johann and Heinrich married sisters. Both had to pass through their times of misfortune, and Heinrich’s first years of marriage were also years of great poverty. The pittance allowed him by the town of Arnstadt was irregularly paid, or not paid at all, in consequence of the immense drain upon the resources of Germany made by the continued—it seemed, the endless—war. Heinrich had to sue as a beggar to the Count of Schwarzburg. But no trouble made either of the brothers waver in their warm-hearted generosity to their kin or in their earnestness in their calling. They lived in the honourable esteem of the Thuringian towns wherein they dwelt, and left behind them a new generation to carry on and to exalt their fathers’ art and name. Each left two sons; and, by a curiously repeated custom, each of these pairs of brothers married sisters. Renown first came to the younger branch, and the skill and learning with which the sons of Heinrich were informed remains a monument of their father’s powers, as distinct and certain as if he were still known to us as a composer. Johann Christoph and Johann Michael are an astonishing phenomenon in this mid-time of national depression. Their writing has a freshness and vigour which seems to carry us back to the beginning of the seventeenthPg 7 century, when the spirit of Germany was strong and creative, or forward to the age following, when the people had again recovered its strength. Of the greater achievements of the latter time the work of Johann Christoph and Michael appears as a prelude. In the pedigree of Sebastian Bach they fade to a comparative obscurity; viewed by themselves they are luminaries of signal brilliance. Johann Christoph was more than a complete master of the musical science of his day; he was also one of the first who ventured to deviate from the rigid rules of the early contrapuntists, to make them freer, more flexible, and more significant. He is a link between ancient and modern music, blending the old church modes with the modern tonality of major and minor. Besides this, he marks an important step in the growth of dramatic music. His Michaelmas piece, The Fight with the Dragon, follows in the track of those Germans who had invented the idea of setting to music scenes from Biblical history, Schuetz and Hammerschmidt; but it goes far beyond them in command of the orchestral body, and in the genius of dramatic utterance. The sacred drama is, in his hands, clearly on the road which leads to the perfected oratorio of Handel or the no less perfected Passion music of Sebastian Bach. But the permanent interest of Johann Christoph Bach lies, even more than in his historical significance, in the beauty of his melodies and the expressiveness3 with Pg 8which he wrought them. It was Sebastian, his cousin in the next generation, who first knew how to appreciate his great predecessor. Contemporaries, however, were attracted rather by Johann Michael. But, excellent musician as he was, and gifted with a fine artistic sense, Michael failed specially in that power of expression which signalized his brother. The motets by which he is best known are deficient in symmetry. The ideas they contain are irregularly worked, and appeal to us by isolated beauties rather than by the unity of their spirit. The performance lags behind the conception. Of the instrumental works of the two brothers, works principally for the organ, and also for clavichord, there is not space to speak here. It is enough to have indicated in bare outline their general position. Their external history need only so far detain us as to notice that the elder was organist at Eisenach, the younger at Gehren near Arnstadt, and that Michael’s daughter became the wife of her cousin Sebastian.

The musical faculty grew to ripeness more rapidly in the family of Heinrich Bach than in those of either of his brothers. Johann’s sons were of course musicians, but composition first appeared in a grandson, Johann Bernhard, a man of wide capacity. He was cembalist in the Duke of Saxe-Eisenach’s band, and of such distinction as an organist, that he was chosen to succeed to the post of his illustrious cousin, Johann Christoph, at the latter’s death. He holds an honourable rank as a composer, having written orchestral suites as well as the proper productions of his office, organ-chorales.Pg 9 The latter follow somewhat directly in the steps of the famous organist of Erfurt—afterwards of Nuernberg—Johann Pachelbel, whose influence is indeed paramount over all the Bachs of his time. The orchestral works, however, have overtures which are described as equal in power and energy to some of those to Handel’s operas and as only surpassed in genius and richness by Sebastian’s own. They have the peculiar interest of existing mostly in the autograph of the latter, who transcribed and esteemed them at the period of his greatest maturity when he was cantor at Leipzig.

Leaving the rest of the musician-posterity of Johann and Heinrich Bach—and hardly a place in Thuringia or even Saxony but claimed some of them whether as organists or cantors, or in the minor arts of town piper or fiddler—we return to the brother who stands between them in age, and who is the grandfather of Sebastian. Christoph Bach, who was born at Wechmar in 1613, is the most secular of the sons of Hans. He was simply and solely a player, first in the service—menial as well as musical—of the Duke of Saxe-Weimar; then at Prettin in Saxony, where he took to him a wife; and thirdly, when he was near thirty, in the Company of Musicians in the more familiar town of Erfurt. His last years were spent in the band of the court and town of Arnstadt, where he died at the age of forty-eight, on the 14th September, 1661, his widow following him on the 8th of the next month.

Georg Christoph, his eldest son, of whom a concerted piece of church music was long preserved in the family, retreated in middle life from the immediate circle ofPg 10 the Bachs; he became cantor at Schweinfurt, and founded the Franconian branch of the continually expanding house. Next to him came two sons, twins, Johann Ambrosius and Johann Christoph, born on the 22nd of February, 1645. The coincidence of their birth was, in their case, accompanied by an almost unique identity of physical nature, character, and taste. The brothers were so alike that their own wives could not tell them apart: both adopted the family profession, and both the same instrument, the viol. Their strange psychological affinity subjected the one with the other to the same illnesses; and the elder survived the younger by little more than a year. Johann Christoph is the subject of one of the few detailed narratives which we encounter in the history of the Bachs before Sebastian; and this, if it does not seriously damage his reputation, equally does not credit him with the prudence that is characteristic of his kin. It appears that an indiscreet though innocent friendship with one of the Arnstadt maidens, accompanied, most rashly, with an exchange of rings, brought upon the young fiddler a prosecution at the hands of his would-be mother-in-law. The consistory, it is presumed, urged amends by the marriage of the parties; but Bach was firm—this is a family trait—and appealed to the higher consistory at Weimar, from which at length he obtained release from his difficulty. An experience of this sort made him hesitate before he finally decided to take a wife; and, after his marriage, misfortune—not of his own making—followed him for some years more. His place in the Arnstadt band was harassed by thePg 11 jealous persecution of the principal town musician. The Bachs of Erfurt and Arnstadt combined in a memorial in his favour, but nothing came of it. In the end the Count dismissed the entire band for indolence and disunion. Christoph, in his poverty, still helped his uncle Heinrich in the Sunday music of his church; but this brought no subsistence to his household. He was fain to go to Gehren, if he might but do some service with quiet music, whereby to support himself and his family in their need. The death of the Count at last brought them rescue, for his successor restored Bach to the posts of court musician and town piper. From this time, 1682, the musician lived in peace; but his death eleven years later left a legacy of new troubles to his widow and her five children, the eldest just ten years of age. They had a long time of poverty and sickness to struggle with, though the boy, Johann Ernst, did his best to gain a living for them in the family craft. But he was a poor musician, and fortune kept him waiting. Ultimately he got the organistship at Arnstadt vacated by Sebastian, who, himself ill-provided and on the point of marriage, left Ernst the arrears of his salary and ended his kinsman’s days of trouble.

Johann Ambrosius, the brother of the unlucky Christoph, has a meagre record. He was attached to the town band of Erfurt, afterwards of Eisenach; and married twice. His first wife, Elisabeth, daughter of Valentin Laemmerhirt, a furrier of Erfurt, gave him eight children, of whom six were sons. Three of these only grew to man’s estate; the youngest is the subjectPg 12 of the present study. Ambrosius’ second marriage was followed in two months by his death, in January, 1695. Of his character we have but one solitary notice, when a funeral sermon on a weak-minded sister gave occasion to the preacher to mark the contrast with her two brothers: whom we see to be men of a good understanding, endowed with art and skill, who are well seen and heard in churches and schools, and in the common life of the town, in such wise that the work praiseth the Master. A portrait of Ambrosius, which looks down upon the precious reliques of his son in the Berlin library, is notable not only for its likeness to Sebastian but also for the simplicity of its manner. There he is, not sprucely dressed out for the occasion in wig and powder, but in plain working clothes, with brown hair and moustache. There is a certain pride in this disdain of outward decoration.

Before closing the recital of the genealogy of the Bachs, a word of notice is claimed by the Companies of Players that existed in Germany in their time, and with which they necessarily stood in close relation. The regulations of these fellowships are in some cases preserved, and are interesting memorials of the pious care which their framers took to guard against the abuses to which the musician’s craft was peculiarly exposed, to inflict the sternest penalties on profligate or irreligious conduct, and to exclude the singing or accompanying of any but virtuous music. It does not appear, however, that any of the Bachs belonged to such a company. Many of them held a better worldly position, most were better educated than the commonPg 13 town player. It is a plausible inference that their number alone served to constitute them an informal guild by themselves, of which the name was that of their family, and the only regulation that which sprang from the generosity of their nature and the close ties which knit the kin together in a common pride and emulation in their common art. Emanuel Bach, Sebastian’s son, has left us a genial picture of how the kinsmen would gather all together, at Erfurt, or Eisenach, or Arnstadt, once in the year, and there make merry. First they sang a chorale; and, this duty ended, soon turned to a medley of secular songs. The climax was reached in the quodlibet, when all joined in a sort of comic chorus. The music consisted of any scrap, no matter whether sacred or profane, that occurred to any of the assembled company. It was an improvised catch. Each man in turn gave his own part or refrain, all different and all in harmony. The words were as incongruous as the music, and every one added his own quip or jest to the general jollity. Such was the homely festival that held its place in the family life of the Bachs as late as the middle years of Sebastian’s career.

CHAPTER II.

Johann Sebastian Bach was born at Eisenach on the 21st March, 1685.4 The Thuringian town had been a home of the Bachs ever since the two sons of Johann Bach had found their wives there. Two of the family, and no less men than Johann Christoph and Johann Bernhard, had successively filled the post of organist in the town church. The death of his parents, however, before he had completed his tenth year removed Sebastian from the surroundings that seemed so fitted for the training of his genius. Already he was his father’s apt pupil on the violin, and the music which was the daily occupation of the house was not lost upon the eager ears of the child. He passed from Eisenach into the care of his brother Johann Christoph, his elder by fourteen years, who was organist in the little town of Ohrdruf; and it was here, in one of the Pg 15most beautiful of the valleys of Thuringia, that the rest of his boyhood was passed. The impression of this country of soft hills and warm wooded valleys became a part of Sebastian’s nature and still lives in his music. The least attentive listener cannot mistake the inclination to a pastoral treatment which is continually appearing not in the professed Pastorales, as in the Christmas Oratorio, merely, but throughout the compass of Bach’s works; still more striking is his vein of idyllic melody, peculiarly obvious in the fine gold into which he transmuted the baser metal of the Italian aria, to illuminate his church cantatas.

At Ohrdruf Bach lived until he was fifteen, learning the clavichord from his brother, who was a pupil of Pachelbel, and apparently exciting his jealousy by the facility of his progress. A story of him tells us that he once coveted a book containing compositions by several of the great German masters, Froberger, Bruhns, Pachelbel, and Buxtehude; but the obtuseness of the elder brother forbade his venturing into studies too high for him. So the boy went every moonlit night to the cupboard in which it was shut away, and, thrusting his hand into the lattice, rolled up the volume and stealthily made his copy of it. However, when the deed was discovered, this labour of half a year was taken from him and not restored until after his brother’s death.

If Bach’s musical discipline at home left much for him to find out by himself, his education at the Ohrdruf Lyceum proceeded fairly enough and in music excellently. He learned Latin and the Greek TestaPg 16ment, with a little arithmetic and rhetoric. Of these subjects indeed Latin only had any pretence to thoroughness, and, although its range of reading did not extend beyond Cicero and Cornelius Nepos, it included a good deal of composition both in prose and verse. Very different was the musical instruction of the Ohrdruf school, which qualified the boys to furnish all the choral music of the church, besides singing motets and concerts at weddings and funerals.

Five years of this routine, and Bach left Ohrdruf. There was little more to be learned from his brother, who, with a family of his own, was no doubt glad to be rid of his charge. Accordingly he travelled, with a comrade of the school, to Lueneburg, and the lads together joined the choir of the Michaëlisschule. It seems that Thuringian boys were in special request for their musical training, as well as for the remarkable quality of their voices; and Bach’s proficiency on the violin and clavichord, added to his fine treble, placed him at once in the select Matin choir.

Lueneburg at this time enjoyed a wide repute throughout North and Middle Germany for the goodness of its musical training. There were two schools belonging to the churches of S. Michael and S. John, and the rivalry was so keen between the scholars that, when in winter time they perambulated the town—like the rude manner of our waits—it was necessary to mark out the road which each should take to avoid an unseemly wrangle. This custom of itinerant choirs, however bad for the singers’ voices, was of service in quickening the popular sympathy with music; andPg 17 the rivalry itself was useful in stimulating the ardour of the colleges. The principal work of the school of S. Michael’s was to prepare the music for the choral services of its church, two on Sundays, with motets and anthems, and, above all, high services with orchestra on the eighteen feast-days of the Lutheran kalendar. These formed the business of Bach’s life for three years. Some employment in playing or in the training of the choir must have occupied him after his voice changed, for he continued to take his commons at the free board until 1703.

All this time his general education was carried on much after the Ohrdruf pattern, with a rather wider circle of Latin authors, the Greek Testament, divinity, and logic. Higher than this the course did not go; and Bach had not the means, if he had the wish, to engage private teaching there, or to proceed to one of the universities. We shall see hereafter that he obtained an exemption from the classical work of the Thomasschule at Leipzig. At Lueneburg poverty conspired with his natural impulse to keep him closely to the profession as well as to the study of music. It was the period of his apprenticeship in the three branches in which he was afterwards to achieve a supreme excellence. At the Michaëlisschule he gained an intimate knowledge of the capacities of choral singing; he worked at the organ; and he became acquainted with the lighter instrumental music lately brought to Germany from France.

The organ claimed his chief and unremitting labour, and more than once did he journey to Hamburg toPg 18 attend the performances of Reincke, the father of North German organists. Old Reincke, as he is affectionately known—he lived well into his hundredth year and died in 1722—was a pupil of Sweelinck and one of the channels by which the learning and method of the great Amsterdam organist was diffused through the entire length of Northern Germany. From the dexterous and graceful toccatas which still attest Reincke’s powers Bach probably derived little; the principal reward of his Hamburg visits was the insight he acquired into the scope of organ composition, a lesson which he so worked out as to receive (according to a well-known story) the honourable testimony of the master himself. I thought, said Reincke, when, just before the old man’s death, Bach elaborated before him the chorale An Wasserflüssen Babylons in the true organ style, I thought that this art was dead, but now I see that it lives in you.

Bach stood in a closer connexion with a pupil of Reincke, Georg Boehm, organist at S. John’s Church, Lueneburg, and also a distinguished composer. In chamber-music as well as in the organ Bach learned much from him, but more in the manner of instrumental treatment and in the theory of composition, than by any direct influence on his writings. At this time also he made acquaintance with French music at Celle, where it had been naturalised forty years since and was now in its prime at the court of Duke Georg Wilhelm and his Huguenot consort Eléonore d’Esmiers.

A further training in instrumental music was afforded by the post which Bach held for some months after leaving Lueneburg, in 1703, in the band of Prince Johann Ernst at Weimar. But he could not long be content with the limited scope of a court violinist; and a chance visit to Arnstadt, where his grand-uncle Heinrich had founded a tradition of organ playing, but, dying eleven years before, had left no worthy successor, offered to Bach the opportunity of following out his special bent. An organ had recently been built in the new church of the town, but the burghers had not yet succeeded in finding a musician who satisfied their notion of the importance of the post. The man they had engaged they watched so jealously that he was not even trusted with the keys of his loft: one of them was deputed to receive them back from him as soon as playing was over. It is significant of the skill which Bach had already won, that he no sooner tried the organ—it does not appear, as a candidate—than the consistory welcomed in this lad of eighteen the musical heir of their honoured town organist, dismissed the incapable Boerner, and forcibly installed Bach at a triple salary augmented out of the municipal chest. On the 14th August, 1703, he took the solemn pledge of diligence and faithfulness and all that appertaineth to an honourable servant and organist before God and the worshipful Corporation.

The brilliancy of Bach’s reception at Arnstadt was transient. The New Church was a sort of chapel-of-ease to the principal church of the town; and BachPg 20 was only entrusted with the training of a small, partly voluntary, choir. His duties accordingly engrossed but a couple of hours on three days of the week, and the townspeople were well satisfied if he did not fall short in them. In this languid atmosphere he found no incitement to convince the town, by his performances, how far his hopes and ambitions exceeded those of the ordinary organist. He seems in time to have been content with a bare fulfilment of his duties, or hardly that, and to have concentrated himself in his private studies. After two years the respite of a month’s leave enabled him to visit Luebeck, the home of the illustrious organist Buxtehude; and hither a long walk of fifty leagues brought him in November, 1705.

As Reincke was a Dutchman, so Dietrich Buxtehude, who did as much, on his own lines, to establish the North German school of organists, was a Dane. He had settled in Luebeck in 1660, and the enthusiasm with which his art was attended was such that his influence remained in the town until the present century. One of the causes of his popularity was the custom which he innovated of having concerts, with a full orchestra of uncommon strength, in his church. A deeper reason was his consummate command over the organ and the important advances he made in composition.

Buxtehude stands apart from the organ composers of the rest of Germany, in the greater technical elaboration of his works. In spirit he has a single point of alliance with the organists of SouthernPg 21 Germany, in his want of sympathy with, his estrangement from, the chorale, in which the music of Middle Germany had its life. The melodic richness which this training in popular music developed in Pachelbel and Johann Christoph Bach was lacking in Buxtehude. His strength lay in pure instrumental music and was displayed specially in fugue-writing, to the development of which he contributed much, both in the combination of several themes in a fugue and in the extended function he assigned to the pedal. The form is conceived with breadth and freedom, the voices are melodiously worked together, and the harmonies are unusual in their originality, often so unusual as to seem merely discordant, harsh, restless. For if the works of Buxtehude strike one first by the massiveness, they strike no less by their inequality, their strange, erratic transitions from a sombre, often tempestuous, mood to one of tenderness and pathos.

It was at the feet of this rugged genius that Bach sat for three months; and the impress left upon his mind was distinct and durable. His fastidious censorship in later years allowed very little of his Arnstadt work to survive. A single church cantata comes down to us in the shape to which a careful revision at Leipzig reduced it 5; but several instrumental works let us see how far he had advanced in composition, and two organ fugues,6 at least, how much he needed the Pg 22education of these months at Luebeck to complete the studies hitherto influenced by the school of Pachelbel. The subjects in them are ingeniously constructed, but the entire compositions are deficient in relief and coherence. They shew the earnest spirit in which he worked, but also that this earnestness acted as a weight upon the freedom and brightness of the result. Outwardly he retires under the established musical forms of his time, but even now his individuality forces itself into view. An instance of his technical immaturity is afforded by his treatment of the pedal, which, according to the universal custom except in Northern Germany, Bach used merely occasionally, limiting it to the production of sustained notes or at the most of slow progressions.7 Buxtehude, on the other hand, changed it from a capricious accessory into a real support to the manuals and often entrusted it with a brilliant solo part. In this important element of organ composition, his Luebeck visit opened a new road to Bach and a road which he was not slow to follow.8

The clavichord works that occupied his leisure at Arnstadt seem, to judge from the few specimens that Pg 23have come down to us,9 to have been chiefly of that sort of free fugue, sometimes with a humorous design, to which it was the custom to give the name of capriccio. In one of them, a sonata (No. 216, p. 12), a fugue of the most melodious conception is followed by a capriccio founded on the cackle of a hen; Thema all’ Imitatio Gallina Cucca is the macaronic title. Another (No. 208, p. 30) portrays the feelings and the circumstances attending the departure of his brother—sopra la lontananza del suo fratello dilettissimo—Johann Jakob, who went as hautboy-player in the Swedish guard of Charles XII. We have the sad gathering of the family, and their recitals of the perils that may befall the traveller in a strange land. They seek in vain to stay him, and, finding him resolute, join in a general lamento—a fine composition, by the way, written upon two ground-basses, and tenderly pathetic—ere they take leave. When the slow fare-*well is ended, the postilion makes his appearance, and the sorrow of the departure is exchanged for the lively bustle of the road, the picture ending gaily with the post-horn deftly worked into a fugue.10 This curiously Pg 24elementary form of what it is the fashion to call programme-music may appear to have been suggested by the fantastic compositions of Couperin and others, which Bach heard at Celle. But, in this regard at least, the old German Froberger was another Couperin. He is recorded to have written a suite depicting the Journey of the Count of Thurn and the Peril that came to him on the Rhine, plainly delivered before eye and ear. Probably, however, Bach’s immediate reference is to a work that had recently been published by a musician whom in after-life he was to succeed as cantor at Leipzig. Johann Kuhnau’s Biblische Historien are scenes from the history of the children of Israel presented in a series of sonatas for the clavichord. To judge by their contents it is likely that Bach took the idea of this capriccio from them, but it is significant of his insight into the unsatisfying nature of the peculiar style, that he never returned to it, unless indeed we admit a kindred basis in the rare examples of the imitation of outward emotion, which appear in his Passion music.

When Bach returned home from Luebeck, in February, 1706, his month’s holiday having expanded into three, he not unnaturally encountered the displeasure of the authorities. Summoned before the consistory, he excused himself on the ground that he had been to Luebeck with the intent to perfect himself in certain matters touching his art, and, having provided a substitute for the time, he was under no misgivings as to the discharge of his duties at Arnstadt. But heavier charges lay behind. He was to be rebukedPg 25 (to quote the pedantry of the official record) for that he hath heretofore made sundry perplexing variations and imported divers strange harmonies, in such wise that the congregation was thereby confounded. In the future, continues the Minute, when he will introduce a tonus peregrinus, he is to sustain the same and not to fall incontinent upon another, or even, as he hath been wont, to play a tonus contrarius. A witness added that the organist Bach hath at the first played too tediously; howbeit, on notice received from the superintendent, he hath straightway fallen into the other extreme and made the music too short. Evidently he had brought things into a bad way, for the next charge is, that he refused to train the choir. Bach retorted by demanding a conductor. He was allowed time to consider whether he would comply with the order of the Board or leave them to appoint some one to fill his place. Under the circumstances it shows a surprisingly gentle temper in the consistory, possibly a just appreciation of their organist’s great, however capricious, excellence, that they waited near nine months before they repeated, with some severity, the demand for an explanation. Bach agreed to furnish one; but the document has unfortunately not been preserved. It is evident, however, from the indifference with which he treated the consistory, as well as from his unwillingness to fulfil the conditions of his post, that he had already decided to resign it on the first opportunity.

The opportunity was not long coming: before the end of the year the organist’s place at S. Blasius’ Church, Muehlhausen, fell vacant. A succession ofPg 26 distinguished musicians and the various eminence of the last holder of the post, Johann Georg Ahle—perhaps also the fame of the poet’s crown with which the Emperor had decorated him—made the office an exceptionally coveted one. Among the various candidates, however, it was adjudged apparently without debate to Bach, who was even requested to make his own terms as to the salary he should receive. He modestly stipulated the same sum as he had been allowed at Arnstadt—it was indeed considerably in excess of Ahle’s salary—together with the accustomed dues of corn, wood, and fish, to be delivered without charge at his door. He asked also for a cart to bring his goods to his new house.11 These trifling details are oddly characteristic of the man, and remind us of a letter he wrote long after to a relative, thanking him for a cask of wine, but quoting the expense of carriage, and begging that the costly present might not be repeated. Just at present he had a special reason for thrift. He left Arnstadt by the end of June, 1707; in the following October, the 17th, he was married at a village near Arnstadt, to his cousin Maria Barbara, daughter of the great Gehren organist, Pg 27Johann Michael Bach. A single year after his appointment he accepted the more ambitious post of organist in the Ducal Chapel at Weimar.

His short stay at Muehlhausen had been pleasant and useful to him. He entered upon his work, which was purely that of organist, with ardour, and—in contrast with his lax performance of his duties at Arnstadt—even took a share in the training of the choir, although there was a cantor as well. The only drawback was that the pastor of his church was a strenuous pietist, one of those puritans who found, not a spiritual gain, but a worldly intrusion upon the sacredness of divine worship, in those church cantatas which it was Bach’s work to create anew. The organist held to a close friendship with his pastor’s hot antagonist at the Church of S. Mary, and seems to have gone into the neighbouring villages whenever he wished to produce music upon which he could not venture in his own church. This can hardly have been, however, the principal reason of his leaving Muehlhausen so quickly as he did. The charges of married life made his stipend barely a maintenance, even without a family. He had had enough of the subordination of a town organist. But most of all he must have been stimulated by the renown of the music at Weimar, with which he had become acquainted in an inferior capacity four years before, and the wide field it promised for the cultivation of his art in all its departments. On the 25th June, 1708, he respectfully submitted his resignation to the consistory. Their answer, requesting that his departure should not hinder his continuingPg 28 to supervise the repair of the church organ with which they had entrusted him, is evidence of the good terms on which they separated.

For the next fifteen years Bach stands in a circle of greater honour, removed from the small troubles of a town official. His return to a burgher’s life in 1723—and at Leipzig he was never free from the harass of the wiseacres of his consistory—may surprise us, unless we conclude that the experience of his intervening years had taught him that if the delights of life came more liberally in the atmosphere of a court, a great town was after all the place for him who would live laborious days.

CHAPTER III.

Passing from Muehlhausen to Weimar was to Bach as the step from school to a university. The nine years of his life there produced works in which almost any other musician might glory as the perfect consummation of his powers; but when we range them beside the performance of Bach’s middle life, we see that all this time was still a period of preparation. Wonderful indeed is this strenuous preparation, carried on with increasing earnestness to his thirty-second year; this prelude to a life-long study—the index of the faithful artist—which was never relaxed until sight and strength forsook him. And no less wonderful is the growth of his genius—when we look back upon his earlier performances—revealed in rapid stages from the beginning of his sojourn at Weimar. But it was not only the years that had come upon him, but also the opportunity they brought with them, that make this change so marked an epoch in his life. Little as we know of the court of Weimar, there are some facts about its condition at this time which let us see that its intellectual atmosphere could not have been without its excitement and inspiration to Bach.

The Duke, Wilhelm Ernst, was a man of naturallyPg 30 grave and religious character. It is told of him that at eight years old he preached a sermon before his parents and their company; and in later life his chief pleasure and occupation lay in building churches, organizing religious schemes, and founding schools. In the troubles of an unhappy marriage and the approach of a childless age, his serious temper deepened into austerity. But, if always averse from gaiety or the least approach to the wonted dissipations of a court, he was a good friend to arts and letters; and the forty-five years of his rule began the tradition of culture which led up to the historical era in the annals of Weimar a century later. He founded the library, had a collection of coins, and—what is more to our purpose—took a strong and pious delight in hearing and fostering the music in the castle chapel.

The strict and sombre discipline which the Duke imposed upon his homely court—it went to bed, we are told, at eight in winter, and only an hour later in summer—was relieved by the brighter influence of his brother, Johann Ernst, the prince with whom Bach had taken service as a violinist in 1703. He died in 1707, but his son, also Johann Ernst, inherited his father’s taste for the chamber-music of France and Italy, and showed himself in his short life a composer of promise. The boy liked to be surrounded by musicians, to take lessons from them, and hear his favourite music. At the present time there was a brilliant circle at Weimar, and in this the prominent figures were the town organist Walther, known for his Musical Dictionary, and Bach. A famous story connects the two. Bach, we are told, had boasted ofPg 31 his ability to play anything at first sight, and Walther determined to baffle him. He asked him to breakfast, and, knowing Bach’s habits, laid among the music upon the clavichord a piece of simple and innocent appearance. While the meal was making ready the host leaves the room. Bach comes upon the piece, tries it and halts, begins again, and breaks down. Then he leaves the instrument in exasperation, shouting to his friend, No, one cannot play everything off: the thing is impossible.

Of the routine of Bach’s life at Weimar we can only gather the outline. He held the double post of organist and musicus in the court. The latter function involved in Bach’s case either taking a fiddle in the orchestra—a band of sixteen performers all attired in a grotesque uniform of Hungarian heyducks—or accompanying from the basso continuo on the harpsichord (cembalo). When after some years he was appointed concertmeister he of course took the place of first violin. He was now required to supply a certain number of church compositions; and the age of the capellmeister often added to his duties the task of conducting. The series of church cantatas written at this time—among which the magnificent one, Ich hatte viel Bekümmerniss, stands preëminent—are sufficient evidence of the energy with which he applied himself to his additional duties. If we ask how he lived in his household—and no man lived more than Bach in the life of his home—we are answered by a blank. We have not even a clue as to the manner of woman his wife was. Six of her seven children were born at Weimar, and two, twins, died there inPg 32 1713. The names of the sponsors to them show the varied popularity Bach had gained among the different ranks with whom he was thrown. Pages in waiting and a Muehlhausen clergyman appear beside Bach’s kinsfolk or his professional comrades—Telemann is among them—or the humbler associates of his early life at Ohrdruf or Arnstadt. His continually increased salary—it never indeed exceeded some thirty pounds, added to the usual perquisites paid in kind—is one of the many signs of his being valued. More significant is the request he was in as an organist throughout Saxony, and even in a wider circle. He was always being invited to try or inspect organs, to play at different courts and attend musical celebrations, till it came to be a yearly practice with him to break the busy monotony of his Weimar life by a holiday spent in answer to these various calls. Some accounts that remain of these journeys are the more interesting since they are the only record, outside his compositions, of these years.

In 1713 he was at Halle, and so much attracted by the quality of a new organ then building as to offer himself for the organistship. The consistory eagerly accepted him, and Bach composed a cantata on the spot, and brought it out as a testimonial. The documents of office quickly followed him back to Weimar for signature. But Bach was dissatisfied with the terms, possibly the Duke had persuaded him to stay at the castle; in any case, he wrote a courteous letter asking for some changes in the conditions of the post. The church authorities were indignant, refused to alterPg 33 a word in the agreement, and hinted, quite falsely, that Bach had merely played with them in order to get an increase of pay at Weimar. Bach wound up the correspondence by a vigorous and dignified defence of his action; and it is pleasant to know that peace was tacitly re-established by Bach’s accepting a flattering invitation to play upon that same organ on its completion in 1716.

Another autumn journey of Bach took him to Cassel (1714), where he played a pedal solo on the organ, a feat of miraculous agility, which few, one relates, could equal with their hands. The hereditary prince, who was present, took a precious ring from his finger and expressed by the oriental gift his admiration of the performance.12 Other years Bach went to Leipzig, perhaps to Meiningen, and his excursions from Weimar end with the celebrated visit to Dresden. Just before this, in 1716, Mattheson, one of the most influential musical critics of his day, had asked for his biography, and wrote of him as the renowned organist; in the following year his mere name vanquished a redoubtable harpsichord-player, Marchand, who had never before been confronted by an equal. The Frenchman was so popular at the Dresden court that some friends of Bach in the orchestra there seem to have induced the German master to stand forward in defence of his national music. It is certain that a challenge was sent to Marchand, and that a large company awaited the contest of the pianists in the Pg 34house of one of the royal ministers. Bach was there, but not Marchand. After long expectation, a messenger at last was sent to his lodging, only to bring back the news that he had left Dresden by express post that morning. No defeat could be more decisive, especially when we remember that Bach’s fame had hitherto rested upon his consummate powers as an organist. It may be added that he was so far from being prejudiced by his personal relations with Marchand that he always valued the gracefulness and exuberant variety of the French composer; and Adlung, who tells the story, says that he only once was able to appreciate his music, and that was when Bach played it to him. Success never affected Bach’s judgment: his generosity was always without vanity.

In leaving Weimar in 1717, Bach ceased for ever to be by calling an organist, though the instrument remained always his chief delight, and once at least he was tempted again to resume it as a profession. As a performer he seems to have grown every year in mature strength. In 1720, when he visited Hamburg, his performance at S. Katharine’s Church was attended by the aged organist, Reincke, and an assemblage of many of the principal men of the city. How he impressed Reincke has already been related, and no doubt it was partly the enthusiasm with which he was greeted that made him view Hamburg as a congenial home for him. An organistship was vacant at one of the other churches there, and Bach directly offered himself for the place. He had to leave before the trial of the candidates took place, but was so eager for the apPg 35pointment that he wrote from Coethen to repeat his willingness to accept it. The post as it turned out, was given to the man who paid the highest premium, and Mattheson was not the only man in Hamburg who expressed indignation at the well-to-do tradesman’s son, who could prelude better with dollars than with fingers, being preferred to the great virtuoso whose mastery excited the admiration of every one. Neumeister, who was chief preacher of the church, took occasion to remark in a sermon just after, that he was sure enough that if one of the angels who sang at Bethlehem were to come down from heaven and play divinely and desire to be organist of S. James’s, nevertheless if he had no money he might as well fly back again straight.

There are constant and innumerable proofs, besides the few we have noticed, of the impression Bach made as an organist: not the least striking among these is a note by Gesner, with whom Bach was closely connected in later years at Leipzig, illustrating a musical passage in Quintilian. After describing in vigorous rhetoric the almost superhuman powers of his friend, he adds, Though none can surpass me in my support of the ancients I opine that many Orpheuses and twenty Arions are comprehended singly in my Bach and any, if such there be, like to him.13 The characteristics which gave Bach his quite unique position as an organist are partly those of an extraordinary originality in the application of the mechanical resources of the instrument. How minutely he knew its structure is shewn by the frequency with which he was chosen, almost from boyhood, to pronounce upon the necessity and the Pg 36detail of repair in organs, and to judge the success of the result. His arrangement of stops before he played was so singular as to make connoisseurs absolutely incredulous of the possibility of so producing harmonious combinations, but when he began the doubt was changed into amazement at the swiftness, the precision, and the power of his movements both of feet and hands. If, however, a by-stander expressed astonishment, he would silence him with quiet modesty. There is nothing to wonder at in that, he would say: you have only to touch the right key at the right time and the instrument plays itself. As a rule he gave the pedal a real part of its own, often of incredible difficulty; and by this means he left his hands free to develop the theme in the broadest manner, and to apply the stops, each as it appeared most appropriate and characteristic, with wonderful insight and ingenuity. He liked also to use the pedal to announce a tenor part whenever (as was the case at Weimar) he could find a four-foot register. Of difficulties he seemed unconscious, and this was equally true when he was elaborating a simple bass or a chorale, or improvising a fugue, as when he was playing from a written score. Indeed Forkel, who knew Bach’s sons, relates that “his unpremeditated voluntaries on the organ, where nothing was lost in writing down, are said to have been still more devout, solemn, dignified, and sublime,” than those which stand in record of his supreme command of the instrument. Forkel instances Bach and the son to whom his gifts were transmitted in a special measure, Wilhelm Friedemann, as solitary examples of consummate skill equallyPg 37 on clavichord and organ. “Both,” he says, “were elegant performers on the clavichord; but when they came to the organ, no trace of the harpsichord-player was to be perceived. Melody, harmony, motion, &c., all was different, that is, all was adapted to the nature of the instrument and its destination. When I heard Will. Friedemann on the harpsichord, all was delicate, elegant, and agreeable. When I heard him on the organ, I was seized with reverential awe. There, all was pretty; here, all was grand and solemn. The same was the case with John Sebastian, but both in a much higher degree of perfection. William Friedemann was here too but a child to his father, and most frankly concurred in this opinion.”14

I have already taken occasion to trace the studies by which Bach prepared himself to become the greatest organ composer as well as the greatest organist of all time. At the present break in his life it will be convenient to give a summary account of his total production in this department,15 though it must be little more than an enumeration of the works that survive; since organ music least of all lends itself to any but a scientific analysis, such as would be altogether out of place here. My references are to the compositions contained in the Fifth Series of Peters’ collected edition of Bach’s instrumental works.16

Bach’s organ works divide themselves into three great branches, the first of which is connected most closely with his religious office. It is well known that the German chorale since the days of Luther has always held its regular place in the service of the church. This form of melody, however much more beautiful, is essentially the same with what we in England used to sing as psalm tunes, at a time when one metrical version of the Psalter was employed and the modern hymn with its new words and heterogeneous structure had not yet made its voice heard. In Germany words and music were alike familiar to every one; they formed in fact the nucleus of Lutheran worship both in church and at home. We shall see hereafter how Bach collected two hundred and forty chorales for use in his household; and there are hardly any of his church cantatas which do not contain at least one. In church, whenever a chorale was announced, every one present could be trusted to sustain the melody, and it was allowed to the organist to vary the harmonies almost to any extent he pleased without fear of confusing the people.17 In this way it came to be a recognised part of the organist’s function, at least in Middle Germany, to adorn the simple grandeur or pathos of the chorale by means of preludes, interludes, and variations, generally improvised at the moment; and this treatment of chorales was so popular, through the influence of Johann Christoph and Michael Bach, Pachelbel, and a number of leading organists just before Sebastian Pg 39Bach’s time, that it became extended so as to form the basis of independent instrumental compositions, for use at other intervals in the church service. It was a custom of which Bach was peculiarly fond, giving him, as it did, a firm groundwork, with high associations, upon which his fancy could build with the utmost freedom. And though he wrote down but a minute part of what he composed, we possess in print no less than a hundred and thirty elaborations of chorales (parts 5-7), besides twenty-eight of which the genuineness is disputed (suppl. 9-36). They range from short and slight preludes to works of the most intricate brilliancy, abounding in all the science as well as in all the melodious art of which Bach was master. Those to whom the organ chorales are inaccessible may learn their spirit by unravelling the harmonies he has used in the fivefold setting of one chorale in the S. Matthew Passion or from other no less remarkable instances in that according to S. John, to quote only from works which are best known in England. The inexhaustible invention which is pressed into the brief compass of these verses, is in the organ-chorales distributed over a long composition; but the extension is never for the purpose of display, and the fundamental motive insistently maintains itself throughout.

In opposition to these the second branch of Bach’s organ works stands remote from the church. It was not choice only but also the determined bent of musical taste at Weimar that directed his study again to the instrumental music of Italy; and the influence for the present lay strongly upon his organ music as well asPg 40 upon the rest of his compositions. Three of Vivaldi’s violin-concertos with a movement of a fourth (part 8, 1-4) he arranged for his instrument; he wrote fugues on themes by Legrenzi and Corelli 18 (4. 6, 8), and a fugue and canzone (8. 6; 4. 10) recalling the manner of the great Roman organist, Frescobaldi, whose Fiori Musicali, published in 1635, he possessed.

But it would be a great mistake to imagine that Bach was at this time engrossed by the Italian masters. On the contrary Weimar was the place where he wrote the bulk of his organ works of the third branch, the preludes, fantasias, toccatas, and fugues, in which his strong religious sense united with his power of musical creation to build up masterpieces of a perfection never approached either before or since. The list of his works of this period is as follows:—

3. Fifteen Preludes and Fugues in A, F minor, C minor, G minor, E minor, C, G, and D; besides a collection of eight shorter ones (2. 3, 5, 6; 3. 5, 10; 4. 2, 3; 8. 5. i-viii.):

5. Two Fantasias and Fugues both in C minor (3. 6; 4. 12): to which must be added three single works, namely a Fantasia in C (8. 9); a Pastorale in F (1. 3); Pg 41 and the superb Passacaglio in C minor, well known to all organists worthy of the name (1. 2).

For the years succeeding those he spent at Weimar, Bach has left us, with one grand exception, no certain record on the organ; we shall see hereafter that he was otherwise occupied. But there is hardly a doubt that he took advantage of the exceptional opportunity offered by his Hamburg visit in 1720, to produce his famous Fantasia and Fugue in G minor (2. 4). It does not surprise us to find that the Fugue, which English musicians have personified as the Giant, left an abiding impression among the listeners.19 As we possess it, it has undergone a rigorous revision, to which, in common with the major part of his younger works, Bach afterwards submitted it when at Leipzig.

Accordingly the short series which he is believed to have composed in later years does not represent more than a fraction of his activity in this direction; since revising in his case usually meant re-writing, certainly re-thinking. The compositions which are presumed to date originally from the year 1723 onwards, consist of seven Preludes and Fugues, in C, G, A minor, E minor, B minor, E flat, and D minor,20 (2. 1, 2, 8, 9, 10; 3. 1, 4), and a Toccata and Fugue in D minor, known as the Doric toccata (3. 3); together with six Sonatas written Pg 42to exercise the growing skill of Bach’s eldest boy, Wilhelm Friedemann (1. 1).21

It is impossible to characterise in a few words the works which gave Bach his chief renown among contemporaries, and the familiarity of many of the greatest of them renders such an attempt unnecessary. It may suffice to direct attention to the majestic motion of the august Passacaglio, as contrasted with the idyllic grace of the Pastorale which follows it in the printed edition, and which remains lamentably a fragment;—to the broad directness of the Fugue in C (2. 1), the daring invention of the longest of the fugues, that in E minor (2. 9), which proceeds almost entirely by chromatic intervals, the irresistible charm of the G minor, or the marvellously varied solemnity of the E flat, naturalised in England as the S. Ann Fugue. It is as an organ composer that Bach stands, as a colossus, absolutely unapproached and unapproachable.

CHAPTER IV.

The reasons which determined Bach to leave Weimar are not quite clear. He was in fact one of those quick-tempered men whom a small irritation might kindle to a resolve of disproportionate gravity. In the present case he had a real grievance in the appointment of a son as successor to the old capellmeister, whose work Bach had done for a long time and the reversion of whose office he might reasonably have counted upon. Leopold, the reigning prince of Anhalt-Coethen was no stranger at Weimar. A family alliance connected the two courts, and it is likely that he had heard Bach there. In any case Bach was known to him by report, and in 1717 was invited to take the post of capellmeister at Coethen.

The six years that Bach spent in the service of this prince make a kind of pause or breathing-space in his life. It is not that he was idle during this period: his work was different. He had, as it were, stepped aside from the road upon which he had journeyed all the years of his manhood, to follow a by-lane where he might loiter if it pleased him. And if this short abandonment of his peculiar art, dedicated to the service of the church, in favour of the writing of suites for strings or clavichord, hardly needs apology, it remains rePg 44markable that Bach consented to take a position in which church music or even organ-playing had no place. In no one of the three churches in Coethen had he any control; perhaps he was not sorry in the present case, since two of them, with the bulk of the population, belonged to (his special aversion) the reformed or Calvinistic sect.22 The Castle Church could boast but an indifferent organ and was unprovided with a choir; so that even had Bach wished to overstep the limitations of his duty, there were no opportunities, but rather discouragement, in Coethen for him to return to his old work.

He was designated Capellmeister and Director of his Highness’s Chamber Music, but in the peculiar situation of the Coethen court the title imperfectly describes the nature of his post. Leopold was a young bachelor who gave to music the loving worship he had not yet consecrated to a woman. He cultivated his art with an eager enthusiasm, sang a full bass, and was no mean performer on violin, viola-da-gamba, and clavichord. He welcomed Bach as a brother in the craft, and not only employed him to compose for his varied requirements, but took him into his familiar fellowship,23 played with him, sang with him, insisted on his company whenever, as was his habit, he journeyed abroad.

Before this he had learned some knowledge of the world, had travelled in England and Italy, and made acquaintance with the music of Rome and Venice. For the future we find him and Bach making repeated visits to Karlsbad and other distant places, and the obedient capellmeister sometimes perhaps a little ennuyé, if we may credit a story which relates that on one of these journeys he consoled himself for the lack of all musical instruments by striking off the greater part of the Wohltemperirte Clavier. The incongruous performance recalls the tale of the famous printer, Henry Estiennes, that he divided the New Testament into verses, the verses which we still retain, on a ride from Paris to Lyons.

In spite of the widened experience, it was in truth a narrowing life to Bach. He was not one of a musical group as at Weimar; there is no record of his having any friends in the place. If he had the pleasantness of the grateful appreciation of the Prince, he had no public to sustain his ambition. His days were divided between his house and the music-room of the castle; and he only came into contact with the musical society outside by the custom which he still maintained of employing his holiday in the autumn to visit towns where he was known, where he was invited to try organs and exhibit his skill, or to produce occasional cantatas. Once he went to Leipzig to prove the new organ at the University Church, another time, as has been already mentioned, to Hamburg. Once again he travelled to Halle in the hope of making Handel’s acquaintance, but just missed him.

A visit with Prince Leopold to Karlsbad in 1720,Pg 46 was sadly memorable to Bach. For while he was on his way home and no news could reach him, his wife suddenly fell sick and died. He arrived only to learn that she was already buried. How deep a grief this was to the family—the mother was but thirty-five—we know from the recollection of it which the second son, Philipp Emanuel, then a child of six, bore more than thirty years later. His tender, flexible nature reflected hers closely, as his elder brother Friedemann’s robust vigour did that of his father. And the fact that the two most striking figures, as also the most musical, among Bach’s twenty children sprang from this marriage may be taken in evidence of the near sympathy subsisting between the parents. Else we know nothing of Maria Barbara, and one is apt to depreciate her by comparison with the more gifted woman whom Bach chose for his second wife.

His care was now mainly for the children, four of his seven alone surviving their infancy. The eldest was a daughter, Katharina Dorothea, whom we shall hereafter meet again as helping with her voice in the family concerts; then came three sons, the two already mentioned, and Johann Gottfried Bernhard.24 It was Wilhelm Friedemann, now a lad of ten, who claimed his father’s most anxious attention; and never was a charge fulfilled with greater love and willingness. In later life Bach’s relation to him was one of intimate friendship; already the promise of his musical skill aroused the keenest hopes of his father. He showed Pg 47afterwards that he had all the characteristics of Sebastian accentuated: stolid independence was carried into wilful obstinacy, hotness of temper into a confirmed irascibility, morose when not violent. At present he was only the hopeful eldest son, for whose sake Bach developed a complete scheme of musical training, beginning with a Clavier-Büchlein of easy pieces, as early as January, 1720. There is an air of tenderness for the small fingers he loved, and longed to educate, in the ladder of difficulties he so carefully constructed, and in the little preface, in nomine Jesu. This was followed by Inventions in two and three parts, designed to cultivate an equable strength and free motion in all the fingers. The title was apparently chosen to indicate that beyond this he sought to teach in these pieces the elements of musical taste, invention in the scholastic sense being a compound of just disposition of the members and appropriate expression.25 The third stage in the course of instruction was constituted by the preludes and fugues of the Wohltemperirte Clavier, in which technical execution is combined with beauty of form and expression, each in its finest development. One of the points on which Bach insisted was that the practice of the clavichord should from the outset go hand in hand with composition. He assumed that no one should learn to play who could not think musically, as he expressed it; and he never allowed a pupil to compose at the instrument. He would not, he said, have him to be a piano-hussar, a taunt that might well be taken to heart by some of our modern composers. A Pg 48parallel system of training for the organ was also primarily intended for Friedemann; and both alike shew the clearness and penetration with which Bach understood the functions of a teacher.

In after-years the rector of his school at Leipzig, between whom and Bach there was no love lost, said of him that he was a bad teacher and could not keep order in class. The latter is likely enough, and the former may not be without foundation in the particular case. A man of Bach’s extreme sensibility would certainly appear at his worst in the irritating surroundings of a rude schoolroom. That he could teach, however, and teach better than any man of his time, is proved by the string of distinguished names that appear among his scholars and by the unbroken succession of pupils whom he had in his house from his marriage almost to his death, the applicants increasing in his later days until he was continually forced to turn them back. To his chosen pupils he was kind and genial, and full of encouragement. You have five as good fingers on each hand as I have, was his answer to complaints of difficulty. He never set himself up as a model to which others could not attain: I was obliged, he would say, to be industrious; whoever is equally industrious will succeed as well. From these glimpses of his bearing we may readily conceive the love and enthusiastic reverence which he aroused in his pupils, and as for his irritability, the common failing of great artists, experience shews that at least it does not make a man a bad teacher in private, however much it may militate against his success in a school.

Bach did not remain long a widower. The tradition of his ancestors contained no law requiring a year of mourning; indeed his father married again in seven months. Sebastian was more patient, waited nearly a year and a half, and chose wisely. His new wife, Anna Magdalena Wuelken, held a position as singer at the Coethen court; her father was trumpeter in that of the Duke of Saxe-Weissenfels. She was twenty-one, fifteen years younger than her husband.

The marriage, which took place on the third of December, 1721, was entirely happy. Anna Magdalena proved herself no mere hausfrau, but a real companion to Bach in all his tastes, a helper in work and a sharer in all his pleasures. She had a fine soprano voice, for which her husband delighted to arrange songs and recitatives. Often she copied them out for herself, and besides this her clear well-formed hand, closely resembling Bach’s, occurs constantly in the collections of his manuscripts. On his side he helped her to master the clavichord. Two Clavier-Büchleins, written for her, exist in his autograph, and to judge by their handsome bindings and the inscriptions in them, were intended as gifts to her, one just after their marriage, in 1722, the other in 1725. She used and added to them afterwards as a sort of album. They contain a great part of what we now know as the French suites, with a variety of preludes, arrangements of airs from his cantatas, &c., and also a set of rules for thorough-bass. It is plain that if the one was an indulgent teacher, the other was a ready and diligent pupil.

The beginning of Bach’s new happiness was soon attended with an unexpected drawback. Prince Leopold married a week after his capellmeister, and from this time forth his interest in music declined. His wife, so unlike Bach’s, cared nothing for music the concerts were still attended, but no longer listened to, and Bach’s work became more and more irksome to him. He had no outside public to take the place of the now indifferent court. He continued, however, for a year, until the death of Kuhnau, the learned and original cantor of the Thomasschule at Leipzig, offered to him an opportunity of returning to that work in the service of the church for which he must have longed all these years. He left Coethen in the summer of 1723, having first composed two church cantatas, as evidence of his fitness for the post. It is probable that, in the hope of the election taking place before Easter, he wrote the S. John Passion Music to grace his arrival, as though to prove that the divorce from sacred music which he had supported for so long a time had made his fertility and creative force only the more abundant. But the delay of the Leipzig authorities postponed the production of this masterpiece. By a coincidence the Princess of Coethen, the determining course of Bach’s removal, died just before he left. Perhaps for the moment he regretted the step he had taken: to us that step is the most fortunate act in his life and the herald of his greatest triumphs.

As we considered the Weimar time as representative of Bach’s career as an organist, so Coethen is the scenePg 51 of his most extensive production for the clavichord, for the chamber, and for the orchestra. We may therefore here enumerate the compositions that belong to these classes, reserving for the present the great collections of fugues contained in the Wohltemperirte Clavier, of which the second half falls under a later date when the first was alone entirely rearranged and partly rewritten, and the Kunst der Fuge which was the achievement of Bach’s last years.

The clavichord works admit of a double classification. On the one hand we have independent compositions, of which the idea is mostly derived from the organ-style; on the other stand the suites, or sets of pieces in dance-measures, which are moulded upon Italian models. Both alike are adapted by Bach to the clavichord in such a manner that they are completely naturalised in their new-found country. To the former class belong the following works arranged in conformity with Dr. Spitta’s critical results; the numbers refer to Peters’ cheap edition:—

1. Four Fantasias, in D, A minor, G minor, and B minor (211, p. 28; 215, pp. 3, 30; 216, p. 9):26

2. Four Toccatas, in E minor, D minor, Gr minor and major (210, pp. 3, 30; 211, p. 4; 215, p. 17):

3. Six Fugues, two in A, and two in A minor (212, p. 10; 216, p. 20; 212, p. 14; the fourth in MS. at Berlin), together with two, in A and B minor, on subjects taken from Albinoni (216, p. 25; 214, p. 12):

4. One Prelude and Fugue in A minor (211, p. 14): to these we may perhaps add the well-known one in B flat of which the subject is on the (German) notes contained in the name Bach (B flat, A, C, B natural) but of which the genuineness is suspicious (212, p. 24).

2. Four Fantasias and Fugues, in D minor (the famous Chromatic Fantasia), B flat, and D (207, p. 20; 212, pp. 28, 32).

4. A Prelude in C (printed among the organ works, series v. 8. 3), and two sets of twelve and six little preludes for beginners (200, pp. 3, 14).

5. Five Fugues, in C minor, two in C, and two in D minor (200, pp. 20, 22, 24; 212, pp. 3, 5).

6. Four Preludes and Fugues in D minor, E minor, and two in A minor (200, pp. 26, 28, 33; 207, p. 36).

Two Fantasias and Fugues in A minor and C minor (208, p. 22; 207, p. 32 and 212, p. 22, the two parts are separated in the edition).

To this list must be added the two sets of inventions (201) written at Coethen; and the four great Duets (208 p. 36) in which the idea of the invention (or sinfonia) is treated on a much larger scale.27 The duets Pg 53were written at Leipzig, and it has always been claimed that no skill could possibly add a third real part to them.

In a similar intermediate position stand the two sets of Variations, one in A minor, a Weimar composition, headed alla maniera Italiana (215, p. 10), the other a great series of thirty variations in G, of which notice will be taken in connexion with Bach’s life at Leipzig (209).

The Suites begin at Coethen with the six so-called French Suites (202) and three single sets which probably belong together (214, pp. 18, 26, 32). A solitary suite, in F, bears traces of having been written at Weimar (215, p. 25). At Leipzig Bach produced six Great Suites, known as the English (203, 204), and an equal number of sets of Partitas (205, 206). Another partita of the same period, in B minor, is known from its opening as the French Overture (208, p. 4).28

At Coethen Bach also wrote three sonatas, in A minor, C, and D minor (213, pp. 2, 16, 24), with a fourth which remains only a fragment (212, p. 18).29 These sonatas, the title being to some extent interchangeable with suite, have little in common with the form to which Bach’s son Philipp Emanuel, Haydn, and Mozart (Beethoven can of course not come into the comparison) developed it. The parent of this exists also among Bach’s works, but it has a different name, being disPg 54tinguished as the Italian Concerto (207, p. 4). It is remarkable that it should bear a designation properly true of an orchestral composition, as though in prevision of the unlimited development of which the form was susceptible.30 But the feeble internal resources of the clavichord, Bach’s chosen instrument for study—the harpsichord was too hard, and the infant pianoforte too coarse for him—prevented him from himself following up the conception. He preferred to write music which was independent of so imperfect an exponent; and his clavichord works are characterised by freedom and delicacy of melody, infinite fancy, and, as we see specially in his fugues, the fullest solidity and richness of structure, rather than by any effects which need a responsive sympathy in the instrument. It is as such that we ought to judge them, however much their life is broadened by performance on the piano.

It is difficult to separate Bach’s chamber compositions from those for orchestra. The orchestras of that day were very small, that at Weimar consisted but of sixteen performers, and Bach’s matured scheme for the production of his church music at Leipzig asked only for a band of twenty. It is wholly uncertain how far it was usual, or considered necessary, to multiply with the parts; in any case chance might often Pg 55reduce the small orchestra to numbers more consistent with chamber music. That this happened in the concertos which Bach conducted in his own house we may be pretty sure. There is, therefore, little objection to our enumerating both forms of composition in one section.

The Concertos are written on various scales, the use of one instrument concertante being extended to Concerti Grossi requiring as many as four. For the harpsichord there exists six; for two harpsichords two, and for three again two. In another concerto he has combined the harpsichord with two flutes, and in two more with flute and violin, as the three obbligato instruments.

For the violin Bach composed three concertos, besides one apiece for two violins, for violin and hautboy, for two flutes and violin, and for flute, violin, hautboy, and trumpet.

Orchestral works, but for an orchestra of very various constitution, are three of the so-called Brandenburg Concertos,31 and four parties or suites which rank among the most flexible and melodious of all Bach’s creations.32 The list would be increased by nearly thirty works if we added the instrumental symphonies which occur in the course of his cantatas.

As strict chamber music we may reckon his three Pg 56sonatas or trios, in which the harpsichord combines respectively with two flutes, flute and violin,33 and two violins. For harpsichord and flute there are six sonatas; for harpsichord and violin a like number, together with three separate pieces, a sonata, a partie, and a fugue; finally, three sonatas for harpsichord and viola-da-gamba.

The list of Bach’s instrumental works is completed by two sonatas for obsolete instruments, one for the lute, the other for his own invention, the viola pomposa, and by the memorable sets, of six sonatas each, for the violin and violoncello, which are well enough known in England to render an account of them superfluous.

But a few words are needed in conclusion to mark Bach’s position in reference to the clavichord. In the first place, being acutely sensible of the least falsity of tune, he always tuned the instrument himself, a process which never cost him more than a quarter of an hour. In this art he introduced a great reform, that of tuning on a basis of equal temperament. Without such a reform his chromatic music, and notably his Chromatic Fantasia and the Wohltemperirte Clavier, would have been impossible. Another instance of his fastidious taste is that no one but himself could adjust the quills of a harpsichord to his satisfaction. He took great pains in improving the action Pg 57of the clavichord, and invented a new instrument, the lute-harpsichord (lauticlavicymbel), with a surprising brilliancy of tone; but the difficulty of tuning it led to its abandonment.

It would demand too technical a discussion if we were to analyse the method of playing which Bach introduced. That he was the first to insist upon an equal use of the thumb with the rest of the hand, and to act upon the principle that touch proceeds from the lower joints of the fingers, and not from the wrist or arm, makes him the founder of the modern art of piano-playing. It is said of him that he “played with so easy and small a motion of the fingers that it was hardly perceptible. Only the first joints of the fingers were in motion; the hand retained, even in the most difficult passages, its rounded form; the fingers rose very little from the keys, hardly more than in a shake, and when one was employed, the others remained still in their position. Still less did the other parts of his body take any share in his play, as happens with many whose hand is not light enough.”34 His playing was light, smooth, swift—powerful or expressive, as he chose—but always without display or the appearance of effort.

CHAPTER V.

For near forty years Bach’s history had followed the common course of the musicians of his generation, and he had reached what was then held the most dignified rank in his craft. He had passed through the stages of chorister, orchestral violinist, and organist: he was now capellmeister in a ducal palace, and, measured by conventional standards of success, he had nothing further to look for or to desire. Least of all was it to be expected that he would descend from this dignity to the position of a school-teacher and precentor in the less select atmosphere of a trading town. Success, however, held a small place in Bach’s mind in comparison with anything which should forward his highest artistic aims, consistently with his own honour and integrity; and the confined circle of activity in the chapel at Coethen could satisfy but a part of his complete musician’s nature. The years of study and the years of ripe performance must be completed by a period of broadened influence exerted in the arousing of the musical soul of a great town, and in the foundation of a school of disciples of his own spirit.

In the spring then of 1723 Bach quitted a life which had become ungrateful to him since the duke had tired of his devotion to music. One reason for his leaving—and this perhaps was decisive—was, that he might do his best for his children’s bringing up. His care was always for Wilhelm Friedemann, his eldest and best-loved child; and in this very year we find that he entered him as a student at the university of his new home. In reviewing his life seven years later Bach touches upon all these considerations which took him from Coethen to Leipzig.

The school of S. Thomas in this town, where Bach was called to fill the post of cantor, was an ancient foundation, already in its fifth century of existence. Once belonging to the Augustinian Canons of the Thomaskloster, it combined music and general teaching, like other conventual schools of the middle ages. In this shape it survived the reformation: it remained both a choir-school and a grammar-school; and of its seven masters, the cantor, who took a middle place, lowest of the four superiores, had his share of both branches of teaching. He gave a certain number of lessons a week in music and Latin grammar, varied on Sunday evenings by the Latin catechism of Luther. Bach, however, was allowed to pay one of his colleagues to take the Latin teaching from him—less, it is to be presumed, from incapacity than from disinclination or perhaps from diffidence; so that, except when his substitute was ill, his occupation was solely musical. His formal declaration of office bound him to treat the boysPg 60 humanely, and to instruct them as well in instrumental as in vocal music.

But the work in school was the least portion of the cantor’s task. He had the musical oversight—as we should say, he was precentor—of the two chief churches of S. Thomas and S. Nicholas; he had to provide a choir for the simpler service at S. Peter’s; and he had also a more undefined control over the New Church (S. Matthew’s). Among these four churches, and apparently, on festivals, in the extra-mural church of S. John too, the cantor had to distribute his choir. The best-trained voices were reserved for S. Thomas’s and S. Nicholas’, where the services were so arranged that the cantor could preside over the important music at both. The other churches had to be content with the younger and more unskilled choristers. All of them the cantor supplied with music—not too long or too operatic, was the special injunction when Bach entered office. He had to be ready with special services for high days, weddings, and funerals, which last he was directed to attend in person. Finally, he had to supervise the different organists, the fiddlers and pipers—the embryo orchestra—of the town.

It was this commanding position, of Director of Music of the great town of Leipzig, rather than that of teacher in the Thomasschule, which drew Bach from the ease and quiet of his ducal chapel. How little it was realised at the time of Bach’s arrival, we shall soon see. In the first place, the school itself was just then at the last period of decay. It had long suffered from the blunders of its rector, JohannPg 61 Heinrich Ernesti, a solemn man, clergyman and pedant—he was Professor of Poetry in the university—who had lived his seventy years without learning the first secret of acquiring influence over masters or scholars, far less of giving unity or vigour to the management of the school. There was discord everywhere, with its usual accompaniment. The attendance of the scholars fell off, in the lower classes to less than half their former number; and, worse than this, their quality deteriorated in equal stages: the best pupils drifted away to Lueneburg, and the Leipzig school threatened to sink into a mere training-place for people who were to make their livelihood by singing at funerals. Yet every attempt to reform it was thwarted by the timid obstinacy of its rector; and it was not until his death, when Bach had been under him for six years, that any effectual measures for its revival were possible.

An even greater obstacle to the prosperity of the school lay outside it; for, since the first years of the century, the institution of the opera had established a separate centre of musical training and musical interest in the town. The new importation gained a sudden popularity and success when it came under the hands of Telemann, afterwards famous as organist at Hamburg. The Opera became a dangerous rival to the School; and the rivalry was the keener since Telemann was organist of one of the churches that drew their choirs from S. Thomas’s. If the cantor was mortified at the retrenchment of his authority, it was the school that suffered the most. For its scholars at first spentPg 62 their holidays in the opera-company; soon the choir of the New Church was absorbed into it. The boys went over altogether, willing enough to abandon the restraints and the severer training of the school, for the freedom and gaiety, not to say the profit, of the career now open to them. And, although Telemann left Leipzig after a year (1705), the Musical Society (Musikverein) which he founded went on growing and flourishing at the expense of the school. The music at S. Thomas’s had to be kept down to the diminished capacity of its voices. Difficult works could only be attempted with a certainty of failure. Even the Town Council, usually blind to the faults of old endowments, came to see the fruitlessness of helping any pretence of reform on the part of a school which produced results so inferior to the unendowed performances at the New Church.

Such was the condition of affairs when Bach came to Leipzig: the whole musical life of the place seemed to be dying away in disunion and mismanagement. The very opera which had ruined the Thomasschule ceased to exist in 1726; the Musical Society founded by Telemann had passed into incapable hands; and, to complete the chaos, the University organ and the direction of University music had been given (in the interval between Kuhnau’s death and the appointment of Bach as his successor in the cantorate) to the pitifullest of musicians, one Goerner,35 who was to Bach for many Pg 63years a standing grievance and obstruction. The temporary substitute was tacitly kept on by the indulgent University magnates, and the Thomasschule lost that connexion with the University which gave the only promise for its revival. Moreover, Goerner, who was also organist at S. Nicholas’—afterwards, in 1730, at S. Thomas’s, under Bach’s own authority, which he disregarded—had a Collegium Musicum of his own, for which he arrogated a rank superior to the Thomasschule, the latter, in fact, being (as he explained) merely preparatory to his. It seemed as though the old school were destined to lose all weight in the town. The New Church had been monopolised by Telemann’s Musikverein; and now the University Church was being supplied by Goerner’s Collegium.

We cannot be wrong in believing that Bach was well aware of these things; that he accepted his new post in the high ambition of re-creating what had been once a true home of musical art, of keeping alive and (as we see) of infinitely exalting the honourable tradition handed down in the learned line of his predecessors.

On the 5th May, 1723, Bach appeared before the Town Council and made the declarations of office; the appointment was ratified by the consistory of the church, and before the month was over he was formally inducted.

From this time to his death he was settled in the official lodgings in the left wing of the Thomasgebäude, which, added to some 700 thalers, made upPg 64 the emoluments of his post. It is significant of the position he was resolved to maintain that, directly upon entering office, he distinctly subscribes himself not only cantor of S. Thomas’s, but also, in defiance of Goerner, Director of Music, or, as we should say, Choragus, in the University. The double function had belonged to his predecessor; and no one could challenge Bach’s claim to a part of the academical function—the duty namely of furnishing music for the proper University services (at the quarterly Acts, the Reformation Festival, and the three high-days of the Church). But of late years there had been a regular Sunday service as well, in the University Church; and this Goerner insisted on appropriating. It was not a mere question of fees that determined Bach’s appeal in 1725 to the King-Elector at Dresden; the entire issue as to who should be supreme in matters musical in Leipzig was at stake. A long correspondence as usual brought no practical result. Goerner seems to have retained his weekly services, and even now and then to have encroached on Bach’s strict province of composing special odes and the like for high University occasions. The fact that in 1736 he is actually described as Academical Director of Music shows that the dispute had not even then been set at rest. It is a common picture, this of a great man being perpetually harassed by the pretensions of a vain fellow who is only remembered for his self-assertion; but it reveals a singular want of appreciation on the part of the Leipzig authorities, that they suffered the nuisance without a hint of its absurdity. Bach never let himselfPg 65 for an instant appear in the light of a rival. He only resented the impertinence in a certain leonine fashion, and held to his academical title.

This punctiliousness about titles has more in it than shews at first sight. Bach doubtless knew his public, and knew that, if he claimed to be a simple choir-*master, his influence would be restricted proportionately. But, moreover, such a description would have been misleading, since, as Dr. Spitta observes,36 if Bach’s music is the truest church-music, it contains none the less the elements of independent concert-music as well. Accordingly the titles of Capellmeister of Coethen, which he held when he came to Leipzig, and of Weissenfels, which was conferred upon him in the year of his arrival, Bach bore until his death. As a final vindication of his position, he appealed to the king, in 1733, for a court appointment at Dresden. The petition was accompanied by a part of the great Mass in B minor, which was written expressly for the royal chapel; but the honorary distinction of Composer in Ordinary did not follow for three years.

Whatever honours he won from abroad, nothing to the end of his days could spare him continual annoyance from the municipal council. With his native independence of spirit he could not brook the invasion of this body into a province totally beyond their scope. All through his life he could never get to understand them or the reasons for their action, simply because he knew perfectly that they were incapable of under-* Pg 66standing him. This much he knew about them, and they gave him ample opportunity, to his cost, of knowing it. He could not go further and make concessions to their limited intelligence. Their presumption irritated him, when he found his every act hampered and restrained as though he were the most incompetent of sciolists.

Bach’s grievances in relation to the council began some years after his appointment at the Thomasschule. At first he probably threw himself with zest into his work, and gave no ground for fault-finding. But in time he must have restricted himself to the bare quantum of duty assigned to him, and given his best energies to composition. At least the differences begin in the spring of 1729, and the charge that he did no work came with a peculiar force of demonstration just when he had brought out The Passion according to Saint Matthew, not to speak of three great church-cantatas at the commemorative festival of the Augsburg confession. The council proceeded to vote that he was not to be trusted even in the choice of choristers for his school. To fill nine vacancies Bach had examined a number of competitors, and sent in a careful report as to their qualifications. The council accepted only five of his nominees, making up the list by three who (as he told them) nichts in Musicis praestirten, and whom he had not even named. Then the council decided that he was so bad a teacher of music that he must be set to secular teaching as well, apparently as a punishment. This he managed to escape; but he suffered a suspension of all the accidenPg 67tien or extraordinary emoluments of his post. The council resolved either to work him or to starve him out.

Almost in despair, he wrote to an old friend, Erdmann the schoolfellow who had gone up with him from Ohrdruf to Lueneburg, now Russian agent at Danzig, and begged for a more suitable post anywhere, if any could be found. He gave an account of his position at Leipzig, the reasons that drew him thither, and his disappointment. His routine was ungrateful, his salary reduced (it relied upon varying items, and, as he explained, when a healthy wind blew, he could not count on much from the funerals) and the town very expensive—you could live in Thuringia for half as much—above all, he was under the control of an extraordinary council with little liking for music (eine wunderliche und der Musik wenig ergebene Obrigkeit), with which he stood perforce in continual disagreement and ill-will. Certainly it was, as I have said, the unaccountable—"wunderlich"—genius of the council that most impressed Bach. With that consciousness of himself which no great man is ever wholly without, he could not understand their action. It was an incongruity in the nature of things which would have been comical had it not been a perpetual irritation to him.

There is, however, no hint of this irritation, but rather a haughty disdain which shows through the verbose respectfulness of Bach’s official memorials. Once, for instance, when he was rehearsing a Passion music for Good Friday, the council insisted on hisPg 68 submitting it to their inspection. He replied that he had gone to work precisely as on former occasions, the text in fact had been already produced more than once. However, he was not concerned to perform the thing: it would only give him trouble and no profit. He would report to his ecclesiastical superior that the council forbade its performance. In this way he managed to shift the dispute on to the shoulders of the consistory, which had a standing quarrel with the council as to their respective powers over the school. The present question belonged clearly to the church body; and it is evidently with grim satisfaction that Bach seizes on the technical mistake. Let it be noticed, too, how he refuses to give any explanation, refuses even to complain of his disappointment. He says, in so many words, that he is dealing with mere business people, and will use merely business arguments.

Again, in 1730, when they sent one of their number to admonish him gravely of the submission which was due to them, Bach was preparing—perhaps had already sent in—an elaborate and carefully arranged report on the wide-reaching reform and extension which he demanded for the choir and orchestra under his direction. There is an irony in the way the man, who is to be frightened into docility by a retrenchment of his salary and influence, occupies himself meantime in devising and proving the necessity of a large scheme which should extend the scope of his authority and indirectly augment his income. The reform, of course, never came, and the memoir is only interesting as the reflection ofPg 69 the independent nature of the writer, and as evidence of the dimensions to which instrumental music had grown under his hands. It should, however, be mentioned that in the ten previous years the council had not been unmindful of the needs of the two chief churches, and had sanctioned an unusual outlay in the repair of the organs and in the purchase of stringed instruments and music-books for the performers.

It is pleasant to turn from these disputes and anxiety to the glimpse—unfortunately almost a solitary glimpse—of the home life which saved Bach from ever really despairing, and which cheered him in a thankful contentment, so that no disappointment from without was able to dwarf his energy for work, or to cool the genial spirit which ever attended his composing. At the end of the letter to Erdmann, from which I have already quoted, he says: I must now acquaint you with somewhat of my domestic estate. For the second time I am married, my first lamented wife having deceased at Coethen. Of her I have living three sons and a daughter, whom your Excellence will kindly remember to have seen at Weimar; of the second marriage there are living a son and two daughters. My eldest son is a student of law, the next two are at school in the first and second class, and my eldest daughter remains unmarried. The children of my second marriage are still little, the eldest a boy of six years. Altogether, however, they are born musicians, and I can assure you that even now I can arrange a concert with my family vocaliter and instrumentaliter, whereas my wife thatPg 70 now is sings a pretty soprano, and my eldest daughter plays not amiss.

From a variety of scattered facts we may form some idea of the activity of this musical house. Indeed, just at this time the home was reaching its happiest period. The two eldest boys, the worthiest inheritors of the family genius, were still with their father; and there is hardly a doubt that it was to play with them that Sebastian wrote his two concertos for three pianos. Who formed the orchestra we can only conjecture, but it is certain that the string of pupils who had formed part of his household since he began married life at Muehlhausen, and who continued in increasing numbers until his death, were in different degrees capable of giving their help; and the gaps may have been filled by promising scholars of the Thomasschule, or, indeed, by the—chiefly under-*graduate—members of the Musical Society of which Bach undertook the management in 1729. We know, from the inventory taken after his death, that he possessed latterly five clavecins (the word must be used inaccurately, and taken to include clavichords) and ten stringed instruments, not counting his three lutes; so that in the house itself there was material for the nucleus of an orchestra, though violinists would probably, and players on wind instruments necessarily, bring their own instruments with them. In all this domestic music his wife took her share, both as player on the clavichord, in which she was his apt pupil, and especially as a singer. It is likely that some church cantatas were written for her and for the eldestPg 71 daughter Katharina (who sang alto) as may be inferred from the prevalence in such of one solo voice, and by other points (for instance, the shortness of one) which render them unfit for performance in church.37 Nor need we doubt that a similar use dictated Bach’s great collection of 240 chorales, of which unhappily only fragments remain. For it is almost needless to observe that the old German temper in its best form combined religion inextricably with all the common acts of life. We know how the festive gatherings of the Bachs, however jovial their purpose, always began with a chorale; and Sebastian himself, seeking for a definition of music, can find nothing more comprehensive to say than that Its final cause is none other than this, that it minister solely to the honour of God and refreshment of the spirit; whereof, if one take not heed, it is no proper music, but devilish din and discord.38

The preparation for these perpetual concerts must have furnished incessant occupation to the household. Printed music was very rare and costly, and, as a matter of course, the parts had regularly to be copied Pg 72out. A great deal exists in the delicate hand of Anna Magdalena Bach, who also transcribed many scores for her husband’s private use. No one was idle, and a certain amount even of music-engraving was done in this busy house. Bach himself, we are told, often laboured far into the night. The day was not long enough for all he found to do.

CHAPTER VI.

Bach’s appeal to Erdmann in the winter of 1730, to try and find him a more congenial post than he had at Leipzig, was without result. In fact, little as he suspected it, events had already begun to take a favourable turn for him. The year before, the organist of the New Church had left, and Bach had followed him as director of the Musical Society, which had hitherto furnished the choir at that church, instead of the boys of the Thomasschule. It was a good thing for Bach in every way to break down a rivalry of this sort. But a greater gain had come to him the very month before he wrote to Erdmann. For the new rector of the school, Gesner, proved himself consistently the firm friend of the ill-used cantor.

Gesner appears to have been much more than his books shew him—one of the revivers of classical learning in Germany. He was also a teacher by instinct, one who by infinite tact and patience could restore harmony to a school that had been dissolving for a generation, and form so direct an understanding between master and pupil that the friend was seen through the severe disciplinarian, and the fervent scholar through the mists and morasses of an antiquated pedagogy.Pg 74 He diffused a new spirit into the school; to Bach he gave his generous sympathy, and an earnest of hopefulness. How he appreciated him as a musician has already been noticed in another connexion; as head of the school he saved him from the petty annoyances to which he had hitherto been subjected. Bach had now his just share of the fees which made the largest item in his income and which were now the more necessary as his family was growing up. Moreover, thrifty as he was, his different posts must have involved expensive journeys to Coethen and Weissenfels; and he was fond of making short visits to Dresden to hear the opera, at that time under the leading of his friend Hasse, Il Sassone, as he is known by the Italians, among whom he lived for many years, and whose music in turn he naturalised in Germany. Friedemann, let us go again and hear the pretty Dresden songs, Bach would say to his boy; and the two went together. The phrase used is, by the way, characteristic of Bach. He enjoyed the opera, but could not call it by any more dignified name than songs (liederchen). Accordingly he never adopted this form of composition; his genius is essentially undramatic. But he studied the operatic style with eager energy, and absorbed it so thoroughly that the arias, duets, &c., which occur in his cantatas, are the worthiest representatives of the opera that Germany produced before Gluck, whom indeed he anticipated in his treatment of the recitative. They have the gaiety and grace of the Italian manner, and the inspiration of German thought.

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 accustomedPg 76 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 findPg 77 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 Pg 78the 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 Pg 79older 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 Pg 80third, 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 Pg 81cantatas—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 Pg 82the 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 toPg 83 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 thePg 84 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 SundayPg 85 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 purityPg 86 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,Pg 87 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:—

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

The S. John Passion comes second in the series, and was brought out in 1724. Of the presumptive work of 1725, above-mentioned, a solitary chorus exists in record. The Passion according to S. Matthew follows in 1729; and last of all, in 1731, that according to S. Mark. The printed text of this, which we still possess, was adapted by Picander to the Dirge of 1727; but it had necessarily to be greatly augmented for the occasion, and of this supplemental music nothing remains to us.

The dramatic presentment of the passion of Jesus Christ is one of the oldest traditions of the German people. A continuous line unites the Passion Play of Ober-Ammergau with the Mystery of the medieval church. In this respect the reformation made no change in the popular religious custom. We may find it at Zittau, in 1571, when a stage was erected in the church, and the drama acted by the schoolmasters and choir; or we may trace it in every part of Silesia, Upper Saxony, and Thuringia, down to the close of the seventeenth century. Side by side this popular representation stood the church usage of distributing the parts of the passion-narrative between the officiating priest and the choir, a usage which plainly took its origin in a desire to give life to the Latin words. The necessity of it was removed when the Gospel came to be recited in the vernacular tongue, but the habit had struck too deep roots in the heart of the people to be interfered with. The Catholic wont survived, with so much else in the Lutheran churches of Middle Germany; and the musical Passion remained, at LeipzigPg 90 at least, a part of the regular service until the second half of the eighteenth century. German Passions at once sprang up, and won an ever-increasing popularity, since it was now attempted to exalt their religious impression by an artistic treatment of the subject as a whole. At first the music hardly departed from the strict medieval recitation; then it was varied by the introduction of hymns; the form of the motet was added, and found so attractive that it was applied universally and nothing was left for a solo voice. The recited Gospel—once the basis of the whole—seemed to be falling into disuse, when it was suddenly revived in the shape of the new Italian discovery, the recitative, especially in that most expressive variety, the arioso. Instrumental accompaniment became the rule; the story was interrupted by short symphonies; above all, the aria was introduced, to give stress to the spiritual feeling of the text, as a sort of emotional commentary. Finally, the Italian importation was naturalised, as it were, by the insertion of chorales, at first sung by the congregation, and increasing in number to twenty, thirty, or even more.

Hitherto the foreign element had been drawn from the concerted music of the Italian churches. A more potent influence entered Germany during Bach’s youth, that namely which proceeded from the Italian theatre—opera or oratorio, it mattered little; for in each, though the form was different, the spirit was the same.58 The first result in Germany has an analogy in Pg 91the contemporary stage of the history of the church cantata. The place of the chorale or direct biblical recitative was taken by poems written for the occasion; it was sought to realise a religious impression, not by these plain and popular means, but by the poetic unity of the composition. A reaction, however, soon took place in favour of the popular form; and the Passion text of Brockes (1712), which combined chorales and the words of the Gospel, slightly altered, it is true, with the general structure of an oratorio, immediately established itself as a model, and was set to music, within six years of its publication, by musicians of the eminence of Keiser, Telemann, Handel, and Mattheson. It forms also the basis of Bach’s S. John Passion; but here the biblical narrative is followed with entire fidelity,59 and the master has proceeded with such independent judgment that his work stands quite remote from the strange medley of sacred and secular, old and new, with which his immediate predecessors had to be contented. The music they wrote to it was indeed of great individual beauty, but in their hands it never gained the symmetry of an organic whole. It is Bach’s peculiar glory to have succeeded in this endeavour where everyone else had failed. He adopted not the forms of the Italian oratorio, but he absorbed its spirit. He blended it in a manner of Pg 92which no previous composer had ever suspected the possibility, with the profound religiousness of the national chorale. Above all, he created a recitative of his own, stripped of all that was theatrical and entirely appropriate to the setting forth of the divine narrative. In his Passion music he brings to absolute completeness the form for which his conception of the church cantata had been through long years the preparation. But musical power alone could not have achieved what Bach achieved. It was his perfect sympathy with the religious sense and emotional needs of the German people, his reverent acceptance of all that was noble in the musical tradition of his race, that enabled him to mould the ideal fulfilment of that which had been imperfectly foreshadowed in the presentments of the passion, whether as an act of divine service, a folk-play, or an oratorio.

The Passions according to S. John and S. Matthew lie before us as the noblest monuments of Bach’s spirit. Often as they have been compared, to the inevitable disadvantage of the former work, it needs little study of them to shew that any comparison must be strained and unnatural. Each is in truth incomparable, whether in relation to the other, or to the rest of sacred music. The S. John Passion is the perfection of church-music; the S. Matthew reaches the goal of all sacred art, while its colossal dimensions take it almost, happily not quite, out of the range of church performance. The S. John Passion stands closer to the oratorio, as we may learn from the way in which nearly every choral sentence, that is to say, whatever is spoken byPg 93 the disciples, the Jewish crowd, or the soldiers, is wrought into a regular chorus, or at least several times repeated. This arrangement certainly impairs the proportion of the different parts, since it appears to lay a greater emphasis upon the voice of the many than upon the single utterance of Christ or another. There is, however, always a musical fitness in these elaborations, and nothing can be more artistic than the way in which, for example, the sentence, We have a law, and by our law he ought to die, is rehearsed as the subject of a fugue, the most formal and (so to say) legal phrase that music admits, and also the most expressive of the dispersed yet unanimous speech of a multitude. It is part of the idea of Passion music to break the continuity of the narrative in the Gospel by chorales and by meditations, in the form of arias or of developed recitative (called arioso), dwelling upon the weighty moments of the story, after the fashion of the chorus in Greek tragedy; and Bach has taken advantage of the custom to insert in the S. John Passion some of his most melodious and most profoundly impressive creations. But, what is highly significant of the spirit in which he planned his work, he never allows these to interrupt the real unity of the narrative, almost invariably prolonging the vocal cadence of the foregoing recitative by leaving it on the dominant harmony. “The course of the action and the reflections upon it seem thus to be linked in unbroken sequence, as if the one sprang irresistibly to the other.”60

The entire work is begun and ended by great choruses. The opening one was written and prefixed later, the original chorus having been relegated to the close of the first part of the S. Matthew Passion;61 that at the end has also a similar inspiration to the concluding chorus of the latter work, but its preservation in its present form as well is a matter for which we cannot be too grateful, whether we regard most the exquisite pathos of its melody or the perfect flow of the several instruments, which, in their separate progressions, give a personal, almost an individual, sentiment to the composition. This sentiment lies at the root of the Passion according to S. John, and makes a peculiar contrast to the universality which is the note of that according to S. Matthew. As though to merge this mood in a broader sympathy with his fellow-believers, Bach has protracted the end so as to close the work by a chorale, the distinctive symbol of congregational brotherhood.

If this be the motive of the unusual termination of the earlier Passion, Bach has no need to explain his intention in the Passion according to S. Matthew. In the first bars of the opening chorus the long majestic tread of the basses is heard clearly to introduce us to the thought of a drama of which the whole world is the spiritual scene, all mankind, in their Representative, the actors. The never-ending wail of the violins preludes to a tragedy which sums up all human Pg 95suffering. The cry has slowly risen to its height when the daughters of Zion are shown to us, assembled to mourn, in the same piercing measures, the Bridegroom as he passes on bearing his cross. A chorus of believers, with wondering question, first interrupts their lament, finally takes up their burthen and unites in the common sorrow. Meantime the listening ear detects a third choir, of a single voice, singing as from afar, and again strangely breaking off, the chorale, O Lamb of God. The art of the work is stupendous; but more wonderful still is the truthfulness with which it figures forth the immensity of the drama to which it is the prologue.

Nevertheless it was far remote from Bach’s mind to present the Passion in the guise of a drama; it would have been altogether foreign to the essence of his genius. The Passion he will shew to us as a picture, or rather as a series of pictures. He takes the text of S. Matthew without gloss or change; choruses he leaves in the terse briefness of natural utterance, repeating little or not at all. He seeks to give just expression to the words by a thoughtful distribution of the speeches between two complete choirs, each with its own organ and orchestra. Above all he separates the words of Jesus from the rest of the recited narrative by a different accompaniment, that of a string quartet, within which setting he places them, with the purity of a crystal, as within an aureole.62 At Pg 96certain moments of supreme dignity, the simple recitative rises into the measured melody of the arioso, the words, however, remaining without change. In this way the solemn act of the last supper is carried to a sublime height, and inspired with a supernal tenderness, wherein music reaches its noblest and most divine ideal. Once only does the glory fade from around Christ’s words, and that is at the last cry, Eli, Eli, lama asabthani. Here it is the organ—the accompaniment of the human recitative—which alone sustains the harmony. It is the finest thought in all Bach’s writing.

The additions to the text of the Gospel are of two sorts. First there are the chorales, which appear in great frequency owing to the numerous repetitions of a few melodies. One, the special Passion chorale, O Haupt voll Blut und Wunden, recurs five times, with different words, and the harmonies each time newly constructed. The intention is evidently to fix the thought upon the prevailing tone of the subject, in the same fashion, diversely applied, as that of the modern Leitmotiv. Beside these chorales stand Picander’s verses which are set in the form, not only of arias or ariosos, but also of recitative; and these, to throw the biblical recitative into greater relief, have, for the most part, an accompaniment of wind instruments: sometimes the single voice is blended, as in converse, with the voices of the choir. Usually in the Passion music the company of the faithful came simply as Pg 97prologue and epilogue; here, on the contrary, it attends throughout, and from one side of the church answers to the voice of the Daughter of Zion on the other. Once and again the multitudinous cry breaks in upon the pathos of her song; and it seems as if no place were void of the all-pervading agony. At the end both choirs join together in a hymn of tender watching addressed to the Saviour as he lies sleeping in the tomb.

We should certainly fail to appreciate Bach’s place as a writer for the church, if we left out of regard his Masses. That a composer so peculiarly representative of Protestantism should have written such works will only surprise those who are unfamiliar with the usage of Lutheran worship. The conservatism of Leipzig, in particular, retained many Catholic customs which the Protestant churches as a rule had discarded, for instance, the surplices of minister and choir, and the ringing of a bell during the eucharistal office. Latin motets, hymns, and responses, were sung on high festivals; and the use of the Latin Magnificat furnished Bach with a theme for perhaps the splendidest of his shorter church compositions.

The original performance of the Magnificat throws an interesting light on the manner in which the old tradition of the Latin singing was fused with an entirely popular service. The famous work, notable also as the first masterpiece which Bach produced at Leipzig, was not performed on the Christmas of 1723, as we now hear it, as a continuous whole. It was broken up by a string of Christmas songs, which, wePg 98 may rather say, served as a curiously wrought setting to enhance the beauty of the gem it enclosed. At every pause the thanksgiving of the virgin-mother was interrupted by verses of a well-loved German hymn, Vom Himmel hoch, by the Gloria in Excelsis, and by little songs, part in Latin, part German, of the most homely simplicity. Most likely the church too kept the old German fashion, with its cradle and lullaby and touching chorus of angels. Strangely out of place must the superb canticle have sounded, but for that reverent spirit which breathes through it and makes it a fulfilment of Protestant feeling, and a contrast only by completion.

Besides these occasional performances, the first three divisions of a complete Mass—the Kyrie, Gloria, and Credo—formed a regular part of the service on Sundays and feast-days; the Sanctus distinguished the three high festivals of the Lutheran kalendar: the only element of the Mass which is not known to have been sung was the Agnus Dei, and even of this we have evidence that it was performed in the University Church (from a Mass of Haydn) later on in the eighteenth century.

Accordingly there is nothing to hinder the supposition that Bach employed his Masses for production in the Leipzig churches. Concerning two of the five he wrote 63 this is highly probable; and a similar influence Pg 99is suggested by the transcripts of several Italian Masses, drawn from such different sources as Palestrina and Lotti, which exist in Bach’s autograph and in that of his wife and son. At the least the latter bear witness to the hold which this form of church-*music had taken upon his mind. But it was not until he had traversed the whole field of Protestant music that he allowed himself to rise to the conception of a work that should embrace the universal faith of Christendom, whose voice should be persuasive to the hopes and beliefs of Catholic and Protestant alike, the sonorous majesty of the one growing intense in the human earnestness of the other. To this Mass in B minor 64 Bach put all his strength, consecrated every resource of inspiration and art, every possibility of voice and instrument. While Catholic writers have treated the Mass music as the gorgeous accompaniment of a mighty pomp, in which the outward, dramatic, impressiveness stands in the foreground, Bach passes back to the verities of which the sacred office is the symbol. Thus his Kyrie is not the mere opening of a stately pageant. From four bars of majestic chorus, the orchestra go on at once to Pg 100announce a theme unsurpassed in the entire range of Bach’s music; each of the five voices of the choir take it up in turn and weave together their passionate, yet restrained cry for mercy. The human passion of the Kyrie eleison has its counterpart in the tender, almost personal feeling of the Christe eleison, which is set as a duet to an exquisitely melodious accompaniment of the violin, and in the closing Kyrie chorus, which, instead of being conceived in the usual way as a petition to the Holy Spirit, resumes the tone of the first and sums up the total supplication in a spirit now suggestive of the broad treatment of the Catholic writers but soon betraying the hand of Bach in its conciseness, its more nervous motion and acuter harmonies. The same abandoning of traditional currents in order that he might go back straight to the springs lying deep in the nature and experience of the world, to which the office of the holy communion owes its life, is equally manifest throughout the Mass. The Gloria becomes again the angel-song of the nativity. Bach throws himself at once into the spirit in which he wrote the Christmas Oratorio; and of this great work the later chorus is a sort of summary, to be used again for performance at Christmas. But if his profound grasp of the reality of that which he expressed is the supreme excellence of Bach’s High Mass, no less striking in its way is the discrimination with which he treats the different elements of the Creed. Intellectual dogmas find an intellectual rendering, as in the curious places in which the union of the divine nature in Christ is reflected by a canon, first in the unison,Pg 101 then in the fourth below. But doctrines which are more directly bound up with the soul of Christianity are recited with a fulness of living sympathy, which feels the pathos of the human life of Christ, pulses with unspeakable awe and an intensity almost terrific at the rehearsal of his death, then springs up in most glorious rejoicing at the resurrection. The declaration of his personal faith did not obscure in Bach’s mind the fact that he was writing a work which should hold true for the one catholic, apostolic church of which existing churches were all alike members. He returns to this thought openly in the article of baptism, where the Gregorian intonation, Confiteor unum baptisma, is pronounced, as a second subject, by the basses and wrought with superb art into the texture of the fugue.

Words, however, can give but a very faint impression of this masterpiece of universal Christendom; and daring with forced fingers rude to touch its perfect outline, I leave inviolate the lyrical tenderness of the Agnus Dei and the yearning desire 65 of the Dona nobis pacem, the restful consummation of the whole. Nor can I describe the infinite fertility of the design, the happy frequency with which in the arie a single Pg 102instrument, violin, flute, hautboy, or horn, is made to enhance the delicacy of the human voice, or the splendour of the grouping of the orchestra, equally noble in sonorous magnificence and in chastened softness. Whether in its art or in its religion the High Mass stands among the creations of Bach’s master-spirit, first and alone, but for its sole equal, the Passion according to Saint Matthew.

CHAPTER VIII.

We quitted the direct narrative of Bach’s life at the point when the arrival of the new rector of the Thomasschule gave it an interval of peace and quietness, an interval of which we took advantage to review the great ranges of church-music which fell as an official task to the cantor. The four years of Gesner’s rule are the ripest and busiest in Bach’s life; not that they include his greatest individual works, with the notable exception of the High Mass, but that they are the most productive, and of works attaining a more uniform level of first-rate excellence than any others. After 1735 Bach was content to relax somewhat, and he employed his time, less in composing new cantatas or the like, than in revising, solidifying, and balancing his earlier works. He must also have retired more into the quiet of his family life, and devoted himself to his private pupils, after the blow struck at his influence in the school by Gesner’s successor, Ernesti.

Ernesti, a young man of great learning and a good teacher, was as incapable as his father, the old rector under whom Bach first taught, of grasping the primary conditions of the school, namely, its combination ofPg 104 musical with general education. He was jealous of the predominance of the former, and therefore started with a bias against Bach. He succeeded in winning a victory for his own schemes, but at the expense of the ruin of the music. Bach was not the only sufferer; the same dispute was going on elsewhere in Germany at the time, and was in fact one of the incidents of a transitional period in the history of education. The Thomasschule from its double government, the cantor having an equal supremacy in musical matters with the rector’s in secular, was peculiarly liable to such a conflict. Unless the two heads were joined by a strong bond of sympathy, as happened with Bach and Gesner, rivalry was, perhaps, inevitable. When Ernesti succeeded to the place, we have not long to wait before the unpleasant spectacle presents itself.

It is needless to follow the details of the quarrel which kept Bach in a nervous state of exasperation for nearly two years, and left him in official discomfort for the rest of his life. Suffice it to say, that in 1736 Ernesti quite unwarrantably usurped the cantor’s right of nominating the musical prefects. Bach’s contention was throughout the just one, only he made the mistake of losing his temper about it. However, it is to be observed that his language, if occasionally violent, is consistently to the point, and the musician shews better breeding than the scholar, who is not ashamed of vulgar abuse, charges of lying, and like scurrilities. The whole thing, indeed, began by a scene that tells strongly for Bach’s sense of justice. A prefect had been, as he believed, wrongly condemned to a publicPg 105 flogging before the school. Bach, who had had nothing to do with his subordinate’s crime, interposed by taking the whole blame upon his shoulders. The rector was in a rage, and refused to remit the punishment: so the prefect had to leave, and the rector filled up the vacancy. Hence the quarrel. To Bach it must have been irritating beyond bearing to have a man, little more than half his age, intruding upon his incontestable rights, still more to find the Town Council and consistory unscrupulous in supporting the claim of the stronger, by declining to disturb a right which had no precedent. It was not until he had appealed to the King, and delighted him by some evening-music, produced when he was next at Leipzig, that the matter came for a fair hearing. As often happens, when we have elaborate documents of the progress of a case, the conclusion has disappeared, but it is presumed that the royal judgment was broader than the indecent partiality of the Leipzig officials, and that the grievance was redressed. But the harm had gone too far to be undone, and while Bach and Ernesti lived there was no more unity in the school. How deeply Bach resented the injury is seen from the eager interest he took in a quarrel that turned on the same principles as his own, the very year before his death. He not only had a critique of the offending school-*master written and printed for him but actually changed the phrasing of a secular cantata, The Contest of Phœus and Pan, when it was next performed, so as to convey a covert sneer at him and Ernesti jointly.

One more assault came to disturb Bach’s tranquillityPg 106 a short time after the controversy with Ernesti had come to an end. This was an insolent article by Scheibe, a musician not without a superficial cleverness, whom Bach had rejected as unqualified for a certain organistship. It appeared anonymously in Scheibe’s own review, the Critische Musicus, in 1737; nor was Bach’s name given, though the reference was too clear to escape notice. Bach is said to have resented the attack, which was a mere flippant pasquinade upon his music, bitterly; and he was almost induced to enter into literary warfare in defence. Happily we are spared the sight of a master in one art essaying to use weapons with which he is sure to show to disadvantage; and it was Bach’s friend, Magister Birnbaum, who took up his cause for him.

Bach had certainly warm admirers and true friends in Leipzig. His old pupils remained faithful to him, and one, Altnikol, married his second daughter. Their number continually increased with the master’s fame, and among them are reckoned three at least of his kinsmen and not a few musicians of high repute in the younger generation, such as J. L. Krebs (afterwards court organist at Altenburg), J. F. Agricola (capell-*meister at Berlin), J. F. Doles (cantor of the Thomasschule), G. A. Homilius (cantor of the Kreuzschule at Dresden), and J. P. Kirnberger (a noted contra-*puntist, and court musician at Berlin), not to mention the most eminent of all, Bach’s two eldest sons. Another, J. T. Goldberg, was the clavichord-player for whom Bach made his Thirty Variations. He was attached to the suite of the Baron von Kayserling, an invalid whoPg 107 suffered greatly from sleeplessness. The Baron would often have Goldberg pass the night in a room adjoining his, that he might play to him when he could not rest. Once he said to Bach that he should like to have some music “of a soothing and rather cheerful character, that he might be a little amused by them in his sleepless nights.”66 To this request Bach replied by his variations which combine a monotony of ground-work with an endless variety of treatment, including canons in all intervals, and winding up with a quodlibet of delightful freshness.67 Kayserling was more than amused by the present. He was never tired of hearing the pieces, and “for a long time afterwards, when the sleepless nights came, he used to say, Dear Goldberg, do play me one of my variations:”—they were always his variations. He thanked Bach for them with a gold cup filled with a hundred louis-d’or (or about 75l. sterling).

But while students thronged to Bach as a master; and while he was often assailed by smatterers who only wanted to be known as his pupils—and were disappointed—his later years were years of declining influence in Leipzig, precisely in proportion to his increasing celebrity outside. Like Milton his fame grew when public recognition failed. He became merely one of the sights of the place. No musician who passed through or near Leipzig was satisfied without an interview. But when any real occasion came, when his help and judgment would have been of use, he was not called. I do not refer to the Society Pg 108of Musical Sciences, to which Bach was only admitted years after it was established at Leipzig, and only as an ordinary member with a canon sent in as testimonial. Probably its scientific discussions on the theory of music were little to Bach’s taste: perhaps he declined to join at first; though to a man of smaller generosity it would have been a blow to see Handel chosen as an honorary member. The occasion on which even courtesy should have decided a resort to Bach’s advice and co-operation was the establishment in 1743 of the Grosse Concert, the parent of the famous concerts of the Gewandhaus. It was arranged by an association of rich burghers; and its tendencies were from the outset in a distinctly modern direction. Rossini—of all people—notes Dr. Spitta, supplanted Beethoven among contemporaries; and the great Leipzig master became a stranger in his own town. But the fact that Bach had nothing to do with the beginning of the decisive musical movement 68 of the town does a great deal to fix his position in one’s mind. Equally significant is the circumstance that some time, perhaps some years, after 1736 he resigned the leadership of the Musical Society over which he had presided since 1729. If he was not to be first, he preferred to retreat into privacy. This privacy must have become closer when his three eldest sons left Pg 109him to follow a musical calling elsewhere, Friedemann at Dresden and then at Halle, Emanuel at Berlin, and Bernhard at Muehlhausen. One daughter of his first marriage was all that remained to him. Of the thirteen children of his second marriage, seven died in early childhood and one was an idiot. Friedrich and Johann Christian were the only sons of musical promise; the former became capellmeister to the Count of Schaumburg at Bueckeburg, the latter made the name of Bach famous in London drawing-rooms, but only through his own thin productions. Born in 1735, he was the darling of his father’s old age, and was the only son who remained with his three sisters in the home when Bach died.

With Friedemann and Emanuel their father always kept near relations, as far as the difficulty of travelling allowed. It was through the latter that Bach came to make his famous visit to the court of Frederick the Great. The king had often expressed a desire to see him and Emanuel had informed his father of it. But Bach was usually now too busy to undertake so long a journey. At last, in 1747, he decided to go, and, characteristically enough, fetched Friedemann from Halle on the way to accompany him. I give the account of the interview at Potsdam in the words of Forkel, who had it from Friedemann himself:—

"At this time the king had every evening a private concert, in which he himself generally performed some concertos on the flute. One evening, just as he was getting his flute ready, and his musicians were assembled, an officer brought him the list of the strangersPg 110 who had arrived. With his flute in his hand he ran over the list, but immediately turned to the assembled musicians, and said, with a kind of agitation, Gentlemen, old Bach is come. The flute was now laid aside, and old Bach, who had alighted at his son’s lodgings, was immediately summoned to the Palace.... At that time it was the fashion to make rather prolix compliments. The first appearance of J. S. Bach before so great a King, who did not even give him time to change his travelling-dress for a black chanter’s gown, must necessarily be attended with many apologies. I will not here dwell on these apologies, but merely observe, that in William Friedemann’s mouth they made a formal dialogue between the King and the Apologist.

"But what is more important than this is, that the King gave up his concert for this evening, and invited Bach, then already called the Old Bach, to try his fortepianos, made by Silbermann, which stood in various rooms of the palace," and numbered fifteen. "The musicians went with him from room to room, and Bach was invited everywhere to try and to play unpremeditated compositions." The king gave him a subject to develop in fugue, and Bach concluded by adding one that occurred to himself, which he extemporized in six voices. It was the greatest display of Bach’s life, and certainly an exhibition that has never been equalled on its own lines. A permanent record of the visit lies in the Musikalische Opfer, wherein Bach treated the theme which the king had proposed to him with an exuberance of learning and varietyPg 111 beyond the possibilities of ex tempore composition. It comprises fugues in three and six parts, eight canons, and a sonata for three instruments, ending in a perpetual canon.

The Musical Offering has always been an object of admiration for the ingenuity of its workmanship. But its object was mainly the display of contrapuntal learning. It was a parergon to which Bach delighted himself by applying every resource of musical science; and therefore stands on a different footing to the three great collections of fugues which Bach composed, the last of which was his employment almost to the time of his death. The Art of Fugue stands nearest to the Musical Offering, since it too consists of fugues and canons, all upon a single subject. It differs from that work inasmuch as here he wrote not to display his own skill, but to illustrate the final possibilities of contrapuntal art. But equally it appeals to a very limited class of musicians; to us in the present moment it is chiefly interesting as shewing that, if Bach’s productive energy ceased comparatively early, his power only became the more massive when he chose to use it. Far otherwise is it with the two sets of preludes and fugues through all the major and minor keys, called the Wohltemperirte Clavier.69 These no musician or pianist can ignore with impunity; Schumann himself, whose style of playing and composing lies at the antiPg 112podes of Bach’s, commends them to “young musicians” as their “daily bread.”70

The Forty-Eight Preludes and Fugues were begun partly with an educational purpose. Bach wished to prove the capacity of the clavichord, now that he had enlarged its sphere by an improved method of tuning, and to impress this variety upon his pupils. The first half, to which alone the title Das Wohltemperirte Clavier properly belongs, was completed in 1722, just before the author left Coethen; the second was finally arranged some time before 1746, perhaps before 1740. The labour and the years Bach took to mature these great works seem to indicate that he regarded them as representative works. Not a bar but was subjected to the most thoughtful remodelling.71 The first part in particular needed many a trial before it could find the master’s approval, and thrice did he transcribe the whole with his own hand. Every idea that was out of place, every line that led nowhere, was ruthlessly pruned away. When the root of the piece was reached, perhaps the motive of the original would germinate afresh, and the whole would assume a quite new and statelier form. The two parts are in some measure distinguished by the greater development of some of the preludes in the second, which are now and then sonatas on a small scale, and by the technical incompleteness of some fugues in the first. But, though the latter part is perhaps the richer and more full of Pg 113fancy, there is a symmetry about the whole series which makes inconceivable that Bach should have not intended the two parts to be combined. Indeed we are told that Bach liked to have the whole played through at a sitting. The work as it stands bears no trace, except in its various readings, of the multiple processes through which it has passed to gain each time in purity and simplicity and freedom.72

For it must at the outset be explained that the Forty-Eight were never intended as model fugues. Learning was to Bach a means to an end. Except for amusement, as in the Musikalische Opfer, he never let it shew itself. To produce living work it needed the touch of his imagination and the guidance of his clear artist’s instinct. In fact, nothing is freer than his management of the several voices of a fugue. “He considered his parts,” it has been finely said, “as persons, who conversed together, like a select company. If there were three, each could sometimes be silent, and listen to the others, till it again had something to the purpose to say. But, if in the midst of the most interesting part of the discourse, some uncalled and importunate note suddenly stepped in, and attempted to say a word, or even a syllable only, Bach looked on this as a great irregularity, and made his pupils comprehend that it Pg 114was not to be allowed." But “no part, not even a middle part, was allowed to break off, before it had entirely said what it had to say.... This high degree of exactness in the management of every single part is precisely what makes Bach’s harmony a manifold melody.”

What Forkel here says of Bach’s part-writing in general is true in an even fuller sense of the fugues. I quote him because he was not only one of the most learned contrapuntists of his day, but also a man who discerned clearly the limits of counterpoint and the difference between musical learning and musical art. His description of the fugues is concise and plain, and so much to the point that it deserves quotation here:—

"A highly characteristic theme, an uninterrupted principal melody, wholly derived from it, and equally characteristic from the beginning to the end; not mere accompaniment in the other parts, but in each of them an independent melody, according with the others, also from the beginning to the end; freedom, lightness, and fluency, in the progress of the whole, inexhaustible variety of modulation combined with perfect purity; the exclusion of every arbitrary note, not necessarily belonging to the whole; unity and diversity in the style, rhythmus, and measure; and lastly, a life diffused through the whole, so that it sometimes appears to the performer or hearer, as if every single note were animated; these are the properties of Bach’s fugue.... All Bach’s fugues ... are endowed with equally great excellencies, but each in a different manner. Each has its own precisely defined character; and dependent upon that, its ownPg 115 turns in melody and harmony. When we know and can perform one, we really know only one, and can perform but one; whereas we know and can play whole folios full of fugues by other composers of Bach’s time, as soon as we have comprehended, and rendered familiar to our hand, the turns of a single one."73

There is no work that realizes better the conception of a perfect fugue than that in C sharp minor in the first part of the Wohltemperirte Clavier. That it is in five voices and contains three subjects, are facts that would by themselves place it among the most vertebrate of the collection. But least of all does the grandeur of the fugue rest upon its complexity. It is the character-drawing of the several voices, and the nobility of them, that make their discourse sublime—three voices entirely contrasted and entirely blended—each time with a new and surprising effect, now of pomp, now of tenderest pathos—one a slow organ-voice, the next delicate and flowing, and the third vehement, striking hammer-blows. The second and then the last gradually die away; the solemnity of the original theme communicates itself again to the whole web of thought, and the end is plaintive and restful.74

A story is told which displays in a characteristic way Bach’s instinctive knowledge of the nature of a Pg 116fugue. When he happened to be in a strange church where a fugue was announced, and one of his two eldest sons stood near him, “he always, as soon as he had heard the introduction to the theme, said before-*hand what the composer ought to introduce, and what possibly might be introduced. If the composer had performed his work well, what he said happened: then he rejoiced, and jogged his son, to make him observe it.” Otherwise, it is added, his modesty made him the most lenient of critics.

The Art of Fugue has already been mentioned as the last and most massive of Bach’s works. It must have been begun in 1749, and so careful was the author of what he wished to be considered as his masterpiece—in the strict sense—that he had it engraved under his own eyes.75 He did not live to see it published 76; the carelessness or ignorance of those into whose hands it came allowed it to appear with several extraneous insertions, and its intended regular structure of fifteen fugues and four canons upon a single theme in D minor remained long obscured. Not content with this gigantic fugue—for it is one fugue through all its fifteen sections—Bach resolved to penetrate still further into the labyrinth of harPg 117monic combinations, and to write, so it is said, a fugue in four parts with four subjects, all of them to be reversed in each of the parts. He had not, however, gone much beyond the introduction of the third subject, which contained in the German notation the letters of his own name, when his excessive application was terminated by a painful disorder in the eyes. He had always been near-sighted, and now his vision almost failed. He consulted an English oculist of repute, who was then in Leipzig; but after two operations he became totally blind, and the medical treatment he underwent broke his hitherto hale constitution. For half a year he declined, until he found his rest on the evening of Tuesday, the 28th of July, 1750. Ten days before his death his eyesight for a short space suddenly returned to him. It was a few days after that strange illumination that he called Altnikol, his son-in-law, to him, and bade him write at his dictation the chorale When we are in the depths of need. But death had become a new presence to him. Often had he lingered upon the idea in chorale and cantata; but now he felt himself to have passed beyond the gulf. He bade Altnikol set other words at the head of the music. The words were these: Herewith I come before thy throne.77

CHAPTER IX.

The fact of Bach’s death was registered by the Town Council in the following terms: The Cantor at the Thomasschule, or rather the Capelldirector, Bach, is dead. They proceeded to resolve that the school needed a Cantor, and not a Capellmeister, although he must understand music too. Such was the public recognition of Leipzig’s greatest man. His widow was suffered to live on in need, and to die a pauper ten years after her husband. The youngest daughter was at last relieved by a public subscription, in which Beethoven was proud to join; but not by the town. The last infamy of Leipzig was achieved when S. John’s churchyard, in which Bach had been laid to rest, was rooted up and made into a road. His bones were scattered, no man knew or cared where.

The boys of the Thomasschule, of course, followed their cantor’s funeral, and one of his colleagues published a short memorial upon his friend. But Bach was very soon forgotten in his own school. His works were doubtless performed, more or less frequently; but cantatas and motets were required for the church service, and it was easier to fall back upon the stores of music he had left, than to buy or transcribe newPg 119 pieces. How little the treasure was valued we may learn from the circumstance that in 1803 over a hundred church compositions existed there in autograph, while seven years later there remained but three in score and forty-four in parts.

Nevertheless the name, only the name, of Bach continued powerful in Leipzig. When the Gewandhaus was opened, in 1781, it was painted in great letters upon a screen behind the orchestra; but nothing of his was performed there until the concerts had existed for more than half a century. It was his feeblest son, Johann Christian, whose compositions were admired. The visit of Mozart, in 1789, of which I have before spoken, did something to revive the interest in Bach’s music; but the process was a slow one. His works became known among an increasing number of scattered admirers; then they came to be partially published; but it was not until 1842 that he had a monument on the Promenade, behind the windows of his old house, not until 1850 that a worthier monument was begun in the establishment of the Bach Society, whose collection of the master’s works has hardly an equal in critical accuracy or magnificence of form. The erection of the first was due to the efforts of Mendelssohn; the second, in great measure, to Schumann.

From these two monuments we turn again to their original. Of Bach’s figure we know nothing but the head and the square shoulders. His countenance was one of singular dignity and refinement. The thick eyebrows that stood out beneath his great forehead,Pg 120 knotted above his long firm nose, seemed to denote a force, if not a severity, of character; but the impression was softened by the sweet, sensitive lines of his mouth. Both traits are true of the man. He had a strong self-dependence, which was reflected in his sense of duty, the consistency, the uprightness of his life, but which was liable to exaggeration in self-will, even obstinacy. Partly this was owing to his irritable temperament, the other side of his nature, born of an acute sensibility, which might reveal itself either so or more often in the tender charities of his family life. These double tendencies, the fine and the strong, had their ground in his active and contemplative religious faith; they find their testimony in his music. Only here we see a third factor, not so manifest in his own life, in the boundless flexibility of mind to which it points. If, however, one is asked the dominant characteristics of it, there is but one reply,—manliness and melody, the one never too vigorous to overpower the melody, the other restrained by it from any approach to effeminacy.

It is these qualities that adjudge Bach the same place among musicians as Milton holds among our own poets; and the thought has a touching suggestion in the lack of recognition of his later years, and in his blindness. But the likeness goes deeper into their work. Each is in his craft the most learned of artists; each is ruled by an absorbing religious sense. They are equals in chastened grace, in balance and ear; and equally wanting in two special gifts, humour and dramatic power.

This is not the place to pursue the parallel more closely; but the statement of it may help us to realise how little popularity can be taken as an index of artistic worth, it may also serve as a warning to those who insist on comparing Bach with other masters. He can as little be compared with Beethoven, for instance, as Milton with Shakespeare. That he should have been constantly brought into comparison with Handel was, perhaps, inevitable; but to see the unfairness to both, it is only necessary to observe that neither produced his best work in the same fields as the other. Bach wrote nothing more than distantly akin to the Oratorio; Handel attempted nothing great in Masses or in Passion Music. Wherever they do enter into comparison, only ignorance can excuse the claim of superiority often made for Handel. So it is remarkable when they are set side by side as organists. With his prodigious brilliancy Handel was untrue to the nature of the organ; he made it a concert-instrument. Bach, on the other hand, developed its powers to the utmost extent possible while preserving its church character. Accordingly, it is not strange that no single work for organ solo by Handel is known to exist, while among contemporaries Bach was hardly known except as an organ-master, and his works have remained to organists the most precious of possessions. Mattheson, no unqualified judge, courteously decided that in this sphere their names must stand in alphabetical order.

To complete the picture of Bach as a performer, we must add to his command of the organ and clavichordPg 122 the skill he acquired as a violinist. In both his appointments at Weimar this was his instrument, and to have written and played the sonatas for violin solo, he must almost have attained perfection in its technicalities. But his favourite stringed instrument in later years was the viola, because it placed him, “as it were, in the middle of the harmony, whence he could best hear and enjoy it, on both sides;”78 and, when he was in the vein, he would extemporize an additional part to a trio or whatever was being played. In the same way he would at sight combine scores on the clavichord with astonishing fluency. That he could readily expand a figured bass is only to say that he was proficient in the ordinary training of an accompanist; but there are some details noticed by Forkel in this connexion, which bear in an interesting manner upon a vexed question of the present day, namely, the lawfulness of writing “additional accompaniments” to his vocal works, and must not be passed over.

Bach was able, we are told, “if a single bass part, often ill-figured, was laid before him, immediately to play from it a trio, or a quartet; nay, he even went so far ... as to perform extempore, to three single parts, a fourth part, and thus to make a quartetto of the whole.”79 The plain meaning of this is that, when he pleased, he did not play simple chords to the given bass, but extracted from them two or three strains of independent melody. The principle has been applied to many of Bach’s compositions, especially by Robert Franz, whom a close study of the master led to the Pg 123opinion that, when Bach had left a vocal piece accompanied only by a single bass, the natural way of making the accompaniment satisfactory was to treat it polyphonically, in the same style as Bach is recorded to have done sometimes himself; in other words, to write new parts over it in counterpoint and imitation. The necessity for some such treatment is argued from the decay, in modern times, of the art of expanding even the common harmonies of a figured bass. The real reason against it is that we may be thus obscuring the relief of light and shade which Bach designed to produce by leaving some pieces barely accompanied, as in contrast to the elaborate orchestration of others. This is more weighty than the argument drawn from the absence of any authoritative example of it; as for instance, that it is not to be found in some exercises in figured bass by a pupil which Bach corrected. It is obvious to answer that a master would probably be content with accuracy in his scholar’s work, and would not apply to it the same standard of elaboration, or allow the same freedom of treatment, as he would desire in his own. No doubt Bach employed, probably he preferred for teaching purposes, a simple accompaniment of three or four-part harmonies. But side by side with this must be placed the testimony of a pupil, that he had never heard anything more excellent than the singing of the voices among each other, when Bach accompanied: the accompaniment was in itself so beautiful that even the principal voice could not withdraw from the pleasure he received from the accessory. Failing this faculty now-a-days, it is probably wisest to adoptPg 124 the judgment of Mendelssohn and limit the additional accompaniment to the writing out of the implied organ part.80

Two other facts demand notice in reference to the production of Bach’s music in modern times. One is the non-existence of distinctive solo singers. When an aria was to be sung, a single member stood up out of the body of the choir. This will explain the almost equal difficulty of each. The other fact relates to the proportion of the choir to the orchestra. In the last century the latter regularly outnumbered the former; and Bach’s own scheme for the organisation of the music at S. Thomas’s desiderated only twelve singers to a band of eighteen, exclusive of the organ—the organ, be it remembered, being entrusted by Bach with a very important part. Such a distribution must have given the performances which he conducted a different colour from that which they present now. He did not separate the voices and the instruments so broadly as we are accustomed to do. The voice was to him hardly more than any other instrument; and if we are to judge his music fairly, we must consider the two elements of his band, not as choir and accompaniment, but as one mass of sound, composed of two balanced and co-ordinate parts.

It remains to give a brief sketch of the reception which Bach has had in England. Probably Dr. Burney, the learned historian of music, was the first to Pg 125introduce him here; but he afterwards confessed that his partial verdict was based solely upon a copy of the first half of the Forty-Eight Preludes and Fugues—"a vile and most diabolical copy," as it turned out, fall of mistakes—and had never heard one played. The first serious steps to promote the knowledge of Bach in England were taken by a company of three enthusiastic worshippers at his shrine; to one of whom is due the honour of the first publication anywhere of the Wohltemperirte Clavier. It was brought out in London by A. F. K. Kollman in 1799. The impulse thus given was carried on by two leading musicians, Horn and Wesley, who planned a complete edition of Bach’s works. The series was begun in 1809, but, although well received, did not proceed very far. Eleven years later appeared a translation of Forkel’s Life of Bach. The most interesting record, however, of this movement, lies in a recently published collection of letters by Samuel Wesley,81 the greatest organist of his time.

The little band of enthusiasts set out as the apostles of a new religion. Wesley proclaimed his championship of Saint Sebastian, as a sacred mission, in the defence of truth and justice, against the idolaters of Pg 126Handel—quite unconscious how necessarily such a combat must resolve itself into mere partisanship, and the very bigotry which he opposed. He has, however, the credit of having convinced the redoubtable Burney of the injustice of his published opinion of Bach, and also of being the first in England to observe, what Forkel had seized upon independently abroad, that of his “characteristic beauties” “air” was “one of the chief and most striking.”82 No doubt his wonderful playing of the organ did something to make Bach known in England; but it was long before he was really accepted. The movement, in fact, for a time subsided; it was roused again into life by the energetic work of Mendelssohn, who declared it was high time that the “immortal master, who is on no one point inferior to any master, and in many points superior to all, should no longer be forgotten.” He prepared the road for the successful labours of Sterndale Bennett, who, as the most prominent English musician, was able to force Bach into notice in London. In 1849, a year before the foundation of the German Bach-Gesellschaft, he established the Bach Society, with the main object, however, not of publishing, but of producing the works of Bach. By this the S. Matthew Passion was performed in 1854 and 1858, to be followed by part of the High Mass, and lastly by the Christmas Oratorio. Moreover, as musical professor at Cambridge, Sir

William extended the study of Bach in a wider circle; and it was taken up by many provincial associations. In the meanwhile Schumann’s widow was asserting, by her wonderful playing, the rightful place of Bach’s clavichord works among the treasures of the pianist. At length in 1871, the S. Matthew Passion was produced at Westminster Abbey, and since that time, there, or in S. Paul’s Cathedral, the Passion Music and the Christmas Oratorio have taken their constant position as the special services of Holy Week and the new year. Other churches in London, notably S. Anne’s, Soho, have taken up the example, and the formation of the Bach Choir has added a new zeal to the cultivation of the master. If England was late in acknowledging his greatness, nowhere now are his works performed more regularly, and nowhere does he stand in so wide and so assured a popularity.

PEDIGREE OF MUSICIANS IN THE BACH FAMILY

A LIST OF CHURCH CANTATAS IN PRESUMED ORDER OF PRODUCTION.83

FOOTNOTES:

[45] The Edifying Reflexions of a Tobacco-smoker are printed by C. H. Bitter in his Life of Bach, vol. i. pp. 124 f. (Berlin, 1865), and the music added in facsimile at the end. The words recall entirely the old English song, Tobacco’s but an Indian weed, of Tom d’Urfey’s Pills to Purge Melancholy, 1699, or Wither’s delicious verses, with the refrain Thus think and drink tobacco, of which d’Urfey’s are a réchauffé. But the English has not the analogy of the pipe and the human soul carried into such detail as Bach’s text; witness the lines:—

Wie oft geschieht’s nicht bei dem Rauchen,
Dass, wenn der Stopfer nicht zu Hand,
Man pflegt den Finger zu gebrauchen?
Dann denk’ ich, wenn ich mich verbrannt,
O macht die Kohle solche Pein;
Wie heiss mag erst die Hölle sein.

LONDON:
PRINTED BY GILBERT AND RIVINGTON, LTD.,
ST. JOHN’S HOUSE, CLERKENWELL ROAD, E.C.

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Uniform with this Volume, price 3s. each. THE GREAT MUSICIANS A SERIES OF BIOGRAPHIES EDITED BY FRANCIS HUEFFER.
WAGNER. WEBER. SCHUBERT. ROSSINI. PURCELL. HAYDN. MOZART.	HANDEL. MENDELSSOHN. SCHUMANN. BERLIOZ. BEETHOVEN. CHERUBINI.
ENGLISH CHURCH COMPOSERS.

CHAPTER I.
PAGE
Bach’s Ancestry	1
CHAPTER II. 1685-1708.
His Youth and Apprenticeship—in an orchestra at Weimar—and as organist at Arnstadt and Muehlhausen:—Marriage	14
Early Compositions chiefly for Organ and Clavichord	21-42
CHAPTER III. 1708-1717.
Organist and Concertmeister at Weimar	29
The Organ Works	37-42
CHAPTER IV. 1717-1723.
Capellmeister at Coethen: Second Marriage	43
The Works for Clavichord, Chamber, and Orchestra	51-56
CHAPTER V. 1723-1730.
Cantor at Leipzig: the Music of Bach’s Household	58
CHAPTER VI. 1730-1734.
Bach’s Work at Leipzig	73
The Secular Cantatas	75-80
The Church Cantatas and Oratorios	80-86
The Motets	86-87
CHAPTER VII.
The Passion Music and the High Mass	88
CHAPTER VIII. 1734-1750.
Bach’s later years at Leipzig: his Death	103
The Great Collections of Fugues	111-116
CHAPTER IX.
Characteristic of Bach: Estimation in England	118
Pedigree of Musicians in the Family of Bach	128
Chronological List of Church Cantatas	131

VEIT BACH, d. 1619 (Cithara), Wechmar.
┌───────┴────────┐
Lips (See page 130).	HANS, d. 1626 (Der Spielmann), Arnstadt.
┌───────────┬─────┴──────┐
Johann, 1604-1673 (Town Musician and Organist) Erfurt.	CHRISTOPH, 1613-1661 (Town Musician), Erfurt and Arnstadt.	Heinrich, 1615-1692 (Organist), Arnstadt.

Johann, 1604-1673 (Town Musician and Organist), Erfurt.
┌───────────────┼───────────────┐
Johann Christian, 1640-1682 (Viol), Erfurt and Eisenach.		Johann Aegidius, 1645-1717 (Viol), Erfurt. │		Johann Nikolaus, 1653-1682 (Viola-da-Gamba), Erfurt.
┌──┴───┐		┌────┴────┐
Johann Jakob, 1668-1692 (Town Musician), Eisenach.	Johann Christoph, 1673-1727 (Cantor and Organist), Gehren.	Johann Bernhard, 1676-1749 (Organist), Eisenach. │ │ Johann Ernst, 1722-1777 (Capellmeister), Weimar.	Johann Christoph, 1685-post 1735 (Town Musician), Erfurt.

CHRISTOPH, 1613-1661 (Town Musician), Erfurt and Arnstadt.
┌──────────────────┴───────────────────┐
Georg Christoph, 1642-1697 (Cantor), Schweinfurt.		JOHANN AMBROSIUS, 1645-1695 (Viol), Eisenach.			Johann Christoph, 1645-1693 (Viol), Arnstadt.
│		┌───────┼────────┐			│
Johann Valentin, 1669-1720 (Town Musician), Schweinfurt.		Johann Christoph, 1671-1721 (Organist), Ohrdruf. │	Johann JAKOB, 1682-1722 (Haut-boy), Stockholm.	JOHANN SEBASTIAN, 1685-1750 (Director Musices), Leipzig.	Johann Ernst, 1683-1739 (Organist), Arnstadt.
┌───┴───┐		├──────┬─────────┬────────┬──────┐
Johann Lorenz, 1695-1773 (Organist), Lahm.	Johann Elias 1705-1755 (Cantor), Schweinfurt	Tobias Friedrich, b. 1695 (Cantor), Uttstädt.	Johann Bernhard, 1700-1744 (Organist), Ohrdruf.	Johann Christoph b. 1702 (Cantor), Ohrdruf.	Johann Heinrich, b. 1707 (Cantor), Uehringen.	Johann Andreas, b. 1713 (Organist), Ohrdruf.

The Project Gutenberg eBook of Sebastian Bach

SEBASTIAN BACH