Johann Sebastian Bach by Herbert F. Peyser

Author:Herbert F. Peyser
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Bach, Johann Sebastian, 1685-1750
Published: 2015-05-16T16:00:00+00:00

Bach’s Greater Work

Bach settled in Leipzig at the age of thirty-eight. He remained there the rest of his life. True, he came and went, and he made journeys of one sort or another, but they were never far distant or protracted. In Leipzig he created his grandest, his most colossal, and also his profoundest and subtlest works. His duties were incredibly numerous and often heart-breakingly heavy. He was responsible, it has been said, “to all and to none.” Again and again he had the rector of the St. Thomas School, the city council, the church Consistory, and yet others about his ears. He had to look after the musical services in four churches, two of them the most important in the town. Under exasperating conditions he had to teach turbulent and ruffianly pupils. He had to combat official ill will and intrigue. For the performances he was obliged to conduct he had vocal and instrumental forces that strike us as laughably inadequate and were in numberless cases grossly unskilled. The demands on his physical and spiritual strength must have been appalling. Yet Bach appears to have had the resources and the resistance of a giant. We know that over and again his temper, his obstinate nature and inborn pugnacity were tried to the uttermost. But in the face of all irritations he was earning enough, his home life was comfortable, he met and entertained artists, he had the satisfaction of knowing that his sons could enjoy the educational advantages of Leipzig, and he gradually gathered about him a company of greatly gifted young students and devoted disciples.

In the course of years he shifted some of his most unsympathetic duties to other shoulders. How he could otherwise have written the gigantic amount of music he did is an unanswerable question. For consider: he came to Leipzig the composer of about thirty church cantatas. When he died in 1750 he had produced there 265 more. Of this staggering total (295) 202 have come down to us. As if this were not enough (these cantatas, incidentally, were week-to-week obligations), his years at Leipzig account for many secular cantatas, six motets, five masses (including the titanic one in B minor), the Passions according to St. John and St. Matthew (not to mention lost ones), the Christmas Oratorio, the resplendent Magnificat, the Easter and Ascension oratorios, besides clavier works like the Italian Concerto, the Goldberg Variations, the second book of the Well-Tempered Clavier, and an incredible mass of other things.

The rector of St. Thomas’ School during Bach’s first years in Leipzig was Johann Heinrich Ernesti, with whom Bach’s relations were cordial enough, though the rector was a slipshod disciplinarian. Matters remained pleasant enough under Johann Gesner, but presently the latter left St. Thomas to assume a more profitable post at Göttingen. His successor, Johann August Ernesti, quickly proceeded to stroke Bach’s fur the wrong way by declaring that altogether too much attention was given to the study of music. “So you want to be a pot-house fiddler,” he used to say to youths he found practising the violin.

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