Bach Bibliothek programme
Scholars have long been aware that Bach kept an extensive library of works both by members of his family and by a remarkably wide range of European composers. But why should this be of anything more than academic significance if — as many may assume — Bach’s own music stands head and shoulders above that of most contemporaries? Certainly, by the aesthetic priorities of high modern art, Bach’s supremacy must be unassailable, but one of the bonuses of cultural taste at the end of the twentieth century is that we are now capable of appreciating a much wider range of styles and qualities. Many of Bach’s contemporaries have grown immensely in aesthetic stature since we have found appropriate models and standards by which to appreciate them. And lest this might be thought to dilute the ‘high’ cultural taste which makes Bach seem so urgently important, there is a sense in which knowledge of his contemporaries — indeed knowledge of his specific encounters with contemporaries — might actually enhance our appreciation of his compositional skill.
Bach’s library is not important merely as a reservoir of interesting pieces that might or might not have influenced him; it was, from the very beginning to the very end of his career, his primary means of learning music, of understanding what possibilities lay in the existing musical conventions. It is, after all, unlikely that Bach studied composition in the systematic and abstract way that developed during the century following his death (he himself, as an influential teacher, might have been partly responsible for the development of the ‘profession’ of composer). As we glean from the anecdotes about his youth, Bach learned music by copying and studying, by taking models and improving them, by taking models and improvising similar pieces and by working on new pieces in a more thorough idiom away from the keyboard. While Handel has long been recognised as something of a composing magpie, taking excellent passages from his older contemporaries and turning them into pieces that far surpass the originals, Bach examined his models for potential procedures, ways of combining and spinning-out any particular idea. In short, the very essence of composition lay in the concept of imitation and imitation presupposed a comprehensive and infinitely-expandable library. While different parts of Bach’s library might have had different immediate purposes — for performance with the Leipzig Collegium Musicum in the case of Johann Bernhard Bach’s Suites and Handel’s Armida Abbandonata and with the Leipzig Thomasschule in the case of the arrangement of the Pergolesi Stabat Mater — there is a sense in which they all contributed to his comprehensive and ever-flexible conception of music per se. Even at the very end of his life the Pergolesi Stabat Mater could still provide the inspiration for original composition in a movement of the Mass in B minor.
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| Leipzig |
Johann Bernhard Bach (1676–1749, second cousin of J. S. Bach) was intimately involved in the musical life of Eisenach, Sebastian’s home town, and he was also the godfather to one of the younger Bach’s children. Given that the Suite in G Minor is known only from J. S. Bach sources from around the time of his taking over of the Leipzig Collegium Musicum (c.1730) it is impossible to gauge how long before Bernhard actually wrote it. With its pronounced French accent it clearly follows a German fashion largely popularised by Telemann, and Bach evidently chose it both for its elegance and for the brilliance of the solo violin line. It is likely, though not entirely certain, that it was the model for much of Bach’s suite in B minor for flute and strings — generally considered the most ‘modern’ he wrote. Bach would have been unlikely to perform a piece with such a memorable syncopated fugue subject in the overture after having written a similar piece himself. The ‘Air’ provides a fascinating example of what was clearly a popular genre at the time, but one that is extremely difficult to pin down. This one has a very full accompaniment — which must have gained the younger Bach’s approval — and a continuous melodic line. On the one hand, this is supremely vocal, on the other, it goes beyond the limitations of the human voice by containing no rests from beginning to end; there is also (as in Bach’s own airs, such as in the D major suite and two of the harpsichord partitas) a sense of narrative, of a journey or story being relayed. All the remaining movements are characterised by a wonderfully full texture and many present secondary dances that profile the soloist. In all, we see a typically Bachian desire to reconcile seemingly opposed idioms: a virtuoso solo line but also a full accompaniment, a sense of elegance and spontaneity but also a certain learnedness, a French poetic phrasing coupled with an Italianate penchant for long spun-out sequences.
It is not often acknowledged that Handel — that inveterate borrower of others’ music — showed far less interest (perhaps, indeed, none) in Bach’s music, while Bach used at least two substantial pieces of Handel’s music, the Brockes Passion and the cantata Armida abbandonata. The latter he performed with the Leipzig Collegium around 1731, thus just a little later than J. B. Bach’s Suite in G minor. Bach had written the greater proportion of his own cantatas by this time and it is unlikely that his immediate purpose was compositional study. Most likely he was looking for a piece that would profile a particularly talented soprano in one of the coffee-house concerts, one who could sing expressive laments (complete with extraordinary coloratura in ‘Ah! crudele’), angry recitatives and arias, and the closing wistful siciliana. Bach’s own secular cantatas suffer from rather banal texts and he was clearly never inclined to develop the changing moods of a single character over the course of a complete cantata. Nevertheless, his secular works written in the next five years or so — whether setting the rather stilted libretti celebrating Saxon royalty or the stunningly trivial saga of the Coffee Cantata — do display a freshness and clarity that show an assimilation of the best Italianate cantata writing.
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Armida violin part |
There are several ironies surrounding Bach’s arrangement of Pergolesi’s Stabat Mater as a German psalm-setting (Psalm 51). Pergolesi was some twenty years Bach’s junior, yet he died at the tragically young age of 26 in 1736. Partly through his exceptionally fortunate ability to sense the popular trends of his age, and perhaps partly because of the mythology that his early death was soon to inspire, Pergolesi was one of the most celebrated composers of the age — celebrated to a level to which Bach himself could hardly have aspired or even wished to aspire. Not only was Pergolesi’s short opera, La Serva Padrona, a landmark in dramatic music but the Stabat Mater was one of the most famous works of the entire eighteenth century. So we have Bach, an ageing conservative composer with very little popular appeal, arranging an extremely famous piece in a much lighter style than most of his own church music. Moreover, the last ten years of Bach’s life were those in which his musical style became particularly conservative: it was the age of the great contrapuntal works such as the Art of Fugue and Musical Offering.
On the other hand, Bach had, throughout his life, attempted to appropriate every musical style that came his way. It was almost as if he believed it was his mission to encompass the whole world of music, to come to grips with every style and genre, however complex or simplistic. Thus this arrangement might be the last in a long succession of learning experiences for Bach, perhaps (like his arrangements of Vivaldi concertos so many years before) the prelude to a new work — this time in the galant style — that Bach never lived to write. One move in that direction might have been the late addition of the ‘Et incarnatus est’ in the Mass in B minor which has much in common with the movement ‘Wer wird seine Schuld verneinen’ in Bach’s Pergolesi arrangement. Bach may also have relished the idea of finding a text so appropriate as Psalm 51 that seemed to fit the mood of the original movements (setting an indulgently grief-stricken poem about Mary at the foot of the Cross, from the Catholic tradition) like a glove.
Pergolesi’s church style is certainly somewhat distinct from his light operetta style (he made a much greater distinction between sacred and secular music than Bach himself made), but the work is framed by two movements in ‘serious’ style which are not incompatible with Bach’s own. It starts with a texture not unlike the solemn opening of a Corelli trio sonata; the final movement is an Amen fugue which has at least the semblance of deep musical working of its themes. The inner movements provide virtually a catalogue of galant gestures (this in itself might have appealed to Bach’s encyclopedic instincts): light syncopated gestures; airy duets in thirds; the so-called ‘Lombard’ rhythm (or ‘scotch snap’); simple repetitions of emotional gestures and repetitions of simple chord progressions. And Bach’s contribution? In some places he has rewritten the viola part, rendering the texture more complex and creating a much darker, perhaps more ‘German’ image of the piece. Another touch is Bach’s repetition of the closing F-minor ‘Amen’ in the major mode — virtually an unprecedented move in Bach’s church music. Is this Bach’s way of impersonating the galant style, pushing it further than Pergolesi himself had ventured, or is it perhaps a hint of the Lutheran theology that pervades so many of Bach’s cantatas: that earthly suffering leads to a greater joy beyond the grave?
John Butt, 1999