Bach performing at the organ of the Potsdam garrison-church. In the center is Frederick the Great, at whose request Bach played the organs in several of Potsdam’s leading churches.
Bach accompanying his musically gifted second wife—for whom he wrote some of his most inspired arias—in an informal recital at their Leipzig home.
In 1736 Augustus the Strong conferred upon Bach the title of Court Composer. The patent of Bach’s dignity was committed to the Russian envoy in Dresden, Carl Freiherr von Keyserling. He was a sufferer from chronic insomnia and it is to this circumstance that we owe one of Bach’s supreme works for the clavier—the so-called Goldberg Variations. To ease the torment of sleepless nights the Count had in his service a gifted clavecinist, Johann Gottlieb Goldberg, a pupil of Bach’s. While Bach was in the midst of his troubles with Ernesti, Keyserling commissioned him to write Goldberg “something soothing” to divert his wakefulness. Bach took a Sarabande melody he had copied into his wife’s Notenbuch and used it as the basis of thirty variations. So delighted was Keyserling that he never wearied of listening to Goldberg play them and actually referred to them as “my Variations.” The Count, paradoxically enough, now had every reason to remain awake and enjoy the never-ending ingenuity and luxuriant fancy of these variations and the lively Quodlibet toward the close, which recalls those boisterous medleys the Bach family of old used to improvise at its reunions. It is pleasant to record that Keyserling paid Bach liberally for “his” Variations.
St. Matthew Passion and B minor Mass
On Good Friday, 1729, came the turn of St. Thomas’ Church to produce the music appropriate to the day. The result of this official duty was the Passion according to St. Matthew, for which Christian Friedrich Henrici, who wrote under the name of “Picander” and provided Bach with innumerable “librettos” for all purposes, compiled the text. The composer himself chose and distributed the chorales which punctuate the score. Bach was still at work on it when his former patron, Prince Leopold of Cöthen, died. Rather than prepare a special memorial piece he asked Picander to adapt appropriate words to parts of the music in the St. Matthew and he performed them in Cöthen at his friend’s obsequies.
It is hard for us to believe that the St. Matthew Passion did not receive on that far-off April 15, 1729, the tribute of wondering amazement which in the fullness of our hearts we bring it today. Yet we are told that the Leipzig worshipers considered its overwhelming dramatic pages “theatrical.” “God help us,” exclaimed a scandalized old dame, “’tis surely an opera-comedy!” We know that, judged by our standards, the first performance of the work must have been inefficient. Whether it was much better done at its repetition in 1736 may be doubted. Be this as it may, the St. Matthew Passion passed into oblivion for nearly a hundred years. The glory of its rediscovery and its reawakening an exact century after its birth belongs to Felix Mendelssohn who, with its resuscitation at the Singakademie in Berlin, performed a service that would have shed immortal luster upon his name had he never done anything else.
The St. Matthew Passion, which is Bach at his most tender, intimate, lacerating and compassionate, stands, like the B minor Mass, Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony and Wagner’s Tristan, as one of the epochal feats of music, a lonely and incomparable achievement of the human spirit. Bach is believed to have written a Passion according to St. Mark, but not a trace of it survives. Another, according to St Luke, is extant but most certainly spurious. It is hard to believe he could ever have surpassed the lyric glory of the St. Matthew. For generations after its re-emergence musicians paid it everything from lip-service to ecstatic tribute. A complete, full-length performance of it was, however, a rarity and not even Mendelssohn had the courage to attempt it. In our own time we have finally come to the ways of wisdom, recognizing that the St. Matthew Passion can produce its proper effect only when heard in its entirety, with never a bar or a phrase omitted. Those who have heard it thus are unlikely ever again to listen willingly to a cut version.
If anything can be said to rival the grandeur of the St. Matthew Passion it is the Mass in B minor, the triumphal hymn of the church militant. This utterance of subduing and inscrutable majesty, which transcends the world to bestride the universe, was completed in 1733 and offered to Augustus the Strong as “an insignificant example of my skill in Musique”! Augustus the Strong, being occupied at the moment with problems of state, did not deign to notice Bach’s “insignificant” gesture. The composer never heard a performance of this gigantic creation, which soars to heights beyond human gaze and, in its proportions and technical details, is too vast to serve ordinary liturgical purposes. Yet here, as so often elsewhere, Bach followed the example of his age and employed several numbers from this Mass—with greater or lesser alteration—elsewhere. Even the triumphant Osanna, which expert criticism has pronounced a polonaise (apparently a subtle compliment paid to Augustus as King of Poland), and the ineffably touching Agnus Dei may be encountered again in several of Bach’s cantatas.
Visit to Frederick the Great and Later Works
Early in 1741 Bach’s son Philipp Emanuel had become clavecinist to the new sovereign of Prussia, Frederick the Great. Moved, it appears, by a paternal wish to see the young man comfortably settled, the father made a trip to Berlin in the summer of that year. Details of the journey are few and it was cut short by news that Anna Magdalena, in Leipzig, was seriously ill.
Bach’s famous visit to Berlin and Potsdam did not take place, however, till fully six years later. One of its chief objects was to make the acquaintance of his daughter-in-law, whom Philipp Emanuel had married in 1744, and of his first grandchild. But the visit had more spectacular consequences. Frederick the Great had learned about Bach from his court pianist. Whether or not the great Cantor went to the palace of Sans-Souci in Potsdam at the king’s special command, he arrived there at a psychological moment on May 7, 1747, just as Frederick was about to begin one of his regular evening concerts at which, surrounded by his picked musicians, he loved to exhibit his own considerable virtuosity on the flute. “Gentlemen, old Bach is here!” the monarch exclaimed and, calling off the concert, received his guest with cordiality. He immediately had Bach examine the new Silbermann claviers with hammer action newly installed in the palace and invited him to show his skill. After putting each of the instruments to a test, Bach amazed Frederick and his court by improvising a superb six-part fugue on a subject submitted him by the king himself. The next evening he transported his hosts once more with a recital on the organ of the Church of the Holy Ghost in Potsdam and a little later, in Berlin, examined the new opera house, detecting acoustical effects which the architect himself seems not to have suspected.
Back in Leipzig Bach resolved to break a rule against dedicating scores to noble patrons he had made after the shabby treatment accorded him in the case of the Brandenburg Concertos and the B minor Mass. But he would have been less than human if he had not thought that a gracious gesture on his part might perchance further his son’s interests at court; and besides, he was genuinely pleased with the fine theme Frederick had given him to develop. So, alleging that his Potsdam improvisation had failed to do the royal theme justice, he dispatched to the monarch with a suitable dedication a series of elaborate contrapuntal developments of the theme, diplomatically incorporating in the set a sonata for flute, violin and clavier. This princely gift is the work known as the Musical Offering, whose beauty and ingenuity have come to be properly valued only in recent years.
Theoretical problems of music now interested Bach more and more and in 1747 he was elected to the so-called Society for the Promotion of Musical Science, founded by Lorenz Christoph Mizler. Men as illustrious as Telemann, Handel and Graun were already members and after a brief period of hesitation Bach joined it, too, presenting the Society in return for his diploma with a formidable sample of his technical skill in the shape of a lordly set of canonic variations for organ on the Christmas hymn Vom Himmel hoch, da komm ich her.
In 1749 he was occupied with a work in some ways his profoundest and most enigmatic, which virtually till our own time has been misconstrued even by serious musicians as a dry and abstract experiment in polyphony of no independent musical value. It is that stupendous succession of fugues and canons (or “counterpoints,” as the composer himself called them) under the collective title The Art of Fugue. On a subject not unlike the theme given him by Frederick the Great, Bach has heaped one polyphonic marvel upon another in a manner to exploit to the limits of technique and imagination every possible device of fugal and canonic development. He was not spared to complete it but dropped his pen at a passage in the final counterpoint when the notes “B-A-C-H” (in German B flat, A, C, B natural) were woven into the contrapuntal texture. What adds to the further riddle of the work is the fact that the composer did not indicate for what instrument or group of instruments he intended it. In our day it has been scored by turns for a full orchestra, a chamber orchestra, a string quartet, two pianos, and the organ. It is difficult to believe that Bach did not intend this colossal conception to be performed and that he projected it merely as a theoretical problem or an exercise in what is called “eye music.” It stands in relation to Bach’s other works something as the mystical last quartets of Beethoven do to his more popular creations. It was published posthumously and reissued by Philipp Emanuel Bach in 1752. Yet four years later not more than thirty copies had been sold and Philipp Emanuel, in disgust, sold the plates for old metal.
Death
Bach’s eyesight had long been failing. The strain to which he had mercilessly subjected it all his life, copying music as well as engraving elaborate compositions of his own, was now telling on it. By the end of 1749 his vision was in such a state that an English eye specialist, John Taylor, who later treated Handel but at this time chanced to be touring the continent, was summoned and operated on Bach about the beginning of 1750. It was of little avail. Prolonged confinement in a dark room, medicines and dressings told on the master’s ordinarily robust constitution. When his condition permitted and his sight temporarily improved he recklessly returned to his creative labors and also prepared for the engravers a set of eighteen choral-preludes for organ. But the end was at hand. Calling to his side his son-in-law, Johann Christoph Altnikol, Bach dictated to him the variation on the chorale When We Are in Our Deepest Need, prophetically bidding him alter the title to With This Before Thy Throne I Come. On July 18 he suffered an apoplectic stroke and lay for ten days in a desperate state. At nine in the evening on July 28, 1750, he passed from a world that could barely discern the shadow of his greatness.
It is excessive, perhaps, to maintain that for over three quarters of a century after his death Bach went into total eclipse. But he was disregarded if not forgotten. A handful of musicians, indeed, remembered him, among them some of his talented pupils. From time to time a few scattered works of his gained a limited circulation and came into worthy hands. Thus, in the seventeen-eighties several became known in Vienna, and at the Baron Van Swieten’s Mozart had occasion to acquaint himself with a few specimens, which powerfully stimulated his genius. Afterwards, in Leipzig, being shown the parts of one of the motets he exclaimed after closely studying them: “Here, at last, is something from which one can learn!” Beethoven, too, knew the Well-Tempered Clavier and even went so far as to ask someone to procure him the Crucifixus from the B minor Mass. His exclamation is well known: “Not Bach (brook) but Ocean should be his name!”
Yet, in the latter part of the eighteenth century it was chiefly Philipp Emanuel, not his father, to whom one referred when the mighty name was invoked. For the sons of Bach, not the mighty parent, embodied “the spirit of the time.” Even prior to his death Johann Sebastian had passed for outmoded and rather hopelessly “old hat.” Philipp Emanuel went so far as to call his father “a big wig stuffed with learning”; and such was the opinion shared by many of the young bloods in Leipzig and elsewhere. In a way this was not surprising. Bach represented a type of music whose complex profundities were giving place to homophony, entertainment and the graceful superficialities of the so-called “gallant style.” The new age was concerned with the problems of the sonata and the opera. Even if Bach’s scores—most of them unpublished—had been accessible, it is questionable whether the epoch we call “classical” would have been able to see him in a just perspective.
In due course the wheel was to turn full-circle and surely none would have been more amazed than Philipp Emanuel, Wilhelm Friedemann, and Johann Christian could they have known that one day their own works would be looked upon as museum pieces, while the creations of the “learned old perruque” had become the fountain of musical youth, the perpetual source of strength and of illimitable, self-renewing wonder. With Mendelssohn’s revival of the St. Matthew Passion in 1829 there began that resurrection which went on increasingly through the nineteenth century, headed by the redemptive labors of the Bach-Gesellschaft, and which continues to gain momentum right through our own day. Boundless as the universe, timeless as eternity, modern as tomorrow, Bach remains from decade to decade what Richard Wagner once called him—“the most stupendous miracle in all music.”
COMPLETE LIST OF RECORDINGS
BY THE
PHILHARMONIC-SYMPHONY SOCIETY OF NEW YORK
COLUMBIA RECORDS
LP—Also available on Long Playing Microgroove Recordings as well as on the conventional Columbia Masterworks.
Under the Direction of Bruno Walter
Barber—Symphony No. 1, Op. 9
Beethoven—Concerto for Violin, Cello, Piano and Orchestra in C major (with J. Corigliano, L. Rose and W. Hendl)—LP
Beethoven—Concerto No. 5 in E-flat major (“Emperor”) (with Rudolf Serkin, piano)—LP
Beethoven—Concerto in D major for Violin and Orchestra (with Joseph Szigeti)—LP
Beethoven—Symphony No. 1 in C major, Op. 21—LP
Beethoven—Symphony No. 3 in E-flat major (“Eroica”)—LP
Beethoven—Symphony No. 5 in C minor—LP
Beethoven—Symphony No. 8 in F major—LP
Beethoven—Symphony No. 9 in D minor (“Choral”) (with Elena Nikolaidi, contralto, and Raoul Jobin, tenor)—LP
Brahms—Song of Destiny (with Westminster Choir)—LP
Dvorak—Slavonic Dance No. 1
Dvorak—Symphony No. 4 in G major—LP
Mahler—Symphony No. 4 in G major (with Desi Halban, soprano)—LP
Mahler—Symphony No. 5 in C-sharp minor
Mendelssohn—Concerto in E minor (with Nathan Milstein, violin)—LP
Mendelssohn—Scherzo (from Midsummer Night’s Dream)
Mozart—Cosi fan Tutti—Overture
Mozart—Symphony No. 41 in C major (“Jupiter”), K. 551—LP
Schubert—Symphony No. 7 in C major—LP
Schumann, R.—Symphony No. 3 in E-flat major (“Rhenish”)—LP
Smetana—The Moldau (“Vltava”)—LP
Strauss, J.—Emperor Waltz
Under the Direction of Leopold Stokowski
Copland—Billy the Kid (2 parts)
Griffes—“The White Peacock,” Op. 7, No. 1—LP 7"
Ippolitow—“In the Village” from Caucasian Sketches (W. Lincer and M. Nazzi, soloists)
Khachaturian—“Masquerade Suite”—LP
Messian—“L’Ascension”—LP
Sibelius—“Maiden with the Roses”—LP
Tschaikowsky—Francesca da Rimini, Op. 32—LP
Tschaikowsky—Overture Fantasy—Romeo and Juliet—LP
Vaughan-Williams—Greensleeves
Vaughan-Williams—Symphony No. 6 in E minor—LP
Wagner—Die Walküre—Wotan Farewell and Magic Fire Music (Act III—Scene 3)
Wagner—Siegfried’s Rhine Journey and Siegfried’s Funeral March—(“Die Götterdämmerung”)—LP
Under the Direction of Efrem Kurtz
Chopin—Les Sylphides—LP
Glinka—Mazurka—“Life of the Czar”—LP 7"
Grieg—Concerto in A minor for Piano and Orchestra, Op. 16 (with Oscar Levant, piano)—LP
Herold—Zampa—Overture
Kabalevsky—“The Comedians,” Op. 26—LP
Khachaturian—Gayne—Ballet Suite No. 1—LP
Khachaturian—Gayne—Ballet Suite No. 2—LP
Lecoq—Mme. Angot Suite—LP
Prokofieff—March, Op. 99—LP
Rimsky-Korsakov—The Flight of the Bumble Bee—LP 7"
Shostakovich—Polka No. 3, “The Age of Gold”—LP 7"
Shostakovich—Symphony No. 9—LP
Shostakovich—Valse from “Les Monts D’Or”—LP
Villa-Lobos—Uirapuru—LP
Wieniawski—Concerto No. 2 in D minor for Violin and Orchestra, Op. 22 (with Isaac Stern, violin)—LP
Under the Direction of Charles Münch
D’Indy—Symphony on a French Mountain Air for Orchestra and Piano—LP
Milhaud—Suite Française—LP
Mozart—Concerto No. 21 for Piano and Orchestra in C major—LP
Saint-Saens—Symphony in C minor, No. 3 for Orchestra, Organ and Piano, Op. 78—LP
Under the Direction of Artur Rodzinski
Bizet—Carmen—Entr’acte (Prelude to Act III)
Bizet—Symphony in C major—LP
Brahms—Symphony No. 1 in C minor—LP
Brahms—Symphony No. 2 in D major—LP
Copland—A Lincoln Portrait (with Kenneth Spencer, Narrator)—LP
Enesco—Roumanian Rhapsody—A major, No. 1—LP
Gershwin—An American in Paris—LP
Gould—“Spirituals” for Orchestra—LP
Ibert—“Escales” (Port of Call)—LP
Liszt—Mephisto Waltz—LP
Moussorgsky—Gopack (The Fair at Sorotchinski)—LP
Moussorgsky-Ravel—Pictures at an Exhibition—LP
Prokofieff—Symphony No. 5—LP
Rachmaninoff—Concerto No. 2 in C minor for Piano and Orchestra (with Gygory Sandor, piano)
Rachmaninoff—Symphony No. 2 in E minor
Saint-Saens—Concerto for Piano and Orchestra No. 4 in C minor (with Robert Casadesus)—LP
Sibelius—Symphony No. 4 in A minor
Tschaikowsky—Nutcracker Suite—LP
Tschaikowsky—Suite “Mozartiana”—LP
Tschaikowsky—Symphony No. 6 in B minor (“Pathétique”)—LP
Wagner—Lohengrin—Bridal Chamber Scene (Act III—Scene 2)—(with Helen Traubel, soprano, and Kurt Baum, tenor)—LP
Wagner—Lohengrin—Elsa’s Dream (Act I, Scene 2) (with Helen Traubel, soprano)
Wagner—Siegfried Idyll—LP
Wagner—Tristan und Isolde—Excerpts (with Helen Traubel, soprano)
Wagner—Die Walküre—Act III (Complete) (with Helen Traubel, soprano and Herbert Janssen, baritone)—LP
Wagner—Die Walküre—Duet (Act I, Scene 3) (with Helen Traubel, soprano and Emery Darcy, tenor)—LP
Wolf-Ferrari—“Secret of Suzanne,” Overture
Under the Direction of Igor Stravinsky
Stravinsky—Firebird Suite—LP
Stravinsky—Fireworks (Feu d’Artifice)—LP
Stravinsky—Four Norwegian Moods
Stravinsky—Le Sacre du Printemps (The Consecration of the Spring)—LP
Stravinsky—Scènes de Ballet—LP
Stravinsky—Suite from “Petrouchka”—LP
Stravinsky—Symphony In Three Movements—LP
Under the Direction of Sir Thomas Beecham
Mendelssohn—Symphony No. 4, in A major (“Italian”)
Sibelius—Melisande (from “Pelleas and Melisande”)
Sibelius—Symphony No. 7 in C major—LP
Tschaikowsky—Capriccio Italien
Under the Direction of John Barbirolli
Bach-Barbirolli—Sheep May Safely Graze (from the “Birthday Cantata”)—LP
Berlioz—Roman Carnival Overture
Brahms—Symphony No. 2, in D major
Brahms—Academic Festival Overture—LP
Bruch—Concerto No. 1, in G minor (with Nathan Milstein, violin)—LP
Debussy—First Rhapsody for Clarinet (with Benny Goodman, clarinet)
Debussy—Petite Suite: Ballet
Mozart—Concerto in B-flat major (with Robert Casadesus, piano)
Mozart—Symphony No. 25 in G minor, K. 183
Ravel—La Valse
Rimsky-Korsakov—Capriccio Espagnol
Sibelius—Symphony No. 1, in E minor
Sibelius—Symphony No. 2, in D major
Smetana—The Bartered Bride—Overture
Tschaikowsky—Theme and Variations (from Suite No. 3 in G)—LP
Under the Direction of Andre Kostelanetz
Gershwin—Concerto in F (with Oscar Levant)—LP
Under the Direction of Dimitri Mitropoulos
Khachaturian—Concerto for Piano and Orchestra (with Oscar Levant, piano)—LP
VICTOR RECORDS
Under the Direction of Arturo Toscanini
Beethoven—Symphony No. 7 in A major
Brahms—Variations on a Theme by Haydn
Dukas—The Sorcerer’s Apprentice
Gluck—Orfeo ed Euridice—Dance of the Spirits
Haydn—Symphony No. 4 in D major (The Clock)
Mendelssohn—Midsummer Night’s Dream—Scherzo
Mozart—Symphony in D major (K. 385)
Rossini—Barber of Seville—Overture
Rossini—Semiramide—Overture
Rossini—Italians in Algiers—Overture
Verdi—Traviata—Preludes to Acts I and II
Wagner—Excerpts—Lohengrin—Die Götterdämmerung—Siegfried Idyll
Under the Direction of John Barbirolli
Debussy—Iberia (Images, Set 3, No. 2)
Purcell—Suite for Strings with four Horns, two Flutes, English Horn
Respighi—Fountains of Rome
Respighi—Old Dances and Airs (Special recording for members of the Philharmonic-Symphony League of New York)
Schubert—Symphony No. 4 in C minor (Tragic)
Schumann—Concerto for Violin and Orchestra in D minor (with Yehudi Menuhin, violin)
Tschaikowsky—Francesca da Rimini—Fantasia
Under the Direction of Willem Mengelberg
J. C. Bach—Arr. Stein—Sinfonia in B-flat major
J. S. Bach—Arr. Mahler—Air for G String (from Suite for Orchestra)
Beethoven—Egmont Overture
Handel—Alcina Suite
Mendelssohn—War March of the Priests (from Athalia)
Meyerbeer—Prophète—Coronation March
Saint-Saens—Rouet d’Omphale (Omphale’s Spinning Wheel)
Schelling—Victory Ball
Wagner—Flying Dutchman—Overture
Wagner—Siegfried—Forest Murmurs (Waldweben)