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Malcolm Boyd

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1 Oxford New York Athens Auckland Bangkok Bogatá Buenos Aires Calcutta Cape Town Chennai Dar es Salaam Delhi Florence Hong Kong Istanbul Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Mumbai Nairobi Paris São Paulo Singapore Taipei Tokyo Toronto Warsaw and associated companies in Berlin Ibadan Copyright © 2000 by Malcolm Boyd First published 1983 by J. M. Dent & Sons Ltd. First paperback edition 1986 by J. M. Dent & Sons Ltd. Second edition 1990 Reprinted with corrections 1995 by Oxford University Press American edition 1997 by Schirmer Books Third edition 2000 Published by Oxford University Press, Inc. 198 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016 Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without prior permission of Oxford University Press. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Boyd, Malcolm. Bach / Malcolm Boyd. — 3rd ed. p. cm. — (The master musicians) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-0-19-514222-8 (cloth) ISBN-13: 978-0-19-530771-9 (pbk) ISBN-10: 0-19-514222-5 (cloth) ISBN-10: 0-19-530771-2 (pbk) 1. Bach, Johann Sebastian, 1685–1750. 2. Composers—Germany—Biography. I. Title. II. Master musicians series. ML410.B1 B73 2000 780'.92—dc21 [B] 00-033976

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T O C O L I N A N D D E LY T H O holder Tag, erwünschte Zeit . . .

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Contents

Preface ix List of Illustrations xiii List of Bibliographical References A Note on Currency xv

1 Background and Early Years (1685–1703) .

1 17

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

35

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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27

3 Weimar (1708–17) . 4 Organ Music

. . . . . . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

2 Arnstadt, Mühlhausen (1703–8) . Early Works

xv

Chorale Settings 49 Preludes and Fugues 60 Miscellaneous Organ Works

5 Cöthen (1717–23) .

66

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

6 Orchestral, Instrumental, and Keyboard Music

. . . . . . . . .

70 80

Concertos 80 Orchestral Suites 91 Instrumental Works 94 Keyboard Works 101

7 Leipzig (1723–30)

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

122

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

161

8 Music for the Leipzig Liturgy Cantatas 123 Motets and Magnificat Passions 152

9 Leipzig (1730–41)

110

149

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Contents

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10 Parodies and Publications

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

176

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

201

Oratorios and Masses 178 Harpsichord Concertos 191 The Clavier-Übung 193

11 Leipzig (1742–50)

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

210

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

228

12 Canons and Counterpoints 13 The Bach Heritage Appendices A B C D

Calendar . . . . . . List of Works . . . Personalia . . . . . Select Bibliography

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

General Index 301 Index of Bach’s Works 309

247 255 283 295

Preface

I

t is not to excuse any shortcomings in the present volume if I say that the task of writing about J. S. Bach is a more formidable one in the 1980s than it was in 1900 or 1947, when my predecessors in the Master Musicians series published their studies of the composer. At that time the image of Bach as a devout Lutheran, his art and life wholly directed towards the improvement of church music, was well established, and seemingly on the firmest foundations. After all, hadn’t Philipp Spitta thoroughly researched archival sources for his exhaustive book on the composer published in 1873–80? Hadn’t he established a chronology for Bach’s works based on the most rigorous scientific methods, including the study of paper types, watermarks, and calligraphy? And didn’t the monumental edition of the music published by the Bach-Gesellschaft in 1851–99 provide as complete and accurate a text as any scholar could wish for? What might be called the Spitta image of Bach survived until the 1950s, when the new chronology, affecting particularly the Leipzig cantatas, was proposed by Alfred Dürr at Göttingen and Georg von Dadelsen at Tübingen; the cantatas were now seen to occupy only the early years of Bach’s cantorate. The wider implications of this discovery were expounded by Friedrich Blume in an essay, presented at the 1962 Bachfest in Mainz, which was regarded, indeed intended, as an earthquake, with the chronology of Dürr and Dadelsen at its epicentre. Despite recent attempts, notably by Piero Buscaroli, to bring the new Bach image into focus, it will not be seen clearly until the tremors set up by that earthquake have subsided. Meanwhile, other issues have also claimed the attention of Bach scholars in the wake of the new collected edition (Neue Bach-Ausgabe) initiated in 1950: questions of textual criticism and attribution, the evaluation of different versions and adaptations, and the relevance to Bach’s music of Affektenlehre, Figurenlehre, numerology,

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Preface

Lutheranism, and the Aufklärung, not to mention the multifarious aspects of performing practice. It is not my purpose in this brief introductory volume to come to grips with the many problems that preoccupy Bach scholars today, but rather to present as coherent an account as possible of Bach’s life and works in the light of current knowledge.To this end I have avoided the life/works dichotomy that operates so well in other Master Musicians volumes and organized the book in a way which will, I hope, serve to show the unique connection that exists between Bach’s music and the circumstances in which it was written.The first two chapters are mainly biographical, the last mainly exegetical; the others alternate between biography and discussion of the music. As far as the latter is concerned, chronology is at times relaxed in order to organize the discussion in broad categories (organ music, church music etc.), but where it has been found desirable to divide a particular genre between different chapters the reader will be guided to related sections by cross-references within the text and by the book’s index. I am grateful to Stanley Sadie for persuading me to embark on the writing of this book, and for encouraging me to finish it.Visits to East Germany were made possible by financial help from University College, Cardiff, and pleasurable by the warm hospitality of Heinz and Gertrud Sawade in Mühlhausen and Charlotte Bemmann in Leipzig. For assistance of various kinds I am deeply indebted to David Humphreys, David Wyn Jones, Charles Langmaid, Ruth Thackeray and, not least, my wife Beryl and son Jeremy. Without their help the book would have been the poorer. The difficulty of writing anything on Bach remotely worthy of its subject remains. Cardiff, 1983

M.B

Note on the third edition For this new edition, marking the 250th anniversary of Bach’s death in 1750, the test has been thoroughly revised to take into account recent findings and fresh perspectives on the music.While the basic shape of the book remains the same, with discussion of the music interleaved between the biographical chapters to which it relates, due reference has been made to the chronological refinements that have challenged, without yet

Preface

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invalidating, this structure.The opportunity has also been taken to revise the list of Bach’s works, to reorganize and expand the bibliography, and to provide a new map. For several of the revisions I am indebted to my reviewers and colleagues, among whom I would mention in particular Peter Williams, Don Franklin, and Stephen Crist. I would also like to thank Julia Kellerman, who saw the book through its earlier revisions at J. M. Dent & Sons and then at OUP, and Ursula Payne, whose careful editorial work helped to shape the present edition. Cardiff, 1999

M.B

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Illustrations Plates between pages 170 and 171

1. Portrait (not fully authenticated) of Bach, aged about thirty (c. 1715), attributed to Johann Ernst Rentsch, the Elder. (Angermuseum, Erfurt) 2. View of Arnstadt, 1650. Engraving by Matthaeus Merian. 3. Bach’s earliest surviving autograph (c. 1705): the organ chorale Wie schön leuchtet der Morgenstern (bwv739). (Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin— Preussischer Kulturbesitz, Musikabteilung mit Mendelssohn-Archiv. Mus. Ms. Bach P488) 4. The earliest printed music by Bach (1708): Cantata No. 71, Gott ist mein König (opening of soprano part). (The British Library, London) 5. View of Mühlhausen, 1650. Engraving by Matthaeus Merian. 6. The Blasiuskirche, Mühlhausen. Engraving by J. F. G. Poppel after Ludwig Rohbock. 7. The Wilhelmsburg castle at Weimar, showing the covered gallery. Based on old engraving in A. Doebber, Das Schloss in Weimar, 1911. 8. View of Halle, 1650. Engraving by Matthaeus Merian. 9. The ducal chapel (Himmelsburg) at Weimar, from a painting c. 1660, by Christian Richter. (Kunstsammlungen zu Weimar, Foto-Atelier Louis Held) 10. Prince Leopold von Anhalt-Cöthen, c. 1723. Painting by an unknown artist. (Bach-Gedenkstaate Schloss Köthen/Historisches Museum für Mittelanhalt)

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Illustrations

11. The Castle at Cöthen, 1650. Engraving by Matthaeus Merian. 12. Viola pomposa by Johann Christian Hoffmann, Leipzig, 1732 (Musikinstrumenten-Museum der Universität Leipzig, Inv.-Nr. 918. Photograph by K. Kranich) 13. The Thomaskirchhof, Leipzig, with the rebuilt Thomasschule and, on the right, the Thomaskirche. (Drawing by S. Hauptmann, 1868, in R. Sachse, Die ältere Geschichte der Thomasschule zu Leipzig, 1912) 14. Johann Sebastian Bach, from a replica (1748) by Elias Gottlob Haussmann of his 1746 portrait in oils (W. H. Scheide Library, Princeton, New Jersey) 15. The final page, in Bach’s hand, of the unfinished fugue from the Art of Fugue (bmw1080). (Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin—Preussischer Kulturbesitz, Musikabteilung mit Mendelssohn-Archiv, Mus. Ms. Bach P200/1, Beilage 3, Blatt 5r)

Integrated Illustrations 1. Map. Page xvii 2. A Bach family tree. Page xviii 3. Class list (1699), of the Klosterschule, Ohrdruf, recording Bach’s departure ‘ob defectum hospitiorum.’ (Stadtarchiv, Ohrdruf ). Page 10 4. Record of payments to the Mettenchor, Lüneburg,April–May 1700 (Archiv des Michaelisklosters, Lüneburg). Page 12 5. Part of Bach’s letter to Georg Erdmann in Danzig, 28 October 1730. (State Central Historical Archives, Moscow). Page 120 6. First page of the printed libretto for Bach’s Christmas Oratorio (1734). Page 182 7. Title-page of the Goldberg Variations, original edition (1741–2). Page 198 8. Perpetual canon in four parts, bmw1073. (Autograph, Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts). Page 213

Bibliographical References

Brief references only are given in text and footnotes to items included in the Select Bibliography (Appendix D). Some standard works frequently referred to are cited by the author’s name or an abbreviation.They are: BC

BG bwv

NBA

Schweitzer Spitta Terry NBR

Schulze, Hans-Joachim, and Wolff, Christoph, Bach Compendium: Analytisch-bibliographisches Repertorium der Werke Johann Sebastian Bachs (Leipzig, 1985–) J. S. Bach: Werke [collected edition of the Bach-Gesellschaft] (Leipzig, 1851–99) Schmieder, Wolfgang, Thematisch-systematisches Verzeichnis der musikalischen Werke Johann Sebastian Bachs: Bach-Werke-Verzeichnis (Leipzig, 1950; 2nd ed., 1990); Kleine Ausgabe, ed. A. Dürr, Y. Kobayashi, and K. Beisswenger (Wiesbaden, 1998) Neue Bach-Ausgabe [collected edition of the Johann-SebastianBach-Institut, Göttingen, and the Bach-Archiv, Leipzig] (Kassel and Basle, 1954–) Schweitzer, Albert, J. S. Bach (London, 1911; German version, 1908; French original, 1905) Spirra, Philipp, Johann Sebastian Bach (London, 1884–5; German original, 1873–80) Terry, Charles Sanford, Bach: a Biography (London, 1928; 6th ed., 1967) David, Hans T., and Mendel, Arthur: The Bach Reader (New York and London, 1945; 2nd ed., 1966); revised and enlarged by C.Wolff as The New Bach Reader (New York, 1998)

A note on currency 12 pfennig = 1 groschen; 21 groschen = 1 florin (or gulden); 24 groschen = 1 thaler. Bach’s salary in 1714 was 250 florins; in 1718 it was 400 thalers, and in 1730 about 700 thalers.These figures do not include payments in kind. •

xv

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Bibliographical References

A pound of raw meat could be bought for about 2 groschen and a pound of butter for about 35 pfennig (although it might cost twice that in winter); coffee was relatively expensive at about 12 groschen a pound, and tea was even dearer. Clothing was also expensive, but a good clavichord could be purchased for about 20 thalers, less than seven times the published price of Bach’s Clavier-Übung III.

NORTH SEA

Lübeck Hamburg

Lüneburg (1700-1702)

R. W

eser

R. E lb e

BRANDENBURG R. H

av

Celle

Berlin

el

Hanover Bückeburg

Potsdam R. ree Sp

Zerbst Cöthen (1717-1723)

Mülhausen (1707-1708)

ns

Cassel

Sangerhausen

R.

U

trut

le Saa R.

Göttingen

Halle Leipzig (1723-1750) Dresden Zeitz

Weissenfels

Ohrdruf (1695-1700) e R. W

THURINGIA Schleitz a

R

lster .E

rr

Weimar (1703, 1708-1717) Arnstadt (1703-1707)

R. Elbe

SAXONY

Eisenach (1685-1695)

Carlsbad

Places where Bach lived Places visited by Bach Other places

20

0 0

20

40

40 60

60 80 Kilometers

80 Miles

Johannes (1604–73)

Georg Christoph (1642–97)

Christoph (1613–61)

J.Ambrosius = (1) Maria Elisabetha [Lämmerhirt] (1645–95) (1644–94) = (2) Barbara Margaretha [Keul] (b. 1658)

J. Christoph = Martha Elisabetha [Eisentraut] (1645–93) (1654–1719)

Johannes (c. 1580– 1626)

Viet Bach (c. 1555–1619)

J. Christoph (1642–1703)

Caspar (d. before 1644)

Heinrich (1615–92)

J. Michael = Catharina [Wedemann] (1648–94) (1650–1704)

J. Günther = Barbara Margaretha (1653–83) [Keul] (b. 1658) [maiden names are shown in square brackets] 2 A Bach Family Tree

J. Valentin (1669–1720)

J. Elias (1705–55)

J. Christoph (1671–1721)

Catharina Dorothea (1708–74) Wilhelm Friedemann (1710–84)

J. Balthasar (1673–91)

J. Christoph (1713) Maria Sophia (1713) (twins)

}

J. Jacob (1682–1722)

Carl Philipp Emanuel (1714–88) J. Gottfried Bernhard (1715–39)

J. Sebastian = (1) Maria Barbara (1685–1750) (1684–1720)

Leopold Augustus (1718–19)

= (2) Anna Magdalena [Wülcken] (1701–60)

Christiana Sophia Henrietta (1723–6) Gottfried Heinrich (1724–63) Barbara Catharina (1680–1709) J. Ernst (1683–1739)

Christian Gottlieb (1725–8) Elisabeth Juliana Friederica (1726–81) Ernestus Andreas (1727) Regina Johanna (1728–33) Christiana Benedicta Louisa (1730)

Barbara Catharina (1679–1737)

Christiana Dorothea (1731–2) J. Christoph Friedrich (1732–95)

Maria Barbara (1684–1720)

J. August Abraham (1733) J. Christian (1735–82) Johanna Carolina (1737–81) Regina Susanna (1742–1809)

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C H A P T E R

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Background and Early Years (1685–1703)

T

he landscape of thuringia, that region of central Germany lying just south of the Harz Mountains, has altered little since Bach’s time. Even today it is known as the ‘green heart’ of Germany. Its wooded slopes and gently rolling fields, in the folds of which red-tiled roofs cluster round the modest spire of a village church, continue to please the eye of the visitor and to provide a setting in which mankind and nature can exist harmoniously together. Most of the villages (and, one is tempted to add, the roads that connect them) seem also to have changed little since the eighteenth century, although the churches no longer offer the possibility of employment to organists, organ builders, tuners, and repairers to the extent they once did. Even in Bach’s day it was to the larger towns and the free imperial cities of Thuringia and neighbouring regions that musicians looked for a professional career. The need there was for church organists, for Kantors to teach in the schools and to organize a town’s musical activities, and for Stadtpfeifer to provide music for municipal and civic functions and to augment the churches’ instrumental resources when called upon to do so. Music was not studied as an independent university discipline, but teachers and students in university towns such as Erfurt, Halle, Jena, and Leipzig involved themselves in the musical life of the community, principally through the church and the secular collegium musicum. Other, and perhaps more lucrative, employment could be found at the princely courts that proliferated at the time in central Germany. •

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While exercising little or no military and political influence, these petty principalities and dukedoms, altering in size and number as dynasties flourished and declined, vied with each other in intellectual and cultural pursuits; most of them maintained a Kapelle, a body of singers and instrumentalists who provided music for the court chapel and for such secular enterprises as the prince or duke was interested in encouraging. Even such minor courts as Weimar and Co¨then, where Bach was employed, offered musicians a better chance of advancement than all but the largest churches and the most generous municipalities. The payment of salaries at court may have been irregular at times, but other things compensated for this, and an appointment as Konzertmeister or Kapellmeister brought the ambitious musician a measure of prestige not easily to be won in an ecclesiastical or municipal post. Opera was the only important sphere of professional music-making in which Thuringia was unable to compete with other parts of Germany in the early eighteenth century. Some courts in the region did support opera sporadically and on a modest scale; at the Weissenfels court, for example, with which Bach enjoyed close contact, German operas were performed most years between 1680 and 1736, and from 1696 to 1709 touring opera troupes appeared regularly at the Weimar court. In Leipzig, too, opera gained a precarious foothold between 1693 and 1720, first under Nicolaus Adam Strungk (1640–1700) and then under Telemann. But the main operatic centres in Germany lay further afield, and composers eager to realize their gifts in the theatre would travel east to Dresden, south to Munich, or north to Brunswick, Hanover, and Hamburg. A case in point is Reinhard Keiser, a native of Thuringia and a pupil at the Thomasschule in Leipzig, who pursued his career as an opera composer first in Brunswick and then in Hamburg, where in 1705 Handel produced his first operas, Almira and Nero. One reason for Thuringia’s resistance to opera, and to the overwhelming penetration of Italian musical styles that usually accompanied it, was the presence of a strong Lutheran tradition. Martin Luther was born at Eisleben, in the northern part of Thuringia, in 1483, and died there in 1546. He went to the Lateinschule in Eisenach (the same that Bach was to attend two centuries later) and to the university of Erfurt, and it was at the Wartburg Castle, overlooking Eisenach, that he found refuge after being excommunicated and outlawed by the Diet of

Background and Early Years (1685–1703)

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Worms. The spiritual presence of one for whom music was ‘a gift from God’ and ‘next in importance to theology’ remained strong throughout Thuringia. Luther had been knowledgeable enough in the art to be able to admire the works of Josquin Desprez, Heinrich Isaac, and Ludwig Senfl, and practised enough in it to derive enjoyment from singing and playing the lute and the flute. His achievement in establishing the German hymn, or chorale, was of fundamental importance to the formation and preservation of a distinctively German musical style, especially in church music, during the Italian-dominated Baroque period. The conception of music as ‘sounding number’ received its most powerful expression in the music (particularly the late music) of Bach. The social, political, and religious climate of Thuringia tended to produce a particular type of musician: traditional, conservative, slow to be influenced by wider European developments. Contact with foreign ideas and innovations in musical style came mainly through the courts, as Bach was to find at Weimar and later at Dresden, while in the towns (and to some extent in the courts as well) local traditions were perpetuated by a system of guilds and by the handing on of employment from father to son (or in some cases from father to son-in-law). The Baroque aesthetic placed craftsmanship above originality (or at any rate regarded craftsmanship as a prerequisite of originality), and this was conducive to the establishing of musical families, of which the Scarlattis in Italy, the Couperins in France, and the Purcells in England were outstanding examples. The family (or clan, as it has with some justification been called) into which Johann Sebastian Bach was born in 1685 had furnished Thuringia with some of its best musicians for three or four generations, and the name ‘Bach’ had become so common in musical circles that (if it did not in fact mean by derivation ‘musician’1) it had become synonymous with ‘musician’ in many places. J. S. Bach’s awareness of this family tradition, and the pride he took in it, can be judged from the valuable Genealogy (the Ursprung der musikalisch-Bachischen Familie) which he compiled in 1735. Brought up to date in 1774–5 by his son Carl Philipp Emanuel, this traces musical members of the family back through six generations to a certain Veit (or Vitus) Bach, a native of 1

See G. Kraft, ‘Neue Beitra¨ge zur Bach-Genealogie’, Beitra¨ge zur Musikwissenschaft, i (1959), 29–61.

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‘Ungarn’, which included parts of Moravia and Slovakia as well as Hungary. A baker by trade, he left home with his son Johannes because of religious persecution and settled in the Thuringian village of Wechmar, near Gotha, in the 1590s. According to the Genealogy, Veit enjoyed playing the cittern, ‘which he even took with him to the mill and played while the grinding was going on’. (This Veit, who died in 1619, has frequently been confused with another Veit Bach, possibly not a family member, who died before 1578.) Veit Bach had two further sons: the second has not been identified, but the youngest, Caspar, was active as a musician in Gotha and later in Arnstadt. It was, however, from Johannes (c. 1580–1626), a baker like his father and a town musician, that J. S. Bach descended, the succession proceeding to Christoph (1613–61, court and town musician at Weimar, Erfurt, and Arnstadt) and then to Johann Ambrosius (1645– 95), Sebastian’s father. Ambrosius and his brother Johann Christoph (1645–93) were the first of a number of twins among the Bachs, and they resembled each other so much in manner and appearance that, as C. P. E. Bach noted in the Genealogy, ‘even their wives were unable to tell them apart’. After living closely together for over twenty-five years, sharing the loss of both parents in 1661 and enduring the siege of Erfurt by troops of Archbishop Johann Philipp of Mainz three years later, they finally separated in 1671 when Christoph became a court musician at Arnstadt and Ambrosius a Hausmann (town musician) at Eisenach. What no doubt helped Ambrosius to secure the Eisenach appointment was the presence there of his cousin, another Johann Christoph (1642–1703), who for six years had been organist at the important Georgenkirche and was also organist and harpsichordist to the Duke of Eisenach, Johann Georg I. Christoph was highly thought of for his practical and creative gifts, and was in fact the most talented composer among the Bachs before Johann Sebastian himself, in whose early development he may have played an important role. But an intractable disposition earned him many enemies, and as a musician Ambrosius seems to have enjoyed greater esteem among the townspeople, and certainly among the town councillors. Ambrosius’s duties as Hausmann included twice-daily performances of chorales from the tower of the

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town hall, at which he would have played the trumpet, and assistance as violinist or viola player in concerted music at church on Sundays and feast days; to these duties were added others when, in 1677, he was made a member of the court orchestra. He was evidently a musician of some ability, and in 1684, when he sought to take up a new appointment at Erfurt, the authorities refused to release him. In 1668, three years before settling in Eisenach, Ambrosius had married Maria Elisabetha La¨mmerhirt (or Lemmerhirt), who came from a family already tenuously connected by marriage to the Bachs (her halfsister Hedwig was the second wife of Ambrosius’s uncle, Johannes Bach [1604–73], town musician and organist at Erfurt). Before the couple left Erfurt for Eisenach they had buried one son and christened a second, Johann Christoph. Six more children were born to them at Eisenach, the last being Johann Sebastian on 21 March (old style) 1685; he was christened two days later at the font of the historic Georgenkirche. The name Sebastian was given to him by one of his godparents, Sebastian Nagel, Hausmann at Gotha. His first name was that of his other godfather, Johann Georg Koch, a forester at Eisenach, but Johann was an exceedingly common name in Germany at the time, and nowhere more so than among the Bachs: Ambrosius’s six sons were all called Johann, as were the four sons of his twin brother Christoph, and there were numerous other Johanns and Johannas elsewhere in the family. Nothing is known for certain about Sebastian’s early years until 1693, when, at the age of eight, he was listed forty-seventh in the fifth class (Quinta) of the Lateinschule at Eisenach. He was by no means the first of the Bachs to be educated there. A distant uncle, Jacob (1655–1718), from the Meiningen branch of the family, had entered the school in 1669 (he was expelled for theft two years later) and the names of four brothers and four cousins also appear in the school records. Religious instruction and Latin grammar formed the basis of the curriculum, which included also some arithmetic and history, and in the higher forms Greek, Hebrew, philosophy, logic, and rhetoric. Sebastian probably enrolled in the school on or shortly after his seventh birthday in 1692, and he remained there until 1695. The bare facts of his scholastic progress are recorded in the annual school lists, and can be summarized as follows:

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Date

Class

1692–3 1693–4 1694–5

Quinta Quinta Quarta

Number in class

Position

Absences

90 90 64

47 14 23

96 59 103

It was customary to spend two years in each class, but promotion depended upon achievement rather than age, and so the number of boys in a class tended to decrease further up the school. Sebastian’s final position of twenty-third after one year in the Quarta compares favourably with that of his brother Johann Jacob, who came twenty-fifth in the same class despite being three years older and having fewer absences. The nature and extent of Sebastian’s musical training during these years remain matters for conjecture. His father presumably taught him to play the violin, and probably introduced him to the rudiments of music theory as well. What, if anything, his father’s cousin Christoph contributed to his musical education at Eisenach is difficult to guess. Karl Geiringer has suggested that the two families may not have been very close,2 and both Mizler’s Obituary3 and Bach’s first biographer, Johann Nikolaus Forkel, tell us that Sebastian’s first lessons in keyboard playing came later, at Ohrdruf, from his elder brother Johann Christoph. But even if the cousin gave him no formal instruction, the boy would certainly have come into contact with him at the Georgenkirche, and he may even at this early stage have been aware of the special qualities of the music of this ‘profound composer’, as he later called him. Undoubtedly Sebastian would have learnt, too, from Andreas Christian Dedekind, Kantor at the Lateinschule. He was in charge of the chorus symphoniacus that sang at the Georgenkirche, and Sebastian’s ‘uncommonly fine treble voice’ (as the Obituary described it) must have been in demand for this and for the Schulkurrende, when singers from the school serenaded the neighbourhood to raise money. School was held from 6 a.m. until 9 a.m. (from 7 a.m until 10 a.m. 2 3

The Bach Family, 74.

Written by C. P. E. Bach and J. F. Agricola in 1750 and published in the final issue of L. C. Mizler’s Musikalische Bibliothek (1754). An English translation is in NBR, pp. 297–307.

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during the winter) and from 1 p.m. until 3 p.m., Wednesdays and Saturdays being half-holidays. Reckoned in hours (one hour being the length of a lesson; the German word Stunde serves for both) the total of 103 absences recorded for Sebastian during 1694–5 would represent four whole weeks away from school; reckoned in half-days it would indicate longer periods of absence. In either case the figure perhaps reflects the tragic domestic events of that year. Sebastian’s father, already saddened by the early death in 1691 of his second surviving son, Johann Balthasar, and by the death at Arnstadt in 1693 of his much-loved twin brother, Johann Christoph, had to suffer in May 1694 the loss of his wife Elisabetha. Ambrosius was left with three children to look after (the eldest having by then left for Ohrdruf), and he resolved to provide for them by marrying again. When Barbara Margaretha Bartholomaei (ne´e Keul) entered into matrimony with Ambrosius Bach on 27 November 1694 it was not the first time in her thirty-six years that she had married into the Bach family. Her late husband had been deacon at Arnstadt, but before that she had been the wife of Ambrosius’s cousin Johann Gu¨nther (1653– 83), described in the Genealogy as ‘a good musician and a skilful maker of various newly invented instruments’. Possibly Ambrosius’s decision to remarry was strengthened by a sense of family obligation towards Barbara Margaretha and her nine-year-old daughter Christina Maria— and still more towards Gu¨nther’s daughter Catharina Margaretha (born six months after her father’s death, in October 1683), if she was still living. In any event, the match was ill-fated. Gu¨nther had died only four months after his marriage to Barbara Margaretha, and Jacob Bartholomaei after about four-and-a-half years. On 20 February 1695, less than three months after her marriage to Ambrosius, the unlucky lady was widowed for a third time, and Sebastian made an orphan. After appealing unsuccessfully to the council for permission to carry on her late husband’s duties with the help of assistants and apprentices, as the widow of his twin brother had been allowed to do at Arnstadt, Barbara Margaretha was forced to look for someone to take care of the two orphaned sons, Jacob and Sebastian, now aged thirteen and ten respectively. The relative best able to do this was their elder brother Johann Christoph, who since 1690 had been organist at the Michaeliskirche at Ohrdruf and had married there in October 1694. Christoph’s

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house stood in what is now the Bachstrasse, not far from the church itself, and it was there that Jacob and Sebastian came to live in March 1695. With their own first child already expected (he was born on 21 July), this must have stretched the modest resources of Christoph and his new wife quite considerably; Jacob returned to Eisenach after his fifteenth birthday in 1697, but by then a second child was on the way. Sebastian also remained at Ohrdruf until he was fifteen, and we may suppose that his musical training during these years came mainly from his elder brother. Christoph had studied at Erfurt under Johann Pachelbel, the most important organ composer of the central German school, and his library of keyboard music, which Sebastian would certainly have known, included works by Pachelbel, Froberger, Kerll, and other German masters. It was under Christoph’s guidance, according to Mizler’s Obituary, that Sebastian ‘laid the foundations of his keyboard technique’, and it is therefore unfortunate, and almost certainly unjust, that Christoph has been remembered chiefly for what must seem today an act of unkindness towards his younger brother. It appears that Sebastian had for some reason been denied access to a book of keyboard pieces belonging to Christoph, and to obtain it had practised what the Obituary calls ‘the following innocent deceit’: The book was kept in a cupboard secured only by lattice doors. He [Sebastian] was therefore able to reach through the lattice with his small hands and roll up the book, which had only a paper cover; in this way he was able to remove it at night, while everyone else was in bed, and to copy it by moonlight, since he had no other light. After six months he was delighted to have this musical treasure in his hands, and tried secretly and with unusual zeal to profit from it until, to his deep dismay, his brother got to know of it and was harsh enough to confiscate the music he had taken such pains to copy.

We are insufficiently informed about Christoph’s character to be able to judge his motives in this affair (or, for that matter, the veracity of the story itself), but we know enough about his younger brother to recognize here an early example of Sebastian’s determination to seek out every possible opportunity for developing and perfecting his art,

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even at the risk of incurring the displeasure of others. There were soon to be further examples of this single-mindedness. Christoph did not neglect his brother’s general education. On Sebastian’s arrival in Ohrdruf he was sent to the old Klosterschule, where the progressive educational reforms of Comenius Jan A´mos Komensky´) had been adopted, and which attracted pupils from as far away as Cassel and Jena. Latin grammar and theology remained at the basis of the curriculum, but geography, history, arithmetic, and natural science were also taught, and music (Luther’s handmaid to theology) was prominent in the timetable; four hours a week were devoted to it in the third and fourth classes, five in the first and second. As at Eisenach, there was also a Kurrende choir from which Sebastian, and no doubt Johann Christoph, derived much-needed financial benefit. Sebastian seems to have found the curriculum more agreeable (or perhaps the competition of his classmates less formidable) than at Eisenach, and his school record is impressive. Entering the fourth class in March 1695 (or so one presumes; the register contains no entries for 1694–5), he was evidently promoted to the third (Tertia) in July. In 1696 he was fourth and the following year first in the class, gaining promotion to the Secunda. Similar progress, from fifth in 1698 to second in 1699, earned him a place in the top class, but after a few months in the Prima his school career at Ohrdruf was cut short. A week or two before his fifteenth birthday he left the town and set out for Lu¨neburg in northern Germany. The reason for Sebastian’s departure from Ohrdruf is conveyed in the phrase ‘ob defectum hospitiorum’ found against his name in the school register (see p. 10), but it is uncertain whether we should infer from this a shortage of space in Christoph’s house or, as seems more likely, the lack of a free place at the school. Konrad Ku¨ster has shown that the top class, the Prima, was overcrowded in 1700, and that this possibly coupled with Bach’s change of voice, may have been the reason for his leaving.4 Why he should have transferred to a place some 200 miles away, where there were no family connections and where the Bachs had never exercised their profession, also requires explanation, 4

K. Ku¨ster, Der junge Bach, 97–109.

3

Class list (1699) of the Klosterschule, Ohrdruf, recording Bach’s departure ‘ob defectum hospitiorum’

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and this is to be found in events that had taken place at the Klosterschule during the preceding two or three years. The Kantor and master in charge of the Tertia there was a certain Johann Heinrich Arnold, known and feared for his severity. In fact, so intolerable was the discipline he exacted that in 1697 he was dismissed and replaced by Elias Herda, a young man from Leina, near Gotha, only a few miles north of Ohrdruf. Herda had studied theology at the university of Jena, but before that he had attended the Michaelisschule at Lu¨neburg, and it was probably on his recommendation that Bach secured a place there. It has been suggested that Herda may have persuaded Bach, with his outstanding scholastic record, to aim eventually for a university education, and this would help to explain why he did not immediately look for musical employment in Thuringia, as his brother Jacob had done.5 On the other hand, the Lu¨neburg organist George Bo¨hm could also have been the magnet that attracted Bach’s steps to the north, as we shall see. What is certain is that the Michaelisschule offered free board and tuition to children and youths with good voices, and it presented an immediate solution to the problem of an indigent boy forced to make his way in the world ‘ob defectum hospitiorum’. Bach was not the only pupil from Ohrdruf to make the journey to Lu¨neburg in March 1700, for Herda had secured a place also for one of his schoolfellows, Georg Erdmann. Their names appear together in the lists of the Lu¨neburg Mettenchor (Mattins choir) for April and May 1700 (see p. 12). This was composed of about fifteen singers selected from the larger and less specialized chorus symphoniacus, but restricted to poor children who were paid a nominal sum for their services. The lists show that in 1700 Bach and Erdmann each received 12 groschen for April and the same sum for May, and they doubtless benefited also from monies raised by the chorus symphoniacus at weddings, funerals, and the usual Kurrenden. Unfortunately the payment lists after May 1700 have not survived, so we cannot be certain how long Bach remained a member of the Mettenchor. Most biographers follow Spitta, who stated that Bach’s voice broke shortly after he went to Lu¨neburg and conjectured that he then earned his place in the school by playing the violin and 5

A. Basso, Frau Musika: la vita e le opere di J. S. Bach, i, p. 226.

4

Record of payments to the Mettenchor, Lu¨neburg, April–May 1700

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harpsichord. Forkel, however, is imprecise on this point, and the Obituary, from which Spitta took his information, states merely that Bach’s voice broke ‘some time’ (‘einige Zeit’) after his arrival in Lu¨neburg. A school regulation of about 1736 stated categorically that scholars receiving free board and remuneration ‘must be children of poor people and have good treble voices’.6 This, however, was over thirty years after Bach was admitted to the school, and Ku¨ster has produced evidence that suggests that both he and Erdmann entered the Mettenchor as bass singers.7 It was, apparently, quite common for Lu¨neburg choirs to recruit their tenors and basses from central Germany. The repertory of the Mettenchor was drawn from an unusually fine music library begun in 1555 by the first Lutheran Kantor8 and subsequently enlarged, notably by Friedrich Emanuel Praetorius (1623–95). By 1696, when August Braun succeeded Praetorius as Kantor and a catalogue of the library was drawn up, the collection had grown to some 1,100 manuscript volumes by at least 175 different composers, as well as a large number of printed works. What personal use Bach, as a mere choirboy, was allowed to make of this library we do not know, but he must have known something of its contents. It included Latin polyphony by Lassus, Monteverdi, Carissimi, Rovetta, and others, and sacred works by the greatest German masters of the seventeenth century: Buxtehude, Hammerschmidt, Kerll, Scheidt, Schein, Schu¨tz, Tunder etc. Bach might also have been aware of the inclusion of pieces by his great-uncle Heinrich (1615–92) and by his father’s cousin Johann Christoph, still living then at Eisenach. Also represented in this precious library (unfortunately destroyed by fire in about 1800) was Georg Bo¨hm, organist at the Johanniskirche in Lu¨neburg from 1698 until his death in 1733 and a composer of keyboard and church music. Whether Bach actually studied the organ with Bo¨hm is uncertain (the poor state of the Johanniskirche instrument at the time perhaps argues against it), but we have it on C. P. E. Bach’s authority that he ‘loved and studied the works of the Lu¨neburg organist Bo¨hm’, 6 7 8

Terry, 35, n. 3. K. Ku¨ster, op. cit. pp. 85–97.

Published in M. Seiffert, ‘Die Chorbibliothek der St. Michaelisschule in Lu¨neburg zu Seb. Bach’s Zeit’, Sammelba¨nde der Internationalen Musik-Gesellschaft, ix (1908), 593–621.

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and it seems likely that the two were personally acquainted. Bo¨hm was a native of Thuringia, born and brought up near Ohrdruf, and he had been a schoolfellow of Johann Bernard Vonhof, father-in-law of Bach’s elder brother Johann Christoph. Quite possibly Bach had left Ohrdruf with at least one letter of introduction to the Lu¨neburg organist, and the fact that Bo¨hm later acted as agent in north Germany for printed editions of the Bach Partitas suggests that they knew each other well. Before moving to Lu¨neburg Bo¨hm had spent five or more years in Hamburg, where he had heard, and perhaps studied with, the renowned Johann Adam Reincken, organist at the Catharinenkirche since 1663. It was perhaps in Bo¨hm’s company, or at least at his instigation, that Bach more than once made the 30-mile journey from Lu¨neburg to hear Reincken, who was considered one of the finest organists in Germany. A further reason for visiting Hamburg was the presence there of his cousin Johann Ernst (1683–1739), who had been at school with him at Ohrdruf before continuing his musical training in Hamburg (he later succeeded Sebastian as organist at Arnstadt). No doubt Ernst also introduced his cousin to other musical attractions in the Hanseatic city, including perhaps opera performances under Reinhard Keiser which were soon to bring the young Handel to Hamburg. The cultural life offered by a prosperous port and commercial centre must have made a strong impression on a youth who had lived until then in small provincial towns, and the possibility of making a career in Hamburg remained in Bach’s mind, as we shall see, some twenty years later. There were, however, in Lu¨neburg itself other sources of musical stimulus for Bach. Adjoining the Michaelisschule was the Ritteracademie, an educational establishment for the sons of noblemen where French was spoken as the language of politesse, and where the essentially French arts of fencing and dancing were cultivated. The dancing master there was a certain Thomas de la Selle, who was also employed, possibly as a violinist, in the Kapelle maintained by the francophile Duke Georg Wilhelm of Brunswick-Lu¨neburg, whose court, modelled on Versailles, was situated at Celle, some 50 miles south of Lu¨neburg. The Obituary tells us that the young Bach ‘had the opportunity to go and listen to a then-famous band kept by the Duke of Celle, consisting for the most part of Frenchmen; thus he acquired a thorough grounding in the French taste, which, in those regions, was at the time something quite

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new’ (NBR, 300). It has usually been assumed from this that Bach made fairly frequent journeys to Celle in the company of De la Selle, but, as Christoph Wolff pointed out,9 the Obituary nowhere states that he actually went there, and indeed it is unlikely that he could have raised the money or obtained permission from the Michaelisschule to do so. In 1700 the duchess, Ele´onore Desmier d’Olbreuse, chose her dower house in Lu¨neburg, and it is probable that Bach heard the Celle orchestra there or elsewhere in the town. Precisely what music Bach would have heard them play we do not know, but it would presumably have included orchestral suites and chamber music by the fashionable French composers of the day and by frenchified Germans such as J. S. Kusser (in fact of Hungarian origin), Georg Muffatt, and J. C. F. Fischer. The court was Calvinist, and so, even if he did travel to Celle, Bach would not have heard any French sacred music for voices, though he did at some stage become familiar with liturgical organ pieces by Franc¸ois Couperin, Raison, and Grigny, whose Premier livre d’orgue he later copied out in his own hand. The date of Bach’s departure from Lu¨neburg is unknown, but at Easter 1702 he would have completed the usual two years in the top class of the Michaelisschule and we may suppose that, not wishing to proceed to university or lacking the funds to do so, he began to look for openings in the profession of music. The first to come along seems to have been at the Jacobikirche in Sangerhausen, near Halle, where a successor was needed to Gottfried Christoph Gra¨ffenhayn, who had died early in July 1702. Bach submitted to the customary Probe (examination), which normally included the performance of a piece of concerted music by the applicant, and despite his youth and lack of experience he was immediately offered the post. But the reigning duke, Johann Georg of Saxe-Weissenfels, had other ideas, and intervened to secure the appointment of his own candidate, Johann Augustin Kobelius, remembered now as a composer of operas for the Weissenfels court. Bach’s immediate reaction to this example of ducal partiality is not recorded; that he regarded it as an injustice is suggested by his letter of 18 November 1736 to burgomaster Klemm, recommending his son Johann Gottfried Bernhard for a similar post at Sangerhausen, in which 9

C. Wolff, Bach: Essays on his Life and Music, 62.

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he calls on the council to fulfill their promise of ‘nearly thirty years ago’ (in fact thirty-four years). Bach’s movements during the months that followed cannot now be traced, but by March 1703 we find him employed as a ‘lackey’ at the minor Weimar court of Duke Johann Ernst. Terry (p. 56) suggested that the Duke of Weissenfels, who maintained close relations with the Weimar court, may have secured this appointment for Bach to compensate him for the loss of the Sangerhausen post; but the presence at Weimar of another lackey-musician by the name of David Hoffmann, possibly a member of the Hoffmann family closely related by marriage to the Bachs, may also have helped. It is impossible to be specific about Bach’s duties, or even about his actual position, at the Weimar court. In the Genealogy he is described as ‘HoffMusicus’ (court musician) and according to Forkel he was ‘engaged to play the violin’, but in an Arnstadt document of 13 July 1703 he is mentioned as ‘HoffOrganiste’ (court organist) at Weimar. This last may be technically an error, but it probably reflects the truth about Bach’s activities during these months. That he was by then an organist of quite exceptional ability is evident from the readiness of the Sangerhausen authorities to appoint him, and there is every reason to suppose that at Weimar he was frequently called upon to substitute for the titular organist, Johann Effler, who was advanced in years and in poor health. In any event, it seems that the Weimar position was little more than a stop-gap in Bach’s search for an organist’s post—a search that was soon to come to an end at Arnstadt.

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Arnstadt, Mu¨hlhausen (1703–8)

S

ituated some twenty miles south-west of weimar, arnstadt was the principal town in the territory of SchwarzburgArnstadt, ruled since 1681 by Count Anton Gu¨nther II (1653–1716).1 When Bach went there in 1703 his family name was already familiar to many of its 3,800 inhabitants, and had been since about 1620, when Caspar Bach (d. before 1644) and four of his sons, Caspar, Johannes, Melchior and Nicolaus, found employment in the town. They were followed by a long line of Bachs, including Johann Sebastian’s father and his uncle Johann Christoph; Ambrosius had lived and worked there between 1654 and 1667, and his twin brother had served Count Ludwig Gu¨nther and his successor as Hofmusicus (court musician) from 1671 until 1693. Still remembered also would have been old Heinrich Bach, who for over fifty years was organist at the town’s two principal churches, the Liebfrauenkirche and the Oberkirche; he died in 1692, aged almost seventy-seven. Nowhere among the Bachs at Arnstadt do we find a predecessor for Sebastian as organist of the town’s third church, the Bonifatiuskirche, for the very good reason that this building, along with the municipal offices and over 400 dwelling houses, had been destroyed by fire in 1581. It was not until nearly 100 years later, in 1676, that the money was found to rebuild the Bonifatiuskirche, which on its completion in 1

He was elevated to the rank of prince in 1697, but did not use the title until 1707.

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1683 became known as the Neue Kirche (new church), and even then it remained without an organ until one was commissioned in 1699 from Johann Friedrich Wender, one of the most reputable Thuringian builders. Wender’s contract stipulated that the work should be completed by 24 June 1701, but it was not until two years after this that the instrument was ready. Meanwhile an organist had been appointed in the person of Andreas Bo¨rner (1673–1728), the son-in-law of Christoph Herthum (1651–1710), Heinrich Bach’s successor at the two principal churches. It may seem surprising that when the time came in July 1703 to test and exhibit Wender’s new organ, it was not Bo¨rner, nor even Herthum, who was chosen to carry out these functions, but the young and as yet little-known Johann Sebastian Bach. The decision to call upon the services of an eighteen-year-old from another town cannot be explained solely by reason of Bach’s early mastery of organ technique, even in a region where such mastery was appreciated and respected; we must look also at the family connections that so often secured advancement for the musical Bachs in Thuringia. Bach had at least two such connections in Arnstadt in 1703, not counting his stepmother Barbara Margaretha, who had presumably returned to Arnstadt with her daughter after being widowed in 1695. One was the organist Christoph Herthum, who had married a daughter of Heinrich Bach, Maria Catharina, in 1668, when both he and his bride were only seventeen. The other was the burgomaster Martin Feldhaus, whose wife’s sisters, Maria Elisabetha and Catharina Wedemann, had both married relatives of Sebastian, respectively Johann Christoph of Eisenach and Johann Michael (1648–94), organist at Gehren, about 15 miles south of Arnstadt, from 1673 until his death. Bach was not short of influential contacts at Arnstadt. Where Bach had acquired the expertise that, from this time onwards, was in such demand when there was a new or rebuilt organ to be tested and assessed is something of a mystery. A keen ear for the acoustical properties of an instrument or a building seems to have been a natural endowment, but the technical knowledge required to adjudicate on such matters as wind pressure, voicing, and the thickness and quality of pipe metal could have come only from close study and observation. It is worth recalling that during Bach’s early years at Eisenach the organ at the Georgenkirche frequently needed attention; work on its rebuilding started the year after he left. Moreover, his brother Christoph’s

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organ at Ohrdruf, which Pachelbel had tested in 1693, was extensively rebuilt between 1696 and 1713 (and so partly during Bach’s years there). Again, at Lu¨neburg the Michaeliskirche organ had undergone extensive repairs when Bach was at school there, and Bo¨hm’s organ in the Johanniskirche also needed a good deal of attention at that time. There had been many opportunities for Bach to observe organ builders and craftsmen at work, and, knowing what we do about his curiosity over other musical matters, we may safely assume that he took every possible chance to learn from them. It was, however, Bach’s gifts as a performer, rather than his expert evaluation of the instrument itself, that impressed the consistory and citizens of Arnstadt in July 1703—so much so, indeed, that he was immediately offered the post of organist at the Neue Kirche in preference to Bo¨rner, who was compensated by a transfer to the Liebfrauenkirche (technically a promotion, since this was the more important church). As the chronology of Bach’s first contacts with Arnstadt has been frequently confused, it may be useful to set it out here: ?3 July 1703: Wender is granted his certificate after a successful inspection of the new organ by Bach and at least one other assessor 8 July (Sunday): Bach gives a public recital on the new organ 13 July: he receives his fee and expenses (8 florins 13 groschen) 9 August: his contract as organist of the Neue Kirche is drawn up 14 August: he enters upon his duties at the Neue Kirche

Under the terms of his contract Bach was expected to accompany the services at the Neue Kirche on Sundays, feast days, and other occasions of public worship, to maintain the organ in good order, and to report any faults that might develop in it. In return he was to be paid an annual salary of 84 florins 6 groschen, which compared very favourably with what other Arnstadt musicians received. In view of subsequent events it is worth remarking that Bach’s contract made no mention of any obligation to provide the church with ‘figural’ music (that is, more advanced choral music, usually with instruments). Indeed, performance of any vocal music more complex than chorales and simple motets was virtually ruled out by the poor quality of the Gymnasium students allotted to him, and the situation was aggravated by Bach’s inability to maintain good discipline among them. From what we know about the

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Arnstadt students this would have been a difficult enough task for an experienced choirmaster; it was doubly so for someone no older than many of the choristers themselves. Bach’s duties left him with ample free time, much of which he presumably spent perfecting his organ technique and making his first essays in composition. It is also likely, although there is no evidence to prove it, that his services were required for musical entertainments at Neideck Castle, where Count Anton Gu¨nther drew from time to time on the resources of the town to augment his permanent Kapelle. At court Bach would have come into contact with Paul Gleitsmann, who had succeeded Adam Drese as Kapellmeister in 1701, and he would have heard something, too, of the poet Salomo Franck, with whom he was later to collaborate at Weimar. Franck had served as Regierungs-Sekra¨ter (administrative secretary) to the count from 1689 to 1697, when he left for Jena, and in 1700 he had written the text for a secular cantata, or serenata, to inaugurate (on 23 August) the Augustenburg, the country seat that the countess, Augusta Dorothea, had had built in the vicinity of Arnstadt. It was after a visit to Neideck Castle on 4 August 1705 that an incident occurred which provides the earliest evidence we have of the difficulties that Bach had to face at Arnstadt. Returning home late that evening in the company of his cousin Barbara Catharina,2 he was approached in the market-place by a pupil from the Gymnasium, a certain Johann Heinrich Geyersbach, three years Bach’s senior, and five companions. Geyersbach, a bassoonist, threatened Bach with a stick, saying that he had insulted him and his instrument, whereupon Bach drew his sword to defend himself. After a scuffle the disputants were separated, but they were later summoned before the consistory to explain their conduct, and evidence was taken also from 2

Probably the third daughter (b. 13 December 1679) of Johann Michael Bach of Gehren, and elder sister of Sebastian’s future wife, Maria Barbara. Another slightly younger cousin, also called Barbara Catharina Bach (b. May 1680), was living at Arnstadt at the same time; she was the daughter of Sebastian’s late uncle Johann Christoph. Karl Mu¨ller (Arnstadter Bachbuch [Arnstadt, 2nd ed., 1957], 105) stated that it was this younger cousin who was with Bach on the evening in question, but this seems unlikely in view of the fact that in the Arnstadt burial register (ibid., 155) she is said to have been bedridden for over four years before her death in January 1709.

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Barbara Catharina and two of the other students, Hoffmann and Schu¨ttwu¨rfel. Bach had to admit that he had called Geyersbach a ‘Zippel Fagottist’. This is usually translated in English text as ‘nannygoat bassoonist’ and taken to refer to Geyersbach’s imperfect mastery of his instrument, but Konrad Ku¨ster has drawn attention to the derivation of Zippel from Zippeler, a German form of the Latin discipulus (pupil).3 According to this interpretation Bach would have been drawing an invidious social distinction between himself, a twentyyear-old professional organist, and Geyersbach, a twenty-three-yearold schoolboy. Whatever the nature of the insult, the consistory’s reprimand did not rest there, but referred also to Bach’s inability to get on with the students and his unwillingness to rehearse them in figural music. Bach, in his reply, pointed out the need for a director musices to train the choir. Bach was soon in further trouble with the consistory. Some two months after the brush with Geyersbach he was granted leave of absence for four weeks to visit the northern city of Lu¨beck, a journey of some 260 miles which he is said to have made on foot. The purpose of the visit was to hear and learn from Dietrich Buxtehude; but another reason for going (perhaps even the main one) might have been to explore the possibility of succeeding this famous sixty-eight-year-old organist, who had at his command at the Marienkirche a splendid three-manual instrument with fifty-four speaking stops. Two years earlier Handel and his friend Johann Mattheson had journeyed to Lu¨beck from Hamburg for the same reason, but they had been unwilling to accept the main condition imposed upon any successor: that he should marry Buxtehude’s daughter. Bach also let pass the chance to become the great man’s son-in-law (Anna Margaretha Buxtehude was ten years his senior and of unprepossessing appearance), but he found other things to detain him in Lu¨beck, including the Abendmusiken, a series of evening concerts of spiritual, oratorio-like music which Buxtehude arranged annually in the Marienkirche on the last two Sundays after Trinity and the second, third, and fourth Sundays of Advent. In 1705 two additional ‘extraordinaire’ Abendmusiken were given on 2 and 3 December, at which Buxtehude’s Castrum doloris and Templum honoris were performed, the first 3

K. Ku¨ster, Der junge Bach, 136.

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to commemorate the late emperor, Leopold I, and the second to hail his successor, Joseph I. Bach was presumably present at these and the other Abendmusiken of 1705, details of which have unfortunately not survived. How he occupied the rest of his time in north Germany we do not know— possibly he renewed friendships he had made some years previously in Hamburg and Lu¨neburg—but he was back in Arnstadt by 7 February 1706, when he took communion, and a fortnight later he was trying to satisfy an angry consistory as to why an absence of four weeks had grown into one of four months. The old complaints, that he failed to get on with the students and neglected to rehearse them in figural music, were renewed, and a further charge was added: that of introducing sundry curious embellishments (‘viele wunderliche variationes’) and many strange notes (‘viele frembde Thone’) into the hymns, to the confusion of the congregation. Whether Bach was attempting to put into practice what he had heard at Lu¨beck is not entirely clear. Bach’s refusal to rehearse the students in concerted music remained the main bone of contention between him and the consistory, and it doubtless lay behind other criticisms of his conduct, including that made on 11 November 1706, when he was accused of having breached regulations by admitting to the choir loft a ‘frembde Jungfer’ (usually translated as ‘stranger maiden’). Most writers since Spitta have identified the young lady in question as Bach’s cousin and future wife, Maria Barbara. She was born on 20 October 1684 at Gehren, where her father, Johann Michael Bach, was organist, and the supposition is that she came to live with her uncle, the burgomaster Martin Feldhaus, after her mother’s death in October 1704 and that Bach was also living under the same roof. The consistory’s use of the word ‘frembde’ in referring to a niece of the burgomaster who had lived in the town for over two years is puzzling, until one realizes that it ought probably to be translated as ‘unauthorized’ rather than as ‘stranger’. One indisputable fact to emerge from the consistory minutes is that Bach was not getting along at all well with either the students or his superiors, and the fault seems to have been chiefly Bach’s. As someone scarcely out of his teens, he must have appeared intolerably arrogant and self-willed, and, whatever posterity might think, the consistory had every right to question whether what Bach did for the Neue Kirche

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merited the salary they paid him. At the same time, it must be said that his actions stemmed from a perfect understanding of the musical situation at Arnstadt. He knew that with the available resources he could never achieve what he was soon to refer to as his aim for a ‘wellregulated church music’, and he was not prepared to strive for anything short of this. The only way he could resolve an increasingly irksome situation was to look elsewhere. Fortunately an opportunity soon presented itself at Mu¨hlhausen. Mu¨hlhausen, about 36 miles north-west of Arnstadt, was an imperial free city governed by an elected council of six aldermen and forty-two councillors. One of its two principal churches was the Blasiuskirche (see Plate 6), a building of cathedral proportions dating from the thirteenth to fourteenth centuries and scarcely altered since then. It owed its musical reputation to a long line of fine organists, of whom Johann Rudolf Ahle (1625–73) was the most important. A native of Mu¨hlhausen, Ahle composed in both sacred and secular genres and enriched the repertory of congregational hymns; in his last year he served the city as burgomaster. He was succeeded at the Blasiuskirche by his son Johann Georg, who won fame as both poet and musician. Father and son between them served the Blasiuskirche as organists for over fifty years. The younger Ahle died on 2 December 1706 at the age of fifty-five. Among those who were invited to compete for the post was Johann Gottfried Walther, a relative of Bach and organist at the Thomaskirche in Erfurt. Walther declined the invitation to make the customary Probe, and instead went to Weimar as organist of the Stadtkirche, where he later came into close contact with Bach. There were presumably other attempts to fill the vacancy before Bach was invited to Mu¨hlhausen for his Probe the following Easter. Mu¨hlhausen was one of the few important towns in Thuringia not already ‘colonized’ by the Bachs, but it is not surprising to find some family connection linking Sebastian with the place. One of the councillors responsible for choosing a new organist there was Johann Hermann Bellstedt, whose brother, Johann Gottfried, lived at Arnstadt and was married to Susanna Barbara Wedemann, a maternal aunt of Maria Barbara and a sister-in-law of Martin Feldhaus. It was quite possibly J. H. Bellstedt who proposed Bach’s candidature for the Blasiuskirche post, and it was he whom the parish

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council asked to work out a ‘favourable agreement’ with Bach a month after his successful Probe. The delay in offering Bach the post perhaps reflects reservations about appointing someone whose relations with his previous employers had been far from cordial, but the council was evidently well satisfied at securing someone of Bach’s reputation as a musician, and when he appeared before them on 14 June 1707 he was asked to state his terms. He requested, and was granted, the salary he had been paid at Arnstadt (85 gulden—about 20 gulden more than Ahle had been paid), together with the same perquisites of grain, wood, and faggots that his predecessor had received and a wagon to convey his belongings from Arnstadt. On 29 June Bach requested his dismissal from the Arnstadt consistory and assigned the last quarter of his salary to his cousin Johann Ernst, who succeeded him (with a much smaller salary) at the Neue Kirche. Once established at Mu¨hlhausen with what must have seemed good prospects, Bach found himself in a position to make Maria Barbara his wife. (They were second cousins, and so their relationship did not infringe the laws of consanguinity.) At the opportune moment came a legacy of 50 gulden (more than half a year’s salary) from his maternal uncle, Tobias La¨mmerhirt, who had died at Erfurt on 10 August 1707, and the couple were married in the village church at Dornheim, a mile or two outside Arnstadt, on 17 October. The choice of Dornheim for the ceremony no doubt resulted from their friendship with the pastor there, Johann Lorenz Stauber. Stauber’s first wife had died the previous June, and in June 1708 he was to marry Regina Wedemann, Maria Barbara’s aunt. While Bach’s marriage to Maria Barbara must have been the source of much personal happiness, he was soon to find that his appointment at Mu¨hlhausen could offer him little professional satisfaction. His relations with his employers, who evidently recognized his outstanding ability, were amicable, but opportunities for the composition and performance of concerted music were again very restricted. Most (probably all) of the church cantatas he wrote at Mu¨hlhausen had no connection at all with the Blasiuskirche, where it seems that opposition was strong to any kind of church music more advanced in style than that of the Ahles. Spitta (i, 358–61) suggested as the main reason for this the Pietist leanings of Johann Adolf Frohne, the church’s pastor and superinten-

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dent. Philipp Jakob Spener, whose Pia desideria (1675) had signalled the rise of the Pietist movement, had died only two years previously (in 1705), and his crusade for an undogmatic, subjective, and devotional Christianity which stressed the moral responsibility of the individual had by then found wide support among Lutherans. In some ways akin to Puritanism, Pietism tended to frown on the use in church of any music more elaborate than hymns and simple motets. Opposed to Frohne in the controversy that had divided congregations in Mu¨hlhausen for almost a decade before Bach’s arrival was the pastor of the Marienkirche, Georg Christian Eilmar, a strictly orthodox Lutheran. The researches of Martin Petzoldt, however, have shown that Frohne’s religious convictions did not, in fact, incline towards Pietism, and that the dispute between the two pastors was more to do with their personal temperaments and their interpretations of the scriptures.4 The long-established practice at Mu¨hlhausen for the two pastors to alternate weekly between the two main churches must have allowed the controversy to impinge strongly on their congregations. We may doubt whether Bach allowed himself to be caught up in it, but he and Eilmar do seem to have formed close professional and personal ties. Eilmar almost certainly furnished the texts for some of Bach’s early cantatas, and on 29 December 1708 he stood godfather at Weimar to Bach’s first child, Catharina Dorothea. Two years later Eilmar’s daughter, Anna Dorothea, was godmother to Bach’s eldest son, Wilhelm Friedemann. When Spitta first drew attention to the religious squabbles at Mu¨hlhausen he did not, as has been said, suggest that it was to these that Bach alluded when he complained, in his letter of resignation to the parish council, of the ‘Wiedrigkeit’ (hindrance) and ‘Verdriesslichkeit’ (vexation) he had experienced during his year as organist of the Blasiuskirche.5 In fact, Spitta stated quite clearly that in Bach’s use of these words We must understand in the first place the disposition of a portion of the municipality of Mu¨hlhausen which clung to old fashions and customs, and neither could nor would follow Bach’s bold flights, and even looked askance 4 5

M. Petzoldt, Bachsta¨tten aufsuchen (Leipzig, 1992), 133–4.

See F. Blume, ‘J. S Bach’s Youth’, Musical Quarterly, liv (1968), 1–30; also H. Serwer, ‘ ‘‘Wiedrigkeit’’ and ‘‘Verdriesslichkeit’’ in Mu¨hlhausen’, Musical Quarterly, lv (1969), 20–30.

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at the stranger who conducted himself so despotically in a position which, as far back as the memory of man extended, had always been filled by a 6 native of the city, and for its sole honour and glory.

It was indeed this ‘clinging to old fashions and customs’ that caused Bach to experience hindrances and vexations at Mu¨hlhausen. Heinrich Nicolaus Gerber, later a pupil of Bach, complained about the town in 1717–21 as a place where, as far as music was concerned, darkness covered the earth, and even as late as 1762 Johann Lorenz Albrecht, Kantor and organist at the Marienkirche, severely criticized Mu¨hlhausen for its entrenched conservatism, its resistance to new ideas and musical styles, and its archaic system of organizing the available vocal and instrumental resources.7 Bach had attempted against impossible odds to improve the condition of church music not only in Mu¨hlhausen itself but also in the neighbouring villages, where, as he said in his letter of resignation, ‘the music is often better than the harmonie produced here’. He had secured for the benefit of the parish a ‘good collection of the finest church compositions’ (which, we may be sure, he had few opportunities to perform), and had complied with the terms of his contract by reporting on the repairs needed to the Blasiuskirche organ. Indeed, in this last particular he had gone further and drawn up a detailed project for rebuilding the organ which was put to the parish council on 21 February 1708, and agreed to. The work included the addition of a third manual, and it was entrusted to Wender, who had constructed the Neue Kirche organ at Arnstadt. By the time it was finished Bach was installed in his new post at Weimar. Despite the ‘Wiedrigkeit’ and ‘Verdriesslichkeit’ of Mu¨hlhausen, Bach remained on good terms with his employers and parted from them amicably. It is clear from his letter of resignation that ‘the most gracious entre´e to the Kapelle and Chamber Music of His Serene Highness of Saxe-Weimar’ had come unexpectedly; as he explained to the council, it offered him an immediate increase in salary and the prospect of achieving his goal of a ‘well-regulated church music’. Efforts were no 6 7

Spitta, i, 357.

F. W. Marpurg, ed., Historisch-kritische Beytra¨ge zur Aufnahme der Musik, v (1762), 381–409; see Serwer, loc. cit.

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doubt made to persuade him to remain at the Blasiuskirche, but on 26 June 1708 the council agreed to his dismissal, ‘since he could not be made to stay’, requesting only that he should supervise the rebuilding of the organ. This he most probably did, and it is likely that he also composed the organ chorale Ein’ feste Burg (bwv720) to inaugurate the restored organ in 1709, as Spitta suggested. Certainly he kept in close touch with Mu¨hlhausen for a time, and in 1709 (and perhaps in 1710 also) he returned to direct a new cantata for the annual change of town council, the cantata Gott ist mein Ko¨nig (BWV71) having been a conspicuous success on the same occasion in 1708. Bach was succeeded at the Blasiuskirche by his cousin Johann Friedrich (c. 1682–1730), who remained there until he died. In 1735 Bach’s third son, Johann Gottfried Bernhard, became organist at the Marienkirche. Another Thuringian town had been ‘colonized’. Early Works Bach was no youthful prodigy as far as composition was concerned. Except for two or three cantatas, very few of the works he wrote before leaving Mu¨hlhausen at the age of twenty-three would be regularly performed today if they had been composed by anyone else. As might be expected, they are mainly for organ or clavier (a generic term used here for any keyboard instrument other than the organ); all but one of the few surviving cantatas are occasional pieces, not composed for the regular church services at Arnstadt or Mu¨hlhausen. Many of the early clavier pieces included in BG and listed by Schmieder are now known to be spurious, or at best of doubtful authenticity. Perhaps the earliest of those that remain is the Capriccio in E major (bwv993), a single fugal movement written in honorem Johann Christoph Bachii Ohrdrufiensis, as its title states. It shows how well Bach had profited from the instruction of his elder brother at Ohrdruf, and also how much he still had to learn about organizing fugal pieces on a large scale. The Capriccio sopra la lontananza del fratello dilettissimo bwv992 (known under its English title as ‘Capriccio on the departure of his most loved brother’) is more familiar, mainly on account of its naive programmatic content: it is said to depict the feelings of family and friends when Bach’s brother Johann Jacob left Eisenach to enlist in the service of Charles XII of Sweden. The last two movements include the

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call of the posthorn. The piece is usually dated c. 1704, the time of Jacob’s departure; but it could have been written later, and it is worth pointing out that the word lontananza in the title should be translated as ‘absence’ rather than ‘departure’. The title itself, like that of the last movement of the roughly contemporaneous Sonata in D major (bwv963), Thema all’imitatio gallina cuccu (Theme in imitation of the hen and the cuckoo), suggests Italian influence, but Bach probably found his models nearer home in pieces by Poglietti, Kerll, and Kuhnau. Also thought to date from the Arnstadt-Mu¨hlhausen or early Weimar periods are four toccatas for clavier (bwv912–15), multi-sectional works like the organ toccatas, incorporating fugal movements. Perhaps the best known is the E minor Toccata (bwv914), described by Spitta (i, 441) as ‘one of those pieces steeped in melancholy which Bach alone could write’. Its final fugal section, however, is apparently a reworking of a piece by an Italian composer not yet identified;8 possibly it dates from the same period as similar rifacimenti of Legrenzi and Corelli pieces (bwv574 and 579) and the fugues on themes from Albinoni’s trio sonatas Op. 1 (bwv946, 950–1). The dangers of relying on stylistic analysis alone in determining authorship or chronology are no less acute when studying the early organ music, and since other evidence is again scanty the general picture must remain largely conjectural. The only organ piece from the period to survive complete in what is probably Bach’s own hand (see Plate 3) is the cantus firmus setting of the Advent hymn Wie scho¨n leuchtet der Morgenstern (bwv739); if authentic, it dates from about 1705. The type of chorale setting more readily associated with the Arnstadt years, however (indeed, often referred to simply as the ‘Arnstadt type’), is one in which each line of a straightforward chordal harmonization is separated from the next by a brief improvisatory flourish. The harmonies are typically adventurous and often chromatic, as in Ex. 1.1, Gelobet seist du, Jesu Christ (bwv722). Although this piece, like most other surviving examples of the type (e.g. bwv715, 726, and 732), is now thought to date from the Weimar years, and although we cannot be sure that Bach used it to accompany 8

G. Pestelli, ‘Un’altra rielaborazione bachiana: la fuga della toccata bwv914’, Rivista italiana di musicologia, xvi (1981), 40–4.

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Ex. 1.1

! ! !

BWV722, bars 1–5 q Ł Ł Ł Š  ŁŁ ŁŁŁ ŁŁŁ ŁŁŁ Ł ŁŁ Ł ŁŁŁ ² ŁŁŁ ððð ³ Ł ²Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł ¦ Ł Ł ²Ł Ł Ł ²Ł Ł
µ b ŁŁŁ Ý  ŁŁ ŁŁ ŁŁ ŁŁ −ŁŁ ŁŁ ¦ Ł ŁŁ ² Ł ŁŁ ¦ Ł ŁŁ ð ð w c b q Ł  Ł Š µŁŁŁ ŁŁ ∑ŁŁŁ −Ł Ł Ł Ł ² ŁŁ Ł ŁŁ Ł Ł ŁŁŁý ² Ł Ł ŁŁ Ł Ł ¹ ŁŁ Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł b µ b

  Ł Ł Ł ¦ Ł Ł Ł Ł Ý Ł ý Ł Ł ² ŁŁ Ł ² Ł ŁŁ Ł Ł Ł ¦ Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł ¹ ŁŁ Ł ŁŁ Ł Ł Ł
ŁŁŁŁ  Ł w (

(

Š ŁŁŁ Ý Ł Ł

a congregation, it does seem that it was this kind of harmonization to which the consistory at Arnstadt took exception when they reproved their organist in 1706 ‘for having hitherto introduced sundry curious embellishments in the chorales and mingled many strange notes in them, with the result that the congregation has been confused’. Some of Bach’s earliest organ chorales are included in a manuscript volume now in Yale University Library (MS LM 4708), which was brought to scholarly attention independently, and almost simultaneously, by Christoph Wolff and Wilhelm Krumbach in 1985.9 It was compiled some time after 1790 by Johann Gottfried Neumeister (1757–1849), a pupil of Bach’s friend and colleague Georg Andreas Sorge, and includes in all eighty-two chorale preludes, of which thirty-eight are attributed to J. S. Bach and twenty-eight to other members of the Bach family. 9

C. Wolff, ‘Bach’s Organ Music: Studies and Discoveries’, Musical Times, cxxvi (1985), 149– 52; W. Krumbach: ‘Sechzig unbekannte Orgelwerke von Johann Sebastian Bach: ein vorla¨ufiger Fundbericht’, Neue Zeitschrift fu¨r Musik, cxlvi/3 (1985), 4–12.

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The pieces are arranged, like those in Bach’s Orgel-Bu¨chlein (see p. 53), in the order of the liturgical year, and indeed two of them (bwv601 and 639) were included in the Orgel-Bu¨chlein (Little Organ Book); three others (bwv719, 737, and 742) appear in other sources in the form in which they are found in the Neumeister volume, and a further two (bwv714 and 957) were previously known in shorter versions. One prelude, on Christe, der du bist Tag and Licht, to which the bwv number 1096 was originally attached, has been shown to be by Johann Pachelbel. Several of the remaining thirty pieces can be shown, on stylistic grounds, to belong to Bach’s earliest years as a composer. The titles of most of the hymns were entered in the Orgel-Bu¨chlein for subsequent composition, but, except possibly for Als Jesus Christus in der Nacht (bwv1108, a title not entered in the Orgel-Bu¨chlein), none of the versions in the Neumeister collection would have been appropriate for inclusion in the other volume, since they lack both the concision and the motivic integrity of the Orgel-Bu¨chlein chorales and only a few of them specify use of the pedals. They show a tendency to treat each line of the hymn separately, in half-a-dozen cases even changing the metre (and by implication the tempo and possibly the registration) more than once, perhaps in response to a particular text. The Neumeister collection nevertheless represents a valuable addition to the canon of Bach’s organ works, and an interesting one in the way that certain features, for example the often fragmented figuration and a penchant for echoes marked p, reflect the style of the early cantatas. Among the other chorale-based pieces of the early period are three sets of variations (partite diverse, bwv766–8), models for which—if they date from the Lu¨neburg years, as Spitta first suggested—Bach could have found to hand in the chorale partite of Georg Bo¨hm (although the music itself suggests other influences as well). Bo¨hm’s partite were probably designed as clavier music for use in the home, and there is much in the style of Bach’s pieces that suggests the same purpose. Pedals are not obligatory at all in the first two sets, and are required in only five of the eleven variations on Sei gegru¨sset, Jesu gu¨tig (bwv768). This is unquestionably the most interesting of the three works. The number of variations and the order in which they appear vary considerably from one source to another, and the lack of a definitive shape, together with

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the variable quality of the music itself, suggests that bwv768 was probably composed over a fairly lengthy period; the earliest source dates from Bach’s Weimar years (1708–17). To arrive at even a tentative chronology for the early organ pieces not based on chorales is, if anything, more difficult still. All that can be done here is to point to certain stylistic features of the preludes (or toccatas) and fugues that others have assigned to the ArnstadtMu¨hlhausen period, bearing in mind that many of those features continue to appear in the Weimar works up to about 1712. One thing to notice, then, is that most of the pieces, despite being called ‘prelude and fugue’ or ‘toccata and fugue’ in modern editions, and even in the sources, are multi-sectional works of a type referred to by north German organists simply as ‘praeambulum’ or ‘praeludium’.10 A good example is the Prelude and Fugue in E major (bwv566), printed in BG and listed by Schmieder as ‘Toccata’ (it exists also in a C major version, generally thought to be earlier). This is in four quite separate sections, the second and fourth being fugues on contrasted but thematically related subjects—a feature, too, of Buxtehude’s preludes and toccatas. In other works, such as the so-called Prelude and Fugue in A minor (bwv551), the music is more continuous. bwv551 has five sections, the second fugue being followed by a coda obviously designed to regain the brilliant bravura style of the opening, and so to provide a climactic ending. Most other preludes and fugues of this period are similar in style and construction, but with only three sections, the fugue occupying a central position. Among other features of the early organ preludes are their impressive and sometimes quite lengthy (but not difficult) pedal solos, their chordal ‘trills’ (fully notated), much rushing about over the keyboard in semiquaver and demisemiquaver runs, and generally speaking a loose construction which suggests a recalled improvisation. The fugues, on the other hand, despite relying heavily on sequence and often remaining unadventurously in tonic and dominant keys, are surprisingly well organized (i.e. thematic), even though their subjects are typically long and ‘garrulous’ (Ex. 1.2). It is not surprising to find that pedal entries are usually long-delayed and sometimes modified. 10

P. Williams, The Organ Music of J. S. Bach, i, 222.

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Ex. 1.2 (a)

bars 1–3 Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł ŁBWV531/ii, Ł Ł Łý ¾ Ł Š Ł Ł Ł

(b)

−Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł ¹ Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł ¹ −Ł Ł −Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł Š− Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł  Allegro

BWV535a/ii, bars 1–5

BWV578, bars 1–5 b µ Ł Š −  Ł Ł ý Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł ²Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł

(c)

Š − Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł ²Ł Ł Ł

Works representative of this early style and usually thought to date from the Arnstadt-Mu¨hlhausen years include (in addition to those already mentioned) the Preludes and Fugues in C (bwv531), G minor (535a, an early and incomplete version of 535), and G major (550), the Prelude (only) in G (bwv568), the Fugue (only) in G minor (bwv578), and the Fantasia in G (bwv572); the ‘Little’ E minor Prelude and Fugue (bwv533) is less flamboyant, more tightly organized, and without the usual toccata-like flourish at the end of the fugue. It is ironic that the famous Toccata in D minor (bwv565), in which the rhetoric of the prelude–fugue–postlude combination is at its most exuberant and dramatic, should show features that put Bach’s authorship in doubt, at least in the form in which we know it today.11 The difficulty in establishing tight stylistic norms for the music of the early period must, however, leave the question of its authenticity open. The situation is somewhat clearer with the early cantatas, the background to which is sketched in a later chapter (see pp. 123 ff.). These all date from Bach’s period as organist of the Blasiuskirche, Mu¨hlhausen, 11

See R. Bullivant, Fugue (London, 1971), 161, and P. Williams, ‘bwv565: a toccata in D minor for organ by J. S. Bach?’, Early Music, ix (1981), 330–7.

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although they were not written for performance there. The earliest is probably Aus der Tiefen rufe ich (bwv131), a penitential work which Terry (81) connected with the disastrous fire that destroyed part of Mu¨hlhausen in 1707. Its text may have been compiled by G. C. Eilmar, pastor of the Marienkirche, who was probably responsible also for that of Gott ist mein Ko¨nig (bwv71), written for the service marking the town council election on 4 February 1708 and printed at the council’s expense. Gottes Zeit ist die allerbeste Zeit (bwv106) was for a funeral, Der Herr denket an uns (bwv196) for a wedding (perhaps that of Maria Barbara’s aunt, Regina Wedemann, to the pastor Johann Lorenz Stauber). With these works belongs also Cantata 150, Nach dir, Herr, verlanget mich, which is thought to date from Bach’s first year at Weimar (1708–9). The occasional nature of these cantatas helps to explain the diversity of their texts, structures, and instrumentation, which in no two cases are the same. But they also share certain features in common. Like some of the clavier and organ works, they fall into several short sections without any very sharp distinction between one section and another, or even between solo and tutti items. The texts, untouched by the reforms that Erdmann Neumeister brought to the cantata, never invite the use of recitative, and da capo arias, too, are almost entirely absent. Phrase lengths are short and the range of keys very restricted. Motet style, with instruments doubling the voices, predominates in the choruses. The cantatas thus reflect the conservatism that permeated church music at Mu¨hlhausen, and the only one that Bach felt able to revive at Leipzig later on was Christ lag in Todes Banden (bwv4), a chorale cantata on the Easter hymn, which he added to his second annual cycle in 1725. For all their immaturity and dependence on parochial models, these early cantatas have achieved a degree of popularity in modern times which is out of proportion to that accorded (in live performance, at least) to Bach’s later and finer examples of the genre. The reason is no doubt that the early works have a larger numbers of four-part (SATB) sections and therefore commend themselves to choral societies more readily than the later ones, most of which have (apart from simple chorales) only one four-part movement, and sometimes none at all. Probably the best known of all the pre-Weimar cantatas is No. 106,

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Gottes Zeit ist die allerbeste Zeit, also known as the ‘Actus tragicus’. It may have been composed for the funeral of Bach’s uncle Tobias La¨mmerhirt, who died on 10 August 1707, but there is no certain evidence for this; the earliest source is a copy dating from after Bach’s death, and it is there that the title ‘Actus tragicus’ is found. The work opens with an instrumental Sonatina which, despite its major key, takes a sombre colouring from the scoring—for two recorders, two bass viols, and continuo—and from the prevalence of drooping ‘sigh’ motifs. The rest of the work is built around three choruses: the first, in three sections, is somewhat in motet style, the instruments for the most part doubling the voices; the last in an elaborate working-out of the seventh strophe of Adam Reusser’s chorale In dich habe ich gehoffet, Herr, with the last line set as a fugue. The remarkable central chorus again combines three distinct elements: a fugal setting of a verse from Ecclesiasticus, ‘Es ist der alte Bund’, a soprano arioso from Revelation, ‘Ja komm, Herr Jesu’, and (in the instrumental accompaniment) the chorale melody Ich hab mein Sach Gott heimgestellt. On each side of the central chorus there are two sections for solo voices, resulting in the kind of symmetrical layout that can be observed in many of Bach’s later works: Sonatina—Chorus—Tenor—Bass—Chorus—Alto—Bass ⫹ Alto—Chorus

The early cantatas as a whole reveal a youthful exuberance and an almost Romantic approach which Bach was rarely to recapture in his later years. This goes, by and large, for the clavier and organ music as well. Something was inevitably lost in acquiring the control, technique, and sense of proportion that were to make possible the masterpieces of the future. But it is doubtful whether Bach could ever have developed from a gifted but minor German composer into an artist of international importance within the narrow confines of Arnstadt and Mu¨hlhausen. He needed a window opening on wider musical horizons, and a catalyst to help form his mature musical style. Weimar was to provide that window, Vivaldi and the modern Italian concerto the catalyst.

l

C H A P T E R

3

;

Weimar [1708–17]

T