Creators (12 page)

Bach was criticized at the time, by those who did not understand his religious motivation, for making high technical demands, in instrument playing and singing, the norm for his entire range of compositions. The musical theorist Johann Adolph Scheibe (1708–1776) wrote of Bach in his periodical
Der Critische Musikus
in 1737: “Since he judges according to his own fingers, his pieces are extremely difficult to play; for he demands that singers and instrumentalists should be able to do with their throats and instruments whatever he can play on the keyboard. But this is impossible.” It is true that Bach, although he had been a brilliant treble in his boyhood, was less interested in the voice than in instruments, especially keyboard instruments. He certainly imposes hardships on the voice in many pieces. It is also true that Bach wrote mainly for himself and for musicians directly under his control or supervision, and for pupils he was training for the highest pitch of accomplishment. He did indeed publish some work, but not for the general musical public, and least of all for amateurs. He published for professional musicians of high quality who belonged to his school—a much narrower group than, say, Handel’s followers and admirers. Bach was known and revered among the north and central German musical community, but beyond it his accomplishments were unrec
ognized (as a rule) and would not have earned him much repute even if they had been better known.

Even in Germany, and even among the musical community there, though Bach was seen as a great master, few (if any) then recognized the sheer scale of his achievement. Only nine of his significant works were published in his lifetime. Yet, unlike any other composer in history, Bach wrote examples (often in formidable numbers) of every type of music then known (opera alone excepted), usually deepening their seriousness and extending their variety, adding new dimensions by experimenting with fresh combinations of instruments or pushing the technical frontiers. His encyclopedic reach was a matter not of vision or vainglory but of work. He produced something new virtually every week of his life—one is tempted to say almost every day—since (like Dürer with his watercolors), Bach composed even when traveling. He wrote music in his head, memorized it, and only afterward tried it out on the keyboard (this information comes from his son Carl Philipp Emanuel). The output tended to reflect his current work, since he wrote (as a rule) for immediate performance—as, of course, did Shakespeare. Thus most of Bach’s organ work was written while he was principally an organist, at Arnstadt, Mulhouse, and Weimar. At Köthen, as Kappellmeister, he specialized in chamber music. His vocal works date mostly from his long spell in Leipzig, though he also produced a vast amount of keyboard music during these years, for a variety of purposes. What we have of Bach today, despite two centuries of vigorous searches in archives, forms only a part of his output. He kept his scores about him during his lifetime, and his pupils sometimes copied them. At his death in 1750 the scores were divided among his surviving children and his widow; and it was then that the process of sale, dispersal, and loss began, continuing until the end of the eighteenth century, when his value began to be appreciated again. The losses were enormous—over 100 church cantatas disappeared without trace, and more than half his secular cantatas. Even so, what remains is astonishing. There are over 200 church cantatas, including a few doubtful ones; thirty-four secular cantatas; five masses, plus two settings for the Magnificat, five from the Sanctus, and two other sections;
six passions; eight motets; 253 chorales and sacred songs; 260 organ works, plus many “possibles” among those classified as “spurious or doubtful”; about 200 works for other keyboard instruments; seven works for lute; about forty chamber works and twenty-five for orchestra; and a dozen studies in canonic music and counterpoint. There are probably about 1,200 works all told, out of—perhaps—1,600 or 1,700 composed; a few are short, but only a tiny number are slight. Considering the amount of time Bach had to spend playing, conducting, arguing with officials, teaching, and copying, this output is astounding—the man was a copious, gushing, unceasing fountain of creativity.
⁸

It is important to grasp that Bach’s life, including his creative life, centered on the organ. Indeed, to appreciate his power fully, you need to know exactly how an eighteenth-century organ works, as well as how to play one—knowledge I do not possess. The reed is the oldest of all musical instruments—human beings learned to play on reeds at the time artists were painting the caves at Lascaux and Altamira—and mechanical reed players or organs go back at least to the early first millennium BC (in Greece). By Roman times, whether worked by water or by wind, organs were becoming sophisticated; there is a fascinating reconstruction of one organ, based on a surviving fragment, in the Budapest Museum. Organs continued to evolve throughout the Dark Ages, Middle Ages, and the early modern period, becoming larger and more intricate. Until the industrial revolution at the end of the eighteenth century, they were by far the most complex machines ever made—watches and clocks were sometimes as elaborate, but much smaller. Organs were, however, machines, not instruments—that is, the quality of the sound was produced not by human skill in manipulating keys or stops or covering holes with greater or lesser pressure, or by wielding bows with varying strength. All the organist and the keyboard can do is signal to the machine what note to play. The machine does the rest, and the quality of the note depends on how it is made and set. (A harpsichord has much the same mechanical character, but not a pianoforte, in which the pianist’s hands are fully in control of the musical quality.) The second point about the organ as a machine is that it deals in sound power, not music. Some early
medieval organs could produce enormous sounds, but they tended to be noise rather than music. We know of one organ that required two players and seventy blowers, operating bellows, which produced a noise “like thunder.” This might have some useful role in the liturgy or a service, but not a musical one. How to turn wind power into art is the central problem of playing the organ and composing for the organ, and I suspect it is one that will never be finally solved. Operating an organ is, and always has been, a source of great anger. A twelfth-century English drawing shows two organists, at a keyboard, shouting at fan bellows blowers and wagging furious fingers at them. These blowers may have been lazy, producing too little air power; or they may have been overzealous, producing too much—so that the sound emitted from the pipes horrified the players. We do not know. Even harder to portray in line is the continual warfare between those who play the organ and those who make organs. Since the eighteenth century, when the art of organ building began to mature, the builders have exercised enormous amounts of time, ingenuity, money, and creative energy on making organs capable of emitting the widest possible ranges of sound and every gradation of volume. They regard the organist as a constitutionally ungrateful creature for not showing the gratitude they feel they deserve. But organists are not so much ungrateful as angry at what they regard as the aural insensitivity of the makers, who construct machines that are impossible to play in a musical manner. I cite as an example of this anger the article on organ playing in the old
Grove’s Dictionary of Music
, written by the great organist Dr. Percy Buck. He points out that inconsiderate, unmusical organ construction can produce horrible noises, which “all but the most hardened organ-players find insupportable”; or sounds which, while enjoyed by an uninstructed public, are distasteful to musicians. The article is written in a tone of despair. Buck makes five practical suggestions for improving the musicality of the organ, but he admits that the builders will take no notice: it is of no use for people like himself to give advice—“organ-builders with one accord seem to have set their faces against it.”
⁹

Bach himself was well aware of the tension between performers and builders, being personally involved in the design, build
ing, rebuilding, testing, and repair of dozens of major organs in Germany. By his day the organ was a bewildering and often monstrous instrument. Often, a single instrument consisted of five distinct organs: great, swell, choir, solo, and pedal, sometimes with an echo, celestial, and altar organ as well. The pipes would be numbered in hundreds, sometimes thousands, with, for instance, nine different pipes to produce the same C: rohrflöte, quintadena, gedackt, Lieblich gedackt, flute dolce, spillflöte, nachthorn, salicet, and normprinzipal. All organs had four main parts: first, the mechanism for collecting and distributing wind, that is, the bellows, wind trunk, wind chest, and soundboard grooves; second, the key action or Klavier and key movement, which the organist controlled directly; these were supplemented, third, by the draw-stop action, controlling the type or types of pipes the organist was using; and fourth, the couplers and pedals, which created or refined composed sounds. The last three are the concern of the organist, and it was regarding the functioning of these controls, and the sounds they produced, that Bach chiefly dealt with the builders. During his day, and especially in the last twenty-five years of his life, magnificent organs were built all over Europe, particularly the great organs of Naumburg, Dresden, Breslau, Potsdam, Uppsala, Pisa, Tours, Paris, Gouda, Weingarten, Herzogenburg, and Haarlem. Bach saw and played on only two of these, but he was familiar with some great German organs built from 1700 to 1750, which were of comparable size and quality. No performer or composer of his age, perhaps of any age, knew more about organs than he did. His problem was how to use the vast resources of the eighteenth-century organ to produce the maximum quality and flexibility of sound in performance, and how to write organ music for such performances.

To do this, he mastered, refined, and expanded the musical science peculiar to organ playing (and, to a limited degree, to the harpsichord) known as registration. On an organ, the registers, or separate stops, control the “on” and “off” positions for the pipes, and so determine the entire tonal capacity of the instrument. By deciding which stops he uses, the organist settles the nature of the sound produced, as opposed to the note, which he picks through the keyboard. Organ registration as a science con
sists partly of the advice tendered by the builders about the optimum use of the stops, singly or in combination, to produce particular tones; and partly by the markings of composers or master organists in the scores of particular works. Bach spent much of his life working on registration, both in general terms and for particular organs. His son Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach wrote: “No one understood registration as well as he. Organ builders were terrified when he sat down to play one of their organs and drew the stops in his own manner, for they thought the effect would not be as good as they were planning. Then they heard an effect that astounded them.”
¹⁰
This skill, never surpassed before or since, was the result of long experience, familiarity with numerous fine organs, and experiments on their mechanisms acquired in building and rebuilding them—much scrambling about in organ lofts. Bach trained pupils to use his methods and acquire his instinctive sense of registration when confronted with a new score. Hence he seldom wrote down in his organ works his advice on registration, but it must be understood to constitute a dimension of the scoring in addition to the melodic line and the harmonics. He did put names of stops in the Concerto in D Minor (after Vivaldi, the composer he most admired) and two choral preludes. Four chorale preludes have pitch levels, and in some large choral works he put such marks as
forte
,
piano
,
Rückpositiv
,
Oberwerk
, and
organo plenoso
.

Bach composed for the organ all his life; but, unlike his predecessors, he rarely put together works that could be played on either organ or harpsichord. For the harpsichord, he worked on systematic groups of pieces to be used both in teaching keyboard skills and in composing. The works known as the
Well-Tempered Clavier,
twenty-four preludes and fugues (Book 1 of
Forty-Eight Preludes and Fugues
), the
Goldberg Variations
, and
The Art of Fugue
constitute a didactic survey and exploration of the keyboard types, fashions, and opportunities of his day. These works have never been equaled, and experts can—and sometimes do—spend an entire lifetime exploring them.
The Art of Fugue
, which exists in autograph, takes the performer through simple fugues to counterfugues, double fugues, and triple fugues, culminating in a mirror fugue, fugues with interpolated canons, and a
quadruple fugue. What is so notable about these exercises is not only the pedagogic skill, which reflected Bach’s phenomenal success as a teacher, but the thematic and harmonic variety, and the sheer creative ingenuity with which Bach honors the keyboard.

A keyboard instrument usually needs to be tempered because the concords of triadic music—octaves, fifths, and thirds—are often incommensurate in their pure form. The scale has to be tuned to make most concords improve so that none or few sound definitely wrong. Despite the existence of the
Well-Tempered Clavier,
it is not known whether Bach favored equal tempering, but this is certainly the method his son Carl Philipp Emanuel preferred. Today equal tempering is used universally for modern works, but in the twentieth century it became fashionable to temper instruments unequally for early music, including Bach’s. Controversy rages over the issue and will continue to do so. As Bach knew, and often made clear, music is a complex business because of the natural imperfections of the sonic scale and the inadequacy of man-made instruments. Perfect solutions were impossible, and standards, including his own, had to be personal. We do not know whether Bach, writing for the instruments then available, would have wished to hear his keyboard work transcribed and played on the modern piano (though we do know that he looked forward to and worked toward such an instrument). Nor do we know whether performances of his organ work on the vast organs built in the nineteenth century (let alone the high-technology monstrosities of the twentieth and twenty-first) would have pleased or irritated him. Albert Schweitzer, the most passionate of Bach scholars, was quite sure Bach would have approved of technical advances: “What a joy it is [to play Bach] on the beautiful Walcker organs [built c. 1870–1875],” and “How happy Bach would have been to have had a fine piano on his third manual by the Venetian shutter-swell.” This is true, in general terms: Bach was too strong (and therefore generous) a creative personality to resist innovation in any form on principle. But it is evident from his record with new organs that he would have inspected the nineteenth-century and modern monster organs with a highly critical eye, and would have insisted on many modifications before using them. These organs would of course have inspired fresh compositions to stretch their powers to the
utmost. Bach would also, almost certainly, have taken up a third, personal position—as opposed to those who insist on special instrumentation and arrangements for his music to get an “authentic” sound and those who consider such practices pedantic. Bach was not only a creative genius. He was also, like Shakespeare, a “sensible man.” He was judicious, a great musical judge, articulating the laws of music from the bottomless well of his knowledge and from his wholesome gift for right and righteousness. This characteristic comes out well in the only authentic image of him, now at Princeton. The big broad face and head radiate sense and wisdom as well as virtuosity.