The toccatas and the fantasias are on a much broader plan than the preludes. The former are essentially impressive, if not show pieces. They are usually built up upon a series of brilliant runs, oftenest scales or close arpeggios, with slower moving passages of chords and contrapuntal weavings scattered here and there. The fantasias are, as the name implies, quite free and irregular in form. Both fantasias and toccatas are for the most part distinctly in organ style. Their glory is, like the beauty of the preludes, a glory of harmony. The long, rapid runs may have lost their power to thrill ears that have heard the studies of Liszt; but the chords which lie under them have a majesty that seems to defy time.
The toccatas and the fantasias are on a much broader plan than the preludes. The former are essentially impressive, if not show pieces. They are usually built up upon a series of brilliant runs, oftenest scales or close arpeggios, with slower moving passages of chords and contrapuntal weavings scattered here and there. The fantasias are, as the name implies, quite free and irregular in form. Both fantasias and toccatas are for the most part distinctly in organ style. Their glory is, like the beauty of the preludes, a glory of harmony. The long, rapid runs may have lost their power to thrill ears that have heard the studies of Liszt; but the chords which lie under them have a majesty that seems to defy time.
There are several ‘concertos’ and ‘sonatas’ of which to say much is to repeat what has already been said of other forms of his music. Both are obviously indebted to Vivaldi for style, or the external features of style, as well as for form.
The idea of the concerto in Bach’s day was not the idea which Mozart planted firmly in the mind of musicians. To show off the special qualities of the harpsichord against the background of an orchestra is not often evident as a purpose in Bach’s concertos. He wrote for the harpsichord much as he wrote for the orchestra; or for the orchestra as he wrote for the harpsichord. To the solo instrument he allotted passages which required a fineness in execution of details, orpassages which he wished to be softer than the general run of the music. There is a clear intention to get contrast between the group of instruments and the solo instrument, but apparently little to write for the two in a distinct style.
One may take the D minor concerto for harpsichord and a group of instruments, or even better, the Italian Concerto, for a single harpsichord, preferably with two manuals, as the perfect type. The arrangement and number of movements is well worth noticing. There are three, of which the first and last are in the same key and of about the same length and style. The middle movement is in a contrasting key, is shorter and nearly lyric in character. The scheme is perfectly balanced as a whole, and, it will be noticed, shows little kinship with the suite.
The first and last movements are in the same rapid tempo and both are treated contrapuntally throughout. Their internal structure is fundamentally tri-partite, like the fugues and the preludes in the English suites, the opening and closing sections being the same. The middle section brings out new material, but also retains suggestions of that already announced; the new material tending to take on an episodic character, like the couplets in Couperin’s rondos. This is unusually clear in the middle section of the last movement of the Italian Concerto, in which there are three very distinct episodes, one of which appears twice, quite after the manner of the Beethoven rondo. But one feature, which Bach probably acquired from Vivaldi, makes the whole procedure different from Couperin’s. This is that the main theme, either the short or long part of it which may be restated between the episodes, appears in different keys. The same feature is evident in the preludes to the English suites.
The slow movements in both the D minor and the Italian concertos are written upon a favorite plan ofBach’s. The bass repeats a certain form or ground over and over again, above which the treble spins an ever varied, rhapsodical melody, highly ornate in character. The plan is an exceedingly simple and a very old one. It may be traced in the old motets of the mensuralists of the thirteenth century, with their droningordines; and in the favorite ‘divisions’ of the early English composers. The Chaconne and the Passacaglia are but variants from the same root. It is, of course, a simple form of variations.
This leads us, at last, to a brief consideration of what is perhaps from the point of view of the pianist, if not indeed from that of the musician, the most astonishing of Bach’s harpsichord music,—the Goldberg Variations. The story of their origin will bear repetition for the light it throws on the mood in which they were written.
A certain Count Kaiserling, at one time Russian ambassador to the court of Saxony, supposedly suffered from insomnia and nervous depression. He had in attendance a clavecinist named Goldberg, a pupil of Bach’s, who, among other duties, had by his playing to wile away the miserable night hours of his unhappy patron. Hearing of the great Bach through Goldberg, Kaiserling requested him to write some harpsichord music of pleasant, cheerful character especially for these weary vigils. Bach composed and sent back a theme and thirty variations, which so pleased the count that he presented Bach with a goblet filled with one hundred Louis d’or.
One cannot but smile; the mere thought of thirty variations is soporific. Yet an examination of them will convince one that Kaiserling must have rewarded Bach for sheer delight in the music, not for the blessed forgetfulness in sleep to which it may have been expected to seduce him. The quality of these variations is inexpressibly vivacious and charming. Bach shows himself,it is true, always the master of sounds and the science of music; but this may be taken as the secure foundation on which he allows himself for once to be the brilliant and even dazzling virtuoso.
With the object in view of enchanting an amateur who must have been,ex officio, very much a man of the world at large, Bach composed objectively. That is to say he wrote not so much to express himself as to please another. The same might be said of two other of the latest harpsichord works, theMusikalisches Opferand theKunst der Fuge; except that in both of these masterpieces his aim was more technical. In the Goldberg Variations he is, so to speak, off duty.
Consequently, there is in them little trace of the stern, albeit tender idealist, or of the teacher, or of the man sunk in the mystery of religious devotion. There are nine canons, at every interval from the unison to the ninth, some in contrary motion. But even in these learned processes there is a social suavity and charm. Witness especially the canon at the third (the ninth variation), and that at the sixth (the eighteenth variation). Only the twenty-fifth variation seems to show Bach entirely submerged within himself. Elsewhere he is for the most part primarily a virtuoso. In the matter of wide skips, of crossing the hands, and of sparkling velocity, he outruns Scarlatti. In fact the virtuosity of the variations as a whole is far beyond Scarlatti.
To begin with, he wrote for a harpsichord with two manuals; and in many of the variations, conspicuously in the eighth, the eleventh, the twentieth, and the twenty-third, he availed himself to the uttermost of the advantages of such an instrument. The hands constantly pass by each other on their way from one extremity of the keyboard to the other, or cross and recross. The parts which they play are interwoven in complications which, unhappily, must forever be the despair of the pianist. In such cases, of course, he maynot justly be compared with Scarlatti, who wrote always for one manual.
But take for example the twenty-eighth and twenty-ninth variations, which may be played on either one or two manuals. The trills and double trills in the former, together with the wide and sudden crossing of the hands, savor of Paganini and Liszt. So do the interlocked chord trills in the latter, and the airy, whirring triplets which follow them. Indeed, leaving aside a few effects in double notes, and certain others of the thunder and lightning variety which were wholly beyond the possibilities of the harpsichord, the modern pianoforte virtuoso style has little to show in advance upon the style of the Goldberg Variations.
Furthermore, if the Goldberg Variations are thus amazing from the point of view of the pianist, they are none the less so to the musician regarding their general form. There is in them positively no trace of the stereotyped form of variations of that day, which consisted either of a repetition of the theme with more and more elaborate ornament, or at best of a series of arabesques over the more or less bare harmonic foundation of the theme. The theme is for Bach but the simple germ of an idea, which, throughout the whole elaborate series, undergoes change, transformation, metamorphosis, hardly to be recognized in any of its varied forms, scarcely suggesting a unity to the work as a whole. Mood and rhythm change. New ideas sprout, seemingly quite independent of their origin. Even the harmonic foundation is veiled and altered. Bach speaks, as it were, in beautiful metaphors.
This conception and treatment of the variation form render it true greatness; endow it, indeed, as a form, with immortal life. External figurations will grow old-fashioned, or the ear will become satiated with them. But the Goldberg Variations have an inner life that cannot wither or decay. Bach’s warm imagination inspiredthem, gave them poetry as well as brilliance. No more modern variations are quite comparable with them except Brahms’ great series on a theme of Handel, in which, however, there is less warmth than severity, less imagination than art.
VIII
How shall Bach be placed in the history of music, in particular of pianoforte music? What part may he be said to play in the development of the art? The paternity which most composers of the nineteenth century rejoiced to fasten upon him, is hardly fitting. Bach was the father of twenty-two children in this life, but musically he died without heir. His sons Emanuel and Christian were two of the most influential composers of the next generation; but both discarded their father’s inheritance as of little service to them in the forward march of music.
Even before his death Bach knew that the forms and style of music which he had given his life to perfect and ennoble were already of the past. That he invented a simple system of temperament in order to afford himself the harmonic freedom necessary to his expression, or that he devised a system of fingering which considerably facilitated the playing of his difficult music, does not constitute him the progenitor of the new style of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The composers who followed him knew little or nothing of his music. They were far less likely to appropriate what they might have found useful in his old-fashioned art, than to meet the problems inherent in the new, which they served, with their own ingenuity. Accept, if you like, Scarlatti as the founder of the modern pianoforte style; Couperin as the creator of the salon piece. The fugue had had its great day, and so had the suite. The flawless counterpoint of Bach, with its involutions andits smoothness, was of too compact a substance to serve the adolescent, transparent sonata. His harmonies were too rich and fluent. And Bach had been but once the Bach of the Goldberg Variations.
No; Bach’s harpsichord music attained perfection. A river flowed into the sea. Further than this no art can go. Where a parallel excellence seems since to have been achieved, the growth of which it was the ultimate perfection was from another root. Bach is hardly more the father of Beethoven, Schumann and Chopin, than Praxiteles is the father of Michelangelo, or Sophocles of Shakespeare. But he left a standard in music of the complete mastery and welding of all the elements which make an art everlasting,—of form, of texture, of noble and impassioned emotion. And by virtue of this standard which he fixed, he has exercised over the development of music down to the present day a greater spiritual influence than that of any other single composer.
The harpsichord works of his great contemporary Handel are far less significant. Several sets of suites were published in London between 1720 and 1735, also six fugues for organ or harpsichord. In the third suite of the first set (1720) there is an air and variations. In the fifth of the same series is the so-called ‘Harmonious Blacksmith,’ the best known of his works for the harpsichord. It is a theme and variations. The air and variations in B-flat major which has served as the groundwork of a great cycle of variations by Brahms constitutes the first number of the second series (1733). There are in other suites aPassacagliaand twoChaconnes, all of which are monotonous series of variations. OneChaconnehas no less than sixty-two varied repeats. In these works Handel shows little ingenuity. His technical formulas are conventional and in general uninteresting. The dance movements of the suites are worthier of a great composer.
Scarlatti, Couperin, and Bach are the great names ofharpsichord music; great because each stands for a supreme achievement in the history of the art. It may be questioned whether, if the pianoforte had not come to supplant the harpsichord, composers would have been able to progress beyond the high marks of these three men, either in style or in expressiveness. New forms had made their appearance, it is true, before the death of Bach. These would have run their course upon the harpsichord without doubt; but it is not so certain that they could have brought to light any new resources of the instrument. These had been not only fully appreciated by the three great men, Scarlatti, Couperin, and Bach, but had been developed to their fullest extent. And, indeed, it may be asked whether any music has more faithfully expressed the emotions and the aspirations of humanity than the harpsichord music of Bach.