Emanuel Bach

“ Bach from time to time made his journeys to various towns, and paid visits to Erfurt, where his cousin, Joh. Christoph, and Adlung were settled. As he advanced in years he gave up these journeys. The last he made was to the Court of Frederick the Great at Potsdam in 1747. His son Emanuel had been capellmeister to Frederick since 1740; and the king had frequently, and always with more insistence, thrown out hints that he would like to hear the great artist. Bach being much occupied, and disinclined for travelling, did not accede to the king’s wishes until they amounted to a positive command. ”

“ J.S. Bach had exhausted the possibilities of the fugue form. [Pg 22] It was perhaps fortunate for Emanuel Bach that, while still young, he left his father's house. After residing for a few years at Frankfort-on-the-Oder, he entered the service of Frederick the Great; and at the court of that monarch he came, at any rate, directly under Italian influence. ”

“ Bach’s labor upon this colossal work exhausted what little strength he had. His eyesight began to fail. His creative faculty was impaired. He could no longer work. The “Art of Fugue” remained unfinished. Philipp Emanuel added to the last bars of his father’s manuscript the sad words:
“While engaged on this fugue, in which the name of ‘Bach’ is introduced in counterpoint, the author died.”
It was true. The old master did not live to finish the work. The end was near at hand. Two operations were performed upon his eyes, but they failed to help him. His life passed into darkness before death. ”

“ With him the descendants of Johann Sebastian Bach became extinct. He was a good pianoforte and violin player, but his modesty prevented him from often appearing, and although he wrote much, in many styles, very little of his music is published.
Carl Philipp Emanuel [25] , third son of Sebastian, often styled the Berlin or Hamburg Bach, born at Weimar March 14, 1714. His general precocity, quickness, and openness to impressions, induced his father to bring him up to the study of philosophy. ”

“ A tedious day’s journey was coming to its close, and the Sunday vesper bells were ringing in the Potsdam turrets, when (May 4, 1747) our eagerly expectant travellers came to the gate, and announced their names and occupations to the gatekeeper, as was the custom. With anxious hearts they entered the city, and went to the quarter where Philipp Emanuel resided as court musician. Bach was received by his daughter-in-law most cordially, as was also Friedemann with sisterly kindness, and he embraced the grandchildren whom she brought to him at once, with much emotion. ”

“ At this stage one might as well mention two other musically outstanding sons of Bach among the twenty children he was to beget. The more prominent of these was Carl Philipp Emanuel, who served Frederick the Great and whose reputation as a pianist and composer was such that, whenever in the latter part of the eighteenth century, it was a question of Bach, people usually meant Philipp Emanuel. Another, Johann Christian (Bach’s son by his second wife) , lived and died in London, composed operas, and became an intimate of the youthful Mozart. ”

“ Bach published only a very few works during his lifetime. The majority of his compositions passed in manuscript into the keeping of his sons. Emanuel later brought out many, but much of what fell to the keeping of Friedemann was carelessly lost or sold for a pittance here and there. There is no way of telling how much of the great man’s music has disappeared, but the amount which has been preserved is prodigious. As is so often the case among musicians, and, indeed, among most artists, his activity is more or less clearly divided into several periods. ”

“ The prospect of complete loss of the tradition of his own polyphonic art he faced with equanimity, saying of the new style, which in the hands of his own son, Philipp Emanuel, was soon to eclipse it for the next hundred years, "The art has advanced to great heights: the old style of music no longer pleases our modern ears." But it would have broken his heart if he had forseen that Friedermann Bach was to attain a disreputable old age after a dissolute and unproductive life. ”

“ He extemporised much but composed little, though some sonatas for clavecin, both solo and with violin, some polonaises, organ-pieces, concertos, fugues, symphonies and cantatas have come down to us.
Johann Christoph (No. 50) died in infancy.
The Berlin Bach
Carl Philipp Emanuel (No. 51) the most celebrated of Sebastian’s sons is called the “Berlin Bach,” having lived in that city for twenty-nine years. He studied at St Thomas’ School at Leipsic under his father, and afterwards joined the University of Leipsic as a student of law, but completed this course of study at Frankfort on the Oder. ”

“ Even if Bach’s scores—most of them unpublished—had been accessible, it is questionable whether the epoch we call [62] “classical” would have been able to see him in a just perspective.
In due course the wheel was to turn full-circle and surely none would have been more amazed than Philipp Emanuel, Wilhelm Friedemann, and Johann Christian could they have known that one day their own works would be looked upon as museum pieces, while the creations of the “learned old perruque” had become the fountain of musical youth, the perpetual source of strength and of illimitable, self-renewing wonder. ”

“ Yet four years later not more than thirty copies had been sold and Philipp Emanuel, in disgust, sold the plates for old metal.
Death
Bach’s eyesight had long been failing. The strain to which he had mercilessly subjected it all his life, copying music as well as engraving elaborate compositions of his own, was now telling on it. By the end of 1749 his vision was in such a state that an English eye specialist, John [60] Taylor, who later treated Handel but at this time chanced to be touring the continent, was summoned and operated on Bach about the beginning of 1750. ”

“ It is a translation of the “Life” of J. N. Forkel, published at Leipzig in 1802, and in London in 1820. Forkel was not only pre-eminent among the learned musicians of the end of the last century, but also the friend and scholar of Bach’s sons Friedemann and Emanuel. He presents us, therefore, with more than a masterly criticism of Bach’s science, knowing, it should seem, little beyond the organ and clavichord works: he is full of anecdotes and reminiscences of the master, all the more valuable, because told with a naïveté and freshness that stamp them at once as genuine and uncoloured. ”

“ Bach mastered the problem for himself. He tuned his own harpsichord and clavichord, making the major-thirds rather sharp; and he must have flattened the fifths as we do. His son Emanuel speaks of his testing the fifths by tuning their octave below, and making this a fourth below the starting point. What he did was the result of practical experiment, for he would have nothing to do with mathematical theory. He always quilled his harpsichord himself ”

“ At Coethen Bach also wrote three sonatas, in A minor, C, and D minor (213, pp. 2, 16, 24) , with a fourth which remains only a fragment (212, p. 18) .29 These sonatas, the title being to some extent interchangeable with suite, have little in common with the form to which Bach’s son Philipp Emanuel, Haydn, and Mozart (Beethoven can of course not come into the comparison) developed it. The parent of this exists also among Bach’s works, but it has a different name, being disPg 54tinguished as the Italian Concerto (207, p. 4) . ”

“ More striking proof of Bach's genius than his modification of his usual mental attitude could not be desired, but though the Mass unquestionably represents the climax of his achievement, it cannot for this reason be taken as a typical work. It is rather in his Passion according to St. Matthew that we find Bach's normal view of things represented in its fullest and most transcendent development. The Passion Music as treated by Bach is a typically German art-form, but like most other musical developments it can be traced to an Italian source. ”

“ On the contrary, all composers since his time have felt the stimulus of his great tone poems, and Mendelssohn, Schumann, Chopin and Wagner found him the most productive of great masters.
The life of Bach need not long detain us. A musician of the tenth generation, member of a family which occupies a liberal space in German encyclopedias of music, art and literature, Sebastian Bach led the life of a teacher, productive artist and virtuoso, mainly within the limits of the comparatively unimportant provincial city of Leipsic. ”

“ But it is small wonder that we find Bach sighing later: "Modest as is my way of life, with the payment of house-rent and other indispensable articles of consumption, I can with difficulty live." A year after his marriage, however, he was appointed court organist to the Grand Duke of Weimar, a post he held nine years. Then he became musical director with the Prince of Anhalt-Köthen. ”

“ The time immediately following Bach had no sympathy with the depth and individuality of his genius. True, his pupils and sons revered him as a consummate and inimitable contrapuntist and a masterly composer, and with true instinct set themselves to collect and copy all his existing works for piano and organ which they could procure. But with their generation all real interest in this mighty genius vanished, and it is not too much to say that within forty years after Bach's death, his fame, though still unapproachable, had become a mere historic tradition. ”

“ The various German courts felt that throb of life and enthusiasm which had distinguished the Italian principalities in the preceding century in the direction of painting and sculpture. Every little capital was a focus of artistic rays, and there was a general spirit of rivalry among the princes, who aspired to cultivate the arts of peace as well as those of war. Bach had become known as a gifted musician, not only by his wonderful powers as an organist, but by two of his earlier masterpieces—"Gott ist mein König" and "Ich hatte viel Bektlmmerniss." ”

“ He it is who reveals the heaven that lies around us. He opens the portals of Nature, and we enter in to find strength and consolation.
Bach does all this in the masterly work we are considering. Not to the Italian, but to the German, did Nature at length disclose her choicest method of expression, and this because the German had ever lived in close contact with her. In all Bach's works at this period the work of emancipation goes forward. Take, for instance, the Brandenburg concertos leading to the combination of the present orchestra.
But a new sphere of action here again opens to Bach. ”

“ The three towns of Erfurt, Arnstadt and Eisenach, now became the chief centres of the Bach family.
Christoph Bach (No. 5) , the grandfather of Sebastian, born at Wechmar, entered the service of the Grand Duke of Weimar as lackey and musician. In 1642 he was a member of the Guild of Musicians at Erfurt, and in 1654 was Court and Town musician at Arnstadt, where his younger brother Heinrich was living. He does not seem ever to have been an organist, but a “Kunstpfeifer.” ”

“ The Prince of Cöthen was allied to the ducal family of Weimar through the marriage of his sister to the heir apparent of the reigning house, and on the occasion of his visit at the time of the wedding festivities, it is very likely that Bach may have attracted his attention. He was just the man to appreciate the importance of so great a musician. Clear-sighted and enthusiastic, unmarried and still in the spring-time of life, he was endowed with an unbiased judgment and the ability to rule, as well as with an unusual talent for music. ”

“ The music stole through his musings and touched him. He lifted his face as the sound swept through the church. The fire and strength of youth had gone from the [74] touch, but something remained—something inevitable and gentle that soothed the spirit and lifted the heart—like the ghost of a soul calling to itself from the past.
Bach started. A hand had fallen on his shoulder. It was the choirmaster, small-eyed and eager. Bach followed him blindly.
At the top of the stairs the choirmaster turned and waited for him. "At last we have the honor. Welcome to the greatest master in Germany!" ”

“ He kept to his pious and simple life all through the horrors of the times, (which reduced the mass of the people to a state of coarseness and immorality) , and brought up six children, three of whom became famous musicians in their day. In the funeral sermon preached by Olearius, he is mentioned as the composer of chorales, motets, concertos, fugues and preludes, but few of his compositions have been preserved.
Johann Christian Bach (No. 7) , a viola player and music director, belonged to Erfurt, whence he went to Eisenach, being the first of his family to settle there. ”

“ That which is imitable in his work is simply the result of certain forms of expression that he used because he found them ready to his hand; that which is his own is inimitable. His oratorios are, in their own style, as unapproached now as ever; he seems to have exhausted what art can do in this direction; but he has not swayed the minds of modern composers as Bach has done.
Bach lived and wrote in retirement; a small proportion only of his works was published in his lifetime, nor did he take into account their effect on the public mind, or feel the public pulse, as Handel did. ”