BACH, JOHANN SEBASTIAN German musical composer. The Bach family was of importance in the history of music for nearly 200 years. Four branches of it were known at the beginning of the 16th century, and in 1561 we hear of Hans Bach of Wechmar who is believed to be the father of Veit Bach (born about 1555). The family genealogy, drawn up by J. Sebastian Bach himself and completed by his son Philipp Emanuel, describes Veit Bach as the founder of the family, a baker and a miller, "whose zither must have sounded very pretty among the clattering of the mill-wheels." His son, Hans Bach, "der Spielmann," is the first professional musician of the family.
Of Hans's large family the second son, Christoph, was the grand father of Sebastian Bach. Another son, Heinrich of Arnstadt, had two sons, Johann Michael and Johann Christoph, who are among the greatest of J. S. Bach's forerunners, Johann Christoph being probably the author of the splendid motet, Ich lasse dick nicht ("I wrestle and pray"), formerly ascribed to Sebastian Bach. Another descendent of Veit Bach, Johann Ludwig, was admired more than any other ancestor by Sebastian, who copied 12 of his church cantatas and sometimes added work of his own to them.
The Bach family never left Thuringia until the sons of Sebas tian went into a wider world. Through all the misery of the peasantry during the period of the Thirty Years' War this clan maintained its position and produced musicians who however local their fame, were among the greatest in Europe. So numer ous and so eminent were they that in Erfurt musicians were known as "Bachs," even when there were no longer any members of the family in the town. Sebastian Bach thus inherited the artistic tradition of a united family aloof from all the musical fermenta tion which in the rest of Europe had destroyed polyphonic music throughout the 17th century.
Early Days.—Johann Sebastian Bach was baptized at Eisenach on March 23, 1685. His parents died in his loth year, and his elder brother, Johann Christoph, organist at Ohrdruf, took charge of him and taught him m>'sic. The elder brother is said to have been jealous of Sebastian's talent, and to have forbidden him access to a manuscript volume of works by Froberger, Buxtehude, and other great organists. Every night for six months Sebastian got up, put his hand through the lattice of the bookcase, and copied the volume out by moonlight, unfortunately to the perma nent damage of his eyesight—as is shown by all the extant por traits of him at a later age and by the blindness of his last year. When he had finished, his brother discovered the copy and took it away from him.
In 1 7 0o Sebastian, now 15 and thrown on his own resources by the death of his brother, went to Luneburg, where his unbroken soprano voice obtained for him an appointment at the school of St. Michael as chorister. We know little about his teachers, but we have abundant evidence of his own incessant study of earlier and contemporary composers, such as Frescobaldi (c. 1587), Caspar Kerl (1628-93), Buxtehude, Froberger, Muffat the elder, Pachelbel and probably Johann Joseph Fux (166o-1741), after wards the author of the Gradus ad Parnassum (17 2 5) on which Haydn trained himself a generation later.
A prettier legend than that of his brother's forbidden organ volume tells how, on his return from one of the many holiday expeditions which Bach made to Hamburg on foot to hear the great organist Reinken, he sat outside an inn longing for the dinner which he could not afford, when two herring-heads were flung out of the window, and he found in each of them a ducat with which he promptly paid his way, not home, but back to Hamburg.
At Hamburg, also, Keiser was laying the foundations of German opera on a splendid scale which must have fired Bach's imagina tion, though it never directly influenced his style. On the other hand Keiser's church music was of immense importance in his development. In Celle the famous Ho f kapelle brought the in fluence of French music to bear upon Bach's art, an influence which inspired nearly all his works in suite-form and to which his autograph copies of Couperin's music bear testimony. Indeed, there is no branch of music, from Palestrina onwards, conceivably accessible in Bach's time, of which we do not find specimens care fully copied in his own handwriting. Again, when Bach, at the age of Ig, became organist at Arnstadt, he found Lubeck within easy distance, and there, in Oct. 1705, he went to hear Buxtehude, whose organ works show so close an affinity to Bach's style that only their lack of coherence as wholes reveals to the attentive listener that this noble music is more primitive than Bach's.
First Appointments.—Enthusiasm for Buxtehude caused Bach to outstay his leave by three months, and this, together with his habit of astonishing the congregation by the way he harmonized the chorales, got him into trouble. But he was already too great an ornament to be lightly dismissed ; and though his answers to the complaints of the authorities (recorded in the archives of the church) were spirited rather than satisfactory, and the consistorium had to make what scandal they could about his allowing a "stranger-maiden" to sing privately in the church, Bach was able to maintain his position at Arnstadt until he obtained the organistship of St. Blasius in Miilhausen in 1707. Here he married his cousin, easily identified with the "stranger maiden" of Arnstadt ; and here he wrote his first great church cantatas, Aus der Tiefe and Gottes Zeit. Gott ist mein Konig he had written two years earlier.
In 1708 Bach went to Weimar where his successes were crowned by his appointment, in 1714, at the age of 2g, as Hofkonzert meister to the duke of Weimar. Here he found ample scope for sacred music, and the great cantata Ich hatte viel Bekummerniss was probably the first work of his new office. In Bach visited Dresden in the course of a concert tour, and was induced to challenge the arrogant French organist, J. Louis Marchand. The two champions heard (or overheard) each other's playing. A musical tournament was arranged at court, but on the appointed day the only news of the French champion was that he had left Dresden by the earliest coach. This triumph was followed by Bach's appointment as Kapellmeister to the duke of Cothen, a post which he held from 1717 to 1723. The Cothen period is that of Bach's central instrumental works, such as the first book of Das Wohltemperirte Klavier, the solo violin and violoncello sonatas, the Brandenburg concertos, and the French and English suites.
Removal to Leipzig.—In 1723, finding his position at Cothen uninspiring for choral music, he removed to Leipzig, where he became cantor of the Thomasschule, being still able to retain his post as visiting Kapellmeister at Cothen, besides a similar position at Weissenfels. His wife had died in 1720, leaving seven children, of whom Friedemann and Philipp Emanuel had a great future before them. (For his sons see BACH, K.P.E., below.) In Dec. 1721 Bach married again, and for the beautiful soprano voice of his second wife he wrote many of his most inspired arias. She was a great help to him with all his work, and her musical hand writing soon became almost indistinguishable from his own. In 1729 Bach heard that Handel was for a second time visiting Halle on his way back to London from Italy. A former attempt of Bach's to meet Handel had failed; illness now prevented his travelling, and his son could not persuade Handel to visit Leipzig; so the two never met. Bach so admired Handel that he made a manuscript copy of his Passion nach Brockes; a fact of great significance. The poem of Brockes, a dreadful example of the literary taste of its day, purported to be a combination of the four Gospel narratives. It had been set by every German composer of the time, but it was transformed by Bach with real literary skill as the groundwork of the nonscriptural numbers in his Passion according to St. John.
Closing Years.—All Bach's most colossal achievements, such as the Passion according to St. Matthew and the B Minor Mass (see ORATORIO and MAss) date from his cantorship at Leipzig. His position there was important and congenial, and his tempera ment was equal to the strain of many a "breeze" with town councillors who would have preferred a less independent cantor and a more ecclesiastical style of music. But graver troubles were not to be avoided in any large family living on the wages of learn ing in those insanitary days. Of his seven children by his first wife only three survived him. By his second wife he had 13 children, of whom he lost four of the six sons. His post was more dignified than lucrative ; and the inventory of his possessions, made after his death, tells a tale of thrift.
His eldest son, Friedemann, delighted him with the growth of a wonderful talent, which showed him to be, as the more famous son, Philipp Emanuel said, more nearly capable of replacing his father than all the rest of the family together. Yet he gave his father much anxiety by a growing wildness which was destined to lead to an unproductive career and a squalid old age. The total eclipse of his own polyphonic art Bach faced with equa nimity, saying of the new styles which in the hands of his sons Philipp Emanuel and Johann Christoph were soon to eclipse it for the next century, "The art has advanced to great heights : the old style of music no longer pleases our modern ears." Philipp Emanuel made a good career and was appointed court-composer to the king of Prussia. This led, in to Sebastian's being summoned to visit Frederick the Great at Potsdam, an incident which Bach always regarded as the culmination of his career, much as Dr. Johnson regarded his interview with George III.
Bach had to play on the newly invented pianofortes of Silber mann, of which the king had bought 15, and also to try the organs of the churches of Potsdam. Frederick, whose musical reputation rested on a genuine if narrow basis, gave him a splendid theme on which to extemporize ; and on that theme Bach afterwards wrote Das inusikalische O p f er. Two years afterwards his sight began to fail, and before long he shared the fate of Handel in becoming totally blind. (The same surgeon operated unsuccess fully on both composers.) Bach died of apoplexy on July 28, 175o. His loss was deplored as that of one of the greatest organists and clavier players of his time. Of his compositions little was known outside the circle of his family and pupils. At his death his ms. works were divided amongst his sons, and many of them have, to the irreparable loss of the art, been irrecoverably lost ; indeed, only a small proportion of his greater works was recovered when, after the lapse of nearly a century, the renascence of polyphony reversed the judgments of his immediate posterity. (X.; D. F. T.) Rediscovery.—The rediscovery of Bach's choral music dates from the boyhood of Mendelssohn, who at 12 years of age read the autograph of the Matthew Passion in the Royal Library at Berlin, and never rested until he had given a private performance of it, the first since Bach's death. In England the revival began still earlier by the performances and publications of Wesley and Crotch. In 185o, a century after his death, a society was started for the correct publication of all Bach's remaining works. Robert Franz, the song-writer, arranged some of Bach's finest works for modern performance ; a valuable service, so long as the scholar ship of the rediscovered art was in its infancy, but now super seded by the realization of Bach's own methods. The Porson of Bach-scholarship, however, is Wilhelm Rust, grandson of an in teresting composer of that name, who wrote polyphonic suites and fantasias early in the 19th century. During the 14 years of his editorship of the Bach-Gesellsclza f t he displayed a steadily in creasing insight into Bach's style, sometimes restoring harmonies of priceless value from incomplete texts, by means of research and reasoning which he sums up in a modest footnote that reads as something self-evident. Until Albert Schweitzer mas tered Bach's art in its entirety, Rust's prefaces to the Bach Gesellscha f t volumes were by far the most valuable contributions to the criticism of the 18th-century music ever written, Spitta's biography not excepted.
The full influence of his whole work has hardly yet begun to show itself. Schumann died before the first editors of the Bach Gesellscha f t began to find more beauty than extravagance in Bach's ordinary musical language (see, for example, Hauptmann's letters, The Letters of a Leipzig Cantor, trans. by A. D. Coleridge, 1892), or, indeed, to grasp the main features of his designs. (See the wild conjectures of the editor of the Four Short Masses as to the "displacing" of structure in the kyrie of the G minor Mass [B.-G., Jahr. viii. preface, with Rust's answer in the preface to Jahr. xxiii.]) . The labours of the Bach-Gesellscha f t occupied more than 5o years. during which about four-fifths of Bach's choral works were published for the first time. In centuries no musician but a specialist will know this mass of work as every musician comes to know his Beethoven. Nor will anthologies hasten the at tainment of such knowledge where the whole body of work so con stantly attains that excellence for which the anthologist seeks. Except for practical difficulties (as when Bach writes for obsolete instruments) the only reason why some cantatas are better known than others is that a beginning must be made somewhere. Indeed, a cantata was once selected, on the ground of its popularity, for a choral competition in a small English country town the year before it was performed as a novelty in Berlin.
Beethoven studied all the accessible works of Bach profoundly, and frequently quoted them in his sketch-books, often with a direct bearing on his own works. His rendering of the Wohltem perirte Klavier is said to be recorded in the marks of expression and tempo given in Czerny's edition; and if that record is true, Beethoven must have been completely in the dark as to Bach's meaning in many important respects. But art is full of such illus trations of the way in which great minds influence each other in spite of every barrier which diversity of language and time can set. Beethoven's great Thirty-Three Variations on a Waltz by Diabelli were actually described in the publisher's puff as worthy of their kinship with the Goldberg Variations of Bach ; and that kinship is revealed in its truest light by a comparison between Beethoven's 31st variation and Bach's 25th ; for here, just where the resemblance is most obvious, each composer utters his most intimate expression of feeling.
In the same way, Chopin is nowhere more characteristic than where he shows his love of the Wohltemperirte Klavier in his Etudes and Preludes. It was Schumann who, in a series of maxims for young musicians, said "Make Das Wohltemperirte Klavier your daily bread." Mendelssohn, Wagner and Brahms.—In a more external, but no less significant way, the Passion according to St. Matthew made its mark on Mendelssohn from the time when he discovered it at the age of 12, and suggested to him many features in the general design of oratorios, by means of which he rescued that branch of art from the operatic influences that had ruined Bee thoven's Mount of Olives. Without the renascence of Bach, Wag ner's Leitmotive would less readily have attained that close poly phony which secures for his music a flow as continuous as that of the drama itself ; and intimately connected with this is the whole subject of Wagner's harmonization, which, in many of its bold est characteristics was foreshadowed by Bach. A close study of the texture of Brahms's work shows that he develops Bach's and Beethoven's artistic devices pari passu, and that the result is a complete unification of that opposition between polyphony and form which in the infancy of the sonata (as in every transitional stage in musical history) threatened to wreck the art as a false antithesis wrecks a philosophy. Perhaps the only great composers who escaped the direct influence of Bach are Gluck and Berlioz. Even Gluck, whose art could owe nothing essential to Bach, echoed in every detail of harmony and figure no fewer than 12 bars of the gigue of Bach's B flat clavier partita in the aria "Je t'implore et je tremble" in Iphigenie en Tauride, a parallel far beyond the possibility of casual coincidence. The deep and all pervading indirect influence of Bach no one could escape, for whatever in later music is not traceable to Sebastian Bach is traceable to his sons, who were encouraged by their father to cultivate those infant art-forms which were so soon to dazzle the world into the belief that his own work was obsolete.
A Seeker of Truth.—Bach's place in music is thus far higher than that of a reformer, or of an inventor of new forms. He is a spectator of all musical time and existence, to whom it is not of the smallest importance whether a thing be new or old, so long as it is true. It is doubtful whether even the forms most peculiar to him (such as the arpeggio prelude) are of his invention. Yet he left no form as he found it—not even that most conventional of all, the da capo aria. On the other hand, with every form he touched he said the last word. All the material that could be assimilated into a mature art he vitalized in his own way, and he had no imitators. The language of music changed at his death, and his influence became all-pervading just because he was not the prophet of the new art, but an unbiassed seeker of truth. Whether so great a man becomes "progressive" or "reactionary" depends on the artistic resources of his time. He will always work at the kind of art that is most complete and consistent in all its aspects. The same spirit of truthfulness that makes Sebastian Bach hold himself aloof from the progressive art which he en couraged in his sons, drives Beethoven to invent new forms and new means of expression with every work he writes. Gluck abolished the da capo aria, because it was unfit for dramatic music. Bach retained and developed it, because he did not intend to write dramatic music. Mature musical art in Bach's time could not be dramatic, except in the loose sense in which en thusiasts apply the term to sunsets, cathedrals, and all kinds of impressive effect whatever. Dramatic expression, properly so called, can be attained in music only by the full development of resources that do not blend with those of Bach's art at all. Meanwhile there are many things unsuitable for the stage which are nevertheless valuable as pure music, and the da capo aria was one. We may regret with Schweitzer, that Bach allowed it to oust more German lyric forms.
Some of His Methods.—Under ARIA, CHORALE, CONTRA PUNTAL FORMS, CONCERTO, FUGUE and INSTRUMENTATION, will be found reference to Bach's handling of various art-forms. Here we may attempt to illustrate his methods in respect of such forms and characteristics as cannot be classified under those headings.
Treatment of the Toccata.—The toccatas of Buxtehude and his predecessors show how an effective musical scheme may be suggested by running over the keyboard of an organ as if to try the touch (toccare), then bursting out into sustained and full harmony, and at last settling down to a fugue. But before Bach, no one seemed able to keep the fugue in motion long enough to make a convincing climax. It soon collapsed, and the process of quasi-extemporization began again, to culminate in a new fugue which often gave the whole work a deceptive suggestion of organic unity by having as its subject a variation of the subject of the first fugue. But in Bach's hands the toccata becomes one of the noblest and most plastic of forms. The introductory runs may be disjointed and exaggerated to grotesqueness, until the gaps between them gradually fill out, and they build themselves up into grand piles of musical architecture, as in the organ toccata in C; or they may be worked out on an enormous scale in long and smooth canonic passages with a definite theme, as in the greatest of all toccatas, that in F for organ, which is most artistically fol lowed by a fugue unusually quiet for its size.
In one instance, the toccata at the beginning of the E minor clavier partita, the introductory runs, though retaining much of the extempore character from which the form derives its name, take shape in an organized and rounded-off group of contrasted themes. The fugue follows without change of time, and is devel oped in so leisurely a manner that it is fully as long as a normal fugue on a large scale by the time it reaches what sounds like its central episode. At this point some of the introductory matter quietly enters, and leads to a recapitulation of the whole introduc tion in the key now reached. The obvious sequel would be a coun ter-development of the fugue, at least as long as what has gone before, as in the clavier-toccata in C minor; but Bach does not choose to weary the hearer and weaken the impression of breadth he has already m, •.de here. Instead, he expands this restatement of the introduction, and makes its harmonies deliberately return to the fundamental key, and thus in an astonishingly short time the toccata is finished with the utmost effect of climax and satis faction.
If such is Bach's treatment of a highly specialized art-form, an art which treats all forms and means of expression on this plane of thought will obviously demand an analysis of each individual work. School generalities are useless here. Fortunately, however, Bach gives us actual demonstrations of his general principles by frequently rearranging his own works. He almost seems to regard adaptability to fresh environment as the test of his art ; and we cannot do better than review the evidence thus given to us— evidence hardly less significant than that of Beethoven's sketch books.
Transplantations and Self-Criticism.—When a work of art is successfully transplanted to a fresh environment, we must dis tinguish between alterations produced by the environment and alterations that imply the composer's dissatisfaction with the original version. And here are traps for the unwary. Let us begin with the birthday cantata Was mir behagt ist nur die muntre Jagd, one of Bach's lightest occasional pieces, and see what became of its contents when they were distributed among two church can tatas, the great Also hat Gott die Welt geliebt and the cheerful Man singet mit Freuden.
In the birthday cantata the fine bass aria "Ein Furst ist seines Landes Pan" seems ill-proportioned with its breakneck return to the tonic and its perfunctory close. But the words assert that "a land without a Prince lacks its better part." So Bach is not thus to be caught napping! Nevertheless, his chief concern in adapting this aria for its place as "Du bist geboren mir zu Gute" in Also hat Gott, was to remedy a defect no longer justified by the words. On the other hand the use of the delightful ritornello for violoncello from the little aria, "Weil die wollenreichen Heerden," in the birthday cantata, and the restoration of the rejected long instrumental fugato that was to follow, were ob viously brought about by the conception of the entirely new material for the voice in the famous aria, "Mein glaubiges Herze." And when the last chorus of Was mir behagt became the first chorus of Man singet mit Freuden, it was expanded to the pro portions necessary for a triumphant opening (as distinguished from a cheerful finale) by the adroit insertion of new material be tween every joint in the design. This material, being new, could not produce the effect of diffuseness that would result from the ex pansion of old material already complete in its simplest form, and thus this instance does not imply criticism of the original idea.
Pure self-criticism is shown in the Passion according to St. John, which was twice revised, and each time reduced to a smaller scale by the omission of some of its finest numbers. The final result was a work of perfect proportions; and of the rejected numbers one (a magnificent aria with chorale) remained unused, two were replaced by finer substitutes, another took shape as part of one of the most perfect and remarkable of the church cantatas, Du waterer Gott, while the greatest of the figured chorales was transferred to the Passion according to St. Matthew, of which it now crowns the first part.
Instrumental Transcriptions.—Such instances of self-criti cisms have been paralleled by other composers; but there is no parallel in music to Bach's power of reproducing already perfect works in different media. The bare fact that a composer has transcribed his own work from one medium to another is neither unusual nor instructive ; the article on Handel will show that Handel did this as often as Bach, and sometimes with significant results. But Handel, is seldom, if ever, dissatisfied with a make shift, while Bach always aims at, and often attains, a perfect effect of originality in the new form. The possibility of this de pends on the identity of all his ritornello forms, including those of choruses. (See ARIA, CONCERTO, and also INSTRUMENTATION.) His power of adding parts to schemes already complete in har mony and counterpoint reveals many principles in his purely musical aesthetics; and the cases in which he adapts the same music to different words will help us to define his range of expression.
The greatest marvels begin with such transformations as that of the prelude of the E major partita for unaccompanied violin into the sinfonia for organ obbligato accompanied by full orches tra (including three trumpets and a pair of drums) at the begin ning of the church cantata, Wir danken dir, Gott. The original version is perhaps the most complete and natural of all the violin solos, for its arpeggios produce full harmony without recourse to the tour de force of playing on all four strings at once, which cannot be achieved with accurate rhythm. Yet in the sinfonia its proportions seem to reveal themselves for the first time. Not a bar is displaced and not a note of the new accompaniment is unnecessary. The whole is almost entirely without themes ; for even this, the largest of all arpeggio preludes, consists essentially of the gradual unfolding of a scheme of harmony in which rhyth mic and melodic organization is reduced to a minimum. Only in the first line does the incisive initial figure persist a little longer in the new accompaniment than in the original solo, but on the last page it reappears and pervades the whole orchestra, even the drums thundering out its rhythm at the climax where the holding notes of the trumpet span the torrent of harmony like a rainbow.
Deeper still is the thought that underlies the transformation of two movements of the great violin concerto in D minor (un fortunately lost except in its splendid arrangement for clavier) into parts of the church cantata Wir mussen durch viel Trubsal in das Reich Gottes eingelien. In both movements the violin is re placed by the organ an octave lower, the orchestral accompani ment remaining where it was. This treatment, with the addition of new and plaintive parts for wind instruments, turns the already very long and sombre first movement into an impressive idealiza tion of the "much tribulation" that lies between us and the king dom of heaven. The slow movement is still more solemn, and is arranged the same way as regards the instruments ; but from the first note to the last a four-part chorus sings, to the words of the title, a mass of quite new material (except for the bass and for numerous imitations of the solo-part), treated with every variety of vocal colouring and a grandeur of conception which is not dwarfed even by the Passion according to St. Matthew.
The adaptations are not always significant; no attempt, for example, is made in the G minor mass to conceal how unfit for a "Kyrie eleison" is the tremendous denunciatory chorus, "Herr, define Augen sehen nach dem Glauben." But the F major and G major Masses are very instructive ; and the A major Mass, except for the damage done to the instrumentation, is a work that no one would conceive to be not original. The Kyrie is one of Bach's most individual utterances and could surely never have fitted any other text ; but we should say the same of the Gloria if we did not possess the church cantata, Halt im Gedachtniss. The Gloria begins with a triumphant polyphonic chorus accom panied by a spirited symphony for strings. At the words "et in terra pax" the time changes, and two flutes softly accompany a single solemn melody in the altos. At the "laudamus te" the material of the beginning returns, and is interrupted again by the calm slow movement, this time in another key and for another voice, at the words "adoramus te." Twice the "laudamus" and "adoramus" alternate in a finely proportioned design ; at last the words "gratias agimus tibi propter magnam gloriam tuam" are set for the full chorus to the music of the slow movement, the strings join with the flutes, and this most appropriate setting of those words is finished. And yet it is quite impossible to regard this as superseding the last chorus of Halt im Gedachtniss. Not one bar or harmony of the framework differs ; yet the two versions are two independent works of art.
In the cantata the beginning is for instruments only ; when the slow movement (here adequately scored for a flute and two oboi d'amore) begins, the basses, permanently separated from the rest of the chorus, sing "Peace be unto you." The other voices then sing the triumph of the faithful helped by the Saviour in their battle against the world. The slow movement is, of course, set for bass alone throughout, and at the last recurrence of the allegro the bass continues to sing "Friede sei mit euch" through the rest of the chorus, as if leading the chorus of humanity through strife to the kingdom of heaven ; and then the single voice of peace remains to the end. Hardly a bar of the chorus material is on the same themes in the two versions.
The study of the sources of the Christmas Oratorio will com plete the evidence on which we support our estimate of Bach's methods and range of expression. It is certain that the occasional cantatas, from which all except the chorale tune numbers and those set to words from the Bible were taken, date from shortly before the oratorio; and that Bach, being incapable of putting inferior work even into birthday odes, rescued his music from oblivion by having the verses for the oratorio built on the same rhythms as those of the odes in order that he might use those occasional works as a sketch (see B. G., Lahr. xxxiv. preface).
Be this as it may, the alterations are confined to details even where an aria is transposed a fourth or fifth; but the effect of them is startling. Pleasure (Wollust) sings a lovely soprano aria to allure Hercules from the paths of virtue, to which Hercules replies indignantly with an aria in a spirited staccato style. We may be shocked to find that Wollust's aria became the Virgin's cradle-song, while Hercules' reply became the alto aria in which Zion is bidden to "prepare for the Bridegroom." But this does not prove that Bach's music lacks definite characterization : on the contrary, these two arias are the best demonstration of his precise range of musical expression.
It never entered his conception of art that Wollust should be represented by a Wagnerian Venusberg-music ; the obvious way to represent Pleasure was by writing pleasant music ; and, with Bach's ideas of pleasance, the step from this to the solemn beauty of the sacred cradle-song was a mere matter of change of colour and tempo. The key is lowered from B flat to G, the strings are veiled with the tender reed tone of a group of oboe d'amore, the soprano becomes an alto whose notes are, as it were, surrounded with a nimbus by being doubled in the upper octave by a flute; and the aria becomes worthy of its new purpose, not by losing a grossness which it never possessed, but by gaining the richness which distinguishes the perfect work from the boldly executed draft.
In the aria of Hercules the change is in manner, while the character is essentially the same. Both Hercules and the faithful Christian of the oratorio are renouncing pomps and vanities for the claims of a higher life; in the one case indignantly, in the other case inspired "mit zartlichem Triebe." A change to a legato style, the substitution of a single oboe d'amore for tutti violins, the addition of delicate ornaments indicative of a slower pace, and the noble stream of melody preserves its identity while changing its aspect. Certain rolling basses that originally symbol ized the serpents strangled by the infant Hercules in his cradle, now mean no more than arpeggio accompaniments. A cathedral reacts on the impressiveness of the rites performed within it, and nature reacts on a poet's thoughts, in the same ways as Bach's melodies react on their texts. They are greater than any possible mood of the moment, not because of any vagueness that pious evasiveness calls reserve, but because of their vital individuality. In their proper directions their changes are limitless; elsewhere change is inconceivable. No amount of Umarbeitung could, for instance, turn the aria of Hercules into the Virgin's cradle-song, or Wollust's aria into the exhortation of Zion to prepare for the Bridegroom. Bach's designs are not masks, but living types. One of the best modern books on Bach is Pirro's L'Esthetique de Jean-Sebastian Bach. It is an account of the system of musi cal symbolism which Bach took over and dew loped from what he regarded as classical tradition. The only thfect in the book is its title, which should have been La Vocabulaire de .1. S.
Bach. The aesthetic system of Bach is a very different thing: it concerns his art-forms as wholes, and is remarkably independent of the vocabulary of musical symbols which he shares with the music of two previous centuries, and which makes him automati cally set the word "high" to a high note even when the text merely mentions the High Priest.
In Der Streit zwischen Phoebus and Pan, Bach answers the critics who censured him for his pedantry and provincial ignorance of the grand Italian operatic style, by making effective use of that style in Pan's prize aria ("Zum Tanze, zum Sprunge, so wack ack-ack-ackelt das Herz"), nobly representing his own style in Phoebus' aria, and promptly caricaturing it in the second part of Pan's ("Wenn der Ton zu muhsam klingt") . Midas votes for Pan—"denn nach meinen beiden Ohren singt er unvergleichlich schon." At the word "Ohren" the violins gave a pianissimo "hee haw" which is as apt and as musical as Mendelssohn's clown theme in the overture to the Midsummer Night's Dream; and in the en suing dialogue the prophecy is verified. As with many other great artists, Bach's playfulness occasionally showed itself inconven iently where little things shock little minds. The hilarious aria "Ermuntre dich," in the church cantata, "Schmticke dich, o liebe Seele," is one instance, and the quaint representation of the words "dimisit inanes" in the Magnificat is another.
This great work, one of the most terse and profound things Bach ever wrote, contains, among many other subtle inspirations one conception with which we may fitly end our survey, for it strongly suggests Bach himself and the destiny of all that work which he finished so lovingly, with no prospect of its becoming more than a family heirloom and a salutary tradition in his Leip choir-school. In the Magnificat he sets the words "quia respexit humilitatem ancillae suae" to a devout soprano solo ac companied by his favourite oboe d'amore. With the next sentence "ecce enim beatam me dicent" the tone brightens to a quiet joy, but Bach takes advantage of the syntax of the Latin in a way that defies translation, and the sentence is finished by the chorus. "Omnes generationes" seem indeed to pass before us in the crowded fugue which rises in perpetual stretto, the incessant entries of its subject now mounting the whole scale, each part a step higher than the last, and now collecting in unison with a climax of closeness and volume overwhelming in its impression of time and multitude.