Bach’s Greater Work
Bach settled in Leipzig at the age of thirty-eight. He remained there the rest of his life. True, he came and went, and he made journeys of one sort or another, but they were never far distant or protracted. In Leipzig he created his grandest, his most colossal, and also his profoundest and subtlest works. His duties were incredibly numerous and often heart-breakingly heavy. He was responsible, it has been said, “to all and to none.” Again and again he had the rector of the St. Thomas School, the city council, the church Consistory, and yet others about his ears. He had to look after the musical services in four churches, two of them the most important in the town. Under exasperating conditions he had to teach turbulent and ruffianly pupils. He had to combat official ill will and intrigue. For the performances he was obliged to conduct he had vocal and instrumental forces that strike us as laughably inadequate and were in numberless cases grossly unskilled. The demands on his physical and spiritual strength must have been appalling. Yet Bach appears to have had the resources and the resistance of a giant. We know that over and again his temper, his obstinate nature and inborn pugnacity were tried to the uttermost. But in the face of all irritations he was earning enough, his home life was comfortable, he met and entertained artists, he had the satisfaction of knowing that his sons could enjoy the educational advantages of Leipzig, and he gradually gathered about him a company of greatly gifted young students and devoted disciples.
In the course of years he shifted some of his most unsympathetic duties to other shoulders. How he could otherwise have written the gigantic amount of music he did is an unanswerable question. For consider: he came to Leipzig the composer of about thirty church cantatas. When he died in 1750 he had produced there 265 more. Of this staggering total (295) 202 have come down to us. As if this were not enough (these cantatas, incidentally, were week-to-week obligations), his years at Leipzig account for many secular cantatas, six motets, five masses (including the titanic one in B minor), the Passions according to St. John and St. Matthew (not to mention lost ones), the Christmas Oratorio, the resplendent Magnificat, the Easter and Ascension oratorios, besides clavier works like the Italian Concerto, the Goldberg Variations, the second book of the Well-Tempered Clavier, and an incredible mass of other things.
The rector of St. Thomas’ School during Bach’s first years in Leipzig was Johann Heinrich Ernesti, with whom Bach’s relations were cordial enough, though the rector was a slipshod disciplinarian. Matters remained pleasant enough under Johann Gesner, but presently the latter left St. Thomas to assume a more profitable post at Göttingen. His successor, Johann August Ernesti, quickly proceeded to stroke Bach’s fur the wrong way by declaring that altogether too much attention was given to the study of music. “So you want to be a pot-house fiddler,” he used to say to youths he found practising the violin. It was only a question of time when the surly new rector and the combustible Bach would come into collision.
What has been called the “battle of the Prefects” was long drawn out and bitter. The details need not detain us. Trouble was intensified by the appointment to a responsible position of a person named Krause, whom Bach had angrily described as “ein liederlicher Hund” (“a dissolute dog”). Things went from bad to worse. Bach accused the rector of usurping his functions. He wrote long, circumstantial letters setting forth his case to “their Magnificences,” the Burgomaster, the civic council, and other outstanding authorities. “Their Magnificences” replied with legalistic hair-splittings and things grew so violent that Bach in one case undertook to drive Krause from the choir loft. The lengthy series of undignified squabbles was finally brought to an end by Augustus the Strong, King of Poland, Saxony, “etc., etc., etc.” (to use Bach’s own designation). We are not certain that the composer obtained the satisfaction he demanded, but everyone seems to have tired of the interminable quarrel and was relieved to see it peter out.
Meanwhile, Bach had other worries and vexations. One of his sons, Gottfried Bernhard, proved as unstable as did Wilhelm Friedemann in a later day, but died before his financial misdeeds had ended in his open disgrace. Then the composer was made the target of attacks by a certain minor musician, one Scheibe, who criticized his works for what he called their “complexity and overelaboration.” Bach immortalized the fellow by satirizing him in the secular cantata, “Phoebus and Pan,” where Scheibe appears as the ignoramus Midas, adorned with a pair of ass’s ears!
Bach performing at the organ of the Potsdam garrison-church. In the center is Frederick the Great, at whose request Bach played the organs in several of Potsdam’s leading churches.
Bach accompanying his musically gifted second wife—for whom he wrote some of his most inspired arias—in an informal recital at their Leipzig home.
In 1736 Augustus the Strong conferred upon Bach the title of Court Composer. The patent of Bach’s dignity was committed to the Russian envoy in Dresden, Carl Freiherr von Keyserling. He was a sufferer from chronic insomnia and it is to this circumstance that we owe one of Bach’s supreme works for the clavier—the so-called Goldberg Variations. To ease the torment of sleepless nights the Count had in his service a gifted clavecinist, Johann Gottlieb Goldberg, a pupil of Bach’s. While Bach was in the midst of his troubles with Ernesti, Keyserling commissioned him to write Goldberg “something soothing” to divert his wakefulness. Bach took a Sarabande melody he had copied into his wife’s Notenbuch and used it as the basis of thirty variations. So delighted was Keyserling that he never wearied of listening to Goldberg play them and actually referred to them as “my Variations.” The Count, paradoxically enough, now had every reason to remain awake and enjoy the never-ending ingenuity and luxuriant fancy of these variations and the lively Quodlibet toward the close, which recalls those boisterous medleys the Bach family of old used to improvise at its reunions. It is pleasant to record that Keyserling paid Bach liberally for “his” Variations.