Bach Lays The Foundation Of Modern Music
1723
Date:2004
Our first recognized triumph in the marvelous modern development of
music, the first great masterpiece which taught the world the beauty of which
the art is capable, was Bach's Das Wohltemperirte Clavier. The production
marks, therefore, "the first great climax of musical art."
Like the other arts and sciences, the story of music is that of a slow
building up. Music "divinest of arts, exactest of sciences" - for music is
both an art and a science - has developed from the crude two - or three-note
scale melody, without semitones, to the elaborate, ornate lucubrations of the
modern oratorio, opera, or symphony. From the beginning the "half-sister of
Poetry" has been the handmaid of Religion. The ancients ascribed miraculous
properties to music. Of the actual system of the Egyptians our information is
very scant; but we learn from the monuments depicting the number and variety
of their instruments that they had advanced from childish practice to
orchestration and harmony. According to Plato, "In their possession are songs
having the power to exalt and ennoble mankind." The harp is undoubtedly of
Egyptian origin.
In Israel plastic art was discouraged; the natural emotion of the people
was, therefore, expressed in poetry and music. Miriam, the daughter of
Jephthah, Deborah, and later the Virgin, whose grand chant, the Magnificat, is
ever being upraised from Christendom's heart, portray the deep emotional
temperament of this great religious race.
The artistic standard of the music of the Greeks was far behind that of
their observation and intelligence in other matters. Their theories on the
combinations, of which they never made use, and analysis of their scales show
much ingenuity, but their accounts are so vague that one cannot get any clear
idea of what these were really like. When art is mature, people do not tell
of city walls being overthrown, of savage animals being tamed - as run the
stories of Orpheus and Amphion. One Greek there was, Pythagoras, who
discerned the association between the distant music of the spheres with the
seven notes of the scale. "He discovered the numerical relation of one tone
to another." ^1 It was about the time of Pythagoras that a scheme of
tetrachords which did not overlap was adopted.
[Footnote 1: Naumann.]
In Persia and Arabia was obtained a perfect system of intonation. The
Chinese system is minutely exact in theory, bombastic in fancy. The Hindus
sedulously avoided applying mathematics to their scales. The development of
the scale is shown in the construction of the ancient Greek scale, the modern
Japanese, and the aboriginal Australian scale, and the phonographed tunes of
some of the Red Indians of North America. Here a reference must be made to
the scale of the Scotch bagpipe, a highly artificial product, without
historical materials available to assist in unravelling its development. It
comprises a whole diatonic series of notes, and modes may be selected
therefrom.
But it is to Rome that we owe the seed of our modern methods of
treatment. The Netherland school had been highly developed there by a long
line of distinguished masters, who paved the way for the gifted Palestrina,
who exalted polyphony to a secure eminence equal to that attained by the arts
of painting and architecture. He brought forth a perception of the needs
which music suffered, adding an earnestness and science to a profound quality
of simpleness and grace. It was between 1561 and 1571 that his genius
mellowed and his style took on those characteristics upon which was based the
future music of the Catholic Church. It was while he was Maestro at the
Vatican that he submitted to the Church the famed Missa Papae Marcelli, which
determined the future of the church music.
The culmination of art in music is strikingly shown in the subjoined
article from the pen of that great authority, Mr. H. Tipper.
The first tonal prophet and poet of the modern era, the era in which
reason made tremendous protest against mere dogma, and the best religious
instincts of human nature called imperatively for emancipation and for nearer
individual contact with God, is Johann Sebastian Bach. We look dazzled at the
brilliant victories of the Italian Renaissance, and amid tumultuous beauty run
riot with imagination we hear the voice of Savonarola at the close of the
period uttering his lamentations. The great Italian reformer saw and felt
that in his own day and in his own country the glory and beauty of the
movement had vanished in sensuality; that hardness of heart and indifference
to primary human needs had diverted the waters of the Renaissance from their
main fertilizing channel.
The deep need of the epoch was social, not mental, sociality in its
widest sense: the right of the individual; his inherent majesty which the
accident of birth should not be able to impair - this and this only was the
natural outcome of the new birth which came to humanity; this and this only
was the sequel which German profundity and integrity, not Italian brilliancy
and carelessness, placed before the mind of Europe.
The Reformation, then, this Protestantism, is distinctive of the new era.
It was a protest, not only religious, as the word is usually applied, but
scientific. It is the basis in the modern Western world of those laws of
criticism which have submitted, or will submit, everything to searching
analytical investigation, and as in the case of the natural world, so in the
moral and ethical, men, by the light of revealed truth, or by those higher
instincts of nobility which emanate from the Eternal Love, seek to apply to
the reformation of society those principles of love, justice, and recompense
which each would wish applied individually to self.
As an inspirer of thought and man of action, the world has seen few such
men as Luther. His genius, as it were, discovered and laid bare the
inexhaustible treasures of the German language; his sympathy and genial
humanity sent a thrill of song, poetical and tonal, throughout the fatherland.
He was the great awakener of German emotion. To Luther, a man who cared not
for song was without the pale of humanity. But his enthusiasm was practical.
In the church, as we have seen, he gathered from all sources whatever was of
the best, and gave it to the people. In the schools he advocated the cause of
song. In the streets the people needed not advocacy. Wherever two or three
gathered together, song was in the midst of them, and it is not too much to
say that the Lutheran hymn was the saviour of Germany poetry and a font of
German song. In the seventeenth century there was in Germany little poetry
worthy of the name save that inspired by the devotional character of Luther's
genius. His heir and successor in the realm of tone was Sebastian Bach.
True, two centuries had elapsed between the death of the great reformer
in morals and the birth of the great reformer in tone; but the work of the
latter could not have been without the former. The chorale was introduced by
Luther; it was perfected by Bach. To what other influence than the Lutheran
can we attribute the growth of Bach? Are there any other resources of German
art and thought which can account for the advent of the great musician? In
art Duerer stood by the side of Luther. In him again we find a man. Thought,
thought! help me to express my native thought. Teach me to express in my art
the reality of Nature, its wonderful beauty, thrice beautiful to me an artist;
the pathos of life, its realism, far apparently from the ideal, yet most
precious to me as a man. This was the aim of Duerer, and he seems a man after
the Lutheran mould.
The aim of Duerer may be found in some respects in Bach's work, because
both men were men of integrity, great and patient in soul. This, of course,
is not to say that Bach was affected by Duerer, but is merely an endeavor to
find what was noblest in Germany preceding Bach. One more allusion. In
Bach's art we trace the mystic; not shadowy outpourings of hysterical emotion,
but beauties of eternal verities disclosed in vision - faint, it is true - to
none save the noblest of mortals.
One such kindred spirit preceding Bach was Boehme, the father of German
mysticism, the poor cobbler, whose soul lay far away in the regions of
celestial love, and whose utterance is of the realities thereof. These three
men, Luther, Duerer, Boehme, are those to whom the great musician Bach is
akin, but he is truly the child of the former, and the father of the highest
aspirations in instrumental music.
For confirmatory evidence we have only to trace the growth of the Bach
family. The progenitor, Veit Bach, was born at Wechmar, near Gotha, in 1550,
and, following his trade as a baker, settled, after considerable wanderings,
near the Hungarian frontier. Veit Bach was a stanch Lutheran. Whether the
Lutheran services had given him a love of music, or whether they had only
quickened a constitutional sympathy, it is impossible to say. Certain it is
that he was passionately fond of music, and, cast for a period among a
population whose emotions found constant and ready utterance in tone, he
brought back to Wechmar, whither he had returned on account of religious
persecution, his beloved cythringa and the art of playing it. There is
evidence that this knowledge afforded him consolation and enjoyment in the
quiet monotony of his life. While the mill was working, Veit Bach was often
playing; and doubtless the peculiar charm and rhythm of old Hungarian
melodies, songs of the people, which he had learned from the wandering
gypsies, recurred to him, as well as those grand devotional hymns on which he
had been nourished from childhood. We have said that Veit Bach was a stanch
Lutheran. From father to son through generations, the Lutheran doctrine, pure
and undefiled, had been handed down, accompanied by the musical gift, until
both, uniting in Sebastian Bach, born at Eisenach in 1685, served to glorify
the Lutheran chorale and the art which perfected it.
Again, the traditions of the great reformer must have been imbibed by
Sebastian Bach from infancy. Surrounding his native town lay a circle of
wooded heights, from one of which arose the Wartburg, that illustrious shrine
of the German nation whither in mediaeval and modern times her sons have
repaired to exhibit and replenish their lamp of genius. There the
minne-singers had gathered in contest a song; thither as a modern Elijah came
the great monk, weary of soul, yet whose immortal genius unfolded the page of
Sacred Writ; and down the woodclad slope came issuing the melody of the Hebrew
psalmist, translated into German speech and entering into German hearts,
mingled with the narrative of the Redeemer's passion lit by awful and solemn
glory of Eternal Love. Who shall say that young Back knew not of these
things? Who will contend that, when his genius matured and ripened, the
immortal tones in which the eternal passion was portrayed owed nothing to this
sympathy of association, this spiritual life with the great reformer born two
centuries before?
Yet once more. The Bach family was full of affection and sympathy one
toward the other. Each year witnessed a reunion of the various members of the
family scattered throughout Thuringia, and each came bearing the gift of
music. As a child among the elders we can imagine how the young Sebastian
revered his uncles, Johann Christopher and Michael Sebastian, in whom were
conserved and developed the Lutheran tonal principles and traditions; how he
somewhat feared the austere character of his elder brother, Johann
Christopher, to whose charge he was intrusted upon the death of his father.
But we need not imagine how the soul of the young boy was filled with
inexpressible yearning for the art of music. We know that it was so. His
brother, who instructed him, gauged not the nature of the lad. Often and
often did the boy's wistful eyes and loving heart covet the possession of a
manuscript book kept by his brother in strict reserve, containing a priceless
collection of compositions by the great German masters and mediators. The boy
extracted them from resting-place, and we see the young tone-prophet striving
to master the art-forms of Reinken, Buxtehude, Frescobaldi, Kerl, Froberger,
and Pachelbel, endeavoring to wrest from them their style and inmost meaning
by the light of the moon's pale rays, which led, alas! in after-years to
blindness.
What revelations came to the soul of the young musician we know not. But
his genius thus directed knew no pause until it had won forever the freedom of
the tonal art, until the last fetter of conventionally had been removed, until
in all dignity and beauty music came forth, henceforth to comfort and solace
the human heart. But of this anon. We trace the young boy to school; we see
him a chorister in the choir of St. Michael's, Lueneburg. Here he entered the
gymnasium, studying Greek and Latin, organ- and violin-playing. Here, too, he
exhausted the treasures of the musical library. But at Hamburg the great
Reinkin was giving a series of organ recitals. Thither young Bach repaired.
At Celle he became acquainted with several suites and other compositions of
celebrated French masters. In 1703 he became violinist in the Saxe-Weimar
orchestra, and in the same year, aged eighteen, he was appointed organist at
the new church at Arnstadt, where other members of his family had held similar
positions. Thus already we have ample evidence both of intense activity and
catholicity of taste, and now, a mere youth, he enters upon his life-work: the
perfecting of church music, especially the chorale form, and the emancipation
of the art from any influence whatsoever other than derives from contact with
nature and emotion. If we ask what equipment he had for his task, we answer:
enthusiasm, so deep, so tempered in all its qualities, that, though in a few
years he became the ablest performer of his time upon the harpsichord and
organ, yet never once is the term "virtuoso" associated in our thought with
the purity of aspiration which characterized him. His enthusiasm was
religious, deep-seated, his vision far and wide, and no temporary triumph, no
sunlit cloud of fame, could satisfy the imperative needs of his inmost nature.
And this nature was calm, with the calmness of strength and with that tender
purity and homely virtue which characterized the surroundings of his boyhood.
This enthusiasm, this religious instinct, for what was noblest and best,
led him early, as we have seen, to seek inspiration from the works of men who
combined in their compositions all that the great previously existing schools
had taught. Bach was never weary of learning if perchance he could attain a
more lucid or more beautiful expression of his thought. We have, then, this
enthusiasm, this capacity for at once discerning what was best. Add to it one
more quality - the religious, in its best sense, which young Bach possessed to
the uttermost, the feeling that his art was but the medium of expression for
the deep things of God - and we have the equipment with which the young
musician started on his quest.
Young Bach had received no great instruction in the schools of
composition. That which he had he gathered with a catholicity of taste from
all renowned masters. Not one of his immediate ancestors had stirred beyond
the confines of their simple home. Well for him was it so. No late
meretricious Neapolitan tinsel could exist in the quiet, calm beauty of his
Thuringian dwelling-place. Nature lay before him. "Come, she said, "seek to
understand me. I have treasures that ye know not of, treasures that can only
be gathered by the pure in heart and patient in spirit. Here around you, in
your quiet German home, are the elements of all your strength. Here there is
no distraction. Riches shall not allure you. Honorable poverty shall
minister to your purity"; and young Bach knew that the voice was true, and,
heeding it, there came to him likewise an inner voice, relating spiritual
things, even as the voice of Nature related natural things.
Comprehending, then, his character, we pass on. His work at this period
was formal. He felt, but could not express. But at Lubeck the noble-hearted
Buxtehude was endeavoring to bring home to the hearts of the people the
mission of music. Bach went thither. Fascinated by the grand organ-playing
of the Lubeck master, and listening with heart-felt love to those memorable
concerts of which we have previously spoken, Bach forgot both time and
engagements. When he returned to Arnstadt, the spirit of Buxtehude was upon
him. Henceforth the quiet people of Arnstadt knew no rest. Variations,
subtle, beautiful, a refined and fuller contrapuntal treatment, mingled with
the chorale. The conservatism of Arnstadt received a severe shock - a
dreadful experience, doubtless, to the quiet German town. Such genius could
come to no good end, and so the consistory and Bach agreed to part.
Bach had married in October, 1707. In 1708, while at Muehlhausen, his
first considerable work, composed for the municipal elector, appeared. His
election at Saxe-Weimar was undoubtedly owing to his playing before the Duke
Wilhelm Ernst, and we can imagine with what pleasure the young musician,
conscious of great power, looked forward to the intellectual and cultured life
for which Weimar was renowned. In the course of a few years Bach was
appointed orchestral and concert director to the Duke.
The liberal atmosphere of Weimar, the appreciation of men whose opinion
was of worth, could but stimulate the mental faculties and widen the range of
thought, and there is a breadth of conception and majesty in Bach at this
period unknown before. With the assiduity of genius he labored for the
realization of his ideal. Palestrina, Lotti, and Caldara were laid under
contribution. The master transcribed the works of these composers with his
own hands, and arranged the violin concertos of Vivaldi for the harpsichord
and organ. It is ever with the greatest artists. They assimulate all the
forms of kindred art, yet never sacrifice their individuality. The means
enabling them to express their inmost soul must be found, but their soul will
alone dictate the form which its expression will assume.
But Bach is approaching the close of the first period of his career. An
invitation has been given him (1717) to become conductor of the orchestra at
the court of Leopold of Anhalt-Koethen, a prince remarkable for his
benevolence and cultured attainments. Here his duties were comparatively
slight and his leisure abundant. Hitherto he had been engaged, as it were, in
the temple service. At Weimar he had developed into a great tone-poet of
sacred song. With refined strength and exquisite perception he had gathered
up the related parts of song, weaving them into a unity of impassioned and
majestic utterance.
But the great poet must have a wider experience. He must enter, as it
were, into the great deeps of sacred emotion in things natural; he must
perceive in the universe a deeper, a more majestic beauty even than in the
temple. Then he will become a great prophet among his fellows, and illumine
for all time the pathway of life, giving strength to the weak, consolation to
the weary, and song to the blithe and pure of heart. This is what Bach became
in tone. His attention at Koethen was directed mainly to instrumental music.
We have previously remarked upon the endeavors which certain German
masters made to bring home to their countrymen an appreciation of instrumental
music. How long the seed lay germinating in Bach's mind we know not. A new
idea had taken possession of him, or, rather, he contemplated the application
of the principle of his former labors in polyphony to instrumental music pure
and simple.
At Koethen he supplemented his labors at Weimar. At Leipsic, whither we
shall presently follow him, he brought them to completion.
But we are anticipating. We have seen how patiently, how toilsomely,
Music has broken one by one the fetters of conventionality; how she has grown
in strength and beauty, anticipating the moment of her final deliverance. It
has come at last. With the patience and impatience of genius Bach strikes in
twain the last fetter of conventionality. He has realized his quest. The boy
who, far away in future thought, studied the art-forms of his great
predecessors and contemporaries in the lowly chamber or by the light of the
silent moon, has found his beloved, the Tonal Muse. She stands free before
him to serve his will - his will purified by conception and incessant effort -
and he will lead her in her new-found freedom and place her in the path of
progress.
Bach's compositions at this time include the early part of one of the
greatest of his works, the Wohltemperirte Clavier. In this work - the second
part of which was composed at Leipsic - Bach attained the full mastery of
form. The strivings and efforts of the great Netherland masters found
completion in this work of Bach. In it are compressed the labors of
centuries. The works of the masters, Okeghem, Dufay, Josquin des Pres, and
others, are but prophecies in tone, announcing a realization of their ideal in
the centuries yet to come, that ideal which they felt so particularly, yet
could not express. The Wohltemperirte Clavier them marks the first great
climax of musical art.
The evolution was certain, and it consummated in a kindred mind. The
deepest expression of human feeling, the agony of the dire distress and
conflict of life, the calm majesty of faith which enables the soul to overcome
every obstacle, its pathetic appeal to God for rest and comfort, the strength
of victory, are possible in music, are expressed in music as no other art can
express them, because of Bach.
True to his trust, he extracted all that was best in the works of his
predecessors and, vivifying it by his genius, created forms of expression
which the greatest that have followed him have utilized and extolled.
But, as we have said, the great poet must perceive in things natural, in
the beauty of the universe around him, in the sacred feelings of human
emotion, a sacredness as worthy and as earnest, though less concentrated in
character, as that which exists in the more direct function of religious
worship. To the great poet, however he works, all things are sacred. He it
is who reveals the heaven that lies around us. He opens the portals of
Nature, and we enter in to find strength and consolation.
Bach does all this in the masterly work we are considering. Not to the
Italian, but to the German, did Nature at length disclose her choicest method
of expression, and this because the German had ever lived in close contact
with her. In all Bach's works at this period the work of emancipation goes
forward. Take, for instance, the Brandenburg concertos leading to the
combination of the present orchestra.
But a new sphere of action here again opens to Bach. His master and
friend, the Prince of Koethen, was distracted from the pursuit of music by his
wife's want of interest therein, and so Bach sorrowfully looks around him for
a more congenial appointment. This he found at Leipsic, in 1723, as cantor to
the school of St. Thomas. Leipsic, like Weimar, was celebrated for its
intellectual life; but the various vexations which the great musician
encountered from the action of the authorities reflects but little credit upon
them. Bach's labors here were simply Titanic. There were four churches at
Leipsic, the principal being St. Nicholas and St. Thomas. Bach seems to have
been responsible for the musical service at each. How innate and healthy was
his genius may be inferred from the fact that for these musical services alone
three hundred eighty cantatas seem to have been composed. Bach entered upon
his labors at Leipsic at the age of thirty-eight, and continued therein until
his death, in 1750. Let us examine briefly the nature of these labors, and
endeavor to glean from them their characteristic principles.
When Bach came to Leipsic he came full of experience and power. As a
youth he had devoted himself to the perfecting of church music. Untiringly,
unceasingly, with steadfast love, he had brought the laws of counterpoint and
fugue to mingle with the grace of melody and the genius of a noble
imagination. At Koethen his poetic and artistic temperament roamed through
the realms of nature, and brought us near to the understanding of their varied
utterance. At Leipsic he finished the education of his life and his career as
a tone-poet. He seeks again the shelter of the temple, but his genius has
matured and ripened. He has examined the mysteries of life. His enthusiasm
for the pure and good is stronger than ever, but life is still a mystery.
Evil, pain, love deep as hell and high as heaven, the Titanic conflict of
opposing principles, Nature and her decrees, sorrow, remorse, sweet,
unaffected joy, and tranquil resignation - what mean they all? The answer,
the solution, is on Calvary. There is no other solution. Intellect, deny it
how it will, is baffled by the complex problem. The solution is of love
through trouble and anguish. The Passion music of Bach rises to the sublime
understanding of this grand mystery, and again the evolution of the old
mystery and Passion-play consummates in a kindred mind. Again the triumph of
faith is with the German. Luther frees the understanding from tyranny. Bach
raises it to the region of genius and sympathy, and closes the labors of a
thousand years of Christian tonal effort by his Passion music of the Redeemer.
But while this is so, he initiated the modern period of tonal art, leaving,
however, this Passion music as his noblest legacy, as if to warn men that no
other solution of life exists.
But though Bach's genius was thus supreme, it was not because he was
undisturbed by the vexations of daily life. Rarely, if ever, has an artist
equally great produced in such boundless profusion the highest works of
genius, when engaged with men most frequently unable to understand his
thought, and immersed in the arduous duties of teacher in an art noteworthy of
producing fatigue and exhaustion of spirit. But his enthusiasm and strength
were equal to the task. With grand integrity, and desire for the welfare of
the congregations of the churches alluded to, he obtained from their
respective ministers the texts of their discourses for the ensuing Sundays,
and produced, apparently without effort, hundreds of cantatas to convey to the
hearers the inner meaning of the words which fell from the preacher's lips.
These cantatas frequently opened with orchestral introduction followed by a
chorus, usually very impressive, and imbued with the meaning of the text. The
recitatives and solo airs would still further convey this meaning, while a
chorale or hymn in four parts, with elaborate instrumental accompaniment,
served to express the feelings of the whole congregation. To each instrument
was assigned a separate part, and the whole accompaniment was separate from
the singing.
But if Bach in the consummation of the chorale perfected Luther's work in
the realm of music, he in his Passion music finds worthy expression of a
nation's devotion. His genius, as it were, felt the spirit-life of the past.
His soul vibrated to the yearnings of the unknown millions of his race who had
passed away in the centuries preceding him, and whose consolation in their
humble toil, in the various hardships of their lives, was the narrative of
this Passion music of the Saviour Christ. The rough, dramatic presentation
accorded to this narrative gathered, as time went on, elements of beauty and
traditional treatment around it. It was powerfully to affect the drama proper
and oratorio, but in its direct and proper functions it was to inspire the
first, and in some respects the greatest, of the great musicians of the
Germany to his utmost effort, to his most lofty flight of genius, as his
winged spirit soared through the ages of the past toward the future ages yet
to come.
This Passion music of St. Matthew is the noblest presentment of the
characteristics of the German mind, and is unsurpassed in the realm of
religious art. It is an unfolding of the German spirit, and evidences
qualities the possession of which makes for national greatness.
As we have said, Bach is the great lyric poet of his nation, the first
great German genius after the devastating horrors of war. Looming on the
sight, or as contemporaries, are Handel, Leibnitz, Wolf, Klopstock, Lessing,
and Winckelmann. The modern era, with its philosophy and revolution, has
arrived. The domain of thought is enwidened, and the Middle Ages blend and
fade in the historic vista of the past. But the modern era commences with
these great affirmations in art and poetry. Bach takes the narrative of the
Passion, and erects the Cross anew with sympathetic genius of art and love.
Handel, as if he had caught Isaiah's prophetic fire, gave to Europe its most
beautiful and noble epic, the Messiah; and Klopstock, the first of the great
line of Germany's modern poets, devoted his genius and labor to the same
subject. But with Bach and Handel no miserable conflicting elements of
theology sully the conception of the Saviour Christ. These great artists rise
to the universal and the true. The highest art is absolute and knows no
appeal. It is in harmony with universal law, both spiritual and physical.
