Only one branch of music had developed relatively independently of the Italian influence—music for the organ. Though this, as we have seen, was given its first impetus by Italian composers, it had grown to its fuller proportions among the Germans, of whom mention has been made in Chapter XI. By the time of Bach organs were well-made and effective instruments, a line of virtuosi in both north and south Germany had developed an astonishing technique, and certain fairly definite types of composition had been established. Of these the toccata, the fugue, and the chorale-fantasy or chorale-prelude received the most attention. The toccata was primarily a piece for display and was looser in structure than the others. Series of brilliant runs, scales and arpeggios over a foundation of rich and varied chords formed the most general and characteristic features, with which were alternated, for effect of contrast, passages of slow moving harmony and thematic significance. The fugue was a piece of music developed contrapuntally throughout from a definite subject and countersubjects, the direct outcome of the old imitative polyphonic music of the later Netherland masters. Both toccatas and fugues were treated with great skill and ingenious variety by Bach’s predecessors—Buxteheude, Reinken, Böhm, Pachelbel and others—but none of these organists succeeded in giving to either form the perfect balance and proportion, the organic unity, the architectonic grandeur, the definitive outline and shape wherewith Bach wrought them into enduring masterpieces. The same is true of the chorale fantasies and preludes. Three distinct types had come into being before the activity of Bach, one dignified and smooth, consisting actually of several short fugues upon sections of the chorale melody, lacking therefore breadth and power; one singing and serene, in which the flowing melody was set above or below an intricate contrapuntal web; and one in which, in the fiery words of Albert Schweitzer, the chorale melody was torn in fragments and tossed into a rushing torrent of virtuosity. The first of these forms was disjunct, the second lacked variety, the third was out of keeping with the simplicity and noble dignity of the chorale. It was Bach who united what was best in all three into a type of prelude which, inspired by the very spirit of the chorale melody, was built up out of the range of organ technique into a structure of faultless proportion. In the department of organ music, therefore, Bach seized upon the materials gathered for his use by men who had gone before, and, for the first time, made of them perfect temples. He was not misled by experiment, he did not falter through lack of power to sustain; he worked with absolute sureness and with the instinct of only the highest genius for perfect form.
In other instrumental music, in suites for clavier, for violin, for violoncello, for orchestra, in sonatas and concertos, he found forms already perfected. Nor can it be said that he did anything to develop or refine the style suitable for these instruments, since his own style was unmistakably influenced by the organ, and is sometimes heavy in comparison with Couperin’s, with Domenico Scarlatti’s, with Corelli’s, and Vivaldi’s. To these branches of music he brought a richness of feeling, an emotional depth and warmth, too, which hitherto had not been expressed in music. Nearly every emotion worthy of expression in music is to be met with in, for example, the Well-tempered Clavichord. On the one hand, liveliness, wit, gaiety; on the other, melancholy, deep sadness, religious exaltation, the lightest, the most serious shades of feeling, the most vivid and the most subdued expression. Thus the equable cool forms of Corelli, so justly proportioned between grace and calm emotion, the scintillating sonatas of Domenico Scarlatti, become suffused with a new, a real, personal life and are neither distorted nor dulled, but animated for all time.
As to organ music, he brought the power to construct and to unify, and to chamber music the warmth of his deep feeling. Vocal music—and his vocal works are, with inconsiderable exceptions, for the church—he made sublime by the true spirit of German religion which has found in him its perfect expression. He wrote in forms which were, as we have said, common to all composers of his day. Keiser, Mattheson, Telemann wrote not only in the same forms as he, but actually set many of the same texts. Undoubtedly they were men of inferior genius, but they were, none the less, excellent musicians, and had remarkable control of the technique of composition; and it is almost incredible that the stupendous numbers of their compositions are lying forgotten in libraries. Many a phrase, many an aria, and many a movement have a real beauty of form and a grace of content, but they are dead and not likely to be restored. The reason, not to be found alone in the second-rate quality of their genius, is, however, not far to seek. The development of opera in Italy during the seventeenth century influenced the whole course of music over Europe. The enthusiasm for opera spread veritably like wildfire. Forms were invented which were obvious and immediate in their appeal to the general public, and these forms were taken over into church music, even in Germany, where the tradition of a more profound and more fitting style still lingered. Cantatas, oratorios, even settings of the Passion, gave way to the universal demand for dramatic and easily pleasing music, were composed of arias and recitatives, and accompanied by instruments just as operas were. It would be absurd to say that church music could not gain, did not gain, as a matter of fact, by the injection of new and extraneous forms. Some few conservatives, notably the austere Johann Kuhnau, cantor of the St. Thomas school at Leipzig, where Bach was to pass the last half of his life, set themselves deliberately against the new movement. Many clergymen waxed bitter and polemical; but by far the majority of musicians, among them the men above mentioned, hailed the new forms with delight and, always more or less closely associated with the theatre, deliberately tried to give to church music the glamour and brilliance of music for the stage. Bach was himself far too much aware of the drift of music in his own day not to take advantage of the new forms which were the outgrowth of the opera. He adopted them into cantata, oratorio, and Passion. But whereas the sacred works of Keiser, Mattheson, and Telemann breathed only the light spirit of the trivial opera of the time, the arias and recitatives of Bach seemed to be the very flower of the meditative religious spirit peculiar to the Teutonic races. Thus his works stand at once with and aloof from his age. Outwardly the same, inwardly different. And that his cantatas and oratorios and Passions, cast in the mold of the Italian opera at the beginning of the eighteenth century, are glowing with the inspiration that was the religious voice of a whole race, is the reason why they live when those of his contemporaries are dead. They brought a trivial style into the church, he made a style glorious by filling it with an intimate, profound, and indescribably tender and genuine devotion. They tried to secularize church music, he to make a secular music the priestess of the temple.
Grandeur of conception, warmth and depth of feeling, nobility and often exaltation of spirit he brought to music, and transformed the materials which were, as the accumulation of a long century, at the service of a hundred of his contemporaries, into masterpieces of imperishable beauty. The cast of his genius seems almost out of place in the general spirit of music at his age. That which makes his music supremely great sprang from out the depths of his own nature, depths which are to-day unsounded and mysterious, the never-failing source of highest inspiration. Famous in his own day as an organist, and a performer on the harpsichord of astounding skill, as a composer he passed unnoticed or misunderstood save by a few pupils and friends. The ideal toward which he worked was fast losing hold upon the world of musicians. He was considered recondite and dry.
I
It is only human to desire the knowledge of some intimate details in the life of such a man, but the exhaustive researches of Philipp Spitta have collected all that is likely ever to be known about Bach, and there is almost a complete absence of any of those details which help to restore the daily life of a man to the admirers of a later age. We know little more than the facts of his life, must remain onlookers except as we may penetrate to his great heart through his music.
He came of a family which can be traced back nearly two hundred years, all of whom were characterized by the strong virtues of the German peasantry, by thrift, honesty, and a sturdy piety which never wavered among all the horrors of religious warfare. Nearly all were musicians, connected either with the church as composers and organists, such as Johann Christoph and Johann Michael, uncles of Johann Sebastian’s father, or with the bands in the towns where they lived, such as Bach’s grandfather, and his father, Johann Ambrosius. The family had so spread over Thuringia that there was hardly a town in the province in which some member of it was not actively associated with music. Ambrosius Bach played the viola in the town band of Eisenach. Here Johann Sebastian was born in March, 1685.[155]
One may believe that his talent showed itself while he was still very young, and that he was intended to follow in the footsteps of his father. Probably he learned from his father how to play the violin. In his father’s house, too, he was surrounded by secular music, lively and rhythmical, so that in his very tenderest years he must have acquired that fondness for, and appreciation of, rhythm which are so strongly evident in all his work. It seems likely, too, that a preference for instrumental music was fostered in his boyhood, for he remained always primarily an instrumental composer. Just how or when he learned to play the harpsichord is not known, but it can hardly be doubted that he had acquired some skill upon it before his father died.
His mother died in 1694. In little more than half a year his father married again, but died very shortly after. Bach was thus left an orphan at the age of ten, the youngest of a large family. He went to live with his brother Johann Christoph, twelve years or more older than he, in the neighboring village of Ohrdruf. Johann Christoph was an organist, a pupil of the great Pachelbel, and in his house Sebastian first came into close contact with church music, and music for the organ. Here he received his first regular instruction on the organ. Here, too, if we may believe one of the few anecdotes which have colored the history of his life, he gave a sign of that tremendous industry which distinguished his whole life in studying and making his own all the scores that came within his reach. The story is that his brother had a valuable collection of music by Pachelbel, Froberger, and other composers famous in that day, which he kept locked behind the latticed doors of a bookcase. Some of this collection the young Sebastian managed to extract for his own use, and he set to work to copy it by stealth, but one day Johann Christoph caught him at his labor, and took the music away. Whether or not the anecdote is true, it is typical of Bach’s method of study. The blindness which fell upon him in the last years of his life was hastened, if not actually caused, by his indefatigable copying of music.