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SEEN
AND HEARD INTERNATIONAL SPECIAL FEATURE
Soli Deo Gloria, The Leipzig Bach Festival
2008:
A
special
three part report by Aart van der Wal (AvW)
Part One : The Background
Shortly after the foundation of the
Neue
Bachgesellschaft (New Bach Society) the first ever Bach Festival
was launched in Berlin in 1900, mainly focusing on the propagation
of Bach’s music and making it accessible to a broad public. Four
years later, the festival came to Leipzig, and again in 1908, 1912
and 1916. Unfortunately, the progression of the First World War
disrupted further plans until 1920 when the festival was back
again, but again it was no everlasting joy. Nazi ideology gradually
invaded the arts and took hold of the Festival’s cultural itinerary.
The name was changed into the Bach-Händel-Schütz Feiern
(Festival). In the late forties the political, military and social
circumstances gravely deteriorated, while travel conditions in
Europe and beyond severely worsened. Additionally, thousands of
musicians were either expelled or lived in exile in non-occupied
countries.
However, the festival
became
revitalised
within one year of the collapse of Nazi Germany: the Bach
Festwoche was more or less in place, albeit only with the
greatest of efforts needed to run it under Soviet ruling. In
1950 the GDR rulers exploited the 200th anniversary of Bach’s
death, realising that one of the nation’s greatest cultural
assets deserved international promotion. The
introduction of a real Bach contest for performing musicians (Dmitri
Shostakovich being one of the jury members), a variety of seminars
and lectures, and an exhibition in Leipzig's Old Town Hall became an
important stimulus, gradually contributing to the festival’s
progressive popularity, even though the whole of Bach’s church music
was sadly missing. For the GDR then, the party's
'religion' had to dominate, not the church’s. After "Die Wende"-
the fall of the Berlin wall and the beginning of Germany's
reunification from November 1989 onwards - the transformation
affected all the arts. It took some time to restructure and to
reorganise of course, along with the almost burning necessity
to reform an otherwise hopelessly old fashioned political and social
system. Massive transitions were taking place on all levels
and in each and every imaginable direction.
Less than five years later the New Bach Society established the 69th
Bach Festival for the first time in conjunction with the famous Bach
Archive in Leipzig. Exactly ten years after the demolition of the
Iron Curtain, the Bach Festival was not just as lively as
ever, but it was now transferred into a solidly planned annual
event, and even more importantly, was also solidly financed by the
city and organised by the Bach Archive. The Leipzig Bach Festival
was now a reality and would last.
On the other hand, the New Bach Society also decided to maintain its
own annual festival tradition in various German cities, but in
specific jubilee years (ending on 0 or 05) they joined the Bach
Archive in organizing the event in Leipzig exclusively.
A fabulous tradition continues
There can be no question that the Leipzig Bach Festival has
gradually grown into one of the major classical music festivals in
Europe, significantly contributing the city's importance for
all music. Johann Sebastian Bach, who lived and worked
in Leipzig during major part of his life, from 1723 until his death
in 1750 was clearly the greatest cantor of all time at the city's
St. Thomaskirche. There he created most of his cantatas, the
St. John and St. Matthew Passions, the Magnificat, the Christmas
Oratorio, the Musical Offering, the Art of Fugue, the Great Mass in
B minor and so much more. There can surely be no more impressive
artistic experience than to hear Bach's music in the two main
churches where he had worked so strenuously: St. Thomas’s itself
and the St. Nikolaikirche. But other historic venues are important
too, like the Old Trading Bourse (Alte Handelsbörse) and the Old
Town Hall (Altes Rathaus). In all of these, the baroque period comes
very close to one’s heart, and not only in a musical sense.
These sites are part of the great inherited tradition, and it
is a most uplifting experience to be a part of it: people from
all over the world gather to listen to baroque music played by
first class performers and ensembles in a most fascinating baroque
settings. We can almost imagine that we actually in
the period when those great baroque masterpieces were conceived,
as if time is standing still for us.
The 2008 Festival's theme: Bach and his sons
One of the Bach Archive’s musicologists, Dr. Andreas Glöckner,
began the programme by lecturing on the current Festival’s
theme: Bach and his sons:
Dr. Glöckner at one of his lectures in the
Old Trading Bourse
Picture ©Bach-Archiv Leipzig/Gert Mothes
Johann Sebastian Bach apparently did not leave behind a written
will, but he may have given rough instructions, after a serious
illness in the fall of 1749, on how his musical estate was to be
handled in the event of his death. The systematic distribution of
his collected work was intended to preserve as much of it as possible
and
yet he still could not prevent some items from being scattered to a certain
extent. In a letter to Bach’s later biographer Johann Nikolaus
Forkel in 1774, Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach complained that the
musical scores of Bach senior were getting hard to track down: “It
is aggravating that my late father’s things should be floating
around like this. I’m too old and too busy to round them up.” An
assiduous keeper of his father’s legacy,
Carl Philipp Emanuel tried – especially in
his later years – to bring the scattered musical scores together as best as he could , with the aim of establishing a “Bachian
Archive”. Although relatives were supportive of his efforts, much of
the work could no longer be located and was irretrievably lost.
J S Bach had apparently divided up his music library
with practical considerations in mind. According to Forkel, most of
his sacred pieces were left to his oldest son, who was most likely
to have a use for them as music director and organist at the
Liebfrauenkirche (the Church of our Lady) in Halle. Wilhelm
Friedemann had performed several of his father’s festival cantatas
from 1746 onwards and had borrowed some of them from his father’s
library for this purpose. They were usually performed in their
unabridged versions with no changes to the texts; only the
instrumentation was occasionally modified. That he possessed at
least one of his father’s Passions is indicated by the account of
his absurd parody of several arias from the “at least
thirty-years-old” Passion oratorio “of a certain, distinguished
double counterpointist.” We would love to know nowadays if this is a
reference to the first Passion piece of his father from the year
1717. Accusations of plagiarism even resulted in a lawsuit in
Halle, where the concert’s patron refused to pay Wilhelm Friedemann
the agreed-upon fee of 100 talers. The files of the proceedings have
unfortunately been lost.
Unlike his older brother, the younger Johann Christian Bach, who
had just turned 15 in the fall of 1750, had virtually no use for his
father’s sacred works. He left most of the manuscripts that came to
him from his father’s estate to his brother Carl Philipp Emanuel
before heading to Italy in the early summer of 1755. There he
converted to Roman Catholicism – much to the dismay of his
Protestant family – in order to take on a position as church
musician. As organist at the cathedral of Milan he understandably
could not perform his father's sacred works , indebted as they were
to the Lutheran tradition. Carl Philipp Emanuel's early church
compositions do betray the stylistic influence of his father,
however.
Johann Christian's inheritance did include original manuscripts of
organ and piano works. Anna Magdalena had actually written his name
“Christel” (= Johann Christian) on some of them to
certifying the claim to ownership of her youngest son, just in case
of arguments. Nevertheless,
disputes did emerge among the heirs when Bach senior gave Johann
Christian three pianos, which his half-siblings later contested.
Johann Christian evidently never emerged as an ambitious performer
of his father’s piano works as it happens and according to Christian Friedrich Daniel Schubart, Bach’s youngest son even admitted “that he was never able
to play what his father set down.”
Compared to Johann Christian, the three years older Johann Christoph
Friedrich must have been “the best player among the brothers,
performing his father’s piano compositions with the most skill.” As
a chamber musician and subsequent concertmaster of the Bückleburg
court orchestra, he composed very few sacred works of his own but
did occupy himself with his father’s choral compositions,
possibly even lending a hand to his brother Philipp Emanuel in the
latter’s first edition of the four-part Chorales (BWV 253-438),
begun in 1765. Judging by his correspondence with
Leipzig publisher Johann Gottlob Immanuel Breitkopf at least, he
pursued the project with avid interest.
In a number of his own church compositions, Bach’s second-youngest son
used choral movements from his father’s cantatas, Passions and
oratorios, sometimes rather prominently. He
inherited numerous sacred works from his father’s estate, and even
performed some of them in later years. There are at least some
strong indications of this in his handwritten notes on the scores of
the cantatas “Jesus schläft, was soll ich hoffen” BWV 81 and “Herr,
gehe nicht ins gericht” BWV 105. When and where these performances
took place remains uncertain, as there was no great interest in
sacred music at the Bückleburg court, where on regular Sundays,
figurate music was never or rarely performed.
The fact that Bach’s sacred works continued to be performed in Leipzig after
his death (1750) is thanks to especially Anna Magdalena Bach, who
was legally entitled to a third of his estate. Among other things,
the widow inherited the performing parts of the so called chorale
cantata cycle, but gave them to the St. Thomas’s School in
August 1750, in exchange for a six-month period of grace, i.e.
permission to stay in the rectory for that time after her husband’s
death. The manuscripts were intended for practical purposes and were
indeed used by Bach’s successors in office, Gottlob Harrer and
Johann Friedrich Doles, for a number of performances – perhaps even
more often than can be verified from the visible records.
According to some historical sources, Doles is said to have
performed three of Bach’s Passions. Two of the three pieces,
however, were erroneously attributed to Bach however but it is
possible that the early version to his Passion According to St.
Matthew BWV 244b was performed in Leipzig around 1756. Even before
Doles took over the cantorship at St. Thomas’s Church, Prefect
General Karl Friedrich Barth had “long administered” the cantorship
– as he expressively pointed out in a subsequent application letter
– performing at least 15 of Bach’s chorale cantatas as interim
cantor and organist.
With his new position in March 1768 as cantor at the Hamburg Johanneum (Latin school) and music director of the city’s five main
churches, Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach assumed tasks largely identical
to those of his father. In this respect, Bach’s second-oldest son
had an enormous workload, and yet his understanding of the office
and assignment of church musician was wholly different
his father's. Though his full-time job was to take care of church
music on Sundays and Holy-Days, Carl Philipp Emanuel devoted himself from the very
start to composing instrumental pieces. Sacred vocal works were only
really of interest to him when they were intended for public
concerts or as part of an edition of collected works. His extensive music
library contained - particularly in later years – most of his
father’s sacred scores although very few of these were performed in full in
Hamburg. CPE Bach usually borrowed individual passages, in most cases
Bible-verse choruses and chorales – in other words, passages with
rather timeless texts, unlike many libretti of the early 18th
century. According to a report on Hamburg church music from 1789,
“texts which are old, poor, and no longer appropriate to
contemporary tastes” were not to be tolerated and Philipp Emanuel
therefore made fundamental changes to the texts when borrowing
pieces. In Hamburg he also performed passages from his father’s
Passions, even using considerable portions of the St. Matthew
Passion BWV 244 in his own first Hamburg Passion pieces (as well as in
their later versions), whereas he composed the contemplative
movements (arias and recitativo accompagnato) himself, in their entirety.
The most prominent church piece from his father’s estate, the Credo from the Great Mass in B minor, was performed, not in a church service, but in one of Hamburg’s public concerts. The spectacular performance on April 9, 1786 made the headlines. The “Staats-und Gelehrte Zeitung des Hamburgischen unpartheyischen Correspondenten” newspaper, for instance, wrote on April 11 that the immortal Johann Sebastian Bach’s composition was “one of the most magnificent pieces of music... ever heard.” The performance undoubtedly helped spark off the Bach preservation movement that began in the early 19th century. Large parts of the Mass were performed in Berlin and Frankfurt am Main between 1811 and 1815, as well as in 1827 and 1828. As early as 1811, Carl Friedrich Zelter wrote that it was “the greatest musical work of art … the world has ever seen.”
Carl Friedrich Zelter (1758-1832)
Zelter was the driving force of an initial large-scale Bach revival
in the following years, performing in full or in part, around 100 of
Bach’s cantatas and many instrumental works, in addition to the St.
Matthew and St. John Passions, at the Friday recitals of the Berlin
Sing-Akademie. He thereby continued a tradition which had begun in
Berlin long before 1800 and which was closely tied to the activities
of musicians like Johann Philipp Kirnberger, Johann Friedrich Hering
and Christian Friedrich Carl Fasch.
Invention creates invention
They were the main ingredients of the current festival’s program:
the works by the Bach family of composers and musicians, partly
from the transitional period from Baroque to Classicism. No other
family contributed so much and so diligently to the musical history of
Europe or was so heavily involved on such high musical levels in
almost any genre, be they in courts, churches or municipalities. The
Saxon Academy of Science is now – at last! - preparing an index of
the complete works of all members of this Bach family. The first
two volumes contain works by Johann Christoph Friedrich (edited by
Ulrich Leisinger) and Wilhelm Friedemann (edited by Peter Wollny).
Another focal point of interest was the music created by same or
later generations of composers, where they referred to Johann
Sebastian Bach as their great contemporary or predecessor. To quote
Shostakovich: “Bach’s music is the most supreme pinnacle of the art
of music in this world.” And: “His music is truly contemporary even
in our day.” An we know of another great composer of the
twentieth century, Igor Stravinsky, who usually started his working
day by playing Bach on his piano.
This year’s festival program could not have been better drafted,
ranging from a great number of sacred and secular works to intimate
chamber and solo music, a substantial part of which is either rarely
heard or even not at all. For instance, I cannot recall any live
performance of Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach’s St. Matthew Passion or
the ingenious pieces for viola da gamba by Johann Christian Bach.
Other fine examples: Fasch’s Mass for 16 voices, Zelter’s “Wachet
auf, ruft uns die Stimme” and “Im Flammen nahet Gott”, Zelenka’s and
Hasse’s Miserere in C minor, or the pasticcio “Wer ist der, so von
Edom kömmt” by the combined efforts of Graun, Telemann and Bach.
An extra
series of commissioned compositions (a Festival initiative) also took
us, for instance, to the “Fantasia on an Arioso by JS B(ach)”, a
piece written by Friedrich Goldmann, inspired by an arioso from
Bach’s St. Matthew Passion. Other contemporary compositions and
performances too carried a mix of Bach’s musical
fundamentals and sparkling jazz sounds, like the ever exciting
Jacques Loussier Trio. They all proved – sometimes just sounding at
random - that invention creates invention.
Click here for Part Two
Aart van der Wal - © July 2008