Early in 1741 Bach’s son Philipp Emanuel had become clavecinist to the
new sovereign of Prussia, Frederick the Great. Moved, it appears, by a
paternal wish to see the young man comfortably settled, the father made
a trip to Berlin in the summer of that year. Details of the journey are
few and it was cut short by news that Anna Magdalena, in Leipzig, was
seriously ill.
Bach’s famous visit to Berlin and Potsdam did not take place, however,
till fully six years later. One of its chief objects was to make
the acquaintance of his daughter-in-law, whom Philipp Emanuel had
married in 1744, and of his first grandchild. But the visit had more
spectacular consequences. Frederick the Great had learned about Bach
from his court pianist. Whether or not the great Cantor went to
the palace of Sans-Souci in Potsdam at the king’s special command,
he arrived there at a psychological moment on May 7, 1747, just as
Frederick was about to begin one of his regular evening concerts at
which, surrounded by his picked musicians, he loved to exhibit his own
considerable virtuosity on the flute. “Gentlemen, old Bach is here!”
the monarch exclaimed and, calling off the concert, received his guest
with cordiality. He immediately had Bach examine the new Silbermann
claviers with hammer action newly installed in the palace and invited
him to show his skill. After putting each of the instruments to a test,
Bach amazed Frederick and his court by improvising a superb six-part
fugue on a subject submitted him by the king himself. The next evening
he transported his hosts once more with a recital on the organ of the
Church of the Holy Ghost in Potsdam and a little later, in Berlin,
examined the new opera house, detecting acoustical effects which the
architect himself seems not to have suspected.
Back in Leipzig Bach resolved to break a rule against dedicating scores
to noble patrons he had made after the shabby treatment accorded him in
the case of the Brandenburg Concertos and the _B minor Mass_. But he
would have been less than human if he had not thought that a gracious
gesture on his part might perchance further his son’s interests at
court; and besides, he was genuinely pleased with the fine theme
Frederick had given him to develop. So, alleging that his Potsdam
improvisation had failed to do the royal theme justice, he dispatched
to the monarch with a suitable dedication a series of elaborate
contrapuntal developments of the theme, diplomatically incorporating in
the set a sonata for flute, violin and clavier. This princely gift is
the work known as the _Musical Offering_, whose beauty and ingenuity
have come to be properly valued only in recent years.
Theoretical problems of music now interested Bach more and more and
in 1747 he was elected to the so-called Society for the Promotion of
Musical Science, founded by Lorenz Christoph Mizler. Men as illustrious
as Telemann, Handel and Graun were already members and after a brief
period of hesitation Bach joined it, too, presenting the Society in
return for his diploma with a formidable sample of his technical skill
in the shape of a lordly set of canonic variations for organ on the
Christmas hymn _Vom Himmel hoch, da komm ich her_.
In 1749 he was occupied with a work in some ways his profoundest and
most enigmatic, which virtually till our own time has been misconstrued
even by serious musicians as a dry and abstract experiment in polyphony
of no independent musical value. It is that stupendous succession of
fugues and canons (or “counterpoints,” as the composer himself called
them) under the collective title _The Art of Fugue_. On a subject not
unlike the theme given him by Frederick the Great, Bach has heaped one
polyphonic marvel upon another in a manner to exploit to the limits of
technique and imagination every possible device of fugal and canonic
development. He was not spared to complete it but dropped his pen at a
passage in the final counterpoint when the notes “B-A-C-H” (in German
B flat, A, C, B natural) were woven into the contrapuntal texture.
What adds to the further riddle of the work is the fact that the
composer did not indicate for what instrument or group of instruments
he intended it. In our day it has been scored by turns for a full
orchestra, a chamber orchestra, a string quartet, two pianos, and
the organ. It is difficult to believe that Bach did not intend this
colossal conception to be performed and that he projected it merely as
a theoretical problem or an exercise in what is called “eye music.”
It stands in relation to Bach’s other works something as the mystical
last quartets of Beethoven do to his more popular creations. It was
published posthumously and reissued by Philipp Emanuel Bach in 1752.
Yet four years later not more than thirty copies had been sold and
Philipp Emanuel, in disgust, sold the plates for old metal.