Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750)
At the time of Johann Sebastian Bach’s birth in Eisenach, the region of Thuringia in central Germany was a part of the Holy Roman Empire, a loose federation of cities and small states that encompassed Germany, Austria, Switzerland, northern Italy, and parts of Poland and Czechoslovakia. Within this region, musicians found employment in many functions: Stadtpfeifers performed music for civic functions; organists provided accompaniment for church services, improvising preludes and other incidental music as necessary and testing new organs; Kapellmeisters oversaw the chapels in the princely courts, selecting and training performers and composing such music as the court demanded for both entertainment and worship; and Kantors undertook responsibility for the musical education and often all other musical activities in a city.
Bach’s family included musicians employed in nearly all of these capacities. His older brother Johann Christoph, a church organist, gave Sebastian his first keyboard lessons after he took responsibility for the child following their father’s death in 1695. Sebastian spent the years 1700-02 in the north of Germany at the Michaelis School of Lüneburg, where he first learned the arts of musical composition and organ playing. After returning to the south, he received his first steady employment as an organist at the St. Blasius Church at Mühlhausen, during which time he composed his earliest cantatas.
From 1708-17, Bach was employed as a chamber musician, concertmaster, and organist at the court of the Duke of Saxe-Weimar, who encouraged him to write organ music and cantatas. When the duke refused to consider Bach for the position of Kapellmeister in 1717, the composer secured a similar post in the service of Prince Leopold of Anhalt-Köthen. The young prince was a skilled player of the violin, the bass viol, and harpsichord and employed eighteen instrumentalists at his court. The situation was advantageous for the composition of secular entertainment. During the six years that he spent at Köthen, Bach produced large amounts of orchestral, chamber, and harpsichord music, including the Brandenburg Concerti, keyboard inventions, concerto transcriptions, suites, and the first volume of the Well-Tempered Clavier.
Bach was one of many musicians who applied in 1723 for the post of Kantor at the St. Thomas School in Leipzig, which included responsibility for both civic music and all of the music for the city’s four largest churches. When Georg Philipp Telemann, the best-known German musician at that time, declined the position, Bach was hired to the job he would hold until his death. Later, he accepted the post of director of the collegium musicum, an amateur society founded by Telemann in 1702 that presented public concerts of secular music. During his twenty-three years of service to the city of Leipzig, he wrote hundreds of cantatas, at least five passions, several masses, three oratorios, and a large amount of instrumental music, including most of his published didactic keyboard music.
After Bach’s death in 1750, his manuscripts, most of which were unpublished, passed into the hands of his sons and widow. Changes in musical taste toward the end of his life left his work unappreciated. As Johann Adolph Scheibe noted in 1737, “This man would be the admiration of whole nations if he…did not take away the natural element in his pieces by giving them a turgid and confused style, if he did not darken their beauty with an excess of art.” Composers in Europe, if they knew of him at all, knew only his half dozen or so published keyboard works.
It was Baron von Swieten who introduced Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier to Viennese music circles in the second half of the eighteenth century, and both Mozart and Beethoven studied his fugal style. Felix Mendelssohn’s performance of the St. Matthew Passion at the Berlin Singakademie in 1829 was the first of many nineteenth-century revivals of Bach’s choral works. Most nineteenth-century performances of Bach’s choral works emphasized large performing groups; Mendelssohn’s choir for the St. Matthew Passion was around 160, at least five times the total number of singers available to Bach at the Thomaskirche. The formation of the Bach-Gesellschaft (Bach Society) in 1850 eventually led to the publication of the first complete edition of Bach’s works and the first critical biography by Philipp Spitta in 1889. Since the 1950s, an increasing number of performing organizations, among them the Boulder Bach Festival, have concentrated on producing historically informed performances using period instruments when possible, appropriately sized forces, and conducted as Bach would have, either from the harpsichord or the violin.
The Concerto
Bach’s concerti may be grouped by his place of employment. He first began studying the concerto during his service to Duke of Weimar (1708-17) by transcribing concertos of other composers into works for solo harpsichord or organ. The transformed works were most likely performed for courtly entertainment. Among the pieces arranged were at least three concertos from Vivaldi’s L’estro armonico (1711) as well as works by young Duke Johann Ernst and other minor German composers. Although these works are not original, through the process of transcription Bach learned the features of the Italian concerto and the concertato style that dominated his later works. During his service at Köthen, he began writing original concerti, and many of these are concerti grossi, featuring a small group of soloists, known as the concertino, rather than a single instrument.
The third period of Bach’s development began in 1729 when he became director of the collegium musicum of Leipzig, a position he held nearly continuously until 1741. This organization comprised students, town musicians, amateurs, and culturally-minded citizens who gathered once a week to hold concerts in the popular coffee houses and gardens of Leipzig. No programs of the collegium have ever been found, but during this time Bach transcribed many of his Köthen concerti, as well as works by other composers, into concerti for one to four harpsichords.
Understandably, Bach’s concerti show influences from Vivaldi’s works, the most obvious being their three-movement form. Additionally, outer movements are structured as a concertato dialogue between the ripieno (the whole orchestra) and the soloist(s). Ritornello form, in which a ritornello theme opens and closes each movement as well as setting off the soloist’s episodes, is usually present in these movements. Since the soloist’s episodes may not be thematically related, the ritornello serves as a unifying force. While the virtuosic skills of the soloists are always aptly displayed in the first movement, and expressly highlighted in the third movement, the middle movements often contain expressive cantabile melodies.
The harpsichord concertos of Johann Sebastian Bach are of great significance in the history of European art music; however, their importance does not lie in their musical content as much as in Bach’s choice of the harpsichord as a solo instrument. For Bach, the compositions were but a small part of the many works that he produced to fulfill the demands of his employment. As passed on to the next generation of composers through the hands of his sons Carl Philipp Emanuel and Johann Christian, the concept of the keyboard concerto initiated a new genre of composition that became a favorite of the composers of the Viennese Classical School.
Sacred Vocal Works
Sacred German dramatic music of the 1700s, as epitomized by the works of Bach, is one of many forms of music influenced by the musical innovations that occurred in northern Italy nearly a century earlier. Bach’s sacred works are characterized by a common set of elements: movements dominated by a single musical idea or Affekt; a mixture of Biblical text and newly authored poetry; and the selection of instruments appropriate to either the text or the occasion for which the work was composed. Bach’s passions, although stylistically similar to his cantatas, are larger works that tell the story of Christ’s crucifixion. A brief historical introduction will provide the perspective necessary to fully appreciate these works.
From the late 1500s, groups of Italian scholars of classical Greek culture began to decry the predominant renaissance forms of a cappella polyphonic music: the mass, motet, chanson, and madrigal. In their place, they proposed a new type of vocal setting called monody, in which a solo vocal part would be supported by unobtrusive accompaniment. In such music, they argued, the melody would be freed to recapture expressive power described by Plato and Aristotle. With the advent of the dramatic monodic style came the birth of recitative and aria that enabled the creation of opera, oratorio, and cantata. Early cantatas were largely secular and, as seen in the more than 600 cantatas of Alessandro Scarlatti (1660-1725), often comprised little more than two recitatives followed by arias.
A second Italian innovation that affected the development of the cantata was the principle of concertato, or concerted music, in which contrasting solo, choral, and instrumental sections are placed side by side in a single movement. The use of concertato effects is extremely striking in the compositions of Andrea Gabrieli and his nephew Giovanni, organists at the Church of St. Mark in Venice from 1566 to 1612. The unusual physical design of St. Mark’s, featuring multiple choir lofts, was especially conducive to sectional contrasts in dynamics, instrumentation, and spatial separation. Although this principle is a familiar feature of the concerto in which an instrument or small group of instruments is contrasted with the tutti or whole orchestra, early Baroque music labeled “concerto” was usually church music for voices and instruments. This style of music was common in Germanic lands, and most of Bach’s predecessors wrote sacred concertos. Bach’s sacred dramatic music differs from its Italian relatives by the incorporation of numerous choruses and the variety of texts: sections of the Bible, Psalms, expressive poetic texts, and the texts of chorales (Lutheran hymns). The personal nature of the inserted texts brings the worshippers into the drama, projecting both the individual’s meditations as arias and the congregation’s reactions as chorales.
While cantatas were a regular feature of the Lutheran Sunday service, oratorios and passions were composed for the special days of Good Friday, Christmas, and Ascension Day. The passions, because they tell the story of Christ’s death, are Bach’s largest creations in this style. Although he created two passions using the gospel of John, and one each using the texts of Matthew, Luke, and Mark, only one St. John Passion and the St. Matthew Passion have survived in their entirety. Sacred works in Latin form a smaller part of the composer’s output; the most significant of these works are the Magnificat, the B minor Mass, and the four short masses, or missae breves, listed in the list of his complete works as originating from 1738-39 and stemming from adaptations of previously composed works.
