By virtue of his high endowment, Bach possessed that wisdom of genius
which, to the thrifty and so-called practical, is but the foolishness
of the visionary. Except in the case of a few works engraved by his own
hands, he gave no thought to the immediate outcome of his labors; and
yet, amidst the accumulation of his great, unpublished compositions,
he wrote on as if all the engravers and compositors of Saxony were
crying for copy. A lesser man, a man of talent, would have seen to it
that his masterpieces for voice and clavichord and organ were first in
the shop and then in the home, the church and the concert hall. That
he felt concern for these, his mentally-begotten, is certain; else he
had spared himself that prodigious concentration of thought the result
of which each preserves in a body vitalized to endure throughout the
centuries. No time had he for obtuse and over-cautious publishers,
nor would he debase his ideals to popularize and make saleable his
inspirations. His was an artistic conscience analogous to that of the
saint and the martyr; his their self-sacrifice to principle; his that
undebasable virtue, that adherence to conviction, which is its own
sweet reward in whatever of high or humble man's lot is fixed. His
every creative act spake something like this: «Brief indeed is the most
lengthened life of man, and long must the world await another Sebastian
Bach. Let me use my permitted day of sunshine ere the hastening
gloom enshroud and silence it forever!» So he filled to fullness the
incomparable hours. Trusting in God and the Time Spirit, he left to an
unknown future the propaganda of his deeds.
Ah, when the ravisher of Peace, and the subjugator of his kind, has
fulfilled his fierce ambition, and the rent land is desolate and a
nation enslaved in tyrant-welded bonds, how fares his name within the
hearts and on the lips of men? Does not its lettering pollute with
blood the annals of his time? Not with the harsh rattle, not with the
red horror of war, but rather with a sound of sweetest harmony comes
the conquering musician, and the charmed world, his debtor, proclaims
him lord of a realm more peaceful than once the great Augustus mildly
ruled.
Longfellow's often-quoted lines:
Lives of great men all remind us
We can make our lives sublime,
are not wholly in accord with truth, for the domestic life of many a
great man lends warrant to Mrs. Carlyle's warning against marrying a
genius. And, surely, what is the brief domestic life of Byron if not a
mystery of unhappiness? On the other hand, the lives of some of earth's
greatest have proved sublime even in such testing ordeal. No «sweet
bells jangled out of tune and harsh» drowned their connubial harmony;
no wranglings of the ill-mated made the house rather a hell than a
home; no Coleridge-like shirking of family responsibilities demeaned
them in the eyes of men; no divergence of aim kept husband and wife
always at cross purpose.
The home of Bach was the modest German home whose like, throughout
the Fatherland, had bred the bone and sinew and brain of a great and
worthy nation. It was the shielding home into whose peaceful shelter
the disquieting world intruded not; the home paternal, maternal, and
fraternal, where blossomed daily those sweet domesticities which
root themselves in mutual love. It was the simple home, source and
conserver of the simple life; the fruitful home free from imputation
of race suicide; the happy home forever young with voices of childhood
and youth; the Christian home from whence ascended in prayer and
thanksgiving the homage of reverent hearts! It was, in short, the ideal
home approved by earth, by Heaven ordained and blessed; and he, the
great Bach, was its patriarchal head.
The creative artist stands at noblest remove from that brute
inheritance of ours, the desire to take by violence. In him is manifest
the God-like characteristic of the highest type of man, namely, desire
to give for the pure love of giving.
Therefore, on such lives as that of Bach, the welfare of the world
depends; they call it back from that insanity of selfishness toward
which the age is tending. Such lives attest the claims of the ideal;
they prove them to be of practical value. Such lives are, indeed,
barriers against an on-rushing Materialism which otherwise might engulf
us all.
Of the modern composer it must often be said that the world is too
much with him; and to this misfortune are largely attributable the
inequalities abounding in his music. Because of his co-partnership with
that which tends to warp and deaden his artistic sensibility, he must
needs force his inspiration; the result proving that the serenity of
the high vision is not in him, but rather the delirium-nightmare of the
world-fever. Nor can it be otherwise unless he benefits by the example
of Bach and his kind. Like him, he should achieve a full and final
consecration necessary as that of the priest and the prophet. Apart
from the world wherewith he mingles; self-centered amidst the babbling
multitude; deaf to the babel of their tongues; he should listen to the
great song of life, the heavenly melody filling the shut sanctuary of
his soul whereinto the world cannot enter. If he so do, it shall not be
said of him that he lived in vain, or that his works but swelled the
rubbish heap of Time.
The staid, methodical life of Bach the man, wherein nothing erratic
is discoverable, was counterparted by the life of Bach the creative
genius. The orderly and exhaustive development of a characteristic
theme was to him the chief artistic end obtainable. In the school
of which he was the great exponent, the imaginings of the composer
must be moulded to the requirements of an exacting and time-approved
model; but, despite the severity of the strict polyphonic style, whose
restrictions led to its modification by the Classicists, and its final
abandonment by the Romanticists, Bach moving in this, his congenial
element, was no more hampered than is the freest illustrator of modern
methods.
Although German Protestantism found in Bach its musical expression,
in him--the towering genius--was inevitably paramount that broad and
lofty religion of pure art which, above credal differences, outpours
its prayer and thanksgiving in the creation of the beautiful, and
therefore the good and the true. Would anyone suppose the author of the
Mass in B minor to be a dissenter from the Roman Catholic communion?
As a noble vehicle of religious feeling, the Mass inspired Bach to a
work surpassing all similar efforts of Roman Catholic composers; a work
which, to every heart in tune with the sublime, is a revelation of the
essence of undogmatic religion.
Whilst grave dignity well becomes a king, and whilst the voice and look
of authority are rightfully his, we love to see him doff at times the
insignia of his station, and eschew the pomp and ceremony of royal
surroundings to enact a part identifying him with the human in the
great common life of the world.
Even so we see the sovereign of the Fugue, the Mass, the Cantata and
the «Passion,» unbending affably toward such lesser things as the
Suite, the Partita and the a capella Motet. But, though condescending,
Bach is nevertheless the king; hence these all acquire from his
magnetic, uplifting presence, a consequence before unknown to any of
their kind.
Bearing in mind the lives of such men as Sir Henry Irving, one hardly
realizes that the play-actor of the Elizabethan Era had no more social
status than the veriest mountebank. The German musical genius of
Bach's day, and for long thereafter, was usually a mere retainer to
some consequential petty prince, and, socially, only a degree higher
than his master's lackey. But habit, sprung from a necessity which
itself may have originated in a refinement and delicacy of organization
inclining the musician rather to submit than to combat the coarse
and selfish, had so accustomed the court composer to the rôle of
servile dependent upon royal patronage, that he seldom realized to
what degradation his anciently esteemed calling, that of the bard, had
fallen.
But as for the masculinely self-assertive Bach, fortunately or
unfortunately not often in touch with princes, he assumed no attitude
of flattery toward his employers, the penurious and unjustly-exacting
town authorities of Liepsic.
Lamentable indeed is the fact that Bach was forced by circumstances
into what, to one of his capabilities, must have been the most dreary,
routine drudgery. Imagine Handel leaving half-penned some sublime
Chorus, to toil with a dull and refractory pupil who never by any means
would attain to average musicianship.
To sensitive nerves, over-tensioned through sympathy with a
high-wrought emotional nature which aspires and soars towards some
beauty native to another sphere, such instant drop is comparable to
that of the wounded bird checked in the moment of most buoyant flight.
Beethoven would none of it for, because of his bachelorhood, he was
independent; but with Bach, the good father of sons and daughters to
the number of twenty, it was far otherwise. Toil he must and toil he
did as cantor in the school and choir-master in the church.
To certain musicians far less endowed than was Bach, the act of
teaching has been but semblance of labor, and, at times, the merest
farce. Behold the modern, world-flattered, fashion-sought Virtuoso of
the Pianoforte, accessible only to the highest aspirant to musical
renown! Behold that awe-struck aspirant ushered into the presence of
the august one! He listens to the embarrassed player, yes, he the lofty
deigns to listen! Ah! but will he, the great Jove of modern music, look
down in kindness from his Parnassus, or will he utterly blast with
the lightning of his eyes, and dumfound with the angry thunders of
his mouth? Who can tell? Surely none but the great Jove himself, for
his pleasure or his displeasure, like that of the ancient deity, is
but matter of caprice dependent wholly upon his present mood. How the
conditions which hampered the life of Bach contrast with those favoring
the musical celebrity of our day! But then, the world abounds with
incongruities even to the placing of the beggar on the throne and the
king on the dunghill.
The poet bards of long ago, the Ossians of the North and the Homers
of the South, declaimed their epics of love and war to a harp
accompaniment which often must have approached free improvisation. The
complex recitative of Wagner, for example, the endless melody of his
«Tristan and Isolde,» purports to be the attained ideal of those elder
singers; but, between the bald freedom of the old and the luxuriant
freedom of the new, have obtained what Wagner considered two grave,
musical mistakes: first, the evolution of fixed form originating in the
primitive dance tune and eventuating in the Bach Fugue, and, second,
largely due to the labors of Bach, the individualizing of instrumental
music apart from vocal music once deemed its indispensable auxiliary.
Speaking without bias, it should be said that although to Bach we
justly render every encomium due unto one of the most gifted masters
of music, we give with full knowledge that his art, notwithstanding
its beauty and excellence, is but a facet of the gem whose all of
resplendence these later days are privileged to behold. Probably the
perfection of contrapuntal writing was to Bach the perfection, the
entirety, of great music. He would doubtless have condemned as vague
and discursive much in the pianoforte and orchestral works which
characterized Beethoven's middle and last period.
How he would have regarded certain liberties in the harmonic
progression may be surmised. Although Bach himself was in this respect
something of an innovator, he must have deemed such divergence the
justifiable limit of rule-breaking. Could he have looked forward
to the chief exponent of the Classical School, he might have said,
«This Beethoven goes too far, even to the deliberate employment
of consecutive, perfect fifths in rash attempt to produce dubious
effects. Besides, he abandons the native German domain of the Fugue
and debouches upon a land whereof I know not, a strange land of
questionable manners and customs.»