Musician of the Millennium

“Bach?” a fellow German composer by the name of Beethoven once snorted, preparing to land a pun on the meaning of the word Bach (“brook”) in German. “Not Brook, but Ocean, should be his name!” Since the 1780s, just about every professional musician of any stature has had something similar to say. Yet for many years after his death in 1750, the immensity of Bach’s achievement as a composer, the truly oceanic depth of his oeuvre, remained hidden even from the most knowledgeable and astute of his successors. Surprisingly little of his music was published during his lifetime, and the great works for which he is revered today existed only in manuscript or fair copies at the time of his death. Insiders like Mozart and Beethoven, who encountered Bach’s music via these sources (or through contact with his students and sons), may have had an inkling of his greatness, but the public at large would begin to “discover” Bach only after a revival of interest in his music got underway early in the 19th century.

That revival, made possible by the efforts of enlightened performers such as Felix Mendelssohn and by the nascent academic discipline of musicology, produced a tidal wave of publication and research. Piece by piece, Bach’s music was tracked down--after being divided at his death among his sons, stored and, in some cases, auctioned off--and what could be found was published. Piece by piece, it was taken up by grateful, often awe-struck musicians and played to grateful and similarly awe-struck audiences. Bach went from being a connoisseur’s composer to one of the three Bs.

Of course, being one of the greatest of the canonic “great composers”--the greatest in many people’s estimation--has not made it easy for Bach’s biographers. So much has been written, so much analyzed, theorized, philosophized over and, truth to tell, trivialized that on the surface at least, there would seem to be little territory left to explore. Although new facts and details are emerging all the time, it’s hard to come up with something of major significance to say about Bach that hasn’t been said before. Yet Beethoven was right after all--Bach really is an ocean; out of the details of his life and the teeming depths of his work a biographer can, if he’s as discerning and disciplined as Christoph Wolff, make rich findings and say something both new and profound.

That it should be Wolff who has done so in “Johann Sebastian Bach: The Learned Musician” should come as a surprise tono one, because he is by common consent the world’s leading authority on Bach’s music--the Jacques Cousteau, if you will, of Bach exploration. Wolff, who holds the title of William Powell Mason professor of music at Harvard University (he’s also dean of the graduate school of arts and sciences there), has published a vast number of papers in German and English on various aspects of Bach’s creativity and, again no surprise, recently presided over the latest edition of “The New Bach Reader,” revising and expanding a compendium of source material relating to Bach’s life that has been indispensable since it appeared more than 50 years ago.

The theme behind Wolff’s treatment of his subject in “Johann Sebastian Bach”--it runs like a cantus firmus through every chapter of the book--is that Bach was the consummate student and practitioner of musical science in the 18th century, much as Isaac Newton, a generation and a half older than he, had been the consummate investigator of physical science. Both, by virtue of their innate genius and systematic approach to the phenomena that interested them, brought about revolutions in their fields of study. Newton’s work became the foundation of modern science, and Bach’s the prototype for the organically conceived, highly structured “pure music” of the 19th and 20th centuries.

We normally don’t think of Bach as a “revolutionary” genius; that’s more the sort of thing we might associate with Beethoven. But Wolff, guided by the music, makes a persuasive case for just how different and innovative Bach was. And he shows how Bach, who from youth onward stood out as the most intellectually inclined of his remarkable clan (the male descendants of Hans Bach were professional musicians in Thuringia for three generations before Sebastian’s birth), undertook a self-directed and systematic exploration of the major musical genres and styles of his day--focusing first on the keyboard, then on the broader realms of concerted vocal and instrumental music--set himself a remarkable series of formal and aesthetic challenges along the way and synthesized a unique personal style from all that he had absorbed. Revolutionary indeed.

One of the ongoing concerns of Bach scholarship has been the question of what Bach composed before, and during, his six-year appointment as kapellmeister to Prince Leopold of Anhalt-Cothen (1717-1723). Before coming to Cothen, Bach had been employed as a “lackey” at the ducal court in Weimar (1703), as organist in Arnstadt (1703-1707) and Muhlhausen (1707-1708) and as court organist and chamber musician (and, from 1714, court concertmaster as well) in Weimar (1708-1717).

There are few autograph sources for his music before 1714, but it is clear that he composed a great deal for the organ, including some of his greatest pieces (among them probably the monumental Passacaglia in C minor, BWV 582), during his four years in Arnstadt. Wolff argues that the quality and amount of what Bach composed in Arnstadt and Muhlhausen, and in his early years in Weimar, have been underestimated. He further suggests that more than 200 compositions from Bach’s years in Cothen, mainly chamber and orchestral works, have been lost to posterity. And he marshals compelling evidence for assuming that the original versions of all six of the works that in 1721 became the Brandenburg Concertos, Bach’s matchless contribution to the genre of the concerto grosso, predate his Cothen appointment. What all this means is that Bach was better, and more prolific, earlier than anyone had thought.

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Bach’s years as cantor and music director in Leipzig (1723-1750), the summit of his career, are treated with impressive thoroughness, and considerable attention is given to the works that date from this period. Here, as elsewhere in the book, Wolff exhibits an extraordinary awareness not just of the data of Bach’s life but also of the cultural milieu in which it was lived.

The cantata cycles and other great sacred works of Bach’s Leipzig years, among them the Magnificat, the St. Matthew Passion and the B minor Mass, may well have been, as Wolff suggests, the means by which Bach sought to forge in a “scientific” fashion, through his music, “an argument for the existence of God” and Wolff’s analysis of them is among the most valuable yet provided.

Wolff also does well with the speculative, large-scale, elaborately contrapuntal vocal and instrumental works of Bach’s last decade--the Goldberg Variations, the Musical Offering, The Art of the Fugue and the B minor Mass--the crowning glories of Bach’s musical science, in which his quest for perfection came as close to fulfillment as it is possible to come in earthly terms.

“Johann Sebastian Bach” contains a number of useful tables in which the fruits of recent scholarly research are laid out handsomely, and digestibly, for the reader. Dates and details that will be of immense use to the specialist--concerning Bach’s professional travels, his examinations of various organs, his productions of sacred and secular cantatas, and much more--are thus presented, and the whole text is generously footnoted. There are an excellent chronology and an extremely interesting appendix covering the value of numerous units of currency that allows comparison of the cost of living in Bach’s time with present-day norms.

At times the details in Wolff’s treatment amount to more than most people will need or want to know, and at times the winding way he takes with the narrative may leave the reader in a bit of a lurch. We are told on Page 151, for example, about a “boiling conflict” in the Weimar court that may have been the reason for Bach’s halting work on a particular cantata. But it’s not until Page 162, after a long digression on Vivaldi’s concertos, that we learn what that conflict was and how it eventually precipitated Bach’s departure from Weimar. It’s important to remember that Wolff comes at his subject with a professorial bias, in which repetition of details and salient points is a virtue rather than a defect, and in which a digression often contains the most important information in the day’s lecture. Besides, it is from the details, and the occasional scenic detours, that the context of a composer’s life and work emerges, especially for a life and career as rich in incident as Bach’s.

Overall, Wolff’s “tuning” of the text is superb. He brings greater precision to the factual account than has hitherto been achieved by any biographer, and he trains the light of the latest scholarship on his subject with remarkable confidence and ease. The chapter-ending summaries are particularly strong, and the documentation throughout the book is superb. The result is as thoughtful, balanced, informative and practical a biography of a major composer as has come along in many years. In this “Bach Year” marking the 250th anniversary of the Leipzig cantor’s death, it’s unlikely that anyone will fashion a finer tribute to his genius than Christoph Wolff has here.