Bach’s appeal to Erdmann in the winter of 1730, to try and find him
a more congenial post than he had at Leipzig, was without result. In
fact, little as he suspected it, events had already begun to take a
favourable turn for him. The year before, the organist of the New
Church had left, and Bach had followed him as director of the Musical
Society, which had hitherto furnished the choir at that church, instead
of the boys of the Thomasschule. It was a good thing for Bach in every
way to break down a rivalry of this sort. But a greater gain had come
to him the very month before he wrote to Erdmann. For the new rector of
the school, Gesner, proved himself consistently the firm friend of the
ill-used cantor.
Gesner appears to have been much more than his books shew him—one of
the revivers of classical learning in Germany. He was also a teacher
by instinct, one who by infinite tact and patience could restore
harmony to a school that had been dissolving for a generation, and form
so direct an understanding between master and pupil that the friend
was seen through the severe disciplinarian, and the fervent scholar
through the mists and morasses of an antiquated pedagogy. He diffused
a new spirit into the school; to Bach he gave his generous sympathy,
and an earnest of hopefulness. How he appreciated him as a musician
has already been noticed in another connexion; as head of the school
he saved him from the petty annoyances to which he had hitherto been
subjected. Bach had now his just share of the fees which made the
largest item in his income and which were now the more necessary as his
family was growing up. Moreover, thrifty as he was, his different posts
must have involved expensive journeys to Coethen and Weissenfels; and
he was fond of making short visits to Dresden to hear the opera, at
that time under the leading of his friend Hasse, _Il Sassone_, as he is
known by the Italians, among whom he lived for many years, and whose
music in turn he naturalised in Germany. _Friedemann, let us go again
and hear the pretty Dresden songs_, Bach would say to his boy; and the
two went together. The phrase used is, by the way, characteristic of
Bach. He enjoyed the opera, but could not call it by any more dignified
name than _songs_ (_liederchen_). Accordingly he never adopted this
form of composition; his genius is essentially undramatic. But he
studied the operatic style with eager energy, and absorbed it so
thoroughly that the arias, duets, &c., which occur in his cantatas,
are the worthiest representatives of the opera that Germany produced
before Gluck, whom indeed he anticipated in his treatment of the
recitative. They have the gaiety and grace of the Italian manner, and
the inspiration of German thought.
The secular post which Bach also held at Leipzig gave a wide opening
for compositions specially in this style. The purpose of musical clubs,
said his predecessor Kuhnau, in his _Musicalischer Quack-Salber_,
written in 1700, is for musicians _ever to exercise themselves
farther in their noble calling, and withal from the pleasant harmony
to establish among themselves so like a sweet-sounding agreement of
tempers, as oftentimes is mainly lacking in their conversation_. We may
think of Bach as realising this description, as he presided over the
_amateur_ gatherings held on winter-nights in a coffee-house in the
Katharinenstrasse, or in summer of an afternoon in a garden outside
the town in the Windmühlengasse. These informal concerts lasted two
hours, and took place weekly, or twice a week during the great popular
festivals of Leipzig, the quarterly fairs.
We have no express evidence of what purely instrumental compositions
Bach wrote for the society. No doubt he revived the chamber-music he
had composed at Coethen; and the bulk of his concertos dating from
Leipzig would probably be performed at its meetings. The works which
are known to have been produced there are chiefly a string of secular
cantatas—perhaps we should rather say _serenatas_, though the actual
title is specifically _Dramma per Musica_. To these we may add the
other compositions which are described simply as for the university
students in general, with whom from the first he was in constant
request at times of rejoicing, birthdays of favourite teachers, their
election as professors, and a multitude of festive occasions prompted
by the accustomed loyalty of undergraduates. These pieces are commonly
distinguished as dramatic chamber-music; but it must be borne in mind
that, although hardly ever acted in costume, they were often presented,
not in a room, but with the natural scenery, for instance, of a garden.
Bach rarely spent his best work on such ephemeral displays—they
mostly had to be got ready in a few days—and whenever he found
afterwards that he had included in them anything in his judgment worth
preserving, he incorporated it in a church cantata or some more lasting
composition. In this way nearly the whole of a _drama_, written for
the Queen’s birthday in 1733, came subsequently to form part of the
Christmas oratorio. But we must guard against the inference that Bach
was careless of the relation between music and words. On the contrary,
we have the distinct statement of a friend, himself a teacher of
rhetoric at Leipzig, that Bach’s _mastery over the qualities and the
excellencies which music has in common with rhetoric is such as not
only to add unfailing pleasure to his discourses upon the likeness
and correspondency between them, but also to move our admiration at
the skilful use of his principles in his works_. So wrote Magister
Birnbaum in 1739; and the importance which Agricola, who was Bach’s
pupil for three years, attaches to the study of rhetoric by musicians,
was probably caught from his teacher. The truth is that Bach was before
all things a sacred composer, and when he adopts in a sacred work that
which had once belonged to something secular, it is not from haste,
indifference, or a want of fertility, but purely because the piece
would find its proper home in a sacred setting. It does not surprise
us, therefore, to find that he habitually brought up old compositions,
with new words, for the festivities for which he was called upon to
provide, and that many of them have entirely perished, their existence
being only known from the circulated programme.
The following seven cantatas are all that remain:—1. In honour of
Dr. Mueller,[39] 3rd August, 1725. 2. On the Promotion of Professor
G. Kortte,[40] 11th December, 1726. 3. The Contest of Phœbus and
Pan,[41] 1731. 4. Hercules at the Boundary,[42] 5th September, 1733.
5. At the Queen’s Birthday, 8th December, 1733. 6. At a Royal Visit to
Leipzig, 5th October, 1734. 7. At the King’s Birthday,[43] 7th October,
1734.
Of these the third alone can claim more than a limited appreciation;
and this has a novel interest outside the music, in certain satirical
allusions, under the character of Midas, to one Scheibe, a poor
musician, whom Bach had rejected as candidate for an organistship, and
who never lost an opportunity of showing his ill-will against the too
rhadamanthyne judge.[44]
This satire connects the student-cantatas with two works of a professed
humourous character. One is the so-called _Coffee-cantata_, which
turns upon the comparatively modern rage for coffee, supplanting all
human joys and interests. Comic pieces of this sort were not unknown in
Bach’s time. His cousin Nikolaus had written one called the _Tapster
of Jena_, and in a kindred vein Bach inserted a most sympathetic ditty
upon his tobacco-pipe in one of the books he wrote for his wife.[45]
But the genial side of Bach’s temper is best reflected in his _Cantate
en Burlesque_, known as the _Peasant’s Cantata_.[46] It was composed in
1742 for a feast-day in a village near Leipzig to celebrate the coming
of a new landlord, and is full of a frolicsome gaiety that looks like
the freshness of a young man’s work; only we know, for instance, from
the _Winter’s Tale_, that such may often shew the mellowed spirit of
older years. The _libretto_ is made up of _badinage_, more or less
clumsy, between the countrymen, who like their own old fashion of
doing honour to their lord, and the upstarts who try to introduce a
new-fangled courtly style. The genuine swains get the better of it,
and have a great deal to say for themselves in a rough way, starting in
the true Saxon brogue, and breaking out into popular songs which were
in every one’s mouth at the time. The music, which is never vulgar, is
certainly the lightest that Bach wrote; but the _volkslieder_ do not
stand alone in his works. Two such songs he has wrought with inimitable
art and charm into the Quodlibet which closes his thirty variations in
G.
The list of Bach’s secular cantatas is completed by some
wedding-music,[47] and by the pieces he wrote for state occasions.
Three of the latter, all birthday cantatas, remain.[48] One was
composed in 1716 for the Duke of Saxe-Weissenfels, when the event
was celebrated by a great hunt;[49] the second is a serenade for the
Prince of Coethen, perhaps in 1717;[50] and the third, for his second
consort, in 1726.[51] Of far greater importance must have been the
_Dirges_ which Bach composed for mourning solemnities, and which are
indeed only distinguished from the rest of his church music by the
personal reference. The music he wrote in 1729 on the death of his
patron is lost; but it is supposed to have been to a great extent built
upon the _S. Matthew Passion_. That which he composed, however, two
years earlier, for the Queen of Poland remains to us, and apparently
was subsequently re-erected into the (now lost) _Passion according to
S. Mark_.[52] On these occasions the appointed mourning did not begin
for some months, and Bach had therefore time to devote thought to them
such as he was not able to give in the hurried seasons of rejoicing.
In itself, the more weighty occasion stirred him to deeper reflexion,
and the _Dirge for Queen Christine Eberhardine_ is of more value than
all his secular cantatas put together. It shows Bach to us in his
native sphere, that of a church composer, and leads naturally to the
consideration of his work as such in its wider manifestations.
His church cantatas are among the earliest and the most mature of
Bach’s productions; but the bulk of them were written while he was
cantor at Leipzig. Barely thirty can be assigned to an earlier period,
while from 1723 onwards he set himself to compose a complete cycle for
five church years—near 300 cantatas—in which of course he inserted
his younger works, though never without a scrupulous revision. Of
this marvellous series about two hundred remain. Musicians owe an
incalculable debt to Dr. Spitta for the exhaustive scrutiny to which
he has subjected every individual number; and although his results,
which will be found tabulated at the end of this volume, are in a
certain degree tentative, yet their general accuracy can hardly fail
to be accepted. In comparatively few cases does the doubt as the
chronological place of a cantata extend over more than four years; and
the student is therefore for the first time enabled to place each one
with security in its proper setting in the total list of Bach’s works.
But it is not the number, but the wonderful variety, individual
character, and consummate workmanship, of the church cantatas, that
make them an absolutely unique phænomenon in music. It is hardly
necessary to say that they have nothing in common with the Italian
_cantata_, which was a mere operatic _scena_ for _solo_ voices.[53] The
church cantata may be roughly called a short oratorio. Its component
parts are one or more choruses and chorales with recitatives and _solo_
airs; but the form is as elastic as that of the modern _sonata_, and
one at least of the elements may often be absent. In Bach’s hands the
type was enlarged in more than one direction, especially under the
influence of the instrumental music of Italy. His first preserved
cantata, dating perhaps from 1704, shows how he was abandoning the
purely polyphonic treatment, which the Germans had adopted but never
been at ease with, and creating for himself his own manipulation
of voices in an instrumental manner. When at Weimar he pursued his
studies through the entire range of Italian chamber-music accessible
to him, the effect was not to make him in any sense imitate them.
His chamber-music is almost wholly of later date. What he did was to
apply the forms of the _sonata_ and _concerto_ to the clavichord, the
organ, and above all to the church cantata. In this way he brought
to perfection his art of writing _solo-arias_, of which the earlier
examples are so complete and mature as to leave no room for future
improvement. Here accordingly he made little change in the course of
his later composing; and the same holds good for his treatment of
the recitative, _arioso_, and simple chorale. The variety he threw
into the structure of the cantata is infinite. Sometimes a whole
cantata takes the shape of a _concerto_, or of an orchestral _partie_;
sometimes its second division is opened by a regular chamber-sonata.
An overture in French style is combined with a freely-imagined
chorus, even with a chorale. Dance-measures, the _passacaglia_, even
the jig, are not excluded; and a chorale has its counterpoint in a
_siciliano_. Everywhere instrumental forms are applied, in a way
hitherto unsuspected, to the development of church-music. Now a chorale
is played by the orchestra in the midst of a recitative, as though to
set a bound to its unmeasured phrases: now the recitative appears as
a personal application of the thought between the lines of a chorale.
But the influences of the master’s boyhood are not forgotten: except
in the _arias_, the organ is the main basis of his cantata-style; and
Pachelbel, Boehm, Buxtehude, have still their reminiscence, in a more
glorious apparel. The old forms are broadened, and combined, with
inconceivable fancy, with one another and with the new forms which Bach
devised for himself.
It is in the choruses, however, that the Leipzig cantatas rise above
the works of Bach’s earlier time. The great choruses which he wrote
at Weimar, for instance, the splendid one that opens _Ich hatte viel
Bekümmerniss_, are indeed models of his instrumental treatment.
The difference between his early and later writing is rather the
uniform massiveness and magnificence of the latter—the more complete
absorption in them of the organ-style. Though generally formed on a
figured subject, they are wrought with far greater freedom and force.
The choruses, based upon the melody of a chorale, are unmatched in
depth and grandeur, and it was to these, the rich embodiment of his
strenuous religious sense, that Bach turned with peculiar affection in
his later years; a long series of cantatas in which they take the chief
place were written by him from 1735 onwards.
Yet, it must be confessed that the church cantatas suffer exceedingly
from the poverty of the texts to which they are written. Unless Bach
draws directly from the Bible or from the old chorale-hymns—for the
chorales have a mine of poetry within their rough mass—there are few
places in which one is not repelled by the tastelessness of the rhymes
he had to use. Bach himself seems at one time to have been conscious of
their inadequacy and to have returned to the nervous religious poetry
of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. One cannot but suspect that
the finer judgment of Gesner—they all bear traces of having been
composed during his stay at Leipzig—had something to do with the
improved choice of subject. But commonly the texts are derived from
three contemporary poetasters, Franck and Neumeister of Weimar and
Picander of Leipzig. The last was a neighbour of Bach’s and a docile
follower. In fact we cannot, where he was concerned, exculpate Bach
from a certain responsibility for the texts. Certainly Picander wrote
as he was bid, and would alter as Bach told him. But probably the
musician felt that he could do no better than employ so convenient a
hack, and it would be going beyond all we know of his life to assume
that the artistic sensibility which swayed him in matters musical
extended also into the domain of letters. He was content if the meaning
of the words agreed with the music.
It remains to add that all the church cantatas are written for
orchestra, but for an orchestra of very varying compass, ranging from
the simple bass, which accompanies the recitative, to dimensions
scarcely inferior to those of modern times; only Bach seldom employed
the whole available body at once. He liked to have a reserve, to
prevent the music of one Sunday being exactly like its neighbour; and
he was specially fond of keeping an instrument to come out prominently
as the _obbligato_ accompaniment of an _aria_.
Among the cantatas there stands a composition of a partly different
character. This is the _Ascension Oratorio_, which connects itself by
its title with the two more important works of the same sort which
Bach has left, namely, the _Easter_ and _Christmas Oratorios_, written
respectively in 1734 and 1736. The second has the nearest resemblance
of the three to what we know as oratorios elsewhere: the last, by far
the greatest, is divided into six parts, for performance on Christmas
and the two days following, New Year’s Day, the first Sunday in the
year, and the Epiphany. It has, however, a unity of feeling running
through it, which stamps it as a single work. We have already noticed
and explained the presence here of much that had previously formed
part of secular cantatas; but it may be added that there is the less
incongruity in the case when we consider how largely the rejoicing
of Christmastide was mixed up with social festivities. That Bach,
however, was careful lest the deeper meaning of the incarnation should
be forgotten, is shown by the employment of the melody of a well-known
Passion chorale—his favourite _O Haupt voll Blut und Wunden_—which
occurs twice, the second time with an exuberance of instrumental
accompaniment to close the work. The Oratorio has by this time become
so familiar in England that it is perhaps unnecessary to describe
its structure. Nothing of Bach surpasses it in the warm life of its
choruses or the delicate charm of its airs—the purity of one alto
song, _Bereite dich, Zion_, or the idyllic beauty of another, _Schlafe,
mein Liebster_, than which no lovelier lullaby has ever been written.
Before noticing the mysteries which Bach consecrated to the history of
the Passion—works by the side of which the Christmas Oratorio takes
a worthy place, rather by virtue of its great compass and masterly
performance, than by any close affinity of scheme—we may complete the
summary of his German works by a brief mention of the _Motets_.
The motet may be described as a sacred madrigal: in other words, it
is written in several parts, commonly four, five, six, or eight; it
does not require an instrumental accompaniment; and it is set to a
text from the Bible, or a verse from a church hymn. It was a style
of composition entirely polyphonic, which had gradually declined in
popularity as instrumental music and especially solo singing came into
vogue. And it is one of Bach’s great services to church-music to have
revived it, so that in the present day the weekly motet-singing in his
own Church at Leipzig remains one of the most popular institutions of
the town. Contrary, however, to the custom now, Bach seems to have
had the motets accompanied, apparently on the organ; and this fact
indicates their principal distinction from the older style. They are
in fact based upon an organ treatment, and have precise parallels in
several chorale-movements in the church cantatas. Few, however, have
survived the carelessness of Bach’s successors at the Thomasschule,
though their melodious figuration and religious sublimity might, one
would have thought, have secured their unintermitted performance
there. When Mozart came to Leipzig in 1789, and heard one of them (No.
5) he exclaimed, _Here is a new thing from which I may learn_, and,
finding that the piece existed only in parts, he ranged them round the
room until he had mastered their structure. The following are all that
remain, not included in the body of church cantatas:—
1. _Lobet den Herrn_[54] for four voices;
2. _Nun danket alle Gott_ for five;
3. _Jesu, meine Freude_, also for five;
4. _Der Geist hilft unsrer Schwachheit auf_;
5. _Singet den Herrn ein neues Lied_;
6. _Fürchte dich nicht_;
7. _Komm, Jesu, komm_; the last four for a double chorus of eight
voices.