Johann Sebastian Bach (60 page)

As Thomana faculty and students attended services at the church adjacent to their school, they were joined by faculty members and students from the university, including the above-mentioned Birnbaum, Gottsched, Kapp, Ludovici, Müller, Rivinus, and Winckler, all of whom regularly worshipped at St. Thomas's. The academic and academically trained constituency of the congregation was substantial—Leipzig boasted by far the largest university in the German-speaking countries, with forty-four full professors,
⁵⁹
a good number of associate professors, many assessors and part-time lecturers, and a student enrollment averaging 280 in the winter semester and 125 in the summer semester.
⁶⁰
Even the city council was unusually well equipped with highly educated people; for example, of the twenty-eight councillors who elected Bach in 1723, fourteen held doctorates. Burgomasters Dr. Lange and Dr. Born worshipped at St. Thomas's, while the majority of the council attended St. Nicholas's, the traditional “council's church,” whose makeup was similar—the St. Nicholas School faculty and students and a share of the university community. Although these constituencies made up little more than 10 percent of the regular Sunday churchgoers, they were joined by other segments of the city's intellectual elite: attorneys, physicians, and scholars and editors attracted by Leipzig's book-publishing industry. To all this we may add the extended community of wealthy merchant families, scattered aristocracy, and a strong contingent throughout the year of visitors from out of town.

The overwhelmingly well-educated and well-to-do congregation members, who rented seats in their preferred pews,
⁶¹
correlated with the erudite, professorial style of preaching that obtained in the city's main churches, following the level and tone set by superintendent D. Deyling,
professor primarius
of the Theological Faculty, who delivered the regular Sunday morning sermon at St. Nicholas's throughout Bach's tenure.
⁶²
A comparison here might be as inappropriate as it is unavoidable, but the poetic, theological, and musical depth as well as the style and virtuosic execution of the “cantata sermon” from the choir loft clearly aimed at matching the forceful and virtuoso performance from the pulpit, even though the time allotted to the cantor was less than half of that taken by the preacher. Both catered to the same audience, with remarkably little regard for the simple folk and the less well educated attending the same services.
⁶³

While many of Bach's regular listeners would have been moved by his music and appreciated its artful design and impassioned performance, very few possessed a close understanding of its internal structure. Most of those who did and were fascinated by it, or who wanted to learn more about it, were to be found among the performers. Next to the most musically accomplished—privately instructed St. Thomas
alumni
and the top players of the town music company—Bach could rely on a solid group of musicians with professional ambitions who were studying at the university, mostly in the Faculties of Law, Philosophy, and Theology, and wanted to prepare themselves for careers as cantors, court musicians (with secondary expertise in legal or diplomatic service), and the like. They took private lessons with Bach, and many probably paid for them by participating as vocalists or instrumentalists in the regular cantata performances or assisting in other tasks. Those who paid for lessons generally showed “themselves willing to do this in the hope that one or the other would in time receive some kind of reward and perhaps be favored with a
stipendium or honorarium
,” as Bach wrote in 1730,
⁶⁴
but the expected benefits were not easy to come by, and the cantor had to fight hard for them with the city council or find supplementary sources of income—for example, through the sale of text booklets.

Nevertheless, Bach had a steady supply of gifted and versatile university students who received private lessons from him.
⁶⁵
Some sixty such senior students—not including Thomana
alumni
who chose not to enter Leipzig University—can be confirmed,
⁶⁶
though the actual number may be well above a hundred. By a conservative estimate, four to six professional-caliber students were working closely with Bach at any given time in Leipzig. Numerous testimonials Bach wrote for his best students demonstrate the comprehensive experience they gained under his tutelage. As a case in point, we read in a 1730 letter of reference for Johann Christian Weyrauch, candidate of laws, “that he not only masters various instruments but can also well afford to make himself heard
vocaliter
, has given many examples of his skill, and also can show on request what he has done in the art of composition.”
⁶⁷
A testimonial from 1748 for Johann Christoph Altnickol, candidate of theology but provided by Bach with the self-styled academic title of “candidate in music,” relates that its bearer “not only did…act for four years diligently as assistant for our
Chorus Musicus
, but he also has shown, in addition to his vocal performance, such outstanding work on various instruments as one could desire from an accomplished musician. A number of fine church compositions of his have found no less ample approval in our town.”
⁶⁸

The wealth of performance activities introduced Bach's students to many of the basics any musical leader had to master, from the right way to position ensembles in different performing spaces to the design of instruments, their technology, and their proper use. Here they benefited from Bach's own hands-on experience, as son Carl Philipp Emanuel recalled in 1775:

 

As a result of frequent large-scale performances of music in churches, at court, and often in the open air, in strange and inconvenient places, he learned the placing of the orchestra, without any systematic study of acoustics. He knew how to make good use of this experience, together with his native understanding of building design so far as it concerns sound; and these were supplemented in turn by his special insight into the proper design of an organ, the disposition of stops, and the placing of the same.

 

Bach always stressed the practical side of music, if only to confront his students with the results of their efforts, so he kept them away from purely speculative matters. Again, Carl Philipp Emanuel underscored that his father “like myself or any true musician, was no lover of dry, mathematical stuff.” Even when he taught musical composition, Bach disregarded neutral writing exercises and trained his students directly on the basis of keyboard practice, introduced them to the principles of thoroughbass as the foundation of music, and had them conceptualize chorale harmonization as the interplay of polyphonic voices:

 

Since he himself had composed the most instructive pieces for the clavier, he brought up his pupils on them. In composition he started his pupils right in with what was practical, and omitted all the dry species of counterpoint that are given in Fux and others. His pupils had to begin their studies by learning pure four-part thoroughbass. From this he went to chorales; first he added the basses to them himself, and they had to invent the alto and tenor. Then he taught them to devise the basses themselves.
⁶⁹
Bach's students apparently copied out their teacher's own chorale settings from his cantatas and oratorios. One such compilation from the mid-1730s survives; written in the hand of Thomana
alumnus
Johann Ludwig Dietel, later cantor in Frankenhain,
⁷⁰
it underscores the central pedagogical role Bach assigned to the writing of chorales—further affirmed by Bach's contribution to the Schemelli
Gesang-Buch
of 1736, BWV 439–507—and suggests that Bach may have planned to publish an edition of his chorales, as Graupner had in 1728 and Telemann in 1731.
⁷¹
At any rate, Carl Philipp Emanuel's first two-volume edition of Bach chorales of 1765/69 may have been motivated as much by his father's teaching methods as by his own plans to compile and publish models of “the art of writing” that drew “appropriate attention to the quite special arrangement of the harmony and the natural flow of the inner voices and the bass.”
⁷²

The methodical approach of Bach's teaching was special in every respect but truly unique in the sophisticated and challenging materials he provided. His approach is brought to life in an illuminating account given in 1790 by Ernst Ludwig Gerber, author of the first comprehensive biographical dictionary in music. There he reports on the education that his own father, Heinrich Nicolaus Gerber, received when, at age twenty-two, he

 

went to Leipzig, partly to study law and partly to study music with the great Sebast. Bach…. In the first half year, as he arranged his courses, he had heard much excellent church music and many a concert under Bach's direction; but he had still lacked any opportunity that would have given him courage enough to reveal his desires to this great man; until at last he revealed his wish to a friend, named [Friedrich Gottlieb] Wild,
⁷³
later organist in St. Petersburg, who introduced him to Bach.

Bach accepted him with particular kindness because he came from [the Thuringian county of] Schwarzburg, and always thereafter called him
Landsmann
[compatriot]. He promised to give him the instruction he desired and asked at once whether he had industriously played fugues. At the first lesson he set his
Inventions
before him. When he had studied these through to Bach's satisfaction, there followed a series of suites, then
The Well-Tempered Clavier
. The latter work Bach played altogether three times through for him with his unmatchable art, and my father counted these among his happiest hours, when Bach, under the pretext of not feeling in the mood to teach, sat himself at one of his fine instruments and thus turned these hours into minutes. The conclusion of the instruction was thoroughbass, for which Bach chose the Albinoni violin solos; and I must admit I have never heard anything better than the style in which my father executed these basses according to Bach's fashion, particularly in the singing of the voices. This accompaniment was in itself so beautiful that no principal voice could have added to the pleasure it gave me.
⁷⁴

 

While in Bach's tutelage, Heinrich Nicolaus Gerber copied the materials he was given to study, signed the finished volumes, and added to his name
“L[itterarum] L[iberalium] S[tudiosus] ac M[usicae] C[ultor]”
(student of liberal letters and devotee of music). The manuscripts Gerber assembled from late 1724 to 1726 corroborate the information in the biographical report, even in terms of their chronological sequence:
⁷⁵
at the beginning, we find the
Aufrichtige Anleitung
(Gerber copied all fifteen inventions and fifteen sinfonias), then eight
French
and seven
English Suites
(copied from a larger collection of suites with and without preludes)
⁷⁶
and twenty-one movements from the partitas that were published in 1731 as
Clavier-Übung
, part I, and finally,
The Well-Tempered Clavier
⁷⁷
and the realization of the Albinoni figured bass (including Bach's corrections)
⁷⁸
—a truly demanding course of study for only two years.

Heinrich Nicolaus Gerber, later court organist at Schwarzburg-Sondershausen, was one of a large and impressive group of composers who received their training from Bach and that included, apart from Bach's own sons, Carl Friedrich Abel, royal court musician in London; nephew Johann Ernst Bach, court capellmeister in Eisenach; Johann Friedrich Doles, Bach's second successor in Leipzig; Gottfried August Homilius, cantor at Holy Cross in Dresden; Johann Ludwig Krebs, court organist in Altenburg; Johann Christian Kittel, town organist in Erfurt; Johann Gottfried Müthel, city organist in Riga; and Johann Trier, organist of St. John's in Zittau. A substantial number of Bach students also actively engaged in literary contributions and theoretical writings on music; aside from Wilhelm Friedemann
⁷⁹
and Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, the most prominent were the following:

• Christoph Nichelmann, pupil of Bach's at the St. Thomas School and from 1739 active as a composer and harpsichordist in Berlin; published in 1755 a major treatise on the controversy over the merits of the French and Italian styles,
  Die Melodie nach ihrem Wesen sowohl, als nach ihren Eigenschaften.
  
• Lorenz Christoph Mizler, who wrote his thesis on musical art as a part of philosophical erudition
  (Dissertatio quod musica ars sit pars eruditionis philosophicae)
  at Leipzig University and taught there from 1737 to 1743. He dedicated the published thesis (1734) to Johann Mattheson, Georg Heinrich Bümler, and Johann Sebastian Bach and acknowledged in its preface, “Your instruction in
  musica practica,
  most celebrated Bach, have I used with great profit, and I regret that it is not possible for me to enjoy it further.”
  ⁸⁰
  He edited the
  Musikalische Bibliothek
  (1736–54), translated and annotated Fux's
  Gradus ad Parnassum (1742), and published several
  musical treatises.
  
• Johann Friedrich Agricola, who attended Leipzig University from 1738 to 1741, studied with Bach during that period. He later became capellmeister at the Prussian court in Berlin, where he played an influential role as a composer and prolific writer on music; he also translated and annotated Pier Francesco Tosi's
  Opinioni de' cantori antichi e moderni (1723) under the title Anleitung zur Singekunst.
  
• Johann Philipp Kirnberger, whose studies in Leipzig closely overlapped with Agricola's, also ended up in Berlin, as capellmeister to Princess Amalia, sister of King Friedrich II. Of all of Bach's students, he most deliberately transmitted his teacher's concepts and methods in musical composition, particularly in his major two-volume treatise
  Die Kunst des reinen Satzes in der Music
  (1771), in which he focuses like Bach on both principles and practical examples. In 1784–87, he collaborated with Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach on a new, four-volume edition of the four-part chorales,
  Johann Sebastian Bachs vierstimmige Choral-Gesänge.