Evening in the Palace of Reason Page 12

  In the Houdemann canon, it turns out, the subjects follow one another immediately and on four different keys, the tightest possible canon to write, and despite that it has several very different solutions. In somewhat more readable if no less enigmatic form than Bach’s and with a guide to what all those strange markings are about, the Houdemann canon looks like this:

  Bach gave the “prime” solution—the one that uses the subject as written and in the order of keys that he specified with the four clefs at the beginning—to J. G. Walther:

  But he clearly foresaw other solutions, and every theorist of Bach’s time took a shot finding them. Johann Mattheson inverted the subject (turned it upside down) and used the four-flat solution:

  Friedrich Wilhelm Marpurg, author of the first book on the theory of fugue, inverted it too, but left it in a major key, without the flats:

  Bach also suggested a minor-key “retrograde” solution, in which the subject is played backward—

  and a major retrograde-inversion solution, which puts the melody both backward and upside down:

  All the solutions result in “perpetual” canons, since by the nature of the subject there is no place for it to end, and all of them make sense musically, though some are less gainly (the realizations in retrograde and inversion) than others (the retrograde inversion and the prime).

  Solving such canons, not to mention making them up, was clearly not work for the easily frustrated, and Bach wrote at least fifty of them during his career, of which eight are in the Orgelbüchlein. Walther wrote canons too, though he did not exploit the form as thoroughly and elegantly as Bach did. Bach commemorated their mutual passion in a perpetual canon for four voices (BWV 1073), which he wrote on the birth of his godchild, Walther’s eldest son. Critics will say, and said very loudly in Bach’s time, that canons are not always tuneful or pleasing to the ear, and they have a point, but nowhere better than in a perpetual canon like this can you hear so clearly the connection between music and celestial harmony, the canonic voices weaving in and around one another like so many orbiting planets, eternally in motion and eternally the same. In that sense even when they are not pretty they can be beautiful.

  IT WAS JUST Bach’s luck that when he had finally mastered the highest art of contrapuntal writing, not only breaking into but making himself right at home in the sanctum sanctorum, heathens came banging at the door, decrying the elitist and esoteric nature of counterpoint (though some of them were at the same time demanding to be let in on it). Friedrich Erhard Niedt, a well-known organist of Copenhagen, for example, wrote, “Many an honest bore has spent many an hour of his life trying to excel at canons.” He thought counterpoint had been ridiculously mystified by its practitioners.

  There are doubled, inverted, salted, larded, roasted counterpoints, and those basted with hare drippings that occur when voices are inverted and bass, alto, tenor and discant are interchanged.… I do not think it worth the trouble and expense to waste paper and ink on [them].

  The Kapellmeister in Dresden, Johann David Heinichen, said that as a student, he “could hardly eat, drink or sleep until I found the solutions to all canons.” Now he wanted someone to put together a book containing all the rules of counterpoint. “Such [an undertaking] would greatly lessen the general wonderment at these kinds of paper witches.” The most unrelenting and painstakingly reasoned attack on canons and other forms of learned counterpoint came from Mattheson, who began his argument with their practical worthlessness. “Do not expect that after all that quill-chewing and toiling to be rewarded for your pains,” he advised students. “There will probably be not a single one among 2000 listeners who will notice your finesse, unless he be alerted to it beforehand.”

  More broadly, the critics of counterpoint were renouncing music’s allegorical and cosmic nature, its claim to be a manifestation of the divine. To this generation, music was not to be written according to any higher theory or objective than that of sensual, aural pleasure. “Rules are valid as long as I consider it well and sensible to abide by them,” Mattheson wrote. “They are valid no longer than that.… The rule of nature, in music, is nothing but the ear.”

  Mattheson vented his most provocative polemics against counterpoint in his journal Critica Musica. One particularly incendiary article prompted a friend of Bach and Walther, the prominent contrapuntist Heinrich Bokemeyer, to leap rather unwisely to counterpoint’s defense, overstating his case, which allowed Mattheson to continue the attack by publishing the defense along with his own devastating commentary on it. Bokemeyer was eventually so undone by the war of words that he actually capitulated in a letter he allowed Mattheson to print. “When I look at my old ideas,” he wrote Mattheson later, “I am filled with the greatest disgust.”

  Obviously, given the heat of the debate, this was an intense moment in the history of music. Theorists were full of ideas, newly able presses were there to deliver them up to a ready audience, and there really was something important to talk about. Music was now at the intersection of what could be thought of as a horizontal-vertical crossroads: the point at which the idea of music as a spiritual weave of independent voices moving roughly equally and together through time (polyphony) was giving way to the ideal of a sensuously beautiful and all-important melody hoisted aloft and borne forward by an undergirding of chords (homophony). The arrival of thoroughbass accompaniment—the part played by the harpsichord and perhaps a bass viol or a similar “continuo” group—put a roof and floor on this divided house, as it were, by giving priority to the highest and lowest voices, but it was still a house without walls, and it was on the brink of collapse.

  We will be coming back to this subject (if not the mixed and overextended metaphor) because this is the point at which Bach parted company with his sons and their generation, including Carl and his royal employer, and where they parted company with him. And we will be returning to the subject of canon—the pride of counterpoint’s defenders and the bane of its detractors—because inside the exploding bouquet that was Bach’s Musical Offering to Frederick the Great there were exactly ten of them.

  AS A COMPOSER in Weimar Bach was everywhere all the time. For the cantatas he wrote there he continued to plant allegorical meanings in his key changes, as he had done in the Actus tragicus, but now he began also to sharpen his theological and musical ideas with new interpretive poetry being written for the liturgy and new forms from the opera, especially recitatives (a free, formless passage of music, usually for a solo voice, that follows the natural accents and rhythm of a piece of text) and da capo arias (da capo, literally “from the head,” indicating a work of two parts and a repeat of the first, resulting in the A-B-A form familiar from every popular song).

  In his study of every structural and stylistic device of his time, Bach was a musical omnivore (and given his taste for food and drink, which were now beginning to show, not an exclusively musical one). At the same time that he was mastering the intellectual rigors of canon, he was trying to understand the passionate intensity of the latest music from Italy, especially that of Antonio Vivaldi, whose L’Estro armonico was published while he was in Weimar. The young duke Johann Ernst brought it back with him from Amsterdam, along with so many trunks full of the latest music that new shelves had to be built in the palace to hold it all.

  Once they had music in hand, old or new, Walther and Bach—like every other conscientious composer of their day—went about studying it as they had been taught in school to study oratory, through the threefold discipline of praeceptum, exemplum, and imitatio (learning principles, studying examples, and imitating good execution). In just this way, Bach and Walther studied the Italians: first by copying out their works note for note, then by arranging them for various instruments, finally by transfiguring them in works of their own. Both men did transcriptions of Italian violin concerti for harpsichord and organ. From this period date Bach’s fugues on themes of Albinoni, Corelli, and Legrenzi, as well as his F-major concerto “after Vivaldi” for harpsichord. />
  Bach did more than study and replicate his models, though, and he was more than “influenced” by them. Unlike his contemporaries Handel and Telemann, whose ambition was directed toward creating the epitome of a particular style, Bach deconstructed styles and put them back together again combined with his strengths in invention, orchestration, and counterpoint. The result especially of his encounter with the structural and melodic strength of Vivaldi was not only a sum greater than its parts but something utterly new: a burlier, grander, ever more confident Bach, who was now fully armed and ready for glory. First, however, there would be a fall.

  AFTER FIVE YEARS in Weimar, he had already become sufficiently well known and respected that, at the age of twenty-eight, he was asked to succeed no less than Friedrich Wilhelm Zachow, the teacher of Handel, who had presided at the Market Church in Halle since the year Bach was born. During his courtship by the Halle consistory, he was put up for two weeks at the best hotel in town, where he appears to have had a very good time; his room charges included more than thirty quarts of beer, as well as respectable quantities of brandy. Given the likely result on his mood, it is perhaps not surprising that he was very receptive to his hosts’ offer, but several weeks later he reversed himself. In Halle, this change of heart was taken as evidence that his romance with them was only a ploy to better his position in Weimar. Bach objected in the strongest possible terms to the inference but gratefully accepted a large raise and promotion from the duke.

  The promotion was to concertmaster, a position inferior only to that of Kapellmeister Samuel Drese and his son the Vice Kapellmeister. More important, it required him to compose new works for the duke’s Kapelle at least once a month. For the next three years he poured forth an extraordinary amount of work in every form and style—music for choir, chamber music, music for orchestra and keyboard. When Kapellmeister Drese died at the end of 1716, Bach no doubt considered himself the best possible replacement, and if any proof were needed, his work of this period should have been more than sufficient. Ultimately, however, the job went to Drese’s son, and it later became apparent that Bach had never been seriously considered for it.

  He did not have to look for long for another job. The young prince Leopold of Anhalt-Cöthen quickly signed Bach to be his Kapellmeister, the position with the duties and authority he had always wanted. Bach accepted even before his release by the duke because he was so certain of it. If all else failed, he could count on the fact that, in this world, a prince outranked a duke. Of course all else did fail, and dukes, it turned out, had their devices, prince or no prince.

  While the duke was still considering his options for the next Kapellmeister, Bach was invited to Dresden for what was clearly set up to be a battle of titans: the organ virtuoso Louis Marchand versus the master of Weimar in a keyboard duel. The match was probably instigated by Count von Flemming, the Saxon elector’s prime minister and an admirer of Bach, at whose castle the contest was to take place. Bach certainly knew Marchand by reputation and through his music, but he apparently had not heard him play, because before he wrote the letter setting forth the challenge he surreptitiously attended a performance to take the measure of his opponent. Obviously undaunted, Bach wrote the letter, received Marchand’s agreement, and turned up at the appointed time. Bach, his hosts, and the expectant audience waited … and waited, until finally someone went to Marchand’s hotel to fetch him, only to find that he had left that very morning by the fast coach out of Dresden.

  It says something about the common perception of Bach’s mastery that the great Marchand’s absence was taken immediately for capitulation. Bach had been dodged before. He twice attempted to meet Handel, only to be eluded with somewhat flimsy excuses. After one of Handel’s visits to Dresden, Count von Flemming wrote to Bach:

  I tried to get a word with Mr. Handel and to pay him some civility for your sake but I could accomplish nothing. I used your name on my invitation to him to come and see me, but he was always out or else ill. Il est un peu fou, ce qu’il me semble [It seems to me he’s a little crazy].

  Possibly inflated from his triumph over Marchand and the fuss made over him in the court of the Saxon elector, Bach returned to Weimar and pressed the duke for his immediate release with all of his usual political delicacy. A note in the ducal records tells the rest:

  On November 6, [1717] the quondam concertmaster and organist Bach was confined to the County Judge’s place of detention for too stubbornly forcing the issue of his dismissal.

  No doubt struggling at his bars round the clock, he was nevertheless kept in prison for four long weeks before finally being sent away from Weimar with a dishonorable discharge.

  No mention is made of Bach’s imprisonment in any contemporary account of his life except for a passing reference by one Ernst Ludwig Gerber, who wrote that Bach had written the first book of his Well-Tempered Clavier “in a place where ennui, boredom and the absence of any kind of musical instrument forced him to resort to this pastime.” Once again, in being passed over for a lesser musician and then imprisoned for his trouble, Bach’s career had been brought up short by the peremptory power of aristocracy.

  THE TWENTY-THREE-YEAR-OLD Prince Leopold of Anhalt-Cöthen loved music, was a musician himself, and was interested in the relationship between music and social structures. He had hired the right man. In works he began in Weimar and finished in Cöthen, Bach was exploring just such issues, though perhaps without thinking of it that way. In the Brandenburg Concertos, for example, the musicologists Michael Marissen and Laurence Dreyfus both found any number of places where Bach seems intentionally to confront and subvert both musical and social conventions. In the first Brandenburg, for the first time in any concerto, he uses flashy, aristocratic hunting horns, only to devalue them by making them an equal contrapuntal partner with the lowly oboe, which was associated with downscale, town-piper music. In the fourth Brandenburg he promotes over the violin the even lowlier recorder, an instrument too common even to be claimed as one of a town musician’s proficiencies in applying for a job. Bach put canons into his most elaborately ornamental developments; he blurred the distinction between full-orchestra and solo episodes; he put French and Italian forms together to comment on each other; and far from simply absorbing the styles he studied, he seemed to go out of his way to break them, writing in the French or Italian manner, as Dreyfus memorably puts it, “like a surly foreigner.”

  To ask if Bach was doing this intentionally or not would be to imply an insult. Bach was nothing if not thorough, intentional about everything he did.

  ONE OF THE most persistent and provocative dialogues in the history of Western culture takes place between those who claim for art a universal, metaphysical basis and those who see it as culturally determined, the articulation of the artist’s response to a particular time and place. On one level it is clear that both positions must be correct. It seems quite obvious that a composer writes from and about a particular time and place and equally obvious that a composer’s power of expression and a listener’s empathy have a more complex system of roots.

  In Bach’s time and as far back as Plato’s, the question was framed in terms of ratio and sensus, or intellect vs. emotion/intuition, as alternate faculties by which one could most properly create or appreciate a piece of music. The proponents of ratio cited Pythagoras’ galactic harmony and numeric proportions, the intellectual, quasi-scientific aspect of music that linked it to astronomy, geometry, and arithmetic in the classical quadrivium. Although even Plato reluctantly had to admit that aesthetic pleasure rather than intellectual purity was the ultimate judge of music, the proponents of sensus had to wait many centuries for less grudging advocates—for example, Mattheson. But the sensus position did not really come into its own until the onceunquestioned imperative of social conformity was challenged by the assertion of the individual and personal feelings, a very gradual process that heated up considerably during the eighteenth century and culminated in the Romantic hero of the nineteenth. One of
Bach’s most dramatic contributions to this mind-vs.feeling and order-vs.-freedom debate was the fifth Brandenburg concerto, in which, very oddly for his time, he seems to come down strongly on the side of the passionate, self-asserting, singular human being.

  The development of the modern concerto heralded the advance of the individual and in a way enacted it: There was the orchestra, representing the collective society, who would articulate the subject (theme) of the evening, and in front of it stood the soloist. The interaction between them was a kind of discourse between the individual and society, one that could at times take on the character of argument. The knowledge that in the end we would always return to the place, or key, where we began offered a kind of reassurance that the tension in this play of the one and the many would be resolved, that all would be well in the end. (When music could no longer be relied upon to end up where it started, two world wars and the atomic bomb had taken away the assurance of such happy endings.)

  Into the dialectic of the concerto entered, for one example, Vivaldi, house composer to an orphanage and the Republic of Venice, a far from traditional aristocracy. Doges were generally installed toward the end of their lives, had no real power, and were told on their installation to remember that life is short. At least one doge’s life was shortened for him when he forgot he had no power. In other words, Vivaldi composed in a relatively free aesthetic environment, and in part for this reason his solo parts could be dazzling, virtuosic statements that unapologetically upstaged the orchestra. In some parts of the world, such a role for the individual would have been regarded as downright subversive.