Johann Sebastian Bach (25 page)

Historical accounts describe the
Himmelsburg
as “adorned with a marvelous organ.” Considering the unique architectural circumstances, its place in the
Capelle
, just behind the balustrade of the shorter east side of the rectangular ceiling opening, provided for maximum exposure and projection. We do not know what the organ actually looked and sounded like during Bach's time because the information we have about the instrument, which is no longer extant, either predates or postdates his Weimar years. A publication of 1737 specifies twenty-four stops on two manuals and pedal,
¹⁹
reflecting changes that date from a rebuilding of 1719–20. The original organ (seen in the illustration, p. 146) was built in several sections from 1658 on by one of the most famous German organ builders, Ludwig Compenius of Erfurt.
²⁰
However, that instrument had been thoroughly overhauled and enlarged by the organ builder Johann Conrad Weishaupt immediately before Bach's arrival in Weimar; the most significant changes included new wind chests, new pedal stops (including a 32-foot subbass), and a rebuilding of the
Seitenwerk
(side organ, lower manual) into an
Unterwerk
(lower organ). Further design changes were made during Bach's nine years there, but generally the organ seems to have been in excellent technical condition throughout his tenure, for the court registers contain no entries pertaining to even minor repairs.

In Weimar, Bach developed a close personal relationship with the resident organ builder, Heinrich Nicolaus Trebs, who provided maintenance service for the organ at the court church. Trebs signed a contract on June 29, 1712, for a complete overhaul and manufacture of several new stops, in exchange for a payment of 200 florins.
²¹
Of the plans, drawn up by Bach, we know only that they called for a glockenspiel stop, which had also been a part of Bach's 1708 rebuilding project for the Mühlhausen organ. By October 1712, Trebs had already obtained twenty-nine chimes from a Nuremberg maker, and twelve additional ones arrived the following spring.
²²
The organ project was coordinated with a redesign and expansion of the entire
Capelle
. In late June 1712, the organ's wind chests were dismantled, so that the instrument was rendered unplayable. Beginning December 21, eleven carpenters and two day laborers worked day and night installing the bellows chamber so that the organ could be played on Christmas eve.
²³
But work on the instrument was by no means finished then. Bach's student Kräuter, hoping to remain longer with Bach, wrote to his Augsburg sponsors in April 1713 that “by Whitsuntide the palace organ here will be in as good a condition as possible; hence I could familiarize myself more completely with the structure of an organ, in order to be able to judge if this or that would be useful for an organ, if all repair work were executed well and not superficially, and at the same time how much, approximately, one or two ranks of pipes would cost, all of which I consider rather worthwhile.”
²⁴
Still, the project was not entirely completed even by Whitsuntide 1713. The importance of keeping the organ playable throughout much of the construction explains why Trebs took such a long time to finish it. Only on May 19 of the next year, 1714, was a bellows operator finally paid for fourteen days of “labor for the tuning of the organ,” indicating that the finishing touches were being applied.
²⁵
All this means that Bach's organistic activities at the court church were curtailed for a long period, from Christmas 1712 through May 1714, and that for half a year he could not play the organ at all.

Far fewer services were held each week at the court church than at any regular town church—in general, one Sunday and one weekday service—with Johann Georg Lairitz, the duchy's general superintendent, serving as the main preacher. According to the new Weimar formulary of 1707,
Agende, oder kurtzer Auszug aus der Kirchen-Ordnung
, the order of divine service complied with standard Lutheran practices in all major respects (see Table 4.2), but showed the following small variants: the service opened with a congregational hymn in line with the liturgical season; then a polyphonic Kyrie was performed by the choir, followed by the Gloria intonation by the pastor from the altar and the congregational Gloria hymn “Allein Gott in der Höh sei Ehr.” A single Kyrie by Bach has come down to us, albeit in posthumous sources. But since the work in question—Kyrie “Christe, du Lamm Gottes,” BWV 233a, for five voices and continuo, later integrated into the Mass in F major, BWV 233—not only fits stylistically among Bach's early choral fugues but also employs the Weimar melodic version of the Litany, it may confidently be placed in the early Weimar period. The existence of this Kyrie suggests that the court organist Bach played at least a modest role in the realm of vocal music, too. In his Mühlhausen resignation letter, Bach had made such a strong case for his “ultimate goal of a well-regulated church music” and expressed such a keen interest in getting more involved in vocal music that his voluntary withdrawal from it would indeed be hard to imagine. Nevertheless, as in Arnstadt and Mühlhausen, his official activities continued to focus primarily on organ music.

It would be misleading to describe Bach's musical functions at Weimar as exclusively liturgical. Of course, playing at the divine services was of central importance, but this task was essentially limited to accompanying hymns and providing introductory chorale preludes and a postlude. The remarks in the Obituary that “the pleasure His Grace [Duke Ernst August] took in his [Bach's] playing fired him with the desire to try every possible artistry in his treatment of the organ” and that in Weimar “he wrote most of his organ works” suggest activities of a much broader scope, perhaps frequent organ recitals or performances at the end of the church services, at the request of Duke Ernst August or for the pleasure of both ducal families, guests and foreign dignitaries, and other interested parties. Similarly, when the occasion arose, Bach may also have presented solo performances on the harpsichord. Taking pride in a keyboard virtuoso of Bach's stature would have been only in keeping with the princely habit of regularly showcasing the trophies of their “talent hunters,” thereby also justifying financial rewards over and above the pay scale called for by the musician's actual rank. Such courtly entertainment would then have permitted Bach to impress and captivate his audience by performing works that would ordinarily be unsuitable for worship services, because of either their disproportionate length (large-scale preludes, toccatas, and fugues) or their unconventional design (Italian concerto and other transcriptions).

Bach's “desire to try every possible artistry,” a major impetus for his creative endeavors as organist in Arnstadt and Mühlhausen as well, could never have found this kind of focused support and promotion in a position under regular church and civic governance. Thus, it stands to reason that, as noted earlier, Weimar was where most of his organ works originated. This Obituary statement clearly refers to written compositions, and considering that a large portion of a capable organist's work consisted of improvised music, the organ compositions that have come down to us represent only a fraction of the music that originated from Bach's creative mind. Nevertheless, his decision to fix so many organ works—some if not most of them based on improvisations—in written form indicates that Bach considered these pieces worthy of elaboration and preservation, that the musical ideas embedded in them stimulated and challenged his compositional instincts, that the functions for which they were written required a certain degree of preparation and exercise, and finally, that these compositions would serve his increasing teaching activities. After all, Bach's Mühlhausen pupils Schubart and Vogler moved with him to Weimar, where they were joined over time by more than ten other students, among them the first complement of Bach family members: Johann Lorenz, eldest son of cousin Johann Valentin Bach of Schweinfurt, arrived in the fall of 1713 and remained for five years; Johann Bernhard, his Ohrdruf brother's second son, came to Weimar as a fifteen-year-old in late 1714 or early 1715 and stayed on until 1719, through Bach's early Cöthen years;
²⁶
and his own son Wilhelm Friedemann surely began to receive his father's instruction well before his seventh birthday, in 1717.

Roughly half of Bach's extant organ works point either to Weimar origin or to Weimar revisions of, or amendments to, earlier works; evidence is provided both by autograph manuscripts and, in particular, by copies (or sources related to copies) made by Bach's student Johann Tobias Krebs and colleague Johann Gottfried Walther. None of these sources, however, permit us to differentiate clearly between chronological stages. Even the few samples available of Bach's music hand that are datable to the period 1708–14 feature insufficient changes in his penmanship. One of the few indirect chronological clues for Bach's keyboard works from the Weimar period relates to an important historical fact. In the spring of 1713, Prince Johann Ernst, Duke Ernst August's half-brother and a musician of professional caliber, returned from his grand tour to the Low Countries and brought back with him copies of recent music, published and in manuscript, that he had acquired in Amsterdam. Indeed, additional music shelves had to be installed in the library of the Red Palace to hold this bounty.
²⁷
In Amsterdam, Johann Ernst may also have met the blind organist Jan Jacob de Graaf, who was known for his playing of the latest fashionable Italian ensemble concertos in keyboard transcriptions and presumably supplied the indirect model for similar transcriptions by the young prince's teachers, Walther and Bach.

Bach's organ and harpsichord transcriptions (BWV 592–596 and 972–987) from Antonio Vivaldi's
L'Estro armonico
, Op. 3 (1711), and of concertos by Alessandro and Benedetto Marcello, Giuseppe Torelli, and others, as well as compositions by the prince himself, signal the adoption in 1713–14 of the most modern Italian concerto type—not coincidentally, right after the prince's return. Compositions by Bach that are directly indebted to the Vivaldi-style ritornello concerto include the Toccata in F major for organ, BWV 540 (its canonic beginning modeled after Vivaldi's Double Violin Concerto in D minor, transcribed in BWV 596), and the opening prelude of the English Suite in G minor, BWV 808. Works such as the “Dorian” Toccata for organ, BWV 538, the Toccata in C major, BWV 564, and the Prelude in G major, BWV 541, reflect compositional principles of an older Italian concerto type, suggesting an earlier origin. That older style is represented by Tomaso Albinoni's Concertos Op. 2 (1700), with which Bach was familiar. (Also, a fragmentary continuo part for one of Albinoni's concertos, BWV Anh. I 23, written in Bach's hand around 1710 or earlier, was probably prepared for a performance with the court capelle.)

All these keyboard works demonstrate a remarkable ability to expand on their models or to synthesize different models. Bach's orientation was neither exclusively Italianate nor exclusively modernist. In the very early Weimar years, for instance, he copied Nicolas de Grigny's
Premier Livre d'Orgue
(1700);
²⁸
also, a work such as the
Pièce d'Orgue
in G major, BWV 572, exemplifies a sovereign exercise in French style. Similarly, Bach's (lost) copy of Frescobaldi's
Fiori musicali
(1635), which bore the date 1714, is evidence of his continuing interest in the great keyboard masters of the more distant past. Taken together, Bach's Weimar keyboard music shows little uniformity, less dependence on specific stylistic models than his earlier works, and a greater tendency toward a more efficient and more individualized application of different compositional principles and techniques.

One particular seminal project not only spans the entire Weimar period, from 1708 to 1717, but also extends beyond it in both directions: the
Orgel-Büchlein
(Little Organ Book). Near the beginning of his tenure as court organist, Bach apparently intended to compile a large collection of short organ chorales that would enhance the core melodies of the Lutheran hymnbook. To this end, he prepared a bound volume (its title was added only after 1720)
²⁹
with room for 164 settings of as many chorale melodies, all of whose headings he entered at the outset. Altogether they constitute virtually the entire “classic” Lutheran hymn repertory up to about 1675. Bach was focusing here on the melodies of his childhood days, with no attention paid to the more recent chorale melodies. The collection does not follow any specific hymnal, although the structure and sequence of the liturgical rubrics are fairly standardized in the Lutheran tradition. Most every hymnbook begins with the seasonal chorales for the ecclesiastical year (the first invariably being “Nun komm der Heiden Heiland,” Martin Luther's poetic translation of the Ambrosian “Veni redemptor gentium”) and continues with the topically organized hymns for all seasons (see Table 5.2, left-hand column). Of the two hymnals in use at Weimar during Bach's years there—
Auserlesenes Weimarisches Gesangbuch
of 1681 (second edition 1713) and
Schuldiges Lob Gottes, oder: Geistreiches Gesang-Buch
of 1713—the second comes closest to the
Orgel-Büchlein
in its order and contents. Bach, however, could have worked basically from memory and ordered the collection according to his own plan.

Each of the
Orgel-Büchlein
's ninety pages in oblong-quarto format, about 6 by 7.5 inches, was ruled with six staves, and, depending on the length of the cantus firmus (the plain chorale melody), the composition had to fit on exactly one or two pages (see illustration, p. 128). This type of miniature organ chorale harks back to the style of the chorale partita, whose individual movements are closely defined in character and in motivic design. Bach also integrates into this new collection a number of preexisting settings, perhaps with minor refinements, for quite a number of the entries represent fair copies without any trace of compositional activity. He probably selected them from a portfolio of chorales that he had begun to compile much earlier and from which other, later collections might have benefited as well. The typical
Orgel-Büchlein
chorale combines tight motivic construction and refined contrapuntal devices (including strict canon) with bold expressive language and subtle musico-theological interpretation; in each, manual and pedal lines converge elegantly into a paradigmatic organ score.