Really, there is no explanation for Johann Sebastian Bach. He himself would have attributed his gift to God, but that only raises another mystery to account for what he achieved. He might also have mentioned science, because in one of his few surviving statements about music he called it “an art and a science.” He considered music to be a matter of rules and definable phenomena: say, with a given fugue subject you can do this but you can’t do that. But though Bach knew as much about notes as anyone ever has, and was clearly a gifted teacher because three of his sons became important composers, none of his pupils ever achieved anything like what he did. Which is to say that in the end, Bach himself didn’t know how he did it.
If that sounds kind of moony, that’s because for me and for many musicians, Bach is a figure of awe. The fact that we know so little about his life and personality only magnifies the mystery. How could he think in such complexities and make his music so moving, so delightful, so directly communicative?
Inevitably it is noted that Bach is a testament to the reality of inborn talent. He came from a family so prolific with musicians that in Thuringia, their home territory, musicians regardless of name tended to be called a “Bach.” Yet none of the Bachs before him is much remembered in history. He likely had teachers in performance, but as a composer he seems to have been self-taught. He simply took to notes with the same kind of brilliance and instinctive understanding that Einstein did to numbers. Temperamentally conservative, he was not an inventor of genres and forms; instead, he absorbed the models around him and brought nearly the whole spectrum of baroque music into a unique synthesis.
Johann Sebastian Bach was born in the town of Eisenach, his father a town string player. The family was surrounded by Bachs in musical posts all over the map. His parents died during his childhood and he was taken in by his eldest brother, Johann Christoph, an organist in Ohrdruf. From this brother Johann Sebastian probably received his first keyboard training.
At eighteen, already a brilliant performer, he got his first church organist job in Arnstadt. He stayed there for four years, but failed to earn the affection of local authorities. Among other offenses, after he secured a month’s leave to hear the celebrated organist and composer Dietrich Buxtehude in Lübeck, a walk of 200 miles, he lingered there for four months listening to his hero. There were some words when he got back. Meanwhile, his superiors complained that his hymn accompaniments were too complicated and confused the congregation, and besides, he wasn’t writing enough music. Then there was his street brawl with an orchestra player whom he had called a “nanny-goat bassoonist.” Bach seems to have been an affable man on the whole, sociable, a leader and a valued colleague, a fine dad to his children, but when it came to his music he was prickly and proud, especially if he felt undervalued by his employers.
In 1707 Bach escaped to a job in Mühlhausen, where he married his cousin Maria Barbara and they got busy making babies. (Of Bach’s eventual twenty children, ten made it to adulthood, a normal percentage for the time.) In these years he wrote his first masterpieces, including the most famous organ piece in the world, the Phantom of the Opera one: Toccata and Fugue in D Minor. This hair-raising work is a good sample of Bach’s youthful style: melodramatic, dissonant, the toccata stream of consciousness, all of it overflowing with passion and youthful bravado. Bach may have been the greatest organist who ever lived, noted for finding new colors on the instrument, and hearing him do this live must have been a devastating experience. He was also a phenomenal improviser, able to invent on the organ a six-voiced fugue on the spot.
Once again, though, in Mühlhausen Bach and the authorities got on one another’s nerves; he didn’t like the conditions or the pay. In 1708 he took a job at the court of the Duke of Weimar and stayed until 1717. It was during this period that he began studying and arranging the work of his Italian contemporary Antonio Vivaldi, who taught him clarity and directness, giving focus to his predisposition to complex counterpoint. (Try the sparkling Concerto for Four Harpsichords BWV 1065, his arrangement of a Vivaldi concerto, which he transforms into a kind of aviary excursion.) This job didn’t end all that well, either. Disgusted at being passed over as court music director, Bach secured a plum job heading the music for a princely court in Köthen. After “too stubbornly forcing the issue of his dismissal,” Bach found himself clapped in jail for a month before he could move on.
The years at Köthen may have been the happiest period of Bach’s life. Prince Leopold loved music and admired his music director. In these years Bach wrote a huge quantity of mostly secular music, including some of his most celebrated works: the Brandenburg Concertos, the sonatas and partitas for solo violin and solo cello, and the epochal Well-Tempered Clavier, Book 1. All these works are splendid from first note to last, a kind of compendium not only of what instruments can do, but what music itself can do.
In relation to The Well-Tempered Clavier, we need a digression here. As part of his attention to every dimension of music, Bach was highly and historically concerned about the sticky issue of keyboard tuning. Explaining what I mean by sticky will take a while.
In dealing with tuning, there are two main terms to know. One is interval. It means the distance between notes. Intervals are also mathematical ratios. If you take an open guitar string sounding E, stop it with your finger in the middle, and pluck, you get E an octave above. The octave ratio, then, is 2:1. If you stop the string in the ratio 3:2, you get a fifth higher than the open string, the note B. The other intervals have progressive ratios; 4:3 is a fourth, and so on.
Now comes the gods’ great joke on musicians. If you start with a C at the bottom of a piano keyboard and tune a series of twelve perfect 3:2 fifths up to the top, you discover that where you expect to have returned to a perfect high C, that C is overshot, intolerably out of tune. In other words, nature’s math doesn’t add up. A series of perfect intervals doesn’t end at a perfect interval from where you started. It is this surreal irreconcilability of pitch that, through the centuries, has driven musicians nuts.
What all this means in practice is that in tuning keyboards and fretted instruments, you have to screw around with the intervals to fit the necessary notes into an octave. (None of this applies to instruments like violin or to singing, where you can tune each note on the fly.) In other words, as we say, on keyboard instruments you have to temper pure intervals, nudge them up or down a hair in some systematic way. Otherwise, you get chaos. So, there’s the second word you need to remember: The business of adapting tuning to nature’s messy math is called temperament. And now we’re halfway to understanding Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier: it has to do with the art and science of keyboard tuning.
Before Bach’s time, dozens of keyboard-tuning systems had been created, but they resulted in only fourteen workable keys. The rest of the twenty-four possible major and minor keys simply weren’t used in keyboard music because they were intolerably out of tune. And no scale on a keyboard, not even good old C major, can be perfectly in tune. If you want your fifths nicely in tune, the thirds can’t be; if you want pure thirds, you have to put up with impure fifths. Medieval tunings voted for pure fifths. By the late Renaissance, the tuning systems favored better thirds. The latter were various kinds of mean-tone temperament. In mean-tone, most of the accumulated fudges were dumped onto two notes, usually G-sharp (a.k.a. A-flat) and E-flat. The A-flat in particular sounded so out of tune that it was called the “wolf.” You didn’t write in the key of A-flat for keyboard, and generally tried to skirt the note entirely.
Between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries a lot of splendid music was written in mean-tone tuning, within that range of fourteen acceptable major and minor keys. But the inability to write in all twenty-four possible keys ate at composers’ guts. More and more, there was a demand for a tuning system that would render all keys usable.
One of those tuning systems was already known to the ancients: equal temperament. Here the poison is distributed equally through the system: the distance between each adjacent note is mathematically the same, so each interval is equally in, and slightly out of, tune. Nothing is perfect; nothing is terrible. So, now it’s all fixed, yes?
Of course not. The gods don’t let us off so easily. For centuries, equal temperament didn’t catch on because musicians tended not to like it. Most especially, musicians didn’t like the fat major thirds of equal temperament, which are way out of tune with nature. They preferred the sweet thirds of mean-tone temperaments, with all their limitations. For another thing, in mean-tone each key had an audible personality, from, say, the almost-pure and upstanding C major, suitable to moods of equanimity and celebration, to shadowy C minor, suitable for doubt and despair. Equal temperament leaves every key with exactly the same personality, which was widely felt to be boring. Musicians still preferred, then, the old varieties of what is generically called unequal temperament.
In the late seventeenth century, tuning geeks came up with a new idea: let’s hair-split all over the keyboard, tweaking this and that in minuscule ways, letting, say, a third be a bit larger in one spot and a bit smaller in another. These kinds of flexible temperaments accomplished several things at once: (1) they made all keys usable; (2) yet they preserved the individual character of keys, because each still had its distinctive collection of intervals; and (3) they tamed the big bad wolf. Hey, said adherents of this more sophisticated unequal system, this really works well! So, they called it well-temperament. One of those adherents was J. S. Bach. He wanted, he said somewhat testily, to write in any damn key he felt like, and he tuned his harpsichord himself to make that possible. When a famous organ tuner who did mean-tone tuning showed up, Bach would play an A-flat major chord on one of his organs, with its howling wolf, just to torture the old man. Eventually, though, history stepped in: by the third decade of the nineteenth century equal temperament had more or less triumphed because it was best at handling the increasing harmonic complexity Beethoven and his heirs were exploring.
Back to The Well-Tempered Clavier (clavier meaning any kind of keyboard instrument), as art rather than science. Bach wrote the preludes and fugues of the WTC in all twenty-four possible keys. Not only does this collection show off this improved tuning system, but Bach helped make well-temperament mandatory by writing irreplaceable pieces in every key. Anybody who wanted to play from the WTC was pressured to use well-temperament, because many of the pieces sounded sour in any other tuning. However, heh-heh, there’s no reliable record of which well-tempered system Bach used, though it probably was not equal temperament.
For a sample of the WTC, start at the beginning. The little Prelude in C Major that starts the set is one of Bach’s most famous and beloved pieces (it was reportedly a favorite of his, too), yet what appears to be a simple rippling up and down on chords disguises a complex interweaving of melodies. It prefaces a gently lyrical fugue. Then the Prelude in C Minor explodes in a kind of faux-demonic fury, rattling strenuously from beginning to end, followed by an impish and intricate C-minor fugue. The Prelude in C-sharp Major that follows is one of the most happy-making pieces in the world. And so on. Looking further into the piece, listen to the massive Prelude in B-flat Minor, a long-breathed mournful aria. In these ways the WTC surveys the spectrum of human feeling, and the spectrum of what music can do in expressing it. It is one of the wellsprings of all Western music that followed it. One of the first musicians to grow up playing the WTC was Beethoven, and it’s among the reasons he became what he did. (The many available recordings of the piece include both harpsichord and piano, and either can be equally effective. But I entreat you, skip the synths, Japanese kotos, didgeridoos, and other versions we used to call “schlock Bach.” I’ll allow an exception for the effervescent scat-sung Bach by the Swingle Singers, from the 1960s.)
Another of his legendary keyboard works is the Goldberg Variations, made up of thirty contrasting variations on an aria. Even before the Bach revival of the nineteenth century, this was considered the greatest of its genre; when Beethoven’s Diabelli Variations were published, they were compared with the Goldbergs. The work’s modern reputation was created practically overnight in 1955 in a crystalline recording by the young Glenn Gould.
In the summer of 1720 Bach returned from a journey with his prince to find his wife Maria Barbara had died. (Some have speculated that his tragic Chaconne for solo violin was a memorial for her.) The next year he married the young singer Anna Magdalena Wilcke. She bore him thirteen more children and beyond that was a fine helpmate; some of his later manuscripts are in her hand. His affection is shown in the collection of winsome little harpsichord pieces he assembled for her, the Notebook for Anna Magdalena Bach.
Spring of 1723 found Bach in a new job, as director of Lutheran church music for Leipzig. The city was an arts center rivaling Paris, the position extremely prestigious. Still, Bach had been the third choice for the job, securing it only after two more-famous composers had turned it down. From that point some of his employers tended to look at him as third-rate in general, which led to contrapuntal aggravations in the following decades. Bach never traveled far from home and did not publish much, so he never had the wide reputation of broadly popular composers such as Handel. Eventually he became the dominant musical figure in Leipzig, but elsewhere except for the occasional enthusiast, not much more than a name. In his last years Bach had the pleasure of being received and praised by one of his fans, Frederick the Great of Prussia, who was an avid flute player. Afterward Bach wrote The Musical Offering, a series of pieces based on a theme the king gave him.
Based at the Thomas Church, Bach had also to supply music for three other churches, and was expected to compose steadily. At the same time he was much involved in town music-making. In the first years he sometimes wrote a church cantata every week, meaning fifteen to twenty-five minutes of music composed, copied, rehearsed, and performed in the course of seven days. An oratorio is more or less an unstaged opera, with recitatives and arias and choruses, and a cantata is like a miniature oratorio. Of his over two hundred surviving cantatas inevitably some are less inspired, but there are countless glories in them. It was a killing job, but Bach carried it out with indefatigable energy and a burning determination always to put out the best that he was capable of. Many of his manuscripts have tiny holes where revisions were pinned in; they have all been lost.
A good introduction to his surviving cantatas is Wachet auf, ruft uns die Stimme (Awake, the voice is calling). Like all of them, this is based around a single Lutheran chorale melody; the cantata ends with the hymn. Throughout, this is Bach at his most buoyant. It’s worth looking up this piece on Wikipedia or the like to get the text and context: it’s for a service that symbolically joins Christ as bridegroom of the church, so the whole thing is portrayed with matrimonial warmth.
As a sample of Bach’s singular approach to expressing a text, have a listen to one of my favorite of his arias, “Wie zittern und wanken” from the cantata Herr, gehe nicht ins Gericht (Lord, do not pass judgment). The text portrays sinners trembling before the judgment seat of God, repeating themselves, accusing one another of their own sins—dark Lutheran stuff. Bach paints every part of that scene: the string accompaniment is a tremolo, so they tremble; the solo oboe repeats a phrase over and over, like the sinners; there is no bass, so the sinners have no foundation. Yet this is some of the most beautiful and touching music he ever wrote, its keynote not vengeance but pity.
The largest works to recommend for Bach are the obvious ones, because they stand at the summit of the entire choral repertoire. Bach never took up opera, but he absorbed it along with everything else, and put operatic drama and emotion into his St. Matthew Passion, originally from 1727 and later revised. A passion is an oratorio whose subject is the suffering and death of Christ. Here his forces are vocal soloists, including an Evangelist who tells the story, with double choir and orchestra for echoing effects. The throbbing opening chorus is a tapestry of mourning, beginning, “Come ye daughters, help me lament.” Here and in all his sacred music Bach treats the familiar biblical story as a universal human drama. The St. Matthew evokes the universal experience of loss: we all lose loved ones, all suffer, all die. Bach rests his work on that inescapable tragedy. The music is alternatively sorrowful and gently consoling, held together by the recitatives of the Evangelist, the words of Jesus (always surrounded by a symbolic halo of strings), and the Lutheran chorales that turn up among the movements. We stand beside the cross, participate in Christ’s suffering, grieve for his death. Listen to No. 75, the bass aria “Mache dich mein Herze rein,” with its poignant refrain “I will myself bury Jesus.” (Avoid versions that take this sorrowful movement at lively dance tempo, which these days is common and unfortunate.) This is perhaps the greatest of oratorios, rivaled only by Handel’s Messiah.
At the end of his life, in 1748–1749 Bach pulled together earlier movements written for various works, added new material, and created the Mass in B Minor. He probably never heard it complete in his lifetime because it is a full Catholic Mass, with movements the Lutheran service doesn’t use, and at some two hours it’s too long for a Catholic service. Why would Bach undertake such a thing? It may have been another tour de force like The Art of Fugue that he wanted to leave for posterity. For Bach, the mass was the most important of all musical genres. It was the perfect canvas for him to show everything he could do, musically and expressively. Its ancient text contains the deepest despair and the wildest joy, the mystical and the lyrical: every corner of life and of religion. And religion was at the center of Bach’s life. Despite its checkered sources, the result is of a piece, for many of us not just the summit of sacred music but of all music.
Perhaps start not with the whole piece but a sampling to show its astonishing range. After an introduction the Mass begins with a massive and solemn fugue on Kyrie eleison. The No. 4 Gloria in excelsis is a dancing explosion of joy. It’s a good test of a recorded performance: if it isn’t one of the most glorious things you’ve ever heard, try another one. No. 8, Domine Deus, begins with an enchanting flute melody whose gentleness carries through the movement. In the center is the anguished Crucifixus, depicting the Crucifixion in grinding dissonances and perpetually falling lines. At the end it descends into the grave and silence. From that erupts the Et resurrexit, an ecstasy of joy flashing with trumpets.
Bach’s end in July 1750 was sad, but he met it on his terms. He had been working on the epic Art of Fugue, a compendium of pieces all based on a single theme that was intended to demonstrate everything he had learned about fugue. He was not to finish the last piece. In it he had worked in his own name as a countersubject, which in German notation are the notes B-flat, A, C, and B. They were some of the last notes he wrote with his own hand. On his deathbed, blind and suffering, he dictated to a pupil a revision of one of his organ works, which he renamed Vor deinen Thron tret’ ich allhier (Before Thy Throne I Stand). It was his calling card to God.
I was reared on the old tradition that said Bach was forgotten for a hundred years after he died. In fact, while the major works were not heard, The Well-Tempered Clavier and other smaller works kept his name alive. When Beethoven first arrived in Vienna, he made his early reputation as a virtuoso partly by playing the WTC, which was known to connoisseurs. Although he knew sadly little of the music, Beethoven understood Bach’s significance: “He should not be named Bach [which in German means “brook”] but rather ocean!” The nineteenth-century Bach revival took off in earnest with Felix Mendelssohn’s historic performance of the St. Matthew Passion in 1829, the first time it had been heard since Bach’s lifetime. The first complete edition of Bach’s music took the rest of the century to finish.
One more point. Many would agree that the supreme artists in the Western musical tradition are Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven. There is a nice symmetry to that group because they are three different kinds of composers: Bach the conservative, called old-fashioned in his time; Mozart, the au courant artist, completely involved in his time; Beethoven, who from early on was called a revolutionary (though he never called himself that). Which is to say that there is no pattern for genius and inspiration, any more than there is ultimately any explanation for them. We try to explain all we can, but in the end genius is a profound mystery, even to its possessors. We can only look on and marvel.
More Bach: Magnificat in D; the suites for solo cello and violin; the Brandenburg Concertos; Harpsichord Concerto No. 1 in D Minor; cantata Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott.