THE CULMINATION OF GERMAN PROTESTANT MUSIC:
JOHANN SEBASTIAN BACH
The name of Bach is the greatest in Protestant church music,--there are
many who do not hesitate to say that it is the greatest in all the
history of music, religious and secular. The activity of this man was
many-sided, and his invention seems truly inexhaustible. He touched every
style of music known to his day except the opera, and most of the forms
that he handled he raised to the highest power that they have ever
attained. Many of his most admirable qualities appear in his secular
works, but these we must pass over. In viewing him exclusively as a
composer for the Church, however, we shall see by far the most
considerable part of him, for his secular compositions, remarkable as
they are, always appear rather as digressions from the main business of
his life. His conscious life-long purpose was to enrich the musical
treasury of the Church he loved, to strengthen and signalize every
feature of her worship which his genius could reach: and to this lofty
aim he devoted an intellectual force and an energy of loyal enthusiasm
unsurpassed in the annals of art.
Johann Sebastian Bach is one of the monumental figures in the religious
history of Germany, undoubtedly the most considerable in the two
centuries following the death of Luther. Like Luther, of whom in some
respects he reminds us, he was a man rooted fast in German soil, sprung
from sturdy peasant stock, endowed with the sterling piety and
steadfastness of moral purpose which had long been traditional in the
Teutonic character. His culture was at its basis purely German. He never
went abroad to seek the elegancies which his nation lacked. He did not
despise them, but he let them come to him to be absorbed into the massive
substance of his national education, in order that this education might
become in the deepest sense liberal and human. He interpreted what was
permanent and hereditary in German culture, not what was ephemeral and
exotic. He ignored the opera, although it was the reigning form in every
country in Europe. He planted himself squarely on German church music,
particularly the essentially German art of organ playing, and on that
foundation, supplemented with what was best of Italian and French device,
he built up a massive edifice which bears in plan, outline, and every
decorative detail the stamp of a German craftsman.
The most musical family known to history was that of the Bachs. In six
generations (Sebastian belonging to the fifth) we find marked musical
ability, which in a number of instances before Sebastian appeared
amounted almost to genius. As many as thirty-seven of the name are known
to have held important musical positions. A large number during the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were members of the town bands and
choruses, which sustained almost the entire musical culture among the
common people of Germany during that period. These organizations,
combining the public practice of religious and secular music, were
effective in nourishing both the artistic and the religious spirit of the
time. In Germany in the seventeenth century there was as yet no opera and
concert system to concentrate musical activity in the theatre and public
hall. The Church was the nursery of musical culture, and this culture was
in no sense artificial or borrowed,--it was based on types long known and
beloved by the common people as their peculiar national inheritance, and
associated with much that was stirring and honorable in their history.
Thuringia was one of the most musical districts in Germany in the
seventeenth century, and was also a stronghold of the reformed religion.
From this and its neighboring districts the Bachs never wandered. Eminent
as they were in music, hardly one of them ever visited Italy or received
instruction from a foreign master. They kept aloof from the courts, the
hot-beds of foreign musical growths, and submitted themselves to the
service of the Protestant Church. They were peasants and small farmers,
well to do and everywhere respected. Their stern self-mastery held them
uncontaminated by the wide-spread demoralization that followed the Thirty
Years' War. They appear as admirable types of that undemonstrative,
patient, downright, and tenacious quality which has always saved Germany
from social decline or disintegration in critical periods.
Into such a legacy of intelligence, thrift, and probity came Johann
Sebastian Bach. All the most admirable traits of his ancestry shine out
again in him, reinforced by a creative gift which seems the accumulation
of all the several talents of his house. He was born at Eisenach, March
21, 1685. His training as a boy was mainly received in choir schools at
Ohrdruf and Lueneburg, attaining mastership as organist and contrapuntist
at the age of eighteen. He held official positions at Arnstadt,
Muehlhausen, Weimar, and Anhalt-Coethen, and was finally called to Leipsic
as cantor of the Thomas school and director of music at the Thomas and
Nicolai churches, where he labored from 1723 until his death in 1750. His
life story presents no incidents of romantic interest. But little is
known of his temperament or habits. In every place in which he labored
his circumstances were much the same. He was a church organist and choir
director from the beginning to the end of his career. He became the
greatest organist of his time and the most accomplished master of musical
science. His declared aim in life was to reform and perfect German church
music. The means to achieve this were always afforded him, so far as the
scanty musical facilities of the churches of that period would permit.
His church compositions were a part of his official routine duties. His
recognized abilities always procured him positions remunerative enough to
protect him from anxiety. He was never subject to interruptions or
serious discouragements. From first to last the path in life which he was
especially qualified to pursue was clearly marked out before him. His
genius, his immense physical and mental energy, and his high sense of
duty to God and his employers did the rest. Nowhere is there the record
of a life more simple, straightforward, symmetrical, and complete.
In spite of the intellectual and spiritual apathy prevailing in many
sections of Germany, conditions were not altogether unfavorable for the
special task which Bach assigned to himself. His desire to build up
church music did not involve an effort to restore to congregational
singing its pristine zeal, or to revive an antiquarian taste for the
historic choir anthem. Bach was a man of the new time; he threw himself
into the current of musical progress, seized upon the forms which were
still in process of development, giving them technical completeness and
bringing to light latent possibilities which lesser men had been unable
to discern.
The material for his purpose was already within his reach. The religious
folk-song, freighted with a precious store of memories, was still an
essential factor in public and private worship. The art of organ playing
had developed a vigorous and pregnant national style in the choral
prelude, the fugue, and a host of freer forms. The Passion music and the
cantata had recently shown signs of brilliant promise. The Italian solo
song was rejoicing in its first flush of conquest on German soil. No one,
however, could foresee what might be done with these materials until Bach
arose. He gathered them all in his hand, remoulded, blended, enlarged
them, touched them with the fire of his genius and his religious passion,
and thus produced works of art which, intended for German evangelicalism,
are now being adopted by the world as the most comprehensive symbols in
music of the essential Christian faith.[73]
Bach was one of those supreme artists who concentrate in themselves the
spirit and the experiments of an epoch. In order, therefore, to know how
the persistent religious consciousness of Germany strove to attain
self-recognition through those art agencies which finally became fully
operative in the eighteenth century, we need only study the works of this
great representative musician, passing by the productions of the
organists and cantors who shared, although in feebler measure, his
illumination. For Bach was no isolated phenomenon of his time. He created
no new styles; he gave art no new direction. He was one out of many
poorly paid and overworked church musicians, performing the duties that
were traditionally attached to his office, improvising fugues and
preludes, and accompanying choir and congregation at certain moments in
the service, composing motets, cantatas, and occasionally a larger work
for the regular order of the day, providing special music for a church
festival, a public funeral, the inauguration of a town council, or the
installation of a pastor. What distinguished Bach was simply the
superiority of his work on these time-honored lines, the amazing variety
of sentiment which he extracted from these conventional forms, the
scientific learning which puts him among the greatest technicians in the
whole range of art, the prodigality of ideas, depth of feeling, and a
sort of introspective mystical quality which he was able to impart to the
involved and severe diction of his age.
Bach's devotion to the Lutheran Church was almost as absorbed as
Palestrina's to the Catholic. His was a sort of cloistered seclusion.
Like every one who has made his mark upon church music he reverenced the
Church as a historic institution. Her government, ceremonial, and
traditions impressed his imagination, and kindled a blind, instinctive
loyalty. He felt that he attained to his true self only under her
admonitions. Her service was to him perfect freedom. His opportunity to
contribute to the glory of the Church was one that dwarfed every other
privilege, and his official duty, his personal pleasure, and his highest
ambition ran like a single current, fed by many streams, in one and the
same channel. To measure the full strength of the mighty tide of feeling
which runs through Bach's church music we must recognize this element of
conviction, of moral necessity. Given Bach's inherited character, his
education and his environment, add the personal factor--imagination and
reverence--and you have Bach's music, spontaneous yet inevitable, like a
product of nature. Only out of such single-minded devotion to the
interests of the Church, both as a spiritual nursery and as a venerated
institution, has great church art ever sprung or can it spring.
Bach's productions for the Church are divided into two general classes,
_viz._, organ music and vocal music. The organ music is better known to
the world at large, and on account of its greater availability may
outlive the vocal works in actual practice. For many reasons more or less
obvious Bach's organ works are constantly heard in connection with public
worship, both Catholic and Protestant, in Europe and America, and their
use is steadily increasing; while the choral compositions have almost
entirely fallen out of the stated religious ceremony, even in Germany,
and have been relegated to the concert hall. In course of time the organ
solo had grown into a constituent feature of the public act of worship in
the German Protestant Church. In the Catholic Church solo organ playing
is less intrinsic; in fact it has no real historic or liturgic
authorization and gives the impression rather of an embellishment, like
elaborately carved choir-screens and rose windows, very ornamental and
impressive, but not indispensable. But in the German system organ playing
had become established by a sort of logic, first as an accompaniment to
the people's hymn--a function it assumed about 1600--and afterwards in
the practice of extemporization upon choral themes. Out of this latter
custom a style of organ composition grew up in the seventeenth century
which, through association and a more or less definite correspondence
with the spirit and order of the prescribed service, came to be looked
upon as distinctively a church style. This German organ music was
strictly church music according to the only adequate definition of church
music that has ever been given, for it had grown up within the Church
itself, and through its very liturgic connections had come to make its
appeal to the worshipers, not as an artistic decoration, but as an agency
directly adapted to aid in promoting those ends which the church ceremony
had in view. Furthermore, the dignity and severe intellectuality of this
German organ style, combined with its majesty of sound and strength of
movement, seemed to add distinctly to the biblical flavor of the liturgy,
the uncompromising dogmatism of the authoritative teaching, and the
intense moral earnestness which prevailed in the Church of Luther in its
best estate. It was a form of art which was native to the organ, implied
in the very tone and mechanism of the instrument; it was absolutely
untouched by the lighter tendencies already active in secular music. The
notion of making the organ play pretty tunes and tickle the ear with the
imitative sound of fancy stops never entered the heads of the German
church musicians. The gravity and disciplined intelligence proper to the
exercise of an ecclesiastical office must pervade every contribution of
the organist. This conception was equally a matter of course to the mass
of the people, and so the taste of the congregation and the conviction of
the clerical authorities supported the organists in their adherence to
the traditions of their strict and complex art. This lordly style was no
less worthy of reverence in the eyes of all concerned because it was to
all intents a German art, virtually unknown in other countries, except
partially in the sister land of Holland, and therefore hedged about with
the sanctions of patriotism as well as the universally admitted canons of
religious musical expression.
This form of music was evolved originally under the suggestion of the
mediaeval vocal polyphony,--counterpoint redistributed and systematized
in accordance with the modern development of rhythm, tonality, and
sectional structure. Its birthplace was Italy; the canzona of Frescobaldi
and his compeers was the parent of the fugue. The task of developing this
Italian germ was given to the Dutch and Germans. The instrumental
instinct and constructive genius of such men as Swelinck, Scheidt,
Buxtehude, Froberger, and Pachelbel carried the movement so far as to
reveal its full possibilities, and Bach brought these possibilities to
complete realization.
As an organ player and composer it would seem that Bach stands at the
summit of human achievement. His whole art as a player is to be found in
his fugues, preludes, fantasies, toccatas, sonatas, and choral
variations. In his fugues he shows perhaps most convincingly that supreme
mastery of design and splendor of invention and fancy which have given
him the place he holds by universal consent among the greatest artists of
all time. In these compositions there is a variety and individuality
which, without such examples, one could hardly suppose that this
arbitrary form of construction would admit. With Bach the fugue is no dry
intellectual exercise. So far as the absolutism of its laws permits,
Bach's imagination moved as freely in the fugue as Beethoven's in the
sonata or Schubert's in the lied. Its peculiar idiom was as native to him
as his rugged Teuton speech. A German student's musical education in that
day began with counterpoint, as at the present time it begins with
figured bass harmony; the ability to write every species of polyphony
with ease was a matter of course with every musical apprentice. But with
Bach, the master, the fugue was not merely the sign of technical
facility; it was a means of expression, a supreme manifestation of style.
By the telling force of his subjects, the amazing dexterity and rich
fancy displayed in their treatment, the ability to cover the widest range
of emotional suggestion, his fugues appeal to a far deeper sense than
wonder at technical cleverness. Considering that it lies in the very
essence of the contrapuntal style that it should be governed by certain
very rigid laws of design and procedure, we may apply to Bach's organ
works in general a term that has been given to architecture, and say that
they are "construction beautified." By this is meant that every feature,
however beautiful in itself, finds its final charm and justification only
as a necessary component in the comprehensive plan. Each detail helps to
push onward the systematic unfolding of the design, it falls into its
place by virtue of the laws of fitness and proportion; logical and
organic, but at the same time decorative and satisfactory to the
aesthetic sense. There is indeed something almost architectonic in these
masterpieces of the great Sebastian. In their superb rolling harmonies,
their dense involutions, their subtle and inevitable unfoldings, their
long-drawn cadences, and their thrilling climaxes, they seem to possess a
fit relation to the vaulted, reverberating ceilings, the massive pillars,
and the half-lighted recesses of the sombre old buildings in which they
had their birth. In both the architecture and the music we seem to
apprehend a religious earnestness which drew its nourishment from the
most hidden depths of the soul, and which, even in its moments of
exultation, would not appear to disregard those stern convictions in
which it believed that it found the essentials of its faith.
A form of instrumental music existed in the German Protestant Church
which was peculiar to that institution, and which was exceedingly
significant as forming a connecting link between organ solo playing and
the congregational worship. We have seen that the choral, at the very
establishment of the new order by Luther, became a characteristic feature
of the office of devotion, entering into the very framework of the
liturgy by virtue of the official appointment of particular hymns
(Hauptlieder) on certain days. As soon as the art of organ playing set
out upon its independent career early in the seventeenth century, the
organists began to take up the choral melodies as subjects for extempore
performance. These tunes were especially adapted to this purpose by
reason of their stately movement and breadth of style, which gave
opportunity for the display of that mastery of florid harmonization in
which the essence of the organist's art consisted. The organist never
played the printed compositions of others, or even his own, for
voluntaries. He would no more think of doing so than a clergyman would
preach another man's sermon, or even read one of his own from manuscript.
To this day German unwritten law is rigorous on both these matters. The
organist's method was always to improvise in the strict style upon themes
invented by himself or borrowed from other sources. Nothing was more
natural than that he should use the choral tunes as his quarry, not only
on account of their technical suitableness, but still more from the
interest that would be aroused in the congregation, and the unity that
would be established between the office of the organist and that of the
people. The chorals that were appointed for the day would commonly
furnish the player with his raw material, and the song of the people
would appear again soaring above their heads, adorned by effective tonal
combinations. This method could also be employed to a more moderate
extent in accompanying the congregation as they sang the hymn in unison;
interludes between the stanzas and even flourishes at the ends of the
lines would give scope to the organist to exhibit his knowledge and
fancy. The long-winded interlude at last became an abuse, and was reduced
or suppressed; but the free organ prelude on the entire choral melody
grew in favor, and before Bach's day ability in this line was the chief
test of a player's competence. In Bach's early days choral preludes by
famous masters had found their way into print in large numbers, and were
the objects of his assiduous study. His own productions in this class
surpassed all his models, and as a free improviser on choral themes he
excelled all his contemporaries. "I had supposed," said the famous
Reinken, who at the age of ninety-seven heard Bach extemporize on "An
Wasserfluessen Babylon" at Hamburg,--"I had supposed that this art was
dead, but I see that it still lives in you." In this species of playing,
the hymn melody is given out with one hand or upon the pedals, while
around it is woven a network of freely moving parts. The prelude may be
brief, included within the space limits of the original melody, or it may
be indefinitely extended by increasing the length of the choral notes and
working out interludes between the lines. The one hundred and thirty
choral preludes which have come down to us from Bach's pen are samples of
the kind of thing that he was extemporizing Sunday after Sunday. In these
pieces the accompaniment is sometimes fashioned on the basis of a
definite melodic figure which is carried, with modulations and subtle
modifications, all through the stanza, sometimes on figures whose pattern
changes with every line; while beneath or within the sounding arabesques
are heard the long sonorous notes of the choral, holding the hearer
firmly to the ground idea which the player's art is striving to impress
and beautify. This form of music is something very different from the
"theme and variations," which has played so conspicuous a part in the
modern instrumental school from Haydn down to the present. In the choral
prelude there is no modification of the theme itself; the subject in
single notes forms a _cantus firmus_, on the same principle that appears
in the mediaeval vocal polyphony, around which the freely invented parts,
moving laterally, are entwined. Although these compositions vary greatly
in length, a single presentation of the decorated choral tune suffices
with Bach except in rare instances, such as the prelude on "O Lamm Gottes
unschuldig," in which the melody is given out three times, with a
different scheme of ornament at each repetition.
That Bach always restricts his choral elaboration to the end of
illustrating the sentiment of the words with which the theme is
illustrated would be saying too much. Certainly he often does so, as in
such beautiful examples as "O Mensch, bewein' dein' Suende gross,"
"Schmuecke dich, meine liebe Seele," and that touching setting of "Wenn
wir in hoechsten Noethen sein" which Bach dictated upon his deathbed. But
the purpose of the choral prelude in the church worship was not
necessarily to reflect and emphasize the thought of the hymn. This usage
having become conventional, and the organist being allowed much latitude
in his treatment, his pride in his science would lead him to dilate and
elaborate according to a musical rather than a poetic impulse, thinking
less of appropriateness to a precise mood (an idea which, indeed, had
hardly became lodged in instrumental music in Bach's time) than of
producing an abstract work of art contrived in accordance with the formal
prescriptions of German musical science. The majority of Bach's works in
this form are, it must be said, conventional and scholastic, some even
dry and pedantic. Efforts at popularizing them at the present day have
but slight success; but in not a few Bach's craving for expression crops
out, and some of his most gracious inspirations are to be found in these
incidental and apparently fugitive productions.
In order to win the clue to Bach's vocal as well as his instrumental
style, we must constantly refer back to his works for the organ. As
Haendel's genius in oratorio was shaped under the influence of the Italian
aria, direct or derived, and as certain modern composers, such as
Berlioz, seize their first conceptions already clothed in orchestral
garb, so Bach seemed to think in terms of the organ. Examine one of his
contrapuntal choruses, or even one of his arias with its obligato
accompaniment, and you are instantly reminded of the mode of facture of
his organ pieces. His education rested upon organ music, and he only
yielded to one of the most potent influences of his time when he made the
organ the dominant factor in his musical expression. The instrumental
genius of Germany had already come to self-consciousness at the end of
the seventeenth century, and was as plainly revealing itself in organ
music as it did a century later in the sonata and symphony. The virtuoso
spirit--the just pride in technical skill--always keeps pace with the
development of style; in the nature of things these two are mutually
dependent elements in progress. In Bach the love of exercising his skill
as an executant was a part of his very birthright as a musician. The
organ was to him very much what the pianoforte was to Liszt, and in each
the virtuoso instinct was a fire which must burst forth, or it would
consume the very soul of its possessor. And so we find among the fugues,
fantasies, and toccatas of Bach compositions whose dazzling magnificence
is not exceeded by the most sensational effusions of the modern
pianoforte and orchestral schools. In all the realm of music there is
nothing more superb than those Niagaras of impetuous sound which roll
through such works as the F major and D minor toccatas and the G major
fantasie,--to select examples out of scores of equally apt illustrations.
But sound and fury are by no means their aim; Bach's invention and
science are never more resourceful than when apparently driven by the
demon of unrest. In order to give the freest sweep to his fancy Bach, the
supreme lord of form, often broke through form's conventionalisms, so
that even his fugues sometimes became, as they have been called,
fantasies in the form of fugues, just as Beethoven, under a similar
impulse, wrote _sonate quasi fantasie_. Witness the E minor fugue with
the "wedge theme." In Bach's day and country there was no concert stage;
the instrumental virtuoso was the organist. It is not necessary to
suppose, therefore, that pieces so exciting to the nerves as those to
which I have alluded were all composed strictly for the ordinary church
worship. There were many occasions, such as the "opening" of a new organ
or a civic festival, when the organist could "let himself go" without
incurring the charge of introducing a profane or alien element. And yet,
even as church music, these pieces were not altogether incongruous. We
must always keep in mind that the question of appropriateness in church
music depends very much upon association and custom. A style that would
be execrated as blasphemous in a Calvinist assembly would be received as
perfectly becoming in a Catholic or Lutheran ceremony. A style of music
that has grown up in the very heart of a certain Church, identified for
generations with the peculiar ritual and history of that Church, is
proper ecclesiastical music so far as that particular institution is
concerned. Those who condemn Bach's music--organ works, cantatas, and
Passions--as unchurchly ignore this vital point. Moreover, the conception
of the function of music in the service of the German Evangelical Church
was never so austere that brilliancy and grandeur were deemed
incompatible with the theory of religious ceremony. It may be said that
Bach's grandest organ pieces are conceived as the expression of what may
be called the religious passion--the rapture which may not unworthily
come upon the believer when his soul opens to the reception of ideas the
most penetrating and sublime.
Certainly no other religious institution has come so near the solution of
the problem of the proper use of the instrumental solo in public worship.
Through the connection of the organ music with the people's hymn in the
choral prelude, and the conformity of its style to that of the choir
music in motet and cantata, it became vitally blended with the whole
office of praise and prayer; its effect was to gather up and merge all
individual emotions into the projection of the mood of aspiration that
was common to all.
The work performed by Bach for the church cantata was somewhat similar in
nature to his service to the choral prelude, and was carried out with a
far more lavish expenditure of creative power. The cantata, now no longer
a constituent of the German Evangelical worship, in the eighteenth
century held a place in the ritual analogous to that occupied by the
anthem in the morning and evening prayer of the Church of England. It is
always of larger scale than the anthem, and its size was one cause of its
exclusion in the arbitrary and irregular reductions which the Evangelical
liturgies have undergone in the last century and a half. There is nothing
in its florid character to justify this procedure, for it may be, and in
Bach usually is, more closely related to the ritual framework than the
English anthem, in consequence of the manner in which it has been made to
absorb strictly liturgic forms into its substance. Bach, in his cantatas,
kept the notion of liturgic unity clearly in mind. He effected this unity
largely by his use of the choral as a conspicuous element in the cantata,
often as its very foundation. He checked the Italianizing process by
working the arioso recitative, the aria for one or more voices, and the
chorus into one grand musical scheme, in which his intricate organ style
served both as fabric and decoration. By the unexampled prominence which
he gave the choral as a mine of thematic material, he gave the cantata
not only a striking originality, but also an air of unmistakable fitness
to the character and special expression of the confession which it
served. By these means, which are concerned with its form, and still more
by the astonishing variety, truth, and beauty with which he was able to
meet the needs of each occasion for which a work of this kind was
appointed, he endowed his Church and nation with a treasure of religious
song compared with which, for magnitude, diversity, and power, the
creative work of any other church musician that may be named--Palestrina,
Gabrieli, or whoever he may be--sinks into insignificance.
Bach wrote five series of cantatas for the Sundays and festal days of the
church year--in all two hundred and ninety-five. Of these two hundred and
sixty-six were written at Leipsic. They vary greatly in length, the
shortest occupying twenty minutes or so in performance, the longest an
hour or more. Taken together, they afford such an astonishing display of
versatility that any proper characterization of them in a single chapter
would be quite out of the question. A considerable number are available
for study in Peters's cheap edition, and the majority are analyzed with
respect to their salient features in Spitta's encyclopedic Bach
biography. Among the great diversity of interesting qualities which they
exhibit, the employment of the choral must be especially emphasized as
affording the clue, already indicated, to Bach's whole conception of the
cantata as a species of religious art. The choral, especially that
appointed for a particular day (Hauptlied), is often used as the guiding
thread which weaves the work into the texture of the whole daily office.
In such cases the chosen choral will appear in the different numbers of
the work in fragments or motives, sometimes as subject for voice parts,
or woven into the accompaniment as theme or in obligato fashion. It is
more common for entire lines of the choral to be treated as _canti
firmi_, forming the subjects on which elaborate contrapuntal choruses are
constructed, following precisely the same principle of design that I have
described in the case of the organ choral preludes. In multitudes of
cantata movements lines or verses from two or more chorals are
introduced. There are cantatas, such as "Wer nur den lieben Gott," in
which each number, whether recitative, aria, or chorus, takes its
thematic material, intact or modified, from a choral. The famous "Ein'
feste Burg," is a notable example of a cantata in which Bach adheres to a
hymn-tune in every number, treating it line by line, deriving from it the
pervading tone of the work is well as its constructional plan. The ways
in which Bach applies the store of popular religious melody to the higher
uses of art are legion. A cantata of Bach usually ends with a choral in
its complete ordinary form, plainly but richly harmonized in
note-for-note four-part setting as though for congregational singing. It
was not the custom, however, in Bach's day for the congregation to join
in this closing choral. There are cantatas, such as the renowned "Ich
hatte viel Bekuemmerniss," in which the choral melody nowhere appears.
Such cantatas are rare, and the use of the choral became more prominent
and systematic in Bach's work as time went on.
The devotional ideal of the Protestant Church as compared with the
Catholic gives far more liberal recognition to the private religious
consciousness of the individual. The believer does not so completely
surrender his personality; in his mental reactions to the ministrations
of the clergy he still remains aware of that inner world of experience
which is his world, not merged and lost in the universalized life of a
religious community. The Church is his inspirer and guide, not his
absolute master. The foundation of the German choral was a religious
declaration of independence. The German hymns were each the testimony of
a thinker to his own private conception of religious truth. The tone and
feeling of each hymn were suggested and colored by the general doctrine
of the Church, but not dictated. The adoption of these utterances of
independent feeling into the liturgy was a recognition on the part of
authority of individual right. It was not a concession; it was the legal
acknowledgment of a fundamental principle. Parallel to this significant
privilege was the admission of music of the largest variety and
penetrated at will with subjective feeling. This conception was carried
out consistently in the cantata as established by Bach, most liberally,
of course, in the arias. The words of the cantata consisted of Bible
texts, stanzas of church hymns, and religious poems, the whole
illustrating some Scripture theme or referring to some especial
commemoration. The hard and fast metrical schemes of the German hymns
were unsuited to the structure and rhythm of the aria, and so a form of
verse known as the madrigal, derived from Italy, was used when rhythmical
flexibility was an object. For all these reasons we have in Bach's arias
the widest license of expression admissible in the school of art which he
represented. The Hamburg composers, in their shallow aims, had boldly
transferred the Italian concert aria as it stood into the Church, as a
sign of their complete defiance of ecclesiastical prescription. Not so
Bach; the ancient churchly ideal was to him a thing to be reverenced,
even when he departed from it. He, therefore, took a middle course. The
Italian notion of an aria--buoyant, tuneful, the voice part sufficient
unto itself--had no place in Bach's method. A melody to him was usually a
detail in a contrapuntal scheme. And so be wove the voice part into the
accompaniment, a single instrument--a violin, perhaps, or oboe--often
raised into relief, vying with the voice on equal terms, often soaring
above it and carrying the principal theme, while the voice part serves as
an obligato. This method, hardly consistent with a pure vocal system,
often results with Bach, it must be confessed, in something very
mechanical and monotonous to modern ears. The artifice is apparent; the
author seems more bent on working out a sort of algebraic formula than
interpreting the text to the sensibility. From the traditional point of
view this method is not in itself _mal a propos_, for such a treatment
raises the sentiment into that calm region of abstraction which is the
proper refuge of the devotional mood. But here, as in the organ pieces,
Bach is no slave to his technic. There are many arias in his cantatas in
which the musical expression is not only beautiful and touching in the
highest degree, but also yields with wonderful truth to every mutation of
feeling in the text. Still more impressively is this mastery of
expression shown in the arioso recitatives. In their depth and beauty
they are unique in religious music. Only in very rare moments can Haendel
pretend to rival them. Mendelssohn reflects them in his oratorios and
psalms,--as the moon reflects the sun.
The choruses of Bach's cantatas would furnish a field for endless study.
Nowhere else is his genius more grandly displayed. The only work entitled
to be compared with these choruses is found in Haendel's oratorios. In
drawing such a parallel, and observing the greater variety of style in
Haendel, we must remember that Bach's cantatas are church music. Haendel's
oratorios are not. Bach's cantata texts are not only confined to a single
sphere of thought, _viz._, the devotional, but they are also strictly
lyric. The church cantata does not admit any suggestion of action or
external picture. The oratorio, on the other hand, is practically
unlimited in scope, and in Haendel's choruses the style and treatment are
given almost unrestrained license in the way of dramatic and epic
suggestion. Within the restrictions imposed upon him, however, Bach
expends upon his choruses a wealth of invention in design and expression
not less wonderful than that exhibited in his organ works. The motet
form, the free fantasia and the choral fantasia forms are all employed,
and every device known to his art is applied for the illustration of the
text. Grace and tenderness, when the cheering assurances of the Gospel
are the theme, crushing burdens of gloom when the author's thought turns
to the mysteries of death and judgment, mournfulness in view of sin, the
pleading accents of contrition,--every manifestation of emotion which a
rigid creed, allied to a racial mysticism which evades positive
conceptions, can call forth is projected in tones whose strength and
fervor were never attained before in religious music. It is Bach's organ
style which is here in evidence, imparting to the chorus its close-knit
structure and majesty of sound, humanized by a melody drawn from the
choral and from what was most refined in Italian art.
"One peculiar trait in Bach's nature," says Kretzschmar, "is revealed in
the cantatas in grand, half-distinct outlines, and this is the longing
for death and life with the Lord. This theme is struck in the cantatas
more frequently than almost any other. We know him as a giant nature in
all situations; great and grandiose is also his joy and cheerfulness. But
never, we believe, does his art work with fuller energy and abandonment
than when his texts express earth-weariness and the longing for the last
hour. The fervor which then displays itself in ever-varying registers, in
both calm and stormy regions, has in it something almost demonic."[74]
The work that has most contributed to make the name of Bach familiar to
the educated world at large is the Passion according to St. Matthew. Bach
wrote five Passions, of which only two--the St. John and the St.
Matthew--have come down to us. The former has a rugged force like one of
Michael Angelo's unpolished statues, but it cannot fairly be compared to
the St. Matthew in largeness of conception or beauty of detail. In Bach's
treatment of the Passion story we have the culmination of the artistic
development of the early liturgic practice whose progress has already
been sketched. Bach completed the process of fusing the Italian aria and
recitative with the German chorus, hymn-tune, and organ and orchestral
music, interspersing the Gospel narrative with lyric sections in the form
of airs, arioso recitatives, and choruses, in which the feelings proper
to a believer meditating on the sufferings of Christ in behalf of mankind
are portrayed with all the poignancy of pathos of which Bach was master.
Injudicious critics have sometimes attempted to set up a comparison
between the St. Matthew Passion and Handel's "Messiah," questioning which
is the greater. But such captious rivalry is derogatory to both, for they
are not to be gauged by the same standard. To say nothing of the radical
differences in style, origin, and artistic conception,--the one a piece
of Lutheran church music, the other an English concert oratorio of
Italian ancestry,--they are utterly unlike also in poetic intention.
Bach's work deals only with the human in Christ; it is the narrative of
his last interviews with his disciples, his arrest, trial, and death,
together with comments by imagined personalities contemplating these
events, both in their immediate action upon the sensibilities and in
their doctrinal bearing. It is, therefore, a work so mixed in style that
it is difficult to classify it, for it is both epic and implicitly
dramatic, while in all its lyric features it is set firmly into the
Evangelical liturgic scheme. The text and musical construction of the
"Messiah" have no connection with any liturgy; it is concert music of a
universal religious character, almost devoid of narrative, and with no
dramatic suggestion whatever. Each is a triumph of genius, but of genius
working with quite different intentions.
In the formal arrangement of the St. Matthew Passion Bach had no option;
he must perforce comply with church tradition. The narrative of the
evangelist, taken without change from St. Matthew's Gospel and sung in
recitative by a tenor, is the thread upon which the successive divisions
are strung. The words of Jesus, Peter, the high priest, and Pilate are
given to a bass, and are also in recitative. The Jews and the disciples
are represented by choruses. The "Protestant congregation" forms another
group, singing appropriate chorals. A third element comprises the company
of believers and the "daughter of Zion," singing choruses and arias in
comment upon the situations as described by the evangelist. It must be
remembered that these chorus factors are not indicated by any division of
singers into groups. The work is performed throughout by the same company
of singers, in Bach's day by the diminutive choir of the Leipsic Church,
composed of boys and young men. Even in the chorals the congregation took
no part. The idea of the whole is much the same as in a series of old
Italian chapel frescoes. The disciple sits with Christ at the last
supper, accompanies him to the garden of Gethsemane and to the
procurator's hall, witnesses his mockery and condemnation, and takes his
station at the foot of the cross, lamenting alternately the sufferings of
his Lord and the sin which demanded such a sacrifice.
Upon this prescribed formula Bach has poured all the wealth of his
experience, his imagination, and his piety. His science is not brought
forward so prominently as in many of his works, and where he finds it
necessary to employ it he subordinates it to the expression of feeling.
Yet we cannot hear without amazement the gigantic opening movement in
which the awful burden of the great tragedy is foreshadowed; where, as if
organ, orchestra, and double chorus were not enough to sustain the
composer's conception, a ninth part, bearing a choral melody, floats
above the surging mass of sound, holding the thought of the hearer to the
significance of the coming scenes. The long chorus which closes the first
part, which is constructed in the form of a figured choral, is also built
upon a scale which Bach has seldom exceeded. But the structure of the
work in general is comparatively open, and the expression direct and
clear. An atmosphere of profoundest gloom pervades the work from
beginning to end, ever growing darker as the scenes of the terrible drama
advance and culminate, yet here and there relieved by gleams of divine
tenderness and human pity. That Bach was able to carry a single mood, and
that a depressing one, through a composition of three hours' length
without falling into monotony at any point is one of the miracles of
musical creation.
The meditative portions of the work in aria, recitative, and chorus are
rendered with great beauty and pathos, in spite of occasional archaic
stiffness. Dry and artificial some of the _da capo_ arias undoubtedly
are, for that quality of fluency which always accompanies genius never
yet failed to beguile its possessor into by-paths of dulness. But work
purely formalistic is not common in the St. Matthew Passion. Never did
religious music afford anything more touching and serene than such
numbers as the tenor solo and chorus, "Ich will bei meinem Jesu wachen,"
the bass solo, "Am Abend, da es kuehle war," and the recitative and
chorus, matchless in tenderness, beginning "Nun ist der Herr zur Ruh'
gebracht." Especially impressive are the tones given to the words of the
Saviour. These tones are distinguished from those of the other personages
not only by their greater melodic beauty, but also by their
accompaniment, which consists of the stringed instruments, while the
other recitatives are supported by the organ alone. In Christ's
despairing cry upon the cross, "Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani," this
ethereal stringed accompaniment is extinguished. What Bach intended to
signify by this change is not certainly known. This exclamation of Jesus,
the only instance in his life when he seemed to lose his certainty of the
divine cooperation, must be distinguished in some way, Bach probably
thought, from all his other utterances. Additional musical means would be
utterly futile, for neither music nor any other art has any expression
for the mental anguish of that supreme moment. The only expedient
possible was to reduce music at that point, substituting plain organ
chords, and let the words of Christ stand out in bold relief in all their
terrible significance.
The chorals in the St. Matthew Passion are taken bodily, both words and
tunes, from the church hymn-book. Prominent among them is the famous "O
Haupt voll Blut und Wunden" by Gerhardt after St. Bernard, which is used
five times. These choral melodies are harmonized in simple homophonic
style, but with extreme beauty. As an instance of the poetic fitness with
which these chorals are introduced we may cite the last in the work,
where immediately after the words "Jesus cried with a loud voice and gave
up the ghost," the chorus sings a stanza beginning "When my death hour
approaches forsake not me, O Lord." "This climax," says Spitta, "has
always been justly regarded as one of the most thrilling of the whole
work. The infinite significance of the sacrifice could not be more
simply, comprehensively, and convincingly expressed than in this
marvellous prayer."
This wonderful creation closes with a chorus of farewell sung beside the
tomb of Jesus. It is a worthy close, for nothing more lovely and
affecting was ever confided to human lips. The gloom and agony that have
pervaded the scenes of temptation, trial, and death have quite vanished.
The tone is indeed that of lamentation, for the Passion drama in its very
aim and tradition did not admit any anticipation of the resurrection;
neither in the Catholic or Lutheran ceremonies of Good Friday is there a
foreshadowing of the Easter rejoicing. But the sentiment of this closing
chorus is not one of hopeless grief; it expresses rather a sense of
relief that suffering is past, mingled with a strain of solemn rapture,
as if dimly conscious that the tomb is not the end of all.
The first performance of the St. Matthew Passion took place in the Thomas
church at Leipsic, on Good Friday, April 15, 1729. It was afterwards
revised and extended, and performed again in 1740. From that time it was
nowhere heard until it was produced by Felix Mendelssohn in the Sing
Academie at Berlin in 1829. The impression it produced was profound, and
marked the beginning of the revival of the study of Bach which has been
one of the most fruitful movements in nineteenth-century music.
A work equally great in a different way, although it can never become the
object of such popular regard as the St. Matthew Passion, is the Mass in
B minor. It may seem strange that the man who more than any other
interpreted in art the genius of Protestantism should have contributed to
a form of music that is identified with the Catholic ritual. It must be
remembered that Luther was by no means inclined to break with all the
forms and usages of the mother Church. He had no quarrel with those
features of her rites which did not embody the doctrines which he
disavowed, and most heartily did he recognize the beauty and edifying
power of Catholic music. We have seen also that he was in favor of
retaining the Latin in communities where it was understood. Hence it was
that not only in Luther's day, but long after, the Evangelical Church
retained many musical features that had become sacred in the practice of
the ancient Church. The congregations of Leipsic were especially
conservative in this respect. The entire mass in figured form, however,
was not used in the Leipsic service; on certain special days a part only
would be sung. The Kyrie and Gloria, known among the Lutheran musicians
as the "short mass," were frequently employed. The B minor Mass was not
composed for the Leipsic service, but for the chapel of the king of
Saxony in Bach's honorary capacity of composer to the royal and electoral
court. It was begun in 1735 and finished in 1738, but was not performed
entire in Bach's lifetime. By the time it was completed it had outgrown
the dimensions of a service mass, and it has probably never been sung in
actual church worship. It is so difficult that its performance is an
event worthy of special commemoration. Its first complete production in
the United States was at Bethlehem, Pa., in the spring of 1900. It is
enough to say of this work here that all Bach's powers as fabricator of
intricate design, and as master of all the shades of expression which the
contrapuntal style admits, are forced to their furthest limit. So vast is
it in scale, so majestic in its movement, so elemental in the grandeur of
its climaxes, that it may well be taken as the loftiest expression in
tones of the prophetic faith of Christendom, unless Beethoven's Missa
Solemnis may dispute the title. It belongs not to the Catholic communion
alone, nor to the Protestant, but to the Church universal, the Church
visible and invisible, the Church militant and triumphant. The greatest
master of the sublime in choral music, Bach in this mass sounded all the
depths of his unrivalled science and his imaginative energy.
There is no loftier example in history of artistic genius devoted to the
service of religion than we find in Johann Sebastian Bach. He always felt
that his life was consecrated to God, to the honor of the Church and the
well-being of men. Next to this fact we are impressed in studying him
with his vigorous intellectuality, by which I mean his accurate estimate
of the nature and extent of his own powers and his easy self-adjustment
to his environment. He was never the sport of his genius but always its
master, never carried away like so many others, even the greatest, into
extravagancies or rash experiments. Mozart and Beethoven failed in
oratorio, Schubert in opera; the Italian operas of Gluck and Haendel have
perished. Even in the successful work of these men there is a strange
inequality. But upon all that Bach attempted--and the amount of his work
is no less a marvel than its quality--he affixed the stamp of final and
inimitable perfection. We know from testimony that this perfection was
the result of thought and unflagging toil. The file was not the least
serviceable tool in his workshop. This intellectual restraint, operating
upon a highly intellectualized form of art, often gives Bach's music an
air of severity, a scholastic hardness, which repels sympathy and makes
difficult the path to the treasures it contains. The musical culture of
our age has been so long based on a different school that no little
discipline is needed to adjust the mind to Bach's manner of presenting
his profound ideas. The difficulty is analogous to that experienced in
acquiring an appreciation of Gothic sculpture and the Florentine painting
of the fourteenth century. We are compelled to learn a new musical
language, for it is only in a qualified sense that the language of music
is universal. We must put ourselves into another century, face another
order of ideas than those of our own age. We must learn the temper of the
German mind in the Reformation period and after, its proud
self-assertion, led to an aggressive positiveness of religious belief,
which, after all, was but the hard shell which enclosed a rare sweetness
of piety.
All through Bach we feel the well-known German mysticism which seeks the
truth in the instinctive convictions of the soul, the idealism which
takes the mind as the measure of existence, the romanticism which colors
the outer world with the hues of personal temperament. Bach's historic
position required that this spirit, in many ways so modern, should take
shape in forms to which still clung the technical methods of an earlier
time. His all-encompassing organ style was Gothic--if we may use such a
term for illustration's sake--not Renaissance. His style is Teutonic in
the widest as well as the most literal sense. It is based on forms
identified with the practice of the people in church and home. He
recognized not the priestly or the aristocratic element, but the popular.
His significance in the history of German Evangelical Christianity is
great. Protestantism, like Catholicism, has had its supreme poet. As
Dante embodied in an immortal epic the philosophic conceptions, the hopes
and fears of mediaeval Catholicism, so Bach, less obviously but no less
truly, in his cantatas, Passions, and choral preludes, lent the
illuminating power of his art to the ideas which brought forth the
Reformation. It is the central demand of Protestantism, the immediate
personal access of man to God, which, constituting a new motive in German
national music, gave shape and direction to Bach's creative genius.
It has been reserved for recent years to discover that the title of chief
representative in art of German Protestantism is, after all, not the sum
of Bach's claims to honor. There is something in his art that touches the
deepest chords of religious feeling in whatever communion that feeling
has been nurtured. His music is not the music of a confession, but of
humanity. What changes the spirit of religious progress is destined to
undergo in the coming years it would be vain to predict; but it is safe
to assume that the warrant of faith will not consist in authority
committed to councils or synods, or altogether in a verbal revelation
supposed to have been vouchsafed at certain epochs in the past, but in
the intuition of the continued presence of the eternal creative spirit in
the soul of man. This consciousness, of which creeds and liturgies are
but partial and temporary symbols, can find no adequate artistic
expression unless it be in the art of music. The more clearly this fact
is recognized by the world, the more the fame of Sebastian Bach will
increase, for no other musician has so amply embraced and so deeply
penetrated the universal religious sentiment. It may well be said of Bach
what a French critic says of Albrecht Duerer: "He was an intermediary
between the Middle Age and our modern times. Typical of the former in
that he was primarily a craftsman, laboring with all the sincerity and
unconscious modesty of the good workman who delights in his labor, he yet
felt something of the tormented spiritual unrest of the latter; and
indeed so strikingly reflects what we call the 'modern spirit' that his
work has to-day more influence upon our own thought and art than it had
upon that of his contemporaries."[75]
The verdict of the admirers of Bach in respect to his greatness is not
annulled when it is found that the power and real significance of his
work were not comprehended by the mass of his countrymen during his life,
and that outside of Leipsic he exerted little influence upon religious
art for nearly a century after his death. He was not the less a typical
German on this account. Only at certain critical moments do nations seem
to be true to their better selves, and it often happens that their
greatest men appear in periods of general moral relaxation, apparently
rebuking the unworthiness of their fellow citizens instead of
exemplifying common traits of character. But later generations are able
to see that, after all, these men are not detached; their real bases,
although out of sight for the time, are immovably set in nationality.
Milton was no less representative of permanent elements in English
character when "fallen upon evil days," when the direction of affairs
seemed given over to "sons of Belial," who mocked at all he held
necessary to social welfare. Michael Angelo was still a genuine son of
Italy when he mourned in bitterness of soul over her degradation. And so
the spirit that pervaded the life and works of Bach is a German
spirit,--a spirit which Germany has often seemed to disown, but which in
times of need has often reasserted itself with splendid confidence and
called her back to soberness and sincerity.
When Bach had passed away, it seemed as if the mighty force he exerted
had been dissipated. He had not checked the decline of church music. The
art of organ playing degenerated. The choirs, never really adequate,
became more and more unable to do justice to the great works that had
been bequeathed to them. The public taste relaxed, and the demand for a
more florid and fetching kind of song naturalized in the Church the
theatrical style already predominant in France and Italy. The people lost
their perception of the real merit of their old chorals and permitted
them to be altered to suit the requirements of contemporary fashion, or
else slighted them altogether in favor of the new "art song." No
composers appeared who were able or cared to perpetuate the old
traditions. This tendency was inevitable; its causes are perfectly
apparent to any one who knows the conditions prevailing in religion and
art in Germany in the last half of the eighteenth and the early part of
the nineteenth centuries. Pietism, with all its merits, had thrown a sort
of puritanic wet blanket over art in its protest against the external and
formal in worship. In the orthodox church circles the enthusiasm
necessary to nourish a wholesome spiritual life and a living church art
at the same time had sadly abated. The inculcation of a dry utilitarian
morality and the cultivation of a dogmatic pedantry had taken the place
of the joyous freedom of the Gospel. Other more direct causes also
entered to turn public interest away from the music of the Church. The
Italian opera, with its equipment of sensuous fascinations, devoid of
serious aims, was at the high tide of its popularity, patronized by the
ruling classes, and giving the tone to all the musical culture of the
time. A still more obvious impediment to the revival of popular interest
in church music was the rapid formation throughout Germany of choral
societies devoted to the performance of oratorios. Following the example
of England, these societies took up the works of Haendel, and the
enthusiasm excited by Haydn's "Creation" in 1798 gave a still more
powerful stimulus to the movement. These choral unions had no connection
with the church choirs of the eighteenth century, but grew out of private
musical associations. The great German music festivals date from about
1810, and they absorbed the interest of those composers whose talent
turned towards works of religious content. The church choirs were already
in decline when the choral societies began to raise their heads. Cantatas
and Passions were no longer heard in church worship. Their place in
public regard was taken by the concert oratorio. The current of
instrumental music, one of the chief glories of German art in the
nineteenth century, was absorbing more and more of the contributions of
German genius. The whole trend of the age was toward secular music. It
would appear that a truly great art of church music cannot maintain
itself beside a rising enthusiasm for secular music. Either the two
styles will be amalgamated, and church music be transformed to the
measure of the other, as happened in the case of Catholic music, or
church song will stagnate, as was the case in Protestant Germany.
After the War of Liberation, ending with the downfall of Napoleon's
tyranny, and when Germany began to enter upon a period of critical
self-examination, demands began to be heard for the reinstatement of
church music on a worthier basis. The assertion of nationality in other
branches of musical art--the symphonies of Beethoven, the songs of
Schubert, the operas of Weber--was echoed in the domain of church music,
not at first in the production of great works, but in performance,
criticism, and appeal. It is not to be denied that a steady uplift in the
department of church music has been in progress in Germany all through
the nineteenth century. The transition from rationalism and infidelity to
a new and higher phase of evangelical religion effected under the lead of
Schleiermacher, the renewed interest in church history, the effort to
bring the forms of worship into cooperation with a quickened spiritual
life, the revival of the study of the great works of German art as
related to national intellectual development,--these influences and many
more have strongly stirred the cause of church music both in composition
and performance. Choirs have been enlarged and strengthened; the soprano
and alto parts are still exclusively sung by boys, but the tenor and bass
parts are taken by mature and thoroughly trained men, instead of by raw
youths, as in Bach's time and after. In such choirs as those of the
Berlin cathedral and the Leipsic Thomas church, artistic singing attains
a richness of tone and finish of style hardly to be surpassed.
The most wholesome result of these movements has been to bring about a
clearer distinction in the minds of churchmen between a proper church
style in music and the concert style. Church-music associations
(evangelische Kirchengesang-Vereine), analogous to the Catholic St.
Cecilia Society, have taken in hand the question of the establishment of
church music on a more strict and efficient basis. Such masters as
Mendelssohn, Richter, Hauptmann, Kiel, and Grell have produced works of
great beauty, and at the same time admirably suited to the ideal
requirements of public worship.
In spite of the present more healthful condition of German Evangelical
music as compared with the feebleness and indefiniteness of the early
part of the nineteenth century, there is little assurance of the
restoration of this branch of art to the position which it held in the
national life two hundred years ago. In the strict sense writers of the
school of Spitta are correct in asserting that a Protestant church music
no longer exists. "It must be denied that an independent branch of the
tonal art is to be found which has its home only in the Church, which
contains life and the capacity for development in itself, and in whose
sphere the creative artist seeks his ideals."[76]
On the other hand, a hopeful sign has appeared in recent German musical
history in the foundation of the New Bach Society, with headquarters at
Leipsic, in 1900. The task assumed by this society, which includes a
large number of the most eminent musicians of Germany, is that of making
Bach's choral works better known, and especially of reintroducing them
into their old place in the worship of the Evangelical churches. The
success of such an effort would doubtless be fraught with important
consequences, and perhaps inaugurate a new era in the history of German
church music.