The second shade of grey takes us to the father, or perhaps mother, of it all, Johann Sebastian Bach. And it takes us, specifically, to his lyric, or song-like side.
It’s a good way to know Bach, to start to understand him. Because yes, he can be the most cerebral, the most theoretical of composers; he’s a composer that every mathematician loves. But make no mistake about it, he’s also a composer who is surprisingly song-like, who can just deliver up a beautiful melody, something you’ll sing all day.
He was also a guy who was a church musician, so he knew how to serve up, and then dress up, a simple hymn. But let’s go back.
He was born in 1685 in Eisenach, a town in Germany, into a family of musicians. His father was director of the musicians in the town, all his uncles were professional musicians. One of them, Johann Cristoph Bach, took Bach in at age ten when his father died (his mother had died eight months earlier), and introduced him to the organ. Bach then attended the St. Michael’s School in Lüneburg, graduated, and then obtained a position as a court musician in the chapel of Duke Ernst of Weimar. He did that for a few years, grew a bit dissatisfied and decided to take a hike.
Literally—he walked 250 miles to go see one of the finest composers of the day, Dieterich Buxtehude in the northern town of Lübeck. Right, that went well enough, and Bach might have been Buxtehude’s successor, but there was a little catch: he had to marry Buxtehude’s daughter—it was a bit like a fairy tale, or at any rate a package deal.
So Bach, presumably again by foot, married his second cousin, and hoofed it to Mülhausen, where he spent a couple of years. In 1708, Bach returned to Weimar, where he began a long career of composing, as well as directing the musicians of the ducal court. He next moved to Köthen, where his employer is a Calvinist; here Bach would write most of his secular compositions. Finally, in 1723, he was appointed director of music in two important churches in Leipzig, which had an important university.
Bach stayed in Leipzig all his life, and progressively went blind. He had an eye surgery that was completely unsuccessful, came down with pneumonia, and died in 1750.
Bach was prolific in two senses; biologically, he had two wives and twenty children, several of whom became important composers in their own right; musically, he wrote 300 cantatas, 2 passions, 2 oratorios, orchestral suites, 6 Brandenburg concerti, and a huge amount of keyboard music.
In fact, the only thing he didn’t do was compose an opera, as Handel, his exact contemporary, would do. Nor did he, like Handel, travel extensively, either to Italy or to London. Though well known in his lifetime, he wasn’t not particularly celebrated as a composer, but instead as an organist. The fame came later, when Mendelssohn, most conspicuously, champions Bach’s compositions.
Right—that’s the man. What about the music?
Well, here James chooses a lovely song, written by the Italian composer Alessandro Marcello. Originally, it was part of Marcello’s oboe concerto—Bach freely borrows it, and transcribes it for piano. Have a listen:
Transcriptions were popular in the 19th century—everyone had a piano, everyone wanted to take a nice choral or orchestral piece and play it at home, in the evening, on the piano. And so lots of Bach’s best tunes got transcribed. And Bach himself borrowed liberally from his fellow composer, as they did from him. Here’s another famous song, Bist du bei Mir, which Bach lifted from the composer, Gottfried Heinrich Stölzel:
Bist du bei Mir, in fact, is song expressing the melancholy sentiment: “if you are with me, I will go gladly to my death; oh, what a pleasant end it would be, for your hands to be the last things my faithful eyes were to see, as they close my lids to rest….” Or words to that effect. And as you can hear, it’s a knockout.
There’s more, much more, and it’s all well worth exploring. I will, more fully, in my other blog, Words on Musick. But it’s a beautiful spring day, in New York City. All of the flowering tree—the crab apples, the cherry trees, the redbud—are in full bloom. Time to turn from sonic loveliness to visual delight!
But I send you one last clip—a piano transcription of “Sheep may Safely Graze.”
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