Sebastian Bach

by Reginald Lane Poole

For near forty years Bach’s history had followed the common course of the musicians of his generation, and he had reached what was then held the most dignified rank in his craft. He had passed through the stages of chorister, orchestral violinist, and organist: he was now capellmeister in a ducal palace, and, measured by conventional standards of success, he had nothing further to look for or to desire. Least of all was it to be expected that he would descend from this dignity to the position of a school-teacher and precentor in the less select atmosphere of a trading town. Success, however, held a small place in Bach’s mind in comparison with anything which should forward his highest artistic aims, consistently with his own honour and integrity; and the confined circle of activity in the chapel at Coethen could satisfy but a part of his complete musician’s nature. The years of study and the years of ripe performance must be completed by a period of broadened influence exerted in the arousing of the musical soul of a great town, and in the foundation of a school of disciples of his own spirit.

In the spring then of 1723 Bach quitted a life which had become ungrateful to him since the duke had tired of his devotion to music. One reason for his leaving—and this perhaps was decisive—was, that he might do his best for his children’s bringing up. His care was always for Wilhelm Friedemann, his eldest and best-loved child; and in this very year we find that he entered him as a student at the university of his new home. In reviewing his life seven years later Bach touches upon all these considerations which took him from Coethen to Leipzig.

The school of S. Thomas in this town, where Bach was called to fill the post of cantor, was an ancient foundation, already in its fifth century of existence. Once belonging to the Augustinian Canons of the Thomaskloster, it combined music and general teaching, like other conventual schools of the middle ages. In this shape it survived the reformation: it remained both a choir-school and a grammar-school; and of its seven masters, the cantor, who took a middle place, lowest of the four superiores, had his share of both branches of teaching. He gave a certain number of lessons a week in music and Latin grammar, varied on Sunday evenings by the Latin catechism of Luther. Bach, however, was allowed to pay one of his colleagues to take the Latin teaching from him—less, it is to be presumed, from incapacity than from disinclination or perhaps from diffidence; so that, except when his substitute was ill, his occupation was solely musical. His formal declaration of office bound him to treat the boys humanely, and to instruct them as well in instrumental as in vocal music.

But the work in school was the least portion of the cantor’s task. He had the musical oversight—as we should say, he was precentor—of the two chief churches of S. Thomas and S. Nicholas; he had to provide a choir for the simpler service at S. Peter’s; and he had also a more undefined control over the New Church (S. Matthew’s). Among these four churches, and apparently, on festivals, in the extra-mural church of S. John too, the cantor had to distribute his choir. The best-trained voices were reserved for S. Thomas’s and S. Nicholas’, where the services were so arranged that the cantor could preside over the important music at both. The other churches had to be content with the younger and more unskilled choristers. All of them the cantor supplied with music—not too long or too operatic, was the special injunction when Bach entered office. He had to be ready with special services for high days, weddings, and funerals, which last he was directed to attend in person. Finally, he had to supervise the different organists, the fiddlers and pipers—the embryo orchestra—of the town.

It was this commanding position, of Director of Music of the great town of Leipzig, rather than that of teacher in the Thomasschule, which drew Bach from the ease and quiet of his ducal chapel. How little it was realised at the time of Bach’s arrival, we shall soon see. In the first place, the school itself was just then at the last period of decay. It had long suffered from the blunders of its rector, Johann Heinrich Ernesti, a solemn man, clergyman and pedant—he was Professor of Poetry in the university—who had lived his seventy years without learning the first secret of acquiring influence over masters or scholars, far less of giving unity or vigour to the management of the school. There was discord everywhere, with its usual accompaniment. The attendance of the scholars fell off, in the lower classes to less than half their former number; and, worse than this, their quality deteriorated in equal stages: the best pupils drifted away to Lueneburg, and the Leipzig school threatened to sink into a mere training-place for people who were to make their livelihood by singing at funerals. Yet every attempt to reform it was thwarted by the timid obstinacy of its rector; and it was not until his death, when Bach had been under him for six years, that any effectual measures for its revival were possible.

An even greater obstacle to the prosperity of the school lay outside it; for, since the first years of the century, the institution of the opera had established a separate centre of musical training and musical interest in the town. The new importation gained a sudden popularity and success when it came under the hands of Telemann, afterwards famous as organist at Hamburg. The Opera became a dangerous rival to the School; and the rivalry was the keener since Telemann was organist of one of the churches that drew their choirs from S. Thomas’s. If the cantor was mortified at the retrenchment of his authority, it was the school that suffered the most. For its scholars at first spent their holidays in the opera-company; soon the choir of the New Church was absorbed into it. The boys went over altogether, willing enough to abandon the restraints and the severer training of the school, for the freedom and gaiety, not to say the profit, of the career now open to them. And, although Telemann left Leipzig after a year (1705), the Musical Society (Musikverein) which he founded went on growing and flourishing at the expense of the school. The music at S. Thomas’s had to be kept down to the diminished capacity of its voices. Difficult works could only be attempted with a certainty of failure. Even the Town Council, usually blind to the faults of old endowments, came to see the fruitlessness of helping any pretence of reform on the part of a school which produced results so inferior to the unendowed performances at the New Church.

Such was the condition of affairs when Bach came to Leipzig: the whole musical life of the place seemed to be dying away in disunion and mismanagement. The very opera which had ruined the Thomasschule ceased to exist in 1726; the Musical Society founded by Telemann had passed into incapable hands; and, to complete the chaos, the University organ and the direction of University music had been given (in the interval between Kuhnau’s death and the appointment of Bach as his successor in the cantorate) to the pitifullest of musicians, one Goerner,[35] who was to Bach for many years a standing grievance and obstruction. The temporary substitute was tacitly kept on by the indulgent University magnates, and the Thomasschule lost that connexion with the University which gave the only promise for its revival. Moreover, Goerner, who was also organist at S. Nicholas’—afterwards, in 1730, at S. Thomas’s, under Bach’s own authority, which he disregarded—had a Collegium Musicum of his own, for which he arrogated a rank superior to the Thomasschule, the latter, in fact, being (as he explained) merely preparatory to his. It seemed as though the old school were destined to lose all weight in the town. The New Church had been monopolised by Telemann’s Musikverein; and now the University Church was being supplied by Goerner’s Collegium.

We cannot be wrong in believing that Bach was well aware of these things; that he accepted his new post in the high ambition of re-creating what had been once a true home of musical art, of keeping alive and (as we see) of infinitely exalting the honourable tradition handed down in the learned line of his predecessors.

On the 5th May, 1723, Bach appeared before the Town Council and made the declarations of office; the appointment was ratified by the consistory of the church, and before the month was over he was formally inducted.