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A Composer for All Seasons (But Especially for Christmas)

24 minute read
TIME

THE shadows of Christmas Eve stretch across the cobblestone court yard of the St. Thomas school in Leipzig. Along the first floor, where the choirmaster lives, the windows glow with candlelight. A young Hausfrau, surrounded by half a dozen children and pregnant with another, bustles through the cluttered rooms preparing dinner. Her husband is busy copying the parts of his latest cantata, which he must soon rehearse with his musicians and singers for next morning’s service, at the church across the courtyard.

First, though, there are prayers to be said, friends to chat with, a roast goose to be eaten. Papa even allows himself an extra glass of his favorite Rhenish wine, which he calls a “noble gift of God.” After the meal, he eases his thick frame down before a harpsichord in the parlor. Crowding about the creche and the candlelit tree, the party joins in singing a carol or one of Luther’s mighty hymns. Then Papa—head thrown back, fingers marching over the keys in a steady, stately rhythm—begins to improvise, outlining a succession of daring harmonies, guiding the simple theme through a contrapuntal labyrinth of variations. The melody emerges transformed: elaborate, yet plain; passionate, yet rigorously logical. It is a prayer to God in sound.

Thus might Johann Sebastian Bach and his family have celebrated Christmas nearly 250 years ago. In its joyous expression of a faith that was as natural as breath, that scene seems to be more than a millennium away from 1968, when the season celebrating the Saviour’s birth is a time of commercial convulsion. Even many of those yearning for piety find Jesus elusive, a shadowy problematical name in history rather than a symbol of ultimate reassurance. Seen through the scrim of contemporary anxiety and unbelief, everything about the Bach-family Christmas seems to be a quaint anomaly.

Everything, that is, except the music, which looms far larger today than it did in Bach’s own time. In 18th century Germany, Bach had a national reputation as a virtuoso organist. Yet as a composer, he attracted mostly condescending notice—even his son Johann Christian, one of the four Bach children who distinguished themselves as composers, referred to him as “the Old Wig.” Today, of course, Bach is universally ranked among the transcendent creators of Western civilization. Choral works that he turned out for rowdy schoolboys to sing in drafty provincial churches are cherished by the world’s finest choruses. Keyboard exercises that he jotted down for his children and students still beguile and challenge great virtuosos. Instrumental pieces that he com posed to curry favor with obscure princelings are judged among the glories of all chamber music.

The greatness of Bach has been recognized for more than a century. But in all likelihood no prior age has better appreciated the true nature of his gifts. Musicologists have brought his works into clearer focus by editing his scores and clarifying their historic and esthetic background. Today’s performers, heirs to the Baroque revival of recent decades, have a better sense of 18th century style, and instinctively reject the romantic excesses of the past. The advent of the LP has created a vast new audience for Bach, as it has for other composers; but Bach is a special beneficiary because his many intimate, complex compositions generally sound better in the home than in a large concert hall. In 1949, there were 15 Bach albums on the market; today there are more than 500—including 24 rival versions of the complete Brandenburg Concertos, and 12 interpretations of the B-Minor Mass. Says Pianist Rosalyn Tureck, founder of the International Bach Society for specialized study of the composer: “The great fire under all of this is the direct meaning that Bach has for us as contemporary persons. He is a phenomenon of our time.”

Never does he seem more so than at Christmas. A devout Lutheran who spent much of his life in the service of the church, Bach wrote more than 1,000 works, according to the definitive Bach-Werke-Verzeichnis (BWV) catalogue. Nearly three-quarters of these were intended to be performed at Christian worship—including a Magnificat and 41 Christmas cantatas (plus six more that make up the famed Christmas oratorio). Even in the secularist atmosphere of the 20th century, his music rings with what Toronto Choral Conductor Elmer Iseler calls a positive, “D-major feeling about life.” From the evidence of the 1968 holiday season, more and more listeners are trying to get into the same key.

This week West Berlin’s Singakade-mie performs the Christmas oratorio with members of the Radio Symphony Orchestra. In London, Composer Benjamin Britten conducts three cantatas for the BBC from St. Andrew’s Church in Holborn. In Manhattan, Violinist and Conductor Alexander Schneider completes a two-concert series of cantatas and concertos at Carnegie Hall. And in New York, as in other major capitals, the coming weeks will see a performance of Bach’s undoubted masterpiece, the B-Minor Mass—a work that he began as a tribute to the Catholic King of Poland, but which in its final form did not fit either the Catholic or the Lutheran liturgy. In English-speaking countries, the wide-ranging appeal of such performances threatens even Handel’s oratorio Messiah as a holiday staple. “If you want a full house now,” says the London Times Critic William Mann, “you put on Bach’s St. Matthew Passion.”

Perhaps more significant than such major concerts by well-known artists are the thousands of more modest Bach performances, ranging down to the smallest towns and the merest amateur level. Here Bach is pervasive. Following the pattern set by the present-day chorus at Bach’s own St. Thomas Church in Leipzig, church and community choirs throughout the Western world are marking Christmas by singing something of Bach’s, even if only a two-minute chorale. And what church organist will let Christmas—or any other week—go by without playing at least one Bach prelude or perhaps an entire recital?

A Beat for Young Bachniks

Church or concert, Christmas or midsummer, there is one striking thing about the new audience for Bach. It is young. At the weekly Bach cantata performances at Manhattan’s Holy Trinity Lutheran Church, the congregation sports more beards than button-downs, appears to be almost entirely under 35. “Students will brave rainstorms to wait in line for standing room at a Bach recital,” marvels German Organist Helmut Walcha. Record stores report a marked increase in the number of teen-agers thronging around the classical counters, buying up Bach without so much as a glance at the new Beatles album.

The prevalence of youthful Bachniks, says Music Critic Bernard Jacobson of the Chicago Daily News, explains why “the rise in Bach’s popularity has not brought about an increase in the amount of Bach at symphony concerts, where all the subscribers are 90 years old. Bach is a revolutionary figure, allied with the liberals, while Beethoven, the archrevolutionary, has become the bulwark of the conservative establishment.”

What attracts the young to Bach is what attracts them to almost any other music: the beat. Artists of the past sometimes judged Bach to be nothing more than jigging monotony—”a sublime sewing machine,” Colette called him—but the young know better. “There is a bridge between Bach’s ideas of rhythm and those of the mid-20th century,” says Pianist Glenn Gould, “and it has been created by popular music and jazz.” The Swingle Singers, an eight-member Paris-based group led by American Ward Swingle, popularized Bach scores by performing them to the accompaniment of a jazz rhythm section, singing the themes in wordless scat syllables (ba ba da ba dee). As for jazz itself, its linear bass line, contrapuntal melodies and free improvisation all suggest parallels to Bach—parallels that have been explored notably by such performers as the Modern Jazz Quartet, Dave Brubeck and Lalo Schifrin.

Even rock musicians have struck a bond with Bach—and why not? The very improbability of it appeals to their fanciful eclecticism; besides, they like the way his music is melodic but not meandering, emotional but not sentimental. Blues-Rock Singer Paul Butterfield, 27, names Bach his favorite music along with the blues and Ravi Shankar. “I don’t always know what Bach is doing,” says Butterfield, “but we seem to be friends.” One of last year’s hit records, A Whiter Shade of Pale, by England’s Procol Harum, was arranged around an organ theme inspired by Bach’s organ setting of the chorale Wachetauf. Beatle George Harrison admits that the soaring trumpet obbligato in Penny Lane was inspired by the Second Brandenburg Concerto. Three of the five members of the New York Rock & Roll Ensemble are Juilliard products who double on oboe, organ and cello in order to alternate, and sometimes combine, Bach’s structure with rock’s fluidity.

Unlikely as it may seem, humor can also open a pathway to Bach, as has been shown over the past four Christmas seasons by the P.D.Q. Bach concerts organized by Composer Peter Schickele, 33 (TIME, May 31). Through the medium of the fictitious P.D.Q., Schickele has perpetrated such neglected works as the oratorio The Seasonings (“Bide thy thyme, now thy subscription’s through”). At this year’s concerts, scheduled for this week and next at Manhattan’s Philharmonic Hall, he plans to premiere Toot Suite, a piece for three players at the same organ. What makes even his broadest buffoonery so devastating is his obviously knowledgeable, intimate feeling for Bach. “Mine,” he says, “is a satire of love.”

For those who seek Bach through a more McLuhanesque medium, there is Switched-On Bach, a new LP of ten transcriptions performed on a Moog electronic synthesizer. Partly due to its vogue among the rock generation, the album has sold 50,000 copies since its release five weeks ago, making it the hottest “classical” release in the country. Pianist Gould, reviewing it in the current issue of the Canadian monthly Saturday Night, hears “an inkling of the future” in it, calls it “the record of the year (no, let’s go all the way—the decade!).”

Order and Spirit

No matter what Bach derivative initially captivates them, most young listeners eventually turn to the real thing. One result is that Bachanalia is rampant on U.S. campuses. And oddly, in this time of college riots and talk of revolution, it is Bach’s granite solidity as much as his uplifting spirit that young people seem to respond to. It is as if he provided a firm ground-bass that stabilizes their improvisatory life style. Explains David Rockefeller Jr., 27, whose Boston-based Cantata Singers are an offshoot of the 1963 Harvard Glee Club:

“Bach just seems to make sense—there is order rather than chaos.”

Order and spirit are the twin pillars of Bach’s enduring appeal. “He is characteristic of our era in that his music is equally balanced between mathematics and emotion,” says Violinist Yehudi Menuhin. “When we go to the moon, we shall need this same mixture: technical precision and deep feeling.”

In technique alone, Bach was probably the most accomplished composer in the history of music. His mastery of contrapuntal devices such as fugues and canons, his handling of such particular forms as the concerto and the da capo aria, his uncanny sense of the inner relationships of any large structure, all spring from that rarefied realm where pure science blends into esthetics. “If a listener does anything well himself—makes a fine chair or a beautiful piece of mechanical equipment—he recognizes the same integrity in Bach,” says Conductor Robert Shaw. This is what makes Bach’s music an inexhaustible challenge and joy for performers. Cellist Pablo Casals, 92, still begins each day with his lifelong custom of playing preludes and fugues from The Well-tempered Clavier on the piano. Says he: “There is always something left to discover in it.”

A crystalline logic underlies all of Bach’s work—which is one reason why he is so often the favorite composer of mathematicians and scientists. But his music also throbs with a living pulse; his rhythms and harmonic modulations, however controlled, evolve with a seeming spontaneity. His endlessly inventive melodies, however neatly they fit into a scheme, rise and fall and intertwine with a lyrical life of their own. The most solid of his constructions are nevertheless charged with energy and intensity. And as Robert Shaw points out, his lines serve not only to fill in the structure but also to define thoughts or emotions: “Counterpoint in a choral work is not counterpoint of line but of the human spirit.”

Feeling of Transcendence

The spiritual side of Bach has probably prompted as much exaggeration as the notion that he is a dry, abstract musician’s musician. Because so much of his work was intended for use in worship, he has traditionally been known as “the fifth evangelist,” pealing out a musical gospel from some celestial organ loft. “For me,” wrote French organist Charles Marie Widor in 1907, “Bach is the greatest of preachers.” Two years ago, three Venetian music lovers wrote to the Vatican weekly Osservatore della Domenica, suggesting that Bach, even though he was a Lutheran, ought to be canonized as a saint.

It is true that Bach’s chorales are still widely used at Protestant services—and in the ecumenical climate of modern Roman Catholicism, no organist would hesitate to use his setting of Luther’s A Mighty Fortress as a prelude to Sunday Mass. Still, the mode of Christian worship is not that of Bach’s time, and the impact of his compositions, whether secular or sacred, stems largely from a general feeling of transcendence in the music. “He will give Christianity to Christians, Judaism to Jews, even Communism to Communists,” says Karl Richter, conductor of the Munich Bach Choir and Orchestra. Ultimately, says Helmut Walcha, “Bach opens a vista to the universe. After experiencing him, people feel there is meaning to life after all.”

Yet Bach’s spiritual depth alone clearly does not account for his force, any more than his forbidding technique does. What generates his awesome power is the dynamic equilibrium between both sides of his creative faculty. He gives a full measure of both head and heart, and stands as an exemplar not only of fullness but, above all, of balance. Existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre, of all people, once wrote of Bach: “He taught how to find originality within an established discipline; actually—how to live.”

Artisan with Tools

Bach himself never dreamed of such a thing. Rarely has an artist ever worked with less thought of teaching posterity. He considered himself not an artist, but an artisan, no more elevated in stature than a cabinetmaker with his tools and wood. This was before the Romantic era introduced a more heroic, self-indulgent conception of the artist; still, even some of Bach’s contemporaries were afflicted with careerism and flashes of temperament. Bach, throughout his life, merely tried to do an honest job. “I was obliged to be industrious,” he said. “Whoever is equally industrious will succeed just equally well.”

Although scores of books have been written about Bach and his family, the underlying personality of the man is known only in the most shadowy way. It is, in fact, almost as much an esthetic miracle that this foursquare German burgher could produce the greatest music in history as it is that a glover’s son from Stratford could write plays that are the glory of the English language. Bach was born in 1685 at Eisenach, a town on the edge of the Thuringian Forest that is still dominated by the Wartburg, the medieval castle where Luther translated the New Testament into German in 1522. Bach’s ancestors had provided the region with town bandsmen, organists and composers for generations; eventually the word Bach, which means “brook” in German, became a synonym for “musician.” Sebastian studied with his violinist father until he was orphaned at the age of nine, then continued with an older brother who was an organist. After solid secondary schooling—the classics and catechism—and some experience as a choirboy, he set out at 18 on a career as a journeyman musician.

The next decade formed the patterns that were to run throughout his life. In various Thuringian posts, he repeatedly got into squabbles with his civic and clerical bosses, which his temper and stubbornness did nothing to smooth over. He won little or no attention for his compositions, and even had to shrug off complaints that his organ playing confused congregations with “surprising variations and irrelevant ornaments.” He was plagued by incompetent musicians; one of them once attacked him with a stick after Bach called him “a nanny-goat bassoonist.” But Bach persisted in his study of the best European composers, particularly such Italians as Vivaldi and Corelli, whom he valued for their clarity and economy of line. In 1707, he married his cousin Maria Barbara Bach, the first of his two wives, and in 1708 fathered the first of his 20 children (of whom ten died in childhood).

At 23, Bach joined the court of Weimar’s Duke Wilhelm Ernst as violinist and organist. There he flourished for nine years as an organ virtuoso and composed his first great works for the instrument: Fantasia and Fugue in G Minor, Passacaglia in C Minor. As his fame began to spread through Germany, towns and churches invited him to test new organs—always an occasion for wining, dining and bravura performing. France’s leading organist, Jean Louis Marchand, once ducked out of Dresden rather than answer a challenge to a musical duel with Bach. When Bach played, reported one witness, “his feet flew over the pedals as though they had wings, and powerful sounds roared like thunder through the church.” Bach described his own technique with so much humility that it may actually have been irony: “You only have to hit the right notes at the right time, and the instrument plays itself.”

Passed over for the job of court conductor at Weimar, Bach landed a similar position with Prince Leopold of Anhalt-Cothen; the defection so angered Duke Wilhelm that Bach was clapped in the Weimar jail for a month. Once he arrived at Cothen, Bach devoted five placid, productive years to superb keyboard and chamber pieces, including the French Suites for harpsichord, the unaccompanied music for cello and violin, and the six Brandenburg Concertos. This period is usually labeled Bach’s secular phase, though he was not fussy about the distinction between sacred and secular. Bach often borrowed from his secular music for sacred occasions, just as Martin Luther had used love songs and barrack ballads for some of his chorales. He even turned out such mundane pieces as a song on the joys of pipe smoking or a cantata about the glories of coffee. But the attitude behind all of his music was, as he noted in his manuscripts, “Deo soli gloria” (to God alone the glory).

His fortunes declined at Cothen after Prince Leopold married an unmusical wife. In a monumental miscalculation, Bach accepted the post of choirmaster at Leipzig’s St. Thomas Church. The salary and social status were lower, the living conditions drearier, and the duties more onerous. Besides being responsible for the music in two Leipzig churches, Bach had minor chores at two others, even had to teach catechism and act as proctor to choirboys. His family obligations were increasing too. After the death of Barbara, he had married a professional singer named Anna Magdalena Wilcken in 1721; she became stepmother to the four surviving children, and was to bear him another 13 herself. Beyond all this, he found himself entangled in drawn-out quarrels with the church rector and the municipal council.

Teacher and Technician

Somehow, over the next 15 years or so, he managed to pour out Masses, passions, oratorios and a large share of the 350 cantatas he is believed to have written (of which 224 survive). Yet Bach’s listeners remained unimpressed. At the first performance of his St. Matthew Passion, one puritanical woman in the congregation cried out in dismay: “Heaven help us! It might be an opera!”

In his later years, Bach gradually turned away from church composition and developed an even more austere and adventurous secular idiom, seemingly for his own satisfaction. He had always been a teacher, first to his children and then to paying pupils. He was one of the first keyboard instructors to introduce the use of the thumb and to advocate playing with curved rather than straight fingers. He told his composition students that contrapuntal lines should be like people in a conversation—each speaking grammatically, completing his sentences and remaining silent when he had nothing to add. Now, in the compositions of his 50s and 60s, Bach became more than ever a teacher. He produced collection after collection summing up the accumulated skill of a lifetime: the Goldberg Variations for harpsichord, the Catechism Preludes for organ, the unfinished The Art of Fugue.

A single worldly triumph crowned Bach’s old age. King Frederick the Great of Prussia, a gifted amateur musician, invited him to the court at Potsdam. When he arrived, Frederick immediately dismissed his minions, exclaiming: “Old Bach is here!” The two then spent an evening together, and Bach delighted Frederick by improvising a fugue on one of Frederick’s themes. After returning home, Bach wrote an extensive chamber cycle on the same theme and sent it to Frederick with the title Musical Offering. Soon after this, Bach’s overworked eyes as well as his rugged constitution began to fail. Two operations on his eyes only weakened him further. Finally, at 65, just before dying, he lay in bed, totally blind, and dictated his last composition: the chorale Before Thy Throne I Stand.

Veneration and Desecration

Bach was the last great voice of the polyphonic style that had lasted since the early 17th century. The very forms he favored—fugue, church cantata, motet—were outmoded as he used them, and he knew it. “My art,” he said, “has become old-fashioned.”

The new trend in music moved away from virile counterpoint toward softer melody and simple accompaniment, from rich harmonic modulations toward more basic cadences, and from daring elaboration toward the cultivation of controlled elegance. Bach’s composer sons—notably Carl Philipp Emanuel, Johann Christian and Wilhelm Friedemann —were all attracted to this style. After his death, Bach was mourned as a fine organist and teacher, but for 70 years his reputation as a composer was kept alive only by a few enthusiasts and composers, notably Mozart and Beethoven.

In 1829, Felix Mendelssohn, then 20, conducted a Berlin performance of the St. Matthew Passion. Although severely cut and subjected to a much doctored orchestration, the music awoke the public to Bach. Thereafter, the 19th century treated him with a mixture of veneration and desecration. His choral works were frequently performed, but with muddy-sounding 1,000-voice choirs and thick, brass-bottomed orchestras. His original scores were collected over a period of 50 years for the definitive 60-volume Bach-Gesellschaft edition of his works, completed in 1900 (a new, even more complete edition is now under way). But they contained few indications of tempo, dynamics or phrasing, so many publishers continued to issue altered, expanded and “improved” editions. Gounod thought nothing of using the C Major Prelude from The Well-Tempered Clavier as a mere accompaniment to his saccharine melody for Ave Maria.

The beginning of the modern outlook came in 1905, with the publication of Albert Schweitzer’s two-volume musicological study J. S. Bach. Besides illuminating the context of Bach’s works and propounding a more scrupulous performing style, Schweitzer showed that many seeming peculiarities in Bach came from his “pictorial” method of wedding music to text: a wiggling melody when a line refers to a Biblical serpent, an upward line when mists rise, and so on.

Following Schweitzer, Harpsichordist Wanda Landowska, Cellist Pablo Casals and Guitarist Andres Segovia joined in a virtual crusade to give Bach’s music greater authenticity—and a wider hearing. By contemporary standards, their playing was still impure; Casals always said he interpreted Bach “like any other composer, like Chopin, like Brahms.” Their glorious music gave vital impetus to the more scholarly researchers and performers who have succeeded them.

“We are closer to the true Bach today than at any other time since his death,” says German Musicologist Friedrich Smend. He may be right, but it all depends on who is meant by “we.” The back-to-Bach purists, capitalizing on rediscoveries of Baroque instrumental design and technique, have laudably stressed pared-down choruses and orchestras, lively rhythm and clean, linear texture. They prefer Bach played with recorders rather than flutes, harpsichords rather than pianos, modest 18th century-style organs rather than the ear-boggling supermachines favored by César Franck. Occasionally, the purists have gone too far. One famous incident in music circles concerns an embellishment that an eminent harpsichordist had been playing for years; it turned out to be an ink blot on the score.

The popularizers, on the other hand, claim to be close to what Bach’s intentions would be if he were alive today and could avail himself of modern musical resources. They argue, with some justice, that Bach himself was an inveterate transcriber, of both his own works and others’. And they point out that he did not specify the instrumentation for many of his scores—The Art of Fugue is completely abstract in that sense, and the pieces that he wrote for “clavier” could be for any keyboard instrument. Yet the popularizers, too, have sometimes gone too far. In concert halls and in Walt Disney’s 1940 film Fantasia, millions of Americans were introduced to Bach through Conductor Leopold Stokowski’s lush symphonic transcriptions of the organ preludes and toccatas. The only trouble with them was that they presented Bach draped in the purple robes of Wagner.

Some of the best Bach performances in the world now come from musicians who combine the purists’ expertise with an intensely personal and contemporary style—Pianists Tureck and Gould, for example, or Conductor Richter. “All attempts at the ‘authentic’ derive from a certain snobbishness,” says Richter. “This doesn’t mean that one shouldn’t use approximately the kind of orchestra and instruments that Bach prescribed. But as a whole, properly performed, Bach always will stay right in the spirit of the present.” Richter measures his own success by the fact that romantics accuse him of being a purist and purists dismiss him as a romantic.

The argument rages on, and probably always will. It is one more aspect of the limitless fascination Bach exerts. “In the 21st century, there will be other music, other attitudes toward music, and Bach is still going to be there,” says Rosalyn Tureck. “He will be influential and meaningful even when he’s played on unimaginable instruments and in combinations of sounds beyond the whole electronic movement.”

Even the creators of new music that points firmly away from Bach cannot escape him. He is too deeply embedded in the curriculum of music conservatories, and he towers too imposingly as an unrivaled craftsman. Polish Composer Krzysztof Penderecki, 35, acknowledges the continuity between Bach and his own St. Luke Passion (1966) by spelling out the master’s name in a recurring cantus firmus: B flat, A, C, H (the German notation for B natural). Used by Bach himself in The Art of Fugue, the motif is a traditional tribute that has been paid by composers as diverse as Schumann, Liszt and Webern.

Perpetual Presence

The eternal mystery is that an artist who seemed to his contemporaries so backward-looking should seem to his successors so forward-looking. Compared with Monteverdi or Beethoven or Schoenberg, he was not an innovator. Historically Bach’s distinction was to summarize and culminate all the musical developments that led up to him. But he did this with such subtlety and daring, such piety and passion, that he ended up reconciling, completing and extending everything he touched, thereby preparing music for the centuries ahead. It has been said that the history of philosophy consists of a series of footnotes to Plato. It might just as easily be argued that the history of music since the 18th century has consisted of a series of variations on Bach. Without knowing it, he divided music history into two basic periods: pre-Bach and post-Bach. The difference between the two is that in the post-Bach era, he is a perpetual presence.

For proof, music lovers have only to look around them and listen this Christmas—in churches and concert halls, on campuses and in record stores, in homes and on the streets. Then they, too, can say with Frederick the Great: “Old Bach is here.”

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