CHAPTER VI.
Bach’s appeal to Erdmann in the winter of 1730, to try and find him a more congenial post than he had at Leipzig, was without result. In fact, little as he suspected it, events had already begun to take a favourable turn for him. The year before, the organist of the New Church had left, and Bach had followed him as director of the Musical Society, which had hitherto furnished the choir at that church, instead of the boys of the Thomasschule. It was a good thing for Bach in every way to break down a rivalry of this sort. But a greater gain had come to him the very month before he wrote to Erdmann. For the new rector of the school, Gesner, proved himself consistently the firm friend of the ill-used cantor.
Gesner appears to have been much more than his books shew him—one of the revivers of classical learning in Germany. He was also a teacher by instinct, one who by infinite tact and patience could restore harmony to a school that had been dissolving for a generation, and form so direct an understanding between master and pupil that the friend was seen through the severe disciplinarian, and the fervent scholar through the mists and morasses of an antiquated pedagogy. He diffused a new spirit into the school; to Bach he gave his generous sympathy, and an earnest of hopefulness. How he appreciated him as a musician has already been noticed in another connexion; as head of the school he saved him from the petty annoyances to which he had hitherto been subjected. Bach had now his just share of the fees which made the largest item in his income and which were now the more necessary as his family was growing up. Moreover, thrifty as he was, his different posts must have involved expensive journeys to Coethen and Weissenfels; and he was fond of making short visits to Dresden to hear the opera, at that time under the leading of his friend Hasse, Il Sassone, as he is known by the Italians, among whom he lived for many years, and whose music in turn he naturalised in Germany. Friedemann, let us go again and hear the pretty Dresden songs, Bach would say to his boy; and the two went together. The phrase used is, by the way, characteristic of Bach. He enjoyed the opera, but could not call it by any more dignified name than songs (liederchen). Accordingly he never adopted this form of composition; his genius is essentially undramatic. But he studied the operatic style with eager energy, and absorbed it so thoroughly that the arias, duets, &c., which occur in his cantatas, are the worthiest representatives of the opera that Germany produced before Gluck, whom indeed he anticipated in his treatment of the recitative. They have the gaiety and grace of the Italian manner, and the inspiration of German thought.
The secular post which Bach also held at Leipzig gave a wide opening for compositions specially in this style. The purpose of musical clubs, said his predecessor Kuhnau, in his Musicalischer Quack-Salber, written in 1700, is for musicians ever to exercise themselves farther in their noble calling, and withal from the pleasant harmony to establish among themselves so like a sweet-sounding agreement of tempers, as oftentimes is mainly lacking in their conversation. We may think of Bach as realising this description, as he presided over the amateur gatherings held on winter-nights in a coffee-*house in the Katharinenstrasse, or in summer of an afternoon in a garden outside the town in the Windmühlengasse. These informal concerts lasted two hours, and took place weekly, or twice a week during the great popular festivals of Leipzig, the quarterly fairs.
We have no express evidence of what purely instrumental compositions Bach wrote for the society. No doubt he revived the chamber-music he had composed at Coethen; and the bulk of his concertos dating from Leipzig would probably be performed at its meetings. The works which are known to have been produced there are chiefly a string of secular cantatas—perhaps we should rather say serenatas, though the actual title is specifically Dramma per Musica. To these we may add the other compositions which are described simply as for the university students in general, with whom from the first he was in constant request at times of rejoicing, birthdays of favourite teachers, their election as professors, and a multitude of festive occasions prompted by the accustomed loyalty of undergraduates. These pieces are commonly distinguished as dramatic chamber-music; but it must be borne in mind that, although hardly ever acted in costume, they were often presented, not in a room, but with the natural scenery, for instance, of a garden. Bach rarely spent his best work on such ephemeral displays—they mostly had to be got ready in a few days—and whenever he found afterwards that he had included in them anything in his judgment worth preserving, he incorporated it in a church cantata or some more lasting composition. In this way nearly the whole of a drama, written for the Queen’s birthday in 1733, came subsequently to form part of the Christmas oratorio. But we must guard against the inference that Bach was careless of the relation between music and words. On the contrary, we have the distinct statement of a friend, himself a teacher of rhetoric at Leipzig, that Bach’s mastery over the qualities and the excellencies which music has in common with rhetoric is such as not only to add unfailing pleasure to his discourses upon the likeness and correspondency between them, but also to move our admiration at the skilful use of his principles in his works. So wrote Magister Birnbaum in 1739; and the importance which Agricola, who was Bach’s pupil for three years, attaches to the study of rhetoric by musicians, was probably caught from his teacher. The truth is that Bach was before all things a sacred composer, and when he adopts in a sacred work that which had once belonged to something secular, it is not from haste, indifference, or a want of fertility, but purely because the piece would find its proper home in a sacred setting. It does not surprise us, therefore, to find that he habitually brought up old compositions, with new words, for the festivities for which he was called upon to provide, and that many of them have entirely perished, their existence being only known from the circulated programme.
The following seven cantatas are all that remain:—1. In honour of Dr. Mueller,[39] 3rd August, 1725. 2. On the Promotion of Professor G. Kortte,[40] 11th December, 1726. 3. The Contest of Phœus and Pan,[41] 1731. 4. Hercules at the Boundary,[42] 5th September, 1733. 5. At the Queen’s Birthday, 8th December, 1733. 6. At a Royal Visit to Leipzig, 5th October, 1734. 7. At the King’s Birthday,[43] 7th October, 1734.
Of these the third alone can claim more than a limited appreciation; and this has a novel interest outside the music, in certain satirical allusions, under the character of Midas, to one Scheibe, a poor musician, whom Bach had rejected as candidate for an organistship, and who never lost an opportunity of showing his ill-will against the too rhadamanthyne judge.[44]