Johann Sebastian Bach (13 page)

The organ chorales of the Neumeister Collection that are based on Pachelbel examples (mainly four-part compositions, most of them with
ad libitum
pedal, some with pedal
cantus firmi
) never slavishly imitate their model. What makes them stand out is their deliberate tendency to expand on the model, to go beyond its scope—often cautiously, sometimes daringly—with new forms (migrating chorale tune in the compact “Jesu, meine Freude,” BWV 1105), consistent motivic construction (“Als Jesus Christus in der Nacht,” BWV1108), and chromatically enriched harmonic design (“Herzliebster Jesu,” BWV 1093). Also noteworthy is the unconventional variety of final cadences: every piece ends in a different way.

Considering the makeup of what is presumably the earliest layer of the Neumeister Collection, these works may date from the later Ohrdruf years, but they hardly represent Bach's very first compositional exercises. Closer to those may be three short chorale fughettas, transmitted in sources even later than the Neumeister Collection: “Herr Jesu Christ, dich zu uns wend,” BWV 749, “Herr Jesu Christ, meins Lebens Licht,” BWV 750, and “Nun ruhen alle Wälder,” BWV 756. These modest and perfectly fine settings, which extend over nineteen to twenty-four measures, show close adherence to their models (
Choräle zum Praeambuliren
,
³¹
a collection prepared for publication by Johann Christoph Bach [13], and some works of Pachelbel), carefully observing the contrapuntal rules but lacking the spark of originality—all marks of genuine school exercises.

Forkel reports that when Bach was later “asked how he had contrived to master the art to such a high degree, he generally answered: ‘I was obliged to be industrious; whoever is equally industrious will succeed equally well.' He seemed not to lay any stress on his greater natural talents.”
³²
Without a doubt, Sebastian was brought up from his earliest childhood days to observe the virtues of perseverance and constant hard work. Extreme industriousness is, however, but one side. The musical experiences that shaped Sebastian through his formative years are almost unparalleled in their quality, variety, and extent. Besides being born into a family of musicians that included great-grandfather, grandfather, father, three brothers, and numerous uncles and cousins, and being in the constant company of journeymen, apprentices, and colleagues around his parents' and uncles' houses, the thoroughly professional surroundings in which he grew up exposed him to all major facets of musical culture: instrumental and vocal, ensemble and solo, sacred and secular, performed at home or in town, court, or school. Sebastian had to understand this multifaceted setting as unified—from the more workmanlike making and maintenance of instruments, preparation of performing materials, and commissioning and contracting of deals all the way up to the artistic aspects of performance and the creation of new music, represented most significantly in the person of his uncle Christoph, “the profound composer.” There is hardly a question about the overall quality of the music Sebastian grew up with, a situation comparable to the educational background of his own sons Wilhelm Friedemann and Carl Philipp Emanuel. To the question of why they excelled among his pupils, Bach provided the appropriate answer: “Because they had, from their earliest youth, opportunity in their father's house to hear good music, and no other. They were therefore accustomed early, and even before they had received any instruction, to what was most excellent in the art.”
³³

The “hands on” approach Sebastian naturally absorbed became increasingly complemented by academic scholarship, especially theological and linguistic subjects that opened his mind to philosophical issues as well as logic, grammar, and style. This intellectual dimension, which may have received its major impetus at the Ohrdruf Lyceum, set him apart from the previous family tradition as much as it predestined him for the eventual crowning of it. Sebastian's increasingly inquisitive disposition led him to explore and conquer the available repertoire in all its breadth and depth; it made him eager to learn about the highly advanced mechanical engineering and technology of organ building; and it drove him to discover, in his early compositional activities, how to venture beyond his models and reach for new horizons.

FROM LÜNEBURG TO WEIMAR, 1700–1703

C
HORAL
S
CHOLAR AT
S
T
. M
ICHAEL'S IN
L
ÜNEBURG

Shortly before his fifteenth birthday, on March 15, 1700, Johann Sebastian set out for Lüneburg, well over two hundred miles to the north of Ohrdruf. Not only was he embarking on a long trip for such a young lad, he was also leaving the narrower territory that for generations had served as home for the Bach family of musicians. Considering the many connections readily available to him, he could easily have secured a musical apprenticeship in the “Bach territory” bounded by Eisenach, Erfurt, and Schweinfurt. An apprenticeship would have taken care of his financial needs, but accepting one would have meant ending his formal education, and he clearly wanted to find a way to complete Latin school. So Sebastian made a courageous decision that would also further his professional interests: to widen his experience as a senior choral scholar by taking on assignments as vocal soloist
(concertist)
and to broaden his future options by completing his academic training at an illustrious institution. He would learn to become independent as he had to adjust to an unfamiliar setting in a town four times the size of Ohrdruf and almost twice the size of Eisenach. He would also be in the immediate vicinity of Hamburg, then the largest city in Germany, not only a metropolis much grander than any place he had ever seen, but also one that could claim a great musical tradition and a legendary reputation, especially among organists and organ music devotees. The fabulous large instruments in Hamburg and other north German Hanseatic cities were unmatched anywhere and would have been a major draw for any ambitious young organist. For Bach, they were surely the most exciting prospect of what otherwise must have loomed as a frightening trip into uncertainty.

There is no doubt that both Bach and Georg Erdmann were eagerly awaited in Lüneburg by cantor August Braun, and that the Ohrdruf cantor Elias Herda, a Thuringian from Erdmann's birthplace Leina, near Gotha, and himself a recent graduate of St. Michael's School, had paved the way for his students.
¹
Herda must have learned around Christmas 1699 that cantor Braun was in need of experienced singers, for whom scholarships would be available; he also knew that Thuringian boys were traditionally welcome in Lüneburg because of their solid training in music fundamentals.
²
So Herda suggested Erdmann and Bach when he learned that both were losing free board and stipends. Erdmann left the Ohrdruf Lyceum in January, but Bach managed to stay in school until their joint departure for Lüneburg in March, probably through support received from his elder brother. During that time, Bach and Erdmann had to arrange for passports and other necessary travel documents, obtained from St. Michael's School. Actually, the time difference between Erdmann's and Bach's dismissal from the Lyceum must be reduced by eleven days: Protestant Germany, lagging behind the rest of western Europe, finally adopted the Gregorian calendar in 1700, and therefore a leap occurred from February 18 to March 1.

The two boys traveled together,
³
and Bach would later expressly refer to Erdmann as his “schoolmate and travel companion.”
⁴
The perils and imponderables of such a long-distance trip made it a virtual necessity that the eighteen-year-old Erdmann would escort the much younger Bach. The students would have had to travel at least part of the way on foot, carrying their belongings with them. The most direct postal route would have led them through Gotha, Sondershausen, Nordhausen, and Brunswick, where Johann Stephan Bach served as cantor at St. Blasius's Cathedral. Johann Stephan, a distant relative of Sebastian's and twenty years his senior,
⁵
might have provided the boys with overnight shelter. By whatever means of transportation, the two arrived in Lüneburg well before the end of March, as they were already singing in the choir of St. Michael's School on April 3, the Saturday before Palm Sunday.
⁶
This arrival date must have been carefully planned, for it coincided with the start of the most active musical period of the entire ecclesiastical year: Good Friday, the three-day church festival at Easter, and the Sundays and feast days through Whitsunday, another three-day festival seven weeks later.

Bach and Erdmann began their active duty as choral scholars at St. Michael's on Palm Sunday weekend with the Saturday afternoon Vespers service, then took part in the 6:00
A.M.
Sunday Matins service, followed by the 7:15
A.M.
main service.
⁷
The following week included rehearsals for the music to be performed on Good Friday and Easter, the Good Friday Vespers most likely featuring the performance of a Passion story setting. The St. Michael's choral library held recent vocal-instrumental settings by Joachim Gerstenbüttel (Telemann's predecessor in Hamburg) and Augustin Pfleger (court capellmeister at Gottorf), though we don't know which Passions were selected for 1700 and subsequent years. Bach and Erdmann were accepted into the so-called Matins choir, a select ensemble of fifteen musically experienced, resident scholarship students who formed the core group of the school choir and whose assignment included the daily Matins service. Supplemented by nonresident students, the Matins choir formed the nucleus of the chorus musicus, the vocal-instrumental ensemble whose twenty-five or so members performed at the regular Saturday Vespers and the Sunday main services, and, in particular, in the more elaborate musical programs at the afternoon Vespers services of special Sundays and feast days.
⁸
The special Vespers were the principal occasions for which concerted music was performed (between the sermon and the organ postlude), while the musical repertory of the other services consisted mainly of chant, hymns, and polyphonic motets. Additionally, the chorus musicus also undertook the regular
Currende
singing throughout the year at street corners around town and performed at weddings, funerals, and other events that provided welcome opportunities for supplementary income.

“Bach, because of his uncommonly fine soprano voice, was well received.” These words from the Obituary suggest that he was not just accepted as a regular chorister but was valued for his ability to handle solo soprano parts. For April and May 1700, their first two months in the choir, Bach and Erdmann each received 12 groschen, the third-highest monthly fee among the singers, yet still half the pay of 1 taler the
concertists
received. Since subsequent school records and choir lists have not survived, we cannot ascertain what Bach's actual musical functions were nor what he earned later on.

Bach had now entered an academic and musical environment of considerable distinction. St. Michael's School at Lüneburg, an early capital of the Guelphs, was established in the fourteenth century and originally formed part of the medieval Benedictine monastery of St. Michael's, which dated back to 955. When the ancient monastery fell victim to the Reformation and was dissolved in the sixteenth century, the school took over most of its physical space. St. Michael's School and the Johanneum, the Latin school attached to St. John's Church, served as the major educational institutions not only for the rapidly growing city of Lüneburg—a salt-trade center, member of the Hansa, and the most important commercial town between Hamburg and Hanover—but also for the entire northern region of the duchy of Brunswick-Lüneburg. The highly selective St. Michael's School changed greatly in 1656 when, by ducal decree, a residential academy for fifteen to twenty young noblemen, with a separate, well-paid faculty, was added. Students at this
Ritter-Academie
were taught the regular academic subjects of theology, philosophy, classics, ethics, politics, history, mathematics, physics, and French, to which were added riding, fencing, and dancing—a program in keeping with the civil, military, and social obligations of the aristocracy. In contrast, the older St. Michael's maintained the more traditional curricular structure of a Latin school; its distinguished faculty, led by the erudite M. Johannes Buno, its rector for forty-three years (1653–96) and the author of books on history and geography, helped maintain the highest standards of education in the liberal arts. The school served commoners—mostly nonresident students from the city and the fifteen resident choral scholars from the immediately outlying region, but some, like Bach and Erdmann, from farther away. Official communications between St. Michael's School and the
Ritter-Academie
were limited, but the residential scholars at St. Michael's were housed in a dormitory adjacent to the young aristocrats, creating many points of contact. Moreover, the Matins choir members engaged in joint choral activities with the
Ritter-Academie
students for Matins and Vespers services. These connections provided frequent opportunities for the choral scholars to be hired as valets or as participants in musical entertainments. As a side benefit, the exposure to French language, etiquette, and style—deliberately cultivated by the Ritter-Academie's training program for diplomatic service—would have been welcomed by the choral scholars as a free complement to whatever financial rewards they received.

To the young Bach, Lüneburg, with its ten thousand inhabitants, must have seemed very large. The city continued as the secondary residence of the dukes of Brunswick-Lüneburg after the two ducal houses merged in 1569, and its main market square boasted a new ducal castle, built in 1695–98 by Duke Georg Wilhelm, who reigned for forty years from his principal seat in Celle. The castle later served as a dower house for the widowed duchess, Eléonore Desmier d'Olbreuse, a Huguenot who was the main promoter of the prevailing French taste at the Brunswick-Lüneburg court.

Even though he had completed half the first year of the
prima
at the Ohrdruf Lyceum, whose academic year began in the fall, Bach most likely started over again in the
prima
at St. Michael's, where the academic year began at Easter. But while the school transfer may have resulted in some loss of time, he definitely benefited from the new and probably more demanding requirements at St. Michael's, whose excellent reputation extended well beyond the duchy. The school's rector, M. Johannes Büsche, served as Bach's principal teacher in religion, logic, rhetoric, and Latin. According to a syllabus for 1695, rector Büsche used an imposing group of textbooks for his
prima
classes: Leonhard Hutter's
Compendium locorum theologicorum
(Wittenberg, 1610), a reference work on Lutheran theology whose didactic questions and answers Bach had already begun to memorize at the Ohrdruf Lyceum; Christoph Reyher's
Systema logicum
(Gotha, 1691), whose first volume (
Prolegomena logica de natura logicae)
focuses on the definitions of fundamental terms; and Heinrich Tolle's
Rhetorica Gottingensis
(Göttingen, 1680), a concise summary of Aristotelian rhetoric. In Latin literature classes, Büsche's students read Virgil's
Bucolica
and
Aeneid
, book IV, and Cicero's
De Catilina
.

During their two years in the
prima
, students received further instruction in Latin and Greek from the conrector M. Eberhard Joachim Elfeld, son-in-law of the previous cantor at St. Michael's, Friedrich Emanuel Praetorius, and in arithmetic from the current cantor, August Braun. With Elfeld, they studied the monograph on Alexander the Great by Quintus Curtius Rufus, Cicero's
De
officiis
, selections from Cicero's
Epistolae
, and Horace's
Carmina
. Elfeld was also responsible for the instruction of Greek, where the New Testament served as the main textbook; other readings included philosophical and poetic texts by Kebes of Thebes
(Cebetis Tabula)
, Phocylides, Isocrates, and Theognis. Prima students took individual tutorials with rector Büsche and conrector Elfeld in history and geography, in which they were probably guided by the influential writings of Buno, the previous rector, and in genealogy, heraldry, German poetry, mathematics, and physics.

The demanding scholastic requirements strongly emphasized linguistics, theology, and classical literature, without neglecting the more modern academic subjects of history, geography, and physics. The curriculum was designed to prepare students for graduate study at a university in the liberal arts, theology, jurisprudence, or medicine. So by the end of his schooling, Bach was fluent in Latin and well in command of a broad spectrum of subjects. The later career of Bach's friend Erdmann, who went on to study law and eventually ended up in the Russian diplomatic service, was likely determined by his contacts with young
Ritter-Academie
noblemen and their educators. Bach profited no less from this experience in his future dealings with the aristocracy. Lüneburg must also have been where he acquired his basic knowledge of French,
⁹
the official language at the
Ritter-Academie
, and where he taught himself Italian, an essential language for an educated musician.

As a choral scholar, Bach was involved in the varied musical activities at St. Michael's. These not only took up a considerable amount of time, they also provided welcome further experience and opportunities. As Elias Herda had in Ohrdruf, August Braun provided the young Bach with a role model as a cantor that must have left a deep impression and filled him with respect for and interest in the office. Cantor Braun did not particularly distinguish himself as a composer (only one incomplete mourning aria of his twenty-four inventoried works has survived),
¹⁰
although he was able to make use of St. Michael's remarkable music collection, which ranked with that of St. Thomas's in Leipzig as among the oldest, largest, and richest choir libraries in Germany.
¹¹
When the cantorate passed from Friedrich Emanuel Praetorius to Braun in 1695, an inventory recorded 1,102 items that represent a carefully chosen cross section of seventeenth-century music from Germany and Italy, primarily settings of German and Latin texts. The holdings include collections and individual compositions by many leading composers of the time and of bygone days, among them Heinrich Schütz (30 works), Johann Rosenmüller (96), Wolfgang Carl Briegel (26), Sebastian Küpfer (27), Joachim Gerstenbüttel (41), Claudio Monteverdi, Giacomo Carissimi, Gasparo Casati (17), and Marco Giuseppe Peranda (18). Clear emphasis lay on composers of the most recent generation, some of them—in particular, Gerstenbüttel of Hamburg—still active. A
cappella
motets were balanced by vocal concertos with instrumental accompaniment, including pieces scored for large vocal-instrumental ensembles, among them a thirty-one-part Sanctus by Samuel Capricornus and a twenty-six-part concerto, “Lobe den Herrn, meine Seele,” by the current Leipzig Thomascantor Johann Schelle. It seems unrealistic, however, to imagine the fifteen-or sixteen-year-old Bach roaming around the library and browsing through materials—most of it in partbooks, not scores—for study purposes; his primary musical experience was shaped by actually performing a diversified repertoire of older and newer works for a variety of liturgical, nonliturgical, and secular functions.