Creators (11 page)

All Shakespearean texts are enlivened, almost bejeweled, with words and phrases which he has sewn into them from the great caskets of his verbal inventions. They become part of our language, sometimes of our daily speech; often when we search our minds for something special to say or write, Shakespeare comes to our aid—nowhere more so, or more frequently, than in
Hamlet
. It is his jeweler’s shop, not so much of conscious quotation as of instinctive ownership of memorable phrases, which are part of our heritage, so that when we use them we are almost—even quite—unaware of speaking
Hamlet
’s lines. Shakespeare has scattered a basketful of verbal confetti over our common speech. “Hoist with his own petard.” “Such divinity doth hedge a King.” “Sweets to the sweet,
farewell.” “The readiness is all.” “A hit, a palpable hit.” “The dead vast and middle of the night.” “I know a hawk from a handsaw.” “Caviare to the general.” “Rich not gaudy.” “A king of shreds and patches.” “How all occasions do inform against me.” “Shuffled off this mortal coil.” “The time is out of joint.” “Leave her to heaven!” “I must be cruel only to be kind.” “To hold the mirror up to nature.” “More in sorrow than in anger.” “Wild and whirring words.” “Abstract and brief chronicles of time.” “This fell sergent, death, is strict in his arrest.” “There’s rosemary, that’s for remembrance.” “Absent thee from felicity a while.” “Good night, ladies, good night sweet ladies.” “It smells to Heaven.” “There’s a divinity that shapes our ends, rough-hew them how we will.” “You must wear your rue with a difference.” “A fellow of infinite jest.” “There’s a special providence in the fall of a sparrow.” “Oh, my prophetic soul!” “A nipping and an eager air.” “Neither a borrower nor a lender be.” “Her privates we.” “Hair stand on end like quills upon the fretful porcupine.” “The play’s the thing.” And so on. We quote
Hamlet
almost as we breathe.

Shakespeare creates so fast, so often, so surely, so ubiquitously, not least so imperceptibly, that his creativity is woven into our national life as well as our literature, indeed the literature of the world. He reverberates in us. What more is there to say? We never hear of Shakespeare boasting—though the Elizabethans were, by and large, great boasters, vainglorious creatures. There is nothing in the records he left, his dispositions in law or fact, the things men said about him in his day or after his death, the traditions that surrounded his name, to indicate he had any awareness of his astonishing powers and the magnitude of his achievement. Yet must he not have known he was a great, an extraordinary man? If so, that is one topic on which this man of so many, and so potent, words chose to remain silent.

J
OHANN
S
EBASTIAN
B
ACH
(
1685–1750
)
is the best example in our civilization of the importance of heredity or genes in the development of creativity. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that he illustrates how heredity can provide the foundation from which creative genius of the highest order springs. Nothing is heard of the Bachs before about 1550. Very little is heard of them after about 1850. But during the 300 years in between—that is, from the age of Luther to the age of Bismarck—members of the Bach family, radiating from Thuringia all over Germany and even beyond, constituted the human core of German music, especially of its Protestant north. At times, the word “Bach” became synonymous with “musician” in the world of choir stalls and organ lofts.

Bach himself was keenly aware and modestly proud of his family’s musical heritage. In his industrious and systematic way he investigated the family origins, tracing them back to the man he regarded as their founder, Veit Bach, who flourished around 1540. Veit Bach was a baker, but his hobby was playing the cythinger, or small cittern, and in the view of Bach, his great-great-grandson, he was the founder of the family’s musical fortunes—though another Bach of Veit’s generation, probably his brother, called Hans Bach, founded another branch of the family also prolific in musicians. So successful were Bach’s inves
tigations into the family history that, in 1735, he set down all he had found out in an elaborate document, the
Ursprung
. The original has not survived, but a careful copy of it made by his granddaughter, Anna Carolina Caroline Bach, in 1774–1775, has; and her father, Carl Philipp Emanuel, Bach’s son, who inherited from his father not only formidable musical skills but a taste for dynastic history, made important additions to Anna’s text, from his own knowledge and discoveries. The
Ursprung
reveals biographical data concerning eighty-five male members of the family, the overwhelming majority of whom were musicians. Modern musicology, epitomized in
The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians
, lists eighty Bachs who were distinguished musicians of one kind or another.
¹

The Bachs lived mostly in the Thuringian duchies of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach, and Saxe-Meiningen and the principalities of Schwarzburg-Arnstadt, though they penetrated Saxony and north Germany as far as the North Sea and Baltic coasts, working in major towns like Leipzig, Dresden, Hamburg, and Lübeck. Their employers were, almost without exception, minor or middle-ranking German dukes, princes, and electors; churches and colleges; and municipalities. The Bachs were, without exception, middle class. None rose to riches. None fell into destitution. They were fervently philoprogenitive: Bach families of ten, twelve, or fifteen children were the norm, and J. S. Bach himself had twenty children by two wives. Some Bachs rose no higher than town trumpeter (though this was not a contemptible post: Rossini’s father was one, and proud to be). Others were instrumentalists (especially violinists) or organists, combining the latter career with posts as choirmasters, conductors, and composers.

In the earlier generations, they often had to struggle to raise themselves above the rank of
Spielmann
, or singer, which did not entitle them to citizenship; later, they often rose to the higher ranks—professional titles, then and now, are of great importance in Germany—of
Kantor
,
Konzertmeister
,
Kappelmeister,
and
Stadtpfeifer
. Some of them made musical instruments, especially organs, violins, cellos, and claviers, or advised instrument makers. The Bachs married, almost without exception, wives from their own class, usually from musical families, who could combine annual child
bearing with copying musical parts and performing in family concerts as singers or instrumentalists. The Bachs formed extended family networks of great resilience and helped each other in difficult times. They were overwhelmingly Protestant (usually Lutheran), churchgoing, pious, and law-abiding.

It must not be thought that the Bachs were dull. Some of the earlier Bachs played violins and other stringed instruments in taverns and dance halls. A sixteenth-century Hans Bach, ruffed and carrying a violin, survives in a contemporary print, with a vase in one corner:

Two seventeenth-century Bachs, identical twins and both of course musicians, were so alike, especially when they chose to wear similar clothes, that even their wives could not tell them apart, and they could indulge in occasional wife swapping without their spouses’ noticing. Their playing, too, was indistinguishable. One of these twins, Ambrosius, was the father of Johann Sebastian Bach.
²

The Bach family was by no means the only one in early modern Europe to produce multiple musical virtuosos. Another outstanding example is the Scarlatti family, prominent in Sicilian music in the eighteenth century but also popping up in Rome and Lombardy. Of this tribe Alessandro Scarlatti (1660–1725), an older contemporary of Bach, was an outstanding composer of cantatas (see the list in
New Grove
, XVI, pp. 562–565) and the founder of the Neapolitan school of opera, with sixty-five operas to his credit, plus collaboration in a dozen more. One of his sons, Domenico Scarlatti (1685–1757), born the same year as Bach, also wrote operas but is chiefly known for his 555 keyboard compositions, especially sonatas, which he performed with outstanding skill. Four other Scarlattis achieved musical distinction, but many more made their living by the art. Five of Alessandro’s siblings and three of his own children were professional musicians.
³

Still, it was among German-speaking families that the musical traditions were strongest. The Hoffmanns, the Wilches, and the Lammerhirts were clans of performers and composers. Another example, the Webers, produced, in Carl Maria Weber (1786–1826), a composer of such gifts that, had not tuberculosis carried him off (one of a tragic group of victims at that time, which included Keats, Géricault, and Bonnington), he would now be in the ranks of the greatest men of music. The Webers were originally millers but flourished musically in Lübeck, where Carl Maria’s father was music director of the theater and Kappelmeister to the bishop. (That would have been an unusual combination in Bach’s day, when clerics who employed musicians on church work disapproved strongly of operatic connections; but times were changing by the 1790s.) The sons of the elder Weber’s first marriage studied under Michael Haydn. (Michael and his famous brother Franz Joseph Haydn were not at all from a musical family; their father was a wheelwright.) Carl Maria’s uncle, Fridolm Weber, had several musical daughters, and a book could be written about them. Josepha, the eldest, was a soprano, with coloratura quality, and Mozart wrote for her the role of Queen of the Night in
Die Zauberflöte
. He described her as “a lazy, gross and perfidious woman, and as cunning as a fox.” Of her sister, Aloysia, Mozart said she had “a beautiful, pure voice.” He fell in love with her, proposed marriage, was rejected, and then dismissed her as “false, malicious and a coquette.” Third time lucky, he met their younger sister, Constanze, and married her—happily, one is glad to say. The youngest daughter, Sophie—“good-natured but feather-brained,” according to her brother-in-law—was present during his last hours and wrote a touching account of them many years later, which she gave to his biographer George Nissen.
⁴
The Mozarts were likewise a musical family, though Mozart’s grandfather was a bookbinder. Mozart’s father, Leopold, was a fine violinist, a composer, and a musical theorist and teacher of distinction—Mozart was lucky in his parent, as he very well knew. Two of Mozart’s sons started musical careers but did not get very far. His sister Maria Anna, or Nannerl, played the piano well. She composed, too, though none of her works survives. When Vincent and Mary Novello visited her in Salzburg in
1829, nearly forty years after her brother’s death, they found her “blind, languid, exhausted, feeble and nearly speechless,” living in great poverty and loneliness.
⁵

This kind of neglect was less common in the Bach family, which looked after its own. Born in Eisenach, Luther’s town, Johann Sebastian, the youngest child of eight, had a happy childhood until 1694, when his mother, daughter of a prosperous furrier, died; she was followed by his father in 1695. At nine, then, J. S. Bach was an orphan, and he and his brother Jacob were taken in by their elder brother Christoph. Thereafter, one relative after another came to J. S. Bach’s aid, both in providing sustenance and in ensuring that he got a good musical education. (Bach reciprocated: a teacher of extraordinary gifts and innovative methods, he not only taught music to his six sons but also took in—free—among his pupils six male Bach nephews and cousins.) Bach’s musicology was thus looked after by the family; but the truth is that once he had acquired a mastery of the keyboard (and the violin, which he played to a professional standard), and of musical notation, a process accomplished by his early teens, he became an autodidact and remained one all his life. Whenever he could, Bach (like Dürer) traveled to meet masters, such as Buxtehude in his case. He also traveled to try out fine organs he had heard about. But essentially he learned about music by poring over scores in music libraries and, whenever possible, copying them out himself. From the age of thirteen he spent countless hours copying French, Italian, and German composers, chiefly of organ music but also of other instruments and even ensemble scores. A story has been handed down that, at age fourteen, he wanted to study a certain score. His brother Christoph forbade it; he copied it out by moonlight; Christoph found the copy and kept it, and Bach did not get it back until Christoph died. There is another story that Bach, traveling in north Germany, was short of money and hungry and, outside an inn, fell on two fish heads thrown out of the kitchen window. To his astonishment each head contained a gold coin, and this little miracle enabled him to complete his studies and travels.
⁶

Bach’s career can be easily summarized. In 1702–1703 he was a violinist at the court of Weimar; from 1703 to 1707 he was organ
ist at the Neukirche in Arnstadt. From June 1707 on he was organist at St. Blasius, Mulhouse; during this period he married his cousin Barbara Bach. Then followed a job as chamber musician and organist to the duke of Saxe-Weimar, from 1708 to 1717, and seven children. In 1717 he became Kapellmeister to Prince Leopold at Köthen. In 1720 Barbara died and Bach married a Wilcke, Anna, daughter of a court trumpeter (so both his wives came from musical families). In April 1723 Bach became director of music at Leipzig and Kantor of the Thomasschule there. He remained in this city for the rest of his life, fathering a further thirteen children. In his last years, fearing blindness, he submitted to two operations by the traveling English eye surgeon John Taylor, who also operated on Handel. Both operations failed and may have hastened his death, blind, on 28 July 1750.

Although Bach was in continuous musical practice for nearly half a century, he was hardly what we would now call a celebrity. In his first official post he was described as a “lackey” and all his working life he was at the beck and call of petty princes, church administrators, or town councillors, who often combined ignorance with arrogance. When he wished to move from Weimar to Köthen, the reigning duke was so incensed by the tone in which Bach handed in his resignation that he imprisoned Bach for a month in the ducal jail. The experience seems to have left no mark on Bach whatsoever. Thereafter he was periodically involved in disagreements with his often difficult superiors, especially in Leipzig. Bach’s conduct was uniform. He was the reverse of arrogant, but he had a quiet, natural pride in his skills and performance and a shrewd sense of what was due to him, in salary, responsibilities, treatment, assistants, and deference. His demands were always reasonable; and it must be said that his employers almost invariably ended by meeting them. In return he rendered services which were always punctilious and usually distinguished. Bach was by far the most hardworking of the great musicians, taking huge pains with everything he did and working out the most ephemeral scores in their logical and musical totality, everything written down in his fine, firm hand as though his life depended on it—as, in a sense, was true, for if Bach had scamped a musical duty, or performed it with anything less than the perfection he demanded, he clearly could
not have lived with himself. It is impossible to find, in any of his scores, time-serving repetitions, shortcuts, carelessness, or even the smallest hint of vulgarity. He served up the highest quality, in performance and composition, day after day, year after year, despite the fact that his employers, as often as not, could not tell the good from the bad or even from the mediocre. Bach’s one taste of celebrity—and that was diluted—came in May 1747, when he was sixty-two and visited King Frederick the Great of Prussia at Potsdam. The king, a musician of some competence (as a flutist), gave him a theme and asked for a fugal improvisation, which Bach performed on the spot to general applause. Not content with this impromptu, Bach, on his return home, wrote it down, then used the result as the basis for an elaborate work in four parts for harpsichord, violin, and flute, which he called
Musikalisches Opfer
(“Musical Offering”), sent to the king, and published.
⁷

If Bach had a fault, it was his cerebral but also instinctive and emotional insistence on the highest standards, in himself and others. It is important to grasp that Bach was not only a man of strong religious beliefs and great moral probity but a dedicated musician who felt that music was one way (and, to him, the best way) of speaking to and serving God. He was a rigorous Lutheran in creed, sometimes uneasy when serving Calvinist masters or Lutherans with strong Pietist leanings, but not (so far as we can see) bigoted. Indeed, by the standards of eighteenth-century Germany—where the Wars of Religion had ended as recently as his own childhood (and the Peace of Westphalia, which ended the devastating Thirty Years’ War, had been signed just thirty-seven years before he was born)—he was ecumenical, certainly irenic. The vast majority of his religious compositions were written to be performed in a Lutheran church. But there is nothing in them offensive to non-Lutherans. Unlike his contemporary Handel, Bach does not exude Protestant religiosity. He could and did compose settings for the Latin liturgy and hymns. That, indeed, is how his Mass in B Minor began, with a setting for the Kyrie and Gloria, gradually expanding over the years into a complete Latin mass of astounding power and complexity, which could be, was, and still is—today more than ever—performed with equal enthusiasm and devotion by Catholics and Protestants. His great
St. Matthew Passion
, which together with the mass marks
the summit of his artistic achievement, is set in German, the vernacular regarded as suspect for services by south German Catholics. But, again, it is regarded with reverence by many Christians today as the most faithful and exalted musical presentation of Christ’s suffering and death. Bach was a Lutheran by birth, education, taste, and, not least, loyalty. In a deeper sense, he was a Christian, and his Christianity took the primary form of worshipping God through sound. That sound, whether performed by himself or others, had to be of the highest quality, always and everywhere. Anything less would be an insult to the deity, or at best a gross dereliction of duty. Moreover, quality was not enough. Bach was aware of the great originality of his mind both in devising new musical forms and in perfecting old ones. He knew he could serve God best by demonstrating his originality. Hence he had a religious compulsion to create; and his creations had to stretch his own powers to the uttermost, and are therefore hard for anyone else to play.