Background, style, influences.

Bach’s output, unparalleled in its encyclopedic character, embraces practically every musical form of his time except opera. The accepted genres were significantly added to by Bach (notably with the harpsichord concerto and chamber music with obbligato keyboard); further, he opened up new dimensions in virtually every department of creative work to which he turned, in format, density and musical quality, and also in technical demands (works such as the St Matthew Passion and the B minor Mass were to remain unique in the history of music for a long time to come). At the same time Bach’s creative production was inextricably bound up with the external factors of his places of work and his employers, as was normal in his time. The composition dates of the various repertories thus reflect Bach’s priorities in his various professional appointments; for instance, most of the organ works were composed while he was active as an organist at Arnstadt, Mühlhausen and Weimar, whereas most of the vocal works belong to the period of his Kantorate at Leipzig. But Bach’s production was by no means wholly dependent on the duties attaching to his office at the time. Thus during his Leipzig period he found time to produce a body of keyboard and chamber music to meet his requirements for concerts, for advertisement, for teaching and other purposes. And his career may be seen as a steady and logical process of development: from organist to Konzertmeister, then to Kapellmeister, and finally to Kantor and director of music – a continual expansion of the scope of his work and responsibilities. This is no matter of chance. Bach chose his appointments, and chose the moment to make each move. If he was unable to accomplish what he required (as was often the case in Leipzig), he was capable of turning his attention elsewhere in pursuit of his creative aims. Bach was a surprisingly emancipated and self-confident artist for his time.

The uncertainty about the dating of Bach’s early works, with so little help in the form of source materials, makes it difficult to reconstruct and assess the beginnings of his work as a composer. It is to be supposed that he started to compose while under the tutelage of his elder brother in Ohrdruf, but although he took no formal lessons with an established composer, as Handel did with Zachow, it would be mistaken to call him self-taught as a composer, for the significance of his belonging to a long-standing family of professional musicians should not be underestimated. Composing was probably overshadowed by instrumental playing in Ambrosius Bach’s family; this must to some extent have applied to the young Johann Sebastian, and probably he devoted more attention to developing his skills as an instrumentalist, especially as an organist, than to composition studies. But the art of improvisation – in those days inseparably bound up with practice on the instrument – would at the very least prepare the ground for his work as a composer. This reciprocity between performing and composing is reflected in the unruly virtuoso and improvisatory elements in Bach’s early works.

As composers who influenced the young Bach, C.P.E. Bach cited (in 1775, in letters to Forkel) Froberger, Kerll, Pachelbel, Frescobaldi, Fischer, Strungk, certain French composers, Bruhns, Buxtehude, Reincken and Böhm – almost exclusively keyboard composers; C.P.E. Bach also said that Bach formed his style through his own efforts and developed his fugal technique basically through private study and reflection. In his letter of resignation from Mühlhausen Bach himself wrote of having procured a good supply of the very best vocal compositions, suggesting that in vocal music too he was decisively stimulated by the study of other composers’ music. Bach came into personal contact with the last three of the composers named by C.P.E.; there was no question of any teacher–pupil relationship. No record survives of what works he collected at Mühlhausen, but they might have included Keiser’s St Mark Passion, a six-part mass by Peranda and an italianate chamber concerto by Biffi, for his early autograph copies of all these survive, demonstrating the breadth of his knowledge of the repertory. As later influences, C.P.E. Bach named Fux, Caldara, Handel, Keiser, Hasse, the two Grauns, Telemann, Zelenka and Benda. This list, though certainly less representative than the earlier one, suggests that Bach’s main interests still lay in his great contemporaries, whose music he not only heard but also studied in transcripts. With them he abandoned his one-sided attention to the organists among older composers, but his interest in the retrospective style represented by Fux and Caldara, complemented by his enthusiasm (mentioned by Birnbaum, 1737) for Palestrina and Lotti, is notable, and is borne out by tendencies in his music from the mid-1730s. Clearly he also became interested in, and ready to follow, more recent stylistic trends, particularly in respect of the music of Hasse, the Graun brothers and Benda (for example in the ‘Christe eleison’ of what was to become the B minor Mass) and in such works as the Peasant Cantata, the Goldberg Variations and the Musical Offering). Mizler, in an article of 1739 on Bach’s cantata style, referring to the Scheibe–Birnbaum controversy, mentioned a work (bwv Anh.13, lost) composed ‘perfectly in accordance with the newest taste’ (‘vollkommen nach dem neuesten Geschmack eingerichtet’).

Curiously, C.P.E. Bach’s list of the masters his father had ‘loved and studied’ contains no mention of Vivaldi and the two Marcellos, or of Corelli, Torelli and other late Baroque Italian composers. Forkel compensated for this by his emphasis on the importance of Vivaldi’s concertos, without citing any particular source to support his claim. Indeed, it was Vivaldi who exercised what was probably the most lasting and distinctive influence on Bach from about 1712–13, when a wide range of the Italian repertory became available to the Weimar court orchestra. Bach drew from Vivaldi his clear melodic contours, the sharp outlines of his outer parts, his motoric and rhythmic conciseness, his unified motivic treatment and his clearly articulated modulation schemes. His confrontation with Vivaldi’s music in 1713–14 provoked what was certainly the strongest single development towards his own personal style. In Forkel's words, Vivaldi ‘taught him to think musically’; his musical language acquired its enduring quality and unmistakable identity through his coupling of italianisms with complex counterpoint, marked by busy interweavings of the inner voices as well as harmonic refinement. It is impossible to describe Bach’s personal style by means of simple formulae; but the process of adaptation and mutation that can be felt throughout his output seems to have taken a particularly characteristic turn at that point in 1713–14 whose principal landmarks are the Orgel-Büchlein and the first Weimar series of cantatas. His adaptation and integration of various contemporary and retrospective styles represent his systematic attempt at shaping and perfecting his personal musical language (‘unlike that of any other composer’, according to C.P.E. Bach) and expanding its structural possibilities and its expressive powers.

An essential component of Bach’s style can be seen in his combination of solid compositional craftsmanship with instrumental and vocal virtuosity. The technical demands made by his music reflect his own prowess as an instrumentalist. Bach’s own versatility – his early involvement in singing (it is not known whether he was later active as a singer), and his experience as a keyboard player, violinist and viola player – was partly responsible for the fact that demanding technical standards became the norm for every type of composition he wrote. This led to Scheibe’s famous criticism: ‘Since he judges according to his own fingers, his pieces are extremely difficult to play; for he demands that singers and instrumentalists should be able to do with their throats and instruments whatever he can play on the keyboard. But this is impossible’. It makes no essential difference at what level these demands are made (for instance between the Inventions and the Goldberg Variations, the four-part chorale and the choral fugue); everywhere Bach’s requirements are the antithesis of conventional simplicity. Yet technical virtuosity never predominates; it becomes a functional element within the composition as a whole. Bach’s impulse towards integration is also manifested in the typically instrumental idiom in which he cast his vocal parts. He thus produced in his music for voices and instruments a homogeneous language of considerable density. Even so, he differentiated between instrumentally and (less often) vocally dominated types of writing; but even in such vocally dominated pieces as the Credo of the B minor Mass he maintained both the density and the uncompromising, yet appropriate technical standard. It is of course significant, as regards both matters of technique and the quality of his music in general, that, as far as we know, he wrote almost exclusively for himself, his own ensembles and his own pupils, and never for a broader public (let alone a non-professional one). This partly explains why his music – unlike, say, Telemann’s or Handel’s – was disseminated within unusually narrow confines.

Bach, §III: (7) Johann Sebastian Bach

Cantatas.

About two-fifths of Bach’s sacred cantatas must be considered lost; of the secular cantatas, more are lost than survive. Thus it is difficult to draw firm conclusions about the evolution of the cantata in Bach’s hands, even though the surviving repertory is considerable and roughly proportional to the number of cantatas composed at each place where he worked.

The earliest surviving cantatas, and probably Bach’s first, date from the Mühlhausen and perhaps even the Arnstadt period; they include – as the earliest of all – nos.150, 131, 106 and 196 (c1707). The best, in both form and content, are nos.106 and 71. The latter is especially sumptuous, and its appearance in print bore the young composer’s reputation far beyond the boundaries of Mühlhausen. The early vocal works belong almost without exception to the category of ‘organist’s music’, that is they are pieces composed for particular occasions, not regular cantatas for the Sundays and feast days in the church calendar. Nor do they conform to the type established as modern by Neumeister in 1701, but they rely closely on central German tradition. Their texts are mostly taken from the Bible or the chorale repertory; freely conceived poetry is rare (found only in nos.71, 106 and 150). Musically they consist of a succession of different formal types – concerto, motet, (strophic) aria and chorale – adapted and combined to suit the composer’s purpose. Bach did not call them cantatas: as a rule he reserved that term for the solo cantata of the Italian type (like nos.211 and 212), calling his sacred cantatas ‘Concerto’, and in earlier works ‘Motetto’, sometimes ‘Dialogus’ (depending on the text) or simply ‘Music’.

Bach’s early cantatas are distinguished from their central German precursors, which must have been familiar to him from his upbringing, by his tendency to give each movement a unified structure and his development of a broad formal scheme. He found the means to unify movements that for the most part do not function as closed numbers by reducing motivic material (in the solo movements). Reacting against haphazard sequential form, with its danger of formal dissolution, he began to use strictly symmetrical sequences of movements to underpin the overall cyclic structure: for example, chorus–solos–chorus–solos–chorus (no. 106).

During Bach’s early Weimar years, organ music must have dominated his output; on the other hand, the letters written in 1712–13 by his pupil at Weimar, Johann Philipp Kräuter, show that Bach encouraged him to write cantatas. 1713 is the date, too, of what seems to be Bach’s first secular cantata, the Jagd-Kantate no.208, written to a commission from the Weissenfels court (where it had a repeat performance before 1717). The piece shows Bach, obviously newly acquainted with the Italian style, taking up the recitative and the modern kind of aria (for preference the da capo aria), a step which had a decisive effect on the next sacred cantatas, nos.199, 21 and 63 (nos.21 and 63 were probably written in connection with his application to succeed Zachow in Halle in December 1713). With his nomination as court Konzertmeister on 2 March 1714, he started to produce cantatas on the whole regularly from the end of March onwards, in accordance with an agreement ‘to perform a piece of his own composition under his own direction, in the chapel of the royal castle, on every fourth Sunday at all seasons’. This was Bach’s first opportunity to compose a whole cantata cycle, albeit over a fairly long time-span; however, as things turned out, the number he wrote in Weimar amounted to little more than 20. The principle of the annual cycle is closely bound up with the history of the cantata from Neumeister on; the texts were mostly published in cycles, one for each Sunday and feast day in the church year. Bach, admittedly, never adhered strictly to a single poet (except in the lost Picander cycle of 1728–9), preferring to pick and choose. In Weimar he turned for the first time to librettos by Neumeister (nos.18 and 61) and used texts by G.C. Lehms (1684–1717; nos.199 and 54), but evidently preferred texts by the Weimar court poet Salomo Franck (1659–1725), the author of extremely original and profoundly felt sacred and secular poetic texts, among the best Bach set. Nos.21, 63 and 199 are among cantatas dating from before 1714; regular production began with Cantata no.182 on 25 March 1714. There followed, usually at four-week intervals, in 1714 nos.12, 172, 61, 152; in 1715 nos.18, 54, 31, 165, 185, 163, 132; in 1716 nos.155, 80a, 161, 162, 70a, 186a and 147a. Repeat performances of nos.21, 199, 31, 165 and 185 were slotted into the cycle. Gaps are accounted for by the loss of certain cantatas and in one case by the period of mourning from 11 August to 9 November 1715.

Musically the works are of particular importance for the development they show in Bach’s personal style of writing for voices and instruments. The recitatives contain extensive arioso sections to begin with, but these gradually disappear (although the combinatorial element was to remain typical of Bach throughout his life); the arias become longer, in free or (more usually) strict da capo form and occasionally using more complex structures. The choruses embrace a multiplicity of formal principles, among them fugue and canon (no.182), passacaglia (12), concerto (172), motet (21) and French overture (61). Also notable are the overlapping of instrumental and vocal formal schemes (the use of Chor- and Vokaleinbau) and instrumental quotations of chorale melodies. The extraordinarily colourful instrumentation is especially characteristic: within the smallest of performing ensembles Bach tried out a great variety of combinations, for example recorder, oboe, viola d'amore and viola da gamba in Cantata no.152. Following the Italian ideal, his orchestral writing moved away from the French practice of five-part writing, with two violas, which predominates in the early cantatas towards a more flexible four-part style. Instead of the harmonic weight of the middle voices in five-part writing Bach provided a rhythmically and melodically active viola part that is particularly characteristic.

In Cöthen, corresponding to Bach’s official responsibilities, only secular cantatas were composed (with the single exception of bwv Anh.5) and those were mostly written for New Year celebrations or the prince’s birthday. Bach’s librettist was C.F. Hunold (‘Menantes’, 1681–1721). Among the Cöthen cantatas, many survive only as verbal texts (Anh.6–8) or are lost altogether; a substantial part of the music survives only for nos.66a, 134a, 173a, 184a and 194a. These pieces mostly exemplify the ‘serenata’ type of work, with succinct operatic treatment in dialogues between allegorical figures. It is not surprising that they reflect Bach’s study of the instrumental concerto of the period (in part in the solo–tutti differentiation) or that dance characteristics appear, notably in the solo movements. Bach used transverse flutes in Cantata no.173a, evidently for the first time.

At Leipzig the performance of sacred cantatas on Sundays and feast days (some 60 a year) was one of Bach’s chief tasks, and he produced a large number of new works. His vast workload meant that within the first cycle, beginning on the first Sunday after Trinity (30 May), he not only had to rely on repeat performances of earlier sacred cantatas but also had to resort to parodies of secular cantatas written at Cöthen. Nevertheless, his first cycle (1723–4) contains the following new compositions: nos.75, 76, 24, 167, 136, 105, 46, 179, 69a, 77, 25, 119, 138, 95, 148, 48, 109, 89, 60, 90, 40, 64, 190, 153, 65, 154, 155, 73, 81, 83, 144, 181, 67, 104, 166, 86, 37 and 44; to these must be added his test works (nos.22 and 23, for Quinquagesima 1723) and no.194, composed for the consecration of the new organ in Störmthal. Apart from no.24 (Neumeister) and nos.64, 69a and 77, the poet or poets of this first cycle remain for the most part unknown. The use of Knauer’s Gotha cycle of 1720, which provides two texts for each Sunday and feast day, together with the fact that cantatas in two parts, or two separate cantatas, were sometimes performed (before and after the sermon) – such as nos.75, 76, 21, 24+185, 147, 186, 179+199, 70, 181+18, 31+4, 172+59, 194+165 and 22+23 – indicates that Bach designed his first Leipzig cycle, in part at least, as a double cycle.

Thus in his first year at Leipzig Bach furnished himself with an astonishingly concentrated repertory, and his emphasis on the cantata genre also gave him mastery over an incomparable variety of forms, free from any schematicism. Three favourite groundplans are: biblical text–recitative–aria–recitative–aria–chorale (nos.46, 105, 136 etc.); biblical text–recitative–chorale–aria–recitative–aria–chorale (nos.40, 48, 64 etc.); biblical text–aria–chorale–recitative–aria–chorale (nos.86, 144, 166 etc.). A constant feature, characteristic of the Leipzig cantatas as a whole, is the framework, comprising an introductory choral movement in the grand style (solo pieces appear rarely at the start) and closing four-part chorale, simple but expressive. Compared with the Weimar cantatas, the orchestral forces are larger. From no.75 onwards the brass (mainly trumpets and horns) are more strongly deployed, the flute is brought into play increasingly after 1724, and the oboe d’amore (from no.75) and oboe da caccia (from no.167) are introduced as new instruments, as are the violino piccolo and violoncello piccolo at a later date. Instrumental virtuosity is heightened, and the melismatic quality of the vocal writing is further developed. The ‘prelude and fugue’ type of movement is frequently used for the introductory chorus (as in no.46).

The second cycle, dating from 1724–5, consists mainly of a series of freshly composed chorale cantatas (i.e. cantatas of which both text and music are based on hymns): nos.20, 2, 7, 135, 10, 93, 107, 178, 94, 101, 113, 33, 78, 99, 8, 130, 114, 96, 5, 180, 38, 115, 139, 26, 116, 62, 91, 121, 133, 122, 41, 123, 3, 111, 92, 125, 126, 127 and 1. From Easter 1725 this series was continued at first with cantatas of the traditional kind, that is with texts related to the prescribed scriptural readings for the day (nos.249, 6, 42 and 85), and then with nine cantatas to texts by Mariane von Ziegler (1695–1760): 103, 108, 87, 128, 183, 74, 68, 175 and 176, in all of which there is a tendency to use forms closer to those of the first cycle. 1724–5 was not only the most productive year for cantatas, as far as is known from the surviving works at least; it also, with the chorale cantata, saw the beginnings of a type that perhaps represents Bach’s most important contribution to the history of the genre. What is particularly striking is his endeavour to lay out the introductory movements as large-scale cantus firmus compositions, each adhering to a different structural principle. Cantata no.20, and with it the second cycle, opens with a chorale movement for chorus in the form of a French overture which it is possible to regard as a kind of programmatic statement, whereas the opening chorus of no.2 takes the retrospective form of a chorale motet. By this means Bach marked out a broad framework, in terms of both musical style and compositional technique, to indicate the conceptual range of the cycle he was starting. Cohesion between the movements within each cantata is guaranteed, at least from the textual point of view, by their relationship to the fundamental chorale (with chorale paraphrases for the solo pieces, as opposed to the procedure in no.4); often it is further emphasized by references to the cantus firmus and by the use of various ways of intermingling cantus firmus and free material. The author of the texts for the chorale cantatas is not known – Pastor Christian Weiss of the Thomaskirche, who used to preach chorale sermons, is a possibility.

With the third cycle, from 1725–7, the continuous, weekly production of cantatas ends, or so the sources indicate. It appears, however, from a surviving printed textbook of 1725 covering the third to the sixth Sunday after Trinity, that this cycle must have suffered substantial losses. When his production was actually interrupted Bach usually filled the gaps with works by other composers, including no fewer than 18 cantatas by his cousin Johann Ludwig Bach of Meiningen. The cantatas of the third cycle offer no major innovations in the way of musical structure, but they notably include solo (nos.52, 84, 35 etc.) and dialogue cantatas (58, 32, 49 etc.), as well as large-scale works in two parts. There is an absence of overall formal integrity in the planning of this cycle, but Bach reveals a wide variety of ambitions and intentions, among them completing the cycle of chorale cantatas with further works of that type (no.137), reverting to older texts by Neumeister (28), Franck (72), Lehms (110, 57, 151, 16, 32, 13, 170 and 35) or from a Rudolstadt textbook (17, 39, 43, 45, 88, 102 and 187) and experimenting with the use of complementary texts from the Old and New Testaments (the former in the opening movement, the latter in a central one: Rudolstadt texts). One remarkable trait of the cycle is the frequent introduction of older instrumental movements, pre-eminently as sinfonias but sometimes also with choral participation (the reconstruction of the first movement of the Orchestral Suite bwv1069 to open Cantata no.110 is an example of this). A remarkable innovation in summer 1727 was the appearance of obbligato organ parts (nos.34, 146, 169, 49 and 188), found in both sinfonias (recycling instrumental concertos) and arias.

The third cycle was followed by the 1728–9 cycle on texts by Picander, which has disappeared but for a few remnants (1728: nos.149, 188, 197a; 1729: nos.171, 156, 159, Anh.190, 145 and 174). That Bach really did set the whole of Picander’s Cantaten auf die Sonn- und Fest-Tage durch das gantze Jahr (Leipzig, 1728) as his fourth cycle cannot be accepted without reservation. At the same time, the poet must have been expressing something more than a pious hope when he wrote in the preface ‘that any lack of poetic charm may perhaps be compensated for by the gracefulness of the incomparable Herr Kapellmeister Bach and these songs [Lieder] may be performed in the principal churches of prayerful Leipzig’. One of the characteristics of Picander texts is the frequent interpolation of chorale verses in the free poetry, creating attractive opportunities for mingling choruses and arias, which were not wasted on Bach (see nos.156 and 159, or the first movement of the St Matthew Passion). The cantatas written after 1729 offer nothing essentially new in formal terms, as far as can be determined from those that survive, but they show signs of a late style beginning to develop, manifested (in no.195 for example) above all in a more refined shaping of the accompanied recitative and a more integral, polyphonic treatment of the final chorale (entailing some modification of the cantus firmus). Some of the later cantatas (nos.117, 192, 112, 177, 97 and 100) show an interesting modification of the chorale type: they relinquish freely composed texts but (unlike the older per omnes versus type represented by Cantata no.4) set the central movements as recitatives and arias.

It is impossible to reconstruct a fifth cycle worthy of the name from the surviving works (not even given the large number of unattributed four-part chorales: see §15), but it would have had to be composed over a rather longer period of time, mainly in the 1730s. The mention in the obituary of ‘five cycles of church pieces, for every Sunday and holy day’ is just a tantalizing hint of how much has been lost.

Besides the cantatas composed in connection with the church year, Bach also wrote sacred cantatas for other occasions, like changes of town council, weddings, funerals, the bicentenary of the Augsburg Confession (1730) and inaugurations of organs; in style these are essentially indistinguishable from the other works. The body of cantatas, for all its variety, has an unusually self-contained character, maintained above all by its consistently high musical quality and its unfailing expressive profundity. The distinctive expressive power of Bach’s musical language did not merely evolve in the cantatas, in many essential respects, but also finds its most characteristic representation in them. His expressive urge, as seen in individual arias and choruses, was not confined to single words as the primary bearers of expression, but was geared to movements and formal sections as a whole, in keeping with Baroque formal models (like the ABA of the da capo aria). Only within the context of a movement’s structural and expressive unity did he regard the special treatment of single words as possible or meaningful. Among the tools of Bach’s craft the traditions of musica poetica and musical rhetoric (the theory of musical figures) must certainly be reckoned. They were deeply rooted in him. Yet to reduce Bach’s intentions to their rhetorical and figural components, or even to emphasize those components, would be to diminish their true breadth. Over and above this objective of expressive unity, Bach was always primarily concerned with the contrapuntal organization of melodic-rhythmic and harmonic textures to establish coherence. That is a principal reason why his cantata movements lend themselves so readily to parody. The technical prerequisites for producing a parody work – which Bach did so often – are metrical similarity and expressive affinity; the most essential requirement, however, is self-sufficiency of the musical substance, and its flexibility leaves considerable scope for the musical interpretation of a new text.

During his early Leipzig years Bach wrote only isolated secular cantatas, but these became more frequent as time passed. They were produced for various occasions: university ceremonies (nos.36b, 198, 205, 207), celebrations at the Thomasschule (bwv Anh.18, Anh.19, 36c), festivities in the houses of noblemen and prominent citizens (202, 216, 210, 249b, 30a, 210a, 212) and commissions from court (249a, 36a). Most of his large-scale congratulatory and homage cantatas written for the electoral house of Saxony were produced at the collegium musicum. A favourite format was the operatic dramma per musica, with a simple plot suited to the specific nature of the occasion being celebrated (nos.213, 206, 214, 207a, 215). The more lyrical cantatas such as no.204, or the two Italian works, nos.203 and 209, would certainly have been performed at the collegium musicum. The Coffee and Peasant Cantatas (nos.211 and 212), to some extent tinged with folk style, are distinguished by their lifelike and humorous characterization. The librettist of most of the works of 1725–42 was the versatile Picander, the only other important poet for Bach’s cantatas during this period being J.C. Gottsched (1700–66), the influential Leipzig professor of rhetoric (bwv198, Anh.13, Anh.196). There is concrete evidence of just under 40 secular cantatas composed during the Leipzig years, but in most cases only the texts survive. Their occasional nature is the main reason why so many have been lost: few could have been given a second performance, and then only after alterations to the text. Bach was of course aware that their best chance of survival lay in parody, and he took such opportunities as occurred to save the music, as in the case of the Christmas Oratorio (see §14).

Bach, §III: (7) Johann Sebastian Bach

Date: 2015-12-11; view: 1224