INTRODUCTION

It is July, 1750....

Fashionable gentlemen wear large white wigs when they go out; they wear swords, and carry small jeweled snuff boxes in the great pocket of their jackets. They buckle their breeches at the knee, and wear stockings, and shoes with high heels.

Ladies in ruffled corsets fix beauty marks to their cheeks with lead-based makeup, and dance the minuet in hooped skirts.

A man could be hanged in London for the theft of a loaf of bread, or burned alive in Portugal for speaking heresy against the Church.

In Austria, Franz Josef Haydn is 18, and Mozart's father is just 31. It is still six years before the birth of little Wolfgang.

In Russia, Princess Catherine, later to be known as Catherine the Great, is 21.

The philosopher/author Jean Jacques Rousseau is 38, and has become one of the most influential and versatile Frenchmen of the mid-18th century.

It is July, 1750.

In the far-off colonies of the New World, African slaves till the fields in the hot sun.

In Philadelphia, Benjamin Franklin is 44 years old, and has achieved a huge success with his "Poor Richard's Almanac." To enhance its circulation, he had established the US Postal Service, and promoted the building of long-distance roads. By 1750, Poor Richard's Almanac is second only to the Bible in Colonial readership (10,000+).

George Washington is 18 years old.

On the west coast of North America, Father Junipero Serra is 37. He has begun his life's work of establishing missions and churches up and down the California coast.

What we call "The Baroque Era" in reference to events and culture in Europe is the same as "The Colonial Era" when referring to history in North America. On both sides of the Atlantic there was commerce, there was economic and national conflict, and then as now all things were connected and interrelated.

And in July of 1750, in a darkened room in high summer in Leipzig, Johann Sebastian Bach lay dying.

BACH'S LIFE:

Johann Sebastian Bach: we take his name for granted. Bach's name has become synonymous with the art of fugue, magnificent counterpoint, oratorios, passions, masses, and cantatas, and legendary virtuosity on the organ and harpsichord. He is widely and often automatically considered to be the uncontested meister of Baroque music and perhaps of all western music.

For Mozart he was "a man from whom we can finally learn something." Brahms considered Bach to be his "daily bread and butter." Debussy saw in Bach's music "the most perfect purity of musical lines."

Who was this man? Why does his music and artistry still touch us so deeply two and a half centuries after his death?

Heredity is that principle of genetics which provides that we should somehow take after our grandparents. The Bach family offers us a better demonstration of the principles of heredity than any other family in history.

The Bach family enriched German musical life for more than two centuries. The earliest known member of the family was Veit Bach, a fiddle-playing baker born about 1550. From Veit Bach there descended a family tree with dozens and dozens of musicians. Indeed, by the time Johann Sebastian was born in northern Germany, the word "Bach" was used as a nickname for any musician throughout the region. Many of the actual Bachs might have made a prominent impression were it not for the fact that they all had a relative named Johann Sebastian.

Sebastian Bach was born in the town of Eisenach in northern Germany on the 21st of March, 1685.

His father was a civic musician in Eisenach, and so was required to play several different instruments. He naturally taught the most important of these to his children. Primary among these were violin and keyboard.

In his memoirs Sebastian writes that his father used to take him to the huge Bach family reunions each summer. Together they would walk for two days, about 40 miles, to meet with a hundred or more "Bachs" and fiddle and play and eat and drink. What an impression these trips must have made on the boy: sleeping in barns, eating by the roadside, singing, playing on all sorts of instruments, the whole event culminating in a service in a great stone church where the preacher gave them the benediction and they all took a tearful farewell, vowing to meet again the following year.

Father and son made the final trip to the reunion in 1694, when little Sebastian was nine years old. Late the previous year, the little boy's mother had died. Tragically, before the next summer, Sebastian's father had died also, and the little fellow was orphaned.

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BACH'S EDUCATION:

After their father's death, little Sebastian and his younger brother Jakob went to live with their older brother, Johann Christoph. The little boy was allowed to take only one thing with him, to remind him of his childhood home. He chose to take his father's violin, in a green velvet bag with his father's initials embroidered on it. It had been gift from his mother to his father before they were married.

Sebastian received additional but limited musical instruction from his elder brother, and left his brother's home for good at age 15. From that time, until his death 50 years later at age 65, Johann Sebastian held 7 full time positions as musician. First, at 15, he became member of the St. Michael's Church choir at Lueneburg, where he no doubt received some additional rudimentary musical training. His voice was described as "clear, strong, and true."

As for his compositional training, his schooling as a composer, it is important to remember that while Bach received rudimentary instruction in violin and keyboard from his father and brother, as a composer he was completely self-educated. Starting at a very early age, he taught himself by copying and transcribing music written by others (and he had a voracious appetite for the music of his contemporaries).

The greatness of Bach has to do not only with genius - his innate talent - but also with his hard work and self-discipline that nurtured that talent to its full potential. "I have worked hard" he said, "anyone who works just as hard will go just as far."

During the course of his youth and adulthood, he is known to have made copies or adaptations of works by Vivaldi, Locatelli, Marcello, Palestrina, Pergolesi, Caldara, Handel, Pachelbel, Keiser, Frescobaldi, Telemann, Corelli, Buxtehude, and many others. But Bach often did not merely copy this music, he reworked it so that the music's expressions might become truly his own, transformed by his own creative genius. Bach's music was born of a mix of musical styles that were as much the creations of his contemporaries as of himself. If he is thought to have been a great composer, it is partly because he did not appear out of nothing.

Then at age 18 he accepted his first real professional musical engagement: as a violinist in the prince's Kapelle at the Weimar court. Music lovers are continually surprised by the fact that Bach's first musical job was not as an organist, but as a violinist.

At 20 he became church organist at Arnstadt. That job was followed by periods in neighboring towns, as organist or as conductor of the musicians at the court of the Duke or Weimar and finally the court of Prince Leopold of Cöthen.

We must not forget that all his life Bach was an "employee" of either the churches or the nobility of his region, and he was often treated like a lowly servant. One summer, while he and his group of court musicians were travelling with Prince Leopold, word came to the Prince that Bach's wife had died. The Prince decided not to tell Bach, knowing that Bach would have to leave him and return home. When the entire entourage finally returned to Cöthen, Bach discovered that his wife was dead and buried, and his distraught children were living at home alone. He recovered from this tragedy and met and married his second wife, Anna Magdalena, who was to be his companion and helpmate for the rest of his life.

In 1723, at the age of 38, Bach went to work as an employee of the city of Leipzig, where he remained until his death in 1750. He was musical director of the St. Thomas School, a city-administered charity school for boys from poor families. This school supplied the soprano and alto singers for the four churches in Leipzig.

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In Leipzig his work load was heavy, as it was during most of his professional life. In those days there was no such thing as a free lance composer. A musician such as Bach was expected to do everything from composing to leading the choir, from teaching to directing the chamber orchestra or leading a dirge at funerals.

In Leipzig, for example, from 1723 to 1750, Bach was in charge of music in the four main churches every Sunday. This involved performing 25-40 minutes of music with voices and instruments in two of the churches every week. He composed original music weekly for the first several years at least, and adapted or rewrote his own works for ensuing years or transcribed the music of other composers. He also conducted the choir and small chamber groups, taught private instrumental, voice and composition lessons to the students in the boarding school, as well as teaching them Latin and religion studies. In addition he wrote music on approval for kings, dukes, and bishops.

He didn't have much free time, but when he did he wrote more music. He wrote every kind of music current at the time except operas. But several of his large-scale works, especially the St. Matthew Passion, approach the scope and drama of opera.

J.S. Bach married twice and had 20 children, ten of whom survived into adulthood. Three of them in particular, were famous composers: Carl Philipp Emmanuel, Wilhelm Friedemann, and Johann Christian (known as "the Bach of London") who was for a time the teacher of Mozart.

But no matter how much we acknowledge Bach's genius today, we must remember that during his lifetime he was known only as a great keyboardist and his fame rested solely on his organ and harpsichord virtuosity. Knowledge of his great legacy of choral and instrumental music largely faded away after his death: people preferred the light, simple, elegant music of the younger generation.

BACH AS COMPOSER:

One of my favorite 20th century Bach experts was Albert Schweitzer. A great Bach scholar and virtuoso organist, he was an accomplished interpreter of Bach's music, and also wrote a definitive 2-volume biography of Bach (still read today). But early in his adulthood he gave up harmonizing notes to devote his life to harmonizing souls. He went back to school, earned a medical degree, and founded a famous hospital in Africa. In his biography of Bach, Schweitzer wrote:

Bach is an affirmation. He reassures me that in art, as in life, truth cannot be ignored or subdued. Art does not need any human promotion, it will realize itself by its own strength when its time has come. We need this faith in order to live. Bach had it. Under poorest material conditions, without getting tired or discouraged, without appealing to the world to take notice of his work, without doing anything to preserve it for the future, his single concern was to create what is true.

Schweitzer is referring here to to the fact that virtually all of Bach's vocal and choral compositions - the passions, masses and cantatas - existed in Bach's lifetime only in handwritten manuscript form in his personal possession. Virtually none of Bach's vocal music was published while he was alive.

(We should be grateful that we have any of Bach's compositions today. Nearly half of everything he ever composed was lost in the years immediately following his death. Many of his hand-written manuscripts were given away or lost, the paper often re-used for other purposes. For nearly 100 years after his death he was mostly forgotten and ignored as a composer.)

And as for his actual output, if we were to measure his greatness upon the basis of the number of his compositions, it's not so impressive. His more prolific contemporaries, Telemann and Vivaldi, collectively wrote at least five times as much.

So who was this Bach the composer, and what did Beethoven mean when he wrote: "Nicht Bach sondern Meer soll er heissen." ("His name should not be brook, it should be ocean" "Bach" is the German word for "brook")

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BACH'S GREATNESS:

What is it, really, which makes Bach's music seem so alive to us today? How does he speak so strongly to us over the two and one half centuries after his death?

Here are some compelling reasons which, I think, explain why Bach is considered by many to be the greatest composer who ever lived.

1. He was a superb writer of melodies.

Bach had a natural gift for writing beautiful and memorable melodies. His music is often dominated by a passionate melodic expression that will reach out and grab nearly any person within earshot.

2. He was inventive.

In Bach's day time musical greatness was a matter of virtuostic technique, not originality of thought.

But while Johann Sebastian Bach restricted himself to the styles, forms, and structures of music common in his time, his music is unequaled in its inventiveness.

Although Bach's music has intimate connections to the people, traditions, and institutions of his day, virtually everything that he wrote is characterized by a highly individualistic stamp that makes it easily recognizable as "Bach". While making use of common idioms, his music is always fresh, highly creative, never clichéd and never hackneyed. It seems inevitable and every measure bears the unmistakable mark of his genius

3. Bach was really smart.

Bach's music is probably the most intellectually rigorous music ever conceived by the human mind. There is an intellectual component to Bach, a structural logic, that fascinates musicians and non-musicians alike.

4. He was a master architect

The British physician and musician Anthony Storr, in his wonderful book "Music and the Mind" suggests that our fascination with music derives from an innate human desire to perceive structure and symmetry in all things.

Bach's music manifests a perfect integration of structural elements. In Bach's music the whole composition is always dependent on the interplay of all its parts: the entire piece would be dysfunctional were any one of its parts to be omitted. Conversely, the individual parts or vocal lines in Bach's music are inextricably intertwined with each other, so that no single part is entirely intelligible unless we hear it in combination with all the other parts.

In other words, Bach's music is compellingly and lucidly structured. In terms of its form, its counterpoint of harmony and melody, its balance, completeness, and temporal elements, Bach's music represents the crowning achievement of architectural principles and processes practiced in Western Music for half a millennium.

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5. Bach was a master of fugue and counterpoint

"Counterpoint" or "Fugue" is the art of writing multiple melodic lines - each one beautiful in its own right - which are all interrelated, and all together form a composition of amazing and powerful complexity.

Bach raised the art of counterpoint to a level never seen before nor since. When, late in their careers, Mozart and Beethoven each perceived a need for adding new techniques into their own compositional toolboxes, they each embarked upon a systematic study of the most highly advanced counterpoint known to humankind: Bach fugues. Since that time, Bach's fugues and counterpoint have served as a model for composers throughout the nineteenth and twentieth century - to great modern composers like Stravinsky, Berg, Boulez, and Stockhausen.

The works of this self taught composer have comprised the core material for the formal study of harmony, music theory, and composition for virtually every serious musician since the late 19th century.

6. But there is one last and great reason why Bach's music stirs our hearts so deeply.

As Schweitzer wrote:

Bach is an affirmation. He reassures me that in art, as in life, truth cannot be ignored or subdued. Art does not need any human promotion, it will realize itself by its own strength when its time has come. We need this faith in order to live. Bach had it.

If Bach has earned the respect of each new generation it is primarily because we hear in his music something of himself, something that sustained him, something that he offers to us that we need, something that will make each generation better.

He devoted his talents primarily to the service of his spirituality. In Bach's particular case, that meant the Lutheran church. Of the nearly 1000 Bach compositions in existence today, roughly three-fourths of them were written expressly for use in the Lutheran liturgy.

One cannot escape the conclusion that, though Johann Sebastian certainly cared about his career, careerism was not what moved him. Music moved him, especially when it was offered in thanksgiving to God - which Bach in fact granted to any music that was "well crafted."

I believe we return to Bach because in his music he offers us a generous glimpse of his own spiritual core. We experience the creative product of someone who cared deeply and was fully dedicated to his heart's calling. And the experience of spirituality that Bach offers us transcends his Lutheran roots and also transcends each of our own individual religions.

Through the sounds of Bach's music, and through the intentions he held while creating it, we are united with him and with each other in experiencing something greater than ourselves.

In other words, we return to Bach to enhance, in an artistic framework, our own spiritual sustenance, and the sustenance of our own hearts.

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BACH AND POSTERITY:

The perpetuation of musical works of art depends ultimately upon the willingness of musicians and audiences to play and to listen to them. But Bach is not great merely because people listen to his music: an audience alone is not a measure of greatness. But an audience remaining faithful two hundred and fifty years after the fact is certainly significant. And Bach's audience, which at his death consisted of a few sons and faithful students, has only grown with time.

Johann Sebastian Bach's reputation is unique in that sense; he may be the only composer in western history to have died for all intents and purposes without a reputation but to have been resurrected with such devotion long after his death by generations whose musical tastes and practices he could never have anticipated.

And so 250 years later we contemplate not Bach the artistic genius, but Bach the 65-year-old man.

It's likely that his eyesight had been declining for the last decade of his life, perhaps explaining the slackening of his productivity in his final years. Several strokes and two disastrous cataract operations six months before further undermined his health.

(The same quack doctor operated on Handel's eyes a few years later. handel went blind as well.)

Now, in July, 750, lying on his deathbed, Bach dictates note-by-note to his son-in-law his final composition, a chorale entitled "Now as I approach Thy throne."

In his Bach biography, Albert Schweitzer describes this final scene:

In the manuscript, we can see all the pauses the sick man had to make. The drying ink is more watery from day to day. The notes written at twilight, with the windows curtained, are scarcely readable.

Bach wrote this piece in a dark room. It is unique among his creations. No description can do justice to the perfection of its contrapuntal art. The flow is so natural that after the second line we are not conscious of the art but are completely caught up in the spirit which speaks through these G major harmonies.

The storms and confusions of the world no longer penetrated the curtained windows. Around the dying master the harmonies of the spheres sounded. No sorrow invades the music. The peaceful notes move on the far side of all human passion."

And so once again we return to the text of the funeral cantata Bach had written years before. The words originally referred to Princess Christine of Saxony, but could just as well be our hymn to J. S. Bach:

"Thou shalt not die;
We see in thee our great possession;
Posterity shall not forget thee,
Till all this universe shall fall."

Johann Sebastian Bach is dead. Long live Johann Sebastian Bach.

  - David Gordon, for the Carmel Bach Festival 2000

    Copyright © 2000 David Gordon