Evening in the Palace of Reason Read online

  “I, I, I, I had much grief, I had much grief, in my heart, in my heart, I had much grief etc., in my heart etc. etc., I had much grief etc., in my heart, etc., I had much grief etc., in my heart etc., etc.”

  Possibly if he had known of Maria Barbara’s very recent death, he would not so blithely have poked fun.

  Mattheson aside, Bach’s concert was a huge success, and still the job went to a nonentity, for the price of a large donation to the church, an outcome over which even Mattheson expressed indignation. Several months later, in the summer of 1722, when the job of cantor at the St. Thomas School and director of music in Leipzig presented itself, Bach was near the bottom of a list of twelve candidates. His friend Telemann, the favorite, took himself out of the running, as did two others; another could not win his release from court employment; and Bach, the only candidate without a university education, before a selection committee replete with doctorates, finally got the job almost by default. At the crucial meeting, one town councillor, Dr. Abraham Platz, concluded, “As the best are not available, I suppose we must take one of the second-rate men”—a statement for which he has been justly immortalized.

  The appointment process was, it must be said, highly politicized, a proxy for the ongoing battle between the absolutist ambitions of the Saxon elector, Augustus the Strong, and the contrary assertion of power by Saxony’s nobility and cities, known together as the Estates. The two sides had two very different ideas for the job, a fact that doomed anyone who took it to a world of political wrangling. The absolutist party (led by Augustus’s de facto prime minister, Count von Flemming, Bach’s host for the noncontest with Louis Marchand) wanted a Kapellmeister, someone who would bring musical distinction to the city of Leipzig as a whole. The Estates wanted a school cantor, someone clearly under local auspices. As a candidate of the absolutists (after all, he had spent the last fifteen years in court employment and had long known where the real power was), Bach represented for the council of Leipzig an intrusion by the elector into civic matters. Finally, however, all of their own candidates bowed out for one reason or another, and after passing the requisite examination in theology, Bach was, without recorded enthusiasm, hired.

  The position, in Philipp Spitta’s opinion, was “not a brilliant one,” though it had a distinguished musical lineage going back for more than a century. Among other problems, discipline at the school had been deteriorating for years. In a report as early as 1717 the rector admitted to “a very sad state of things.… [P]articularly of the chorus musicus … there is more of evil to be guarded against than of good to be hoped for.” Spitta reported that the singers spent all they made at weddings and funerals on “prohibited pleasures” and were “often enfeebled and miserable from disease.” A new code set in place by the rector the year that Bach arrived was largely ignored, and even after Bach had been at St. Thomas’s for seven years, the superintendent reported that the school was “fast going to ruin and had almost run wild.” For all that, Bach’s first years at St. Thomas’s were among the most productive of his life.

  HE HAD HIS SECOND wife to thank for that, at least in part. About a year after Maria Barbara died, while he was still in Cöthen, Bach had hired into the court Kapelle a gifted nineteenyear-old soprano named Anna Magdalena Wilcke, daughter of the court trumpeter at Weissenfels. He gave his new singer the unusually lofty title of “chamber musician” and a salary second only to his own. We do not know whether the musical relationship came before the romantic one or whether Bach was being the clever dog, but six months after she arrived, they were married, and a year later they had their first child. When Anna Magdalena Bach was sufficiently recovered to travel, the twenty-one-year-old bride set out with her thirty-six-year-old husband and his family—including his first wife’s sister and four children, now ranging in age from eleven to five—for their new home in Leipzig, where they would spend their entire married life.

  Compared to how little is known about Bach’s relationship with Maria Barbara, what we know of his marriage to Anna Magdalena is abundant and evocative. We know that she loved songbirds and flowers, that she sang beautifully and often at home (though she gave up her career after she married). We can surmise that she wanted to learn to play keyboards because of a notebook Bach began making for her not long after the wedding, which he assembled in a green binding that was stamped with her initials and tied with a band of silk. Some of the pieces in it are copied out in her own elegant hand, some are songs Bach wrote for her to sing, and other songs were clearly addressed to her.

  Your servant, sweetest maiden bride:

  Joy be with you this morning!

  To see you in your flowery crown

  And wedding-day adorning

  Would fill with joy the sternest soul.

  What wonder, as I meet you,

  That my fond heart and loving lips

  O’erflow with song to greet you?

  Every evidence suggests that theirs was a loving home.

  Typically for Bach, it was a busy one as well, with more newcomers to the family virtually every year. Ten months after their first child came the second, fourteen months later the third, and so on, and so on: Anna Magdalena Bach presented her husband with thirteen children in nineteen years. He loved them all but alway doted on his three sons from his marriage to Maria Barbara, and particularly on the eldest. During their first year in Leipzig, Bach gave Friedemann, who was twelve years old at the time, the notice of his future admission to the university wrapped as a Christmas present, and he used the music book he wrote for Friedemann to teach all of his children to play. He boasted in a letter to a friend that all of his children were “born musicians, and I can assure you that I can already form an ensemble both [choral] and [instrumental] within my family, particularly since my present wife sings a good, clear soprano, and my eldest daughter, too, joins in not badly.” But Friedemann was clearly the favorite and Bach’s intended musical heir, the son he took with him to Dresden to hear what he gently disparaged as the “pretty little ditties” of Johann Adolph Hasse, a friend of Bach’s who wrote in the galant style favored by the Saxon elector’s court. And yet the son who would create the greatest legacy as a musician and the one who wrote most about his father is the second son, Carl, or C. P. E., as the world has remembered him. It is from Carl, for example, that we hear his father could predict, at the first entrance of a fugue subject, every way in which it could be developed contrapuntally—and that when the performance proved him right he would proudly give Carl a nudge and a wink. Both sons spoke frankly of having to distinguish themselves from such an outsize character as their father, but Carl seems to have felt that need more keenly than Friedemann, perhaps becau se he was so clearly not the favorite.

  Plainly, Bach enjoyed the role of haus-pater to all of his children, and a family life that was traditionally and devoutly Lutheran: Children were to show respect for the parents, and parents were to learn patience and diligence in dealings with their children and each other in that challenging nexus of family relationships which Luther called the “school for character.”

  Their apartment in the south wing of the St. Thomas building made for a very crowded school. Carl remembered his father’s home as a “beehive, and just as full of life.… No master of music was apt to pass through [Leipzig] without meeting my father and being heard by him.” His students and assistants lived with the family, and there were frequent house concerts, probably in the largest room, the heated living room on the second floor, which was all of 250 square feet. With more than a dozen people at a time living in the 800-square-foot apartment (which apparently had only one unheated bathroom), it is possible to understand why, when he shut himself off in the evening to work in his composing room, he sometimes took along a bottle of brandy.

  There were instruments in the composing room, but he had long since stopped composing at the keyboard. He wrote music at his desk, where there were stacks of paper, the raven-quill pens he always used, and rastrals for drawing staves on
the scores, single staves for instrumental parts, double for keyboard. There too was the powder to make the ink, the red and black ink pots in which he mixed it with water, and a box of sand for blotting the ink dry. On a sunny day he could find his thoughts while gazing out the window of this corner room, which overlooked the river Pleisse and, in the far distance, the castle and cathedral of Merseburg.

  He must have spent a good deal of his time in that room, because his output was astonishing, especially in the early years. On the Sunday he took over his duties in Leipzig, in late May of 1723, he presented the first cantata in the project of “well-organized church music” that he had considered his great goal as a composer ever since he left Mühlhausen fifteen years before, citing in his letter of resignation the “opposition” and “vexations” he had experienced in pursuit of it. This was the first cantata in what would become five complete annual cycles, a cantata for every Sunday and feast day of the ecclesiastical year, some three hundred in all. There are few achievements in the history of art to compare—in ambition, scope, or artistry—with Bach’s composition of cantatas during those first years in Leipzig, and to them he added his passions, the St. John Passion for his first Easter, the St. Matthew for his fourth. Only a deep sense of mission could sustain such an extraordinary outpouring of work. As the Bach scholar Friedrich Smend observed, the cantatas and passions were “not intended to be works of music or art on their own, but [were meant] to carry on, by their own means, the work of Luther, the preaching of the word and of nothing but the word.”

  From his first job in Arnstadt, Bach had worked with the words of Luther and the Bible virtually every day of his career, and as he grew older his pursuit of spiritual understanding became ever more gripping. The library of books on theology that he accumulated, much of it in Leipzig, would have been the pride of any pastor. He owned the best-known works of the Pietists and Christian mystics and numerous works of commentary on Luther’s works and the German Bible. In 1733 he bought a three-volume version of the Lutheran Bible that had been published in 1681 with commentary by Dr. Abraham Calov, and later he spent a large fraction of a year’s salary to buy the seven-volume edition of Luther’s collected writings on which Calov had based his work. This joined an eight-volume set he already owned that had been published in the mid-sixteenth century. Most of Bach’s theological library disappeared after his death, but the Calov Bible was found in the attic of a farmhouse in Michigan in 1934.

  More telling than the extent of the library are all the heavy underlinings and the exclamations he wrote in the margins of his Calov. As anyone who has ever read a used book knows, nothing exposes readers to quite such a high degree of nakedness as the underlinings and marginalia they leave behind, and Bach was no exception. Many of the passages he marked clearly address issues related to texts of his music, but others clearly speak to very pressing issues in his life. Since he bought his Calov in 1733, we can be quite certain that as he scrawled and underscored his way through it, he was often thinking about the constant battles he was having with his superiors, which reached a high pitch in the mid-1730s but began not long after he arrived. Unfortunately for Bach, the close, nearly obsessive attention to matters of form that served him so well as a contrapuntist did not translate at all well to the world of office politics. But it is in these small, sometimes almost slapstick squabbles that we see the character of a man who could ignore everything about him but his own vision.

  ANGER MUST EXIST, BUT TAKE CARE THAT IT

  OCCUR AS IS PROPER AND IN YOUR COMMAND,

  AND THAT YOU EXPRESS ANGER NOT FOR YOUR

  OWN SAKE BUT FOR THE SAKE OF YOUR

  OFFICE.… FOR YOURSELF YOU MUST SHOW

  NO ANGER, NO MATTER HOW SEVERE THE

  OFFENSE HAS BEEN. HOWEVER,

  WHERE IT CONCERNS YOUR OFFICE,

  YOU MUST SHOW ANGER*.

  A few months after he began his new job, Bach decided to raise the issue of who was in charge of music at the university church. Telemann and Christoph Graupner had been offered that job as part of their portfolio, but after they dropped out, and before Bach was hired, the organist who was filling in temporarily, Johann Gottlieb Görner, came forward and was given the position for an annual remittance of all of twelve florins, about enough money to buy four cases of good wine. For Bach, however, as so many things were with him, this was a matter of principle. He petitioned the council for the job, and the twelve florins that went with it, but the council said he had no standing to claim the job or the salary, which was their prerogative to give to anyone they chose. Bach argued back on precedent: Kuhnau had had authority over the university church, and the twelve florins. Since their new cantor was obviously not letting this go, the council decided to split the difference: Bach could have six florins for programming and conducting the music at four annual events at the church, Görner would keep Sundays and other services. For Bach that was not good enough. (Keep in mind that now we are talking about only two cases of wine.)

  IF YOU CHOOSE TO PLACE YOURSELF IN VIOLENT

  OPPOSITION YOU WILL BE POURING OIL ON THE

  FIRE AND RUBBING AGAINST THE BARB.

  Bach took it up with the king of Poland. This, of course, was also the elector of Saxony, his ultimate patron, Augustus the Strong (whose prime minister had helped to put him in the job). He wrote to Augustus once, then again, and finally delivered himself of a several-thousand-word essay that dissected the small matter into very tiny particles. At that Augustus ruled decisively against Bach—by now this issue had been going on for almost three years—declaring that the council’s compromise had been a fair one. On the other hand, the records indicate that, somehow or other, Bach did finally wrangle the full twelve florins, and even a bit more, for the four annual performances he conducted at the university (of recycled cantatas), which he kept doing for the next twenty-five years. Wine, after all, is wine.

  THOSE WHO DIG TRAPS EASILY ERR AND FALL

  IN THEMSELVES. THUS DEALING WITH

  GOVERNANCE AND SUCH MATTERS IN THE

  WORLD IS NOTHING OTHER THAN DIGGING

  PITFALLS, AND YOU MAY BE FOREWARNED TO

  EXPECT ALL SORTS OF DANGERS.

  A few months after the king sided with the council, Bach stepped on Görner. He accepted a commission to write a cantata for a service to honor the recently deceased wife of Augustus the Strong that was to be held at the university. Predictably, Görner blew up, but Bach got away with it, minus some fast-waning goodwill with the council.

  The next year he got into another ridiculously petty feud with St. Thomas’s subdeacon over his right to choose hymns for the service, which became the subject of another arch, nanoscopic argument in a letter to the council, which was beginning to get more than a little tired of its cantor.

  One would think the performance of his first version of the St. Matthew Passion the following Easter might have quieted them down a bit. Besides being the greatest of all Bach’s passions, besides being perhaps the greatest oratorio and one of the most ambitious and powerful works of music ever written, the St. Matthew Passion was also one that used to maximum effect the new forms of recitative and da capo aria with which Bach had been enriching the repertoire of Lutheran church music for several years. Clearly, however, his superiors and parishioners were not particularly grateful for this technical and aesthetic achievement, because the only recorded review of the St. Matthew Passion in Bach’s lifetime was from an aged widow in the congregation: “God help us! It’s an opera-comedy!” A few weeks after that, four choral scholars that Bach had deemed “useless” were admitted to St. Thomas’s over his protest, and things were getting worse.

  THOSE WHO WANT TO ASSIST THE PEOPLE AND

  THEIR AFFAIRS AND WHO HELP FAITHFULLY ARE

  THANKED AS THE WORLD IS ACCUSTOMED: IT

  KICKS THEM AND WIPES ITS SHOES ON

  THEM.… THEREFORE LEARN TO RECOGNIZE

  THE WORLD; YOU WILL NOT MAKE IT DIFFERENT;

  IT WILL NOT DIRECT IT
SELF ACCORDING TO

  YOU; ABOVE ALL OTHER THINGS LEARN AND

  KNOW THAT THE WORLD IS UNGRATEFUL.

  Plainly and understandably discouraged, Bach began to move away from the church in that fall of 1729. He filled an opening for organist at the New Church with his own man and took for himself the leadership of the secular collegium musicum that traditionally came with that post. Predictably, as he began to compose orchestral music and conduct the weekly concerts of the collegium musicum at Zimmerman’s coffeehouse, his superiors at St. Thomas’s became even more clearly focused on his inattention to them. His contribution to the bicentennial of the Augsburg Confession in June 1730, three new cantatas performed over three days, was followed in a few weeks with a town council meeting in which Bach’s failure to teach his regular classes (trying to make musicians out of numbskulls, in his view) was discussed in near-apocalyptic terms. One councillor said he showed “little inclination to work,” and another said he “did nothing.… A break would have to come sometime.” A third called Bach “incorrigible” and wanted to see him fired. Instead, at least for the moment, they reduced his income, and at the same time doubled the salary of the New Church organist and gave him money for new instruments. Bach had every reason to feel that an attempt at his ouster was imminent, which it was. He clearly did feel that his efforts were not sufficiently appreciated, which they were not.

  Into the teeth of this vexatious opposition, in his fashion, Bach hurled a memo entitled “Short but Most Necessary Draft for a Well-Appointed Church Music, Plus Some Modest Reflections Concerning Its Ruin.” The council may never have got past the title. In any case there was no reply to the document, which began with a statement so dry as to leave no doubt of the author’s contempt for the memo’s recipients: “To perform concerted music … both singers and instrumentalists are required.”