Sebastian

(entry for 10/4/24)

When I was a teenager I came across a children’s book about J. S. Bach as a very young man. The story went that his father was a lawyer and expected the young Johann to follow in that same career, and that the boy was interested in music and refused to cooperate in his dad’s plan. Instead, in the daytime, he would pretend to study the subjects a lawyer was expected to know, and then, at night, he would stay up all night studying music, even silently playing the harpsichord keyboard to avoid waking the rest of the household.

It made for an interesting story. Only one problem: Not a word of it was true!

Baby Sebastian, as he was known, was born into a musical family, and into a huge extended musical family. Of the hundred or so local people named Bach at that time, at least thirty of them were accomplished musicians, and, of those, a dozen or so were well-known composers.

Veit Bach, Sebastian’s paternal great-great grandfather, made a living as a baker and miller in Hungary, but was also a good clavier player. As Lutherans, the family fled Catholic Hungary and settled in Thuringia, which eventually became part of Germany. Veit’s first son, Johannes, apprenticed as a piper, as did his son, Christoff.

Christoff had a son named Johann Ambrosius Bach , who in turn became the father of our Sebastian. All of these ancestors were musicians, as were several uncles, grand-uncles, and aunts.

Sebastian, the youngest child in a large family, was orphaned at age 10 when his parents both died in a plague. The boy was then raised by his oldest brother, Johann Christoph. Since both siblings were named Johann, they went by their middle names.

Far from having music forbidden to him, Johann Sebastian Bach was not only encouraged to be a musician; that goal was expected! And the expectation was not only fulfilled, it was exceeded.

Though many of his works are now lost, Bach wrote thousands of pieces of music. In additon to composing, he was an excellent harpsichord and clavier performer. He also played the violin, ‘cello, and flute. And he was a phenomenal organist.

He wrote hundreds of organ solo works, plus many compositions for organ with other instruments or voices. Add to that his countless pieces for solo clavier, solo violin, solo ‘cello, and small chamber groups called Concertos Grosso. (The famous Brandenburg Concertos form one example.) There were also many pieces for small orchestras, as well as Chorales for four-part choirs. (He himself was a tenor, and often sang in his own compositions.) And then came the cantatas!

As church organist to the largest Lutheran cathedral in Leipzig, from 1723 to 1726 he composed one 20-30 minute cantata every week for almost three years, without a break. 

“What’s a cantata?” you ask. The literal meaning is “a piece to be sung,” but that’s a vast over-simplification. A cantata has five to nine movements, all built around the harmonies of a familiar hymn tune. Two of these movements are usually written for vocal solo, accompanied by organ or a small string ensemble or both. The vocal parts for these solos  does not use the hymn tune literally, but contains elaborate variations built on the basic harmonies of the hymn, but without ever quoting the hymn itself. There is always at least one ‘recitative,’ which is almost spoken rather than sung, but not quite. There is always at least one ‘aria,’ similar to an operatic aria but with a sacred text. , Sometimes, nterspersed with the vocal performances, are small pieces for orchestra called Sinfonias. There might or might not be an organ solo or two.

At the very end comes the Chorale. Now, for the first time, we hear the actual hymn tune that the whole cantata is based on. The sopranos sing the tune, while the other voices create interesting harmonies underneath. It’s the ‘grand finale,’ in which the astute listener can ‘see’ where the other derivative parts that came earlier arrive at their culmination and are revealed in their full glory. A ‘peroration,’ as it is sometimes called. (Occasionally the first movement is also a Chorale, on a different but related tune.)

At the top of this post are the first five chords of his most famous Chorale, Ein’ Feste Burg, which we know in English as the hymn A Mighty Fortress is Our God. (Note that this is the way Bach himself wrote it, using four different clefs. If you can’t remember how to read those clefs, you might want to go back and re-read the third post in this blog, which you can do by clicking HERE. You can also look the Chorale up online to see it in the more familiar two-clef form, with two voices on each staff.)

Bach actually wrote this Chorale (based on a tune by Martin Luther himself) twice! He first composed the harmonization in 1715, when he was thirty years old. It was a stand-alone chorale, not part of a cantata. That version is now sadly lost. But by 1723, when he had moved to Liepzig, he had decided that the earlier version was too ‘tame.’ As he wrote in a letter to a friend, he had decided to recompose the work, making the harmonies more complex, and the vocal parts more interesting. The hymn we know now is the 1723 version. We can guess what the earlier version must be like, since we know what his style was like at the time, but we’re only guessing.

It’s hard to imagine the amount of work that must have gone into the Leipzig cantatas. Each one contains many hundreds of notes. Yet he wrote each one in two or three days, saving the rest of the week for choir rehearsals. And he did this for 143 weeks! (The only reason he stopped was that his mentor, the leader of the church, left and moved elsewhere, and the new leader didn’t want long cantatas as part of the service. So Bach resigned.)

The thing that sets Bach’s cantatas apart from most others is the quality of his harmonization of the hymn tune. He almost never repeats the same chord twice. He almost always modulates at some point into a key that is different from that of the beginning and ending of the piece, and usually at least twice. Sometimes he modulations into three or four different keys in the short space of a 16-24 measure Chorale. He always tries to keep all four vocal lines interesting, but he also tries to make ‘vertical’ combinations that are harmonious and pleasing to the ear. This is what I meant in an earlier post about Bach being the ‘bridge’ between the contrapuntal approach to music and the harmonious one. The Chorale parts mostly obey all the ‘rules’ of counterpoint, and yet, at any given moment in time, the sounds you hear sound good together, which is something pure counterpoint doesn’t worry about. The total effect is almost mesmerizing, and made it possible for later composers like Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven to do things that they might never otherwise have thought to do.

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To see other posts in Len’s Music Blog, please click HERE.

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