It is customary to compare the two musical giants of the first half of the eighteenth century, Handel and Bach. Both were born in the same year, 1685, Handel being the senior by one month only: both were natives of small German towns, within a few miles of each other. Both received their earliest musical education in Germany, but with the difference that Bach, coming of a family of professional musicians, there was never any thought of bringing him up to any other profession, while Handel’s father, a surgeon, had all the prejudices of his time and profession against music, and did his best to stifle his son’s proclivities, till they became too strong for him to longer withstand.
After early childhood the ways of the composers were widely different. While Bach was painfully acquiring the technique of his art, by making long journeys on foot to hear and get instruction from eminent German organists, by practising assiduously day and night, and by copying all the best music he could lay hands on, Handel was playing the violin and harpsichord in the German opera conducted by Keiser at Hamburg.
At the age of twenty-one Handel went to Italy and remained there three years studying, and successfully composing operas for the Italians, who called him “Il caro Sassone,”—“the dear Saxon.” At twenty-one Bach was organist of a small and unimportant German town, still working hard to improve his technical powers in every direction. Everyone knows that Handel made his first reputation as a composer of Italian operas which are completely forgotten, and not till he was fifty-five years old did he begin that series of oratorios or sacred dramas by which he is immortalised. Bach, on the other hand, making the organ and the chorale his starting point, continued all his life to compose sacred music—“church music” as it was called, and never wrote for the theatre. Handel, domiciled in England, knew his public and knew them so well that he wrote works which not only became popular at once, but have never ceased to be popular. Bach either did not know, or did not care to please his public, and wrote far above their heads, so that for a time after his death he was forgotten entirely: only when Mozart, and afterwards Mendelssohn, became acquainted with the wonders of his genius did the public, almost against their will, begin to appreciate what a giant had been on the earth in those days.[56]
Ein feste Burg
Bach’s place in Lutheran Church history is very important. He is connected directly with the Reformation through the chorale, which Luther so much encouraged as a means of spreading the new views of religion. Bach was a strict Lutheran; and the chorale, or hymn to be sung by the congregation, was perhaps the most important expression of Lutheran religious feeling. The words will explain this perhaps better than anything else, if we take an example at random from the Leipziger Gesangbuch, in literal prose translation—e.g. No. 171: “A strong castle is our God; a good defence and weapon; he freely helps us in all trouble that can meet us. The ancient wicked enemy is in earnest; his cruel armour is great power and much deceit: there is none like him on the earth.
“We can do nothing of our own power, we are soon lost: but there fights for us the right man, whom God himself has chosen. Dost thou ask his name? Jesus Christ is his name, the Lord of Sabaoth. There is no other God; he is bound to win the day.
“And if the world were full of devils, who would devour us, we need not fear much, for we shall conquer. The prince of this world, however sour he may appear, can do nothing against us: a word is able to slay him,” &c.
A Notable Chorale
This is one of the chorales assigned to the Festival of the Reformation, and one can imagine with what force it would appeal to those disposed towards Luther’s teaching. Its well-known melody was composed by Luther, and it was used by Bach as the foundation of a cantata which is considered by Zelter to have been composed in celebration of the 200th anniversary of the Reformation in 1717, but the composer re-arranged it in 1730. The orchestra contains three trumpets, one flute, two oboes, one oboe di caccia, two violins, viola, violoncello, organ and figured bass.
The first chorus set to the words of the first verse has the following vigorous opening, the orchestra playing an independent accompaniment. (For convenience of English readers we quote from Novello’s octavo edition.)