The Age of Voltaire by Will Durant
For the feasts of Christmas, Easter, and the Ascension Bach composed oratorios—massive songs for choruses, soloists, organ, or orchestra. The Weihnachts Oratorium, as he called the first, was performed in the Thomaskirche in six parts in six days between Christmas and Epiphany, 1734–35. Assuming full right to his own property, he took some seventeen arias or choruses from his earlier works, and wove them into a two-hour story of the birth of Christ. Some of the self-plagiarisms hardly harmonized with the new text, but one could forgive many faults in a composition that presented, almost at the outset, the chorus “How Shall I Fitly Meet Thee?”
Essentially the oratorios were combinations of cantatas. The cantata itself was a chorale interspersed with arias. Since the Lutheran service frequently invited cantatas, Bach composed about three hundred, of which some two hundred survive. Their intimate connection with the Lutheran ritual has limited their audience in our time, but many of the airs embedded in them have a beauty transcending any theology. At Weimar, in his twenty-sixth year (1711), Bach wrote his first outstanding cantata, “Actus tragicus,” mourning the tragedy of death but rejoicing in the hope of resurrection. In 1714–17 he commemorated the divisions of the ecclesiastical year with some of his finest cantatas: for the first Sunday in Advent, 1714, “Nun komm, du Heiden Heiland” (Now Come, Thou Saviour of the Heathen); for Easter of 1715, “Der Himmel lacht, die Erde jubilieret” (The Heavens Laugh, the Earth Rejoices), in which he used three trumpets, a kettledrum, three oboes, two violins, two violas, two violoncellos, a bassoon, and a keyboard continuo to help the chorus, and persuade the congregation, to shake with joy over the triumph of Christ; for the fourth Sunday in Advent, 1715, “Herz und Mund und Tat und Leben” (Heart and Mouth and Deed and Life), with the familiar lilting chorale and oboe obbligato, “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring”; and for the sixteenth Sunday after Trinity, 1715, “Komm, du süsse Todesstunde” (Come, Thou Sweet Hour of Death). At Leipzig he composed another paean to Christ’s resurrection—“Christ lag in Todesbanden” (Christ Lay in Death’s Dark Prison). And for the bicentennial (1730) of the Augsburg Confession he put Luther’s hymn “Ein’ feste Burg ist unser Gott” into the form of a cantata as powerful as the hymn, but perhaps too wildly furious to be a fit expression of faith.
Religious though he was, and wedded to piety by his tasks, Bach had in him a healthy sense of earthly joys, and could laugh as heartily as he could mourn. Secular elements crept into his religious compositions; so some strains from the operas of his time have been detected in the B-Minor Mass.58 He did not hesitate to lavish the resources of his art upon purely secular cantatas, of which twenty-one exist. He composed a “Hunt Cantata,” a “Coffee Cantata,” a “Wedding Cantata,” and seven cantatas for civic ceremonies. In 1725, for the birthday of Professor August Müller of Leipzig University, he wrote a full-length cantata, “Der zufriedengestellte Aeolus,” celebrating, perhaps with a sly metaphor, the liberation of the winds. In 1742 he gave his music to a frankly burlesque “Peasants’ Cantata,” with boisterous villagers dancing, drinking, and making love. After 1740 church music ceased to predominate in Leipzig, and public concerts increasingly presented secular compositions.
Before religious music entered into its decline Bach carried it to heights never reached before in Protestant lands. Among the many survivals of Catholic liturgy in the Lutheran service was the singing of the Magnificat on the Feast of the Visitation (July 2). This commemorated the visit of Mary to her cousin Elizabeth, when, according to the Gospel of St. Luke (i, 46–55), the Virgin uttered her incomparable song of thanksgiving:
Magnificat anima mea dominum,
Et exsultavit spiritus meus in Deo salutari meo,
Quia respexit humilitatem ancillae suae;
Ecce enim ex hoc beatam me dicent omnes generationes
—“My soul doth magnify the Lord, and my spirit hath rejoiced in God my Saviour, for He hath regarded the low estate of His handmaiden; behold, henceforth all generations will call me blessed.” Bach twice set these and subsequent lines to music; in the present form probably for the Christmas service at Leipzig in 1723. Here religion, poetry, and music all reach the same summit in a noble unity.
Six years later he touched those heights again and again in The Passion according to St. Matthew. To set to music the story of Christ’s sufferings and death had for centuries been part of Catholic ritual. Many Protestant composers in Germany had adapted the cantata form to this purpose; two of them had already used the Gospel of St. Matthew as their text.59 Bach wrote at least three Passions, following severally the narratives of John (1723), Matthew (1729), and Mark (1731). Of this last only fragments remain. The Johannespassion suffers from an illogical sequence of scenes and mingling of events, and from a Teutonic tendency to thunderous declamations; but the later parts subside to a tenderness and delicacy of feeling, a somber depth of contemplation, as moving as anything in music. The aria “Es ist vollbracht” (It Is Accomplished) is a profound rendering of the crucial event in the Christian story; there could be no greater test of a composer or a painter.
On Good Friday afternoon, April 15, 1729, in the Thomaskirche at Leipzig, Bach produced the greatest of his compositions. In this Matthäuspassion he had the advantage of a good German libretto, based on Matthew’s relatively full account, and arranged by a local litterateur, Christian Friedrich Henrici, pennamed “Picander.” Bach himself seems to have written the text for several of the choruses. Some have thought these choruses an unwarranted interruption of the Gospel narrative; but, like the chorus in a Greek play, they add to the drama by comment and interpretation, and their somber harmonies both express and purge our emotions—which are two functions of the highest art. Whereas so much of Bach’s music is the proclamation of skill or power, nearly all the Passion according to St. Matthew is the voice of sorrow, gratitude, or love—in the tender somber refrain of the recurring chorale, in the delicacy of the arias, in the haunting melodies of flutes singing as if from another world, in the reverent restraint of accompaniments winding around the words and amid the voices like some gold-and-silver illumination of a medieval missal. Here Bach opens to us depths of feeling and significance revealed elsewhere only in the original narrative itself. For to us in Western civilization this remains the most moving of all tragedies, since it does not merely represent the crucifixion of a noble idealist by our fellow men, but symbolizes also his daily crucifixion in Christendom, and the slow death, in many of us, of the faith that loved him as its God.
Bach almost succeeded in touching again, in the B-Minor Mass, the heights of emotion and artistry reached in the Matthäuspassion. But he could not feel so fully in harmony with his new enterprise. The Gospel Passion was the root and pivot of the Protestant creed, and Bach was irrevocably immersed in that creed. The Mass, however, was a Roman Catholic development; the Credo itself voiced unmistakable commitment to “unam sanctam catholicam et apostolicam ecclesiam.” Though the Lutheran ritual still retained much of the Roman Catholic Mass, this much was an uncomfortable vestige which had already discarded the Agnus Dei. In Bach’s time and churches the Mass was being part by part replaced by cantatas, and Latin remnants were being progressively eliminated from the liturgy. Bach’s Passions were sung in German; he had inserted four German hymns among the Latin verses of his Magnificat; but the Mass was so traditionally Latin that any German interpolations risked the reproach of incongruity. He had risked this challenge by writing four partial Masses with such German adjuncts, to an unsatisfactory result. He studied with care the Catholic Masses composed by Palestrina and other Italians. His connection with the Dresden court suggested that he might please the Catholic Elector-King by composing a Catholic Mass. When he sent to Augustus III (1733) an appeal for a court post and title, he included a Kyrie and a Gloria, which later became parts of the B-Minor Mass. The King apparently took no notice of them. Bach performed them in the churches of Leipzig; they were favorably received; and he proceeded (1733–38) to add a Credo, a Sanctus, an Osanna, a Ben
Shall we expose the hesitant reservations with which we admire this massive Mass in B Minor? Bach’s power overrides in many numbers the humility that should infuse an address to the Deity; sometimes it seems that he must have thought God hard of hearing, as having been so long silent in so many languages. The Kyrie drags along its rumbling and confused immensity, until at last we too cry “Eleison—have mercy!” The Gloria is often exquisite in its orchestral accompaniment, and moves on to a lovely aria, the “Qui sedes ad dexteram Patris”; but then it becomes raucous with horns in the “Quoniam tu solus sanctus,” and treats the “Cum Sancto Spiritu” with such staccato thunder as must have made the Holy Spirit tremble lest this mighty Teuton should take heaven by storm. Strange to say, the Credo—whose doctrinal niceties, dividing Christendom, do not naturally lend themselves to music—produces the supreme moments of the B-Minor Mass: the “Et incarnatus est” and the Crucifixus, where Bach catches again the hushed reverence of the St. Matthew Passion. Then the “Et resurrexit” brings out all the impatient fortissimi of trumpets and drums to shout and roar with jubilation over Christ’s conquest of death. The Benedictus calms us with its delicate tenor aria and its heavenly violin solo; the orchestral accompaniment to the Agnus Dei is profoundly beautiful; but the “Dona nobis pacem” is a proof of power rather than a gift of peace.——These are frank reactions of no critical worth. Only those can fully appreciate the B-Minor Mass who, to a Christian rearing that has not lost its emotional overtones, add the technical competence to discern and enjoy the structure, tonalities, and workmanship of the composition, the variety of resources used, the complexity of the orchestration, and the adaptation of musical motives to the ideas of the text.
Some professional musicians criticized Bach in his lifetime. In 1737 Johann Adolf Scheibe (later Kapellmeister to the King of Denmark) published an anonymous letter praising Bach as an organist, but suggesting that “this great man would be the admiration of all nations if he had more amenity, and if his works were not made unnatural by their turgid and confused character, and their beauty obscured by too much art.”60 A year later Scheibe renewed the attack: “Bach’s church pieces are constantly more artificial and tedious, and by no means so full of impressive conviction, or of such intellectual reflection, as the works of Telemann and Graun.”61 Scheibe had tried to obtain the post of organist at Leipzig; Bach had commented unfavorably on his test performance, and had satirized him in a cantata; there may have been some spite in Scheibe’s critique. But Spitta, the most zealous of Bach’s admirers, tells us that many of Scheibe’s contemporaries shared his views.62 Some of the critics may have represented the reaction of the new generation in Germany against the contrapuntal music that had reached in Bach an excellence beyond which nothing seemed possible except imitations; the twentieth century has seen a similar reaction against the symphony.
Scheibe would probably have preferred Handel to Bach. But Handel was so lost to England that Germans must have found it difficult to compare him with Bach. When this was done it was always to place Handel first.63 Beethoven expressed the German view when he said, “Handel is the greatest of us all”;64 but that was before Bach had been quite resurrected from oblivion. It is a pity that these two giants—the chief glories of music and of Germany in the first half of the eighteenth century—never met; they might have influenced each other beneficently. Both men stemmed from the organ, and were recognized as the greatest organists of their time; Bach continued to favor that instrument, while Handel, moving among divas and castrati, gave supremacy to the voice. Handel wedded Italian melody to German counterpoint, and opened a road to the future; Bach was the completion and perfection of the polyphonic, fugal, contrapuntal past. Even his sons felt that no further movement was open on that line.
Nevertheless there was something healthy in that old music, which men like Mendelssohn would recall with longing; for it was still infused with trustful faith, not yet disturbed by doubts that would reach to the heart of the consoling creed. It was the voice of a culture “in form,” as the consistency and culmination of a tradition and an art. It reflected the ornamental elaboration of baroque, and of a now unchallenged aristocracy. Germany had not yet entered its Aufklärung, nor heard any chanticleers of revolution. Lessing was still young; nearly every German took for granted the Nicene Creed; only Prince Frederick of Prussia preferred Voltaire. Soon the magnificent structure of inherited beliefs and ways was to be shaken almost to collapse by the agitations of innovating minds; that old ordered peace, that stability of classes, that marvelous and unquestioning faith, which had written the music of Bach, would pass away; and all things, even music, would change, always excepting man.
3. Coda
His isolation and domestication in Leipzig enabled him to inherit the past without resentment or revolt. His religious faith was, next to his music, his comfort and refuge. He had eighty-three volumes of theology, exegesis, or homilies in his library. To his masculine and orthodox Lutheranism he added some tinge of mysticism, perhaps from the Pietist movement of his time—even though he opposed Pietism as hostile to any church music but hymns. Most of his music was a form of worship. Usually he began to compose by praying “Jesu juva” (Jesus help me). He prefaced or ended nearly all his works by dedicating them to the honor and glory of God. He defined music as “eine wohlklingende Harmonie zur Ehre Gottes und zulässigen Ergötzung des Gemüths”—“an agreeable harmony for the honor of God and the permissible delight of the soul.”65
The portraits that survive show him in his later years as a typical German, broad-shouldered, stout, with full and ruddy face and majestic nose; add arched eyebrows that gave him an imperious, half-irritated, half-challenging look. He had a temper, and fought stoutly for his place and views; otherwise he was an amiable and kindly bear, who could unbend his dignity in humor when opposition ceased. He took no part in the social life of Leipzig, but he did not stint in hospitality to his friends, among whom he numbered many rivals like Hasse and Graun.66 He was a family man, doubly absorbed in his work and his home. He trained all his ten surviving children to music, and provided them with instruments; his house contained five claviers, a lute, a viola da gamba, and several violins, violas, and violoncellos. As early as 1730 he wrote to a friend: “I can already form a concert, both vocal and instrumental, from my own family.”67 We may see later how his sons carried on his art and surpassed his fame.
In his final years his eyesight failed. In 1749 he consented to an operation by the same doctor who had treated Handel with apparent success; this time it failed, and left him totally blind. Thereafter he lived in a darkened room, for the light that he could not see hurt his eyes. Like the deaf Beethoven, he continued to compose despite his affliction; now he dictated to a son-in-law the chorale prelude “Wenn wir in höchsten Nöten sind.” He had long prepared himself for death, had disciplined himself to accept it as, in its due time, a gift of the gods: so he composed the moving “Komm, Süsser Tod”:
Come, kindly Death, blessed repose,
Come, for my life is dreary,
And I of earth am weary.
Come, for I wait for thee,
Come soon and calm thou me;
Gently mine eyelids close;
Come, blest repose.68
On July 18, 1750, his eyesight seemed miraculously restored; his family gathered around in joy. But suddenly, on July 28, he died of an apoplectic stroke. In the hopeful language of the time, “he fell calmly and blessedly asleep in God.”69
After his death he was almost forgotten. Part of this oblivescence was due to the confinement of Bach to Leipzig, part to the difficulty of his vocal compositions, part to the decline of taste
Only his sons remembered his work. Two of them described it to Johann Nicolaus Forkel, director of music at the University of Göttingen. Forkel studied several of the compositions, became enthusiastic, and published in 1802 an eighty-nine-page biography which declared that
the works that Johann Sebastian Bach has left us are a priceless national heritage, of a kind that no other race possesses.… The preservation of the memory of this great man is not merely a concern of art, it is a concern of the nation.… This man, the greatest musical poet and the greatest musical theoretician that has ever existed, and that probably will ever exist, was a German. Be proud of him, O Fatherland!72
This appeal to patriotism opened Bach’s grave. Karl Zelter, director of the Singakademie in Berlin, bought the manuscript of the Matthäuspassion. Felix Mendelssohn, Zelter’s pupil, prevailed upon him to let him conduct, at the Singakademie, the first non-church performance of the composition (March 11, 1829). A friend of Mendelssohn remarked that the St. Matthew Passion had come to light almost exactly a hundred years after its first presentation, and that a twenty-year-old Jew was accountable for its resurrection.73 All the performers gave their services free. Mendelssohn added to the revival by including other works of Bach in his recitals. In 1830 he was for a time the guest of Goethe, who kept him busy playing Bach.