The history of Passion music leads to Bach, and further than that it cannot go. Way back in the Middle Ages the story of the Passion was chanted in the churches, some time, usually on Good Friday in holy week. The words of the evangelist, of actors in the drama, and of Christ were chanted by a priest or deacon in the monotonous reciting tone, and the choir was given the ejaculations of the crowd. Later the words of Christ, the evangelist, Pilate, Peter, etc., were allowed to different chanters and with the growth of the operatic style the monotonous chant was changed to more expressive recitative. This intrusion of the operatic style was at times bitterly opposed, and the greatest German composer before Bach—Heinrich Schütz—was among the reactionaries, though he had received his training in Italy under Giovanni Gabrieli and Monteverdi himself. However, the influence of opera was too strong for the conservative clergy, and not only did recitative, aria, and dramatic choruses come to play a part in the singing of the story of the Passion, but instruments were introduced into the accompaniment, and the whole became practically a drama. The need for texts suitable for treatment in recitative and aria finally led to versified arrangements of the Biblical narrative itself, as well as to the introduction of strophic stanzas interpretative of the mood or action of the story. A new character, the so-called daughter of Zion, was introduced as a convenient spokeswoman for the congregation.
Such were the theatrical arrangements made by C. F. Hunold, known as Menantes, and by B. H. Brockes, a town councillor of Hamburg, whose arrangement was set to music by Keiser, Mattheson, Telemann, and Handel. Chorale melodies and hymns found no place in these passions. Schütz had employed them at the beginning and the end of his settings, as introduction and epilogue. They were apparently first woven into the body of the work by a little-known composer, Johann Sebastiani, about 1672. The arrangement which Bach finally used for his St. Matthew Passion was a combination of these earlier styles. For the narrative he reverted to the Biblical text, divided among the various characters. He retained the interpretative arias which in the midst of the story dwell for a time on the suffering, on the horror of it all, and their effect upon man; he included among the singers the Daughter of Zion. The chorus was used for the utterances of the crowd, with considerable restraint, and, throughout the work, for richly harmonized chorales which served to draw the congregation into the tragedy even though they were but once or twice given a voice in them. At the beginning and the end massive double choruses, into the first of which a chorale melody was woven, opened and concluded the story. Orchestra and organ made up the accompaniment. All these various elements he combined with unerring sense of proportion and fitness and with no inconsistencies and no histrionic glamour, so that the work stands perfect as a piece of art, and as the purest expression in music of the Lutheran religion.
In his general treatment of the orchestra Bach is allied so much more closely to the past than to the future that in this regard he can be said to have had practically no influence upon his successors. Before his death the Mannheim school, led by Johann Stamitz, was already pointing the way toward a new treatment of the orchestra which was to be taken up and developed by Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven. Bach differs from these later men not so much in a lack of appreciation of tone color as in his forcing all instruments, irrespective of their peculiar capabilities, to conformity in a polyphonic style much influenced by the organ. The result is that trumpets and oboes, for examples, are made to play rapid, agile figures suitable only to violin. All instruments are treated in the same way, may be required to take equal and similar parts in the music. This is, of course, distinctly old-fashioned. Purely technical reasons would prevent any composer of the new school from writing for the oboes as he would write for the violins. Sonority and color, too, ousted the old polyphonic ideal. Bach was not, however, deaf to orchestral color. Often in the accompaniments to cantatas and other vocal works the coloring is rich and unusual, and unusual combinations of solo instruments in the Brandenburg concertos seem to show him on voyages of discovery, so to speak, into the effects of combinations of different timbres.
The two series of orchestral works are the Brandenburg concertos and the Ouvertures, both written during his stay at Cöthen. The names themselves speak from the now distant past of orchestral music. The name concerto then signified a composition written for a small group of solo instruments, called the concertino, accompanied by or alternating with a larger group called the tutti. For instance, in the second concerto the solo group is composed of trumpet, flute, oboe, and violin, the tutti being in all cases made up of strings. The form is Corellian. The relatively modern treatment of a solo instrument in a concerto, writing for it to show off its special qualities and technical peculiarities, is hardly suggested, tutti and concertino having to play the same musical material in the same polyphonic style, offering principally contrast between sonority and delicacy; though, as we have said, the element of tone color plays a part. It must be added, however, that the long passage for harpsichord at the end of the first movement of the fifth concerto is very similar to modern cadenzas. The treatment of all parts is consistently polyphonic.
The same is true of the four Ouvertures. These compositions are in reality suites, having as the first two movements the two characteristics of the French ouverture invented by Lully, one slow and serious, the other an extended allegro in fugal style. The following movements are in dance forms and rhythms. They are scored for the customary brass, wood, and strings, employed here not so much for their specialties as for contrasts of sonority and delicacy.
Bach has not, therefore, contributed in matters of style and form to the development of music after his time nor to the growth of orchestral music, which was the distinguishing feature of the age which followed immediately upon his death. This is due, as we have said, to the fact that the style and forms which were his own inheritance passed out of circulation. In many cases, too, his work was of such unique greatness that no imitation of it could come near enough to suggest more than most vaguely an influence. Copies of his style but emphasize its remoteness, both in time and quality. Certain works must remain forever unique because their peculiar perfection must always keep them in a class by themselves. Among these there are none more striking than the works for solo violin and for solo violoncello, works which have no counterpart in music. Still, we are not limited to intangible influences of melody and harmony in noting the effect which his compositions have had upon his followers. In two ways at least he gave a definite impulse to the course of music; he reorganized the system of fingering keyboard instruments, and invented a satisfactory and universally accepted method of equal temperament.
IV
About the time Friedemann, his first born son, was nine years old Bach began to compose for him the book of pieces known as the ‘Little Clavier Book.’ It is what we should call to-day a graded collection of short pieces intended to perfect the already striking abilities of his son. Beginning with the simplest elements, he introduced difficulties by degrees until the last pieces, in polyphonic style, demand a very considerable skill. The most interesting passages are those in which Bach has indicated the fingering, for they prove that he reorganized all the systems of fingering in use in his day and perfected one of his own upon which future developments are based. His chief innovation is in the manner of using the thumb. Up to the time of Couperin, players of keyed instruments used only the four fingers of the hand. The thumb hung idle. The position must have been stiff and awkward and it is hard to understand how such brilliant performers as the north German organists ever overcame the difficulties of it. Yet Bach himself told his son Emanuel that in his youth he had seen great organists play who never used the thumb except for the widest stretches. Couperin’s famous book on the art of playing the harpsichord appeared in 1717, the very year Bach went to Cöthen. In it he advocated the use of the thumb, but over the fingers, not under them. Bach was one of the first to appreciate the advantages of passing the thumb under the hand. It is hardly possible that he invented the practice. Many of the oldest works for the harpsichord must have called for a use of the thumb, and the contemporary works of Domenico Scarlatti would have been almost insurmountably difficult without it; but in theory the use of the thumb under the hand was avoided, and Bach’s ‘Little Clavier Book’ contains probably the first open recognition of the advantages of so using it, no matter what the actual practice of virtuosi had been up to that time. One will observe that Bach did not abandon the old system, and that many passages marked by him are to be played in the old way; that is, by passing the long fingers, chiefly the middle finger, over the short ones; but he laid the foundations of the new. The most famous of players in the next generation was his own son Emanuel, whose book on playing the harpsichord was the standard authority down to the time that the harpsichord was finally supplanted by the pianoforte. Haydn and Mozart undoubtedly profited by it, and thus the methods of the father were spread abroad through the son and played a considerable part in the development of music for the pianoforte.
‘The Well-tempered Clavichord’[158] is unquestionably an epoch-making work. It is, as is well known, a series of preludes and fugues in all major and minor keys. The term ‘well-tempered’ refers to Bach’s method of tuning the clavichord, which for the first time made such an unbounded use of harmony possible. It will be remembered that the first keyboards had only those keys which are to-day white, sounding only the diatonic tones of the modes. The first chromatic alteration allowed in these modes was the B-flat, which was practically forced upon musicians in order to avoid the augmented interval between F and B natural, an interval excruciating to their ears. So the black key between A and B was the first to find its place on the keyboard, and it was tuned in the relation of a perfect fourth with the F below. E-flat seems to have been the next black key and was tuned in the relation of a perfect fourth to the B-flat. The other black keys were added one by one, nearly always in exact relation to some one of the white keys or the original diatonic notes of the modes, F sharp in that of a perfect fifth with the B below, G sharp in that of a perfect major third with E, C sharp in the same relation with A. Inasmuch as all these intervals were mathematically exact—and such was the idea of tuning all through the Middle Ages and nearly to the time of Bach—the black keys were in perfect relation only with one or more of the white keys, and often quite out of relation with each other. The intervals between them were very noticeably out of tune and false. When, during the seventeenth century, our harmonic system of transposing keys finally supplanted the old modal system, composers for the harpsichord and the organ still found themselves limited by their keyboards to three sharp keys and two flat, so long as their instruments were perfectly tuned.