Johann Christian Bach

“ Bach was laid to rest in the churchyard of St. John's at Leipsic, but no stone marks his resting place. Only the town library register tells that Johann Sebastian Bach, Musical Director and Singing Master of the St. Thomas School, was carried to his grave July 30, 1750.
But the memory of Bach is enduring, his fame immortal and the love his beautiful music inspires increases from year to year, wherever that music is known, all over the world. ”

“ Four more of Johann Sebastian Bach’s sons grew to manhood and became musicians. The eldest of them, Wilhelm Friedermann Bach (1710–1784) was by common repute the most gifted; a famous organist, a famous improvisor and a complete master of counterpoint. But, unlike the rest of the family, he was a man of idle and dissolute habits, whose career was little more than a series of wasted opportunities. Educated at Leipzig, he was appointed in 1733 organist of the Sophienkirche at Dresden, and in 1747 became musical director of the Liebfrauenkirche at Halle. ”

“ Johann Bach had several sons, all of whom were musicians in Erfurt. One of his grandchildren, Johann Bernhard Bach, became organist in Eisenach and won a reputation as composer of organ and orchestral music, but no other member of this branch of the family attained celebrity. The descendants of Heinrich Bach, who himself was a fine organist and excelled in composition, were however more prominent in the musical world. His two sons, Johann Christoph and Johann Michael, took higher rank as composers than any of the other ancestors of Sebastian Bach. ”

“ The activities of this society, together with the new movement to restore Bach's vocal music to its place in the Lutheran Church, cannot fail to have a salutary effect on the future of music.
BACH, KARL PHILIPP EMANUEL (1714-1788) , German musician and composer, the third son of Johann Sebastian Bach, was born at Weimar on the 14th of March 1714. When he was ten years old he entered the Thomasschule at Leipzig, of which in 1723 his father had become cantor, and continued his education as a student of jurisprudence at the universities of Leipzig (1731) and of Frankfort on the Oder (1735) . ”

“ It was, in fact, the artist temperament that led Bach to make the great and sublime his goal. For that reason his music is not merely agreeable, like other composers', but transports us to the regions of the ideal. It does not arrest our attention momentarily but grips us the stronger the oftener we listen to it, so that after a thousand hearings its treasures are still unexhausted and yield fresh beauties to excite our wonder. Even the beginner who knows but the A B C of his art warms with pleasure when he hears Bach's music and can open his ear and heart to it. ”

“ Isn’t it wonderful to think that the great Bach, who wrote some of the masterpieces of the world, could also write simple little Minuets and Preludes that any child can play?
But with all Bach’s comfort he missed an organ! Deep in his soul, he craved the making of religious music—it was part of his thinking. His religious ideas tied up with his 248music, were his life. So we see this saint leaving happiness at Cothen for an ill-paid post in Leipsic, as Cantor (1723) at the school of St. Thomas, where, succeeding Johann Kuhnau, he stayed the rest of his life and wrote his greatest works. ”

“ In his instrumental works he lets himself go. As he never courted popularity, but always pursued his ideal, Bach had no reason to suppress the nobility of his inspirations, or to lower their standard for public consumption. Nor did he ever do so. Therefore every modulation in his instrumental work is a new thought, a constantly progressive creation in the plane of the chosen keys and those related to them. He holds fast to the essentials of harmony, but with every modulation introduces a new suggestion and glides so smoothly to the end of a piece that no creaking of machinery is perceptible ”

“ Never did composer take himself and his mission in deeper earnest. The tenets of Christianity were hard facts to him, not subjects for elegant musical embroidery. Life was a bitter struggle against definite powers of evil, heaven a place of splendor to be attained only by ceaseless warfare. Beauty for its own sake seemed to him an unworthy object for a Christian to pursue.
Springing from this view of life, or at any rate closely allied to it, is the curiously vivid realism of Bach's music. Never has composer visualized his subject with such intensity. ”

“ 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. ”

“ As master of the organ, Bach has never been equaled. His chorales and passion music also belong in a class by themselves. A famous critic has written: “Mozart and Beethoven failed in oratorio, Schubert in opera; the Italian operas of Gluck and Handel have perished. Even in the successful work of these men there is a strange inequality. But upon all that Bach attempted—and the amount of his work is no less a marvel than its quality—he affixed the stamp of final and inimitable perfection.”
With the passing of years, Bach’s genius is being recognized more and more throughout the Christian Church. ”

“ Six years elapsed before Bach was invited to collaborate in another celebration of the royal House. On September 5, 1733, less than two months after his application for the post of Hof-Componist, the University Society celebrated the eleventh birthday of the Electoral Prince by performing Bach's dramma per musica, Die Wahl des Herkules, or Herkules auf dem Scheidewege. Barely three months later, on December 8, 1733, Bach produced another Cantata in honour of the royal family, Tönet, ihr Pauken, erschallet Trompeten, of which he was both author and composer. ”

“ It is to be hoped that when he dies it will not be suffered to decline or be lost, as is to be feared from the small number of people who nowadays bestow pains upon it.”134
Strangers often asked Bach to play to them between the hours of divine service. On those occasions he was wont to select and treat a theme in various ways, making it the subject of each extemporisation even if he continued playing for two hours. As a beginning he played a Prelude and Fugue on the Great Organ. Then he developed it with solo stops in a Trio or Quartet. ”

“ Before blaming him, as is usually done, it may be well to reflect that Bach’s brother was not [13] necessarily moved by an impulse of cruelty but more probably felt the need of curbing somewhat an audacious and immature young genius, who threatened to get out of hand.
During the five years he spent in Ohrdruf Bach attended the town school which enjoyed an unusually high reputation throughout Thuringia. His studies, naturally, ranged much further afield than at Eisenach and his scholastic progress appears to have been rapid. ”

“ No one excelled Bach in this knowledge. Not only is his rich harmony and melody singularly adapted to the instrument, but he gave the pedal a part of its own, even in his early compositions. Yet it was only gradually that he mastered its technique; for his Organ masterpieces belong to the period in which those for the Clavier began to be classics. His early and immature Organ works are widely dispersed; for as soon as a composer begins to be distinguished everybody is anxious to possess a specimen of his art. ”

“ Now bethink you, if Bach’s skilful feet deserved such bounty what gift must the prince have offered to reward his hands as well?” Other stories of his miraculous playing had long circulated throughout the country. People said it was a habit of his to climb into the organ loft of an inconspicuous rural church and so astound people with his improvisations that the cry would go up: “That must be Bach or the Devil!” The tale, one can depend on it, is a myth.
Another trip was to Halle, birthplace of Handel. ”

“ They appealed vividly and powerfully to Bach's spiritual nature, and profoundly influenced his musical utterance. His whole career, as Sir Hubert Parry points out,453 was an effort to widen his means for self-expression. And the Choral Cantata, in effect, was the reconciliation or blending of this self-discipline. It was the supreme achievement of Bach's genius to assert the faith and idealism of Lutheran hymnody with the fullest resources of his technique.
It is not our task to consider the hymn libretto in its relation to the structure of Bach's latest Cantatas. ”

“ In 1700, undoubtedly upon the recommendation of Elias Herda, cantor of the school in Ohrdruf, Bach was admitted to St. Michael's School in Lüneburg; but he was-94- now no longer a pupil, for in return for the general instruction which he received he was obliged to act as a sort of assistant chorusmaster for his comrades; at least as a leader. When his voice changed, which soon came about, he was charged with the clavecin accompaniment at chorus rehearsals, or with playing a violin part in the orchestra. ”

“ CHAPTER VIII. PERSONAL CHARACTERISTICS Distinguished as a player, composer, and teacher, Bach was also an indulgent father, a good friend, and a loyal citizen. His paternal devotion is shown by his care for his children's education, and he was equally assiduous in the performance of his civil and social duties. His acquaintance was agreeable to everybody. Every lover of music, whatever his nationality, was sure of a friendly reception at his house, and his sociability and reputation caused him to be seldom without visitors. ”

“ Bach, Johann Christoph, was probably one of the greatest contrapuntists and most expert organists in Germany towards the close of the seventeenth century. He was court and town organist at Eisenach. In the archives (as they were called) of the Bach family, which Emmanuel Bach possessed in Hamburg, there was, among other pieces, a motet of Johann Christoph's composition, in which he had ventured to make use of the extreme sixth, which, in his days, was considered an extremely bold attempt. ”

“ He makes us feel that he has not stepped outside the diatonic scale, so quick is he to seize upon the consonances common to dissonant systems and combine them to his sure purpose.
The Bach Statue at Eisenach
CHAPTER VI. BACH THE COMPOSER (continued) [pg 80] Bach's treatment of harmony and modulation powerfully influenced his melody. The strands of his harmony are really concurrent melodies. They flow easily and expressively, never engross the hearer's attention, but divide his interest, as now one now the other becomes prominent. ”

“ Bach attains, in these two works, the highest point which it was then possible for him to reach; he comes into his first maturity in treating, it is true, established forms, through which he acquires the necessary mastership for the exploration of new fields.
From this moment progress is manifest. Take the prelude and fugue in F minor; [97] no more superfluous ornaments in the prelude,-49- and, what is especially noteworthy, it is founded entirely, not yet upon a clearly defined subject, but still upon a figure which affects the whole ensemble, imparting to it added coherency. ”

“ In March 1720,397 more than two years after Bach's arrival at Cöthen, Helbig published a cycle of “Musical Texts on the Sunday and Saints' Day Gospels throughout the year,” for performance “in God's honour by the Prince's Kapelle at Eisenach.”398 How they came into Bach's hands we do not know, but can readily conjecture. They are indifferent poetry, judging them by the two specimens Bach made use of, and are uniform in construction. The first movement invariably is a Chorus upon a text from the Gospel for the Day, or a Scripture passage closely related to it. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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!" ”

“ As we have said, Bach is the great lyric poet of his nation, the first great German genius after the devastating horrors of war. Looming on the sight, or as contemporaries, are Handel, Leibnitz, Wolf, Klopstock, Lessing, and Winckelmann. The modern era, with its philosophy and revolution, has arrived. The domain of thought is enwidened, and the Middle Ages blend and fade in the historic vista of the past. But the modern era commences with these great affirmations in art and poetry. Bach takes the narrative of the Passion, and erects the Cross anew with sympathetic genius of art and love. ”