Part 1

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_Johann Sebastian Bach_

By HERBERT F. PEYSER

NEW YORK _Grosset & Dunlap_ PUBLISHERS

Copyright, 1945, by The Philharmonic-Symphony Society of New York under the title: _Johann Sebastian Bach and Some of his Major Works_

Copyright, 1950, by The Philharmonic-Symphony Society of New York

Printed in the United States of America

_Foreword_

Compared with the unimaginable richness of his inner life as the overpowering volume and splendor of his works reveal it, Bach’s day-to-day existence seems almost pedestrian. It had none of the drama and spectacular conflicts that marked the careers of men like Mozart, Beethoven, and Wagner. His travels, far less extensive than those of his great contemporary, Handel, were confined to areas of a few hundred miles at most in central and northern Germany and were undertaken chiefly for sober professional purposes. The present volume, which advances no claim whatever to any new or original slant, aims to do no more than furnish for those who read and run a meager background of a few isolated highspots in Bach’s outward life and a momentary sideglance at a tiny handful of his supreme creations. Its object will have been more than accomplished if in any manner it stimulates a radio listener to deepen his acquaintance with Bach’s immeasurable art.

H. F. P.

_Johann Sebastian Bach_

In families of unusual longevity and fruitfulness, observed Goethe, Nature has a way of bringing forth in her own good time one figure who unites all the greatest and most distinctive qualities of his various forebears. The poet of _Faust_ alluded to this mystic process of genealogy with reference to Voltaire. Actually, he might with quite as much reason have been speaking of Bach. For Bach combined and brought into sharpest focus the musical talents and predilections of almost three antecedent generations, as well as their physical and moral sturdiness, their spirituality, their robust clannishness. Yet the miracle of Johann Sebastian Bach transcends even this amazing fusion of ancestral traits. It is hardly excessive to look upon him as the consummation and fulfillment of all the musical trends that went before him and, in a manner of speaking, the origin of all those that came after.

There is probably nothing in the history of music to compare with Bach’s ancestry from the standpoint of fertility, complexity, and endurance. There can be no question of tracing here its multiple ramifications and cross currents. Enough that we obtain our earliest glimpse of Sebastian’s great-great-great-grandfather as far back as the latter part of the sixteenth century. The direct line of the great composer did not die out till 1845. Seven generations thus stretch between the extremes of this genealogical phenomenon. The Thuringian countryside around Arnstadt, Erfurt, Wechmar, Eisenach, and other communities of the region cradled the different branches of the family. Two traits, at least, all of them had in common—their love of music and their attachment to one another. Some became organists, some cantors, some town musicians, and their devotion to their craft was so proverbial that, for years after, all musicians in the town of Erfurt came to be known as “the Bachs” even if totally unrelated. The real Bachs felt each other’s company so indispensable that, if the members of the family could obviously not all live in the same place, they made it a point to hold periodic reunions. After prayers and hymns they spent the day in feasting and jolly recreation. One of their favorite amusements was to extemporize choruses out of popular songs and these lusty medleys (or, as they called them, “quodlibets”) they would bellow for hours on end with great good humor, while the listeners laughed till their sides ached.

SON OF A COURT MUSICIAN

Johann Sebastian Bach was born in Eisenach on March 21, 1685, according to the Old Style reckoning, which is ten days behind the Gregorian calendar. His father, Johann Ambrosius Bach, had married an Elisabeth Lämmerhirt nearly twenty years earlier in Erfurt, where he was town player. Probably he became Court musician to Duke Johann Georg, at Eisenach, whither he had removed. His plea to return to Erfurt was disallowed by his noble employer and so it came that Johann Sebastian saw the light in Eisenach. Not, however, in the rambling house on the Frauenplan as traditionally supposed. Comparatively recent investigation has shown that the actual birthplace is a short distance away, in a street named after Martin Luther. A rather unromantic looking dwelling, it was occupied till just before the Second World War by a barber.

There is a certain symbolic propriety that Bach should have been born in Eisenach rather than in the more prosaic Erfurt. Eisenach had powerful religious and romantic associations. Luther had been entertained by Frau von Cotta in one of its gabled houses while the Reformer was still a boy. High above the city towered the Wartburg, where Luther translated the Bible, threw his inkwell at the Devil, and composed some of his sturdiest chorales. Up there, too, had dwelt the saintly Elisabeth, while in its halls knightly Minnesingers had competed in tourneys of song. In the remoter distances rose the fabled Hörselberg, where according to legend Dame Venus held her unholy court and ensnared the souls of unwary men. Just what impression these things made on the child Bach we cannot say. At any rate he could not remain untouched by the currents of music. The boy had a pretty treble voice and at the local school he sang in the so-called Currende choir, making a few pennies now and then on feasts and holidays, at weddings and at funerals, in company with his schoolmates. He may even have sat in the organ loft of St. George’s Church, pulling out the heavy stops for his uncle, Johann Christoph Bach, who had been the organist there for many years.

Nevertheless, we have no elaborate record of Johann Sebastian’s boyhood. His father, indeed, taught him the rudiments of violin and viola, and Terry credits the youngster with “patient concentration” in the pursuit of these instrumental studies. We do know that he became before long an uncommonly proficient violinist but took particular delight in playing viola when he participated in ensemble work. Like Mozart in after years, the youthful Bach loved to find himself “in the middle of the harmony.”

EARLY YEARS AT SCHOOL

At the Eisenach “Gymnasium” he learned reading and writing, catechism, Biblical history, and the Psalms. And when only a little over eight he was fairly immersed in Latin conjugations and declensions. In Eisenach was laid the foundation of that learning which distinguished his whole life, though he never enjoyed the advantage of a college education such as he afterwards gave his famous sons. Yet his school attendance at this early stage showed a good deal of irregularity, due, perhaps, to illness or bereavement. He was only nine when he lost his mother. In a short time his father married again but his death terminated that union scarcely four months later.

The Eisenach household having broken up, Johann Sebastian was sent in 1695 to the home of his married brother, Johann Christoph, who lived at Ohrdruf, some thirty miles away. A pupil of the great Johann Pachelbel, the Ohrdruf Bach functioned as organist at the Church of St. Michael’s. Johann Christoph, an accomplished musician, lost no time in giving his young brother his first lessons on the clavier. Presumably he supplemented them with instruction on the organ. In any case the boy seems to have had access to a large quantity of good music. He was an extraordinarily capable student with a voracious appetite for musical learning and no sooner had he mastered one difficult task than he plagued his brother for another more difficult still.

At this period occurred that celebrated incident for which Johann Christoph has been very harshly judged by posterity. A collection of clavier pieces by masters like Froberger, Kerll, Pachelbel, Böhm and Buxtehude, lay in a book case with a latticed front. Johann Sebastian’s pleas to study them met with a stern refusal. So the youngster resorted to stratagem. By thrusting his hands through the lattice and rolling up the music he managed to extract it when his brother’s back was turned. Not being allowed a candle he copied out the various works by moonlight, a job which occupied him for six months and probably laid the foundation for those eye troubles which toward the last were to rob him of his sight. Nor did he enjoy the fruit of his labors. Johann Christoph found the copy and promptly confiscated it. Before blaming him, as is usually done, it may be well to reflect that Bach’s brother was not necessarily moved by an impulse of cruelty but more probably felt the need of curbing somewhat an audacious and immature young genius, who threatened to get out of hand.

During the five years he spent in Ohrdruf Bach attended the town school which enjoyed an unusually high reputation throughout Thuringia. His studies, naturally, ranged much further afield than at Eisenach and his scholastic progress appears to have been rapid. His high, clear voice and instinctive musicianship not only assured him a place (and rather substantial rewards) in the chorus of the institution but in proper season gained him the friendly interest of Elias Herder, a young musician summoned to replace Johann Arnold, a highly unpopular teacher who had been dismissed as a “pest of the school, a scandal of the church and a cancer of the community.” Through the good offices of Herder young Bach found an opportunity to join the select choir (_Mettenchor_) of St. Michael’s Church in Lüneburg, more than two hundred miles to the north.

STUDENT AT LÜNEBURG

The time was ripe, at all events, for Johann Sebastian to leave Ohrdruf. His brother’s family was increasing apace and the organist’s quarters had been growing uncomfortably cramped. Furthermore, Bach was now fifteen, an age at which boys were expected to start earning their living. So the chance to remove to Lüneburg proved a stroke of luck.

But there were more fascinating advantages to it than even the possibilities of bed and board. Easily accessible were several sources of musical and cultural inspiration. In Lüneburg itself the Church of St. John had as its organist none less than Georg Böhm, one of the outstanding personalities in German music of the era preceding the full unfoldment of Bach’s grandeur. Thirty miles off lay Hamburg, which harbored the venerable master of the organ, Adam Reinken; and the operatic life of that city had burst into bloom under the leadership of Reinhard Keiser. Up in the direction of the Danish frontier the town of Lübeck sheltered still another giant, the organist Dietrich Buxtehude. Sixty miles in an easterly direction lay Celle, whose Duke, Georg Wilhelm, had married a beautiful and spirited French Huguenot, Eleanore Desmier d’Olbreuse, and turned his court into a miniature Versailles, where French musicians in particular were royally welcomed. Naturally, a little opera house formed part of this island of Gallic charm, elegance and culture, enlivened by a continual succession of ballets, operas, and other musical diversions. Whether Bach obtained admission to the auditorium or whether he was smuggled into the orchestra pit by some friendly player we do not know. But of one thing we are certain: his love for the music of the French masters and his intimate acquaintance with it was in large degree the result of what he heard and learned at the gracious ducal court of Celle.

Bach spent almost three years in Lüneburg, where St. Michael’s Church and its conventual buildings were his home. He continued his studies at the _Partikular Schule_ of the church, sang with the _Mettenchor_ and was a member of the _Chorus Symphoniacus_, of which the choir formed the nucleus. He developed, gradually, into a capable organist and came under the healthy influence of Georg Böhm at the Church of St. John, whose impress can be detected in some of Bach’s early organ works. Böhm was a pupil of Adam Reinken and undoubtedly urged the young man to hear the aged master, though one can readily imagine that Bach would sooner or later have sought out Reinken of his own volition. The summer vacation of 1701 found him traveling afoot to Hamburg. The patriarch had been organist of St. Katherine’s Church half his life and though now nearly eighty continued to be famous for his virtuosity and his extraordinary skill in improvisation. Nor was it his executive powers alone which captured his young listener. Reinken’s compositions fascinated him and their influence is perceptible in certain of Bach’s clavier pieces twenty years later.

This first trip to Hamburg was by no means Bach’s last. And thereby hangs a tale—a fish story, if you will, but nevertheless true and related a number of times by Bach himself. Tired and hungry on his long jaunt back to Lüneburg, the boy sat down for a moment’s rest outside the kitchen of an inn whose open windows exhaled tempting savors. Suddenly there fell at his feet the heads of two herrings, a fish prized as a great delicacy in his native Thuringia. Eagerly picking them up he found inside of each a Danish ducat obviously put there by some kindly soul who had caught sight of the famished young wanderer. Whether or not Bach ate the heads, he suddenly found himself with money enough for an ample dinner and sufficient also to defray the expenses of another visit to Hamburg.

ORGANIST AT ARNSTADT

It may be taken for granted that Bach planned an eventual journey to Lübeck to hear the mighty Buxtehude. In any case this trip was deferred. Hard as he had studied at Lüneburg and greatly as his musical powers had grown, it was becoming clear that he must put his talents to practical use. He had been earning a living of a sort with his singing and likewise as a violin and viola player. But his voice had changed and was no longer of great use as a source of revenue. His powers as an organist, on the other hand, were expanding prodigiously, a fact which had become known not only in Lüneburg but far away in his native Thuringia. He began to long for an organ post of his own and the steady income it would assure.

Late in 1702 the news spread that a new organ was being completed at the Church of St. Boniface in Arnstadt, one of the ancestral seats of the Bach family and rich in its traditions. Doubtless Arnstadt had its eyes on the promising disciple of Böhm and Reinken, young as he was. Bach, too, felt it wise to watch the situation at close range. So he returned to Thuringia. The new instrument of St. Boniface was not ready nor was it completed till the summer of 1703. Sangerhausen offered a possibility, but that was thwarted by the machinations of high-placed people with influence.

Yet by Easter Bach found himself enrolled in the service of Duke Johann Ernst, brother of the reigning Duke Wilhelm Ernst of Weimar. His stay in Weimar on this occasion was brief though it seems to have earned him some honors, including the useful if misleading title of “Princely Saxon Court Organist.” But scarcely three months later he was back in Arnstadt, where the St. Boniface organ was ready for its test. That Bach should have been entrusted with so responsible a task indicates how high must have been his reputation already. He examined the instrument, reported favorably on it and, to demonstrate his satisfaction, played an inaugural recital which impressed the Consistory to such a degree that on August 9 he was officially appointed organist.

It was not long before he was at odds with the authorities. He had, in addition to his organ playing, the disagreeable job of training the choristers, a shiftless, good-for-nothing rabble from the local school who, as the city council complained, “behave in a scandalous manner, resort to places of ill repute and do other things we shrink from naming.” Bach, for his part, had already developed that obstinate, uncompromising nature that grew more violent the older he became and brought him into no end of difficulties throughout his life. When his mind was fixed on achieving a certain end nothing would swerve him from it. He could be as hardheaded and intransigent a fighter for what he considered his rights and as ruthless in combating opposition as were Beethoven and Wagner in later generations.

His extraordinary talents did not prevent him from attracting a number of enemies which progressively increased. One of the most bitter of these was a bassoonist named Geyersbach whom Bach on more than one occasion had to reproach for his musical incompetence. Matters came to a head when the organist, escorting a lady home one night, was set upon by the ruffian accompanied by a brawling rout of students who attempted to cane him. As tough a fighter as the best of them, Bach took to his sword when Geyersbach shouted, “Hundsfott” (“Cowardly rascal”), and with a roar of “Zippelfagottist” laid about him so furiously that the “nanny-goat bassoonist” escaped manhandling only by the prompt help of his cronies. The incident caused considerable agitation among the townsfolk.

Scarcely had it subsided than Bach upset the Consistory by requesting a month’s leave to make that pilgrimage to Buxtehude in Lübeck which he had been unable to carry out at Lüneburg not long before. He secured as a substitute in his absence a cousin, Johann Ernst, whose efficiency he guaranteed. Grudgingly the authorities complied, unwilling to risk an issue with so valuable, if testy, a servant. While Bach did not make the whole journey of three hundred miles on foot he undoubtedly walked a fair part of the way. He timed his trip to arrive in Lübeck for Buxtehude’s famous _Abendmusicen_, at the Marienkirche, which had been celebrated for a generation and which were continued under the veteran’s successors until the nineteenth century. These evening musicales, in which instrumentalists as well as choristers participated, were carried out on a scale larger than anything to which the young organist had been accustomed. One thing this Lübeck visit did was to give Bach a heightened idea of music in its relation to public worship, an idea he strove to carry out for the rest of his life, but realized only fully when he was at the height of his tremendous powers in Leipzig.

INSPIRATION FROM THE MASTER, BUXTEHUDE

One may be sure that the immense inspiration he received from Buxtehude was as potent and influenced the current of his genius as fully as had Böhm and Reinken a little earlier. That he exhibited his own powers on the Lübeck organ and profited by the example and suggestions of Buxtehude is clear. Forgetting the flight of time and his obligations in Arnstadt, Bach let the winter months slip by. It is even possible that he weighed the question of stepping into the shoes of the seventy-year-old master. But there was a condition attached to that which made him hesitate as it had Handel and Mattheson before him. Whoever wanted Buxtehude’s job had to take Buxtehude’s daughter in the bargain. The lady, it appears, was not especially well favored and she was all of twenty-eight—scarcely the most alluring prospect to a young man only twenty, and one which involved the further possibility of having to house the father-in-law for as long as the Lord might choose to spare him!

The year of 1706 had dawned before Bach turned reluctantly toward Arnstadt once more. He took occasion to make a few side trips on the way, stopping over at Hamburg and Lüneburg to greet old associates and friends. By the end of January he was back in the organ loft of St. Boniface. His return was not exactly a love feast. The congregation and Consistory were looking for a capable, mild-mannered organist, not a disquieting virtuoso. But in a relatively short period Bach had become just that. He was plainly above the musical heads of the townsfolk. There were murmurings of discontent which were duly brought to his attention. He paid not the slightest heed, till finally the Consistory proceeded to lay down the law. The authorities had quite a number of bones to pick with their refractory young genius. They had given him a leave of one month, not of four. He answered that he imagined his substitute was competent to fill his shoes for the extra time. Far from being placated the worthy elders then reproached him for accompanying the church hymns with all sorts of brilliant and audacious improvisations, full of unexpected harmonies and variations which left the congregation groping blindly for the melody. When people had remonstrated that his preludes, interludes and postludes were too long, he had gone to the other extreme and made them too short. And there was worse to come: when he was practicing at St. Boniface, people had been scandalized to overhear the voice of a “strange maiden,” singing to his accompaniment! Such things could not be tolerated any more than an organist whose relations with his choir were so bad that he refused to rehearse it. So he could take his choice—either do what the Consistory required or else....

Bach did neither one thing nor the other but lived for a while in an uneasy state of compromise. He was not in the least minded to renounce the company of the “strange maiden”—probably the same one he was seeing home the night Geyersbach and his rowdies attacked him. She was none other than his cousin, Maria Barbara, and daughter of Bach’s uncle Michael from nearby Gehren. It was not long before he proposed to the musically talented girl and was accepted—the first case of intermarriage between two of the Bach stock. In the fullness of time she became the mother of two of Bach’s most gifted sons.

We have not alluded so far to the compositions which had their origin during Bach’s Arnstadt sojourn nor are they, obviously, among his most memorable. One, however, occupies a place of its own among his clavier works. It is the famous _Capriccio on the Departure of a Beloved Brother_, a piece of program music clearly based on the example of the _Bible Sonatas_ of Johann Kuhnau. The occasion of the _Capriccio_ was the forthcoming journey of Bach’s brother, Johann Jakob, to take service with Charles XII of Sweden, then campaigning in Poland. The work, in four movements, is of a pricelessly humorous character. The first part represents the traveler’s friends, a nervous company apparently, who try to dissuade him from an adventure which they regard as full of hazards. In the second movement one person after another points out the assorted dangers he anticipates and does so in a fugue of delightfully comic effect. This is followed by a slow movement, _Adagissimo_, built over a pathetic ground bass, in which sobbing chromatic phrases lament the inability of the friends to change the wanderer’s mind. As they groan and wail Bach drowns out their noisy sorrows in a lively fugue on the postillion’s horn; and the “beloved brother” is off on what promises to be a wholly pleasant and profitable journey.