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.
St. Matthew Passion and B minor Mass
On Good Friday, 1729, came the turn of St. Thomas’ Church to produce the music appropriate to the day. The result of this official duty was the Passion according to St. Matthew, for which Christian Friedrich Henrici, who wrote under the name of “Picander” and provided Bach with innumerable “librettos” for all purposes, compiled the text. The composer himself chose and distributed the chorales which punctuate the score. Bach was still at work on it when his former patron, Prince Leopold of Cöthen, died. Rather than prepare a special memorial piece he asked Picander to adapt appropriate words to parts of the music in the St. Matthew and he performed them in Cöthen at his friend’s obsequies.
It is hard for us to believe that the St. Matthew Passion did not receive on that far-off April 15, 1729, the tribute of wondering amazement which in the fullness of our hearts we bring it today. Yet we are told that the Leipzig worshipers considered its overwhelming dramatic pages “theatrical.” “God help us,” exclaimed a scandalized old dame, “’tis surely an opera-comedy!” We know that, judged by our standards, the first performance of the work must have been inefficient. Whether it was much better done at its repetition in 1736 may be doubted. Be this as it may, the St. Matthew Passion passed into oblivion for nearly a hundred years. The glory of its rediscovery and its reawakening an exact century after its birth belongs to Felix Mendelssohn who, with its resuscitation at the Singakademie in Berlin, performed a service that would have shed immortal luster upon his name had he never done anything else.