Reginald Lane-Poole

“ While Catholic writers have treated the Mass music as the gorgeous accompaniment of a mighty pomp, in which the outward, dramatic, impressiveness stands in the foreground, Bach passes back to the verities of which the sacred office is the symbol. Thus his Kyrie is not the mere opening of a stately pageant. From four bars of majestic chorus, the orchestra go on at once to Pg 100announce a theme unsurpassed in the entire range of Bach’s music; each of the five voices of the choir take it up in turn and weave together their passionate, yet restrained cry for mercy. ”

“ A chorus of believers, with wondering question, first interrupts their lament, finally takes up their burthen and unites in the common sorrow. Meantime the listening ear detects a third choir, of a single voice, singing as from afar, and again strangely breaking off, the chorale, O Lamb of God. The art of the work is stupendous; but more wonderful still is the truthfulness with which it figures forth the immensity of the drama to which it is the prologue.
Nevertheless it was far remote from Bach’s mind to present the Passion in the guise of a drama ”

“ If, however, one is asked the dominant characteristics of it, there is but one reply,—manliness and melody, the one never too vigorous to overpower the melody, the other restrained by it from any approach to effeminacy.
It is these qualities that adjudge Bach the same place among musicians as Milton holds among our own poets; and the thought has a touching suggestion in the lack of recognition of his later years, and in his blindness. But the likeness goes deeper into their work. Each is in his craft the most learned of artists; each is ruled by an absorbing religious sense. ”

“ Nor can I describe the infinite fertility of the design, the happy frequency with which in the arie a single Pg 102instrument, violin, flute, hautboy, or horn, is made to enhance the delicacy of the human voice, or the splendour of the grouping of the orchestra, equally noble in sonorous magnificence and in chastened softness. Whether in its art or in its religion the High Mass stands among the creations of Bach’s master-spirit, first and alone, but for its sole equal, the Passion according to Saint Matthew. ”

“ His short stay at Muehlhausen had been pleasant and useful to him. He entered upon his work, which was purely that of organist, with ardour, and—in contrast with his lax performance of his duties at Arnstadt—even took a share in the training of the choir, although there was a cantor as well. The only drawback was that the pastor of his church was a strenuous pietist, one of those puritans who found, not a spiritual gain, but a worldly intrusion upon the sacredness of divine worship, in those church cantatas which it was Bach’s work to create anew. ”

“ The human passion of the Kyrie eleison has its counterpart in the tender, almost personal feeling of the Christe eleison, which is set as a duet to an exquisitely melodious accompaniment of the violin, and in the closing Kyrie chorus, which, instead of being conceived in the usual way as a petition to the Holy Spirit, resumes the tone of the first and sums up the total supplication in a spirit now suggestive of the broad treatment of the Catholic writers but soon betraying the hand of Bach in its conciseness, its more nervous motion and acuter harmonies. ”

“ In this age of continued misery the foundations of German society seemed to be gradually undermined. A struggle, which added to the confusion of civil war the passion of religious hatred, threatened to dissolve the natural bonds of the family and of the race. Men sank into a blind and listless state, abandoning themselves to any vice or excess that seemed to deaden the thought of the morrow. It was therefore amid every circumstance of adversity that the Bach family grew to its full stature ”

“ Spitta’s “Johann Sebastian Bach,” published at Leipzig in two volumes in 1873 and 1880, represents the many years’ study of a professed musician. For all the facts of Bach’s life, and all the obtainable data relative to his works, it is a final and exhaustive treasure-house. Nothing can be more scientific and workmanlike than the method with which he has exhumed and collected every detail from every source that might possibly bear upon his subject, and nothing more admirable than the warm enthusiasm which lights up his work. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Emanuel Bach, Sebastian’s son, has left us a genial picture of how the kinsmen would gather all together, at Erfurt, or Eisenach, or Arnstadt, once in the year, and there make merry. First they sang a chorale; and, this duty ended, soon turned to a medley of secular songs. The climax was reached in the quodlibet, when all joined in a sort of comic chorus. The music consisted of any scrap, no matter whether sacred or profane, that occurred to any of the assembled company. It was an improvised catch. Each man in turn gave his own part or refrain, all different and all in harmony. ”

“ It is in the choruses, however, that the Leipzig cantatas rise above the works of Bach’s earlier time. The great choruses which he wrote at Weimar, for instance, the splendid one that opens Ich hatte viel Bekümmerniss, are indeed models of his instrumental treatment. The difference between his early and later writing is rather the uniform massiveness and magnificence of the latter—the more complete absorption in them of the organ-style. Though generally formed on a figured subject, they are wrought with far greater freedom and force. ”

“ SEBASTIAN BACH.
CHAPTER I.
It is never without interest to seek out the beginnings of genius in a great man’s forefathers. The mere tracking of pedigrees has an attraction for more than will willingly confess to what is reputed mainly an innocent weakness of old age. The pursuit, however, gains in dignity when it is not only the kinship but also the intellectual growth of the family, not only the blood but also the soul, with which we have to do. ”

“ In criticism I give exclusively the results of an independent study of Bach’s works, which I have pursued for a number of years. Nor am I sure that Dr. Spitta would invariably approve of my arrangement of his facts, and especially of the extent to which I have drawn from the personal narrative of Forkel. In many respects, a small book demands a different treatment from a large one, and I have not restricted my freedom of choice in a sketch that can never by possibility enter into competition with Dr. Spitta’s work. ”

“ 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. ”

“ We quitted the direct narrative of Bach’s life at the point when the arrival of the new rector of the Thomasschule gave it an interval of peace and quietness, an interval of which we took advantage to review the great ranges of church-music which fell as an official task to the cantor. The four years of Gesner’s rule are the ripest and busiest in Bach’s life; not that they include his greatest individual works, with the notable exception of the High Mass, but that they are the most productive, and of works attaining a more uniform level of first-rate excellence than any others. ”

“ The melodic richness which this training in popular music developed in Pachelbel and Johann Christoph Bach was lacking in Buxtehude. His strength lay in pure instrumental music and was displayed specially in fugue-writing, to the development of which he contributed much, both in the combination of several themes in a fugue and in the extended function he assigned to the pedal. The form is conceived with breadth and freedom, the voices are melodiously worked together, and the harmonies are unusual in their originality, often so unusual as to seem merely discordant, harsh, restless. ”

“ Bach wrote nothing more than distantly akin to the Oratorio; Handel attempted nothing great in Masses or in Passion Music. Wherever they do enter into comparison, only ignorance can excuse the claim of superiority often made for Handel. So it is remarkable when they are set side by side as organists. With his prodigious brilliancy Handel was untrue to the nature of the organ ”

“ To Bach it must have been irritating beyond bearing to have a man, little more than half his age, intruding upon his incontestable rights, still more to find the Town Council and consistory unscrupulous in supporting the claim of the stronger, by declining to disturb a right which had no precedent. It was not until he had appealed to the King, and delighted him by some evening-music, produced when he was next at Leipzig, that the matter came for a fair hearing. ”

“ 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 ”

“ Of his character we have but one solitary notice, when a funeral sermon on a weak-minded sister gave occasion to the preacher to mark the contrast with her two brothers: whom we see to be men of a good understanding, endowed with art and skill, who are well seen and heard in churches and schools, and in the common life of the town, in such wise that the work praiseth the Master. A portrait of Ambrosius, which looks down upon the precious reliques of his son in the Berlin library, is notable not only for its likeness to Sebastian but also for the simplicity of its manner. ”

“ I have already taken occasion to trace the studies by which Bach prepared himself to become the greatest organ composer as well as the greatest organist of all time. At the present break in his life it will be convenient to give a summary account of his total production in this department,15 though it must be little more than an enumeration of the works that survive; since organ music least of all lends itself to any but a scientific analysis, such as would be altogether out of place here. ”

“ In the pedigree of Sebastian Bach they fade to a comparative obscurity; viewed by themselves they are luminaries of signal brilliance. Johann Christoph was more than a complete master of the musical science of his day; he was also one of the first who ventured to deviate from the rigid rules of the early contrapuntists, to make them freer, more flexible, and more significant. He is a link between ancient and modern music, blending the old church modes with the modern tonality of major and minor. Besides this, he marks an important step in the growth of dramatic music. ”

“ Passion according to S. Mark.52 On these occasions the appointed mourning did not begin for some months, and Bach had therefore time to devote thought to them such as he was not able to give in the hurried seasons of rejoicing. In itself, the more weighty occasion stirred him to deeper reflexion, and the Dirge for Queen Christine Eberhardine is of more value than all his secular cantatas put together. It shows Bach to us in his native sphere, that of a church composer, and leads naturally to the consideration of his work as such in its wider manifestations. ”

“ Learning was to Bach a means to an end. Except for amusement, as in the Musikalische Opfer, he never let it shew itself. To produce living work it needed the touch of his imagination and the guidance of his clear artist’s instinct. In fact, nothing is freer than his management of the several voices of a fugue. “He considered his parts,” it has been finely said, “as persons, who conversed together, like a select company. ”