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Journey to Lubeck
Uphill. Both ways. In the snow.
If you are over thirty, some member of
an older generation, possibly a father or grandfather
who grew up in rural environs, has tried to make you
feel guilty over how hard life was in those days, and
how, just to get to school required a long and
treacherous sojourn over rocky cliffs and against
driving winds. And how they cheerfully paid that price
for an education.
Try walking two-hundred fifty miles.
That, at least, is the Romantic
picture some of Bach's early biographers paint for us
when it comes to the strange journey the lad made from
his home church in Arnstadt to Lubeck, to hear for
himself the great organist Dietrich Buxtehude. If you
are not familiar with Buxtehude, take Bach's word, or
rather actions, for it. He was worth the long walk.
We don't know, exactly, what it was
the made Bach want to undertake the trip. Buxtehude did
have a considerable reputation, at least among
musicians, and Bach, a young man of twenty, was in his
first job as a church organist. It wasn't a particularly
large church, and Bach may have felt very constrained by
the limited resources in town, as well as being
motivated by the urge that every ambitious young
musician feels to make contact with other musicians, to
learn from them, and thus improve their own art. One
thing should be stressed--had Bach been content to
simply stay at home and do the job for which he had been
hired, and not gone forth to confront and learn from the
best that German art had to offer at the time, he
wouldn't have been Bach.
In October of 1705, Bach applied for
and got permission to leave his post for a month to hear
Buxtehude. He left his job in the "capable hands" of an
assistant, and traveled to Lubeck where he met the approximately
68-year old Dietrich Buxtehude, organist at St.
Mary's, and director of the town music.
Bach had probably had a copy of a
manuscript or two of the elder composer's in order to
acquaint himself with his organ music; it was not
unusual for a studious musician to make copies (by
hand) of works he wished to study. Bach came from a very
large family of musicians who were adept at the art of
passing around and copying manuscripts. (Bach had once
gotten in some trouble over a forbidden manuscript of
his uncle's that he tried to copy by moonlight). Still,
here in Lubeck, he came face to face with the creative
force himself, who must have shown him a number of his
other compositions, supplementing whatever scant
knowledge Bach had up to that point, as well as
demonstrating them in the church services, or perhaps
even privately.
Here musicology becomes a series of
"must haves" and "probablys" because we don't really
have a record of what went on between the two, and can
only surmise from later pieces of Bach how greatly he
was influenced by Buxtehude, and what pieces he must
surely have known.
Buxtehude's big show, however, was yet
to come. It was a series of concerts known as
"Abendmusik" (Evening music) given on Sundays during
Advent, the season leading up to Christmas, when music
during the church services was banned. Advent was hardly
a celebratory season in those days--the reading for the
1st Sunday which is still in our Common Lectionary today
deals with the end of the age and it ushered in a season
of premonitory and penitential reverence.
Since music wasn't permitted during
the morning service, or the afternoon service, it became
customary (despite a few origin stories nobody is really
sure how) for a large concert to take place following
the afternoon service. Buxtehude composed some very
large works for chorus and orchestra for these
occasions. It is a real musical shame that none of this
music survives.
The problem for Bach was that Advent
is in December, and Bach's leave extended only into
November. This suggests that, whatever Bach knew about
Buxtehude, he did not seem to have been aware of the
Advent concerts when he obtained his leave of absence.
Unless his malingering was premeditated.
Bach was now faced with a tough
choice. If he stuck around for the concerts, he would be
overstaying his leave, and the church authorities would
not be very happy. On the other hand, to miss such
concerts!
Given the distance between the towns
and the impossibility of another trip so soon if he did
return home, Bach decided to stay. He was not about to
wait another year for this seminal influence on his art,
something of great importance to him, and probably of
little consequence to the people back home. That fact
that he remained in Lubeck may be why he is remembered
300 years after his birth as one of the greatest
composers known to history.
That doesn't, however, make his
behavior anything less than rude.
When he returned home, the church
authorities let him know it. A fascinating transcript
survives of the "minutes" of a meeting to which Bach was
called to explain himself. By this time it was well into
February. Bach had not only remained through Christmas,
he found reasons to stay for another month and a half,
causing him to return nearly four months late.
That reason could have been
Buxtehude's daughter, though it is unlikely. She was not
young, not pretty, and perhaps did not posses an
overwhelming personality. At any rate, her father was
having difficulty marrying her off. By the time of
Bach's visit, she had become part of a package deal in
which Buxtehude's job and her hand went together. In
other words, Buxtehude's successor would have to marry
his daughter.
Sound like a strange benefits package?
It had already been turned down by visiting luminaries
like Georg Frideric Handel, and Johann
Mattheson. Did Buxtehude make the same offer to Bach? He
would have had to make another difficult choice in
Lubeck.
Or perhaps not so difficult. Bach
seems to have had his eye on another young woman at the
time, one he would marry shortly afterward. Biographers
have speculated that it was this young lady that Bach
invited up to the choir loft on at least one occasion.
In the document described above, Bach is accused of
"making music" with a "stranger lady". In a time when
women weren't even allowed to sing in the choir, this
was a serious breech of etiquette. Besides, it might
give people...thoughts. Not that church people are ever
given to gossip.
This particular problem predated
Bach's trip, and was waiting for him when he got home.
The authorities were going to have to take their
scandals one at a time, however.
In addition to the awkwardness of
Bach's courtship, the church choir wasn't getting the
sort of attention from Bach that his employers wanted.
It was not the most talented choir in town (literally)
and there were discipline problems with the boys who
made it up. Bach evidently decided he had better things
to do and chose not to come to practice on several
occasions. When questioned, Bach said that he would
return to the choir "if a proper director" were
appointed. The council gave Bach eight days to decide
whether to vacate this position officially, or to
promise to attend practice. But they chose to reprimand
the choir's director, suggesting that they, too, knew
there were problems at that position.
If that were not enough, Bach seems to
have picked up a "musical virus" in Lubeck which caused
him to try some "surprising variations in the chorales".
In other words, Bach was now accompanying the hymns in a
new way. It appears to have been throwing off the
congregation. Whether this was because they didn't like
anything different or because Bach was simply letting
his fancy do with a hymn what he wished, regardless of
whether anybody could recognize the tune is impossible
to judge from this distance. Spitta, in his early
biography, is not too sympathetic with Bach on this
point, and suggests that a chorale prelude that survives
from this period might give an indication of the
unpredictable manner in which phrases were extended, and
variations employed, obscuring the tune, and making
impossible to know when to come in on the next line.
Bach was also making his preludes much longer (it was
customary to play figurative chorale-prelude
introductions to hymns for a few minutes rather than
just play the last line unadorned as many of us do
today) than he had in the past, and, when this was
pointed out to him, he stubbornly made them very short.
At this point the document appears to
have leapt forward eight days, because it is the
choirmaster on the hot seat. On the Sunday previous to
the council's notes, he, apparently bored with the
sermon, had visited a wine shop!
Rambach said he was very sorry about
that and promised not to do it again.
Which doesn't make Bach seem exactly
like an...ahem...choirboy by comparison, but does put
some things in perspective.
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