A dear old friend of mine once showed me a fragment of manuscript music
by John Sebastian Bach.
This bit of music was part of a _gavotte_; and as in this paper I mean
to tell you Bach's story, and his special association with that quaint
dance-music, I think we had better first see what the _gavotte_ and the
_chaconne_, the _passacaille_ and the _sarabande_, mean. All of this
music was popular in Bach's day.
In a French gallery there is a picture of splendidly dressed ladies and
gentlemen dancing the gavotte. They wear the costume of the latter part
of the seventeenth century. They have smiling faces, nourish large fans,
and wear high-heeled slippers, which they lift gracefully; for the
gavotte was a very brilliant dance in its movement.
The name came from a people in Dauphiny, known as Gavots. They danced it
more wildly than the stately people of Louis's court; but the music of
every gavotte seems to me to be best suited to them. One can fancy them
on their village green clattering away to the quaint gay music, flinging
their arms about, or beating time with their hands. But when the gavotte
was introduced into the upper classes, and with it various other dances
of the people, it became more refined, dignified, even more serious.
Bach wrote many gavottes, some singly, some in what are called _suites_,
or sets of short pieces of music. Just now all who can play well at all
are interested in this dance-music of the eighteenth century. It holds
its own perhaps as much from the fact that its form is very generally
classic as from its charming melodies.
It is always well, even for beginners, to understand the _principle_ on
which any kind of music is written. You will find your practicing much
more interesting if you look deeper than the mere sounds. Suppose we
take some simple gavotte, and examine into the way it is written. Here,
for instance, is the first strain in one of Bach's most popular
gavottes:
[Illustration]
Now let us see what the few rules created for its composition are. They
are these:
It must be in _common time_, which really means _equal time_, two or
four beats to the bar, although the term is generally applied to that of
four crotchets to the bar, marked by the Italian C.
The movement is rather quick, and it is generally in two parts. These
parts are, in accordance with a custom peculiar to old dances, repeated.
Originally the gavotte consisted of four bars in the first part and
eight bars in the second; but if the gavotte is only one of various
parts of a suite, no fixed number of bars is given. Now, as a general
rule, the gavotte begins on the third beat of the bar, so that you will
see, if you calculate, that each part must finish with a half-bar
containing a minim, not two crotchets.
I know that to many of my young readers this may sound very dull and
useless; but if you will only give a little careful study to a few rules
which apply to your first "pieces," lessons in real harmony and
thorough-bass will seem much more interesting to you later on. The
chaconne and the passacaille, the passaglia and the sarabande, are all
dances of about the same period as the gavotte, and have certain
governing principles. The chaconne is slow, and is usually written in
the major key. This is always a semitone greater than the _minor_.
The passacaille is written in the minor key. What is called the
_theme_[1] in the chaconne is invariably in the bass; in the passacaille
it may be in any part. The passacaille has a very curious kind of
interest, since in the last century composers made use of it to show
their skill--what is known as contrapuntal skill. It must consist of a
short theme of two, four, or eight bars. Bach, Frescobaldi, and Handel
all wrote famous passacailles.
[1] The _theme_, or, as it is sometimes called, _tema_, is the _subject_
of the work; that is, the principal idea of melody--the "plot," as it
were, of the whole thing.
The sarabande is more stately in its movement. It was a popular dance in
the sixteenth century, and some say it was introduced then by a famous
dancer called Varatanda. I think that it might often have formed part of
very picturesque scenes in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when
people were full of a certain kind of poetry, and enjoyed whatever was
splendid and stately. Sometimes dancers were hired to perform it;
sometimes ladies and gentlemen of quality danced it for their sovereign.
Old songs are full of references to sarabandes as being danced at times
when sadness or even deep regret filled the minds of the performers; so
that we may picture it as a slow, pathetic movement, with melancholy and
sweetness in its train.
And from these dances of olden time we come to a great name--to the
story of a great man who wrote, amidst hundreds of finer things, the
most exquisite gavottes, chaconnes, and passacailles that we know. I
mean John Sebastian Bach.
In a certain part of Germany lived the Bach family, famous for
generations for their musical ability. Finally we hear of one of them
living in the quaint town of Eisenach, and having a little son named
John Sebastian, who from his tiniest years glowed with musical fire. All
the genius of that family seemed to have taken root in him, yet when his
father died, his elder brother, with whom the boy lived, seemed to think
it better for him not to study.
Well, little John Sebastian craved music. I fancy the house in Eisenach
in the year 1695 was very dull. German children then as now were kept
very strictly, and when the elder brother forbade music to the little
boy, he did not know the pain he was inflicting.
[Illustration: YOUNG BACH COPYING MUSIC BY MOONLIGHT.]
In the old house John Sebastian well knew that there was a rare old book
of manuscript music, and this he longed to copy. It was hidden, locked
away in a cupboard; but the door had a lattice-work panel in it, and so
the child watched his opportunity, climbed up, and pulled the book
through the lattice. But even then it was hard to know how to copy the
music, since candles or lights were refused him. So he waited for
moonlight nights, and on every one worked hard in his window, finally
succeeding in copying the entire book. I have often thought of the
picture of the dear little German boy working away in his old-fashioned
room, the moonlight tenderly bathing his head and eager fingers, and the
manuscript page on which he worked. How little he knew that two hundred
years later all music-loving nations would reverence his name.
How he worked on with many trials, the usual ups and downs of an earnest
life, I can only tell you briefly, but employment and leisure in which
to compose came to him quite young in life, and he had the happiest kind
of a domestic circle.
Bach was twice married, and his children inherited enough of his musical
ability to make it a pleasure for him to instruct them. The young Prince
of Anhalt-Cothen loved him so dearly that he could scarcely bear to be
separated from him, and later he was given an important position at
Leipsic.
One grief clouded his later years. From overwork in copying and writing
music he became quite blind--a calamity which all his dear friends felt
deeply. In 1750 he died suddenly.
Now in Bach's lifetime great progress had been made in piano-forte
music. Among other things, he invented a new style of fingering. In
Bach's day the thumb and little finger were rarely used. This he changed
entirely, and our present ideas are due to his influence.
When I spoke of him as the composer of famous gavottes it was only
because that form of composition is one which is peculiarly adapted to
young students, which is now newly popular, and which he wrote with
wonderful grace. But Bach, as you may hear later, filled the world with
many grander sounds. They come in solemn majesty in his famous _Passion
Music_. They come, filling the air with sweetness, in his many preludes
and symphonies. They are in concertos and sonatas. Bach worked with his
heart full of exaltation. About him was the court of Frederick the
Great, of George II. in England. Piano-making was beginning to be a
studied question. People saw the need of good music at home as well as
in public. Bach passed through those years when piano-forte music was,
you might say, on trial, well knowing what it might one day be.
Peace and gentleness were always about him. He was a kindly, keen, busy
man, full of generosity and goodness, and he lived and died believing in
the future of his art.