Johann Sebastian Bach was born at Eisenach on the 21st March, 1685.4 The Thuringian town had been a home of the Bachs ever since the two sons of Johann Bach had found their wives there. Two of the family, and no less men than Johann Christoph and Johann Bernhard, had successively filled the post of organist in the town church. The death of his parents, however, before he had completed his tenth year removed Sebastian from the surroundings that seemed so fitted for the training of his genius. Already he was his father’s apt pupil on the violin, and the music which was the daily occupation of the house was not lost upon the eager ears of the child. He passed from Eisenach into the care of his brother Johann Christoph, his elder by fourteen years, who was organist in the little town of Ohrdruf; and it was here, in one of the most beautiful of the valleys of Thuringia, that the rest of his boyhood was passed. The impression of this country of soft hills and warm wooded valleys became a part of Sebastian’s nature and still lives in his music. The least attentive listener cannot mistake the inclination to a pastoral treatment which is continually appearing not in the professed Pastorales, as in the Christmas Oratorio, merely, but throughout the compass of Bach’s works; still more striking is his vein of idyllic melody, peculiarly obvious in the fine gold into which he transmuted the baser metal of the Italian aria, to illuminate his church cantatas.
At Ohrdruf Bach lived until he was fifteen, learning the clavichord from his brother, who was a pupil of Pachelbel, and apparently exciting his jealousy by the facility of his progress. A story of him tells us that he once coveted a book containing compositions by several of the great German masters, Froberger, Bruhns, Pachelbel, and Buxtehude; but the obtuseness of the elder brother forbade his venturing into studies too high for him. So the boy went every moonlit night to the cupboard in which it was shut away, and, thrusting his hand into the lattice, rolled up the volume and stealthily made his copy of it. However, when the deed was discovered, this labour of half a year was taken from him and not restored until after his brother’s death.
If Bach’s musical discipline at home left much for him to find out by himself, his education at the Ohrdruf Lyceum proceeded fairly enough and in music excellently. He learned Latin and the Greek Testament, with a little arithmetic and rhetoric. Of these subjects indeed Latin only had any pretence to thoroughness, and, although its range of reading did not extend beyond Cicero and Cornelius Nepos, it included a good deal of composition both in prose and verse. Very different was the musical instruction of the Ohrdruf school, which qualified the boys to furnish all the choral music of the church, besides singing motets and concerts at weddings and funerals.
Five years of this routine, and Bach left Ohrdruf. There was little more to be learned from his brother, who, with a family of his own, was no doubt glad to be rid of his charge. Accordingly he travelled, with a comrade of the school, to Lueneburg, and the lads together joined the choir of the MichaËlisschule. It seems that Thuringian boys were in special request for their musical training, as well as for the remarkable quality of their voices; and Bach’s proficiency on the violin and clavichord, added to his fine treble, placed him at once in the select Matin choir.
Lueneburg at this time enjoyed a wide repute throughout North and Middle Germany for the goodness of its musical training. There were two schools belonging to the churches of S. Michael and S. John, and the rivalry was so keen between the scholars that, when in winter time they perambulated the town—like the rude manner of our waits—it was necessary to mark out the road which each should take to avoid an unseemly wrangle. This custom of itinerant choirs, however bad for the singers’ voices, was of service in quickening the popular sympathy with music; and the rivalry itself was useful in stimulating the ardour of the colleges. The principal work of the school of S. Michael’s was to prepare the music for the choral services of its church, two on Sundays, with motets and anthems, and, above all, high services with orchestra on the eighteen feast-days of the Lutheran kalendar. These formed the business of Bach’s life for three years. Some employment in playing or in the training of the choir must have occupied him after his voice changed, for he continued to take his commons at the free board until 1703.
All this time his general education was carried on much after the Ohrdruf pattern, with a rather wider circle of Latin authors, the Greek Testament, divinity, and logic. Higher than this the course did not go; and Bach had not the means, if he had the wish, to engage private teaching there, or to proceed to one of the universities. We shall see hereafter that he obtained an exemption from the classical work of the Thomasschule at Leipzig. At Lueneburg poverty conspired with his natural impulse to keep him closely to the profession as well as to the study of music. It was the period of his apprenticeship in the three branches in which he was afterwards to achieve a supreme excellence. At the MichaËlisschule he gained an intimate knowledge of the capacities of choral singing; he worked at the organ; and he became acquainted with the lighter instrumental music lately brought to Germany from France.
The organ claimed his chief and unremitting labour, and more than once did he journey to Hamburg to attend the performances of Reincke, the father of North German organists. Old Reincke, as he is affectionately known—he lived well into his hundredth year and died in 1722—was a pupil of Sweelinck and one of the channels by which the learning and method of the great Amsterdam organist was diffused through the entire length of Northern Germany. From the dexterous and graceful toccatas which still attest Reincke’s powers Bach probably derived little; the principal reward of his Hamburg visits was the insight he acquired into the scope of organ composition, a lesson which he so worked out as to receive (according to a well-known story) the honourable testimony of the master himself. I thought, said Reincke, when, just before the old man’s death, Bach elaborated before him the chorale An WasserflÜssen Babylons in the true organ style, I thought that this art was dead, but now I see that it lives in you.
Bach stood in a closer connexion with a pupil of Reincke, Georg Boehm, organist at S. John’s Church, Lueneburg, and also a distinguished composer. In chamber-music as well as in the organ Bach learned much from him, but more in the manner of instrumental treatment and in the theory of composition, than by any direct influence on his writings. At this time also he made acquaintance with French music at Celle, where it had been naturalised forty years since and was now in its prime at the court of Duke Georg Wilhelm and his Huguenot consort ElÉonore d’Esmiers.
A further training in instrumental music was afforded by the post which Bach held for some months after leaving Lueneburg, in 1703, in the band of Prince Johann Ernst at Weimar. But he could not long be content with the limited scope of a court violinist; and a chance visit to Arnstadt, where his grand-uncle Heinrich had founded a tradition of organ playing, but, dying eleven years before, had left no worthy successor, offered to Bach the opportunity of following out his special bent. An organ had recently been built in the new church of the town, but the burghers had not yet succeeded in finding a musician who satisfied their notion of the importance of the post. The man they had engaged they watched so jealously that he was not even trusted with the keys of his loft: one of them was deputed to receive them back from him as soon as playing was over. It is significant of the skill which Bach had already won, that he no sooner tried the organ—it does not appear, as a candidate—than the consistory welcomed in this lad of eighteen the musical heir of their honoured town organist, dismissed the incapable Boerner, and forcibly installed Bach at a triple salary augmented out of the municipal chest. On the 14th August, 1703, he took the solemn pledge of diligence and faithfulness and all that appertaineth to an honourable servant and organist before God and the worshipful Corporation.
The brilliancy of Bach’s reception at Arnstadt was transient. The New Church was a sort of chapel-of-ease to the principal church of the town; and Bach was only entrusted with the training of a small, partly voluntary, choir. His duties accordingly engrossed but a couple of hours on three days of the week, and the townspeople were well satisfied if he did not fall short in them. In this languid atmosphere he found no incitement to convince the town, by his performances, how far his hopes and ambitions exceeded those of the ordinary organist. He seems in time to have been content with a bare fulfilment of his duties, or hardly that, and to have concentrated himself in his private studies. After two years the respite of a month’s leave enabled him to visit Luebeck, the home of the illustrious organist Buxtehude; and hither a long walk of fifty leagues brought him in November, 1705.
As Reincke was a Dutchman, so Dietrich Buxtehude, who did as much, on his own lines, to establish the North German school of organists, was a Dane. He had settled in Luebeck in 1660, and the enthusiasm with which his art was attended was such that his influence remained in the town until the present century. One of the causes of his popularity was the custom which he innovated of having concerts, with a full orchestra of uncommon strength, in his church. A deeper reason was his consummate command over the organ and the important advances he made in composition.
Buxtehude stands apart from the organ composers of the rest of Germany, in the greater technical elaboration of his works. In spirit he has a single point of alliance with the organists of Southern Germany, in his want of sympathy with, his estrangement from, the chorale, in which the music of Middle Germany had its life. The melodic richness which this training in popular music developed in Pachelbel and Johann Christoph Bach was lacking in Buxtehude. His strength lay in pure instrumental music and was displayed specially in fugue-writing, to the development of which he contributed much, both in the combination of several themes in a fugue and in the extended function he assigned to the pedal. The form is conceived with breadth and freedom, the voices are melodiously worked together, and the harmonies are unusual in their originality, often so unusual as to seem merely discordant, harsh, restless. For if the works of Buxtehude strike one first by the massiveness, they strike no less by their inequality, their strange, erratic transitions from a sombre, often tempestuous, mood to one of tenderness and pathos.
It was at the feet of this rugged genius that Bach sat for three months; and the impress left upon his mind was distinct and durable. His fastidious censorship in later years allowed very little of his Arnstadt work to survive. A single church cantata comes down to us in the shape to which a careful revision at Leipzig reduced it5; but several instrumental works let us see how far he had advanced in composition, and two organ fugues,6 at least, how much he needed the education of these months at Luebeck to complete the studies hitherto influenced by the school of Pachelbel. The subjects in them are ingeniously constructed, but the entire compositions are deficient in relief and coherence. They shew the earnest spirit in which he worked, but also that this earnestness acted as a weight upon the freedom and brightness of the result. Outwardly he retires under the established musical forms of his time, but even now his individuality forces itself into view. An instance of his technical immaturity is afforded by his treatment of the pedal, which, according to the universal custom except in Northern Germany, Bach used merely occasionally, limiting it to the production of sustained notes or at the most of slow progressions.7 Buxtehude, on the other hand, changed it from a capricious accessory into a real support to the manuals and often entrusted it with a brilliant solo part. In this important element of organ composition, his Luebeck visit opened a new road to Bach and a road which he was not slow to follow.8
The clavichord works that occupied his leisure at Arnstadt seem, to judge from the few specimens that have come down to us,9 to have been chiefly of that sort of free fugue, sometimes with a humorous design, to which it was the custom to give the name of capriccio. In one of them, a sonata (No. 216, p. 12), a fugue of the most melodious conception is followed by a capriccio founded on the cackle of a hen; Thema all’ Imitatio Gallina Cucca is the macaronic title. Another (No. 208, p. 30) portrays the feelings and the circumstances attending the departure of his brother—sopra la lontananza del suo fratello dilettissimo—Johann Jakob, who went as hautboy-player in the Swedish guard of Charles XII. We have the sad gathering of the family, and their recitals of the perils that may befall the traveller in a strange land. They seek in vain to stay him, and, finding him resolute, join in a general lamento—a fine composition, by the way, written upon two ground-basses, and tenderly pathetic—ere they take leave. When the slow fare-*well is ended, the postilion makes his appearance, and the sorrow of the departure is exchanged for the lively bustle of the road, the picture ending gaily with the post-horn deftly worked into a fugue.10 This curiously elementary form of what it is the fashion to call programme-music may appear to have been suggested by the fantastic compositions of Couperin and others, which Bach heard at Celle. But, in this regard at least, the old German Froberger was another Couperin. He is recorded to have written a suite depicting the Journey of the Count of Thurn and the Peril that came to him on the Rhine, plainly delivered before eye and ear. Probably, however, Bach’s immediate reference is to a work that had recently been published by a musician whom in after-life he was to succeed as cantor at Leipzig. Johann Kuhnau’s Biblische Historien are scenes from the history of the children of Israel presented in a series of sonatas for the clavichord. To judge by their contents it is likely that Bach took the idea of this capriccio from them, but it is significant of his insight into the unsatisfying nature of the peculiar style, that he never returned to it, unless indeed we admit a kindred basis in the rare examples of the imitation of outward emotion, which appear in his Passion music.
When Bach returned home from Luebeck, in February, 1706, his month’s holiday having expanded into three, he not unnaturally encountered the displeasure of the authorities. Summoned before the consistory, he excused himself on the ground that he had been to Luebeck with the intent to perfect himself in certain matters touching his art, and, having provided a substitute for the time, he was under no misgivings as to the discharge of his duties at Arnstadt. But heavier charges lay behind. He was to be rebuked (to quote the pedantry of the official record) for that he hath heretofore made sundry perplexing variations and imported divers strange harmonies, in such wise that the congregation was thereby confounded. In the future, continues the Minute, when he will introduce a tonus peregrinus, he is to sustain the same and not to fall incontinent upon another, or even, as he hath been wont, to play a tonus contrarius. A witness added that the organist Bach hath at the first played too tediously; howbeit, on notice received from the superintendent, he hath straightway fallen into the other extreme and made the music too short. Evidently he had brought things into a bad way, for the next charge is, that he refused to train the choir. Bach retorted by demanding a conductor. He was allowed time to consider whether he would comply with the order of the Board or leave them to appoint some one to fill his place. Under the circumstances it shows a surprisingly gentle temper in the consistory, possibly a just appreciation of their organist’s great, however capricious, excellence, that they waited near nine months before they repeated, with some severity, the demand for an explanation. Bach agreed to furnish one; but the document has unfortunately not been preserved. It is evident, however, from the indifference with which he treated the consistory, as well as from his unwillingness to fulfil the conditions of his post, that he had already decided to resign it on the first opportunity.
The opportunity was not long coming: before the end of the year the organist’s place at S. Blasius’ Church, Muehlhausen, fell vacant. A succession of distinguished musicians and the various eminence of the last holder of the post, Johann Georg Ahle—perhaps also the fame of the poet’s crown with which the Emperor had decorated him—made the office an exceptionally coveted one. Among the various candidates, however, it was adjudged apparently without debate to Bach, who was even requested to make his own terms as to the salary he should receive. He modestly stipulated the same sum as he had been allowed at Arnstadt—it was indeed considerably in excess of Ahle’s salary—together with the accustomed dues of corn, wood, and fish, to be delivered without charge at his door. He asked also for a cart to bring his goods to his new house.11 These trifling details are oddly characteristic of the man, and remind us of a letter he wrote long after to a relative, thanking him for a cask of wine, but quoting the expense of carriage, and begging that the costly present might not be repeated. Just at present he had a special reason for thrift. He left Arnstadt by the end of June, 1707; in the following October, the 17th, he was married at a village near Arnstadt, to his cousin Maria Barbara, daughter of the great Gehren organist, Johann Michael Bach. A single year after his appointment he accepted the more ambitious post of organist in the Ducal Chapel at Weimar.
His short stay at Muehlhausen had been pleasant and useful to him. He entered upon his work, which was purely that of organist, with ardour, and—in contrast with his lax performance of his duties at Arnstadt—even took a share in the training of the choir, although there was a cantor as well. The only drawback was that the pastor of his church was a strenuous pietist, one of those puritans who found, not a spiritual gain, but a worldly intrusion upon the sacredness of divine worship, in those church cantatas which it was Bach’s work to create anew. The organist held to a close friendship with his pastor’s hot antagonist at the Church of S. Mary, and seems to have gone into the neighbouring villages whenever he wished to produce music upon which he could not venture in his own church. This can hardly have been, however, the principal reason of his leaving Muehlhausen so quickly as he did. The charges of married life made his stipend barely a maintenance, even without a family. He had had enough of the subordination of a town organist. But most of all he must have been stimulated by the renown of the music at Weimar, with which he had become acquainted in an inferior capacity four years before, and the wide field it promised for the cultivation of his art in all its departments. On the 25th June, 1708, he respectfully submitted his resignation to the consistory. Their answer, requesting that his departure should not hinder his continuing to supervise the repair of the church organ with which they had entrusted him, is evidence of the good terms on which they separated.
For the next fifteen years Bach stands in a circle of greater honour, removed from the small troubles of a town official. His return to a burgher’s life in 1723—and at Leipzig he was never free from the harass of the wiseacres of his consistory—may surprise us, unless we conclude that the experience of his intervening years had taught him that if the delights of life came more liberally in the atmosphere of a court, a great town was after all the place for him who would live laborious days.
