Evening in the Palace of Reason Page 17

  His complaints were many: that incidental fees for town musicians and other vocal and instrumental fill-ins had been reduced, that he needed at least eleven more paid instrumentalists, that more than a third of his student choristers were “not yet serviceable,” and that many others—he listed seventeen by name—were “useless.” Putting on works of the scope of the St. Matthew Passion would obviously have been challenging in such circumstances, but by this time the council had exactly no patience for their cantor or his complaints.

  In the absence of a response, Bach wrote an old friend, now an ambassador in Danzig, asking whether he might know of an opening there and, interestingly, complaining about the many Leipzigers who were clinging so obstinately to life. “My masters are strange folk, with very little music in them,” he wrote, with his customary dips into Latin and French.

  Consequently, I am subjected to constant vexation, envy and persecution.… My present station is worth about 700 thalers a year, and if the death-rate is higher than ordinairement my accidentia increase in proportion; but Leipzig is a healthy place, and for the past year, as it happens, I have received about 100 kronen less than usual in funeral accidentia. The cost of living, too, is so excessive that I was better off in Thuringia on 400 thalers.

  His sense of injustice and ingratitude would never leave him, and from this time forward his work for the church fell into the background. His Passion According to St. Mark for Easter 1731 featured music he had written years before.

  A FOOL AND A HAPLESS MAN IS OF NO USE TO

  HIMSELF.… SUCH PEOPLE ARE FOUND IN ALL

  LEVELS OF SOCIETY; WE MUST LIVE AND WORK

  AMONG THEM, NO MATTER HOW UNBEARABLE

  AND INSUFFERABLE THEY MAY BE.… WHAT IS

  THIS WORLD BUT A LARGE THORN GROWTH THAT

  WE MUST TEAR OURSELVES THROUGH.…

  THIS EARTH IS THE DEVIL’S KINGDOM.

  By the time he actually got his Calov, in 1733, he had a lot of pent-up underlining and marginal exclaiming to do. Given what was going on with him and against him at the time, it is easy to see him with his Calov open, a brandy at his elbow, jowls quivering, wig shaking, the quill in his thick fingers hacking at the page.

  In truth, although he understandably could not see it that way, his rejection by the church was a liberation. In the years that followed, he became ever more inventive and self-confident about going his own way musically. His memo to the council seems in this respect a turning point for him. Here for the first and only time, Bach reflects on his sense that the public taste has changed, that “the old fashioned music sounds strangely in our ears,” and that “the greatest care must be taken to obtain [musicians] capable of satisfying the modern taste in music.” Of course, he was making a case for his request, appealing to the burghers’ interest in appearing to keep up. Bach had no interest in following fashion. He was, however, clearly driven to engage the music of his time, just as he had swallowed Vivaldi whole and devoured Couperin (and Marchand) and bettered the best of his fellow contrapuntists. Having witnessed the silence that was his superiors’ worst response to the St. Matthew Passion, he set about finding new avenues for his ambition—for example, with the collegium musicum and the composition of new keyboard music. The year after his memo to the council, he published the first volume of his Clavierübung (“keyboard practice,” an understated title if ever there was one), containing the finished version of his six masterpieces for keyboard, the Partitas. Hugely diverse and yet entirely comfortable as a set, they are a veritable catalog of styles and devices from every time including his own: In strict and free counterpoint mi xed with extraordinarily elegant galant writing, he embraces the traditions and fashions of half a dozen countries, and yet all of the suites and their parts are uniquely his own. Clavieriibung II, published four years later, consists of his Italian Concerto and French Overture, works admired by the most avid advocates of both counterpoint and the galant. For all that he had already done in these works and in bringing new forms and life into his music for the church, including his “opera-comedy” the St. Matthew Passion, his most dramatic confrontation with the music of his own time had just begun. His freedom for that program of work would have been much curtailed had he depended for it on his superiors at St. Thomas’s, especially since the worst of his problems with them were still ahead.

  AFTER THE DEATH of Augustus the Strong, Bach sought a court title from his son Friedrich, the new elector (amazingly, Augustus’s only legitimate child; all of his hundreds of other children were born to his various daughters and other, extra-familial mistresses). Bach clearly thought this would give him some protection from the authorities in Leipzig. To this end, on a trip to Dresden to visit Friedemann, he brought with him a suitably spectacular composition, the first two sections of what years later would become the B-minor Mass, in a dedication copy for the new elector. He gave it to an intermediary along with a letter to Friedrich which appealed to “Your Highness’s World-Famous Clemency” to take him “under Your Most Mighty Protection.” It was a little early for the new elector to be world-famous, but this was the sort of thing Baroque composers said to absolute rulers. What followed was not quite as common.

  For some years and up to the present moment, I have … innocently had to suffer one injury or another, and on occasion also a diminution of the fees accruing to me in this office; but these injuries would disappear altogether if Your Royal Highness would grant me the favor of conferring on me a title of Your Highness’s Court Kapelle.…

  His application was decidedly ill-timed, coming before the official mourning period for Augustus was over and as Friedrich’s claim to the Polish throne was under attack, but Bach pursued it with almost undignified but oddly uncompromised zeal.

  For the birthday of the new elector’s young son that fall, he wrote one of his secular drammi per musica, this one called Hercules at the Crossroads (BWV 213), which used a classical myth to celebrate the boy’s prestige and also gave Bach the opportunity for a sermon, an attempt to put this young man on the right path (not a bad idea, considering his grandfather). The story was well known despite somewhat esoteric origins. In Xenophon’s Memorabilia, it is told by Socrates, who attributes it to his teacher. As the story goes, Hercules was just coming into his young manhood when two women came to him in a vision, one representing virtue, the other vice. Vice promises him “a short and easy road to happiness. You shall taste of all life’s sweet and escape all bitters … your only speculation what meat or drink you shall find agreeable to your palate, what delight of ear or eye, what pleasure of smell or touch.” Virtue admits that hers is the more difficult path but warns him of the easy road to ruin and promises that if he chooses her, “you shall be moved to accomplish many a [great] and noble deed.”

  Bach, of course, enjoined the new elector’s crown prince to answer as Hercules does, and just to make sure his dedicatee got the message, Hercules’ love duet with Virtue is followed by a recitative from Mercury singing:

  Behold, you gods, here is a portrait

  Of the youth of Saxony’s Crown Prince….

  Three months after Hercules he wrote and staged another dramma per musica for the new elector’s wife. In the fall of the following year, on very short notice—Friedrich decided suddenly to visit the Michaelmas Fair in Leipzig—he cobbled together still another one. We can infer the full measure of his desire to please from the fact that he pulled its nine movements together in only three days and that its lyrics approach Lullian heights of sycophancy over Friedrich’s contest for the Polish throne. At that it was entirely in keeping with the rest of the festivities, for which the town and all its towers were illuminated by hundreds of torches, visible for miles around. Six hundred students carried candles in procession (past little verse messages posted in the windows of hopeful shopkeepers along the way, clearly meant for a merciful and philanthropic elector: “Debts oft bring me incarceration / But tonight I have illumination” and “I love my King with heart devout / I have a lot of
pain from gout”). Four lucky counts presented the score of Bach’s work to the elector and got to kiss his hand, after which came the music. According to the town chronicler, the visiting royalty “did not leave the windows until the music was over and listened most graciously and liked it well.” It must have been long on brass, because Bach’s sixty-seven-year-old lead trumpeter suffered a fatal stroke the next day, brought on, the chronicler said, by smoke from the torches combined with exertions required in Bach’s music.

  Bach’s works for the elector, despite their practical purpose, were composed with no less dedication and conviction than any of his other music. If further proof were needed that Bach drew no distinction between his secular and sacred work, there is this: No fewer than six movements from Hercules turned up at the end of 1734 in his Christmas Oratorio (BWV 248). The love duet between Hercules and Virtue becomes an aria for baritone and soprano giving thanks for the nativity of Jesus. The chorus in praise of young Prince Friedrich becomes in the oratorio a hymn in thanks to God for His Son. Virtue’s promise becomes a plea for faith. Hercules’ rebuke to Vice becomes a challenge to recognize the Messiah upon His birth. And the aria in which Hercules ponders his decision becomes, with little more than a key change, the soliloquy of a devout Christian. Most of the rest of the Christmas Oratorio was taken from his other encomia to Friedrich over the past year.

  Even after the last of these musical tributes to the elector and his family, there was no answer to Bach’s plea for a royal title until two years later, by which time Friedrich was securely installed as the Polish monarch and Bach was finally given the estimable but largely honorific title “Royal Composer to the Noble Court of the King of Poland and Elector of Saxony.”

  WHEN THINGS ARE GOOD CONSIDER THAT THEY

  CAN EASILY TURN BAD, AND IF THINGS ARE BAD

  THAT THEY CAN TURN GOOD, AND DO NOT

  PRESUME THAT THINGS WILL GO THE WAY YOU

  WANT.… HE WHO TROUBLES HIMSELF WITH

  HAVING THINGS TURN OUT THE WAY HE

  WANTS … WILL HAVE NOTHING BUT SADNESS,

  UNREST, AND PAIN OF HEART.

  Bach’s new title did not insulate him as he had hoped. In fact, his situation deteriorated badly that very year, when he and the new rector of the St. Thomas School got into a catfight over who had the right to choose which students could act as Bach’s assistants, or “prefects,” an embarrassment for both men that was actually just one ridiculous scene in a serious drama. The rector, Johann August Ernesti, a distinguished but cold, acerbic academic, was bent on submitting the St. Thomas curriculum to the new light of reason. Twenty-nine when he was made rector, Ernesti was twenty-two years Bach’s junior, which cannot have helped their relationship, especially since the war of ideas under way at that time between Bach’s world and that of the Enlightenment was distinctly generational.

  The battle with Ernesti began when one of Bach’s prefects inflicted too harsh a punishment on a boisterous chorister. According to Ernesti, the prefect’s method of discipline (he beat the singer with a stick) warranted a public flogging. Rather than submit to that, the boy left school. Ernesti then determined that his replacement was to be a boy named Krause, who Bach felt was musically unfit and, he said, “a dissolute dog.” Nevertheless, Ernesti got the backing of the burgomaster to deliver Bach an ultimatum: Make the appointment or Ernesti would do so himself. Bach’s response was the predictable one.

  Ernesti talked to Krause very early on the second Sunday of August 1736, early enough that Bach had time before the main service to appeal the decision to the head of the council, who hedged. By the time Bach got to church the service was begun, and Krause was in the choir loft conducting. Furious, Bach collected another prefect and with him in tow stormed up to the gallery, where he relieved Krause brusquely and apparently with a great deal of noise. Hearing the commotion, Ernesti left the service to find out if Bach was acting with the council’s support. Finding he was not, Ernesti told Krause after the service to take over conducting at vespers that afternoon, and in the meantime he forbade the choir to sing under anyone else on pain of expulsion. Once again at Vespers, of course, Bach drove Krause from the gallery. The second prefect, who sensibly refused Bach’s request to take Krause’s place, was punished that evening when Bach, who had to eat dinner with the students because it was his week to act as school inspector, drove the traitor from his table. As Bach put the students to bed with their evening prayers, those who were not still stinging from the absurd set-to of the day would surely have been snickering about it.

  Bach’s first long, detailed letter to the council about the matter was dated that very day. A longer and even fussier one was dated the next day. There was another two days later, and they kept coming. The next Sunday Bach and Ernesti played out the same awful scene, bringing forth yet another piteous tome from Bach.

  The “affair of the prefects” dragged on for more than a year before finally Bach once again—this time over the earth-shattering issue of a teaching assistant—went right to the top, to the elector of Saxony and king of Poland, for satisfaction. Bach’s king and elector ruled forcefully that he could not care less:

  Whereas Our Court Composer, Johann Sebastian Bach, has complained to Us … that [Ernesti] has had the effrontery to fill the post of Prefect without his concurrence … We therefore desire herewith that you [the town council] shall take such measures, in response to this complaint, as you shall see fit.

  The council minutes do not disclose exactly what happened after that, but both sides seem to have been accommodated to some extent, and the practical issue had been resolved when Krause left school at the end of the previous academic year. (Bach must have appointed his replacement, because there was no quarrel over the matter.)

  The silliness of this bizarre wrangle does no credit to the real issue between the rector and his cantor, which was important and which never did go away. Ernesti was a prototypical rationalist of the early Enlightenment, a grammarian, translator, and professor of philology who sensibly posited that the Scriptures should be submitted to the same objective, scholarly approach as the classics. He was determined to bend the curriculum of St. Thomas toward the humanities and liberate it in particular from the notion of music as handmaiden of theology, his idea of a school being light-years from Luther’s educational ideal of “the training of men toward God as a consequence of the practice of music to the glory of God.” An ardent follower of the Aufklärung’s Christian Wolff, Ernesti believed strongly in the need to rationalize the spiritual, the same bootless project that led Wolff to such contorted solutions as Moses’ expertise in fluid mechanics. It is some measure of his firmness of purpose that he could write this: “Greater weight in exegesis should be attributed to grammatical considerations than to doctrinal ones.” To be fair, he is still felt to have had a salutary impact on biblical scholarship if not on faith.

  Ernesti was far from alone in seeking technical clarity about the mysteries of faith. Typical was one contemporary theologian, Hermann-Samuel Reimarus, who achieved posthumous fame for his massive Apologia for the Rational Worshipers of God. Among other conclusions, his reading of Matthew led him to believe that Jesus not only did not foresee his crucifixion but was completely undone by the prospect: “He began to quiver and quake when he saw that this adventure might cost him his life.” Reimarus reads the climactic crucifixion scene, in which Christ calls out from the cross, “My God, My God, why has Thou forsaken me?” not as the moment which proves that even the Son of God was subject to human weakness, doubt, and pain, without which of course the crucifixion would be meaningless, but as a simple, horrified realization that

  God had not helped him to carry out his intention and attain his object as he had hoped he would have done. It was then clearly not the intention or the object of Jesus to suffer and to die, but to build up a worldly kingdom, and to deliver the Israelites from bondage [emphasis original].

  A practical interpretation certainly, but not the basis for much of a r
eligion.

  In such a cold-lighted world there would be no more cosmological-theological privilege for music, no more number mysticism or claims about divine harmonies and proportions, no more pseudocosmic nonsense. One of the school’s founding principles—“to guide the students through the euphony of music to the contemplation of the divine”—was to be discarded. If Ernesti could have had his way, the curriculum of St. Thomas School would have dispensed with music entirely. He was known to stop music students at their practice to say derisively, “What, you want to be a beer fiddler too?”

  One of Ernesti’s guiding lights and kindred spirits, a professor of aesthetics at the university named Johann Christoph Gottsched, followed Christian Wolff down somewhat different blind alleys. The task he set for himself was to rationalize the creative process, which produced results about as edifying as Reimarus’s reading of the Gospel. Gottsched’s Kritische Dichtkunst of 1730 was a dry, pedantic compendium of rules and formal hierarchies by which German poets were to write poetry and German dramatists were to write drama, presupposing that every proper aesthetic device and effect could be classified and that such a classification, if rigorously adhered to, would produce a true German literature. In his Kritische Dichtkunst, Gottsched ridiculed the use of da capo arias, recitatives, and operatic forms in general. “By an extravagantly wasteful musical art the work of poetry becomes invisible, or so hidden that it is not discernible.” He praised Graun and Hasse, devotees of the galant style, mentioning his Leipzig neighbor Bach not once. As Peter Gay pointed out in his study of the Enlightenment, Gottsched at least had the problem right: German literature and drama had no public, and the language itself, a crude vernacular with no stylish written form, was a large part of the reason.