Johann Sebastian Bach, his Life, Art, and Work Part 1

Johann Sebastian Bach.

by Johann Nikolaus Forkel and Charles Sanford Terry.

INTRODUCTION

Johann Nikolaus Forkel, author of the monograph of which the following pages afford a translation, was born at Meeder, a small village in Saxe-Coburg, on February 22, 1749, seventeen months before the death of Johann Sebastian Bach, whose first biographer he became. Presumably he would have followed the craft of his father, the village shoemaker, had not an insatiable love of music seized him in early years. He obtained books, and studied them with the village schoolmaster. In particular he profited by the "Vollkommener Kapellmeister" of Johann Mattheson, of Hamburg, the sometime friend of Handel. Like Handel, he found a derelict Clavier in the attic of his home and acquired proficiency upon it.

Forkel's professional career, like Bach's half a century earlier, began at Luneburg, where, at the age of thirteen (1762), he was admitted to the choir of the parish church. Thence, at the age of seventeen (1766), he proceeded to Schwerin as "Chorprafect," and enjoyed the favour of the Grand Duke. Three years later he betook himself (1769), at the age of twenty, to the University of Gottingen, which he entered as a law student, though a slender purse compelled him to give music lessons for a livelihood. He used his opportunity to acquire a knowledge of modern languages, which stood him in good stead later, when his researches required him to explore foreign literatures. Concurrently he pursued his musical activities, and in 1774 published at Gottingen his first work, _Ueber die Theorie der Musik,_ advocating the foundation of a music lectureship in the University. Four years later (1778) he was appointed its Director of Music, and from 1779 to 1815 conducted the weekly concerts of the Sing-Akademie. In 1780 he received from the University the doctorate of philosophy. The rest of his life was spent at Gottingen, where he died on March 17, 1818, having just completed his sixty-ninth year.

That Forkel is remembered at all is due solely to his monograph on Bach.

Written at a time when Bach's greatness was realised in hardly any quarter, the book claimed for him pre-eminence which a tardily enlightened world since has conceded him. By his generation Forkel was esteemed chiefly for his literary activity, critical ability, and merit as a composer. His princ.i.p.al work, _Allgemeine Geschichte der Musik,_ was published in two volumes at Leipzig in 1788 and 1801. Carl Friedrich Zelter, Goethe's friend and correspondent, dismissed the book contemptuously as that of an author who had "set out to write a history of music, but came to an end just where the history of music begins."

Forkel's work, in fact, breaks off at the sixteenth century. But the curtailed _ History_ cleared the way for the monograph on Bach, a more valuable contribution to the literature of music. Forkel already had published, in three volumes, at Gotha in 1778, his _Musikalisch-kritische Bibliothek,_ and in 1792 completed his critical studies by publishing at Leipzig his _Allgemeine Literatur der Musik._

Forkel was also a student of the music of the polyphonic school. He prepared for the press the scores of a number of sixteenth century Ma.s.ses, Motets, etc., and fortunately received proofs of them from the engraver.

For, in 1806, after the Battle of Jena, the French impounded the plates and melted them down. Forkel's proofs are still preserved in the Berlin Royal Library. He was diligent in quest of Bach's scattered MSS., and his friendship with Bach's elder sons, Carl Philipp Emmanuel and Wilhelm Friedemann, enabled him to secure precious relics which otherwise might have shared the fate of too many of Bach's ma.n.u.scripts. He took an active interest in the proposal of Messrs. Hoffmeister and Kuhnel, predecessors of C. F. Peters at Leipzig, to print a "kritisch-korrecte" edition of Bach's Organ and Clavier works. Through his friend, Johann Gottfried Schicht, afterwards Cantor at St. Thomas's, Leipzig, he was also a.s.sociated with Breitkopf and Haertel's publication of five of Bach's six extant Motets in 1802-3.

As a composer Forkel has long ceased to be remembered. His works include two Oratorios, _ Hiskias_ (1789) and _Die Hirten bey der Krippe_; four Cantatas for chorus and orchestra; Clavier Concertos, and many Sonatas and Variations for the Harpsichord.

In 1802, for reasons which he explains in his Preface, Forkel published from Hoffmeister and Kuhnel's "Bureau de Musique" his _Ueber Johann Sebastian Bachs Leben, Kunst und Kunstwerke. Fur patriotische Verehrer echter musikalischer Kunst,_ of which a new edition was issued by Peters in 1856. The original edition bears a dedication to Gottfried Baron van Swieten(1) (1734-1803), Prefect of the Royal Library, Vienna, and sometime Austrian Amba.s.sador in Berlin, a friend of Haydn and Mozart, patron of Beethoven, a man whose age allowed him to have seen Bach, and whose career makes the a.s.sociation with Bach that Forkel's dedication gives him not undeserved. It was he, an ardent Bach enthusiast, who introduced the youthful Mozart to the music of the Leipzig Cantor. "I go every Sunday at twelve o'clock to the Baron van Swieten," Mozart writes in 1782, "where nothing is played but Handel and Bach, and I am now making a collection of the Fugues of Bach." The merit and limitations of Forkel's book will be considered later. For the moment the fact deserves emphasis that, inadequate as it is, it presented a fuller picture of Bach than so far had been drawn, and was the first to render the homage due to his genius.

In an illuminating chapter (xii.), _Death and Resurrection_, Schweitzer has told the story of the neglect that obscured Bach's memory after his death in 1750. Isolated voices, raised here and there, acclaimed his genius. With Bach's treatise on _The Art of Fugue_ before him, Johann Mattheson (1681-1664), the foremost critic of the day, claimed that Germany was "the true home of Organ music and Fugue." Friedrich Wilhelm Marpurg (1718-95), the famous Berlin theorist, expressed the same opinion in his preface to the edition of that work published shortly after Bach's death. But such appreciations were rare. Little of Bach's music was in print and available for performance or critical judgment. Even at St.

Thomas's, Leipzig, it suffered almost complete neglect until a generation after Forkel's death. The bulk of Bach's MSS. was divided among his family, and Forkel himself, with unrivalled opportunity to acquaint himself with the dimensions of Bach's industry, knew little of his music except the Organ and Clavier compositions.

In these circ.u.mstances it is not strange that Bach's memory waited for more than half a century for a biographer. Forkel, however, was not the first to a.s.semble the known facts of Bach's career or to a.s.sert his place in the music of Germany.

Putting aside Johann Gottfried Walther's brief epitome in his _Lexikon_ (1732), the first and most important of the early notices of Bach was the obituary article, or "Nekrolog," contributed by his son, Carl Philipp Emmanuel, and Johann Friedrich Agricola, one of Bach's most distinguished pupils, to the fourth volume of Mizler's _Musikalische Bibliothek,_ published at Leipzig in 1754. The authors of this appreciation give it an intimacy which renders it precious. But Mizler's periodical was the organ of a small Society, of which Bach had been a member, and outside its a.s.sociates can have done little to extend a knowledge of the subject of the memoir.

Johann Friedrich Agricola contributed notes on Bach to Jakob Adlung's _Musica mechanica Organoedi,_ published in two volumes at Berlin in 1768.

The article is valuable chiefly for Agricola's exposition of Bach's opinions upon Organ and Clavier building.

With the intention to represent him as "the coryphaeus of all organists,"

Johann Adam Hiller, who a few years later became Cantor at St. Thomas's, Leipzig, published there in 1784 a brief account of Bach in his _Lebensbeschreibungen beruhmter Musikgelehrten und Tonkunstler neuerer Zeit._

Four years after Hiller's notice, Ernst Ludwig Gerber published at Leipzig, in two volumes, 1790-92, his _Historisch-biographische Lexikon der Tonkunstler._ As in Hiller's case, Gerber, whose father had been Bach's pupil, was chiefly interested in Bach as an organist.

Coincidently with Gerber, another of Bach's pupils, Johann Martin Schubart, who succeeded him at Weimar in 1717, sketched his characteristics as a performer in the _Aesthetik der Tonkunst_, published at Berlin by his son in the _Deutschen Monatsschrift_ in 1793.

In 1794 appeared at Leipzig the first volume of a work which Spitta characterises as fantastic and unreliable, so far as it deals with Bach, Friedrich Carl Gottlieb Hirsching's _Historisch-literarisches Handbuch_ of notable persons deceased in the eighteenth century.

Last of Forkel's forerunners, A. E. L. Siebigke published at Breslau in 1801 his _Museum deutscher Tonkunstler,_ a work which adds nothing to our knowledge of Bach's life, but offers some remarks on his style.

Little, if any, information of value, therefore, had been added to the _Nekrolog_ of 1754 when Forkel, in 1802, produced his monograph on Bach and his music. Nor, viewed as a biography, does Forkel much enlarge our knowledge of the conditions of Bach's life. He had the advantage of knowing Bach's elder sons, but appears to have lacked curiosity regarding the circ.u.mstances of Bach's career, and to have made no endeavour to add to his imperfect information, even regarding his hero's life at Leipzig, upon which it should have been easy for him to obtain details of utmost interest. His monograph, in fact, is not a "Life" in the biographic sense, but a critical appreciation of Bach as player, teacher, and composer, based upon the Organ and Clavier works, with which alone Forkel was familiar.

It would be little profitable to weigh the value of Forkel's criticism.

We are tempted to the conclusion that Bach appealed to him chiefly as a supreme master of technique, and our hearts would open to him more widely did not his appreciation of Bach march with a narrow depreciation of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven, the last of whom, he declared ex cathedra, had not produced "a single work which can be called a masterpiece." Gluck he frankly detested.

But Forkel's monograph is notable on other grounds. It was the first to claim for Bach a place among the divinities. It used him to stimulate a national sense in his own people. Bach's is the first great voice from out of Germany since Luther. Of Germany's own Kisorgimento, patently initiated by Goethe a generation after Johann Sebastian's death, Bach himself is the harbinger. In his a.s.sertion of a distinctive German musical art he set an example followed in turn by Mozart, Weber, and Wagner. "With Bach," wrote Wagner, "the German Spirit was born anew." It is Forkel's perpetual distinction that he grasped a fact hidden from almost all but himself. In his Preface, and more emphatically in the closing paragraph of his last Chapter, he presents Bach as the herald of a German nation yet unformed.

It is a farther distinction of Forkel's monograph that it made converts.

With its publication the clouds of neglect that too long had obscured Bach's grandeur began to melt away, until the dizzy alt.i.tude of his genius stood revealed. The publication of the five Motets (1803) was followed by that of the Magnificat in 1811, and of the Ma.s.s in A in 1818. A beginning was made with the Cantatas in 1821, when Breitkopf and Haertel published "Ein' feste Burg" (No. 80), commended in an article written (1822) by Johann Friedrich Rochlitz (1769-1842), the champion of Beethoven, as now of Bach. Another enthusiastic pioneer was Carl Friedrich Zelter (1758-1832), conductor of the Berlin Sing-Akademie, who called Bach "a sign of G.o.d, clear, yet inexplicable." To him in large measure was due the memorable revival of the _St. Matthew Pa.s.sion_ at Berlin, which the youthful Mendelssohn, Zelter's pupil, conducted in March 1829, exactly one hundred years after the first production of the mighty work at Leipzig.

In the following years it was given at Dresden and many other German towns. Leipzig heard it again after a barren interval in 1841, and did tardy homage to its incomparable composer by erecting (1843) the statue that stands in the shadow of St. Thomas's Church, hard by the Cantor's home for a quarter of a century.

Meanwhile, in 1830 and 1831 the _St. Matthew Pa.s.sion_ and _St. John Pa.s.sion_ had been engraved, and by 1845 the B minor Ma.s.s was in print.

The credit of having revived it belongs to Johann Nepomuk Schelble (1789-1837), conductor of the Frankfort Caecilienverein, though the Berlin Sing-Akademie was the first to give a performance, considerably curtailed, of the whole work in 1835. A little later, in the middle of the forties, Peters began to issue his "kritisch-korrecte" edition of the Organ works, which at length made Bach widely known among organists. But the publication of the Cantatas proceeded slowly. Only fourteen of them were in print in 1850, when the foundation of the Bachgesellschaft, on the centenary of Bach's death, focused a world-wide homage. When it dissolved in 1900 its mission was accomplished, the entire works(2) of Bach were published, and the vast range of his genius was patent to the world.

It remains to discuss the first English version of Forkel's monograph, published in 1820, with the following t.i.tle-page:

LIFE OF JOHN SEBASTIAN BACH; with a Critical View of his Compositions. By J. N. Forkel, Author of The Complete History of Music, etc., etc. Translated from the German. London: Printed for T. Boosey and Co., Holles-Street, Cavendish-Square. 1820.

The book was published in February 1820; it was announced, with a slightly differently worded t.i.tle-page, in the _New Monthly Magazine and Universal Register_ for March 1820 (p. 341), and the _Scots Magazine_ for the same month ( vol. lx.x.xv. p. 263). The _New Monthly_ states the price as 5s., the _Quarterly Review_ (vol. xxiii. p. 281) as 6s. The book contains xi+116+3 pages of Music Figures, crown octavo, bound in dark unlettered cloth. It has neither Introduction, notes (other than Forkel's), nor indication of the translator's ident.i.ty. Much of the translation is so bad as to suggest grave doubts of the translator's comprehension of the German original; while his rendering of Forkel's critical chapters rouses a strong suspicion that he also lacked technical equipment adequate to his task. It is, in fact, difficult to understand how such an unsatisfactory piece of work found its way into print.

The character of the 1820 translation has a close bearing upon its authorship. In the article on Bach in the new _Grove_ it is attributed to Samuel Wesley (1766-1837), an attractive suggestion, since Wesley was as enthusiastic a Bach pioneer in this country as Forkel himself was in Germany. But the statement is not correct. In Samuel Wesley's _Letters to Mr. Jacobs relating to the Introduction into this Country of the Works of J. S. Bach_ (London, 1875) we find the clue. On October 17, 1808, Wesley writes: "We are (in the first place) preparing for the Press an authentic and accurate Life of Sebastian, which Mr. Stephenson the Banker (a most zealous and scientific member of our Fraternity) has translated into English from the German of Forkel."

Unfortunately, it is impossible to identify Stephenson precisely, or to detect his activities in the musical circle in which Wesley includes him.

In 1820 there was in Lombard Street a firm of bankers under the style of "Remington, Stephenson, Remington, and Toulmin," the active partner being Mr. Rowland Stephenson, a man of about forty in that year. The firm was wound up in bankruptcy in 1829, Stephenson having absconded to America the previous year. He appears to have been the only banker of that name holding such a recognised position as Wesley attributes to him, though it remains no more than a conjecture that he was the author of the translation issued in 1820.(3) But whoever "Stephenson the Banker" may have been, the poverty of his work fails to support Wesley's commendation of his "scientific" equipment, and suggests that his purse rather than his talents were serviceable to Wesley's missionary campaign.

For the facts of Bach's life, and as a record of his artistic activities, Forkel admittedly is inadequate and often misleading. Stephenson necessarily was without information to enable him to correct or supplement his author. Recent research, and particularly the cla.s.sic volumes of Spitta and Schweitzer, have placed the present generation in a more instructed and therefore responsible position. The following pages, accordingly, have been annotated copiously in order to bring Forkel into line with modern scholarship. His own infrequent notes are invariably indicated by a prefixed asterisk. It has been thought advisable to write an addendum to Chapter II. in order to supplement Forkel at the weakest point of his narrative.

Readers of Spitta's first volume probably will remember the effort to follow the ramifications of the Bach pedigree unaided by a genealogical Table. It is unfortunate that Spitta did not set out in that form the wealth of biographical material his pages contain. To supply the deficiency, and to ill.u.s.trate Forkel's first Chapter, a complete Genealogical Table is provided in Appendix VI., based mainly upon the biographical details scattered over Spitta's pages.

In Chapter IX. Forkel gives a list of Bach's compositions known to him.

It is, necessarily, incomplete. For that reason Appendices I. and II.

provide a full catalogue of Bach's works arranged under the periods of his career. In the case of the Oratorios, Cantatas, Motets, and "Pa.s.sions,"

it is not difficult to distribute them upon a chronological basis. The Clavier works also can be dated with some approximation to closeness. The effort is more speculative in the case of the Organ music.

In his Preface Forkel suggests the inst.i.tution of a Society for the publication and study of Bach's works. The proposal was adopted after half a century's interval, and in Appendix III. will be found a complete and detailed catalogue of the publications of the Old and New Bachgesellschaft from 1850 to 1918 inclusive. The Society's issues for 1915-18 have not yet reached this country. The present writer had an opportunity to examine them in the Library of the Cologne Conservatorium of Music in the spring of this year.

In this Introduction will be found a list of works bearing on Bach, which preceded Forkel's monograph. Appendix IV. provides a bibliography of Bach literature published subsequently to it.

Grateful acknowledgment is made to Mr. Ivor Atkins, of Worcester Cathedral, and to Mr. W. G. Whittaker, of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, who have read these pages in proof, and improved them by their criticism.

C. S. T.

October 1, 1919.

FORKEL'S PREFACE

Many years ago I determined to give the public an account of the life of Johann Sebastian Bach, with some reflections upon his genius and his works. The brief article by Carl Philipp Emmanuel Bach(4) and Herr Agricola,(5) formerly composer to the Court of Prussia, contributed to the fourth volume of Mizler's _Musical Library,_(6) can hardly be deemed adequate by Bach's admirers and, but for the desire to complete my _General History of Music,_(7) I should have fulfilled my purpose long ago. As Bach, more than any other artist, represents an era in the history of music, it was my intention to devote to the concluding volume of that work the materials I had collected for a history of his career.

But the announcement that Messrs. Hoffmeister and Kuhnel, the Leipzig music-sellers and publishers, propose to issue a complete and critical edition of Bach's works has induced me to change my original plan.(8)