CHAPTER II.
BACH AND HÄNDEL.
JOHANN SEBASTIAN BACH.
Born March 21, 1685, at Eisenach.
Died July 28, 1750, in Leipsic.
Johann Sebastian Bach was the son of the city musician of Eisenach, and a descendant of about ten generations of musical Bachs. His father having died when the boy was young, the latter's brother, Johann Christoph, gave him lessons for some time, after which he studied with other masters of considerable celebrity, and at the age of seventeen he was engaged as violinist in the private orchestra of Prince John Ernst, of Saxe-Weimar. He held this place, however, for but a few months, leaving it to accept a more desirable one as organist in the new church at Arnstadt. During the time he held this position he made several journeys on foot to Lübeck to hear the famous Buxtehude play, and later paid the same compliment to another eminent organist. The most important of the early positions which Bach held was that of director of chamber music, and organist to the Duke of Saxe-Weimar, and here, after seven years' service, he was made chief concertmeister. In 1717 he left Weimar to accept a position as musical director at Köthen, where he had a better opportunity to express himself with orchestra. In 1723 be became cantor of the St. Thomas School at Leipsic and music director of the university, as the successor of Johannes Kuhnau. In this position he had the direction of the music in the St. Thomas Church, where he had at his disposal an orchestra, organ, and two choirs, besides which he trained the school-children. He here wrote an enormous amount of church music, consisting of a very large number of cantatas for church service, of which first and last he seems to have produced five entire series for every festival Sunday in the year. These cantatas were short oratorios consisting of choruses, solos, recitatives, instrumental movements, and were frequently of considerable elaboration. Many of them are now lost, but a very considerable number remain. He also composed five oratorios for the Good Friday season—Passion music—of which three yet remain, the most famous one being the "St. Matthew's Passion."
Joh. Sebastian Bach, Geo. Fred. Händel
Bach was married twice, and had, in all, eleven sons and nine daughters, of whom six sons and four daughters survived him. As a practical musician Bach excelled upon the violin, the organ, and the clavier, and he left a very large number of works in all three of these departments, works which still remain the admiration of musicians the world over. His genius was unquestioned in his own lifetime, and the memory of it remained lively even during the fifty years following his death when very few of his works were accessible.
The most complete biography of Bach is the large work by Spitta, in three volumes, in which the entire life-history of this great master, and all the circumstances amid which he worked, his discouragements, and what he accomplished, have been traced with most patient and loving care.
The list of Bach's compositions includes three sonatas and three partitas (generally classed as six sonatas) for violin alone; six sonatas for violin and piano, a large quantity of chamber music of one sort and another, a few orchestral suites, and about ten large volumes of music for the clavier and for the organ.
GEORG FRIEDRICH HÄNDEL.
Born February 23, 1685, at Halle.
Died April 14, 1759, in London.
Händel was the son of a surgeon and it was the wish of his father to educate him to his own profession, but the inclination to music was so strong that it was impossible to prevent him from following it, and, accordingly, he had the best training it was possible to get in the vicinity. When the boy was eleven years old he was taken to Berlin and placed under the instruction of Bononcini and Ariosti, Italian music being then the style at the Prussian court. At the age of sixteen young Händel had obtained a position as organist, and he was also a fine clavecin player and a good violinist. A few years later we find him at Hamburg, where he played the clavecin in the orchestra and was sometimes conductor. Here he produced several operas—"Nero," "Daphne," "Florindo," "Almira"—with so much success that in 1707 he made a journey to Italy for further perfecting himself in the Italian style. Accordingly he spent some months in Florence, three months in Rome, thence back to Florence to produce a new opera, and by the new year of 1708 he was in Venice, where his second Italian opera, "Agrippina," was produced. From Venice he went again to Rome, where he wrote two short oratorios for Cardinal Ottoboni.
He had already made the acquaintance in Venice of Scarlatti, Corelli, and of Antonio Lotti. He accompanied the Scarlattis to Naples and remained with them about a year, and there was great rivalry in regard to the harpsichord playing of Händel and Domenico Scarlatti. This success made Händel's name so celebrated that it led to his being invited to London, where he went in 1712 to bring out some operas. He liked London so well that he remained there all the rest of his life. During a part of this time he was himself the manager of the opera, importing his principal singers from Italy, producing his own operas as well, occasionally, as those by other composers, and experiencing in the vocation of manager the vicissitudes well known to attend it. He made and lost several fortunes; but finally, at his death, had paid up all claims against him and left to charity a very handsome estate.
In London he produced a large number of operas, and then, about 1733, he began to compose oratorios, and in 1741 produced the "Messiah," which had a great success. He also composed a large amount of instrumental music, and was very famous as an organist. He composed a large number of concertos for organ with orchestra, and he was in the habit of playing a new organ concerto in the intermission of an oratorio.
The number of Händel's works is extremely large. All his operas are now forgotten. Nevertheless individual fragments remain, such as the famous alto air, "Lascio Pianga," and many others. From his instrumental works also many charming bits have survived and still please the public, such, for instance, as the famous "Largo." Of the oratorios, his greatest are the "Messiah" and "Israel in Egypt." The most complete biography of Händel is that by Chrysander.
In order to appreciate the importance of Bach and Händel in the history of music, it is necessary to know something of the condition of the world of music when they commenced to work in it. The music-making of the world at that time had come from three original sources, and, in spite of the vast increase in the number of composers and in the volume of musical production, these streams had been kept, and still remained, almost entirely distinct from each other.
At the foundation of all the art of music lies the folk-song—simple melodies which spring up in every country and are easily learned, and pass from one to another until they become current over large extents of territory. The folk-song had its origin, most likely, in the dance; and the dance, in turn, was an artistic evolution from the cadenced chant, accompanied by a measured march, with which the early religious services were performed. The folk-song of the nation naturally disposed itself in the tonality most esteemed by the people, and, accordingly, we find in some countries that most of the folk-songs are in major tonality, while in others minor tonality prevails; the rhythm being determined by the favorite dancing step of the people. Thus, in Germany, many of the folk-songs are waltzes; in Spain, seguidillas; and in Italy, tarantellas. The making of folk-songs must have gone on continually through the spontaneous creation of new melodies by gifted but untaught musicians in all parts of the musical world. These melodies were seldom written down, but were passed from one to another orally; and down to the time of Händel and Bach very little recognition of the folk-song as a possible element in art had been accorded by any trained musician. This is not the place to trace the evolution of the folk-song into more and more symmetrically disposed phrases and agreeable relations of tonality. Enough to say that from the rather slow and minor songs of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, folk-song had blossomed out until, in the time of Bach, it had come to express very much of the simple delights and sorrows of the natural people.
At the opposite extreme from the folk-song were the operations of the thoroughly trained composer. While the folk-song developed itself entirely by ear,—and the ear and feeling of the untaught musician were his sole guide in the production of an agreeable melody,—the trained composer for many centuries entirely disregarded the testimony of the ear, or admitted it in only a slight degree. His principal care was to carry out the rules which he had been taught; and in following this tradition,—the operation of which was almost entirely unchecked by the musical sense properly so called,—the tendency was constantly toward greater and greater elaboration, since only in elaboration could the mastery of the composer be shown. The art of combining tones had been handed down for some centuries almost entirely in the form of what is known as counterpoint, in which the relation of each voice melody to the others was more considered than the chords resulting as the voices moved from one tone to another. This art had its origin apparently in France, and the most promising of the early compositions we know were those produced at the Sorbonne about the eleventh century. By the thirteenth or fourteenth century the pre-eminence had been transferred to the Low Countries, and the Netherlands became the great hothouse of contrapuntal development.
This tendency to extravagant display of learning manifested itself in the Netherlanders in almost every department; and whoever will read the accounts of their receptions and festivals, with the elaborate Latin poems and processions which attended the ceremonies, will find in the music of those times the same qualities brought to expression. Nevertheless, the ear could not be entirely ignored, and now and then a master arose with genius and musical intuition necessitating his pruning his compositions more or less in accordance with the dictates of the ear; and thus there were such masters as Adrian Willaert, who founded a school in Venice somewhere about 1500, and Orlando di Lasso, who founded that in Munich at about the same time. Among the multitudinous works of these men are many which are simple, or at least musical in the proper sense. Nevertheless, as yet, simplicity in this so-called high art was accidental and momentary, and complication was the rule of its being and the measure of its power.
The complication of the works of the contrapuntal school almost passes belief. All kinds of imitations, canons, and fugal devices; inversions of motives, so that an ascending melody was transformed into a descending melody and vice versa; the enlargement or augmentation of a motive by doubling or quadrupling the length of each one of its tones; the diminution of a motive by shortening its tones to a quarter of their original value; modification by repeating its rhythm in the chromatic scale in place of the melodic intervals of the original figure, and even to the extent of reversing motives, so that the melodic steps were made in reversed order from the end to the beginning;—and in the midst of all this elaboration the composer or the trained listener of the time was supposed to enjoy not alone the music as such, but all these complicated devices of the composer.
When these things had been carried out in movements having as many as sixteen voice parts, which was not a phenomenally large number at that time, two results unexpected by the composer almost necessarily came about. The first of these was the production of chord successions which could be felt by the hearer only as such, since sixteen real parts moving within the three octaves of choral compass were necessarily obliged to cross each other continually, whereby the contour of the different voice melodies became lost in the mixture, and only the chords and chord successions came to realization. In this way, perhaps, the perception of harmonic good and evil was very much forwarded where nothing of the kind had been intended. The other result was the practical exhaustion of all these artificial resources for conveying an impression of power in a composer. When everything had been done that could be done, the new composer necessarily had to take a different path and arrive in some other way; otherwise he became merely a repeater of what had been done before.
All the scientific composition up to about the middle of the sixteenth century had been designed for voices, and the great bulk of it for the service of the Church. Presently, however, a distinctly secular music began to be developed, in which, very naturally, lighter principles of composition prevailed. Thus arose a great literature of madrigals, which generally were love-songs or glees, containing many of the devices of the extremely well-taught composer already mentioned, but also having in them a lively rhythm and a pleasant quality which, even after the lapse of three centuries and more, still has power to impress and please our ears. A little later an instrumental music of the cultivated kind began to be developed. The two Gabriellis, in Venice, wrote various kinds of organ pieces of a semi-secular flavor; the violin found its form, and, by the beginning of the sixteenth century, had become an instrument somewhat highly esteemed. The principal instrument still in use among the people, however, was the lute, which had taken the place of the harp, and both these instruments naturally tended to develop a taste for chords, since chords were what might be called their "natural product."
About the year 1600 a new department of musical creation was opened in the discovery of opera. This great form of art, which has now attained so much importance, was an accidental evolution from the effort to recover the Greek drama, in which, owing to the size of the theaters, the lines were chanted or intoned rather than spoken, in order that the voice might carry farther. The first operatic composers sought only a clear expression of the declamation, and intended to give their written notes similar effects to those which a speaker's voice would produce in the emphatic delivery of the sentiments and words of the text. Accordingly, the first opera had no melody, properly so called; but almost immediately, in 1608, there appeared a genius in this new form of composition, Monteverde, who not only introduced melodies, but also made a very intelligent use of harmony, and, above all, showed himself the founder of modern instrumentation by placing the violin at the head of the orchestra. Then ensued in Italy a century of the most animated musical productivity the world has ever seen. Operas followed each other from a great variety of composers, and opera-houses were erected in all the principal cities; opera was played everywhere, sometimes by the support of princes and sometimes by the support of the people themselves.
The development of opera was the most important creative inspiration which had ever come into the art of music, since, in the nature of the case, everything was new. What the music sought to do almost immediately, beginning with Monteverde himself in his opera "Tancred," was to represent the feeling of the dramatic moment. Almost at the very first they began to use music in the melodramatic way for accompanying the critical moments of the action, when the performers were not singing, and the forms of the singing utterance differentiated themselves into recitatives for the explanatory parts and arias for the more impassioned moments; and then, very soon, there came ensemble pieces, in which several performers sang together.
Thus all kinds of emotional situations were presented to music for representation and comment, and thus, upon the expressive side, music received the highest possible stimulation. At the same time, through the competition of composers for pleasing the ear, there was an ever increasing tendency toward symmetry and graceful forms. And so the aria became, after a little, a piece of vocal display, often entirely opposed to the action, and sometimes foreign to the genius of the scene; still, it was heard for the sake of the pleasure which people have in a skilfully managed voice. Toward the end of this century, somebody, whose name I do not at this moment recall, began to introduce into opera occasional moments of which the people's song was the type; short movements which did not aim at display or at immense dramatic expression, but sought to please by simplicity alone. In this way, through the desire of the operatic composers to avail themselves as far as possible of the technical resources of composition acquired by the learned musicians of the contrapuntal schools, and to please their hearers and to astonish them in various ways, all the different forces in music began to exercise themselves and come to expression in opera; but as yet nothing of the sort had made any great progress in instrumental music.
Thus we come to the period of Bach and Händel, both of whom began to write shortly after 1700. In the working out of their respective talents, both these composers show their well-schooled musicianship, according to all the learning of the contrapuntal schools—but with very important differences. Händel had all his life a predilection for diatonic tonality, and it is very rarely indeed that he deals with the chromatic at all, and never with the enharmonic. All the music in which he best expressed himself was written for voices, and as a master of vocal effect he still holds a distinguished position, particularly in the creation of compositions in which a large number of voices can be effectively massed. He also had a distinct flavor of the folk-song in many of his melodies, and in some instances the folk-song is the entire work. Such, for instance, is the case in "See, the Conquering Hero Comes," in "Joshua," and in several of the short instrumental movements in "Joshua," "Solomon," and his other oratorios.
Bach, on the other hand, was of a much more intensely organized musical temperament. His genius was of the greatest possible character. As a virtuoso he not only played upon the organ, the clavecin, and the violin better than most of his contemporaries, and upon the organ probably better than any; he also created works in these three departments which held the attention of his own time to an astonishing degree, considering the meager means of communication among men, works which still remain, in our time, the indispensable corner-stones of the literature of these three instruments. The violinist gets a large part of his mastery through the sonatas of Bach for violin solo, the organist learns his art from Bach, and the pianist finds "The Well-tempered Clavier," and many other works of Bach written for the clavecin of indispensable importance for the development of intelligent playing.
The peculiar importance of Bach to modern music lies in the delicacy of his sense upon the harmonic side and upon his intuition of the emotional value of musical combinations. In the form of his work he always more or less resembled his predecessors, the fugue underlying, probably, something more than half of all the music he wrote. But he also showed a strong tendency to impart to his work the vivacity of the folk-song and the expressive melodic quality which he had already found in the violin. Owing to his intensely sensitive harmonic perceptions, he was never able to confine himself for long to the more obvious chords of the key. The diatonic chords and combinations in which Händel found an ever complete satisfaction are not sufficient for Bach, and we find continually new chords, evasive cadences, and a flowing continuity of thought belonging to the master mind.
Hence to the ordinary student there are two difficulties in the way of appreciating and enjoying Bach. The first one is the somewhat antique flavor of much that he wrote, for it is now almost two hundred years since many of Bach's compositions were completed; and the second is this sensitive and evasive harmonic fancy, which surpasses the capacity of untrained hearers. Hence, such works as the recitatives in the "Chromatic Fantasia," the beautiful modulations and changes in the organ Fantasia in G minor, and scores of other passages that might be mentioned in the larger works of Bach, are the legitimate pleasure of advanced musicians or of those especially gifted; but there is a whole world of Bach which lies nearer, within our reach, and it is this more accessible part of the land of Beulah that the present program will approach.
The importance of Bach in the world of art is further attested by the inspiration which he has been to all great composers since his time. In this respect he is the musician's musician par excellence. There has never yet appeared a master so advanced as not to find delight in the works of Bach, and in the opinion of many, all things considered, he was the most richly endowed genius who has ever adorned the art of music.
PROGRAM.
Invention in C major. From the Two-part Inventions. No. 1.
Invention in F major. From the Two-part Inventions. No. 8.
Saraband in D minor. Fifth English Suite.
Loure in G major. Heinze. Third 'Cello Suite.
Song, "My Heart Ever Faithful."
Preamble in E major. Sixth Violin Sonata. Heinze.
Saraband in E minor. Fifth English Suite.
Gavotte in E major. Tours. Sixth Violin Sonata.
Cradle song, from the Christmas Oratorio.
Prelude and Fugue in C minor. Clavier. Book I, No. 2.
"Hope in the Lord." Arranged by William Mason from the celebrated Largo. Händel.
Menuet in D major. First 'Cello Suite. Heinze.
Gavotte in B minor. Saint-Saëns.
(All the instrumental pieces of this program except the two inventions and the Tours arrangement of the Gavotte in E are in the "Bach Album," Peters edition, No. 1820, fifty cents. The inventions are in the Peters edition, fifty cents. The prelude and fugue in C minor may be had separately, as also the two songs.)
The conditions of being pleased with this program are that it be played in a melodious and expressive manner upon a good-toned piano, and that the songs are reasonably well done.
The selections from Bach in this program are intended to illustrate the lighter and, so to say, more superficial characteristics of Bach's music. Accordingly, the inventions are taken to show his manner of developing a piece from a single motive, which by many repetitions remains as a text all through the movement. The same principle carried much farther will be found later in Schumann.
The sarabands illustrate Bach's method in slow movements. These being written for the clavier, which in Bach's time had little tonal value, are rather meager in their development, but when played with a very sincere, melodic quality of tone, and treated exactly like expressive singing, with the necessary rise and fall of the phrase (varying intensity, as the idea advances or retrogrades), will always please. Moreover, while very short, such is the cleverness of their construction that they interest a musician very much.
The gavottes, being arranged from pieces which Bach wrote for clavier with other instruments, are naturally more free; both because Bach had the benefit of a stringed instrument—violin or 'cello—for intensifying the melody, and because they have been recently arranged for piano solo, and hence manifest more of the modern treatment of the piano.
The song, "My Heart Ever Faithful," is really instrumental in its character. In the second part the melody lies very badly for the voice. It is practically an instrumental piece in which the voice is the sole instrument.
Owing to the length of the program and the relatively greater importance of Bach in the development of music, only one selection is given from Händel—Dr. William Mason's adaptation of the words, "Hope in the Lord," to the Händel largo. This melody is so well known as not to require further comment. In later programs other selections from Bach will be given which will illustrate the larger aspects of his style, and, above all, his intense emotionality. This quality, which was once popularly denied concerning Bach, is now recognized by all musical hearers, and it should be brought out in the playing. Another essential characteristic of a successful Bach interpretation is the due observance of the rhythm, which is always admirably organized in Bach's works. Rubato must be introduced in a very sparing manner, and always in such a way as not to destroy the rhythm of the period as a whole.
If the student is disposed to undertake this work seriously, it will be advantageous to enter into an analysis of one or more of the Bach selections (or better, perhaps, assign each selection to one member for study and report), in order to ascertain exactly in what manner he uses motives to answer each other, when he continues upon the same motive, and when he branches off with other material. The inventions will be easiest for this purpose. It would be an advantageous exercise to play the inventions while the hearers note the number of times the leading idea occurs in each one. The object of this exercise is to lead unaccustomed hearers to note the actual musical idea—motive—instead of remaining passively attentive, taking in the music by contemplation. The latter attitude of hearing is the one best adapted for receiving whatever emotional movement there may be in the music; but since the larger works depend upon the development of musical ideas as such, it is desirable to acquire the habit of attending to them. The passive contemplation may be applied later to more emotional works. With Bach the purely musical is the first object of his work.