Johann Sebastian Bach (76 page)

In June 1747, Lorenz Christoph Mizler passed through his old stomping grounds, on his way from Erfurt, where he took his doctorate in medicine, to Warsaw, where he would work mainly as a practicing physician. During his stopover in Leipzig, he finally managed to persuade his former teacher, the Thomascantor, to join the Society of Musical Science, a loose association of intellectually minded musicians that Mizler had founded in 1738. Bach became the fourteenth member of this exclusive corresponding society,
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which aimed at fostering contacts among the regular members by mailing twice a year, at around Easter and St. Michael's Day, a circular containing musical news, essays, and practical and theoretical works contributed or selected by the membership. Bach made quick use of this convenient means of communication among colleagues. In the packet mailed from Leipzig after St. Michael's Day 1747, he sent around copies of the Triple Canon for six voices, BWV 1076, the piece depicted on the Hausmann portrait and also issued by Bach as a separate print. Father Meinrad Spiess of the Benedictine Abbey of Yrsee in southern Germany, a member of the society, attached a copy of BWV 1076 (one of only two that survive) to his working exemplar of his own treatise on practical musical composition.
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Spiess probably found in the same circular a copy of the
Musical Offering
, BWV 1079, for Mizler had reported to him on September 1: “On my return by way of Leipzig spoke to Capellmeister Bach, who told me of his Berlin journey and the story of the fugue he played before the king, which will shortly be engraved in copper and a copy of which will appear in the packet of the Society. I have already seen the beginning of it.”
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Later, Bach mailed the
Canonic Variations on “Vom Himmel hoch
,” BWV 769, “fully worked out,” as Mizler testifies in a concluding paragraph to Bach's Obituary. He also presented to the society a reprint of the canon BWV 1076, and, according to Mizler, “he would undoubtedly have done much more had not the shortness of time—he was member for only three years—prevented him from doing so.”
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Mizler makes no mention, however, of a conflict Bach had with Johann Gottlieb Biedermann, rector of the gymnasium in Freiberg, which erupted in 1749 over the role of music and musicians at Latin schools and which created a major stir well beyond the Saxon borders and also touched the society's interests. The conflict resulted from a performance at the gymnasium of a singspiel composed by Bach's former student Johann Friedrich Doles, cantor at Freiberg (and Bach's second successor as Thomascantor). Under the heading
De Vita musica
(Of Musical Life), Biedermann published a school pamphlet in May 1749 in which he took pleasure in referring to all musicians, without exception, as depraved and wicked. The article, sent to Leipzig probably by Doles himself, infuriated Bach. He commissioned the organist, writer, and instrument maker Christoph Gottlieb Schröter of Nordhausen, with whom he had been in contact for over thirty years, to review and refute the Biedermann piece, and offered to get the review published “in the learned journals”—an allusion to Mizler's
Musikalische Bibliothek
. Schröter, likewise a member of the Society of Musical Science, accepted the task, acknowledging that the pamphlet's “principal aim, despite its title, was not at all directed to the praise of music and its kindred arts” but openly revealed the rector's “unfriendly attitude toward the innocent art of music.” In a letter of December 10, 1749, to another colleague, Georg Friedrich Einike of Frankenhausen, Bach stated that “Schröter's criticism is well written, and to my taste, and will soon make its appearance in print.” He concluded, almost surely with a sidelong glance at Thomasrector Ernesti, with the bitingly sarcastic remark that, with further refutations to be expected, “the rector's dirty ear will be cleansed and made more fit to listen to music.”
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The remark was also a kind of pun: the term for “dirty ear,”
Dreck-ohr
, resembles that for “rector” (
Rec-dor
) as pronounced in the Saxon dialect. Some details of the affair were reported in 1751 by Johann Mattheson, who also included Bach's derogatory pun with the fastidious comment (in French): “A base and disgusting expression, unworthy of a Capellmeister; a poor allusion to the word
rector
.”
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Bach let himself be drawn even more deeply into the matter and, in some ways, managed to make the Biedermann affair very much his own case. Despite the statement about Schröter's “well-written” review, he considered it much too mild. He therefore added his own sharp-tongued comment on the text and, as Einike later reported,

 

sent on a few copies of the said review, but in such form that…it no longer resembled Mr. Schröter's original in the least but had many additions and many changes. Mr. Schröter, when he saw this gruesome mixture, could not help being offended about it and…bade me inform Mr. Bach “that the violent changes made in his criticism had offended him deeply” further, “that his consolation in the matter was that no reader who was familiar with his way of writing or thinking, from other sources, could consider him the author of such a mixture, not to mention the unhappy title
Christian Reflections
upon, etc.”

 

Although no copy of the review with Bach's hot-tempered emendations and the unauthorized heading “Christian Reflections” has turned up, it is easy to imagine that what affected Bach's sensitivities so strongly and provoked his apparently unmeasured response was a matter of school politics. Given the parallels between the Freiberg and Leipzig situations, specifically between the rectors Biedermann and Ernesti, Bach felt that he had to throw his weight behind a defense of the cantorate. He may have tried to explain just that to his irritated colleague in Nordhausen, Schröter, who complained to Einike on June 5, 1750—less than two months before the Thomascantor's death—that “Capellmeister Bach remains at fault, no matter how he twists or turns, now or in the future.” While intending a counterattack on Biedermann's assault, Bach had unintentionally managed to insult his own ally.

Bach's principled defense of the cantorate squares well with his position in the prefect dispute of the late 1730s, even to the extent that in both cases his ardor led him to get carried away and overshoot the mark. Despite his often negative experiences, Bach had the highest esteem for his school and church offices throughout his Leipzig tenure. And it seems that when he self-consciously steered his own course, he did so in justice to himself, to his cantorate, and, by extension, to his function as capellmeister and his calling as composer. Hence, he saw no conflict in the 1730s between school and church on the one hand and the Collegium Musicum on the other, nor in the balancing act of administering the cantorate and pursuing his compositional interests. In the 1740s, these interests ranged conceptually and stylistically from the commissioned 1742 burlesque cantata “Mer han en neue Oberkeet,” BWV 212, with a comical text written in dialect, to the introspective and abstract contrapuntal perspectives of
The Art of Fugue
, BWV 1080, an entirely self-determined project.

The number of commissioned works originating from the 1740s is understandably very small, since Bach had few incentives to seek them after he gave up the Collegium directorship, and little opportunity to perform vocal compositions outside the Leipzig churches. Bach seems also to have reduced his public appearances for keyboard and chamber performances, at least during the second half of the 1740s. Johann Friedrich Wilhelm Sonnenkalb, a choral scholar at St. Thomas's who was close to the Bach family, reported in 1759 that “this great artist did not let himself commonly be heard outside of his own house; but there concerts were held quite often.” He also relates that those performances involved not only the two youngest sons but also their older step-brothers, when they visited, and Bach's assistant and later son-in-law Altnickol.
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Guest performances outside Leipzig were even rarer, but we must assume that any travels by Bach, notably the two trips to Berlin in 1741 and 1747, were undertaken with official invitations.

We know about the first of those trips only because Bach wrote from Berlin to his family at the beginning of August 1741 and Johann Elias Bach wrote him there on August 5 and 9.
¹⁷
He had returned by August 25, in time for the performance of the cantata for the city council election. The Berlin sojourn may have been related to Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach's employ in the court capelle of Friedrich II, who had acceded to the Prussian throne in 1740. An official court visit, which Bach may well have envisioned in planning the journey, did not materialize. Bach apparently stayed with the physician Georg Ernst Stahl, privy councillor at the court and a family friend,
¹⁸
who seems to have played a role in arranging for the trip and whose house was located on Unter den Linden, the avenue in the center of Berlin that led up to the royal palace. Though Bach was not granted an encounter with the king, he must have met Michael Gabriel Fredersdorf, the king's chamberlain and, like the king, an accomplished flutist: an early manuscript copy of the Flute Sonata in E major, BWV 1035, bears the remark “after the [lost] autograph by the composer, which was written anno 17, when he was at Potsdam, for privy chamberlain Fredersdorff.”
¹⁹
The digits missing from the year can be filled in to read either 1741 or 1747, but considering Bach's tight schedule in 1747 and also for stylistic reasons, 1741 is the more plausible date.

The second trip to Berlin and Potsdam in May 1747 turned into one of the most important events of Bach's life. It was also the high-water mark of his public recognition when German newspapers in Berlin, Frankfurt, Hamburg, Leipzig, Magdeburg, and probably elsewhere picked up the official Potsdam press release of May 11:

 

One hears from Potsdam that last Sunday [May 7] the famous Capellmeister from Leipzig, Mr. Bach, arrived with the intention to have the pleasure of hearing the excellent Royal music there. In the evening, at about the time when the regular chamber music in the Royal apartments usually begins, His Majesty was informed that Capellmeister Bach had arrived at Potsdam and was waiting in His Majesty's antechamber for His Majesty's most gracious permission to listen to the music. His August self immediately gave orders that Bach be admitted, and went, at his entrance, to the so-called
Forte et Piano
, condescending also to play, in His Most August Person and without any preparation, a theme for the Capellmeister Bach, which he should execute in a fugue. This was done so happily by the aforementioned Capellmeister that not only His Majesty was pleased to show his satisfaction thereat, but also all those present were seized with astonishment. Mr. Bach found the theme propounded to him so exceedingly beautiful that he intends to set it down on paper as a regular fugue and have it engraved on copper. On Monday, the famous man let himself be heard on the organ in the Church of the Holy Spirit at Potsdam and earned general acclaim from the listeners attending in great number. In the evening, His Majesty charged him again with the execution of a fugue, in six parts, which he accomplished just as skillfully as on the previous occasion, to the pleasure of His Majesty and to the general admiration.
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This time around, we can be sure that a court visit was carefully prepared through diplomatic channels, most likely the good services of Count Hermann Carl von Keyserlingk, Bach's longtime champion, who was then serving as Russian ambassador in Berlin. Keyserlingk's 1746 reassignment from Dresden to Berlin reflected a major political power shift in Europe that resulted from a bold move made in the 1740s by the young Prussian king: in order to expand and secure his territory, he fought two wars against the allied forces of Saxony, Poland, and Austria. During the Second Silesian War, Prussian troops under Leopold of Anhalt-Dessau took Leipzig on November 30, 1745, and occupied it for a year. On December 25, 1746, at the Peace of Dresden, Empress Maria Theresa confirmed the cession of Silesia, and in a 1748 letter Bach recalled the period as “the time we had (alas!) the Prussian Invasion.”
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Hence, the trip of the Leipzig cantor and Dresden court composer to the Prussian capital and, especially, his personal reception by the king—exactly six months after Prussian troops had withdrawn from Leipzig—occurred at a sensitive political moment and surely had implications that would make the people of Saxony, notably the Leipzig city council and the Dresden court, prick up their ears: his musical eminence, the Thomascantor of Leipzig, had gone to Berlin as a true ambassador of peace.

Bach was accompanied on this trip by his oldest son, who had left Dresden the year before to become organist and music director of Our Lady's in Halle—on Prussian territory. Wilhelm Friedemann later provided Forkel with some further details of the Berlin visit. Since Friedemann's story as related by Forkel confirms and amplifies the Berlin press release, we may take the biographer's 1802 account as reliable. According to Forkel, Bach's visit took place largely at the request of the king himself:

 

The reputation of the all-surpassing skill of Johann Sebastian was at this time so extended that the King often heard it mentioned and praised. This made him curious to hear and meet so great an artist. At first he distantly hinted to the son his wish that his father would one day come to Potsdam. But by degrees he began to ask him directly why his father did not come. The son could not avoid acquainting his father with these expressions of the King's; at first, however, he could not pay any attention to them because he was generally too overwhelmed with business. But the King's expressions being repeated in several of his son's letters, he at length, in 1747, prepared to take this journey.
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