Sebastian Bach

by Reginald Lane Poole

If Bach’s musical discipline at home left much for him to find out by himself, his education at the Ohrdruf Lyceum proceeded fairly enough and in music excellently. He learned Latin and the Greek Testament, with a little arithmetic and rhetoric. Of these subjects indeed Latin only had any pretence to thoroughness, and, although its range of reading did not extend beyond Cicero and Cornelius Nepos, it included a good deal of composition both in prose and verse. Very different was the musical instruction of the Ohrdruf school, which qualified the boys to furnish all the choral music of the church, besides singing motets and concerts at weddings and funerals.

Five years of this routine, and Bach left Ohrdruf. There was little more to be learned from his brother, who, with a family of his own, was no doubt glad to be rid of his charge. Accordingly he travelled, with a comrade of the school, to Lueneburg, and the lads together joined the choir of the Michaëlisschule. It seems that Thuringian boys were in special request for their musical training, as well as for the remarkable quality of their voices; and Bach’s proficiency on the violin and clavichord, added to his fine treble, placed him at once in the select Matin choir.

Lueneburg at this time enjoyed a wide repute throughout North and Middle Germany for the goodness of its musical training. There were two schools belonging to the churches of S. Michael and S. John, and the rivalry was so keen between the scholars that, when in winter time they perambulated the town—like the rude manner of our waits—it was necessary to mark out the road which each should take to avoid an unseemly wrangle. This custom of itinerant choirs, however bad for the singers’ voices, was of service in quickening the popular sympathy with music; and the rivalry itself was useful in stimulating the ardour of the colleges. The principal work of the school of S. Michael’s was to prepare the music for the choral services of its church, two on Sundays, with motets and anthems, and, above all, high services with orchestra on the eighteen feast-days of the Lutheran kalendar. These formed the business of Bach’s life for three years. Some employment in playing or in the training of the choir must have occupied him after his voice changed, for he continued to take his commons at the free board until 1703.

All this time his general education was carried on much after the Ohrdruf pattern, with a rather wider circle of Latin authors, the Greek Testament, divinity, and logic. Higher than this the course did not go; and Bach had not the means, if he had the wish, to engage private teaching there, or to proceed to one of the universities. We shall see hereafter that he obtained an exemption from the classical work of the Thomasschule at Leipzig. At Lueneburg poverty conspired with his natural impulse to keep him closely to the profession as well as to the study of music. It was the period of his apprenticeship in the three branches in which he was afterwards to achieve a supreme excellence. At the Michaëlisschule he gained an intimate knowledge of the capacities of choral singing; he worked at the organ; and he became acquainted with the lighter instrumental music lately brought to Germany from France.

The organ claimed his chief and unremitting labour, and more than once did he journey to Hamburg to attend the performances of Reincke, the father of North German organists. Old Reincke, as he is affectionately known—he lived well into his hundredth year and died in 1722—was a pupil of Sweelinck and one of the channels by which the learning and method of the great Amsterdam organist was diffused through the entire length of Northern Germany. From the dexterous and graceful toccatas which still attest Reincke’s powers Bach probably derived little; the principal reward of his Hamburg visits was the insight he acquired into the scope of organ composition, a lesson which he so worked out as to receive (according to a well-known story) the honourable testimony of the master himself. I thought, said Reincke, when, just before the old man’s death, Bach elaborated before him the chorale An Wasserflüssen Babylons in the true organ style, I thought that this art was dead, but now I see that it lives in you.

Bach stood in a closer connexion with a pupil of Reincke, Georg Boehm, organist at S. John’s Church, Lueneburg, and also a distinguished composer. In chamber-music as well as in the organ Bach learned much from him, but more in the manner of instrumental treatment and in the theory of composition, than by any direct influence on his writings. At this time also he made acquaintance with French music at Celle, where it had been naturalised forty years since and was now in its prime at the court of Duke Georg Wilhelm and his Huguenot consort Eléonore d’Esmiers.

A further training in instrumental music was afforded by the post which Bach held for some months after leaving Lueneburg, in 1703, in the band of Prince Johann Ernst at Weimar. But he could not long be content with the limited scope of a court violinist; and a chance visit to Arnstadt, where his grand-uncle Heinrich had founded a tradition of organ playing, but, dying eleven years before, had left no worthy successor, offered to Bach the opportunity of following out his special bent. An organ had recently been built in the new church of the town, but the burghers had not yet succeeded in finding a musician who satisfied their notion of the importance of the post. The man they had engaged they watched so jealously that he was not even trusted with the keys of his loft: one of them was deputed to receive them back from him as soon as playing was over. It is significant of the skill which Bach had already won, that he no sooner tried the organ—it does not appear, as a candidate—than the consistory welcomed in this lad of eighteen the musical heir of their honoured town organist, dismissed the incapable Boerner, and forcibly installed Bach at a triple salary augmented out of the municipal chest. On the 14th August, 1703, he took the solemn pledge of diligence and faithfulness and all that appertaineth to an honourable servant and organist before God and the worshipful Corporation.

The brilliancy of Bach’s reception at Arnstadt was transient. The New Church was a sort of chapel-of-ease to the principal church of the town; and Bach was only entrusted with the training of a small, partly voluntary, choir. His duties accordingly engrossed but a couple of hours on three days of the week, and the townspeople were well satisfied if he did not fall short in them. In this languid atmosphere he found no incitement to convince the town, by his performances, how far his hopes and ambitions exceeded those of the ordinary organist. He seems in time to have been content with a bare fulfilment of his duties, or hardly that, and to have concentrated himself in his private studies. After two years the respite of a month’s leave enabled him to visit Luebeck, the home of the illustrious organist Buxtehude; and hither a long walk of fifty leagues brought him in November, 1705.

As Reincke was a Dutchman, so Dietrich Buxtehude, who did as much, on his own lines, to establish the North German school of organists, was a Dane. He had settled in Luebeck in 1660, and the enthusiasm with which his art was attended was such that his influence remained in the town until the present century. One of the causes of his popularity was the custom which he innovated of having concerts, with a full orchestra of uncommon strength, in his church. A deeper reason was his consummate command over the organ and the important advances he made in composition.