Following are excerpts from the book, The Life of Bach (Peter Williams).
This book was written by uniquely taking the Bach Obituary, written by C.P.E. Bach and J.F. Agricola, as the foundation and structure for its exposition.
“One thread leading through the maze of masterworks is supplied by the so-called Bach Obituary, written probably within six months of his death but published only in 1754, a delay not uncommon in Germany at the time and not necessarily implying faint public interest…the Obituary had an agenda of its own, relaying what its period and its university-educated authors…found important to say about a period and a man they understood only in part…what they say and do not say can be taken as a starting point, something to relate to other evidence.”
[Obituary] Johann Sebastian Bach belongs to a family in all of whose members equally a love for and skill in music seem, as a common gift, to have been imparted by nature.”
“It numbers fifty-three Bachs over some two hundred years, many of them professional musicians well known in central Germany, though only one or two became so in a larger Europe- himself and, as perhaps he could anticipate by 1735, some of his sons.”
“Judging by his position, Bach’s father was a gifted musician, officially praised as a versatile and effective music director.”
“Johann Sebastian was still not ten years old when he found himself deprived of his parents by death. He made his way to Ohrdruf to his eldest brother, Johann Christoph (organist there), under whose guidance he laid the foundations for his keyboard playing.”
[Obituary] A book full of keyboard pieces by the then most famous masters Froberger, Kerll and Pachelbel, which his brother owned, was however denied him. [Nevertheless, he] copied it by moonlight. After months this musical booty was happily in his own hands, [and he] was attempting to put it to use when, to his greatest dismay, his brother became aware of it and mercilessly took from him the copy he had prepared with such trouble.
Other sources suggest “an ardent young spirit, self-reliant, never afraid of hard work and of self-improving study.”
Bach was inspired by Georg Bohm, “the most gifted, inspiring organ composer Sebastian could have heard so far, with an unusual melodic flair for setting chorales and a sense of drama in other works.”
“Bach neither took lessons as such nor became an apprentice-assistant but made study visits, to a major figure in a major church of a major Hanseatic city…Hamburg’s varied musical life in theatre and church was well known to Bohm.”
“The Obituary says nothing about the young Bach having teachers but shows him learning ‘through frequent listening’ to various kinds of music.”
Bach had a grasp “not only of local German church music but also of French and in his case Italian styles.”
First Appointments
“Probably from Christmas 1702, and certainly for the first five months of 1703, Bach was serving at Weimar as ‘court musician.’”
In some accounts “he is listed as ‘Laquey’, and perhaps had lowly servant duties in addition to playing violin and keyboards, copying music, substituting as organist and so forth.”
[Obituary] The following year (August 1703] he took on the duty of organist at the New Church in Arnstadt. Here indeed he showed the first fruits of his industry in the art of organ playing and in composition, the latter of which he had learnt chiefly through observing the works of the then most famous and thorough composers, and applying his own contemplation to them.
“Presumably there was good reason to leave a court to become organist in a second-rank town church: for greater independence, double pay, likely additional fees, less demanding schedule, a preference for church music, more work with the organ, proximity to other family members, and potential students.”
“Whatever gifts Bach developed at Arnstadt, he did so beyond the requirements of his position in the second church of the town.”
Bach was drawn to the Cantata form of church music. “A cantata would gather together all and any kinds of musical idiom, for the greater glory but also for the musical challenge of it: applying modern French rhythms in the accompaniment to an old German chorale melody is exactly the mixing of styles to which Bach was attracted from first to last.”
Weimar
Bach was married to Maria Barbara, “the youngest daughter of Johann Michael Bach, a good composer” in 1707. The following year, they moved to Weimar, where their first child was born.
Weimar…was a city “in whose cultural life music featured high…Weimar musicians built on the tradition for mixed consorts to create newer worlds in a wide variety of instrumental combinations.”
“Apparent contradictions in Bach’s music, at Weimar and throughout his life, give some idea of his inner musical life. One such contradiction is that the very completeness of his coverage – his tendency to ‘tick off a list’ of parameters – was no barrier to achieving quality or even, one might say, fun…A second contradiction in Bach is even more elusive: the sensuality of his music at moments of marked piety…The sensual side of Bach’s personality cannot have been exclusive to music, and one wonders how he dealt with it in daily life. Was it no problem for him to achieve both the cerebral and the sensuous?”
“The cantatas or ‘new pieces to be performed monthly’ that were expected of Bach following promotion at Weimar were ensemble words of several movements sung after the creed and before the seasonal hymn and sermon…chamber-like works of refined forces) four singers, a five-part instrumental consort), with newly created effects and colourful timbres, varying and unpredictable sequences of instrumental and vocal movements, with texts drawn from the newest devotional libretti.”
“The cantatas vary in shape, probably reflecting local tradition rather than Italian imports, and seem consciously to survey all conceivable kinds of music possible within a specific genre – a typical Bach characteristic.”
“Adding to the picture of Bach’s active musical life at Weimar as outlined by the Obituary – organ playing, composing cantatas and organ music, participating in chamber music, teaching – sources give a glimpse of a dozen or so pupils.”
“With respect to musical training, Bach’s own children may have been treated similarly to live-in pupils, who also included family cousins. And as with the seventy-odd pupils documented from the Leipzig years, some of them would have been regular copyists for the performing parts of their master’s cantatas and instrumental works, extracted from his fair-copy score.”
Cöthen
[Obituary] In this very same year [1717]…the then Prince Leopold of Anhalt-Cöthen, a great connoisseur and lover of music, called him to be his capellmeister. He took up the position straightway and held it for almost six years, to the greatest satisfaction of his gracious prince.
“In Cöthen, the period July 1719 to May 1720 saw considerable court expenditure on copying and binding music, commissioning and printing texts, and hiring musicians…A major part of the capellmeister’s job was to produce secular cantatas marking one or other event at court.”
Bach’s first wife died in 1719, and Prince Leopold “was not in the best of health …and his finances were not flourishing.”
“For someone with Bach’s family a job in a church of repute was at least more secure, hanging less on the will or wellbeing of a prince. Though still with its dangers – clergy suspicious of organist’s ineradicable contumacy – a church job offered a home and a clear contract of employment.”
“There is a further point here. In Bach’s biography a pattern emerges in which, despite an initial enthusiasm, ardent creativity and the active support of his employer, the broad chronology of his music implies a gradual dampening of spirits in each of the jobs he held. A pattern emerges which implies that he felt less and less appreciated or encouraged for the work he originally took on with such zeal, turning then to other kinds of music about which he personally was passionate and irrepressibly productive, in this way privately satisfying his Lutheran duty to develop his God-given talent.”
[Obituary] He married for a second time, in Cöthen in 1721, Miss Anna Magdalena, youngest daughter of Mr. Johann Caspar Wülken, court trumpeter to the Duke of Weissenfels.
She was apparently a precociously accomplished singer. She was “aged twenty, he thirty-six.”
“Hints that Sebastian was a solicitous father come from documents concerning the children’s training, career or abilities, areas likely to leave behind written testimony. Thus he refers to Gottfried as ‘inclined to music, especially keyboard’, like the older sons, and in a testimonial he praises a student for teaching his younger children. He is clearly anxious about his difficult son Bernhard; he copies out a grand prelude and fugue for organ, apparently for Friedemann’s first job audition in 1733; he bequeaths keyboard instruments to his youngest son; and he visits Berlin/Potsdam at least in part for Emanuel, whose son – the first grandson – is named after him in 1748. He also continued to work professionally with Anna Magdalena, whose singing probably continued far longer than is suggested by the scant documentation, such as at Cöthen in 1724, and whose part in teaching the children music, likewise unreported, must have been crucial.”
Liepzig, the first decade
[Obituary] The city of Leipzig elected our Bach in 1723 as music director and cantor at the Thomas School. He followed where this called, although he left his gracious prince unwillingly. Providence seemed to want him away from Cöthen before the death of the prince, shortly afterwards and against all expectation, so that he was at least no longer present on this sorrowful occasion.
“Leipzig was an important city with at least three claims to great fame: unrivalled mercantile fairs, a renowned university and a massive publishing activity. Nevertheless, after six or seven years working hard in church and school in Leipzig, it is not surprising that Bach would look wistfully (as he appears to in the Erdmann letter) at a different kind of musical career elsewhere, in a town or court needing other kinds of music than sacred choral.”
“As a non-graduate schoolmaster and musician his social rank in Leipzig cannot have been high and was unlikely to rise much.”
“Bach’s duties as cantor were to “include directing the performers for four churches, two major and two minor, and on occasion for the town council; training (and auditioning?) the Thomasschule choristers and rehearsing the choir and instrumentalists; appointing prefects for some of the music in St Thomas’s (the motet without instruments) and for the two minor churches (to lead the hymns, etc.); teaching the ablest Thomasschule boys; composing and directing music for funerals and weddings (from a fund of works newly adapted each time?); overseeing the organs and their players; taking on university students as private pupils; and directing five regular and various extra events in the university church each year. Even when assistance was provided, as by prefects in copying music or monitoring the choristers, it was clearly necessary to organize a routine for such work.”
“The main weekly service itself was a big event. Three or four hours long, it began at 7 a.m. with a series of musical items (hymns with prelude, motets, special works on some twenty feast days), mostly in older idioms but with the modern cantata between Gospel and Creed, perhaps with a Part II or even another cantata after the sermon.”
“But these duties barely hindered what Bach seems to have seen as his prime duty: to compose – in the first instance cantatas, some sixty per year, the first set straightway on taking up his appointment, all of them major works. In particular the arias of the first Leipzig cantata cycle can give one the impression of a driven creative energy not always hitting a tone of natural melody and effortless shaping.”
“Like suites or partitas, the cantatas (including ‘chorale cantatas’ of the second cycle, based on hymn texts) are most likely to consist of six or seven movements, in each case showing a simple regard for contrast as an organizing principle:
Cantata Suite
grand opening chorus (a prelude of major proportions)
aria allemande
recitative courante
aria sarabande
recitative dance I
(aria) dance II
chorale gigue
The obituary’s work-list includes ‘five Passions’ and ‘five annual cycles’ of cantatas, which at first suggests that as many as 100 cantatas have been lost.”
Leipzig, the second decade
“The interest shown by Bach in so many kinds of music – an interest still not fully documented – lasted his whole life and took various practical forms: owning collections (e.g. a manuscript of Palestrina masses from the Weimar years), copying foreign music and its notation (Grigny), reworking whole movements (Corelli) or their themes (Raison, Legrenzi), transcribing whole works (Vivaldi), ‘completing’ others for performance (bass and instruments for Palestrina’s mass Ecce sacerdo magnus, c1745) or arranging them (Pergolesi’s Stabat mater), even into his final years (a further cantata by J.C. Bach 1703 or J.L. Bach)…he also acted as agent for other publications than his own.”
Leipzig, the final years
“Church work continues, not without moments of chagrin, and the last decade saw a series of other composers’ sacred works adapted and performed in Leipzig.”
Bach had some grievances with the council at Leipzig. “The grievances were an attacking response to the council’s earlier complaints about his contribution to teaching in the school, and it is clear that what he has in view is better circumstances generally – and better appreciation? – for his music.”
“His income is not as high as he was led to believe, Leipzig is twice as expensive as other places he has lived in, the authorities are ‘strange and little devoted to music’, and altogether he is subjected to endless ‘annoyance, envy and persecution.’”
[Obituary] As he often maintained with regret, it never could come about that he would have a really large and really fine organ for his constant use.
“As one of God’s creatures who had been taught the Gospel’s parable of the talents, Bach had been endowed with a gift, exceptional (how conscious was he of this?) but nevertheless something to be returned daily to his Maker, increased by hard work. To return the gift with interest meant not only conscientious self-application but also a deeper commitment, the offering to his Maker of everything he could create through the talent he had been given: simple or complex music, beautiful melody or rich harmony, exciting rhythms or calm counterpoint, appropriate word setting biblical allusions or dance music, fugues or songs, exercises for himself or others – in short, everything. Reasoning in this way, one can speculate that indeed Bach was at his most pious not when the music most moved or delighted his neighbor but when it was so complex or thoughtfully wrought as to be understood only by himself and his Maker. He returned his God-given talent with more interest the farther he developed it.”
“All is devotional for the devout man, and ‘with a music that is devotional, God is always present in his grace’, as Bach wrote in the margin of his house Bible at 2 Chronicles 5:13. These verses in Chronicles describe how voices and instruments were used to praise the Lord, and the marginal note written in about 1733, is the classic response by a Lutheran (or Anglican) of the time, who found nothing but poor theology in the Calvinist (or Presbyterian) argument against music in or out of church. Such reasoning could alone explain why at first in Leipzig Bach made a point of supplying a new cantata each week. He did not have to do this, and at other moments in the service he kept the customary music of previous generations.”
“Such a portfolio would suggest a composer indefatigably learning and gathering examples, counting off the ways to treat themes, exploring the behavior of music’s notes as a chemist might explore the earth’s elements.”
[Obituary] We will not be ill thought of if we are so bold as to go on asserting that our Bach was the greatest organist and keyboard player that we have every had…He had worked out for himself such a comfortable fingering that it was not hard for him to perform the greatest difficulties with the most fluent ease. Before him the best-known keyboard players in Germany and other countries had made little use of the thumb.
“His violin playing, which he kept up until the approach of old age, was described by Emanuel as ‘pure and penetrating,’ which looks less than complimentary, except that it meant he could hold an orchestra together better with violin than from the keyboard. He preferred playing viola, ‘with appropriate louds and softs.’”
“Bach’s singing voice was also ‘penetrating, with a wide compass and good technique, qualities which he clearly found reasonable to require of his singers.”
“A report from 1738 of Bach’s directing thirty or forty musicians – in a church cantata? – with a nod to one, a foot-tap to another and a warning finger to a third, speaks of his noticing everything at once and holding it all together with ‘rhythm in every limb.’
He also had “a deep technical knowledge of organs, both as to how they could sound well and as to how they were constructed.”
“The reduced significance of sacred music general in Protestant countries affected by the cultural changes now variously labelled Rationalism, Secularism or the Enlightenment left music to blossom in other realms, some only just then emerging. Bach’s intense work in counterpoint was reflecting current views of music as a science, and would certainly be so treated by the younger generation, especially after his death. Irrespective of its pedagogical potential, however, such intense work was in itself the typical sign of a mature composer’s tendency towards the abstract, the transcendental and the economy of means by which the merely entertaining is stripped away.”
He was also skilled in understanding various tunings.
[Obituary] he knew how to give harpsichords so pure and correct a temperament in their tuning that all keys sounded beautiful and pleasing.
Certain organs he composed on were not able to be re-tuned. “When a tuning leaves keys with particular characteristics, Bach’s modal sensitivities become more striking…the older key of G, mixolydian and tending towards the subdominant, is clear in many an organ chorale.”
[Obituary] Of his moral character those might speak who have enjoyed dealings and friendship with him and have witnessed his honesty towards God and his neighbor.
“Although Bach was on record as admiring the music of Handel and C.H. Graun, his occasional use of their music over these years could be seen as another form of shrugging off obligations and ‘giving people what they want’.”
“Obviously, deep thought is necessary for the fugues, canons, motivic complexities and various kinds of intimate musical allusion in Bach’s music, throughout his life and especially in the last decade. But he could well have openly shunned textbook calculations of interval rations and the like.”
[Obituary] His sight, rather poor by nature, and weakened yet further by his unheard-of enthusiasm for study…brought him, in his last years, in the wat of an eye disease. Partly from the desire to serve God and his neighbor further…he wanted to improve this by an operation.”
“Evidently, either Emanuel or his father felt obliged to give a reason for the surgery to cure his cataracts, a condition probably brought on by untreated diabetes. ‘Rather poor by nature’ might refer to a gradual deterioration of his eyesight over the last twenty years. In any case, he wanted to be of further service as a composer, and eyesight problems were yet another vexation, another hindrance to that work. But the surgery was dangerous, as events proved, and in the end everyone, neighbour, widow, children, his Maker, was deprived by the sad outcome.”
[Obituary] On 28 July 1750, after a quarter past eight in the evening, in the sixty-sixth year of his life, he passed away gently and peacefully through the merit of his Redeemer.
“In claiming that the surgery and subsequent treatment overthrew his whole system, which succumbed eventually to a final stroke and fever, the Obituary authors speak as if they were eye-witnesses to Bach’s last six months.”
“Bach took communion at home on 22 July, and on the day of his death presumably Anna Magdalena and the younger children were present.”