Evening in the Palace of Reason Read online

  There will not be a quiz on the foregoing. It will be enough to remember that Baroque composers, very much including Bach, practiced a craft of somewhat mysterious and arcane causes and effects, that they used rhetorical figures consciously to invoke specific emotional and moral messages, and that these messages, whether or not they are felt or heard, can be found on the pages of the score.

  Making beautiful music and articulating literal messages at the same time seems to have been as difficult as it sounds. Some were better at it than others, and even the best composers’ attempts were not always successful. Among the little of Bach’s earliest work that has survived is a keyboard suite called Capriccio on the Departure of the Beloved Brother (BWV 992). Most of Bach’s biographers believe it was written as a send-off to his brother Johann Jakob,* who had signed on as oboist with the expeditionary army of Sweden’s Charles XII—a good job for a musician in service to a cause that must have seemed glamorous to a boy in his late teens. The Capriccio is about the most literal work of music that can be imagined. The first movement, in keeping with certain other such storytelling compositions, is titled “Friends Gather and Try to Dissuade Him from Departing,” and sure enough there they are, audibly mingling, softly dissuading. In later movements, just as obviously, we find out that “The Friends’ Lament” and then, “Since He Cannot Be Dissuaded, They Say Farewell.” The finale is a fugue that imitates the horn of a postillion, or lead horseman, presumably trumpeting Jakob off to glory.

  In the current context, however, another part of the work bears notice, of a sort that it first received by the musicologist Michael Marissen. In the movement entitled “Various Misfortunes That Could Befall Him Abroad,” Marissen heard Bach do something very unusual: To get across the idea of misfortune, he modulated the piece radically downward, deep into the flat keys, well outside the range that would then have been considered appropriate. As Marissen noted, he did this later in choral works to underline a textual point. Such a “distant tonal movement in the flat direction outside the ambitus,” in the language of a tweny-first-century musicologist (Marissen), could be used as a pathopoeia, in the language of Baroque musical rhetoric, meant to signify suffering, sadness, grief, and death. After the Capriccio Bach rarely employed this device in his instrumental works, but for one important instance when Marissen heard him doing it again, we will have cause to remember this one.

  BACH’S LIFE WAS hardly a swamp of esoteric music theory, but he had plenty of time to think up rhetorical solutions to musical problems in Arnstadt because he had very little else to do. He was therefore on somewhat shaky ground when the consistory called him on the carpet for refusing to train the Gymnaseum’s choral students for anything beyond simple hymns, even though he was correct in pointing out that he was not required to do so by the terms of his contract. To be fair, his refusal is understandable. The council records contain a complaint about the Gymnaseum students with whom he was saddled:

  They have no respect for their masters, fight in their presence, behave in a scandalous manner, come to school wearing swords, play at ball games in their classrooms, even in the House of God, and resort to places of ill repute. Out of school they play games of hazard, drink, and do other things we shrink from naming.

  These were not choirboys. To complicate matters, some of them were older than their twenty-year-old director.

  One twenty-three-year-old instrumentalist actually started a fight with Bach one night when he was coming home from an event at the castle. As Bach made his way home, according to the consistory records, a student bassoonist named Johann Heinrich Geyersbach braced him in the market square, accused him of comparing his playing to the bleating of a goat, called him a cowardly dog, and swung a stick at him. Bach swore later that he would never have drawn his dagger (a not uncommon dress-up accessory in those feistier days) if Geyersbach had not swung at him first. According to the consistory’s account of the matter, “the two of them tumbled about until the rest of the students who had been sitting with [Geyersbach] … separated them.”

  Bach’s denial that he had said Geyersbach played like a goat was never taken seriously. Where music was concerned, he was famously unforgiving. He is credibly reported to have thrown his wig at an organist once, with the forceful suggestion that the man think about becoming a cobbler. While censuring Geyersbach, the consistory drily observed that Bach “might very well have refrained” from calling Geyersbach a bleating bassoonist and once again censured him for not taking the students’ musical advancement more in hand. Bach replied that he would be happy to help out if there were a director of music to impose some structure and discipline on the effort, to which the consistory remarked, in just so many words, that life is not perfect. The consistory concluded with an admonishment to its young organist: “[Bach] must get along with the students and they must not make one another’s lives miserable.”

  Bach never did get along with the students. Some weeks after the Geyersbach incident, about six weeks before Christmas, he requested and was given a leave of four weeks. He returned four months later.

  WHAT INTERVENED WAS another of Bach’s very long walks in search of his future, this one a two-hundred-fifty-mile journey to Lübeck, where Dietrich Buxtehude presided at the great organ of St. Mary’s Church. Given Buxtehude’s advancing age (he died the next year) and what had just happened in Arnstadt, Bach may well have been investigating the possibility of becoming Buxtehude’s successor. Handel, who was Bach’s exact contemporary and in some ways his exact opposite, had come to Lübeck on the same errand two years before, invited to audition for Buxtehude’s job by the president of the town council. In this oddly rare juncture in the lives of Bach and Handel as young men, Philipp Spitta shrewdly took the measure of both.

  Handel arrives from Hamburg in the bright midsummer days, in the gay society of Mattheson, and in obedience to an invitation from the president of the council; he enjoys an affable welcome, and festivities in his honour. Bach comes on foot in the dull autumn weather from remote Thuringia, following his own instinct, and perhaps not knowing one single soul that might look for his coming.

  In the end, the same problem that had put others off the idea of becoming Buxtehude’s successor would have put off Bach as well. Like many such important posts, this one came with the stipulation that the candidate marry his predecessor’s daughter, who in this case was ten years older and a great deal larger than both Bach and Handel. It may not be entirely cynical to imagine that Bach wanted to consider the alternative before settling down with Martin Feldhaus’s niece in Arnstadt; marriage could be a very practical matter in those days.

  He may have left Lübeck without a new job or a wife, but he left anything but empty-handed, having witnessed that Advent season’s Abendmusiken, Buxtehude’s occasional concerts for choir and orchestra, which this year were especially grand: back-to-back oratorio evenings to commemorate the death of Emperor Leopold and the accession of Joseph I. Extra security was required to hold back the crowds, the church was decorated and lit for the occasion, and the oratorios were productions on a scale that Bach had never before witnessed. There were several orchestras and choirs arrayed around the church, including two bands of timpani and trumpets and two horn-and-oboe ensembles, and at one point no fewer than twenty-five violins played in unison. Fittingly for the occasion and venue, the music was a mixture of secular and sacred, and to judge by the libretto and by Buxtehude’s oeuvre (the score did not survive), both oratorios were works of bold, sweeping strokes. Buxtehude’s music is like the thunder of Jove. He took on huge harmonic and compositional challenges with both hands (and feet), and his life was like his music: He was fiercely independent, as a musician could only be in one of the free (meaning prince-free) imperial cities. He had managed to create for himself several thriving musical lives, as composer, teacher, performer, and entrepreneur. The Abendmusiken, for example, were entirely his show: He courted sponsors and raised the money, printed the music, chose the musicians, conducted the per
formance, and of course wrote the music. A serious theorist as well (though, like Bach, one who wrote nothing on the subject but his works), he was thoroughly intrepid. At a time when collections of music from England, France, Italy, and the Netherlands could seem to be from different continents and when composers tended to aim for epitomes of their own national styles rather than to reach across boundaries for something new, Buxtehude drew everything from everywhere. All German composers fell under the influence of the Netherlands, but Buxtehude also wrote arias in the Italian manner, and his harpsichord suites sound French. He wrote for the viola da gamba like an Englishman and choral movements in the style of Lully. He actually borrowed one of Lully’s airs for a set of variations, and was so taken by the works of Lebègue that two of the French composer’s works were long attributed to him. Bach, who may or may not have taken formal lessons with Buxtehude, was his most attentive student.

  RETURNING TO HIS cramped professional life in Arnstadt must have been either profoundly depressing or profoundly motivating; possibly it was both. The consistory, predictably, inquired what he could have been thinking as he unilaterally and so greatly extended his leave, missing the entire Christmas season. In his defense, Bach lamely replied that he was sure his cousin had filled in well in his absence and said that he had needed the time “to learn one thing and another.…” Perhaps emboldened by his inexcusable absence, the consistory went on to scold him for making “strange variations in the chorale, mixing many outlandish tones in it so that the congregation has become confused thereby.” They actually went further than that, prescribing how he should compose: “In the future, if he wishes to introduce a tonus peregrinus, he must prolong it and not shift too swiftly to something else, or, as he has hitherto been accustomed, even play a tonus contrarius.” Being told his improvisations were ranging too far harmonically—being told by a consistory how to make music—cannot have been a welcome experience. In any case, Bach was finished with Arnstadt, in spirit if not immediately in fact.

  Well known by now as the best organist in Thuringia (which was saying something), he did not have to look far for his next job. He found it only a few miles away in Mühlhausen, a free imperial city like Lübeck where he was now to preside at a big organ in the main church, St. Blaise’s. As he took over his new responsibilities, he married his rooming-house sweetheart, Martin Feldhaus’s niece, and providentially inherited more than half a year’s salary when his mother’s brother died.

  IT MAY WELL have been for that uncle, Tobias Lämmerhirt, that Bach composed the funeral cantata Actus tragicus (BWV 106), his first major work. Had any of his contemporary composers heard it or been able to see it in print, they would have known they were sunk. At the age of twenty-two, Bach delivered himself of a funeral cantata in which messages of deep spiritual wisdom were married to music of heartbreaking and impossibly apposite lyricism. Let us take them in that order, wisdom first—though in truth, amazingly, the theological message and artistic merit of the work are really inseparable.

  A work of twelve movements (some very short; the entire work is less than twenty minutes long), its subject is time, on several levels: the great span of spiritual history on earth, from Creation to the Second Coming; the analogous arc of every human lifetime, facing up to Old Testament judgment on the way to New Testament redemption; and most of all God’s time, in which, says Psalm 90, “a thousand years are a single day, a yesterday now over, an hour of the night.”

  The Actus tragicus begins in human time. The opening lament for recorders and strings, set to a steady heartbeat rhythm in the bass, starts in the innocent key of E-flat major and refuses to leave it, as if to say we may mourn but we may not despair, because death is the door to eternal life. Just in case we missed the point, the first chorus is a sweet, happy work of Renaissance-pure polyphony: “God’s time is the very best time” (Gottes Zeit ist die allerbeste Zeit). Having given us an encouraging glimpse of the joy to come at the final destination—of today’s funeral, of our lives and of all eternity—Bach begins a long and steep descent, through the keys and through the stages of life and history. After staying in E-flat major for the phrase “in Him we live,” the chorus takes a sudden, stomach-turning drop to C minor for “in Him we die” and then for a quote from Psalm 90: “Oh Lord, teach us to remember how few days we have so that our hearts may grow in wisdom.” Sinking ever deeper, into F minor now, a rigorous, muscular fugue sets forth the fearsome law of the Old Testament (“It is the ancient covenant: Man, thou must perish”), followed by a plaintive aria for soprano, “Come, Jesus, come.” The fugal death sentence returns as if to deny relief, but this time, after the third statement of the subject (theme), the soprano returns to join the fugal dirge, literally topping and finally outlasting it with the prayer, “Come, Jesus, come.”

  Only then, after a rest fraught with silence, do we come to the nadir, B-fiat minor, in which an alto sings a tender, painfully tentative aria to the last words Christ uttered from the Cross, “Into Thy hands I commend My spirit,” a declaration of hopeful surrender at the very moment in life when hope and surrender are most dangerous. In all the choral works of Bach, this is the only movement in the key of B-flat minor, the extremum enharmonium, in the phrase of one of his contemporary theorists, the deepest-but-one of the deep-flat keys, a key to which Bach would later descend only for moments of the most profound grief and despair, as in the St. Matthew Passion, when the crucified Christ is at His weakest and most human: “My God, My God, why hast Thou forsaken Me?” (In a very different context Bach will be going through this key again, about forty years from now.)

  Then begins the ascent, the triumph over death in Christ’s resurrection and humankind’s salvation through grace, which here as elsewhere evokes from Bach his most inspired displays of musical and theological wisdom. A bass solo, rising to F minor and even slipping in and out of A-flat major, sings Jesus’ promise to the thief on the cross next to him, “Today thou shalt be with Me in paradise,” and after a virtuoso flourish, the aria is joined by sopranos singing in long, held notes (otherwise known as cantu s frmus) one of the most beloved of Lutheran chorales, “Mit Fried und Freud” (“In Peace and Joy I Now Depart”). The bass drops out just before the sopranos emerge again into the sunlight of E-flat major for the line wie Gott mir verheissen hat (“as God has promised me”), which after a chorale of thanks becomes the subject for a four-voiced fugue. Here Bach gives us music in its divine aspect, where time disappears into simultaneity. Only in music—and nowhere better than in counterpoint—can two complementary or contrasting thoughts combine in the same moment, in this case “as God has promised me” (in the fugue subject) and “through Jesus Christ” (in the words sung to the fugue). Earlier, at the very center of the cantata, history itself is conflated, when the Law (“Thou must die”) and Gospel’s promise of mercy (“Come, Jesus”) are sung together, as they exist otherwise only in God’s time.

  Enough about rhetoric and theology: Considered simply—or not so simply—as a work of art, the Actus tragicus is almost unspeakably beautiful. In fact its beauty is unspeakable, though we can talk about it. We can marvel at how Bach lulls us in the deceptively simple first movement into a world of delectable pain and exquisitely broken hearts, or how the chorale “Mit Fried und Freud” emerges from Jesus’ promise of paradise like a tissue being offered to someone who is crying. We can talk about his brilliantly melodic part writing, the richness of his counterpoint, the way his music follows text the way roses follow a trellis, in perfect fidelity and submission but at not the slightest sacrifice of beauty. Finally, though, one comes up against the fact that the greatness of great music is in its ability to express the unutterable. Having reached that point exactly, and not for the last time, we would be best served to put down this book, get out the score, put on the music, read the words and the music together; and after playing it through several times, consider the power of inspired (as well as rigorously educated and deployed) genius. The St. Matthew Passion, the B-minor Mass
, the Brandenburg Concertos, the cello suites: All of Bach begins here.

  ONLY A FEW people ever heard the Actus tragicus in Bach’s lifetime. Like almost all of his work, it was never published and never performed outside Leipzig until he was long dead. His biggest public moment in Mühlhausen, the same year as the Actus tragicus, was the performance of a cantata marking the annual rotation of the town council, not nearly so great a work as the Actus tragicus but a larger one in terms of its audience and its demands on his musical resources, which would have been stretched to the point of breaking. The title was God Is My King (Gott ist mein König, BWV 71), which seems a bit provocative for an event meant to glorify civic bigwigs, and it takes until the last movement to get around to mentioning them, but either they missed the point or were flattered by the comparison because they paid for the work to be elaborately printed. This and another cantata he wrote for the town council were the only cantatas ever published in Bach’s lifetime. The publications were meant to mark the occasions, of course, not to acknowledge the composer’s genius, but no matter: God Is My King is a work of Buxtehudian ambition and scale, complete with a spectacular fugue that, for the first time, promoted instruments from accompanists to center stage, with coequal voices in the fugue’s development. Bach even let the last statement of the fugue subject ring out triumphantly from the trumpets. With God Is My King, the student surpassed the master. Mühlhausen had surely never heard the like of it.

  On the other hand, even a slight miscalibration could turn rhetorical figures into compositional dynamite, and a bit of it goes off in Bach’s hands in the penultimate movement, where a relatively innocuous line in the libretto (“O, never to adversaries deliver the soul of Thine own best beloved”) is delivered by a chorus of deeply sorrowful, chromatic sighing that goes right over the top, culminating in what Spitta aptly describes as