Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great Volume 14
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Elbert Hubbard >> Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great Volume 14
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--_Sir Hubert Parry_
SEBASTIAN BACH
The art of today is imitative. Once men had convictions, but we have
only opinions, and these are usually borrowed. The artificiality of
life, and the rush and the worry afford no time for great desires to
possess our souls.
We average well, but no Colossus looms large above the crowd and goes
his solitary way unmindful of the throng: we look alike, act alike,
think alike, and in order that the likeness may be complete, we dress
alike.
To wear a hat of your own selection or voice thoughts of your own
thinking is to invite unseemly mirth, and finally scorn and contumely.
The great creators were solitary, rural in their instincts, ignorant and
heedless of what the world was saying and doing. They were men of deep
convictions and enthusiasms, unmindful of laughter or ridicule, caring
little even for approbation.
No "boom town" can possibly produce a genius: it only fosters sundry
small Napoleons of finance. America is a nation of boomers--financial,
political, social and theological.
We have sarcasm and cynicism, and we possess much that is clever, all
produced by snatches of success, well mixed with disappointment and the
bitterness which much contact with the world is sure to evolve. Our age
that goes everywhere, knows everybody's business, and religiously reads
only "the last edition," produces a Bill Nye, a Sam Jones, a Teddy
Roosevelt, a DeWitt Talmage, a Hopkinson Smith, a Sam Walter Foss, a
Victor Herbert; but it is not at all likely to produce a Praxiteles, a
Michelangelo, a Rembrandt, an Immanuel Kant or a Johann Sebastian Bach.
* * * * *
What Shakespeare is to literature, Michelangelo to sculpture, and
Rembrandt to portrait-painting, Johann Sebastian Bach is to organ-music.
He was the greatest organist of his time, and his equal has not yet been
produced, though nearly three hundred years have passed since his death.
"The organ reached perfection at the hands of Bach," says Haweis. As a
composer for the organ, Bach stands secure--his position is at the head,
and is absolutely unassailable.
In point of temperament and disposition Bach bears a closer resemblance
to Michelangelo than to either of the others whose names I have
mentioned. He was stern, strong, self-contained, and so deeply religious
that he was not only a Christian but a good deal of a pagan as well. A
homely man was Bach--quiet, simple in tastes and blunt in speech.
The earnest way in which this plain, unpretentious man focused upon his
life-work and raised organ-music to the highest point of art must
command the sincere admiration of every lover of honest endeavor.
Bach was so great that he had no artistic jealousy, no whim, and when
harshly and unjustly criticized he did not concern himself enough with
the quibblers to reply. He made neither apologies nor explanations. The
man who thus allows his life to justify itself, and lets his work speak,
and who, when reviled, reviles not again, must be a very great and lofty
soul.
Bach was a villager and a rustic, and, like Jean Francois Millet, used
to hoe in his garden, trim the vines, play with his children, putting
them to bed at night, or in the day cease from his work to cut slices of
brown bread which he spread with honey for the heedless little
importuner, who had interrupted him in the making of a chorale that was
to charm the centuries. At times he would leave his composing to help
his wife with her household duties--to wash dishes, sweep the room or
care for a peevish, fretful child. After the evening prayer, like
Millet, again, when his household were all abed, he would often walk out
into the night alone, and traverse his solitary way along a wintry road,
through the woods or by the winding river, a dim, misty, shadowy figure,
spectral as the "Sower," lonely as the "Fagot-Gatherer," talking to
himself, mayhap, and communing with his Maker.
In his later years, when he traveled from one village or city to another
to attend musical gatherings, he was always accompanied by one or more
of his sons. His ambition was centered on his children, and his hope was
in them. Yet nothing has been added to either organ-building,
organ-playing or composition for the organ since his time.
He never knew, any more than Shakespeare knew, that he had set a pace
that would never be equaled. He would have stood aghast with incredulity
had he been told that centuries would come and go and his name be
acclaimed as Master.
Such was Sebastian Bach--simple, polite, modest, unaffected, generous,
almost shy--doing his work and doing it as well as he could, living one
day at a time, loving his friends, forgetting his enemies. His heart was
filled with such melodies that their echo is a blessing and a
benediction to us yet. Art lives!
* * * * *
Heredity is that law of our being which provides that a man shall
resemble his grandfather--or not. The Bach family has supplied the
believers in heredity more good raw material in way of argument than any
dozen other families known to history, combined.
The Herschels with three eminent astronomers to their credit, or the
Beechers with half a dozen great preachers, are scarcely worth
mentioning when we remember the Bachs, who for two hundred fifty years
sounded the "A" for nearly all Germany.
The earliest known member of this musical family was Vert Bach, who was
born about Fifteen Hundred Fifty. He was a miller and baker by trade,
but devoted so much time to playing at dances, rehearsing at church
festivals, and attending gipsy musical performances, that in his milling
business he never prospered and nobody called him "Pillsbury."
This man had a son by the name of Hans, a weaver and a right merry
wight, who traveled over the country attending weddings, christenings
and such like festivals, playing upon a fiddle of his own construction.
So famous was Hans Bach that his name lives in legend and folklore,
wherein it is related that often betimes when he arrived at a village,
the word would be passed and the whole population would quit work and
caper on the green. So luring was his fiddle, and so potent his voice in
song and story, that in a few instances preachers with long faces
warned their flocks against him; and once we find a country Dogberry had
his minions lay the innocent Hans by the heels and give him a taste of
the stocks, simply because he seduced a party of haymakers into
following him off to a dance at a tavern, and in the meantime a storm
coming up, the hay got wet. Poor Hans protested that he had nothing to
do with the storm, but his excuses were construed as proof of guilt and
went for naught.
At last in his wanderings, Hans found a buxom lass who was willing to
take him for better or worse.
And they were married and lived happily ever after, or fairly so.
This marriage quite sobered the fun-loving fiddler, so that he settled
down and worked at his weaving; and at odd hours made himself a bass
viol that looked to be father of all the fiddles. In Eisenach I was told
that this viol was ten feet high. Hans used to play this instrument at
the village church, and his playing drew such crowds that the preacher
had just cause for jealousy, and improved the opportunity, yet stifling
his rage he ordered the verger to lock the doors and allow no one to
depart until after the sermon and collection.
A goodly family was born to Hans and his worthy wife, and all were
trained in music, so that an orchestra was formed, made up of the
father, mother, and boys and girls. All the instruments used were made
by Hans, and these included marvelous fiddles, some with one string and
others with twenty; wooden wind-instruments like flutes, and drums to
match the players, some of whom were wee toddlers. It is said that the
music this orchestra made was more or less unique.
The best part of all this musical exploitation of Hans was that one of
his boys, Heinrich by name, applied himself so diligently to the art
that he became the organist in the village church, and then he was
called to play the great organ at Arnstadt. Heinrich was not a roisterer
like his father: he was a man of education and dignity. He composed many
pieces, and trained his choruses so well that his fame went abroad as
the chief musician of all Thuringia. He held his position at Arnstadt
for fifty years, and died in Sixteen Hundred Ninety-two, at which time
Johann Sebastian Bach, his nephew, was seven years old.
In his day Heinrich Bach was known as the "Great Bach," and he had two
sons who were nearly as famous as himself, and would have been quite so,
were it not for the fact that they had a cousin by the name of Johann
Sebastian.
Johann Sebastian was a son of Johann Ambrosius, a brother of Heinrich,
and Johann Ambrosius, of course, a son of the merry Hans. Johann
Ambrosius was a musician, too, but did not distinguish himself
especially in this line. His distinction lies in the fact that he was
the father of Johann Sebastian, and this is quite enough for any one
man, even if Gail Hamilton did once protest that the office of male
parent was insignificant and devoid of honor.
Johann Ambrosius was a shiftless kind of fellow who drank much beer out
of an earthen pot, and whittled out fiddles, sitting on a bench in the
sun. He sort of let his family shift for themselves. Heinrich Bach, his
brother, used to speak of him as one of his "poor relations," but at the
annual Bach family festival, when a full hundred Bachs gathered to sing
and play, Johann Ambrosius would attend and play on a flute or fiddle
and prove that he was worthy of the name.
On one such annual reunion he took his little boy, Johann Sebastian,
eight years old. The boy's mother had died a year or so before, and
after the mother's death the father seemed to think more of his children
than ever before--which is often the case, I'm told.
They walked the distance, about forty miles, in two days, to where the
festival occurred. It was one of the white milestones in the boy's
life--that trip with its revelation of sleeping in barns, singing, and
playing on many instruments, dining by the wayside, all winding up with
a solemn service at a great stone church, where the preacher gave them
his benediction, and the great company separated with handshakings,
embracings and tears, to meet again in a year. Johann Ambrosius did not
attend the next reunion. Before the Spring had come and birds sang
blithely, a band composed of twenty-five played funeral-dirges at his
grave--and little Johann Sebastian was an orphan.
Johann Sebastian's elder brother, Christoph, who had married a few years
before and moved away, attended the funeral, and when he went back home
he took little Johann Sebastian with him--there was no other place to
go. The lad was allowed to take one thing with him as a remembrance of
the home that he was now leaving forever--his father's violin in a green
bag, with a leathern drawstring. On the bag were his father's initials,
woven into the cloth by the boy's mother--a present from sweetheart to
lover before their marriage.
Christoph was a musician, too, and a prosperous fellow--quite the
antithesis of his father. It takes a lot of love to bring up a child,
and the miracle of mother-love is a constant wonder to every thinking
person. Without mother-love how would the cross-grained, perverse little
tyrant ever survive the buffets which the world is sure to give? It is
love that makes existence possible.
Christoph wished to be kind to his little brother, but it was a kindness
of the head and not of the heart. Only an hour a day was allowed the boy
for playing on the violin he had brought in the green bag, because
Christoph and his wife "did not want to hear the noise." Then when the
boy stole off to the forest and played there, he was waylaid on the way
home and well cuffed for disobeying orders. All this seems very much
like the Goneril and Cordelia business, or the history of Cinderella,
but as Johann Sebastian told it himself in the after-years, we have
reason to believe it was not fiction.
Little Johann Sebastian had been his father's favorite, and this fact
perhaps made Christoph fear the boy was going to tread in his father's
lazy footsteps. So he set about to discipline the lad.
It must be admitted that Johann Ambrosius Bach, who whittled out fiddles
in the sun, and who drank much beer out of an earthen pot, was
shiftless, but it further seems that he was tender-hearted and kind and
took much interest in teaching Sebastian to play the violin, even while
the child wore dresses. And sometimes I think it is really better, if
you have to choose, to drink beer out of an earthen pot and be kind and
gentle, than to have a sharp nose for other folks' faults and be
continually trying to pinch and prod the old world into the straight and
narrow path of virtue. Yet there is wisdom in all folly, and I can see
that the prohibition concerning little Sebastian's playing the violin
only an hour a day--mind you! was not without its benefits. Surely it
would often be a wise bit of diplomacy on the part of the teacher to
order the pupil not to study his arithmetic lesson but an hour a day, on
penalty. Of course it might happen occasionally that the pupil in an
earnest desire to please, might not study at all, yet there are
exceptions to all rules, and we must remember that when Tom Sawyer
forbade the boys using his whitewash-brush, the scheme worked well.
One instance, however, might be cited where the law of compensation
seems really to have stood no chance. Christoph had a goodly musical
library and a collection of the best organ-music that had been produced
up to that time. He kept this music in a case, and carried the key to
the case in his pocket. On rare occasions he had shown bits of this
music to Sebastian, who read music like print when it is easy. The boy
devoured all the music he could lay his hands on, and hummed it over to
himself until every note and accent was fixed in his memory. He dearly
wanted to examine that music in the locked-up case, but his brother
declared his ambition nonsense--he was too young. But the boy contrived
a way to pick the lock--for a music-lover laughs at locksmiths--and at
night when all the household were safely in bed, he would steal
downstairs in his bare feet and get a sheet of the music and copy it off
by moonlight, sitting in the deep ledge of the window. Thus did he work
for six months, whenever the moon shone bright enough to read the lines
and signs and marks. But alas! one day the elder brother was rummaging
around the boy's room in search of things contraband and he pounced upon
the portfolio of copied music. He summoned the offender into his
presence. The facts were admitted, and Johann Sebastian had his bare
legs well tingled with an apple-sprout. Then the portfolio was
confiscated and carried away, despite pleadings, promises and tears. And
the question still remains whether "discipline" is not a matter of
gratification to the person in power rather than a sincere and honest
attempt to benefit the person disciplined.
Nevertheless, Johann Sebastian Bach was working out his own education:
he belonged to the boys' chorus at Ohrdruf, as all boys in the vicinity
did. Music in every German village was an important item, and the best
singers and best behaved members of the village choir were set apart as
a sort of select choir--a choir within a choir--and were often gathered
together to sing on special occasions at weddings and festivals. Johann
Sebastian had a sweet, well-modulated voice, and whenever he was to
sing, he carried his violin in the green bag, so he could play, too, if
needed. Thus he played and sang at serenades, just as did Martin Luther,
many years before, in Johann Sebastian's own native town of Eisenach.
Johann Sebastian's fame grew until it reached to Luneburg, twelve miles
away, and he was invited there to sing in the choir of Saint Michael's.
The pay he received was very slight, but that was not to be considered.
An occasional bowl of soup and piece of rye-bread, and the privilege of
sleeping in the organ-loft, all combined with freedom, made his paradise
complete. He played on the harpsichord in the pastor's study sometimes;
and occasionally the organist, who could not help loving such a
music-loving boy, would allow him to try the big organ, and at every
service he was present to play his violin, or if any of the other
players were absent he would just fill in and play any instrument
desired.
Then we hear of him trudging off to Hamburg, a hundred miles away, with
only a few coppers in his pocket, to hear the great organist Reinke. He
slept in cattle-sheds by the way, played his violin at taverns for
something to eat, or plainly stated his case to sympathetic cooks at
backdoors. One instance he has recorded when all the world seemed to
frown. He had trudged all day, with nothing to eat, and at evening had
sat down near the open window of an inn, from which came savory smells
of supper. As he sat there, suddenly there were thrown out a couple of
small dried herrings. The hungry boy eagerly seized upon them, just as a
dog would. But what was his surprise to find, as he gnawed, in the mouth
of each fish a piece of silver! Some one had read the story of Saint
Peter to a purpose. Young Bach looked in vain for a person to thank, but
perceiving no one he took it as the act of God and an omen that his
pilgrimage to hear the great organist should not be in vain.
The wonders of Reinke's playing and the marvel of the mighty music
filled his soul with awe, and fired his ambition to do a like
performance.
Did the great Reinke know as he played that bright Sabbath morning,
filling the cathedral with thunders of echoing bass, or sounds of sweet,
subtle melody--did he know that away back in the throng stood a dusty,
tawny-haired boy who had tramped a hundred miles just for this event?
And did the organist guess as he played that he was inspiring a human
soul to do a grand and wondrous work, and live a life whose influence
should be deathless? Probably not--few men indeed know when virtue has
gone out of them.
Perhaps Reinke was playing just to suit himself, and had purposely put
the unappreciative, lazy, sleepy occupants of the pews out of his
thought, all unmindful that there was one among a thousand, back behind
a pillar, dusty and worn, but now unconsciously refreshed and oblivious
to all save the playing of the great organ. There stood the boy bathed
in sweet sounds, with streaming eyes and responsive heart.
His inward emotions supplemented the outward melody, for music demands a
listener, and at the last is a matter of soul, not sound: its appeal
being a harmony that dwells within. So played Reinke, and back by the
door, peering from behind a pillar, stood the boy.
* * * * *
Sebastian Bach was such a useful member of the choir at Luneburg that
the town musician from Weimar, who happened to be going that way,
induced him to go home with him as assistant organist.
This was a definite move in the direction of fame and fortune. Men who
can make themselves useful are needed--there is ever a search for such.
They wanted Bach at Weimar. Johann Sebastian Bach, aged eighteen, was
wanted because he did his work well.
After three or four months at Weimar he made a visit to Arnstadt, where
his uncle had so long been organist. His name at Arnstadt was a name to
conjure with, and in fact throughout all that part of the country,
whenever a man proved to be a musician of worth and power the people out
of compliment called him a "Bach."
Johann Sebastian was invited to play for the people, and all were so
delighted that they insisted he should come and fill the place made
vacant by the death of the "Great Bach."
So he came and was duly installed.
And the young man drilled his chorus, wrote cantatas, and arranged
chants and hymns. But he was far from contented. He was being pushed on
by a noble unrest. It was not so very long before we find him packing
off to Denmark, with little ceremony, to listen to the playing of
Buxtehude, the greatest player of his age.
Bach had been quite content to tiptoe into the church when Reinke
played, grateful for the privilege of listening, half-expecting to be
thrust out as an interloper. He had gained confidence since then, and
now introduced himself to Buxtehude and was greeted by the octogenarian
as a brother and an equal, although sixty years divided them. His visit
extended itself from one week to two, and then to a month or more, and a
message came from his employers that if he expected to hold his place he
had better return.
Bach's visit to Buxtehude formed another white milestone in his career.
He came back filled with enthusiasm and overflowing with ideas and plans
that a single lifetime could not materialize. Those who have analyzed
the work of Buxtehude and Bach tell us that there is a richness of
counterpoint, a vigor of style, a fulness of harmony, and a strong,
glowing, daring quality that in some pieces is identical with both
composers. In other words, Bach admired Buxtehude so much that for a
time he wrote and played just like him, very much as Turner began by
painting as near like Claude Lorraine as he possibly could. Genius has
its prototype, and in all art there is to be found this apostolic
succession. Bach first built on Reinke; next he transferred his
allegiance to Buxtehude; from this he gradually developed courage and
self-reliance until he fearlessly trusted himself in deep water,
heedless of danger. And it is this fearless, self-reliant and
self-sufficient quality that marks the work of every exceptional man in
every line of art. "Here's to the man who dares," said Disraeli. All
strong men begin by worshiping at a shrine, and if they continue to grow
they shift their allegiance until they know only one altar and that is
the Ideal which dwells in their own heart.
* * * * *
And now behold how Heinrich Bach had educated his people into the belief
that there was only one way to play, and that was as he did it. It is
not at all probable that Heinrich put forward any claims of perfection,
but the people regarded his playing as high-water mark, and any
variation from his standards was considered fantastic and absurd.
In all of the old German Protestant churches are records kept giving the
exact history of the church. You can tell for two hundred years back
just when an organist was hired or dismissed; when a preacher came and
when he went away, with minute mention as to reasons.
And so we find in the records of the Church at Arnstadt that the
organist, Johann Sebastian Bach, took a vacation without leave in the
year Seventeen Hundred Five, and further, when he returned his playing
was "fantastical."
With the young man's compositions the Consistory expressed echoing
groans of dissatisfaction. A list of charges was drawn up against him,
one of which runs as follows: "We charge him with a habit of making
surprising variations in the chorales, and intermixing divers strange
sounds, so that thereby the congregation was confounded."
Bach's answers are filed with the original charges, and are all very
brief and submissive. In some instances he pleads guilty, not thinking
it worth his while, strong man that he was, to either apologize or
explain.
But the most damning count brought against him was this: "We further
charge him with introducing into the choir-loft a Stranger Maiden, who
made music." To this, young Bach makes no reply. Brave boy!
The sequel is shown that in a few weeks he was married to this "Stranger
Maiden," who was his cousin. She was a Bach, too, a descendant of the
merry Hans, and she, also, played the organ. But great was the horror of
the Arnstadites that a woman should play a church organ. Mein Gott im
Himmel--a woman might be occupying the pulpit next!
Johann Sebastian's indifference to criticism is partially explained by
the fact that he was in correspondence with the Consistory at Mulhausen,
and also with the Duke Wilhelm Ernest, of Saxe-Weimar. Both Mulhausen
and Weimar wanted his services. Under such conditions men have ever been
known to invite a rupture--let us hope that Johann Sebastian Bach was
not quite so human.
* * * * *
Michelangelo never married, but Bach held the average good by marrying
twice.
He was the father of just twenty children. His first wife was a woman
with well-defined musical tastes, as was meet in one with such an
illustrious musical pedigree. It wasn't fashion then to educate women,
and one biographer expresses a doubt as to whether Bach's first wife was
able to read and write. To read and write are rather cheap
accomplishments, though. Last year I met several excellent specimens of
manhood in the Tennessee Mountains who could do neither, yet these men
had a goodly hold on the eternal verities.
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