Johann Sebastian Bach, his Life, Art, and Work Part 10

Easter Oratorio (c. 1736).

Four Ma.s.ses, in P major, A major (c. 1739), G minor, G major (c.

1739).

Secular Cantata: Angenehmes Wiederau (1737).

Do. Willkommen, ihr herrschenden Gotter der Erden (1738) (music lost).

Do. Mer hahn en neue Oberkeet (Peasant Cantata) (1742).

Do. O holder Tag (?1749), _or_, O angenehme Melodei.

Italian Cantata: Amore traditore.

Do. Andro dall' colle al prato (lost).

Do. Non sa che sia dolore.

Clavier:-

Clavierubung, Part II. containing the Italian Concerto (bk. 207) and Part.i.ta in B minor (bk. 208) (1735).

Fantasia and Fugue in C minor (bk. 207 p. 50 and bk. 212 p. 88) (c.

1738).

Clavierubung, Part III. containing the four Duetti (bk. 208) (1739).

Clavierubung, Part IV. containing the Goldberg Variations (bk. 209) (c. 1742).

The Well-tempered Clavier, Part II. (bk. Ib or 2790b) (1744).

Chamber:-

Sonata for Violin, Flute, and Clavier, in C minor (in the "Musical Offering") (bk. 237 p. 3) (1747).

Three Part.i.tas for the Lute (?1740).(345)

Organ:-

The Catechism Choral Preludes (in Clavierubung, Part III.) (bk. 16) (1739).

Fugue in D minor (in ditto) (bk. 16 p. 49) (1739).

Prelude and Fugue in E flat major (in ditto) (bk. 6 p. 28) (1739).

Do. do. the "Great," in C major (bk. 9 p. 156).

Do. do. the "Great," in B minor (bk. 7 p. 52) (1727-36).

Do. do. the "Great," in E minor (bk. 8 p. 98).

Canonic Variations on "Vom Himmel hoch" (bk. 19) (1746).

The Schubler Choral Preludes (bk. 16) (c. 1747-50).

The Eighteen Choral Preludes (bk. 17) (c. 1747-50).

The Musical Offering (P. bk. 219) (1747).

The Art of Fugue (P. bk. 218) (1749).

APPENDIX II. THE CHURCH CANTATAS ARRANGED CHRONOLOGICALLY

We have the statement of Carl Philipp Emmanuel Bach,(346) confirmed by Forkel,(347) Bach's earliest biographer, that his father composed five Cantatas for every Sunday and Festival of the ecclesiastical year.

Concerted music was sung at Leipzig annually on forty-three Sundays and sixteen week-days.(348) Bach therefore must have written at least 295 Cantatas. Of this number he composed at least thirty before 1723. Hence approximately 265 were written at Leipzig. But Bach's fertility does not appear to have outlived the year 1744. We have reason, therefore, to conclude that the 265 Leipzig Cantatas were written in the course of twenty-one years, that is, between 1723 and 1744. To complete that number Bach must have composed a new Cantata every month, a surprising but demonstrable conclusion.

Of the 295 Cantatas only 202 have come down to us, three of them in an incomplete state.(349) Of those written before 1723 the survivors are too scanty to indicate a rate of productivity. But thereafter we have fuller materials for a calculation. Bach, as Cantor, conducted his first Leipzig Cantata on May 30, 1723, and in the following sixteen months produced twenty-four Cantatas, at the rate of more than one a month.(350) Beginning at the New Year of 1725 he wrote eighteen Cantatas in nine months, some of which, however, may belong to the years 1726-7-8-9. But even so, his monthly average seems to have been maintained. For 1730 we have, perhaps, ten Cantatas. For 1731 about twenty survive, of which half a dozen may belong to 1732, a deduction which still preserves Bach's steady average.

In 1735 he produced actually nineteen Cantatas between the New Year and the following November, though not all of them are positively dated.

Thereafter his activity is less certainly measured. But from 1736 till the end of 1744 he composed fifty-three Cantatas, at the rate, that is, of at least six every year, without making allowance for Cantatas written and lost.

There are few phenomena in the record of art more extraordinary than this unflagging cataract of inspiration, in which masterpiece followed masterpiece with the monotonous periodicity of a Sunday sermon. Its musical significance has been presented with illuminating exegesis by more than one commentator. But its literary apparatus has captured little attention. Yet Bach's task must have been materially eased or aggravated according as the supply of libretti was regular or infrequent, while the flow of his inspiration must have been governed by their quality.

Moreover, the libretto was the medium through which he offered the homage of his art to the service of G.o.d. The subject therefore deserves attention. However trivial, measured against the immensities of Bach's genius, the study will at least provide a platform from which to contemplate it.

At the outset the opinion may be hazarded that the provision of his weekly libretti caused Bach greater anxiety than the setting of them to music, a task which he accomplished with almost magical facility. It is true that from the early part of the 18th century cycles of Cantata texts for the Church's year were not infrequently published. Bach was in more or less intimate touch with the authors of four, perhaps five, printed collections of the kind. But he used them with surprising infrequency. Neumeister's published cycles provided him with seven libretti,(351) Franck's with sixteen,(352) Picander's with ten,(353) Marianne von Ziegler's with nine,(354) and Helbig's with two.(355) He took three libretti from the Bible,(356) and the hymn-book furnished him with eleven more.(357) But all these published sources together only account for fifty-eight texts. Bach possessed only one book that could a.s.sist his own efforts at authors.h.i.+p-Paul Wagner's eight-volumed Hymn-book-whence he took the stanzas which decorate his Cantatas like jewels in the rare settings he gave them. It was, therefore, mainly upon writers with whom he was brought into occasional or official contact that Bach depended for his texts.

At the beginning of his career Bach was thrown upon his inexperience. His earliest libretti, consequently, are tentative and transitory in their construction. His first Cantata was written at Arnstadt for the Easter Festival of 1704.(358) The core of the libretto is a seven-stanzaed Easter song by an unknown poet, eked out by two pa.s.sages of Scripture, a Excitativo, Aria, and a verse of a congregational hymn. The Aria and Recitativo are the only original numbers of the libretto, and there is little doubt that Bach wrote them himself.(359) But the whole libretto is stamped by his personality, and reveals the inveterate subjectivity of his religion. For, disregarding the general message of the Festival, the libretto opens on the soul's personal longing for immortality and closes on its song of victory over death. In construction it is archaic, a survival of traditions acquired from central and northern Germany through Bach's earlier residence at Luneburg and intercourse with Hamburg.(360)

Three years pa.s.sed before Bach produced his next extant Cantata. In the interval, on 29th June 1707, he resigned his Arnstadt appointment to become organist of the Church of St. Blasius at Muhlhausen.(361) Here, within the s.p.a.ce of ten months, he produced three Cantatas, the uniform character of whose libretti points to local and transitory influence upon the composer. The first of them,(362) written in August 1707, is a setting of Psalm 130, with the addition of two hymn-stanzas. The second(363) was performed on 4th February 1708, at the inauguration of the Muhlhausen Town Council, and consists of Old Testament pa.s.sages, a verse of a hymn, and three original stanzas. The third,(364) a wedding Cantata, was performed at Dornheim, near Arnstadt, on 5th June 1708, at the marriage of Pastor Johann Lorenz Stauber to Frau Bach's aunt, and is set to four verses of Psalm 115.

We can have little doubt regarding the authors.h.i.+p of these singularly austere libretti, so far removed in atmosphere from those of Bach's subsequent periods. In fact, the clue is furnished by Bach himself. A note in his handwriting on the score of the first of the three Cantatas (No. 131) states that he composed it at the request of Georg Christian Eilmar. The man was a close friend, G.o.dfather of Bach's eldest daughter, Katharina Dorothea (b. 1708), chief pastor of the Church of the Blessed Virgin, and Consistorial a.s.sessor, at Muhlhausen. He was, moreover, an aggressive foe of Pietism, of which Muhlhausen was the citadel, and Bach's minister, Frohne, the protagonist. Indeed, the two men waged so public and wordy a warfare(365) that Bach's social relations with the one and official connection with the other must have been rendered difficult. To his settled convictions regarding the fellows.h.i.+p of music and wors.h.i.+p Pietism offered Puritan opposition. In fact, its lack of sympathy eventually drove him from Muhlhausen, in hope, in his own words, "to realise my views upon the right ordering of Church music without vexation from others."(366) Eilmar, on the other hand, though he admitted the aesthetic value of music, conspicuously lacked the warmth and emotionalism of Bach's religious temperament. To him undoubtedly we must attribute the cold austerity of the three Muhlhausen libretti and the suppression of the personal note already sounded in Bach's Arnstadt Cantata. Nor did Eilmar's influence pa.s.s with Bach's departure from Muhlhausen.(367) It is to be traced in the early libretti of the Weimar period.

The Weimar Cantatas are twenty-two in number, of which all but three were written subsequently to Bach's appointment as Concertmeister early in 1714. He had been organist to the Ducal Court of Weimar since June 1708, a position which did not require him to compose for the Ducal Chapel. On the other hand, three Cantatas are attributed to the early Weimar years. But they cannot be positively dated, and their libretti bear such clear traces of Eilmar's influence that their composition may belong rather to the Muhlhausen period. Their texts display Eilmar's preference for strictly Biblical material and a disinclination to employ secular forms. The first of them(368) is a paraphrase of the Magnificat. The second(369) consists of four verses of Psalm 25, along with three simple rhymed stanzas which we have no difficulty in attributing to Bach himself. The third, _Gottes Zeit ist die allerbeste Zeit_ (No. 106), was composed, Spitta conjectures,(370) for the funeral of Philipp Grossgebauer, Rector of Weimar School, in 1711. But more recently, and more probably, Pirro(371) has expressed the opinion that Bach wrote it for the funeral of his uncle, Tobias Lammerhirt, who was buried at Erfurt in September 1707. The theory accords with the suggestion that all three Cantatas belong to the Muhlhausen period. If so, it is probable that the libretto, a very ingenious mosaic of Scripture texts, was written by Eilmar for the occasion. It is the last in which we detect his influence.

Bach's appointment as Ducal Concertmeister at Weimar can be placed between 14th January and 19th March 1714(372) and, it is probable, was nearer the former date. He seems to have produced the first Cantata his new post required him to write on s.e.xagesima Sunday, which fell on 4th February in that year. From thence to the end of 1716 he produced nineteen Cantatas and collaborated with a writer whose libretti at length gave him a satisfactory literary medium.

The new poet, Erdmann Neumeister, four of whose libretti Bach set to music immediately after his appointment, and a fifth a year later,(373) was considerably Bach's senior.(374) As far back as 1700 he had begun to write a cycle of Cantata texts for the Ducal Chapel at Weissenfels, and pubushed it in 1704, with an explanatory Preface referred to later.(375) In 1708 he issued a second cycle for the Court of Rudolstadt, while in 1711 and 1714 third and fourth cycles were written for the Ducal Chapel at Eisenach.

All four cycles were reissued in 1716,(376) with the addition of a fifth and a Preface, which lauded Neumeister as "the first German to give sacred music its fitting position by introducing and perfecting the Church Cantata."(377)

Spitta has dealt exhaustively(378) with the evolution and construction of the Neumeister libretto. It need only be remarked that it adapted a secular or operatic apparatus to the service of religion, and that the innovation, hateful to many, triumphed because of Neumeister's delicate handling of it. He perfected the new form, however, in stages. "A Cantata," he insisted in his 1704 Preface, "is simply a fragment of Opera made up of Aria and Recitativo." But the restriction excluded from the Cantata its most appropriate material. In his 1708 cycle he found a place for the chorus. Finally, he admitted the Bible stanza and congregational hymn. With their inclusion the Cantata libretto a.s.sumed the form familiar to us in Bach's use. It represents a combination of secular Opera and ecclesiastical Motet. The free Arias and Recitativi are derived from the one, the Bible stanzas and congregational hymns perpetuate the traditions of the other. Unity of design is stamped on the whole by its general subordination to the Gospel for the Day. Thus, at the moment when Bach was about to devote his genius to the Cantata, Neumeister opportunely provided him with a libretto singularly adapted to the end Bach had in view, and appropriate to the musical expression by which he proposed to secure it. He adhered to it almost to the end of his life, and found unfailing inspiration in Neumeister's sincerity, delicacy, and uniformly religious outlook. Neumeister's Arias, with a single exception,(379) are hymn-like in mood and metre. His Recitativi are reflective and prayerful, rarely oratorical or pictorial, simple communings upon the Gospel themes which the libretto handles.(380)

Bach's early introduction to Neumeister's texts is explained by the close relations between the Courts of Weimar and Eisenach, by his a.s.sociations with his own birthplace, and his intimacy with Georg Philipp Telemann, Kapellmeister there, for whose use Neumeister's third and fourth cycles were written.(381) Bach set, in all, seven of the libretti-four from the fourth cycle,(382) one from the third,(383) and two from the first,(384) one of which (No. 142) differs so much from the published version as to raise the question whether Bach did not receive it direct from Neumeister in the form in which he set it.(385)

That Bach should have set no more than seven of Neumeister's texts(386) is strange. He shrank, perhaps, from appropriating libretti on which his friend Telemann had a prior claim.(387) But the reason is found rather in the fact that at Weimar Bach discovered in 1715 a local poet of first-rate ability who, with perhaps but one exception, wrote the libretti of all the Cantatas he composed during the last two years of his Weimar appointment.

Salomo Franck, Bach's new collaborator, was Curator of the Ducal Museum of Coins and Medals at Weimar. He was twenty-six years older than Bach. But Spitta's conjecture,(388) that the two men were not acquainted, is hardly tenable. Both resided in the same small provincial town, both were in the Duke's service, and throughout 1715 and 1716 collaborated in at least ten Cantatas performed in the Ducal Chapel. Moreover, though the Preface of Franck's first cycle is dated 4th June 1715,(389) Bach had already set one of its libretti for Easter of that year. A second cycle of texts, of which Bach made little use,(390) was published by Franck in 1717.(391)

Schweitzer, no doubt, is correct in his conclusion(392) that Bach was drawn to Franck by his poetic insight, his mysticism, and innate feeling for nature. It must be remembered, too, that his libretti were, in some degree, official. On the other hand, Franck was Neumeister's inferior in ability to conceive a picture fit to express Bach's larger moods, and on occasion could descend to sheer bathos.(393) But his texts have a rhythmic swing and melody which Bach found agreeable. He set at least sixteen of them, and returned to them even after he settled at Leipzig.

The circ.u.mstances which terminated Bach's service at Weimar are familiar, and need not be restated. He received a new appointment at Cothen on 1st August 1717, and took up his duties there, probably at Christmas, that year.(394) His position was that of Capellmeister to the princely Court.

He never styles himself Court Organist,(395) and his duties severed him for five years from the service of the Church, to which he had declared his particular dedication in 1708. The Cothen Court was unpretentious.

The Prince was a Calvinist. Figurate music was not permitted in the Court Chapel, and its Organ was small and inadequate. Hence Bach devoted himself chiefly to chamber music, and only two genuine Church Cantatas belong to this period of his career. Both must have been written for performance elsewhere, possibly in connection with Bach's frequent Autumn tours as a performer.(396)

For both Cantatas Bach employed a librettist, otherwise little known, named Johann Friedrich Helbig, State Secretory to the Eisenach Court. In March 1720,(397) more than two years after Bach's arrival at Cothen, Helbig published a cycle of "Musical Texts on the Sunday and Saints' Day Gospels throughout the year," for performance "in G.o.d's honour by the Prince's Kapelle at Eisenach."(398) How they came into Bach's hands we do not know, but can readily conjecture. They are indifferent poetry, judging them by the two specimens Bach made use of, and are uniform in construction. The first movement invariably is a Chorus upon a text from the Gospel for the Day, or a Scripture pa.s.sage closely related to it. Two Arias separated by a Recitative follow. A Choral brings the libretto to an end.(399)

The first of the two Cantatas written to Helbig's words was designed for the Seventeenth Sunday after Trinity, which fell in 1720 on September 22.(400) Spitta conjectures(401) that Bach intended it for performance at Hamburg. In fact, his wife's death postponed Bach's visit to that town until November, by which date the Sunday appropriate to the Cantata had pa.s.sed. Spitta holds that the Cantata may have been performed, after all, during the visit. Schweitzer is sceptical.(402) But Bach certainly expended great pains upon the score.

The second Helbig Cantata(403) is for the Third Sunday in Advent, and the date of it would appear to have been 1721. It is one of the least agreeable of Bach's works. Spitta (404) declares it a juvenile composition hastily adapted to a new libretto. Schweitzer(405) expresses the same opinion, and Sir Hubert Parry(406) finds the work "rather commonplace." Its genuineness is discussed by Max Schreyer in the "Bach-Jahrbuch" for 1912, and more recently Rudolf Wustmann has insisted that it does not bear the stamp of Bach's genius.(407) If it actually was composed in 1721, its production must have coincided with Bach's second marriage on December 3 of that year.(408) In that case, his resort to old material is explicable.