Johann Sebastian Bach (27 page)

The
Hunt Cantata
, BWV 208, not only marked Bach's first documented collaboration with Salomo Franck as librettist, it is his first known secular cantata and, at the same time, his first work of truly large-scale proportions. A dramatic dialogue among four mythological figures—Diana, Pales, Endymion, and Pan (assigned to the vocal parts SSTB)—with an opulent instrumental accompaniment and a large continuo group (including 2 bassoons, a violone, and a violono grosso), the work unfolds in fifteen movements. It contains multiple examples of the three main vocal forms (recitative, aria, and chorus) handled in a host of excitingly different ways, while the forces for which they are scored are variously combined, increasing the sense of musical diversity. The accompaniments to the arias, for example, range from simple continuo writing, both with and without ensemble ritornellos, to colorful and delicately contrasting textures that feature, in turn, 2 horns, 3 oboes, 2 recorders, and solo violin. Sung by the four vocal soloists, the choruses are also textured in a wide variety of ways, from tunefully homophonic to elaborately polyphonic. This dramatic cantata has not, however, survived entirely in its original format. The autograph score, lacking the opening sinfonia, begins immediately with a short recitative. The missing instrumental introduction must have resembled, at least in scoring and key, the early (five-movement) sinfonia version BWV 1046a of the
Brandenburg Concerto
No. 1—if it was not in fact that very work.

If the cantata BWV 208 is indicative of Bach's remarkable accomplishments and reputation in the realm of courtly musical entertainment outside of Weimar, then we can be sure that he would have reached a similarly unchallenged stature at the Weimar court by early 1713 as well and would have done, or would soon do, similar things there. We can surmise that he prepared and composed instrumental and vocal music for the Weimar court capelle more heavily than the surviving musical sources bear out. Indeed, Philipp David Kräuter expressly refers to his learning experience with Bach as including “composing concertos and overtures”
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it is inconceivable that the teacher himself did not also compose such works. Bach's consummate skill and innovative approach in handling instrumental ensemble pieces is manifest in the great variety of instrumental movements he composed for his sacred cantatas in Weimar before and after 1714. Some of them, like the sinfonias of BWV 12 and 21, may have their actual origin in chamber works written for the court capelle.

Given the broad scope of activities and opportunities in Weimar, it is difficult to see why Bach should have found it tempting in late 1713 to seriously consider a new position, that of organist and music director at Our Lady's (or Market) Church in Halle on the Saale. Two possible reasons that could have motivated Bach to leave Weimar come to mind. The first is the new and very large organ, with sixty-five stops on three manuals and pedal, that was under contract to the organ builder Christoph Cuntzius for the spacious Our Lady's Church. (Bach, along with Johann Kuhnau and Christian Friedrich Rolle, examined the organ after its completion in 1716.)
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The Obituary makes a relevant point in this regard: “Despite all this knowledge of the organ, he never enjoyed the good fortune, as he used to point out frequently with regret, of having a really large and really beautiful organ at his constant disposal.”
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The Halle organ would indeed have been enormously attractive to Bach, and he may have derived belated if vicarious pleasure when his son Wilhelm Friedemann, some thirty years later, took that very position. The second reason relates to political or organizational problems emerging at the Weimar court and court capelle, possibly foreshadowing those that contributed to his eventual departure for Cöthen.

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In a 1752 reminiscence, the distinguished Berlin court musician Johann Joachim Quantz discusses the state of instrumental music and the development of musical taste in the late seventeenth century. He singles out “the art of organ playing, which had to a great extent been learned from the Netherlanders,” and emphasizes that it “was already at this time in a high state of advancement, thanks to [Froberger, Reinken, Buxtehude, Pachelbel, Nicolaus Bruhns] and some other able men. Finally, the admirable Johann Sebastian Bach brought it to its greatest perfection in recent times.”
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In Quantz's view, the art of organ playing included both performance and composition. Himself a flute virtuoso and composer for his instrument, the interdependence for Quantz of playing technique on the one hand and compositional ideas on the other was an essential concept for any performer-composer, as it clearly was for Bach. Bach's instrumental orientation and vocal background from childhood days complemented one another, as his keyboard skills were supplemented by his string experience and augmented by a compositional focus that eventually took in the widest possible spectrum of musical instruments and human voices; all this was supported by a deep knowledge and keen awareness of technological and physiological details and balanced by intellectual discipline and temperamental sensitivity.

The foundations for Bach's systematic approach to virtually all his musical undertakings were laid well before he entered professional life. Yet the Arnstadt, Mühlhausen, and early Weimar years—with their fairly limited obligations and their considerable personal latitude and economic security—presented the enormously gifted, highly motivated musician with ideal opportunities for exploration, experimentation, and training. Nor should it be forgotten that early on he received much support from influential political figures such as Councillor Klemm of Sangerhausen, Burgomaster Feldhaus of Arnstadt, Consul Meckbach of Mühlhausen, and Duke Ernst August of Saxe-Weimar. He likewise won encouragement and esteem from eminent senior colleagues like Böhm, Reinken, Effler, and the organ builder Wender, not to mention other members of the Bach clan.

As an organist and keyboard player, Bach had studied everything he could lay his hands on, from very old repertoires—his library eventually contained three copies of Elias Nicolaus Ammerbach's
Orgel oder Instrument Tabulatur
of 1571 and a manuscript copy of Frescobaldi's
Fiori musicali
—to works of German, French, and Italian masters from the previous generation, to compositions by his own contemporaries.
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By around 1714, Bach had explored virtually all genres of organ and clavier music, meeting a variety of musical challenges in most categories of keyboard composition common to both organ and harpsichord, but also in the more harpsichord-specific repertoire. By the time Bach turned twenty-five in 1710, he had reached the peak of his technical facility at the keyboard, which he would then, of course, strive to refine further. However, he also had to learn to acknowledge that limits did exist. In conjunction with Bach's “admirable facility in reading and executing the compositions of others (which, indeed, were all easier than his own),” Forkel relates a revealing anecdote, the source of which could only have been Bach himself, who probably taught his children a lesson about pride going before a fall:

 

He once said to an acquaintance, while he lived at Weimar, that he really believed he could play everything, without hesitating, at the first sight. He was, however, mistaken; and the friend [perhaps Johann Gottfried Walther] to whom he had thus expressed his opinion convinced him of it before the week was passed. He invited him one morning to breakfast and laid upon the desk of his instrument, among other pieces, one which at the first glance appeared to be very trifling. Bach came and, according to his custom, went immediately to the instrument, partly to play, partly to look over the music that lay on the desk. While he was perusing them and playing them through, his host went into the next room to prepare breakfast. In a few minutes Bach got to the piece which was destined for his conversion and began to play it. But he had not proceeded far when he came to a passage at which he stopped. He looked at it, began anew, and again stopped at the same passage. “No,” he called out to his friend, who was laughing to himself in the next room, and at the same time went away from the instrument, “one cannot play everything at first sight; it is not possible.”
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Forkel, largely on the basis of reports from the two oldest Bach sons and partly on the basis of published eyewitness accounts,
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provides particularly useful information about Bach's keyboard technique and its physiological underpinnings. He also gives a chronological sense of how Bach's fingering system developed when he refers to the new mode of fingering—including use of the thumb—in François Couperin's
L'Art de toucher le Clavecin
of 1716 and expressly states that “Bach was at that time above 30 years old and had long made use of this manner of fingering.” He then continues:

 

Bach was, however, acquainted with Couperin's works and esteemed them, as well as the works of several other French composers for the harpsichord of that period, because a pretty and elegant mode of playing may be learned from them. But on the other hand he considered them as too affected in their frequent use of graces, which goes so far that scarcely a note is free from embellishment. The ideas they contained were, besides, too flimsy for him.

 

Without drawing a parallel with the famous priority dispute between Newton and Leibniz about the invention of calculus, Forkel recognizes the revolutionary impact of the seemingly simple method of making the thumb a “principal finger,”
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acknowledges that Couperin and Bach reached their conclusions independently of each other, stresses Bach's far more comprehensive approach, and summarizes its principal features:

 

According to Sebastian Bach's manner of placing the hand on the keyboard the five fingers are bent so that their points come into a straight line, and fit the keys, which lie in a plane surface under them, that no single finger has to be drawn nearer when it is wanted, but every one is ready over the key which it may have to press down. What follows from this manner of holding the hand is:

 

(1) That no finger must fall upon its key, or (as also often happens) be thrown on it, but only needs to be
placed
upon it with a certain consciousness of the internal power and command over the motion.

(2) The impulse thus given to the keys, or the quantity of pressure, must be maintained in equal strength, and that in such a manner that the finger be not raised perpendicularly from the key, but that it glide off the forepart of the key, by gradually drawing back the tip of the finger towards the palm of the hand.

(3) In the transition from one key to another, this gliding off causes the quantity of force of pressure with which the first tone has been kept up to be transferred with the greatest rapidity to the next finger, so that the two tones are neither disjoined from each other nor blended together. The touch is therefore, as C. Ph. Emanuel Bach says, neither too long nor too short, but just what it ought to be.

The advantages of such a position of the hand and of such a touch are very various, not only on the clavichord, but also on the pianoforte and the organ. I will here mention only the most important.

(1) The holding of the fingers bent renders all their motions easy. There can therefore be none of the scrambling, thumping, and stumbling which is so common in persons who play with their fingers stretched out, or not sufficiently bent.

(2) The drawing back of the tips of the fingers and the rapid communication, thereby effected, of the force of one finger to that following it produces the highest degree of clearness in the expression of the single tones, so that every passage performed in this manner sounds brilliant, rolling, and round, as if each tone were a pearl. It does not cost the hearer the least exertion of attention to understand a passage so performed.

(3) By the gliding of the tip of the finger upon the key with an equable pressure, sufficient time is given to the string to vibrate; the tone, therefore, is not only improved, but also prolonged, and we are thus enabled to play in a singing style and with proper connection, even on an instrument so poor in tone as the clavichord is….

The natural difference between the fingers in size as well as strength frequently seduces performers, wherever it can be done, to use only the stronger fingers and neglect the weaker ones…. Bach was soon sensible of this; and, to obviate so greata defect, wrote for himself particular pieces, in which all the fingers of both hands must necessarily be employed in the most various positions in order to perform them properly and distinctly. By this exercise he rendered all his fingers, of both hands, equally strong and serviceable, so that he was able to execute not only chords and all running passages, but also single and double shakes in which, while some fingers perform a shake, the others, on the same hand, have to continue the melody….

When Bach began to unite melody and harmony so that even his middle parts did not merely accompany, but had a melody of their own, when he extended the use of the keys, partly by deviating from the ancient modes of church music, which were then very common even in secular music, partly by mixing the diatonic and chromatic scales, and learned to tune his instrument so that it could be played upon in all the 24 keys, he was at the same time obliged to contrive another mode of fingering, better adapted to his new methods, and particularly to use the thumb in a manner different from that hitherto employed….

From the easy, unconstrained motion of the fingers, from the beautiful touch, from the clearness and precision in connecting the successive tones, from the advantages of the new mode of fingering, from the equal development and practice of all the fingers of both hands, and, lastly, from the great variety of his figures of melody, which were employed in every piece in a new and uncommon manner, Sebastian Bach at length acquired such a high degree of facility and, we may almost say, unlimited power over his instrument in all the keys that difficulties almost ceased to exist for him.
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