Part 3

Before the final decision was made, Bach made it his business to be on hand at Leipzig. When it became clear to Graupner that he was out of the running he heartily recommended Bach. The latter was requested, in order to prove his fitness for the post he sought, to conduct in the Church of St. Thomas on Good Friday, 1723, a work of his own composition, appropriate to the day. That work was the _Passion according to St. John_ which, though it may have been written hurriedly, is a creation of such transcendent grandeur that only the later _Passion according to St. Matthew_ can be said to excel it in lyric splendor and sublimity.

As soon as Graupner’s decision was known, Bach asked Prince Leopold for his official leave. The letter of dismissal was couched in most friendly and flattering terms. At Leipzig Bach executed a document binding himself to discharge all the duties of the Cantorship, undertaking to teach a variety of subjects and even to give private lessons in singing without extra pay. The only thing he balked at was taking charge of Latin classes. For this chore he agreed to provide a substitute at his own expense. Then he took leave of Prince Leopold, with whom he remained on terms of the closest friendship till the prince’s death five years later. On May 5, 1723 he received from the burgomaster of Leipzig the ceremonious notification of his unanimous appointment. On May 30 he conducted at the Church of St. Nicholas (which he served alternately with the Church of St. Thomas) the cantata _The Hungry Shall Be Fed_. Therewith he inaugurated his office.

BACH’S GREATER WORK

Bach settled in Leipzig at the age of thirty-eight. He remained there the rest of his life. True, he came and went, and he made journeys of one sort or another, but they were never far distant or protracted. In Leipzig he created his grandest, his most colossal, and also his profoundest and subtlest works. His duties were incredibly numerous and often heart-breakingly heavy. He was responsible, it has been said, “to all and to none.” Again and again he had the rector of the St. Thomas School, the city council, the church Consistory, and yet others about his ears. He had to look after the musical services in four churches, two of them the most important in the town. Under exasperating conditions he had to teach turbulent and ruffianly pupils. He had to combat official ill will and intrigue. For the performances he was obliged to conduct he had vocal and instrumental forces that strike us as laughably inadequate and were in numberless cases grossly unskilled. The demands on his physical and spiritual strength must have been appalling. Yet Bach appears to have had the resources and the resistance of a giant. We know that over and again his temper, his obstinate nature and inborn pugnacity were tried to the uttermost. But in the face of all irritations he was earning enough, his home life was comfortable, he met and entertained artists, he had the satisfaction of knowing that his sons could enjoy the educational advantages of Leipzig, and he gradually gathered about him a company of greatly gifted young students and devoted disciples.

In the course of years he shifted some of his most unsympathetic duties to other shoulders. How he could otherwise have written the gigantic amount of music he did is an unanswerable question. For consider: he came to Leipzig the composer of about thirty church cantatas. When he died in 1750 he had produced there 265 more. Of this staggering total (295) 202 have come down to us. As if this were not enough (these cantatas, incidentally, were week-to-week obligations), his years at Leipzig account for many secular cantatas, six motets, five masses (including the titanic one in B minor), the Passions according to St. John and St. Matthew (not to mention lost ones), the _Christmas Oratorio_, the resplendent _Magnificat_, the _Easter_ and _Ascension_ oratorios, besides clavier works like the _Italian Concerto_, the _Goldberg Variations_, the second book of the _Well-Tempered Clavier_, and an incredible mass of other things.

The rector of St. Thomas’ School during Bach’s first years in Leipzig was Johann Heinrich Ernesti, with whom Bach’s relations were cordial enough, though the rector was a slipshod disciplinarian. Matters remained pleasant enough under Johann Gesner, but presently the latter left St. Thomas to assume a more profitable post at Göttingen. His successor, Johann August Ernesti, quickly proceeded to stroke Bach’s fur the wrong way by declaring that altogether too much attention was given to the study of music. “So you want to be a pot-house fiddler,” he used to say to youths he found practising the violin. It was only a question of time when the surly new rector and the combustible Bach would come into collision.

What has been called the “battle of the Prefects” was long drawn out and bitter. The details need not detain us. Trouble was intensified by the appointment to a responsible position of a person named Krause, whom Bach had angrily described as “ein liederlicher Hund” (“a dissolute dog”). Things went from bad to worse. Bach accused the rector of usurping his functions. He wrote long, circumstantial letters setting forth his case to “their Magnificences,” the Burgomaster, the civic council, and other outstanding authorities. “Their Magnificences” replied with legalistic hair-splittings and things grew so violent that Bach in one case undertook to drive Krause from the choir loft. The lengthy series of undignified squabbles was finally brought to an end by Augustus the Strong, King of Poland, Saxony, “etc., etc., etc.” (to use Bach’s own designation). We are not certain that the composer obtained the satisfaction he demanded, but everyone seems to have tired of the interminable quarrel and was relieved to see it peter out.

Meanwhile, Bach had other worries and vexations. One of his sons, Gottfried Bernhard, proved as unstable as did Wilhelm Friedemann in a later day, but died before his financial misdeeds had ended in his open disgrace. Then the composer was made the target of attacks by a certain minor musician, one Scheibe, who criticized his works for what he called their “complexity and overelaboration.” Bach immortalized the fellow by satirizing him in the secular cantata, “Phoebus and Pan,” where Scheibe appears as the ignoramus Midas, adorned with a pair of ass’s ears!

In 1736 Augustus the Strong conferred upon Bach the title of Court Composer. The patent of Bach’s dignity was committed to the Russian envoy in Dresden, Carl Freiherr von Keyserling. He was a sufferer from chronic insomnia and it is to this circumstance that we owe one of Bach’s supreme works for the clavier—the so-called _Goldberg Variations_. To ease the torment of sleepless nights the Count had in his service a gifted clavecinist, Johann Gottlieb Goldberg, a pupil of Bach’s. While Bach was in the midst of his troubles with Ernesti, Keyserling commissioned him to write Goldberg “something soothing” to divert his wakefulness. Bach took a Sarabande melody he had copied into his wife’s _Notenbuch_ and used it as the basis of thirty variations. So delighted was Keyserling that he never wearied of listening to Goldberg play them and actually referred to them as “my Variations.” The Count, paradoxically enough, now had every reason to remain awake and enjoy the never-ending ingenuity and luxuriant fancy of these variations and the lively _Quodlibet_ toward the close, which recalls those boisterous medleys the Bach family of old used to improvise at its reunions. It is pleasant to record that Keyserling paid Bach liberally for “his” _Variations_.

ST. MATTHEW PASSION AND B MINOR MASS

On Good Friday, 1729, came the turn of St. Thomas’ Church to produce the music appropriate to the day. The result of this official duty was the _Passion according to St. Matthew_, for which Christian Friedrich Henrici, who wrote under the name of “Picander” and provided Bach with innumerable “librettos” for all purposes, compiled the text. The composer himself chose and distributed the chorales which punctuate the score. Bach was still at work on it when his former patron, Prince Leopold of Cöthen, died. Rather than prepare a special memorial piece he asked Picander to adapt appropriate words to parts of the music in the _St. Matthew_ and he performed them in Cöthen at his friend’s obsequies.

It is hard for us to believe that the _St. Matthew Passion_ did not receive on that far-off April 15, 1729, the tribute of wondering amazement which in the fullness of our hearts we bring it today. Yet we are told that the Leipzig worshipers considered its overwhelming dramatic pages “theatrical.” “God help us,” exclaimed a scandalized old dame, “’tis surely an opera-comedy!” We know that, judged by our standards, the first performance of the work must have been inefficient. Whether it was much better done at its repetition in 1736 may be doubted. Be this as it may, the _St. Matthew Passion_ passed into oblivion for nearly a hundred years. The glory of its rediscovery and its reawakening an exact century after its birth belongs to Felix Mendelssohn who, with its resuscitation at the Singakademie in Berlin, performed a service that would have shed immortal luster upon his name had he never done anything else.

The _St. Matthew Passion_, which is Bach at his most tender, intimate, lacerating and compassionate, stands, like the _B minor Mass_, Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony and Wagner’s _Tristan_, as one of the epochal feats of music, a lonely and incomparable achievement of the human spirit. Bach is believed to have written a Passion according to St. Mark, but not a trace of it survives. Another, according to St Luke, is extant but most certainly spurious. It is hard to believe he could ever have surpassed the lyric glory of the _St. Matthew_. For generations after its re-emergence musicians paid it everything from lip-service to ecstatic tribute. A complete, full-length performance of it was, however, a rarity and not even Mendelssohn had the courage to attempt it. In our own time we have finally come to the ways of wisdom, recognizing that the _St. Matthew Passion_ can produce its proper effect only when heard in its entirety, with never a bar or a phrase omitted. Those who have heard it thus are unlikely ever again to listen willingly to a cut version.

If anything can be said to rival the grandeur of the _St. Matthew Passion_ it is the _Mass in B minor_, the triumphal hymn of the church militant. This utterance of subduing and inscrutable majesty, which transcends the world to bestride the universe, was completed in 1733 and offered to Augustus the Strong as “an insignificant example of my skill in Musique”! Augustus the Strong, being occupied at the moment with problems of state, did not deign to notice Bach’s “insignificant” gesture. The composer never heard a performance of this gigantic creation, which soars to heights beyond human gaze and, in its proportions and technical details, is too vast to serve ordinary liturgical purposes. Yet here, as so often elsewhere, Bach followed the example of his age and employed several numbers from this Mass—with greater or lesser alteration—elsewhere. Even the triumphant _Osanna_, which expert criticism has pronounced a polonaise (apparently a subtle compliment paid to Augustus as King of Poland), and the ineffably touching _Agnus Dei_ may be encountered again in several of Bach’s cantatas.

VISIT TO FREDERICK THE GREAT AND LATER WORKS

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.

DEATH

Bach’s eyesight had long been failing. The strain to which he had mercilessly subjected it all his life, copying music as well as engraving elaborate compositions of his own, was now telling on it. By the end of 1749 his vision was in such a state that an English eye specialist, John Taylor, who later treated Handel but at this time chanced to be touring the continent, was summoned and operated on Bach about the beginning of 1750. It was of little avail. Prolonged confinement in a dark room, medicines and dressings told on the master’s ordinarily robust constitution. When his condition permitted and his sight temporarily improved he recklessly returned to his creative labors and also prepared for the engravers a set of eighteen choral-preludes for organ. But the end was at hand. Calling to his side his son-in-law, Johann Christoph Altnikol, Bach dictated to him the variation on the chorale _When We Are in Our Deepest Need_, prophetically bidding him alter the title to _With This Before Thy Throne I Come_. On July 18 he suffered an apoplectic stroke and lay for ten days in a desperate state. At nine in the evening on July 28, 1750, he passed from a world that could barely discern the shadow of his greatness.

It is excessive, perhaps, to maintain that for over three quarters of a century after his death Bach went into total eclipse. But he was disregarded if not forgotten. A handful of musicians, indeed, remembered him, among them some of his talented pupils. From time to time a few scattered works of his gained a limited circulation and came into worthy hands. Thus, in the seventeen-eighties several became known in Vienna, and at the Baron Van Swieten’s Mozart had occasion to acquaint himself with a few specimens, which powerfully stimulated his genius. Afterwards, in Leipzig, being shown the parts of one of the motets he exclaimed after closely studying them: “Here, at last, is something from which one can learn!” Beethoven, too, knew the _Well-Tempered Clavier_ and even went so far as to ask someone to procure him the _Crucifixus_ from the _B minor Mass_. His exclamation is well known: “Not Bach (brook) but Ocean should be his name!”

Yet, in the latter part of the eighteenth century it was chiefly Philipp Emanuel, not his father, to whom one referred when the mighty name was invoked. For the sons of Bach, not the mighty parent, embodied “the spirit of the time.” Even prior to his death Johann Sebastian had passed for outmoded and rather hopelessly “old hat.” Philipp Emanuel went so far as to call his father “a big wig stuffed with learning”; and such was the opinion shared by many of the young bloods in Leipzig and elsewhere. In a way this was not surprising. Bach represented a type of music whose complex profundities were giving place to homophony, entertainment and the graceful superficialities of the so-called “gallant style.” The new age was concerned with the problems of the sonata and the opera. Even if Bach’s scores—most of them unpublished—had been accessible, it is questionable whether the epoch we call “classical” would have been able to see him in a just perspective.

In due course the wheel was to turn full-circle and surely none would have been more amazed than Philipp Emanuel, Wilhelm Friedemann, and Johann Christian could they have known that one day their own works would be looked upon as museum pieces, while the creations of the “learned old perruque” had become the fountain of musical youth, the perpetual source of strength and of illimitable, self-renewing wonder. With Mendelssohn’s revival of the _St. Matthew Passion_ in 1829 there began that resurrection which went on increasingly through the nineteenth century, headed by the redemptive labors of the _Bach-Gesellschaft_, and which continues to gain momentum right through our own day. Boundless as the universe, timeless as eternity, modern as tomorrow, Bach remains from decade to decade what Richard Wagner once called him—“the most stupendous miracle in all music.”

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COMPLETE LIST OF RECORDINGS BY THE PHILHARMONIC-SYMPHONY SOCIETY OF NEW YORK

COLUMBIA RECORDS

LP—Also available on Long Playing Microgroove Recordings as well as on the conventional Columbia Masterworks.

_Under the Direction of Bruno Walter_

BARBER—Symphony No. 1, Op. 9 BEETHOVEN—Concerto for Violin, Cello, Piano and Orchestra in C major (with J. Corigliano, L. Rose and W. Hendl)—LP BEETHOVEN—Concerto No. 5 in E-flat major (“Emperor”) (with Rudolf Serkin, piano)—LP BEETHOVEN—Concerto in D major for Violin and Orchestra (with Joseph Szigeti)—LP BEETHOVEN—Symphony No. 1 in C major, Op. 21—LP BEETHOVEN—Symphony No. 3 in E-flat major (“Eroica”)—LP BEETHOVEN—Symphony No. 5 in C minor—LP BEETHOVEN—Symphony No. 8 in F major—LP BEETHOVEN—Symphony No. 9 in D minor (“Choral”) (with Elena Nikolaidi, contralto, and Raoul Jobin, tenor)—LP BRAHMS—Song of Destiny (with Westminster Choir)—LP DVORAK—Slavonic Dance No. 1 DVORAK—Symphony No. 4 in G major—LP MAHLER—Symphony No. 4 in G major (with Desi Halban, soprano)—LP MAHLER—Symphony No. 5 in C-sharp minor MENDELSSOHN—Concerto in E minor (with Nathan Milstein, violin)—LP MENDELSSOHN—Scherzo (from Midsummer Night’s Dream) MOZART—Cosi fan Tutti—Overture MOZART—Symphony No. 41 in C major (“Jupiter”), K. 551—LP SCHUBERT—Symphony No. 7 in C major—LP SCHUMANN, R.—Symphony No. 3 in E-flat major (“Rhenish”)—LP SMETANA—The Moldau (“Vltava”)—LP STRAUSS, J.—Emperor Waltz

_Under the Direction of Leopold Stokowski_

COPLAND—Billy the Kid (2 parts) GRIFFES—“The White Peacock,” Op. 7, No. 1—LP 7" IPPOLITOW—“In the Village” from Caucasian Sketches (W. Lincer and M. Nazzi, soloists) KHACHATURIAN—“Masquerade Suite”—LP MESSIAN—“L’Ascension”—LP SIBELIUS—“Maiden with the Roses”—LP TSCHAIKOWSKY—Francesca da Rimini, Op. 32—LP TSCHAIKOWSKY—Overture Fantasy—Romeo and Juliet—LP VAUGHAN-WILLIAMS—Greensleeves VAUGHAN-WILLIAMS—Symphony No. 6 in E minor—LP WAGNER—Die Walküre—Wotan Farewell and Magic Fire Music (Act III—Scene 3) WAGNER—Siegfried’s Rhine Journey and Siegfried’s Funeral March—(“Die Götterdämmerung”)—LP

_Under the Direction of Efrem Kurtz_

CHOPIN—Les Sylphides—LP GLINKA—Mazurka—“Life of the Czar”—LP 7" GRIEG—Concerto in A minor for Piano and Orchestra, Op. 16 (with Oscar Levant, piano)—LP HEROLD—Zampa—Overture KABALEVSKY—“The Comedians,” Op. 26—LP KHACHATURIAN—Gayne—Ballet Suite No. 1—LP KHACHATURIAN—Gayne—Ballet Suite No. 2—LP LECOQ—Mme. Angot Suite—LP PROKOFIEFF—March, Op. 99—LP RIMSKY-KORSAKOV—The Flight of the Bumble Bee—LP 7" SHOSTAKOVICH—Polka No. 3, “The Age of Gold”—LP 7" SHOSTAKOVICH—Symphony No. 9—LP SHOSTAKOVICH—Valse from “Les Monts D’Or”—LP VILLA-LOBOS—Uirapuru—LP WIENIAWSKI—Concerto No. 2 in D minor for Violin and Orchestra, Op. 22 (with Isaac Stern, violin)—LP

_Under the Direction of Charles Münch_