Creators (13 page)

Bach’s work for orchestra was composed on the eve of the sonata-form revolution of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven, which created the modern symphony and its orchestra. That he would have embraced the symphony with joy we cannot doubt. As it was, he pushed the concerto form to its limits, as in the six concerti grossi for varying combinations of instruments that he wrote in 1711–1720 and dedicated to the margrave of Brandenburg: it is not surprising that these Brandenburg Concertos are his most frequently performed and widely enjoyed works. What is remarkable in Bach is that his ear for the nuances and possibilities of keyboards was matched by his gift for using all the tonalities and graces of stringed instruments. We see this in the exquisite sonatas and partitas for solo violin, and still more in the unaccompanied cello suites. The way he combines captivating rhythms, the most refined harmonies, and breathtaking counterpoint, perfectly adapted to the strengths (and weaknesses) of these two instruments, is something, perhaps, no other composer could have achieved. Often in his chamber music he was breaking new ground: he emancipated the harpsichord from its supporting role as a continuo instrument and made it a full partner in his sonatas for violin, viola da gamba, and flute (a wind instrument he understood perfectly). And no one before had written for solo cello, or believed such music possible.

Being judicious, Bach was not so much a revolutionary as an improver, reformer, and systematic innovator. He did not abandon any form, but changed and rarefied it. His Mass in B Minor was not a statement—“I shall write such a mass as no one has ever
heard before!”—but a patchwork of bits and pieces assembled over a long period and then polished into a unity of overwhelming power. As in many of Shakespeare’s plays, there was an element of chance and haphazard opportunities in Bach’s music. It exemplifies a point I have come across again and again in studying the history of great works of creation: a deliberate plan is not always necessary for the highest art; it emerges. (Consider, for instance, Michelangelo’s work in the Sistine Chapel, Dickens’s
Pickwick Papers
, Mark Twain’s
Huckleberry Finn
, and Verdi’s
Rigoletto
.) A book could be written about the great Mass in B Minor, which transformed the genre and now ranks with Beethoven’s
Missa Solemis
and the requiems of Mozart and Verdi—all three unified compositions. The B Minor Mass emerged over twenty years: the Sanctus was written in 1724 and the Credo not long before Bach’s death. He seems to have put together a series of large-scale movements to serve as models, rather than create an unprecedented masterpiece on a stupendous scale. But in effect the latter is what he did, and no one today notices the joins or the chronology, or cares tuppence about the work’s prehistory.

The
St. Matthew Passion
, on the other hand, was conceived as a unity, with notable links between the chorales and systematic tonalities, and virtually all the movements are connected with one another. Moreover, Bach introduced a number of striking innovations in this 300-year-old form of church music for Holy Week, which give this Passion its unique power. Evidently he knew what he was doing—composing a masterpiece on the grandest scale. Being, as always, businesslike, he did it for a particular occasion in 1727 or 1729 (there is dispute over the date); and there were two more performances of a revised version in 1736. Then came silence for more than ninety years. Between 1750, when Bach died, and 1800, no complete work by him was printed. He was regarded as an out-of-date musical pedant. There was then a muted revival, but even by 1820 little of his music was in print—it was impossible, for instance, to get hold of scores of the Brandenburgs, or the
Art of Fugue
or the “Forty-Eight.” Mendelssohn, a musical prodigy with a deep regard for the old masters, first heard of this stupendous, forgotten
Passion
from his great-aunt Sara Levy. He then met the music director
Carl Friedrich Zelter, who had a complete score. Zelter thought the
St. Matthew Passion
too big and difficult to perform. He changed his mind, however, when Mendelssohn arranged a private performance in his own home in the winter of 1827. Mendelssohn, then age twenty, worked on the vast score with the comic actor Edouard Derrient, who was also a musicologist, and remarked: “To think that it took a comedian and a ‘Jew-boy’ to revive the greatest Christian music ever written.” Mendelssohn engaged and trained the musicians and singers and conducted the first concert hall performance in Berlin on 11 March 1829. The word had got around that a great musical event was taking place, and the hall was packed, the reception enthusiastic, and the Bach rebirth a fact. Afterward, at Zelter’s house, there was a grand dinner of the Berlin intellectual elite. Frau Derrient whispered to Mendelssohn: “Who is the stupid fellow sitting next to me?” Mendelssohn (behind his napkin): “The stupid fellow next to you is the great philosopher Friedrich Hegel!”

Bach never sought fame, only perfection. He had his sense of worth, but his real interest was in creating and revising musical works of the highest quality, for all types and combinations of instruments and in all forms. When not creating (or playing, often a form of creation in itself ), he was revising his scores. He was never wealthy and often had difficulty accommodating his vast family in comfort. When he died, he left some cash, bonds, silver vessels, furniture, and instruments, including a spinet, eight harpsichords, two lute-harpsichords, ten stringed instruments (among them a Steiner violin of some value), and a lute. They were valued, all together, at 122 thalers and 22 groschen, probably more than Bach had ever earned in a single year. But this legacy had to be divided between nine surviving children and his widow, Anna Magdalena. There were also his scores, and these were divided too. His widow gave her share to the Thomasschule, and died poor ten years after her husband. How their sons allowed this to happen is a mystery. But then there are many mysteries about Bach, not least how one man’s brains and fingers could have created so much to delight and uplift the human race as long as it endures.

J
OSEPH
M
ALLORD
W
ILLIAM
T
URNER
(
1775–1851
)
was a creative genius on the scale of Bach, in the sense that his manner of painting was entirely original, unmistakably his own—it is impossible to confuse him with anyone else—and conducted on a prodigious scale. But whereas Dürer, like Bach, worked in and expanded all the forms of his art then practiced, and added to them, Turner was from first to last a painter of landscapes and buildings (exteriors and interiors), of seas and skies, mountains and lakes, rivers and forests, and nothing more. He never did portraits, still lifes, animals, or human figures (except as staffage). Within his chosen field, however, he was a master who has never been approached, let alone equaled.

Turner’s family came from Devon, but he was born in London, in Covent Garden, and spent all his life in London, except for traveling strictly for professional reasons (he never took a vacation as such). He seems to have drawn or painted from the age of three, and he started to sell his work when he was very young: “When I was a boy I used to lie on my back for hours watching the skies, and then go home and paint them; and there was a stall in the Soho Bazaar where they sold drawing materials and they used to buy my skies. They gave me 1s. 6d. for the small ones and 3s. 6d. for the larger ones.”
¹

Turner’s father, a wig maker and barber, recognized Turner as an artistic genius when the boy was ten or thereabouts, and not only raised no objections to an artistic career but actively promoted it
with all the means in his power. As soon as Turner began to make money, the father gave up his business and turned himself into his son’s salesman, promoter, and studio assistant, functioning as such from about 1790 to his own death in 1829. (The mother went mad, was committed to the Royal Bethlehem Hospital, or Bedlam, in 1800, and died there in 1804.) At age ten Turner worked in the offices of an architectural draftsman, Thomas Malton; at age fourteen he entered the Royal Academy Schools; he was briefly an assistant scene painter at the Pantheon Opera House in Oxford Street; and then he participated in the Academy of Dr. Thomas Monro, copying watercolors by J. R. Cozens and Edward Dayes in the company of his contemporary Thomas Girtin. That was the extent of Turner’s professional training.

He never lacked recognition or sales. His first watercolor was accepted by the Royal Academy in 1792, when he was sixteen, and his first oil in 1796, when he was not yet twenty-one. He was elected an ARA in 1799, at age twenty-five, and a full Royal Academician (RA) in 1802 at age twenty-eight. He never did anything in his life except draw and paint (though he performed some teaching duties for the Royal Academy). He worked all day, every day. His family life was nothing, though we know he had two regular mistresses and fathered two daughters. Work occupied his entire life until a short time before his death, at age seventy-six, in December 1851.
²
Unlike the works of Dürer and Bach, virtually all he did has come down to us, for he marketed it with great skill and energy or preserved it for the nation. Its extent is staggering: nearly 1,000 oil paintings, some very large and elaborate; and about 20,000 drawings and watercolors.
³
In addition, he left many sketchbooks, some still intact. He etched and engraved and supplied materials for endless publications in the commercial book market, imposing hard bargains on the men of business with whom he dealt. But these activities were ancillary to his major trade, which was to sell large oil paintings to rich collectors at the highest possible prices. For this purpose, he exhibited every year at the Royal Academy and also designed, built, and ran his own studio-gallery, with Etruscan red walls and proper overhead lighting. He guarded it like a gold vault, with peepholes to ensure that no one took advantage of his absence to copy or take notes.

Turner had no master. As a teenager he once imitated Philip de Loutherbourg, a French immigrant whose turbulent nature scenes made a sensation in the 1790s. More seriously, he studied Richard Wilson, the first English landscape painter of any eminence, and through Wilson the great Claude Lorrain, whose sunsets were hugely admired by English collectors and artists in the second half of the eighteenth century—and were fiendishly difficult to imitate. Turner admired and learned from Claude to the point where he sought to create his own version of Claude’s
Liber Veritatis
of mezzotints by publishing, in fourteen parts (1807–1814), a book of prints called the
Liber Studiorum
, each with five pictures (characterized as marine, mountainous, pastoral, historical, or architectural), which Turner etched in outline, leaving the mezzotint to subordinates. The idea was to advertise himself and “show how to do it,” rather like Bach’s
Art of Fugue
or the
Well-Tempered Clavier
. Essentially, however, Turner worked on his own, seeking and taking no advice, attracting no pupils (other than by his classes at the Royal Academy), acquiring few followers, and founding no school. He was from the start, and remained till his death, sui generis. While making use of Claude, he could not refrain from a sneer: “People talk a great deal about
Sunsets
, but when you are all fast asleep, I am watching effects of sunrise—far more beautiful—and then, you see, the light does not faint and you can paint them.”
⁴

Turner began his professional career with major topographical subjects, watercolors of London and the Thames Valley, and oils of the inshore waters of the Estuary. Later he went on painting tours in Yorkshire and the north, and in Wales, forming connections with people (such as the Fawkes family in Yorkshire and Lord de Tabley in Cheshire) who acquired collections of his works. He first went abroad in 1802, to Paris (during the brief Peace of Amiens). Then after the final fall of Napoleon in 1815, he went annually to the Netherlands, Germany, the Alps, and Italy. Unlike Dürer, he never set up a studio abroad, and he painted few pictures in oils (other than sketches) on these trips. But he filled hundreds of sketchbooks and did numerous finished watercolors.
⁵
In general, whether Turner worked outside or in his studio depended entirely on practical considerations. To get his
basic visual material he had to work in the open, drawing with great speed and accuracy. He sketched as if he were writing, his hand never still, taking in details every second and often not glancing at the paper as his hand covered it with lines.
⁶
On his first trip to Venice (1819), he allowed himself only five days. On the first day he took a gondola from the entrance to the Canale di Cannaregio, upstream to where the railroad station now is, then slowly down the Grand Canal to the Salute church, and then into the Baccino, with pauses to sketch the more complex bits. In this way he produced eighty sketches in one day, or possibly two days. Turner formed his own notions of the economics of art and the best means of combining quality with productivity. He knew that a watercolor produced on the spot was more likely to be better than one painted in the studio from a line sketch. (I too have found this to be invariably so.) So if the weather was good he always painted watercolors (and sometimes oils) outdoors, as in the superb series of Yorkshire vales and moors, Lakeland hills and lakes, Welsh hills and cityscapes, especially Oxford, which he did in the late 1790s and early 1800s. These included cathedral interiors, also done on the spot, of great size and magnificent complexity—his watercolor of the Ely crossing is perhaps the finest thing he ever did.

As he grew older, however, and more keen on productivity (more avaricious perhaps), he resented the time taken up by coloring on his trips—you can draw in the rain, but you cannot paint, especially in watercolor. Turner (as he told Sir John Soane’s son) calculated that he could do fifteen or sixteen pencil sketches in the same time he took for one color sketch.
⁷
So he trained himself to memorize colors, a difficult business. After about 1805 he painted outdoors in oils only on special occasions, as the apparatus took so long to set up and dismantle, and the medium tended to determine where he could sit and the viewpoint—an irksome parameter for an artist like Turner, one of whose greatest skills was in finding spectacular viewpoints. But he always carried a small box of watercolor paints, brushes, and a water bottle in his pockets so that he could snatch a color view as soon as he saw it. On his first trip to Venice he painted in watercolor four sketches (almost miraculously brilliant) of the effect of light on the city and its waters, entirely for his
own information and records. These sketches came to light only after his death.
⁸
He never missed an opportunity to record a rare effect, but he was also prepared to wait for it. When his coach was overturned in the Alps, and its passengers were marooned in the dark and snow, Turner whipped out his paint box and, ignoring his freezing hands, produced a magnificent watercolor. But R. J. Graves, who watched him in Naples, said: “Turner would content himself with making one careful outline of the scene and…would remain apparently doing nothing, till at some particular moment, perhaps on the third day, he would exclaim: ‘There it is!’ and, seizing his colors, work rapidly until he had noted down the peculiar effect he wished to fix in his memory.”
⁹
“Apparently doing nothing” conceals the fact that Turner, on a working trip, was never idle, often doing several works at once, turning from one, which was drying, to concentrate on another, sometimes with four or five sketches spread out on a table at once.

He was secretive always when working. One young painter (later Sir Charles Eastlake, president of the Royal Academy), who was with Turner in the West Country in 1813, said that Turner often made sketches “by stealth.” On this trip, eyewitnesses recorded Turner’s going out in a small boat in heavy weather. The rest were seasick, but Turner “sat in the stern-sheets intently watching the sea and not at all affected.” He sketched or sat recording wave motions in his mind, “like Atlas unmoved.” Sea trips were followed by walks on which Turner paused occasionally to sketch. He was “a good pedestrian, capable of roughing it in any mode the occasion might demand.” One evening he had a technical argument with De Maria, a scene painter for Covent Garden, who resolved it by watching the ships in the Tamar. “You were right, Mr. Turner, the ports cannot be seen. The ship is one dark mass.” “I told you so, now you can see it—all is one mass of shade.” “Yes, I can see that is the truth, and yet the ports are there.” “We can take only what we see, no matter what is there. There are people in the ship—we don’t see them through the planks.” “True.”
¹⁰
Turner was a hardy man. Sun, ice, heat, cold, and stormy seas meant nothing to him when art was to be created. When he was sixty-seven, he wanted to make accurate sketches for a big oil he was planning, to be called
Snow Storm:
Steam Boat off a Harbour’s Mouth
. He had himself lashed to the mainmast of the
Ariel
, in what turned out to be a gale, and continued sketching.

Turner was an exceptionally active man, traveling rapidly all over Europe and Britain to feed his creative passion. He was also a very physical man: small but muscular; tough; wiry; with powerful lungs, strong jaws, hands with a fiendish grip, and large feet. He glowed with power in a room. But he was also, in his own semiliterate way, an intellectual, much more interested in ideas than in people. He had more effect on painters, in the long run, than any master since Rembrandt and should be seen as the ultimate progenitor of the modern movement in art. His craftsmanship was important, but it should be noted that the dynamics of his art were strongly intellectual (and emotional). Like Bach (and unlike Dürer), he was little educated outside his craft but (like Beethoven, for instance) he read widely, and wildly, all his life, seized on ideas, thought about them, transformed them, and applied them to his art. Modern research has revealed that the literary and intellectual content of his work is much greater than had been supposed.
¹¹

Turner, unlike most other English artists, characteristically picked up public themes, such as the slave trade, Greek independence, and industrialization. He gave his works literary references, often quoting classical or even modern poetry, and sometimes writing his own (clumsy but vivid). He believed that painting is a form of language and that its object is to tell the truth about nature, seen objectively. He believed also that paintings have a moral purpose, to instruct and improve, but they do so physically by showing the effect of light on objects. In no sense was he an abstract or “uncommitted” painter. By the time he was twenty he had learned from observation that light was the key to all painting—objects merely reflected it. Salisbury Cathedral was an edifice of stone, but what it looked like (since its Chilmark limestone reflected light with astonishing variety and fidelity) depended entirely on the time of day, the weather, and the season. To understand light, Turner studied optics and the current theory of color. He knew classical theory, as explained by Aristotle and Pliny; he was familiar with Newton’s seven-color system,
and had read what Kant and Goethe had to say about color. He followed the works of Thomas Young and read
Chromatics
by George Field, who spent much of his life improving the colors available to artists. He read the manuscript essay “Letter on Landscape Colouring” by Sawrey Gilpin, who did the cows and sheep in some of Turner’s early landscapes. But in the end Turner had to work out for himself a right and systematic way of distinguishing colors and of actually getting them onto the canvas—a very different matter—when they were suffused by light of different kinds and intensities. It was here, above all, that his creative genius manifested itself.