John Sebastian Bach: 1685-1885

HARDLY one month after the birth of Handel, his twin star rose, of equal lustre and importance. John Sebastian Bach was born on the 21st of March, 1685, in Eisenach, Thuringia, under the shadow of the Wartburg, that renowned old mediæval castle, where the Minnesingers held their contests, and where Luther lived concealed. The writer cherishes a pleasant memory of hours spent in Handel’s birthplace, Halle, nearly a quarter of a century ago, in delightful converse with that genial lover and interpreter of both Bach and Handel, Robert Franz. Taking reluctant leave of him in the evening, escorted by him through the quaint old market-place by moonlight, we halted a few minutes under the Handel statue by the old church; when Franz, after leading us to the most striking points of view, exclaimed, “ Great, great! but Bach was greater, nicht wahr ? ” Could our corner of the musical world to-day commemorate one birthday and neglect the other?

The Bach family form a whole Milky Way, covering a space of many degrees on the celestial globe of music. From old Veit Bach, the baker and miller of Presburg, in Hungary, who was driven forth by the religious troubles in the sixteenth century to find shelter in Thuringia, and who solaced himself with his lute amid the clatter of his mill, transmitting the same taste to his two sons, and they to their descendants, there were six generations of them who devoted themselves to music, and in each generation two or three stars, at least, of magnitude. At one time every post of cantor, organist, or town musician, in all Thuringia, was occupied by some scion of that stock. They were simple, frugal,

industrious, contented people, who had no ambition beyond a useful, happy, and God-serving life. This they valued too much to risk its peace and sweetness in pursuit of greater fortune. To show what a race they were, and what musicians, it is enough to state that of the 890 large octavo pages of the first half of Spitta’s monumental work on Bach about one fifth is devoted to an account of his ancestors and an appreciation of their compositions. These were in the most learned contrapuntal style of the period, and probably furnished the richest and the best material from which both Handel and the young Sebastian drew nourishment. This simply pious family, whose whole lives were spent in the musical service of the Protestant faith, were no ascetic Puritans or monks, but hearty, happy, social, loving friends and neighbors, full of strong common sense, not afraid to enjoy themselves, living lives too full of usefulness to be in any danger of excess. Wit and humor played like sunshine on their homely walls. Once a year all branches of their kinship met at the house of one of them, and held a patriarchal festival for several days, when their entertainments were all musical. The first, thing always was to sing together Lutheran chorals, and some larger piece composed by one of them. And then they would have laughter enough in keeping up the musical game of “ quodlibets,” — extempore songs, all sung together, each to its own words, but so ingeniously contrived as to make up a sort of harmony. Childlike simplicity, manlike energy, clearheadedness, and savoir-faire sum up the family character, whose highest type was John Sebastian. In him, if ever, “ the child was father of the man.” Our business here is with Bach’s genius, his wonderful art, and the wonderful amount of his inimitable work. We have no room for biography. The personal incidents of interest are few, and now easily accessible. No better Life, for a short one, can be found than the wise and pithy monograph by Forkel, of which the old translation ought to be republished. Then we have the discreet and conscientious Life by Bitter, a distinguished Prussian minister of finance (Berlin, 1865) ; the two ponderous volumes by Spitta (1873-80), which have been translated in England ; and shorter popular works, like the abridgment of Bitter by Miss Kay-Shuttleworth, and the article in Grove’s Dictionary.

In all of these one may read (we just recall a few particulars, for better, understanding of the mature man and artist) how John Sebastian, an orphan at the age of ten, was put under the care of an older brother, an organist, for his first lessons on the clavichord ; how he soon outran the lessons, milk for babes, and craved more solid meat, knowing of such in a manuscript book of his brother’s, full of things by the best masters of the day (Frohberger, Pachelbel, Buxtehude, etc.), which book was forbidden him ; how he abstracted it from the cupboard, and copied it by moonlight in his little room, — six months’ labor lost, because the cruel brother found him out and confiscated the hard-earned treasure; and yet not lost, for such a lad naturally learned much in copying (the story is a parallel to that of the little Handel’s secret garret practice) ; how, left destitute by the brother’s death, he became a choir-boy at a gymnasium,— a resource which failed him with the change of voice, which contracted an uncanny way of singing double, that is, in octaves ; how he kept on learning all there was to learn in his great art, — harmony and fugue and counterpoint, of course, and especially the most sublime of instruments, the organ, that Gothic temple of harmony, of whose inexhaustible secrets he was to be the principal interpreter to men, and whose peculiar genius answered to his own and breathed through all his works ; how he, too, made his pilgrimage to Hamburg, several years before Handel, — not enticed by the opera siren, but rather to hear Reinken play the organ ; and how, fed as by ravens in the wilderness, the poor boy repeated those visits from time to time (sad tales, indeed, are related of his poverty and hardships) ; how he went to Zell, to hear the prince’s band of Frenchmen, for the French style was deemed the height of excellence at that time, when Voltaire set the taste in literature at the court of the great Frederick. It is said that Bach’s earlier compositions were not free from the frippery and alfectations of French ornament. The influence of Couperin is visible in the works for clavichord. So Zelter, Goethe’s correspondent, says, and adds, “ The endeavor to make one’s self as agreeable as others gives rise to that which does not last. All that is foreign to him, however, we can take away like a thick scum, and the bright liquid lies immediately below it.”

We may not linger over his experiences as organist, on a fabulously meagre salary, at Arnstadt (1703), where be helped compile the Freilighausen Hymn - Book, arranging or composing some three hundred of the tunes himself ; and where he offended the congregation by his “ extraordinary variations ” of the chorals, and still more by his prolonged absence at Lübeck, whither he went, like Handel, to hear the famous Buxtehude, — not, like Handel, to be fêted and received with honor, but in his poverty remaining there three months, an unpresentable and secret listener, returning with increase of knowledge.

Skipping all details of his short stay as organist at Mühlhausen, and in a larger sphere at Weimar, where he wrote some of his cantatas ; and of his life at Cöthen (1717-20), during which time, on one of his journeys with Prince Leopold, he composed the first part of the immortal Wohltemperirte Clavier, “ at a place where he was driven, by low spirits, ennui, and absence of any kind of musical instruments, to resort to this kind of pastime,” we find him at the age of thirty-two without an equal, and a few years later (1723) settled down to his life work in Leipzig, as cantor and director of music in the famous Thomas-Schule, as well as in three churches. There he lived and labored, seldom leaving the old town, except when he ran over to Dresden to hear the opera conducted by his friend Hasse, who had married Handel’s famous singer, the Faustina, and once when Frederick the Great managed to get a famous visit from him. There he wrought, on mighty tasks intent, until, like Handel, he grew blind, and died in poverty, on July 30, 1750, in his sixty-sixth year, nearly nine years before Handel, having outlived most of the twenty children he had had by his two wives. Leipzig was the scene of the great bulk of his noblest work. It is to Leipzig, to its Thomas School and Thomas Church, that music-loving travelers in Germany will long continue to make pilgrimages, He is commonly called the Leipzig Bach, or “ old Bach,” to distinguish him from his second son, Carl Philip Emanuel, the Hamburg or Berlin Bach, the bridge between that old polyphonic school and the free school of Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, who, nevertheless, were rooted in the same deep, fertile soil.

A simple, modest, upright, most laborious, genial, spiritual life was that of John Sebastian Bach ! Absorbed in his unworldly art, he heartily and quietly fulfilled all the relations of life. He was an excellent father, friend, and citizen. All sought him and relied on him. His hospitality, even to humbler fellow artists, was without stint or ostentation ; his house was always full. He was known and trusted as a solid character, as one who neither courted observation nor shrank from it; who was what he seemed; who had the real virtue in him, and did to a certainty what he attempted. If he was a mystery to others, it was not because the waters were not clear, but because they were so deep. His modesty was proverbial. When asked how he acquired such mastery over his art, he would reply, “ I was compelled to be industrious.” He was just to other composers, and forbore to criticise works which to him were trifling. To his pupils, however, he always expressed his real opinion ; for to them he felt himself bound to tell the unvarnished truth. Playing in a quartet, he liked to take the tenor part, the least conspicuous, because it placed him in the middle of the harmony, and left him free to listen to the other parts, He cared not for publicity or fame, but stayed contentedly at home, thinking it not worth while to go out of his way for wealth or honors, when hie might have had both. A humble competence he easily commanded,— not in his later years, alas ! Here he contrasts with Handel, whom he otherwise resembles in his healthy strength of mind and character. He had the highest respect for Handel’s genius; but these two great artists — neighbors when Handel was at home in Halle — never met, although they and their friends tried hard to bring about a meeting. Nor can they have had much mutual influence in their music (not much was published then), although here and there Handel, in choruses like “And with his stripes,” in the Messiah, and “ They loathëd to drink,” in Israel, strongly suggests Bach.

Bach’s exuberant creative impulse was swayed and tempered by the calmest wisdom. If ever there was in art a sage, a wise man, it was he. He loved that art too well to envy others. His admiration of other great composers and performers was unfeignedly apprecitive. He would watch the progress of a piece as the naturalist does the growth of a new plant. Listening to a fugue, with one of his oldest sons beside him, he always, so soon as he heard the theme, told what the composer probably would or ought to bring in next; and when the composition was a good one, it would so come to pass, and he would rejoice, and jog his son with his elbow to make him too remark it. This was no chuckling over his own acuteness, but joy over the beautiful working out in art of the divine laws of nature.

Many anecdotes illustrate his wonderful perceptive as well as his intuitive faculties. He had the keenest, quickest, surest comprehension of relations. He grasped a multitude of particulars at a glance, and seemed to look things into unity and order. He solved any musical problem at first sight; could overlook the fullest score, and translate it on the harpsichord ; could set the several parts side by side, and play them together; could look at a new music hall, and say, In such a corner you will hear an echo. He could have been a great mathematician ; his intellectual was equal to his moral greatness.

What such a man was born to do, what he most heartily and thoroughly and splendidly did do, can hardly yet be estimated, and only by patient study of the vast mass of his incomparable works. They were barely recognized and rapidly forgotten in his own day, and for at least a century, until Mendelssohn revived his Matthew Passion. From the enthusiasm caused by that revival sprang (in 1850) that nobly patriotic and artloving Bach-Gesellschaft for the publication, mostly for the first time, in yearly volumes, of all his works in sumptuous style ; a labor of love and piety, by which money is not made nor sought, the volumes being furnished at actual cost to the subscribers, who are counted as members of the publishing society. Thirty thick volumes are a solid fact already. They contain one hundred and fifty of the cantatas, besides the passions, masses, organ, violin, piano compositions, and much more. How few, alas, are competent to read them, still less to perform them ! — and largely for the very reason that the scores of Handel need a Franz to fill them out to the measure of their original intention.

Of course, in this brief article, only the merest hints of a true estimate of the works, or of the art and genius they illustrate, of this the greatest musician, and surely one of the greatest men, who ever lived, can be imagined possible. Let us modestly begin just where we find ourselves relatively to the strange phenomenon, — with the popular, ignorant, narrow, false idea and prejudice concerning it. To us here in America

— and in how many places elsewhere!

— Bach has been only a name and a bugbear, except in the imagination and the love of here and there a knot of reverent, earnest, sympathetic, easily accepting listeners and readers, until within the last two decades. All that our people knew of him before consisted of some of his organ fugues and some of the forty-eight preludes and fugues of the Well-Tempered Clavichord; and these enjoyed a very limited acquaintance. The common cry was, “ Scientific music ! ” A maker of endless fugues,

— all learned, mathematical, perplexing, dry, with no “ tune ” we can follow, or disentangle from the curious and cunning web ! Now think a moment. “ Scientific music ! ” Scientific art! The idea is absurd: it cannot even be called an idea ; it is inconceivable. Science is wholly abstract; music, art, is wholly concrete, — more than that, alive. Science would have to hear the sole responsibility of any music which it undertook to make; and would it, after all, be music ? A music of science could not be a music of genius, art, or heart; for science of itself is not creative. It may discern, declare the laws which must not be broken, and so contribute to the criticism of all art; but it cannot create the thing it criticises. Can science invent new and beautiful and infinitely varied and original ideas ? It searches into the roots and principles of nature, of the human organism, and of the human mind and heart. But are great poems copied out of law books ? Is the literature of ages dug out of grammars ? What scientist, as such, though he should give the longest life to it, could create a rose, or paint a Madonna, or ever hope to bring about a miracle like the PassionMusic, like the Messiah, the Fifth Symphony, Fidelio ? All this talk about “scientific music” is but senseless, idle cant. Mathematics never made a fugue ; though pedantry and uninspired, imitative, so to say Chinese, drudgery doubtless had a hand in the manufacture of thousands of them in their day.

Luck of acquaintance with his works is the only excuse for the mistaken impression that Bach wrote fugues exclusively or principally. No, he is not all fugue. The larger portion of his greater works is without fugue, “strict fugue,” though full of it as implied in all great composition ; for you feel its presence as a latent principle of form, the secret of artistic unity, even in sonatas, symphonies, etc., of Mozart and Beethoven, though the latter surely does not rank among great fuguists. Bach, to be sure, is great in fugue, and is as truly inspired, imaginative, poetic, even emotional, in that as in the freer forms of art. To have composed only those great organ fugues and that marvelous school for pianists, the Well-Tempered Clavichord, were glory enough for one man. Fugue and canon lay at the root of all the musical training of his day. They all made fugues, almost as easily as they talked or breathed. How happens it that whole wildernesses of such have vanished out of sight and thought, while those of Bach and Handel live to delight both ear and soul ? Simply because fugues, in their way, may be works of genius ; may show inspiration, meaning, beauty, feeling, quite as well as freer compositions ; and may even gain expression by their very limitation. Fugue lurks incognito in all contrapuntal, polyphonic writing, where the voices which compose the harmony move each with an individual melody of its own. Where Counterpoint sits down to work, Fugue looks over her shoulder.

What, then, is a fugue ? What but the unfolding of a musical germ, the development of a musical thought according to its innate law ? It is a theme echoed back and reflected from all quarters, until it becomes all-pervading, ever changing, ever one. One pregnant bit or snatch of melody wakes all the echoes, all the Amens, through the realm of sound. So in a dark night the moon puts out one little point of light, one finger as it were, and instantly the clouds are luminous, and every streamlet glimmers, and every polished leaf and every gilded spire telegraphs the arrival of the light above. Nature is full of fugue. Through all her phenomena there is this tendency of many to one end, this endless chase of lines converging, this confession of relationship. The growth of the plant is fugue. The ocean surf, wave upon wave, rolling in upon the shore, and swallowed back ; the ranks of grain running in waves before the wind, each losing itself in the whole, are fugues. Perhaps the clearest type is flame, which is a spiral ascent of innumerable little fiery tongues, all tending to one point. The theme is uttered by one voice ; another and another takes it up, its predecessors improvising fit accompaniment, till all are swept along in mingled, mutual, swift pursuit, possessed all with one spirit ; or, if episodes occur, the same theme reappears in new keys, inversions, imitations, and contractions, with ever-varied, heightened fascination. As a form of art, it is most like Gothic architecture ; for there, too, innumerable details of form, arches, clustered columns, spires, human figures, animals, fruits and flowers, and all intricacies of ornament, both lovely and grotesque, seem striving upward, and the whole mass looks light and seems to float aloft. You cannot convince yourself that it is still; seemingly, it never is, but evermore becoming. Such is the fugue-like mystery and miracle of form. This is the true organ style of music : no mere tunes that stale by repetition ; no loose stringing together of purposeless and idle passages. Bach, or Handel, or their compeers (some of whom, but for those two, would still be accounted great), when they sat down at the keyboard, chose a pregnant theme (not every one can get as far as that), and then developed it, unraveled the seemingly simple knot into a long series of admirable inferences ; traversing a vast variety, yet always sure to bring you round into the theme again. The soulful artist, trained in such manly exercise, is in little danger of composing superficially. How like the germ of an oak in spring warmth will each spontaneous little motive open out and blossom in his hands! And even when he is not composing fugues, how all he writes betrays a secret intimate relationship to the fugue principle in the vital unity and the expressive logic of the whole! Think of a Beethoven symphony, sonata, or concerto even, from that point of view. Bach’s grandest and profoundest work, the Matthew Passion, has not a fugue in all its choruses, with one very brief exception.

But what Bach always did have when he wrote in parts, what he and all his compeers cultivated as the sovereign art, was polyphony ; that is to say, expressive or melodic counterpoint, — the art of vitalizing, individualizing, every one of the parts or voices, and letting them weave themselves together in fourpart, six-part, eight-part, harmony, so that, while each pursues its own melodic

way, they blend in one beautiful and rich result.

And now, having disposed of these old bugbears, or at least put in our plea against their further standing in court, we are somewhat more prepared and free to begin with Bach where he began, and that is with the Choral.

Hanslick, the Vienna critic, has spoken of Bach, and Eccard and Heinrich Schuetz (or Sagittarius), a century before him, as three “ sounding pillars of Protestantism.” They were to the Lutheran Church in Germany what Palestrina, Gabrieli, Lotti, and the rest were to the Church of Rome. Bach’s was a profoundly pious nature. The music he conceived and wrote welled up from his inmost life and soul in ceaseless prayer and holy love and aspiration. It is the revelation of a very deep, sincere, heartfelt religion. His whole art and genius were employed in the self-forgetting service of his Maker and the Lutheran faith, taking the form especially of a personal discipleship and love for Christ. If he wrote anything besides sacred music, it was either innocent and childlike recreation, or a confession of his faith in art on its own account; for with him art was but the corresponding other side of his religion.

In the new, or Protestant, communion music soon became a vital part of all religious service, quite as much as it had been in the Catholic. But now for the first time the common people began to worship for themselves, and take an active share in the service, instead of having it all done for them sacerdotally. They lifted up their voices all together, in their sacred melodies, in unison, with no accompaniment, no harmony. The hymns, born of the pious fervor of the Reformation, full of simple, tender, sadsweet poetry, were wedded to tunes, or choral melodies, of kindred poetry and fervor ; some of them cherished from the old traditions, but far the greater number, of mostly unknown authorship, springing up out of the spirit of the times,— a tuneful efflorescence of the religious enthusiasm of Luther and his followers. These chorals were the people’s sacred melody, or plain-song ; the insurrection of Nature against conventional, pedantic, dry, and priest-droned music in the church, as the Volkslied, the songs of the Troubadours, and finally the opera were Nature setting herself up outside the sanctuary. That was at once the sweetest, gravest, simplest, of all singing. It sang not of what is personal and fleeting, like the ballads, madrigals, and operas, but of the underlying, universal, deep religious feeling. It allowed the whole congregation to sing, now in solemn, long-drawn notes, now in smooth and limpid melody, borrowed sometimes from the finer secular airs, which had sprung up like wild-flowers among the hills and by the wayside. It was all in unison ; and yet, when multitudes were gathered, the vast uprolling cloud of sound, swelled by so great a mass of voices, saluting the ear from different distances, and swallowing up its own echoes and reflections, did have somewhat the effect of harmony, and a suggestion even of the fugue, just as a cloud, taking the sun at different angles, displays all the colors of the rainbow. A Bach, listening to such mighty volume of sound, could scarcely help hearing tenor and alto and bass, and even imagining florid interwoven melodies clothed in their own spontaneous accompaniment, with fugues in endless chase through the whole labyrinth of thrilling and seductive tone vibrations. Bach’s genius was essentially popular, notwithstanding he is called mystical. Between the music of authority, the conventional, dry music of the old church, and the free, secular recitative and love canlabile of the opera, he stood on this Protestant middle-ground, the choral of the people. Out of this he evolved all his wondrous art.

Hundreds of these choral tunes Bach harmonized in four parts, bringing out their latent possibilities with a skill never equaled. He did not write these little masterpieces for use in public worship. He let the congregation sing on in its old way. He did not even allow these works to be printed. They were occasional productions: partly as exercises for his scholars in composition; partly for the choir of the Thomas School, to be used on their various private anniversaries, New Year festivals, etc.; but mostly as refreshing interludes in his elaborate compositions, his motets, cantatas, passions. For the nearly four hundred known gems of this sort he found the tunes partly in himself; partly among the tunes which owe their origin to Luther and his musical friends and sympathizers ; in the Huguenot and Calvinistic psalters ; in the hymns of the Bohemian brethren ; and even far back in the primitive Gregorian cantus fermus, — selecting, as no one was more competent to do, upon the principle of the “ survival of the fittest.” These chorals differ intrinsically from the common run of our New England psalm-tunes. They are a much more pregnant kind of melody ; there is more in them ; they are not commonplace ditties, manufactured by the thousand for the market. Each has a soul in it ; and it is for a sympathetic soul and genius like Bach to woo forth its beautiful confession. Moving in close tonic intervals, they admit, indeed necessitate, a much richer variety of harmony, within their few bars, than modern tunes in wider, or harmonic, intervals, which get along with a mere ding-dong alternation of tonic, dominant, and subdominant. Whoever would learn much in little of the inmost heart and secret of true four-part setting, let him have by him always, near his pianoforte or organ, the chorals harmonized by Bach. He will find them good, too, for the spirit; he will find in them that “ true nepenthe for a careworn soul,” which Dr. Holmes tells us the good governor, “in the dreadful war-time, on one of the days of anguish and terror,” sought in a lecture by Emerson, “ in listening to that flow of thought, calm and clear as the diamond drops that distill from a mountain rock.” What various meaning Bach’s different settings lent to the same choral ! How he would set it in a wholly new light, win from its face a new expression, always in correspondence with the words, so different in the several stanzas of a hymn !

To see now how he used the choral for material, or subject matter, in his greater works ; how it developed in his hands, as by a natural evolution, we must turn to (1) his Choral -Vorspiele, or organ preludes, in each of which a choral melody is given out line by line, framed in poetic counterpoint, with musing and imaginative interludes between the lines, — priceless treasures, these, in the repertory of a true organist; (2) the exhaustless fund of beauty and of inspiration he has left us in those three hundred and eighty or more wonderful cantatas for church service, each of the magnitude of half an oratorio, and all conceived and executed in the noblest and sincerest style to which the art of music had attained. The list includes not only the cantatas he composed in Leipzig for all the Sundays and church festivals during five years, mostly in the first part of his life there, but also not a few, like “ Ich hatte viel Bekümmerniss,” which he had written earlier, in Weimar and elsewhere.

While Handel was bringing out Italian operas in London, Bach was engaged in this more humble, unexciting, pious, obscure service; putting all the resources of his art and genius, week by week, into these master works, each sung but once, then laid upon the shelf, to slumber for a century and a half, until they should be rescued from dust and oblivion, to reappear within these last few years in those grand volumes of the Bach-Gesellschaft. They were done in the inspired routine of every day, as a matter of course, just to enrich the service, with no eye beyond that either to reward or fame, — not so much as it takes to move one nowadays to make an anthem or a psalm-tune. In simple quantity or mass, as well as in weight of purest gold, these cantatas amount to more than the combined operas and oratorios of Handel.

There is no room here to enter into a description of the contents of a single one of these cantatas. They consist, as a general rule, with more or less modification, of an orchestral introduction, sometimes amounting to an overture; a great chorus, four or eight part, frequently developed from the choral upon which the whole is founded, to fill the hearers with the spirit of the text for the day ; recitatives and arias for various voices ; sometimes more choruses ; and finally the choral harmonized in four parts, with elaborate accompaniment. A perfect unity of tone and feeling reigns throughout. The counterpoint in all those choruses, sometimes fugato if not fugued, but always polyphonic, is matchless in the expressive interweaving of the voices, both the instrumental and the human ; but the latter always dominate, creating, as it were, or waking up their own, companion sprites, winning all nature to their mood, clothing their sensitive, chaste melody with all the tender drapery that strings and reeds and flutes, or all the rougher mail that brass can lend. This is not only art; it is imagination in the highest sense. The beauty and variety of musical ideas, the felicity of invention and expression, are simply inexhaustible. It is not true, as some have charged, that Bach places the voice precisely on a level with the accompaniment, — makes it only one more among many instruments. Theirs is a light borrowed from the voice ; they move with it in its orbit, each with a motion of its own. Is the voice only one more instrument ? What is the flower but one more metamorphosis of the leaf?

The arias for solo voices are of the most melodious, tender, heart-felt, and poetic that can be imagined ; often singularly graphic, lighting up an image in the words, bringing out a hidden meaning as by a divining rod of genius, and causing unsuspected springs to gush up at our feet. And the recitative, often cantabile, is the most expressive, characteristic, human, far from conventional or commonplace, yet free from uncouth intervals such as occur in Wagner, that any master, not excepting Handel or Mozart, ever put into his dramatic monologue or dialogue. Witness his Passion Music, both the St. John and the Matthew. The cantatas offer countless examples of the same. One obstacle to a wider recognition of such music lies in the barbarous texts, the pietistic doggerel, which Bach had to accept from the prosaic pious poetasters of his day, the Picanders and the like, of whom we have more than enough in the Passion. Of course we do not mean the sweet old hymns brought home to us by many of the chorals, as by carrier-doves. He had not the poets Handel had ; no Miltons, Drydens, who could “ build the lofty rhyme ” for him. He makes the utmost of his texts, illuminating the intention they so helplessly fall short of by his own transcendent setting, just as he translates the cruel and perplexing dogmas into the sweeter, deeper, and more human creed of music, — music, the true type of at-one-ment.

Something should be said here of his instrumentation, slender by the standard of full modern orchestras, but telling and significant in every part, showing a most effective economy of forces, and sensitively delicate and sympathetic in the accompaniment of tender and ethereal passages of song. Turn to the Passion Music, and see how exquisitely he can make a pair of flutes, or an oboe, with a few strings, supply the silvery cloud

to an angelic aria, or a soft quartet of violins shed heavenly halo round the head of Jesus when he speaks. For trumpet splendors in most thrilling and awakening choruses, turn to the Magnificat, to the opening joyful exhortation of the Christmas Oratorio, to these cantatas, to the soaring, circling, flaming Sanctus in his B-minor Mass. But his orchestral means were stinted. He was constantly pleading with the town council to grant appropriations for the minimum number of instrumentalists for fit performance of the music which he had to furnish for three churches. He tells them that eighteen to twenty instruments are necessary to a full musical service, to wit: two or three first and two or three second violins, two first and two second violas, two ’cellos, one bass, two or three oboes, one or two bassoons, three trumpets, one drum, and for some pieces two flutes. He needed at least thirty-six singers and from fifty-four to sixty players. But the whole number of alumni at the Thomas School was fifty-five ; besides whom he was granted the assistance of four town-pipers, three violinists, and an apprentice. It is impossible to think of Bach as other than a happy, hearty, and contented man; yet under these restrictions he did chafe. It seems that even his productive life in Leipzig had its thorns, and that, what with poor appreciation and poor pay (his funeral, a mean one, was not even attended by the musical societies!), there was a tragic side to it. Had he so wrought and died but yesterday in New York, would it perhaps have been the same ? But Bach lived inside the wonders of his own creation, dull and common to the many on the outside, like the stained windows of the great cathedrals ; reminding one of Goethe’s parable, if we translate “ poems ” into music : —

The Christmas Oratorio, with its trumpet-toned opening chorus, “ Christians, be joyful,” its most exquisite of pastoral symphonies, its lovely Cradle Song, etc., is properly a series of six cantatas for the first three days of the Christmas festival, for New Year and the Sunday after, and for the feast of the Epiphany. Adding to the cantata form the gospel narrative recited by the tenor, the dramatic dialogue of real characters, not allegorical abstractions, and those swift, excited, vivid little choruses called turbœ, we have the grandest and sublimest works of Bach, his settings of the Passion (three of them are lost) according to St. John, and, greatest of all, greatest of all oratorios or any sacred compositions in whatever form, the Matthew Passion. Marx makes bold to call it “ the fifth gospel,” so deep is its impression on the soul, it so brings home to every heart the image and the spirit of the Son of Man. Passion music, now an exclusively Protestant possession, owes its origin to the Catholic church as far back as the twelfth century, at least. Luther adapted it to the reformed service, sung by the congregation in unison. Schuetz, in 1665, and Sebastiani enriched it with polyphonic harmony. Then in Hamburg, to tile poor text of Brockes, Keiser, Matheson, Telemann, young Handel, tried their hands at it. Finally it opened out into the full and “ wonderful passion-flower ” of Bach, as Hanslick calls it. It is too great a work for more than this mere reference in these few pages. Fortunately, it has at last reached our shore, and has begun to make its deep impression upon listening crowds, especially when the two parts of the entire work have been given in two performances on one day (Good Friday). Again, mere mention only can be made of the great things he composed to Latin texts: his masses, and especially the greatest ever written, not excepting that of Beethoven, the Mass in Bminor, and the grandest of all Magnificats.

Bach was not always serious. Outside the sacred precincts his genius overflowed sometimes in works of frolic fancy, if not comic humor, like the secular cantata, Strife between Phœbus and Pan, in which the cloven-footed deity is drolly manifest in song; and, in a smaller way, the Shepherds’ Cantata and the Coffee Cantata, a pleasant, mild take-off of the rage for coffee-drinking at that time in France and Germany. He also wrote numerous birthday and wedding cantatas, full of picturesque allusion in the music, like the one that opens with a vivid imitation, both in the instruments and voices, of the motion of the water, “ Schleicht, spielende Welle.” He had not played at quodlibets for nothing in his boyhood.

His purely instrumental compositions, of which he has left a great variety, are of the same sterling and enduring quality with his vocal works. His organ preludes and fugues, Choral-Vorspiele, trios (for two manuals and pedal), toccatas, fantasias, pastorals, passacaglia, etc., stand at the head of all the organ music ever written. In his sonatas, fugues, and, above all, the incomparable Chaconne, for violin alone, he seems to anticipate nearly all the best modern effects known to violinists: they all sound fresh and new to-day ; in our own Music Hall a great popular audience has been betrayed into enthusiastic plaudits by a Bach fugue for solo violin. Fascinating and poetic sonatas he has written, too, for flutes and other wind instruments. His pianoforte works, both great and small, are almost innumerable. His concertos for two, three, four pianos, with string quartet accompaniment, are quite a sure attraction both in chamber and orchestral concerts. The “ French ” and the “ English Suites ’’and the Partitas figure more and more frequently in the programmes of pianists who respect their art. They do not spoil the relish of Beethoven, but they introduce him well. Nor can Beethoven, Chopin, Schumann, set them, in spite of their antique cut, at naught. The host of little pieces, all in two, or three, or four part polyphony, were written simply as exercises for his pupils, yet they are charming bits of music, at once naive and simple, subtle and refined. But the wonder-work of all, the most precious vade-mecum of pianists, the Well-Tempered Clavichord, though written for instruction and for lifelong practice, is a casket of rare gems, “ of purest ray serene.” Every great composer or interpreter of true pianoforte music has found strengthening meat and drink in its double circuit of twenty-four fugues and preludes in all the major and minor keys. In quickening influence this one book may almost weigh against the Beethoven sonatas. Should we have had Cramer’s Etudes but for that example, or those of Moscheles, or Stephen Heller? One testimony is of such value here that we are tempted to translate a few sentences from one of Ferdinand Hiller’s Letters to an Anonymous Lady (Cologne, 1877) : —

“ The most immortal work of musical art, or rather the one work of a great composer that will live the longest, seems to me, every time I think of it, to be Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavichord. . . . Rich melodic invention is combined with soundest, strongest harmony, growing out of the most organic polyphony. The short pieces which the work contains show the greatest variety of invention and mood, and a perfection of form which has not its equal. Of a genuine instrumental nature, the limpid fluency of the figures is completely adapted to the peculiarity of the instrument. One may be ever so long familiar with the character, the motives and progressions, of all the pieces, and still the infinite art which pervades the whole tone-tissue, and which had become a second nature with the composer, will never lose its charm, — nay, one will always keep discovering new wonders in it. And with what geniality the carrying out of the multifariously interwoven melodies is accommodated to the possibilities of our ten fingers ! In no note are the cramping fetters felt which the hands impose on the free movement of the several parts. There is no second work which offers to the student such a union of the richest, most substantial music with the means for technical development ; it might be called the pianist’s Bible ! That it will ever be surpassed in its way is not probable; the history of art will hardly have a second John Sebastian Bach to point to.

. . . “ It is the lot of many most extraordinary works of art and intellect to be known by only few, and only by their working on those few to operate in wider circles. To how many men of culture are the creations of a Dante, a Michael Angelo, a Spinoza, more than famous names ! Yet what an incalculable influence their works are exercising day by day ! So, not only Mendelssohn and Schumann, but Beethoven also, owe an extraordinary debt to the WellTempered Clavichord. My own master, Hummel, of whom at first sight one would least expect it, placed this, and no other work, before him every time when, in his later years, he wished to practice as pianist and to strengthen himself musically. And how many prominent men might be named who have built themselves up on it !

“ It is not easy to give account of the impression of these pieces, even if one plays them over and over again, as I have done, all through my life. Their effect seems rather to resemble that of the higher plastic works than that usually ascribed to significant tone-poems : repose of soul amid all their wealth of harmony ; exaltation of spirit, without nervous excitement; grateful satisfaction in sounds, without common sensual charm. One feels himself drawn to contemplation, — almost inclined to surrender himself to a certain mystical brooding ; yes, I might say one feels himself morally more pure.” (The same effect, observe, which we have already remarked in speaking of the tranquilizing influence of the chorals !)

If we were called on to select, out of the whole Walhalla of inspired composers, the completest representative of the true musical life and character, we should have to name Sebastian Bach. No human being ever lived more absolutely in the element of music. It was his religion ; the entire surrender of his heart and soul, and all his energies and genius, with a child’s simplicity and with a saint’s devotion, in a perpetual service, to the worship of the Most High. Glowing with deep and tender feeling, illumined from within and full of holy Innigkeit, rich in imagination and invention, exhaustless in thick-coming shapes of fancy and in beautiful ideas, all developing into the most interesting complex webs of polyphonic harmony as if instinctively, and often flowering out into the finest fioriture and delicate vinelike tendrils of embellishment as exquisite as that of any Chopin, his music, when we look back over it as now published, seems to have risen a perpetual incense from his soul. If there were not such heart and fervor in it, would it be worth the while to crown it, from the intellectual standpoint ? But it is quite as remarkable for its impersonality as for its sincere emotional expression. In a certain sense it is a transcendental music. The finite loses itself here in the infinite, the individual in the all. It is common to apply to those thoughts which come of purely thinking, which deal with principles rather than with facts, the term abstract. So, if we look only at the intellectual side of it, at its artistic, subtle, complex evolution, we might call Bach’s abstract music. Through him Harmony herself reveals her secrets. Not to give vent merely to his private feelings, not to serve an outward purpose, not to win money or renown, not to illustrate any words or programme, was much of this deathless music written. There is nothing in it that could have taken the form of painting or of poetry as well. It is music pure and simple, from itself, and by itself, and for itself. In making it he was

In Bach we see how great a mind and character find sphere enough in the mere world of music; how consistent such devotion is with every solid moral quality. His whole soul was absorbed in the most fascinating of the arts of the beautiful, yet, all the while, what selfpossession, what calm wisdom and serenity! To those who think that the musician must be a creature of impulse and excitement, a dreamy, moody, egotistical enthusiast, wholly at the mercy of the tempter, who salutes him in this siren’s voice, robbing him of reason and of self-control as the condition of her favors ; to those who think it ludicrous to seek a model of a manly and true life in a musician, we commend the music and the life of Bach, — a name never mentioned without reverence among his countrymen, a sort of German Homer. He never mistook his calling, and had no misgivings. He fulfilled it with as much sobriety and earnestness of purpose, with a courage as unfaltering, a cheerfulness as beautiful, and with as much unconscious dignity, as any prophet, bard, or hero. He was incapable of superficiality. No taint of what is morbid or weakly sentimental can be found on any page of all his works. Of him preëminently, and of all true sons of harmony, it may be said that their life, their thoughts, their duty, their devotion, their communion, is in music, and they are strangers in an unideal world. To borrow a simile from Jean Paul, “ his spirit was let down into this nether element, inclosed in this diving-bell of the flesh, like a fisher of pearls ; and when he had gathered enough the bell was drawn up, and he is now in a sphere where all is harmony and never-ending praise.”

We have been celebrating the two hundredth anniversary of the birthday of Bach, as well as of Handel. Handel may be regarded as already popular among English-speaking friends of music. But the jubilant occasion loses its significance at once, unless it shall become the starting-point of a new impulse, greatly needed, to a more constant, intimate acquaintance with the more practicable works of Bach. What without affectation might be called a Bach revival, a Bach culture, could but have an elevating, wholesome, steadying influence, in this day of multifarious and distracting novelties which lead the incipient taste for music helplessly astray. We cannot expect musicians to compose again in just the style and school of Bach and Handel. Nevertheless, to know them well, to hear them often, and to love them is to keep the most divine ideal of the art forever burning in Art’s sacred temple. That will be our best protection from the superficiality, the dissipation, the vainglory, of new things which astonish and intoxicate far more than they edify and strengthen. Where we may end in music no one can foretell; but it does matter much where we begin. Rising generations of music-lovers have to beware of brilliant fashions of the day. In literature there have been times when callow students have begun their reading just when Byron, Bulwer,

or some Zola even, chanced to be in the ascendant, before knowing Milton, Scott, or Hawthorne. How will it be in music with the youth whose first enthusiasm is for Wagner, ere he has ever worshiped at the shrine of Bach and Handel, Mozart, Beethoven, or Schubert? Love Bach first, and Wagner will not harm you, while he may teach you something. As a pertinent conclusion, therefore, summing up the moral of this lesson, we will cite the following passage from a letter written by Mendelssohn to the committee of the Lower Rhine Festival of 1838, accepting the conductorship: —

“ The more successful the previous Cologne Festival was with regard to the arrangement of the pieces, especially in Handel’s work with the organ, the more important it seems to me to have at least one piece in the programme by which this year’s festival may be distinguished from others, and by means of which progress may, as far as possible, be manifested. For this purpose I consider it absolutely necessary to have the name of Sebastian Bach in the programme, if only for one short piece ; for it is certainly high time that at these festivals, on which the name of Handel has shed such lustre, another immortal master, who is in no one point inferior to any master, and in many points superior to all, should no longer be forgotten. The same scruples which exist in opposition to this must also have existed in former years with regard to the works of Handel; and you are all grateful now to those who, disregarding these obstacles, revealed to you such treasures of sublimity and elevation.”

“ Progress ! ” Yes, that is the kind of progress in our musical enjoyment, culture, and appreciation which it most behooves us also to resume with a new energy to-day. Nothing else can place the future of our music on so sound and solid a foundation.

J. S. Dwight.