Some Final Comments of Bach's Last Days

[robert newman]

Just a few notes from many to show how JS Bach was so often falsely portrayed and misunderstood, even by supposedly neutral contemporaries. Some quotes from the great book 'Bach meets Frederick the Great in the Age of Englightenment' by James Gaine -

'In music and virtually every other sphere if life in mid 18th century Germany, Frederick represented all that was new while Bach's music had come to mean everything that was ancient and outmoded......His musical language, teaching and tradition had been rejected and denounced by composers and theorists, even by his two sons, and Bach had every reason to fear that he and his music would soon be forgotten after his death; had indeed been all but forgotten already. For this reason and others his encounter with with the Prussian king threatened to bring in to question some of his most important qualities by which he defined himself, as a musician and as a man.......Frederick, a bisexual misanthorpe in a childless political marriage was a lapsed Calvinist whose reputation for religious tolerance arose from the fact that he held all religions equally in contempt. Bach wrote and spoke German. Frederick boasted he had 'never read a German book'.....Nowhere were the two men more different than in their attitudes to music. Bach represented church music and especially the 'learned counterpoint of canon and fugue, a centuries old craft that some its practitioners thought was a quasi-divine art, even a weaving of the cosmic tapestry itself. Frederick and his generation were having none of that. They denigrated counterpoint as the vestige of an outworn aesthetic, extolling instead the 'natural and delightful' in music, by which they meant the easier pleasure of song, the harmonic ornamentation of a single line of melody. For Bach this new, so-called 'galant' style was full of emptiness......For Frederick the goal of music was simply to be agreeable, an entertainment and a diversion, easy work for performer and audience alike. He despised, as he put it, 'smells of the church' and had called Bach's chorales, 'dumb stuff'....

The facts are these. Frederick gave Bach an impossibly long and complex musical figure and asked the old master to make a 3 part fugue of it...So difficult was this figure the the foremost 20th century composer of counterpoint, Arnold Schoenberg marvelled at the fact that it had been so cleverly contrived, noting that what Frederick gave to Bach 'did not admit one single canonic imitation' - in other words that the royal theme was purposely constructed to be as resistant to counterpoint as possible.....Still, Bach managed there with almost unimaginable ingenuity to do it, even alluding to the king's taste by setting off his intricate counterpoint with a few 'galante' flourishes...(!)

When Bach had finished his three part fugue and while his audience of virtuosi were still 'seized with amazement' Frederick asked Bach if he could go one better, this time making the theme in to a fugue for 6 voices. Knowing instantly that he had no hope of doing such a vastly more complex improvisation (Bach had never even written a six part fugue for keyboard) he demured with the observation that not every musical subject is suitable for improvisation in six voices - he said he would work at it on paper and send it to him later.......Clearly, no-one could have faulted him for turning aside Frederick's challenge - every musician and especially the composers in the room would have realised just how ridiculously demanding it was - but there is no other recorded instance in Bach's life when he had to concede such a defeat. and this was an exceedingly proud man, the acknowledged master of both fugue and imrovisation, before an audience of fellow virtuosi as well as his own two oldest sons.....Bach's embarrasment may have been the reason he had been invited in the first place. Writing 200 years later Schoenberg found in this evidence of a malicious scheme to (publicly) humiliate Bach.....

Bach's 'Musical Offering' to Frederick represents as stark a rebuke of his beliefs and world view as an absolute monarch has ever received....Not incidentally, it is also one of the greatest works of art in the history of music.


R

[Chaszz]

I'm relieved, I thought you were going to suggest that Bach's last works had been written by someone else!...Nonetheless, as is your wont, you do make an assertion that runs counter to the common understanding of a musical situation. I haven't seen this book and know nothing of it, but Frederick's thrice-repeated invitation for Bach to visit is usually regarded as an honor to the aged composer rather than an opportunity for the monarch to humiliate or insult him. How cruel and nihilistic would the king have had to be to ask an old man to come on an onerous 20-hour journey by coach just to insult him? While it is true that fashion had long since passed Bach by and he had his detractors, he was also greatly respected by many younger musicians. The newspaper account of the improvisation of the three part fugue emaphasizes the awe with which all present received it. The king had been interrupted at his evening concert when Bach arrived, said "Gentlemen, old Bach has come!" and insisted the visitor come in straightawy without changing out of his dusty travelling clothes.
The king asked Bach to try out all the new pianofortes in the palace and the group, including all the musicians from the interrupted concert, traipsed from room to room to do so. The next day, a procession went round all the city's churches so Bach could try out the organs. Taken all in all, the evidences of respect given to Bach during this visit do not dovetail with the interpretation you are providing.

[This message has been edited by Chaszz (edited 03-31-2006).]

[robert newman]

No, (jokingly), Bach's work IS everyone else's (and more) !

Seriously, I think it's quite clear my views on wholesale misattribution of great musical works is almost but not entirely confined to the two most famous members of the so-called 'Weiner Klassik', Joseph Haydn and WA Mozart.

Well, it seems I'm not alone in thinking as I do about Frederick the Great's treatment of Bach (supported as it seems to be by Gaines and by Arnold Schoenberg). Bach is asked the equivalent of deciphering the Rosetta Stone after travelling two days and a night by coach. He miraculously achieves it, only to be presented by a silly request to provide next a treatment in 6 parts. At the very least this is childish, immature and hardly worthy of a great king.

If we agree that this original test used a theme which offered virtually no canonic options from the outset (as Schoenberg illustrates at length) we must surely ask if Frederick the Great had not cunningly prepared such an 'impossible' task in advance, or we should attribute to the king a knowledge of fugue that he, in plain fact, never had. My point is simply that. Seen within such a context and knowing as we do that Frederick (and even Bach's sons) were lured in to the 'galant' is it not fair to say that what Bach finally made for the king of his 'Royal Theme' more than answered the king as it still answers, even today, and surely always will, Bach's critics.

Of course Bach was not merely a number crunching solver of technical problems but was, in fact, a man who could even make music during the solving of such problems. Without appreciating this two sided aspect of Bach's music we are left with a version of this man's music that is superficial and lacking in the very areas that make him so great.

Aa to whether later treatment of Bach can be viewed as fair at Potsdam or any other of the courts I might note the number of times in which his submissions to them seem to have been virtually ignored - the Brandenburg Concertos being one of several such examples.

It hardly matters of course and we cannot right what may have been wrong here. I simply note that a feature of the great man's genius was his toleration towards those who, in point of fact, were so amazingly ignorant and who, it seems, chose to remain so.

Regards



[This message has been edited by robert newman (edited 03-31-2006).]

[Chaszz]

The 'Royal Theme' may have been intended to provoke Bach, to a certain extent. Frederick was no angel, by any means. But it is evident from the story of the whole visit that the invitation was intended as an honor and the king genuinely wanted to meet Bach and see and hear him play. To build a theory about the purpose of the whole visit out of the nature of the theme is overreaching, in my opinion.

As for the theme itself, I haven't read Schoenberg's analysis of it. But in my humble estimation I've always admired it. I find it far more interesting than the theme of 'The Art of Fugue'. The middle section descending in half-steps offers much fertile potential for chromatic harmonic variation which Bach took tremendous advantage of. Had the theme been less 'cruel,' we might not have the amazing tapestry of music it spawned. In the final 6-part ricercar - the answer to the king's challenge - the composer ascends to a plateau of wisdom and artistic beauty that few before or since have reached. Isn't it possible that the theme's inordinate length and extra complexity forced Bach into a heightened concentration of his powers, and that the king may have devised it for just such a reason?

[This message has been edited by Chaszz (edited 03-31-2006).]