Bach the Magnificent

You have to know that I play the organ as well as the piano. There is nothing quite so viscerally exciting as sitting at a BIG organ and turning it loose. And, like most organists, I have a bad case of hero-worship of Johann Sebastian Bach. By the way, here is a modern forensic anthropologist's reconstruction of what Bach may have looked like, based on his skull from the Tomaskirche in Leipzig, where he is buried. Put this face on a stocky 5'6" frame and you've got it!

For Christmas, Vickie gave me a course called Bach and the High Baroque produced by The Teaching Company. If you're not familiar with that company, they produce a variety of (mostly) college-level courses on tape, CD, and DVD. The subjects in the arts, sciences, theology, history, and so on, and include everything from Early Christianity to The Joy of Mathematics. The teachers are chosen for their ability to make the course material come alive.

Bach and the High Baroque is comprised of 32 45-minute lectures, all on CD. In addition to that course, our library also includes A Survey of Western Art, The Life and Works of C.S.Lewis, Understanding Linguistics, How to Listen to and Understand Great Music, The Chamber Music of Mozart, and Fundamentals of Music. The music courses we have are all taught be a fellow named Robert Greenberg, who is a well-regarded composer himself, and who works with San Francisco Performances. Founded in 1979, San Francisco Performances is the Bay Area’s leading independent presenter of chamber music, vocal and instrumental recitals, jazz and contemporary dance.

Greenberg is an absolutely riveting lecturer. Because he is a composer and performer himself, he knows his subject from the inside out. But that's not all - he's funny, original, and just plain fun to listen to. Here's a sample from the San Francisco Performances site. Click to get to the link, then scroll down to see Greenberg; you'll need Real Player to play it.

Greenberg covers Bach's very interesting life in some detail, including the time his employer had him jailed for trying to quit! (Bach loved life in jail because he had time to compose.) He discusses the life of a composer in the early 18th century: for example, when Bach was in Leipzig, where he spent the last 27 years of his life, Bach was required to supervise and train the choirs and organist for all five churches in town, write music for every Sunday service, plus municipal events (e.g., a mayor's inauguration), make sure all the organs were working correctly, and, by the way, teach Latin to the 12-year-old choirboys! He also had to get in the middle of the political fights between two factions, one of whom loved Bach's elaborate style and thought highly of his compositional gifts, and the other group, who thought of Bach primarily as a teacher and wanted to make the church music rather starkly simple. That battle, by the way, is still going on for most church organists. Over his time in Leipzig, Bach wrote

• Several complete cycles of cantatas, 54-60 cantatas in each cycle. A cantata is a 20-minute-or-so, 5-7 movement mini-oratorio based on the hymn for that Sunday in the Lutheran liturgical calendar. Bach wrote nearly 300 cantatas, all told; we have only (!) about 200 of them. Click here for a list of which ones were performed each week during Bach's life.
  
• Four or possibly five Passions. A Passion is the crucifixion story set to music. We have Passions for the Gospels of John and Matthew; the rest are lost. The St. Matthew Passion consists of 78 sections and calls for two choirs, two orchestras, a boys' choir, and four soloists. A performance lasts about four hours. It is one of the world's greatest masterpieces of vocal and orchestral music, highly spiritual and deeply moving.
  
• Reams of music for his children. He and his two wives (sequential, not simultaneous!) had 20 of them, all told, of whom ten survived to adulthood. Even the exercises are masterful compositions.
• The B-Minor Mass, an incredible setting (one of the finest ever) of the Catholic Mass - and by a Lutheran composer!
  
• The Art of the Fugue, a masterful exposition of all the tricks used in writing these characteristic Baroque pieces. He uses the fugue subject (theme) forwards, backwards (in regression), upside-down (inversion), upside-down and backwards (inversion-regression), slowed down, speeded up - you name it, he shows how to do it.
  
• An incredible amount of other stuff.

And all of this while doing all the other things his contract required! Well, almost all - he found and paid somebody else to teach Latin.

Bach must have been a real challenge to work with. He had a temper and did not suffer fools gladly, nor was he tolerant of anything but a performer's best efforts in the service of God, which is how Bach defined his role as a musician. This could and did lead to problems, as Bach could play the organ and harpsichord better than any of his keyboard players (in fact, during his lifetime he was better known as an organ virtuoso than as a composer), and violin better than the violinists, plus he was a professional-level singer. In addition, his second wife, Anna Magdalena, was the leading soprano in Cothen, Bach's location before Leipzig, so he brought his own soprano soloist along and wrote many of his soprano parts with her in mind.

Having done some arranging and composing myself, it seems incredible to me that he could have accomplished so much in one lifetime. Consider writing a Lutheran church cantata, for example. He would start working on Monday for the next week's cantata, and would have to have it finished and sent to the copyists on Wednesday so the choir and orchestra could start practicing in order to sing it on Sunday! And he didn't have the terrific music-printing software that we have now. My software, called Finale, will take an orchestral score and automatically print out each part. Bach had to start with blank paper and a pen. Unbelievable! (Especially since he did it so much better than I can.)

The best part of the course, naturally, is the music. We've been listening to the course on our car stereo - it's actually becoming a reason to go for a long drive somewhere, anywhere, just so we can hear some more.

Baroque music is characterized by a highly-emotional musical superstructure built on and controlled by a very rigid formal structure. Greenberg explains and illustrates the formal structures, then plays dozens of different things to illustrate how Bach was a master of just about everything to which he set his hand.

All told, listening to this course is one of the most amazing experiences I've ever had. Bach is by turns introspective, flamboyant, pensive, highly spiritual, funny, unrestrained, or tightly wound. He has an unbelievable gift for coming up with unforgettable melodies and beautiful harmonizations - all within the incredibly rigid confines of the Baroque forms.

I will never look at Bach the same way again. And my most heartfelt thanks to Vickie for getting this course for us!