The fame of Italian sonatas and French suites was such a matter of course, that the Leipzig organist, Kuhnau, when he in 1700 published his collections of genuinely German clavier-pieces, plumed himself mightily, in his chatty prefaces, on the fact that now at last, even in Germany, good music was to be had, which could take its place by the side of the foreign. “Even in Germany,” he exclaimed, “oranges and citrons at last bloom!” The excellent Kuhnau ventured to give the title of sonata to a piece on the model of the Italian sonata da camera, although it was written not for violin but for clavier. Hence it is often said that he was the creator of the clavier-sonata. But this piece has nothing in common with the later popular composition of that name; it was a cento of several movements in various tempi, as the suite was a cento of several dances. Nay, the Cyclopes of Rameau stands nearer to the later type than this. The suites and sonatas of Kuhnau are pure clavier-pieces, somewhat marred by the usual failings of youth, and running every theme to death, but clear, vigorous, and adapted to the fingers, smooth in feeling and modern in technique. But the most curious work of Kuhnau is his “Biblical Histories.” Here he illustrates on the clavier all kinds of Scriptural stories, like the death of Goliath, the cure of Saul, the marriage of Jacob, Hezekiah’s recovery, the life of Gideon, and Jacob’s death, in sonata-form, on the model of the programme-music[74] of the time, and with the assistance of verbal elucidations. Yet Kuhnau is as little as Froberger or anyone else a forerunner of Bach, who so overshadows the work of his predecessors that one may almost say he is independent of them.
It is indeed hard to compare Bach even with the other wonders of the history of art. For there is scarcely one who is so identical with his art as is Bach with music. A Michel Angelo does not include a Rembrandt, nor a Rembrandt a Monet; but in Bach there is a Beethoven, a Schumann, a Wagner. I believe that if the Almighty had wished to offer to men in sensible form what at that time was called music, he would then have given them the work of Bach. In it there are the deepest secrets of musical polyphony, as well as the most intense degrees of decadent expression; the mysticism of the Middle Ages is there no less than the perspective of the future. But content and form are not dissociated as they are in history; they are identical, they are one and the same, as they are in the philosophic concept of music. Once, and perhaps once only, in this world has the “Thing in Itself” been realised, and the difference between concept and actuality been reduced to nothing. The history of music can be written with almost exclusive reference to Bach. We might show how it has converged towards him and again diverged from him in search of its special partialities. We might point out how it revolves round him, comes to him, and goes from him in the course of the centuries, just as in the case of the imitative arts we show that they come from Nature and go to her.
Bach’s life was the most uneventful conceivable. He made no journeys to Rome and Paris; he learned musical literature by studying and copying. A true “Old Master,” he sits with his serious, almost severe countenance, in the midst of his large family of twenty children, all musical, and composes for instruction or for his own pleasure, without seeing many of his compositions printed. His renown had no wide extent;[75] his bold extravagances aroused only that hostility which does not bring honour, and in his successive posts at Arnstadt, Weimar, Köthen, and Leipzig, he had little opportunity for sunning himself in the rays of princely favour. A single moment of his life perhaps stands out prominently, when Frederick the Great at one of his concerts received the list of strangers in Potsdam, and interrupted the playing to say to his officers, “Gentlemen, old Bach has arrived.” He was instantly summoned, and, in his travelling dress as he was, improvised on a theme of the King’s, which, when completed and published, he dedicated to the King as “Musikalisches Opfer.” When two great men meet, the whole world feels the electric shock.
With the appearance of Bach the whole history of music turns to Germany. And clavier-music, so far as it has a particular meaning, is henceforth German. England, France, and Italy, sink either gradually or suddenly into the background.
Bach’s clavier-music is a complete world, a mirror of his music as a whole. As Nature is her whole self in every leaf, so in every piece or group of pieces Bach is the whole Bach. Thus for the first time it came about that the clavier became capable of interpreting the whole nature of a great man. With the early Englishmen it was the embodiment of the whole tone-poet; with Couperin the whole man, indeed, but a man who was nothing but a dancer; with Scarlatti a whole clavier-player; but with Bach the whole nature of a man of whom it is impossible to say whether the musician or the intellect in him was the greater. This was the first outstanding peak attained by the clavier.
The natural creative principle from which Bach works, that which gives unity to his being, is the conception of counterpoint. Music can be written in which every single voice is treated as an independent line, and in which the art of combining these lines reaches the highest possible development, as in a picture of Holbein—and this is counterpoint. Or music could be written, in which an upper melody, clearly illuminated, runs on an advancing basis of accompanying harmony without much attention to purity of voice, as in a work of Ribera—and this is the style resting on “accompaniment.” Bach’s essence lies in the contrapuntal method. He conceives the voices over against one another; and at the very moment in which he interjects a motive, there is a second or third motive introduced, embracing the other in contrapuntal wise.
Konrad Pau(l)mann, the first German
writer for keyed instruments, blind.
Died 1473. After a modern drawing
by Wintter.
Yet he has taken the accompaniment-style also into himself. Just as little as he can ever be censured for defect in melody, so little has he ever neglected the newer “secular” harmony—rather, he has carried on his counterpoint in accordance with its laws. He has of course as little respect as any other first class musician for the common Italian accompaniment with its singing melody alone. If he adopts it, it is in very discreet fashion; the richly decorated arioso soaring above the vigorously moving basso continuo in such delicate arrangement that we think rather of an ornamented contrapuntal passage than of a light singing voice accompanied by the cembalo with figured bass.