Bach is stated to have written a Passion music in five different shapes. Two of these are the familiarPassions according to S. MatthewandS. 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 aS. 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 aS. Mark Passionto lie hid under the guise of theDirge 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;55and 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 1725.56He further offers an elaborate and conclusive defence of the genuineness of theS. Luke Passion, which he places without hesitation in the early years of Bach’s residence at Weimar.57
TheS. John Passioncomes second in the series, and was brought out in 1724. Of the presumptive work of 1725, above-mentioned, a solitary chorus exists in record. ThePassion according to S. Matthewfollows in 1729; and last of all, in 1731, thataccording to S. Mark. The printed text of this, which we still possess, was adapted by Picander to theDirgeof 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 Leipzigat 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 asolovoice. 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, therecitative, especially in that most expressive variety, thearioso. Instrumental accompaniment became the rule; the story was interrupted by short symphonies; above all, theariawas 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.58The first result in Germany has an analogy inthe 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’sS. John Passion; but here the biblical narrative is followed with entire fidelity,59and 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 ofwhich 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.
ThePassions according to S. JohnandS. Matthewlie 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. TheS. John Passionis the perfection of church-music; theS. Matthewreaches the goal of all sacred art, while its colossal dimensions take it almost, happily not quite, out of the range of church performance. TheS. John Passionstands closer to the oratorio, as we may learn from the way in which nearly every choral sentence, that is to say, whatever is spoken bythe 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 ofariasor of developed recitative (calledarioso), 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 theS. John Passionsome 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 theS. Matthew Passion;61that 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 thePassion according to S. John, and makes a peculiar contrast to the universality which is the note of that according toS. 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 thePassion 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 humansuffering. 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.62Atcertain moments of supreme dignity, the simple recitative rises into the measured melody of thearioso, 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 modernLeitmotiv. Beside these chorales stand Picander’s verses which are set in the form, not only ofariasorariosos, 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 asprologue 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 hisMasses. 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 LatinMagnificatfurnished Bach with a theme for perhaps the splendidest of his shorter church compositions.
The original performance of theMagnificatthrows 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, wemay 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 theGloria 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—theKyrie,Gloria, andCredo—formed a regular part of the service on Sundays and feast-days; theSanctusdistinguished the three high festivals of the Lutheran kalendar: the only element of the Mass which is not known to have been sung was theAgnus 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 hisMassesfor production in the Leipzig churches. Concerning two of the five he wrote63this is highly probable; and a similar influenceis 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 minor64Bach 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 hisKyrieis not the mere opening of a stately pageant. From four bars of majestic chorus, the orchestra go on at once toannounce 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 theKyrie eleisonhas its counterpart in the tender, almost personal feeling of theChriste eleison, which is set as a duet to an exquisitely melodious accompaniment of the violin, and in the closingKyriechorus, 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. TheGloriabecomes again the angel-song of the nativity. Bach throws himself at once into the spirit in which he wrote theChristmas 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’sHigh 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,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 forthe one catholic, apostolic churchof 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 theAgnus Deiand the yearning desire65of theDona nobis pacem, the restful consummation of the whole. Nor can I describe the infinite fertility of the design, the happy frequency with which in theariea singleinstrument, 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, thePassion according to Saint Matthew.
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 theHigh 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 ofmusical 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 publicflogging 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 acritiqueof 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 tranquillitya 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, theCritische 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 hisThirty Variations. He was attached to the suite of the Baron von Kayserling, an invalid whosuffered 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.”66To 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.67Kayserling 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 alwayshisvariations. 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 Societyof 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 movement68of 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 lefthim 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 strangerswho 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 theMusikalische Opfer, wherein Bach treated the theme which the king had proposed to him with an exuberance of learning and varietybeyond the possibilities ofex temporecomposition. It comprises fugues in three and six parts, eight canons, and a sonata for three instruments, ending in a perpetual canon.
TheMusical Offeringhas always been an object of admiration for the ingenuity of its workmanship. But its object was mainly the display of contrapuntal learning. It was aparergonto 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. TheArt of Fuguestands nearest to theMusical 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 theWohltemperirte Clavier.69These no musician or pianist can ignore with impunity; Schumann himself, whose style of playing and composing lies at the antipodes 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 titleDas Wohltemperirte Clavierproperly 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.71The 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 offancy, 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 theMusikalische 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 itwas 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 ownturns 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 theWohltemperirte 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 afugue. 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.
TheArt of Fuguehas 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.75He did not live to see it published76; 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 harmonic 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 choraleWhen 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
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 thatthe 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 newpieces. 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,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 organsoloby 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 clavichordthe 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;”78and, 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.”79The 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 theopinion 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, thathe 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 adoptthe 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 distinctivesolosingers. When anariawas 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 tointroduce 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 theWohltemperirte 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’sLife of Bach. The most interesting record, however, of this movement, lies in a recently published collection of letters by Samuel Wesley,81the greatest organist of his time.
The little band of enthusiasts set out as the apostles of a new religion. Wesley proclaimed his championship ofSaint Sebastian, as a sacred mission, in the defence of truth and justice, against the idolaters ofHandel—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.”82No 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 theS. Matthew Passionwas performed in 1854 and 1858, to be followed by part of theHigh Mass, and lastly by theChristmas 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, theS. Matthew Passionwas produced at Westminster Abbey, and since that time, there, or in S. Paul’s Cathedral, thePassion Musicand theChristmas Oratoriohave 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.
(Composers are distinguished byspacedtype)