The Creators: A History of Heroes of the Imagination (80 page)

When the congregation sang they expressed the priesthood of all believers. The congregational hymns translated worship into the vernacular, from the Latin of Rome into the language of the marketplace. Luther had gone to school in Eisenach, and it was at nearby Wartburg that he had made his historic translation of the Bible into German (1521–22). Here too he was said to have written “Ein feste Burg is unser Gott,” which Heine called the Marseillaise of the Reformation and on which Bach composed one of his grandest cantatas.

It is conceivable that the Iconoclasts might have won against music as they nearly had against images a millennium before. The Council of Trent (1545–63), doing the work of the Catholic Counter Reformation, might have inhibited church music by draconian measures, but finally went no further than to condemn everything “impure or lascivious” to preserve the House of God as the House of Prayer. According to a famous legend, the council was about to pass a rule against polyphony. But Giovanni Perluigi de Palestrina (1525?–1594), the leading composer in Rome at the time, composed a Mass for six voices to prove that polyphony was compatible with the reverent spirit and did not prevent an understanding of the sacred text. Palestrina’s Mass was supposed to have defeated a rule against polyphony. But now instead it appears that the legendary Mass (finally published in 1567) was actually written on Pope Marcellus II’s orders to Palestrina to create a decorous Mass in which the text could be understood for Holy Week.

The Council of Trent reflected the ongoing battle between the music of the word and the music of instruments. The main objection to polyphony had been its disregard for sacred words, and the council finally decreed that future church music must be more simply written so the words could be clearly understood. Palestrina’s genius surely had much to do with preserving music in the Roman Church. Named after the small town near Rome where he was born, Palestrina spent his life in Rome as choirmaster and organist at various churches and finally at the Vatican. He supervised the revision of music in the liturgy following orders of the Council of Trent to purify the chants of their “barbarisms, obscurities, contrarieties, and superfluities” due to the “clumsiness or negligence or even wickedness of the composers, scribes, and printers.”

Palestrina’s prolific creations for the church included 102 Masses, 450 motets and liturgical compositions, and 56 spiritual madrigals. Still, he “blushed and grieved” that he had written some music for love poems. He brought into being a “Palestinian style,” a counterpoint of voice parts in continuous rhythm with a new melody for each phrase in the text. Probably the best-known composer of Western music before Bach, he was a landmark in the history of Western music as the first musician to become an identified
model for later composers. If he was not the Savior of Polyphony, he was the undisputed Prince of Roman Catholic Music.

While the Protestant Reformation was ambivalent about the organ and the music of instruments, it invigorated the music of the word. The “chorales,” congregational hymns, became the main current of Protestant church music. As Luther explained in 1524, he never intended “that on account of the Gospel all the arts should be crushed out of existence, as some over-religious people pretend, but I would willingly see all the arts, especially music, in the service of Him who has given and created them.” Under Italian influence, the motet, elaborated into the longer and more complex cantata, took on operatic qualities, combining the chorus, solo singers, and even instruments. To precede the sermons in words, these became Bach’s “sermons in music.” Some two hundred of Bach’s creations in this form have survived. Most use a chorus, but some are for solo singers, with recitatives and arias.

In variety, too, Bach’s brilliant music is unexcelled among modern composers. For instruments he made his own organ trios, in addition to some 170 chorale preludes for the organ, as well as music for the clavier (clavichord or harpsichord). His famous
Well-Tempered Clavier
consisted of two installments of twenty-four each, in each of the twelve major and minor keys. His numerous clavier suites adapted the French and Italian styles. His six delightful Brandenburg Concertos (1721) and the Goldberg Variations (1742) still charm audiences who do not attend church. All these were noted for their intricate contrapuntal technique in the styles of his time.

Bach’s vocal music—music of the word—attained a grandeur that might have worried Luther, and has never been excelled in music for the Church. His secular cantatas, which he called dramma per musica, he sometimes adapted to sacred texts. His Passions—settings of the Gospel story in Oratorio form for Easter services—were dramatic triumphs. The
Passion
based on the Gospel according to Saint John (1724) included fourteen chorales, with added lyrics and some of Bach’s own verses. The
Saint Matthew Passion
(1729) for double chorus, soloist, double orchestra, and two organs, is an overpowering Christian epic of twenty-four scenes recounting the last days of the Savior. It is narrated by the Evangelist, a tenor part in recitative. Choruses speak for the crowd with frightening realism. In addition, there are minor scenes with devotional chorales supposed to have been sung by the congregation. Although Bach never wrote an opera, there are few operatic feats not found in his Passions—and with a dramatic coherence seldom found in opera.

Bach the craftsman also did more than his bit to perpetuate his craft by didactic works. While his
Well-Tempered Clavier
exemplified the range of baroque keyboard compositions, it was intended to be an argument for the tempered scale of equal semitones as against the old “natural scale.”

…

“The more a man belongs to posterity, in other words to humanity in general,” Schopenhauer wrote in his essay on “Fame” (1891), “the more of an alien is he to his contemporaries.… People are more likely to appreciate the man who serves the circumstances of his own brief hour, or the temper of the moment—belonging to it, and living and dying with it.” By Schopenhauer’s test Bach proves his appeal to humanity in general. For his preeminence among modern composers was attained only slowly. His works of “divine mathematics” demonstrated his mastery of the established contrapuntal technique of the preceding age. During the three decades while he was composing in great quantities, musical styles were changing. And by Bach’s late years his early works in Weimar and Cöthen must have seemed old-fashioned. New composers were denouncing counterpoint and producing popular melodies, simplifying the complex structures that Bach had built. Even before his death his music was becoming unpopular. Moreover, he was composing his cantatas, his Passions, and his Mass in an age whose taste was becoming increasingly “enlightened” and secular. The music audiences for the next age would be in ducal and princely courts and then in public concert halls to paying audiences.

The rise of a “German” consciousness in the early nineteenth century would make it plausible for him to be idolized as a German genius (despite his Hungarian roots!). While he stretched Lutheran and Pietist dogma to the limit with his operatic style, the flamboyance of the Passions, and the
Mass in B Minor
for a Catholic prince, he still composed to the order of town council, church authorities, or petty prince, or to secure their favor. His
Art of the Fugue
had sold only thirty copies by 1756, and for some fifty years afterward no complete composition by Bach was separately published. The name of Bach was increasingly associated with his sons and pupils. Bach was admired with nostalgia. Mozart himself in Vienna in 1782 had taken part in Sunday noon concerts at the Baron van Swieten’s house where they played Handel and Bach. He then wrote a prelude and fugue, and when he sent it to his sister (April 20, 1782) explained that he had come to compose it only after a prodding by his wife, Constanze. “Now, since she had heard me frequently improvise fugues, she asked me whether I had never written any down, and when I said ‘No,’ she gave me a proper scolding for not
wanting
to write the most intricate and beautiful kind of music, and she did not give up begging until I wrote her a fugue, and that is how it came about.” When Mozart visited Leipzig in 1789, he heard Bach’s double-chorus motet, “Sing unto the Lord a New Song,” and was newly shocked into recognition. “What is this?” he exclaimed. “Now there is something one can learn from!”

Beethoven, too, became a Bach enthusiast. On first coming to Vienna, Beethoven’s virtuoso performance of
The Well-Tempered Clavier
attracted
attention. He continually sought copies of Bach’s works, and planned a benefit concert for Bach’s last surviving daughter. For him Bach was the Father of Harmony, and “not
Bach
[brook], but
Meer
[sea] should be his name.” After Goethe had heard a friend play some of Bach’s works on the organ, he recalled, “it is as if the eternal harmony were conversing within itself, as it may have done in the bosom of God just before the Creation of the World.”

Ironically the historic revival of Bach was a product of the same Enlightenment spirit that was making him seem the outmoded musician of another age. The growing interest in the historical past expressed by Voltaire’s
Age of Louis XIV
(1751) and Winckelmann’s
History of Ancient Art
(1764) also awakened the widening community of music lovers. The rediscovery of Bach’s church music was the feat of the twenty-year-old Felix Mendelssohn (1809–1847), a brilliant and precocious composer of Jewish descent. The
Saint Matthew Passion
, first performed in 1729, was one of Bach’s grandest, most complex and difficult works. The young Mendelssohn enlisted amateur and professional singers and players and the whole music-loving community of Berlin in a centennial performance. Though inexperienced at conducting he managed the numerous rehearsals and the performance was a spectacular success. The worshipers of Bach, Eduard Devrient, one of the professional performers, noted, “must not forget that this new cult of Bach dates from the 11th of March, 1829, and that it was Felix Mendelssohn who gave new vitality to the greatest and most profound of composers.” When the performance produced some unpleasant jealousy in the Berlin musical community, the young composer’s father promptly sent him on his grand tour. Then stirred by Mendelssohn’s example the repeated performances of the
Saint Matthew Passion
in other cities initiated the uncanny fame of Bach in modern music. It also stimulated the massive program of the Bach-Gesellschaft (sponsored by Robert Schumann and founded in 1850) to publish Bach’s complete works. Johannes Brahms (1833–1897) declared that the two greatest events of his lifetime were the founding of the German Empire and the completion of the Bach-Gesellschaft publications. In 1950, two centuries after Bach’s death, a new Bach Institute was founded in Göttingen to provide a revised edition.

Bach fully merited his posthumous acclaim. Even while he embodied the European religious spirit in music he sounded the way for the next centuries from the church to the public concert hall. As Bach explained, the characteristic techniques of his Baroque music served both God and the listening audience.

T
HE
arts of instrument-created music changed the relation of performer to audience. Western drama had been born in the separation of ancient Greek spectators from the participants, and the “orchestra,” once a dancing place for community ritual, became a site where some danced while others looked on. So, too, modern music climaxing in the symphony would separate the audience from the music makers in a new way. Since Gregorian chants had been sung by the clergy only, Luther’s emphasis on congregational music aimed to allow all to affirm their faith by the very act of singing. But the elaboration of musical instruments, increasingly specialized and requiring increasing skill, opened a widening gulf between performer and listener. Now the audience heard someone else’s affirmation.

A product of this rise of instrumental music, a grand creation of Western music, was the symphony. The word “sonata” (from Latin
sonare
, to sound) as opposed to “cantata,” a composition for voices (from Latin
cantare
, to sing), first comes into English about 1694, for a musical composition for instruments. The great creators of symphony had at hand a new musical form along with a newly elaborated array of instruments in an orchestra—in communities eager to support their work. All these elements came into being slowly after the Renaissance, the product of some people we know and of more who remain anonymous.

The “sonata” in the baroque period (1600–1750; the era of Monteverdi, Purcell, and J. S. Bach) came to denote a new type of instrumental work in the “abstract” style. This meant music without words, and referring to nothing outside itself. By the end of the seventeenth century the sonata had emerged and begun to be standardized in the works of the Italian violinist and composer Arcangelo Corelli (1653–1713). His two versions were classified
not by their music form but by their social function. One was the
sonata da chiesa
, or church sonata (with a slow introduction, a loosely fugal allegro, a cantabile slow movement, and a melodic “binary” finale), the other was the
sonata da camera
, or chamber sonata mainly of dance tunes. A classical style was foreshadowed in the solo sonatas for keyboard instruments of Domenico Scarlatti (1685–1757) and Carl Phillip Emanuel Bach (1714–1788).