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[Illustration: BACH.]
The Great Musicians
_Edited by_ FRANCIS HUEFFER
SEBASTIAN BACH
BY REGINALD LANE POOLE, M.A.
BALLIOL COLLEGE, OXFORD
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF LEIPZIG
LONDON
SAMPSON LOW, MARSTON & COMPANY
_Limited_
St. Dunstan’s House
FETTER LANE, FLEET STREET, E.C.
_Uniform with this Volume, price 3s. each._
THE GREAT MUSICIANS
A SERIES OF BIOGRAPHIES
EDITED BY
FRANCIS HUEFFER.
WAGNER.
HANDEL.
WEBER.
MENDELSSOHN.
SCHUBERT.
SCHUMANN.
ROSSINI.
BERLIOZ.
PURCELL.
BEETHOVEN.
HAYDN.
CHERUBINI.
MOZART.
ENGLISH CHURCH COMPOSERS.
PREFACE.
No one will expect a life of Bach to be amusing, but it will be my own
fault if the present Essay does not offer an interest of a high and
varied character. If it labours under a disadvantage, as the first
biography of the master written in this country, on the other hand
it is only now that, thanks to the devotion of Professor Spitta, we
can congratulate ourselves on the possession of absolutely all the
attainable facts. Hitherto, three translations or abridgements of
German works have appeared in England; and the first is one of those
books which, however incomplete, can never really be superseded. It
is a translation of the “Life” of J. N. Forkel, published at Leipzig
in 1802, and in London in 1820. Forkel was not only pre-eminent among
the learned musicians of the end of the last century, but also the
friend and scholar of Bach’s sons Friedemann and Emanuel. He presents
us, therefore, with more than a masterly criticism of Bach’s science,
knowing, it should seem, little beyond the organ and clavichord works:
he is full of anecdotes and reminiscences of the master, all the more
valuable, because told with a naïveté and freshness that stamp them at
once as genuine and uncoloured.
The translation of Forkel was followed after a long interval by
a volume based partly upon it, partly upon a sketch written by
Hilgenfeldt as a centenary memorial in 1850. Though presumably edited
by the late Mr. Rimbault, whose initials are appended to the preface,
the abstract is so unfaithful and illiterate as to be practically
without value. The third biography to which I have alluded is of a
different character; it is a plain and conscientious abridgement of the
work of C. H. Bitter, now minister of finance in Berlin, and only to be
laid aside in view of the more complete materials which have been made
accessible to us by Professor Spitta, and in the later publications of
the Bach-Gesellschaft.
Dr. Spitta’s “Johann Sebastian Bach,” published at Leipzig in two
volumes in 1873 and 1880, represents the many years’ study of a
professed musician. For all the facts of Bach’s life, and all the
obtainable data relative to his works, it is a final and exhaustive
treasure-house. Nothing can be more scientific and workmanlike than
the method with which he has exhumed and collected every detail from
every source that might possibly bear upon his subject, and nothing
more admirable than the warm enthusiasm which lights up his work.
Practically he has left hardly anything for further research, nothing
certainly that could be made use of in a short sketch like the present.
When, however, I state that my facts are mainly due to him, I do not
wish to imply his responsibility for a single word not covered by
this admission. In criticism I give exclusively the results of an
independent study of Bach’s works, which I have pursued for a number
of years. Nor am I sure that Dr. Spitta would invariably approve of
my arrangement of his facts, and especially of the extent to which I
have drawn from the personal narrative of Forkel. In many respects,
a small book demands a different treatment from a large one, and I
have not restricted my freedom of choice in a sketch that can never
by possibility enter into competition with Dr. Spitta’s work. My best
wishes for it are that it may serve the modest aim of preparing a
worthy reception for his English translation which is shortly to appear.
It would be affectation to conceal the great help in the composition of
this volume which I have had from my wife, not merely in the selection
of material, but even more in the judgment and taste with which she has
controlled my writing.
R. L. POOLE.
_Leipzig, 21st March, 1882._
CONTENTS.
CHAPTER I.
PAGE
Bach’s Ancestry 1
CHAPTER II.
1685-1708.
His Youth and Apprenticeship—in an orchestra at Weimar—and
as organist at Arnstadt and Muehlhausen:—Marriage 14
_Early Compositions chiefly for Organ and Clavichord_ 21-42
CHAPTER III.
1708-1717.
Organist and Concertmeister at Weimar 29
_The Organ Works_ 37-42
CHAPTER IV.
1717-1723.
Capellmeister at Coethen: Second Marriage 43
_The Works for Clavichord, Chamber, and Orchestra_ 51-56
CHAPTER V.
1723-1730.
Cantor at Leipzig: the Music of Bach’s Household 58
CHAPTER VI.
1730-1734.
Bach’s Work at Leipzig 73
_The Secular Cantatas_ 75-80
_The Church Cantatas and Oratorios_ 80-86
_The Motets_ 86-87
CHAPTER VII.
The Passion Music and the High Mass 88
CHAPTER VIII.
1734-1750.
Bach’s later years at Leipzig: his Death 103
_The Great Collections of Fugues_ 111-116
CHAPTER IX.
Characteristic of Bach: Estimation in England 118
Pedigree of Musicians in the Family of Bach 128
Chronological List of Church Cantatas 131
SEBASTIAN BACH.
CHAPTER I.
It is never without interest to seek out the beginnings of genius
in a great man’s forefathers. The mere tracking of pedigrees has an
attraction for more than will willingly confess to what is reputed
mainly an innocent weakness of old age. The pursuit, however, gains
in dignity when it is not only the kinship but also the intellectual
growth of the family, not only the blood but also the soul, with which
we have to do. In no family, perhaps, is it of greater moment than
in that of Sebastian Bach, wherein his special tastes and powers all
have their prophecy and preparation in a tradition where everything is
musical.
From the first years of the sixteenth century—so soon, in other words,
as the arising of a national religion has revealed to us the life of
the German people—we have already traces of Bachs scattered among the
valleys of Thuringia. There are Bachs near Arnstadt, in Erfurt, and
Gotha, and Wechmar, places hereafter to be remembered in the musical
vocations of their descendants. The ancestor of Sebastian appears, a
little later, as a baker of Wechmar. This Veit Bach († 1619), named
from Saint Vitus, the patron of the church there, is related to have
passed some years in Hungary, and to have gone back to his home when
the rigour of dominant Jesuitism made living in Hungary hard and
perilous. We may here note the sole basis for the common story that the
family of Bach was of Hungarian descent. Veit sold his goods and set up
as a baker, and then as a miller, in his native village. _He had_—so
Sebastian tells the tale—_his chief delight in a little cithara_
(Cythringen), _which he would take with him into his mill and play
thereon while the corn was grinding. They must have sounded merrily
together! Howbeit, so he learnt the sense of time; and in this wise
music first came into his house._ But music had already a professor
among the Bachs, and it was to Caspar Bach, the town piper of Gotha,
that Veit entrusted his son Hans.
Hans Bach, _player_ and carpet-weaver, whose portrait was taken with
a fiddle and a _brave beard_[1] and ornamented with a fool’s cap,
returned from his apprenticeship in his double craft, to settle at
Wechmar, where he lived until 1626, when the plague killed him, with
many of his kinsfolk, in middle life. His was a blithe personality, in
great request in all the places round, as much, it seems, for his
hearty goodfellowship as for the help he gave the town musicians
wherever he went. To three of his large family, which included
apparently three Hanses and certainly two Heinrichs, he handed down,
with a part of his open generous nature, that musical inheritance which
in their hands grew into an artistic possession rich with the promise
of greater fruit. It is worth while to stay a moment at this point to
observe how deep roots music had struck into the family of Bach. For
it seems that Hans had a brother whose three sons shewed sufficient
excellence for the Count of Schwarzburg-Arnstadt to send them into
Italy that they might complete their artistic training. Another son
became the ancestor of a continuous succession of musicians, the
last of whom, fourth of his line holding office in the ducal court
of Meiningen, died organist there in 1846. Among this branch Johann
Christian, distinguished as _Clavier_-Bach, a music-master at Halle,
deserves commemoration from his friendship with Wilhelm Friedemann, the
son of Sebastian, if only to illustrate the bond which held together
the most remotely connected members of the family.
The household at Wechmar was broken up at the death of Hans, and
the three brothers, Johann, Christoph, and Heinrich, separated to
form new homes in other parts of Thuringia. But the intercourse of
themselves and of their children was never in the least relaxed. They
married into the same families, helped one another in sickness or
poverty; the younger members were apprenticed to their elder kinsfolk
and often succeeded to their posts when they died; and the yearly
gatherings of the entire family held their ground for a century. The
closeness of this attachment merits insisting upon especially, when
we consider the troubled times on which the family was thrown at its
first dispersion. For the thirty years’ war in its wearisome progress
makes the outward history of Germany, in the second quarter of the
seventeenth century, little more than a record of battles and sieges,
with scant breathing-spaces of peace, not long enough for the towns
to recover from exhausting occupations of foreign troops. In this
age of continued misery the foundations of German society seemed to
be gradually undermined. A struggle, which added to the confusion of
civil war the passion of religious hatred, threatened to dissolve the
natural bonds of the family and of the race. Men sank into a blind
and listless state, abandoning themselves to any vice or excess that
seemed to deaden the thought of the morrow. It was therefore amid
every circumstance of adversity that the Bach family grew to its full
stature; and it is the more noteworthy that the latest, most learned,
and most laborious biographer of Sebastian is unable to furnish a
single evidence, in the entire records of his kindred, of the least
deflection from the straitest paths of virtue.[2]
Johann Bach, the eldest of Hans’s family with whom we have to do, was
apprenticed to the town piper of Suhl, whose daughter he afterwards
married, and whose son he came in time to welcome as a pupil and a
kinsman in his house. He became organist at Schweinfurt, and ultimately
director of the town musicians at Erfurt. It was a hard time, this of
war, for musicians; but they had their meed of glory—and profit—when
any peace festivities came. And Johann Bach seems to have made himself
indispensable, like his father, in all the musical affairs of the
place. He began, in fact, a line of musicians so indissolubly bound up
with the life of the town, that more than a century later, when all
the house was extinct, the town musicians of Erfurt still retained the
generic title of “the Bachs.” Adding to the duties of town musician
those of organist to the Dominican church, he becomes a prominent
forerunner in the two paths in which the genius of his family was to
reach its climax. His home, also, lying equally accessible to Arnstadt
and Eisenach, remained for long the centre of the greater family of
the Bachs in general. It was in Johann that his youngest brother,
Heinrich, found a guardian, when he was left an orphan in his twelfth
year. Heinrich was not only the greatest musician of his generation,
but also specially his father’s son in that kindliness and merry
temper which made him as much the delight of his family as he had been
of his father in his boyish days. He played in the Erfurt band until
he gained the post for which nature and training had fitted him, as
organist at Arnstadt, a post which he retained with increasing honour
and distinction for above half a century. Of his organ works little
remains, but we have the accordant testimony of his contemporaries
to place him among the greatest organists of his time. An equal
agreement acknowledges his genial lovable nature, in all its freshness
and childlike gaiety, which it was beyond the power of adversity to
embitter or to corrupt.
Johann and Heinrich married sisters. Both had to pass through their
times of misfortune, and Heinrich’s first years of marriage were
also years of great poverty. The pittance allowed him by the town of
Arnstadt was irregularly paid, or not paid at all, in consequence
of the immense drain upon the resources of Germany made by the
continued—it seemed, the endless—war. Heinrich had to sue as a
beggar to the Count of Schwarzburg. But no trouble made either of
the brothers waver in their warm-hearted generosity to their kin or
in their earnestness in their calling. They lived in the honourable
esteem of the Thuringian towns wherein they dwelt, and left behind
them a new generation to carry on and to exalt their fathers’ art
and name. Each left two sons; and, by a curiously repeated custom,
each of these pairs of brothers married sisters. Renown first came
to the younger branch, and the skill and learning with which the
sons of Heinrich were informed remains a monument of their father’s
powers, as distinct and certain as if he were still known to us as
a composer. Johann Christoph and Johann Michael are an astonishing
phenomenon in this mid-time of national depression. Their writing has
a freshness and vigour which seems to carry us back to the beginning
of the seventeenth century, when the spirit of Germany was strong and
creative, or forward to the age following, when the people had again
recovered its strength. Of the greater achievements of the latter time
the work of Johann Christoph and Michael appears as a prelude. In
the pedigree of Sebastian Bach they fade to a comparative obscurity;
viewed by themselves they are luminaries of signal brilliance. Johann
Christoph was more than a complete master of the musical science of
his day; he was also one of the first who ventured to deviate from
the rigid rules of the early contrapuntists, to make them freer, more
flexible, and more significant. He is a link between ancient and
modern music, blending the old church modes with the modern tonality
of major and minor. Besides this, he marks an important step in the
growth of dramatic music. His Michaelmas piece, _The Fight with the
Dragon_, follows in the track of those Germans who had invented the
idea of setting to music scenes from Biblical history, Schuetz and
Hammerschmidt; but it goes far beyond them in command of the orchestral
body, and in the genius of dramatic utterance. The sacred drama is, in
his hands, clearly on the road which leads to the perfected oratorio
of Handel or the no less perfected Passion music of Sebastian Bach.
But the permanent interest of Johann Christoph Bach lies, even more
than in his historical significance, in the beauty of his melodies and
the _expressiveness_[3] with which he wrought them. It was Sebastian,
his cousin in the next generation, who first knew how to appreciate
his great predecessor. Contemporaries, however, were attracted rather
by Johann Michael. But, excellent musician as he was, and gifted with
a fine artistic sense, Michael failed specially in that power of
expression which signalized his brother. The motets by which he is best
known are deficient in symmetry. The ideas they contain are irregularly
worked, and appeal to us by isolated beauties rather than by the unity
of their spirit. The performance lags behind the conception. Of the
instrumental works of the two brothers, works principally for the
organ, and also for clavichord, there is not space to speak here. It is
enough to have indicated in bare outline their general position. Their
external history need only so far detain us as to notice that the elder
was organist at Eisenach, the younger at Gehren near Arnstadt, and that
Michael’s daughter became the wife of her cousin Sebastian.
The musical faculty grew to ripeness more rapidly in the family of
Heinrich Bach than in those of either of his brothers. Johann’s sons
were of course musicians, but composition first appeared in a grandson,
Johann Bernhard, a man of wide capacity. He was cembalist in the Duke
of Saxe-Eisenach’s band, and of such distinction as an organist,
that he was chosen to succeed to the post of his illustrious cousin,
Johann Christoph, at the latter’s death. He holds an honourable rank
as a composer, having written orchestral suites as well as the proper
productions of his office, organ-chorales. The latter follow somewhat
directly in the steps of the famous organist of Erfurt—afterwards
of Nuernberg—Johann Pachelbel, whose influence is indeed paramount
over all the Bachs of his time. The orchestral works, however, have
overtures which are described as equal in power and energy to some of
those to Handel’s operas and as only surpassed in genius and richness
by Sebastian’s own. They have the peculiar interest of existing mostly
in the autograph of the latter, who transcribed and esteemed them at
the period of his greatest maturity when he was cantor at Leipzig.
Leaving the rest of the musician-posterity of Johann and Heinrich
Bach—and hardly a place in Thuringia or even Saxony but claimed some
of them whether as organists or cantors, or in the minor arts of town
piper or fiddler—we return to the brother who stands between them in
age, and who is the grandfather of Sebastian. Christoph Bach, who was
born at Wechmar in 1613, is the most secular of the sons of Hans. He
was simply and solely a _player_, first in the service—menial as well
as musical—of the Duke of Saxe-Weimar; then at Prettin in Saxony,
where he took to him a wife; and thirdly, when he was near thirty, in
the Company of Musicians in the more familiar town of Erfurt. His last
years were spent in the band of the court and town of Arnstadt, where
he died at the age of forty-eight, on the 14th September, 1661, his
widow following him on the 8th of the next month.
Georg Christoph, his eldest son, of whom a concerted piece of church
music was long preserved in the family, retreated in middle life from
the immediate circle of the Bachs; he became cantor at Schweinfurt,
and founded the Franconian branch of the continually expanding
house. Next to him came two sons, twins, Johann Ambrosius and Johann
Christoph, born on the 22nd of February, 1645. The coincidence of their
birth was, in their case, accompanied by an almost unique identity of
physical nature, character, and taste. The brothers were so alike that
their own wives could not tell them apart: both adopted the family
profession, and both the same instrument, the viol. Their strange
psychological affinity subjected the one with the other to the same
illnesses; and the elder survived the younger by little more than
a year. Johann Christoph is the subject of one of the few detailed
narratives which we encounter in the history of the Bachs before
Sebastian; and this, if it does not seriously damage his reputation,
equally does not credit him with the prudence that is characteristic
of his kin. It appears that an indiscreet though innocent friendship
with one of the Arnstadt maidens, accompanied, most rashly, with an
exchange of rings, brought upon the young fiddler a prosecution at the
hands of his would-be mother-in-law. The consistory, it is presumed,
urged amends by the marriage of the parties; but Bach was firm—this
is a family trait—and appealed to the higher consistory at Weimar,
from which at length he obtained release from his difficulty. An
experience of this sort made him hesitate before he finally decided
to take a wife; and, after his marriage, misfortune—not of his own
making—followed him for some years more. His place in the Arnstadt
band was harassed by the jealous persecution of the principal town
musician. The Bachs of Erfurt and Arnstadt combined in a memorial in
his favour, but nothing came of it. In the end the Count dismissed the
entire band _for indolence and disunion_. Christoph, in his poverty,
still helped his uncle Heinrich in the Sunday music of his church;
but this brought no subsistence to his household. He was fain to go
to Gehren, _if he might but do some service with quiet music, whereby
to support himself and his family in their need_. The death of the
Count at last brought them rescue, for his successor restored Bach to
the posts of court musician and town piper. From this time, 1682, the
musician lived in peace; but his death eleven years later left a legacy
of new troubles to his widow and her five children, the eldest just ten
years of age. They had a long time of poverty and sickness to struggle
with, though the boy, Johann Ernst, did his best to gain a living for
them in the family craft. But he was a poor musician, and fortune kept
him waiting. Ultimately he got the organistship at Arnstadt vacated by
Sebastian, who, himself ill-provided and on the point of marriage, left
Ernst the arrears of his salary and ended his kinsman’s days of trouble.
Johann Ambrosius, the brother of the unlucky Christoph, has a meagre
record. He was attached to the town band of Erfurt, afterwards of
Eisenach; and married twice. His first wife, Elisabeth, daughter of
Valentin Laemmerhirt, a furrier of Erfurt, gave him eight children,
of whom six were sons. Three of these only grew to man’s estate; the
youngest is the subject of the present study. Ambrosius’ second
marriage was followed in two months by his death, in January, 1695.
Of his character we have but one solitary notice, when a funeral
sermon on a weak-minded sister gave occasion to the preacher to mark
the contrast with her two brothers: _whom we see to be men of a good
understanding, endowed with art and skill, who are well seen and heard
in churches and schools, and in the common life of the town, in such
wise that the work praiseth the Master_. A portrait of Ambrosius, which
looks down upon the precious reliques of his son in the Berlin library,
is notable not only for its likeness to Sebastian but also for the
simplicity of its manner. There he is, not sprucely dressed out for the
occasion in wig and powder, but in plain working clothes, with brown
hair and moustache. There is a certain pride in this disdain of outward
decoration.
Before closing the recital of the genealogy of the Bachs, a word of
notice is claimed by the Companies of Players that existed in Germany
in their time, and with which they necessarily stood in close relation.
The regulations of these fellowships are in some cases preserved, and
are interesting memorials of the pious care which their framers took to
guard against the abuses to which the musician’s craft was peculiarly
exposed, to inflict the sternest penalties on profligate or irreligious
conduct, and to exclude the singing or accompanying of any but virtuous
music. It does not appear, however, that any of the Bachs belonged
to such a company. Many of them held a better worldly position, most
were better educated than the common town player. It is a plausible
inference that their number alone served to constitute them an informal
guild by themselves, of which the name was that of their family, and
the only regulation that which sprang from the generosity of their
nature and the close ties which knit the kin together in a common pride
and emulation in their common art. Emanuel Bach, Sebastian’s son, has
left us a genial picture of how the kinsmen would gather all together,
at Erfurt, or Eisenach, or Arnstadt, once in the year, and there make
merry. First they sang a chorale; and, this duty ended, soon turned to
a medley of secular songs. The climax was reached in the _quodlibet_,
when all joined in a sort of comic chorus. The music consisted of any
scrap, no matter whether sacred or profane, that occurred to any of the
assembled company. It was an improvised catch. Each man in turn gave
his own part or refrain, all different and all in harmony. The words
were as incongruous as the music, and every one added his own quip or
jest to the general jollity. Such was the homely festival that held its
place in the family life of the Bachs as late as the middle years of
Sebastian’s career.