Johann Sebastian Bach (68 page)

But as extensive as Bach's manuscript repertoire of new keyboard music from the 1730s may be, it was clearly overshadowed by a commanding project: the
Clavier-Übung
series (Table 10.7). By publishing, between 1731 and 1741, this comprehensive “keyboard practice” in four parts, Bach provided the most convincing evidence not only of his intent to renew an emphasis on his accustomed métier as clavier and organ virtuoso (despite the fact that he had not held a formal post as organist since 1717) but also of his desire to put a public face on his activities as a keyboard artist. The overall content of the series indicates Bach's pragmatic approach. He selected genres and compositional types with broad appeal, though he did not compromise in the degree of compositional elaboration or performing standards.

Curiously, Leipzig's lively publishing business and book trade had never paid much attention to publishing music. Even a long-established German music-publishing center like Nuremberg never really recovered from the Thirty Years' War and remained, in the early eighteenth century, technologically and commercially far behind the corresponding enterprises in Amsterdam, London, and Paris. By 1800, however, largely through the activities of the Breitkopf firm, then Hoffmeister and Kühnel (later C. F. Peters) and others, Leipzig was well on the way to becoming the unrivaled leader in music publishing. Bernhard Christoph Breitkopf, who had invested considerably in the technology of scientific publishing and whose
Biblia Hebraica
of 1725 marked, in Gottsched's words, the beginning of a “new epoch of German book printing,” moved slowly into music publishing, mainly after 1756.
⁸⁰
The initial steps were actually connected with Bach and modestly foreshadowed a major collaboration with his son Carl Philipp Emanuel. In 1736, Breitkopf published as his very first music item the
Musicalisches Gesangbuch
, edited by George Christian Schemelli; according to its preface, “the melodies to be found in this musical songbook have been in part quite newly composed and in part improved in the thoroughbass by the most noble Mr. Johann Sebastian Bach.”
⁸¹
Bach had most texts of his secular cantatas in the later 1730s printed by Breitkopf (who specialized in movable type) and, later on, the front matter for the
Musical Offering
and
The Art of Fugue
as well, but for the
Clavier-Übung
he turned initially to the Leipzig engraving shop of Johann Gottfried Krügner and later to the Nuremberg music publisher Christoph Weigel, Jr., and his successor, Balthasar Schmid.
⁸²

Bach's Opus 1, a collection of six partitas, appeared in 1731 under the title
Clavier-Übung
, one that had also served his predecessor, Johann Kuhnau, for two sets of keyboard partitas published in 1689 and 1692. Although not yet designated as Opus 1, Bach's collection had previously been issued in single installments of the six partitas. The first came out in the fall of 1726, along with the following announcement: “The Capellmeister to the Prince of Anhalt-Cöthen and Director Chori Musici Lipsiensis, Herr Johann Sebastian Bach, intends to publish a collection of clavier suites of which the first Partita has already been issued, and, by and by, they will continue to come to light until the work is complete, and as such will be made known to amateurs of the clavier. Let it be known that the author is himself the publisher of his work.”
⁸³
As the publisher, Bach acted at his own financial risk, so it was prudent for him to invest in the project gradually so that expenses would largely be recovered by sales; after the first installment of 1726, the other five were issued over the next four years. For distribution, Bach recruited six colleagues in well-chosen locations who agreed, on a commission basis, to serve as sales agents in their areas: Christian Petzold of Dresden, organist at St. Sophia's and royal chamber musician; Johann Gotthilf Ziegler of Halle, organist at St. Ulrich's; Georg Böhm of Lüneburg, organist at St. John's; Georg Heinrich Ludwig Schwanenberger of Brunswick, violinist at the court capelle of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel; Gabriel Fischer of Nuremberg, member of the town music company; and Johann Michael Roth of Augsburg, also member of the town music company. When Bach had tested the market and determined that the individual partitas sold well, he arranged to reprint all six partitas in one volume.

The numbering of the
Clavier-Übung
as Opus 1 indicates that further publications would follow. The concept of an ambitious series of sequels perhaps coalesced in light of similar undertakings by Georg Philipp Telemann, who began in 1728 to bring out a series of works under the title
Der Getreue Musik-Meister
(The True Music Master),

 

in which are arranged for singers as well as for instrumentalists all types of musical pieces for different voice parts and nearly all commonly used instruments and containing moral, operatic, and other arias, as well as trios, duets, solos, etc., sonatas, overtures, etc., and also fugues, counterpoints, canons, etc., hence all the most current music according to the Italian, French, English, Polish, etc., manners both serious as well as spirited, and lighthearted…you might conceive of performing.

 

Although much less comprehensive than Telemann's project (which was never fully realized), the four parts of Bach's Clavier-Übungemerged as a systematic and complete survey of the art of keyboard music as seen from Bach's perspective. First, he included music specifically for the most important keyboard instruments: one-manual harpsichord (part I), two-manual harpsichord (parts II and IV), and large organ as well as organ without pedals (part III). Second, the leading national styles (part II) are complemented by an enormously rich spectrum of other styles, both retrospective and modern (parts III and IV); we find religious hymns (part III) and even a burlesque quodlibet (part IV). In the end, all the standard genres, forms, and categories are represented: suite, concerto, prelude, fugue, chorale settings of all kinds, and variations. All fundamental compositional methods are to be found, from free-voiced improvisatory pieces to imitative polyphony, cantus firmus technique, and strict canon. Everything from solo works and duets to settings with five and six obbligato voices makes an appearance, and Bach fully exploits keys (for commercial reasons, short of the well-tempered system) and the principal church modes. Finally, the collection presents tremendous challenges to the performer, since there are no easy pieces included. On the contrary, with its use of advanced keyboard technique (from
pièces croisées
requiring hand-crossing skills to the most complex double-pedal technique), the
Clavier-Übung
sets new performance standards that match the rigorous principles of compositional organization.

The partitas of part I were followed in the spring of 1735 by the
Italian Concerto
and
French Overture
of part II, now published by Christoph Weigel, Jr. The concerto recalls Bach's Weimar keyboard settings of Italian instrumental concertos by Vivaldi and others, while the overture (suite) has no direct counterpart in Bach's previous work in its imaginative exhibition of French manners of genre and style. That the
Italian Concerto
in particular was enthusiastically received is indicated by a 1739 review written by Johann Adolph Scheibe, who two years earlier had attacked Bach's compositional style for demanding “that singers and instrumentalists should be able to do with their throats and instruments whatever he can play on the clavier.”
⁸⁴
Now Scheibe wrote—perhaps in an attempt to repair the damage he had done previously—that

 

preeminent among works known through published prints is a clavier concerto of which the author is the famous Bach in Leipzig…. Since this piece is arranged in the best fashion for this kind of work, I believe that it will doubtless be familiar to all composers and experienced clavier players, as well as to amateurs of the clavier and music in general. Who is there who will not admit at once that this clavier concerto is to be regarded as a perfect model of a well-designed solo concerto? But at the present time we shall be able to name as yet very few or practically no concertos of such excellent qualities and such well-designed execution. It would take as great a master of music as Mr. Bach, who has almost alone taken possession of the clavier.
⁸⁵

 

With part III, Bach returned to the principle of self-publishing, but he apparently ran into some production problems with the Krügner engraving firm so that the publication date had to be postponed from the Easter Fair in 1739 to the St. Michael's Fair half a year later. Devoting this installment entirely to organ music, Bach created his own version of the
Livre d'orgue
like those by Nicolas de Grigny, Pierre Du Mage, and others, with which he was familiar. Picking up on these French models, he included free pieces (prelude, fugue, duets) and chorale settings of general applicability (the Kyrie and Gloria hymns of the Mass and the classic Lutheran Catechism hymns), shunning hymns with specific themes that tied them to the ecclesiastical year, such as those in the
Orgel-Büchlein
and in the “Great Eighteen” Chorales.
⁸⁶
The conception of part III also relates to Bach's growing interest in broadening the stylistic spectrum from old techniques of motet style (which he adopted for the large Kyrie settings and “Aus tiefer Not”) and ancient church modality
⁸⁷
to the most modern musical idioms (epitomized in the organ Chorales “Vater unser im Himmelreich” and “Jesus Christus, unser Heiland”). In part III, Bach created not only his most extensive but also his most significant organ work. Lorenz Christoph Mizler correctly remarks in his 1740 review: “The author has here given new proof that in this field of composition he is more practiced and more fortunate than many others. No one will surpass him in it, and few will be able to imitate him.” Mizler then states, in direct reference to Scheibe's criticism, that “this work is a powerful refutation of those who have made bold to criticize the composition of the Honorable Court Composer,”
⁸⁸
but fails to observe the practical side that Georg Andreas Sorge addresses in the preface to his own 1750 collection of chorale preludes: “The preludes on the Catechism Chorales by Capellmeister Bach in Leipzig…deserve the great renown they enjoy” at the same time, they “are so difficult as to be all but unusable by young beginners and others who may lack the considerable proficiency they require.”
⁸⁹

The concluding part IV was published (like part II, in Nuremberg) in the fall of 1741. Forkel relates the anecdote that the work came into being at the request of Hermann Carl von Keyserlingk in Dresden, who “once said to Bach that he should like to have some clavier pieces for his [house harpsichordist, Johann Gottlieb] Goldberg, which should be of such a soft and somewhat lively character that he might be a little cheered up by them in his sleepness nights.”
⁹⁰
However, all internal and external clues (lack of any formal dedication to Keyserlingk as required by eighteenth-century protocol, and Goldberg's tender age of fourteen) indicate that the so-called
Goldberg Variations
did not originate as an independently commissioned work, but were from the outset integrated into the overall concept of the
Clavier-Übung
series, to which they constitute a grandiose finale. The variations are based on a thirty-two-measure theme, exposed in the ostinato bass line of an aria and in its first eight measures identical with the theme of Handel's
Chaconne avec
62
variations
, HWV 442, a work dating from 1703–6 that was published later in his 1733
Suites de Pièces pour le clavecin
. The chaconne had already been printed separately around 1732 by Witvogel in Amsterdam, a publisher known to have used Bach as a distributor of the harpsichord works of the German-Dutch virtuoso Conrad Friedrich Hurlebusch (according to an announcement of 1735–36, Hurlebusch's
Compositioni musicali per il Cembalo
were available “from Capellmeister Bach at the St. Thomas School in Leipzig”).
⁹¹
Bach would have known Handel's chaconne from either the Amsterdam or London edition, and he must have noticed the simple two-part canon forming the final variation (as well as flaws in its contrapuntal design). His considering the traditional eight-note ostinato model that Handel used as a ground triggered the kind of complex chain reaction described in the Obituary: “He needed only to have heard any theme to be aware—it seemed in the same instant—of almost every intricacy that artistry could produce in the treatment of it.”
⁹²
So Bach's investigation into the canonic potential of the eight-note subject resulted in a series of
Fourteen Canons
, BWV 1087, which he later entered into his personal copy of
Clavier-Übung
IV. For the variation cycle itself, Bach decided not to stick with the limiting straitjacket of the eight notes nor with the confining notion of a totally canonic work. He thus expanded the original ostinato bass significantly so that it could provide the harmonic underpinning of an aria whose captivating melody ingeniously distracts from its bass and thereby from the true structural backbone of the variation cycle. And he interspersed the canonic movements systematically but as unobtrusively as possible, with the apparent aim of leveling the performer's and the listener's perception of canonic versus noncanonic counterpoint—a powerful demonstration of his ideal that artful design and natural appeal need not be mutually exclusive.