Johann Sebastian Bach portrait by  www.foto-face.com

Bach’s place in history – A Titan

Johann Sebastian Bach is rightly considered the greatest German composer. Admired for both its intellectual and technical depth, Bach’s music transcends his own baroque historical period and remains contempory and fresh irrespective of time, no more so than in the 21st century- where if classical CD sales are any indication – his do a thriving business just behind Mozart but in front of everyone else.

Bach’s music is characterized by a supreme spiritual and intellectual clarity built upon the highest level of technical sophistication. In his music there is an almost perfect mathematical and symetrical balance between harmony and counterpoint which achieves both a formal and at the same time a natural equilibrium. Bach’s music achieved an apex thus far never before attained in western music.

Bach recognized the limitations of his own northern German counterpoint style and therefore had the vision to combine this with the best influences from the prevlelant French and Italian baroque music popular at the time. Vivaldi’s music especially had a profound influence on his harmonic planning and thematic development.

Bach’s works

His most popular [most frequently performed] works include: Concertos for various instruments,  the orchestral Brandenburg concertos; the orchestral Suites,the Goldberg Variations; the English Suites, French Suites, Partitas, and Well-Tempered Clavier; the Mass in B Minor; the St Matthew Passion; the St. John Passion; The Musical Offering; The Art of Fugue; the Sonatas and Partitas for violin solo; the Cello Suites; more than 200 surviving cantatas; and a similar number of organ works, including the celebrated Toccata and Fugue in D Minor.

He also wrote a large number of instrumental works which included keyboard works for both for organ and harpischord – Bach was in his own time known primarily as an organist. These works were often written as instructional pieces for his family and other music students and are in thier own right masterpieces of elegant beauty.  The suites for un-accompanied cello are a case in point. While no one before [and not many since] would ever think that a solo cello could attain such musical heights. Bach has a way of treating these solo musical pieces as self-contained abstractions, independent of any direct social aspect which are unique to the culture of Western music.

Another milestone in the literature of solo keyboard for which Bach was responsible are the Goldberg Variations. The following interesting story tells of how this great piece of music originated.

[The following text is taken directly from Wikipedia]
The tale of how the variations came to be composed comes from an early biography of Bach by Johann Nikolaus Forkel:
[For this work] we have to thank the instigation of the former Russian ambassador to the electoral court of Saxony, Count Kaiserling, who often stopped in Leipzig and brought there with him the aforementioned Goldberg, in order to have him given musical instruction by Bach. The Count was often ill and had sleepless nights. At such times, Goldberg, who lived in his house, had to spend the night in an antechamber, so as to play for him during his insomnia. … Once the Count mentioned in Bach’s presence that he would like to have some clavier pieces for Goldberg, which should be of such a smooth and somewhat lively character that he might be a little cheered up by them in his sleepless nights. Bach thought himself best able to fulfill this wish by means of Variations, the writing of which he had until then considered an ungrateful task on account of the repeatedly similar harmonic foundation. But since at this time all his works were already models of art, such also these variations became under his hand. Yet he produced only a single work of this kind. Thereafter the Count always called them his variations. He never tired of them, and for a long time sleepless nights meant: ‘Dear Goldberg, do play me one of my variations.’ Bach was perhaps never so rewarded for one of his works as for this. The Count presented him with a golden goblet filled with 100 louis-d’or. Nevertheless, even had the gift been a thousand times larger, their artistic value would not yet have been paid for.

Bach’s Canatas – The culmination and crown of his Art.

In the 200 or so extent Cantatas [circa 100 Cantatas have not been found] mostly religious but not all [the “Coffee Cantata”] Bach comes into his own. Bach’s Cantata’s were written for a combination of  small orchestra, soloists and choral accompanyment and on average lasted circa 30 min.  For certain periods Bach was contractually bound to produce one Cantata a month [sometimes once a week!] and his genius is clearly evident in all of them. In the Cantatas Bach magisterially and literally sings and dances out – they are Bach at his very best. What is so astonishing is that, while his Cantatas were mainly the results of contractual obligations many are complete masterpieces nevertheless.

Bach in Berlin

The first time Bach visited Berlin was in 1719, buying a harpsichord for his Koethen employer. With his son Carl Philipp Emanuel living in Berlin, his father became a regular visitor. He was in Berlin again in 1741 and presumably, again in 1745, when Leipzig was temporarily sieged by Prussia during the second Silesian war between Austria and Prussia.

But the most famous visit Bach made to Berlin was the trip in May 1747 with his son Wilhelm Friedemann. He was received at the Stadtschloss in Potsdam by   Frederick the Great of Prussia who was an enthusiastic musical amateur and player of the flute. Bach tried all the organs in Potsdam and the various newly developed fortepianos in the palace.

The visit culminated in the famous theme given to Bach by the king with the request to elaborate on it. Bach improvised on the theme but promised the king that he would make something more sophisticated at home and have it engraved and printed. This resulted in the Musical Offering, BVW 1079 with a dedication dedication to the king.

Bach’s life and personality

JS Bach, was born in Eisenach on March 31st 1685 [using the old Julian Calender this would have been March 21st ]. The Bach clan could trace their ancestry directly back to German tribes living in Hungary and then moving to Germany. Many musicians were to be found in these preceding Bach generations and also amoungst his own immediate family, father, cousins and his own sons.

Throughout his life, Bach was preoccupied with providing for his family and at the same time producing his art. While his music has certainly transcended his historical period – his own life obviously did not. To fully understand the phenomenon Bach, one must study the times in which he lived and the social and political environment in which court artists of the time had to function. Any such investigation into the historical Bach is bound to make modern humanity shudder at the inequality and injustice of the age.

Bach, as all other artists of the day, had to sell his services as nothing more or less than as a glorified tradesmen. His patrons were the so-called nobility, the aritocracy – “the idle classes” – the bourgoisie of the day. While there were a few distinguished exceptions, like Frederick the Great,    these dukes and princes were mostly a vile bunch.

This aristocracy, the so-called noble gentry of the <<noble court>> were mostly a pallid, feebile and often demented lot after generations of inbreeding. However they held the purse strings and controlled the state and anyone who wanted to survive in their midst had to submit to their daftness and hopefully somehow become a benefactor of their largesse.

The mis-managment, incompetence, dishonesty, contemptible arrogance, court intrigue, infighting and pure ignorance of these wealthy gentry, the bourgoisie  who basically held any artist and his entire family hostage – knew no bounds.  And lets not forget the holy church! While not half as bad as the hypocritical Catholic Austian maffia who made life miserable for W A Mozart, the Calvinist but mostly northern German Luthern church heirarchy and masters for whom Bach had to perform and produce works also “put the boot in” when it suited them and assailed Bach’s music for being too long, too modern, too out of fashion, not religious enough, too loud……….. and so on.

At one point Bach was arrested and imprisoned by his <<own>> Duke for a month before being dismissed <<without honour>>. Bach had had the temerity  to compose some wedding music for another rival Duke. This had been forbidden by his own pay-master and stubbornly and understandably, Bach refused. Apparently slavery had not yet been completely abolished in 18th century Northern Germany!
Bach married twice, both happy marriages, his first wife dying prematurely. From both marriages he fathered 20 children of which only 10 survived their infancy.

As a person Bach was a good husband and father devoted to his family. He was also known to be demanding and proud, an assiduously hard-worker and generally a no-nonsense type of person with a lot of self discipline and self-control. However in his younger years he did not always control his temper. As a 23 year old Bach was fired from his first job as organist at the Lutheran church in Arnstadt because he got into a fist-fight with an extremely objectionable bassoonist!

Possibly the happiest time in his life -of both domestic bliss and artistic freedom- was the richly productive period he spent as Kapellmeister in Kothen, Weimar [1717-1723].  The later part of his life spent in Leipzig [1723-1750] as Kantor [teacher and director of music] of the St Tomas Kirche, was a stable and productive time and brought the fame and recognition he so rightly deserved. But there he also had his tribulations with the city concil. He wrote of his domestic situation in a letter dated 1730 – ”I must live amid almost continual vexation, envy and persecution.”

Bach died on the morning of the 28th of July 1750, as a direct  result of medical interventions of a well-meaning, but like most other doctors of the age, medical quack who had come from England to diagnose and treat his detiriorating eye-sight. It is now generally believed Bach suffered from diabetes.

Oddly, and sadly, other famous composers also killed by “well-meaning” doctors include Ludwig van Beethoven and Maurice Ravel – see other OTA-Berlin Composer Bio Series.

In closing – A Personal admission about J S Bach

Yes I have to admit it – Johann Sebastian Bach is my favortie composer and has been as far as I can remember. While I must admit in the last years to having acquired a very strong weakness for the genius of WA Mozart – and believe that the Opera’s of Richard Strauss are in many ways the best music ever written – in spite of these musical excursions I still always find myself coming back to Bach.

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and subjective personal taste can never really be the basis for any intelligent argument – ie “the colour Orange is more beautifull than blue” is silly and leads no-where.[unless it is about the Dutch soccer team beating Italy - then Orange is always more beautiful!]

So I will be entirely subjective and say that I consider Bach’s cantatas -along with the Richard Strauss’s operas -the most beautiful music ever written. At the same time state that the Missa Solemnis by Beethoven is probably the most beautiful single piece of musice ever written.

Bach Performance – Recomendations

There are many good performances of the Cello suites available. I personally prefer Janos Starker and Anner Blysma – both very different. The Starker a bit more romanitc and Blysma a bit more classical/baroque-  and yet both equally legitimate sublime interpretations of which I never tire to hear. Two more recent recordings of these cello partitas which deserve mention are Norwegian cellist Truls Mørk and Dutchman Pieter Wispelwey.

For performance of the Goldberg Variations we must listen to the great Bach interpreteur the Canadian Glenn Gould – both his famous 1955 recording, and the later more contemplative, even somewhat melancholy and at the same time more focused re-recording of 1981. The Russians Vladimir Feltsman and the earlier Maria Yudina provide very different and valid interpretations. Feltsman loves Bach and this comes through with his interpretation, one of my favorites, after Gould. Another version which is extremely stimulating is Maria Yudina’s, Stalins favorite pianist. Perhaps not the best Goldberg Variations ever recorded – as an iconoclast she used to play on stage with running shoes because they were comfortable – however as ever she is completely captivating and her Bach interpretation is stimulating and imaginative – even though I don’t completely share it.

Finally regarding Bach performance of the Canata’s my recomendation is definitely the series on TELDEC by Gustav Leonhardt and Nikolaus Harnoncourt. Recorded over a period of 18 yrs [1971 -1989] this is by far the norm by which all other recordings will be compared.

If you would like to find a humourous contrary view, as presented by the confused yankee brain of a certain Richard Taruskin who thinks the Bach Canata’s <<ugly>> please read his review of the  Leonhardt/Harnoncourt recordings from an article in the New York Times. [http://www.nytimes.com/1991/01/27/arts/recordings-view-facing-up-finally-to-bach-s-dark-vision.html?n=Top/Reference/Times%20Topics/People/B/Bach,%20Johann%20Sebastian]

Bach Scholarship – Further reading

For a detailed and scholarly biography I can recomend “JS BACH The Learned Musician” by Christoph Wolff – a sober, patient and potent assesment of the great man. For further on-line research I highly recommend: http://jsbach.org/