 |
|
|
|
Reviews of books by some of the hottest writers working today, exclusive author interviews, literary news and criticism.
|
|
|
|
|
Fill out your email address
to receive our newsletter!
|
|
|
|
|
 Get new reviews the instant they are posted to the site with RSS
What is RSS?
|
|
| Search Box (type in author's last name or one key word) |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
 Geck shows that Bach is in this period a composer concerned with music as music and if not an innovator in any obvious sense, one who was receptive to new ideas and able to perceive music as a language not bound to specific occasions but having a universal and permanent significance. Although he was in a sense the last of a tradition, he was not a traditionalist.
Reviewed by Bob Williams
Johann Sebastian Bach: Life and Work
by Martin Geck
Harcourt
2006, ISBN 0-15-100648-2, $40.00, 738 pages
There is a short forward by Kurt Mazur (not a conductor that I especially associate with Bach) to this very substantial book, translated from the German by John Hargraves. At first the translation seems stiff with much that is idiomatic in German but not in English. The difficulty arises from the nature of the original, which is carefully phrased and precise in its assessment of Bach and of his early biographers and commentators. As Geck moves into the life of Bach, the mists clear and the difficult early years and the stubborn toughness of the young Bach, seventeen at the time of his first official position, becomes abundantly interesting.
In Geck’s careful assessment, he determines that, although we have lost much of Bach’s music, we have sufficient to make realistic conclusions. One of the enemies of the continued existence of Bach manuscripts is the corrosive action of the ink on the paper, and the plan now is to split the paper so that it can be backed with paper of archival quality. Although the idea of a catalogue raisonné did not become a concern earlier than Haydn and Mozart, it is obvious that Bach did not regard his manuscripts carelessly and loss, considerable loss, has resulted from the vicissitudes of inheritance and hazards of transmission since his death in 1750 at the age of sixty-five.
But at seventeen he was already set on his career and showed himself at his first post in Arnstadt to be a prickly employee, inclined to insist on his rights and prone to define these in a generous manner. He was not long at Arnstadt and took up a post at Mühlhausen where he composed a first work there for the town council, Gott ist mein König (God is My King). Geck observes dryly that this seemed appropriate for one who had so much difficulty all his life with more earthly authorities.
Bach might have managed to stay effectively in Mühlhausen, but, after a year, the senior duke at Weimar took him into his service. There, already married to his first wife Maria Barbara, they arrived at Weimar in 1708 with Bach’s student Johann Martin Schubart. The two dukes of this strangely constituted dukedom did not get along, the elder duke Wilhelm Ernst having once gone so far in a pique as to arrest the younger duke’s advisors. Wilhelm Ernst took a great interest in religious matters, the piety of the members of his court, and in the music designed to stimulate religious feelings. His nephew and co-ruler Ernst August had more secular taste in music and Bach was well equipped and happy to provide music for both uncle and nephew. Bach’s daughter Catherina Dorothea was born towards the end of the year. Bach is now twenty-three.
Geck’s discussion of the early works of Weimar, Mühlhausen, and Arnstadt – his particular choice is the cantata Ich hatte viel Bekümmernis (I Have Much Distress) – takes up the matter of the apprehension of a work as it stands or as it exists within its musicological context. It can hardly come as a surprise that as a teacher of musicology at the University of Dortmund, he prefers the latter.
In 1717 Bach entered the service of Prince Leopold von Anhalt-Cöthen. Leopold was the brother-in-law of Ernst August. Bach may have wished the change for various reasons, a slowing down in the process of supplying compositions as required by his contract and disappointment over a promotion that went to another. Bach was unable immediately to take up his duties in 1717 because he could not escape from his contract. Bach proved himself a match for the stubborn duke although he was arrested for his intransigence before he finally won his freedom. He wrote the early form of The Well-Tempered Clavier while in custody. After he fled the city, he was declared an outlaw and hanged in effigy. He was thirty-two and his household consisted of his wife, her sister and four children, one of whom, Carl Philip Emmanuel Bach (then three), will be one of several of the Bach sons to make a distinguished career in music.
At Cöthen in 1720 Maria Barbara, Bach’s wife, died. In the following year he married again, to a young singer named Anna Magdalena Wilcke. Bach was thirty-six and she was twenty.
Bach would never be happy in any of the positions that he occupied. He now looked for a new position in Leipzig. This was the cultural capital of northern Germany and the post available was as cantor of St. Thomas Church and musical director for the city itself. A group of councilors governed Leipzig, and although it was free of the sometimes arbitrary whims of princes and dukes, it presented problems of its own. The great one was the division between those councilors who wanted Leipzig to be preeminently the showcase of new art and music and those who wanted a decorous and conservative church music. Bach will spend the rest of his life in this post at Leipzig. He will never cease to give battle, but he will seldom win and he will always have an eye out for possible positions elsewhere.
At St. Thomas Bach behaved unexpectedly in his choice of cantata and passion librettists. He avoided the staid, theologically sound but unexciting churchmen with a poetic bent. He used a woman poet for several cantatas and he used the dramatist Picander for the Saint Matthew Passion. Picander was far from staid. He wrote plays the exuberance of which the town council felt necessary to censure and risqué wedding poems. Geck deduces, since Picander’s wife was godmother to one of Bach’s children in 1737, that the ties between Picander and Bach were social as well as professional.
As the troubled story of Bach’s career in Leipzig develops, it gathers a sprinkling of typographical errors, but when Geck talks of Bach’s work with the local collegium musicum, there is a flagrant error that requires specific mention. “Zimmerman,” writes Geck, “. . . will host the collegium – directed by Bach after 1729 – until the time of Bach’s death in 1741.” Since Bach died in 1750, one must conclude that this is an error, possibly committed by the translator, and that it was Zimmerman the host who died in 1741, not Bach. A later reference proves that this conclusion is correct.
But this error should not obscure the importance of the collegium. It was a gathering of musicians who played for the habitués of Zimmerman’s coffeehouse. It was an early instance in Germany of music performed for an audience independent of a princely or ecclesiastical setting.
Geck is not a writer who turns away from digressions if he feels a need. He pauses in the account of Bach’s last period, when he had turned aside from public involvements – and had even found the strength to ignore the constant encroachments and studied pettiness of the Leipzig town council. Geck shows that Bach is in this period a composer concerned with music as music and if not an innovator in any obvious sense, one who was receptive to new ideas and able to perceive music as a language not bound to specific occasions but having a universal and permanent significance. Although he was in a sense the last of a tradition, he was not a traditionalist. However neglected in the concert halls and public performances until his rediscovery by Mendelssohn, he was never out of the mind of the great composers who came after him.
Blindness added to the problems of his last years, and he died in 1750. Scholars now speculate that the combination of blindness and strokes indicate that Bach suffered from and died of undiagnosed diabetes.
Bach’s life occupies roughly a third of this massive book. In the remainder of the book Geck considers the Bach compositions. Many of the questions that he treated earlier – such as performance practices – he now considers in greater detail. He also develops with greater refinement a portrayal of Bach who uses the material available but with a restless creativity remaking it and combining it with startlingly fresh concepts. Geck also cautiously explores in his discussion of the cantatas the possibilities that Bach incorporated Christian symbolism in his music or in at least its scoring purely for its own sake. In Geck’s consideration of the music as well as in his consideration of the life the Bach of this book is a compelling figure, no longer a shadowy ideal but a man of flesh and blood who resisted the oppressions of petty bourgeoisie encroachments with rambunctious vigor and was also a composer of genius who moved towards his goals in a manner that we can follow, admire, and appreciate.
Geck is especially revealing in his treatment of Bach and of his great contemporary Handel. Although Handel wrote in many of the same genres as Bach, his constant search for unqualifiedly beautiful sounds produces music of cold grandeur. The rowdier and less disciplined Bach, often wrongly represented as analytical and intellectual, sought in his music an expressiveness that often was at odds with mere beauty of sound.
Although the musical examples in the latter part of this book exceed my slender abilities, I found the accompanying text sufficiently clear and highly interesting, a sensitive and arresting examination of Bach’s key works. This book, like others on Bach, does not provide the BWV information. I found a site, however, where the reader can remedy this omission. The URL is http://bachcentral.com/bwv.html. It makes a very useful supplement to this otherwise excellent book.
About the Reviewer: Bob Williams is retired and lives in a small town with his wife, dogs and a cat. He has been collecting books all his life, and has done freelance writing, mostly on classical music. His principal interests are James Joyce, Jane Austen and Homer. His writings, two books and a number of short articles on Joyce, can be accessed at: http://www.grand-teton.com/service/Persons_Places
|
|
|
|
|
|
