The Sons of Bach
Saturday, October 13, 7:30 PM
Hanes Auditorium,
Salem Fine Arts Center
The talented sons of Bach have been completely overshadowed by their illustrious father, even though in their own day their reputations exceeded his. Join us for a pre-concert talk by Dr. Nola Reed Knouse of the Moravian Music Foundation in Shirley Recital Hall at 6:45 pm. The program will open with a Sinfonia in B-flat by Johann Christoph Friedrich Bach, performed by the Collegium Musicum Salem, an ensemble of the region’s finest players of period instruments, organized by John Pruett. That orchestra will then support a brilliant Credo Breve by Johann Christian Bach (who converted to Catholicism and proved an important influence on the young Mozart), a brief motet in German by Wilhelm Friedemann Bach (considered by his father the most talented of the bunch), and, after intermission, the magnificent Magnificat of Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, featuring as soloists Marilyn Taylor, Mary Siebert, Jonathan Blalock and John Williams.
Following the performance the Moravian Music Foundation will host a reception and open house in the Archie K. Davis Center.
Program
Johann Christoph F. Bach |
Sinfonia in B-flat major |
Johann Christian Bach |
Credo breve |
Wilhelm Friedemann Bach |
Lobet Gott unsern Herrn Zebaoth |
Carl Philpp Emanuel Bach |
Magnificat |
Director's Notes:
Many who may not be aware of much of his music beyond the handful of recognizable “hits” probably do know of Johann Sebastian Bach’s other fecundity, siring with two wives those twenty-one children. Many are also aware that Professor Peter Schickele not long ago “discovered” a previously unidentified twenty-second child, P.D.Q., whose genius was to create wonderfully imaginative spoofs of all sorts of serious music, some of which hadn’t even been dreamed of during his supposed lifetime.
Many also probably still believe that a stylistic era known as the Baroque collapsed abruptly in 1750, the year of Papa Bach’s death, and also that knowledge of his art disappeared completely until it was resurrected through Mendelssohn’s revival of the St. Matthew Passion in 1829. The reality is that the idiom of which Johann Sebastian became the supreme exponent was gradually going out of style during the last two decades of his lifetime, but also that a large handful of his admirers continued to advocate and perform his work during those remaining decades of the 18th and into the following century.
However, it is also true that if a musician in London or Berlin during the 1770s or ‘80s referred to Bach, he probably meant Johann Christian or Carl Philipp Emanuel rather than Johann Sebastian. The four composers whose work you will experience this evening lived and worked in a transitional period leading to the “Classicism” of Haydn (1732–1809) and Mozart (1756–91). Note that one of the Bachs was born in the year of Haydn’s birth, another three years later and that one actually outlived Mozart. However, their attraction to the new idioms won’t be readily apparent except in the Sinfonia, since their church music remained conservative in style, an attitude not exclusive to them, as witness the sacred music of Haydn and Mozart compared to their instrumental music. But conservative doesn’t mean unimaginative, and we hope that you will find delight in the work of these four Bach kids.
We don’t know much about J.C.F.’s early years, except that his musical upbringing was entirely supervised by his father. In late 1749 at age seventeen he applied for a position at the court of Bückeburg, and before his father’s death in July of the following year was apparently employed as a chamber musician by Count Wilhelm von Schaumburg-Lippe. The count, like most of his contemporaneous aristocrats in what was eventually to become Germany considered a first-class musical establishment a necessity; he also, as did many of his peers, favored the reigning Italian style, with its emphasis on tuneful melody over an uncomplicated texture and slow-moving harmonies, and consequently employed two Italians as directors of his program. They certainly influenced J.C.F. in his contributions to the evolving three-movement sinfonia tradition, one that was to culminate in the four-movement symphony later in the century. Thus, the first movement of Bach’s B-flat Sinfonia is clearly in what would later be called sonata design, with an exposition containing two contrasting themes, a turbulent middle development section and a concluding recapitulation that neatly resolves the earlier conflict. Unlike later symphonies, there is no slow movement, the delicate and ingratiating second movement not radically different in idiom from the more robust concluding Minuet. We can perform this piece only because Johann Friedrich Peter (1746–1813), perhaps the most able of the Moravian musicians who emigrated, copied out a set of instrumental parts (and for three companion pieces as well) in the late 1760s, their only remaining evidence. Peter (who spent the 1780s as the chief musician of the Salem congregation) left an immense library, now divided between archives in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania and Winston-Salem. It would be nice to suggest that you will be able to see the manuscript parts of this particular piece at the open house that follows the concert, but, alas, they happen to reside up north.
By the way, J.C.F. spent the rest of his life in Bückeburg, where he eventually was promoted to more prominent positions as a performer and composed an immense of music of all sorts, including some substantial vocal works. He was on good terms with his brothers and in 1778 paid a visit to Johann Christian in London, where he became enamored of the newfangled pianoforte, bought one and eventually composed extensively for the instrument.
Note that Johann Christian was only fifteen when his father died. Although he studied briefly with brother C.P.E. in Berlin, his principal teacher was the Franciscan priest Giovanni Battista Martini (1706–84) of Bologna, mentor to many. J.C. arrived in Italy as early at 1754, called himself Giovanni Bach, converted to Catholicism by 1757 (perhaps mostly for practical reasons), and been appointed an organist of the Cathedral in Milan by 1760. He was soon writing Italian opera for theaters in Turin and Naples and moved to London in 1762 (where he was identified as John Bach, a “Saxon Master of Music”) after an invitation to write two operas for the King’s Theatre, this in a city whose audiences were ravenous for Italian opera. (Recall that another prominent German musician trained in Italy by the name of Handel was lured to London initially as a composer of Italian opera.) However, he also became active in the vibrant concert life of the city and an intimate of the royal family as Music Master to the German-born queen, as well as an impresario and prolific writer of symphonies, piano concerti, chamber music, etc. He had a notable influence on the young Mozart when that eight-year-old prodigy visited in London in 1764; Bach seated the eight-year-old on his lap and “they played on the same keyboard for two hours together, extempore, before the King and Queen,” apparently playing alternate bars, or improvising fugues, with Bach initiating, Mozart completing the stunt. Some of Mozart’s earliest symphonies were written in London for performance by Bach; Mozart was later to note J.C.’s death as “a loss to the musical world.”
His setting of the Nicene Creed dates from 1758, when Bach wrote to Martini, acknowledging that it was “composed under your eye.” The “breve” suggests compactness in an era when the label of “Missa brevis” was common for pieces designed for practical use on Sunday mornings. Bach doesn’t go to the extreme of overlaying textual phrases in the interest of efficiency, as was often the case, but the words are usually clearly enunciated. He does abide by other conventions of the period, with the proclamation of resurrection bursting forth triumphantly from the despair of the crucifixion. The work also ends with the obligatory full-fledged fugue, that conversation among the four choral voices based on a melodic subject presented in the initial exposition. You might also note that the “Et in spiritum” begins with a clear musical reference to the opening movement.
W.F.’s compact motet had its origins in 1748 when it supported a different text. We don’t know what occasioned the work, but it appeared during the period 1746–64 when Bach served Halle (Handel’s birthplace) as Director of Music and organist of the city’s principal church.
W.F. was certainly his father’s favorite child, perhaps symbolized in the “Little Clavier Book of Wilhelm Friedemann Bach,” an anthology of all sorts of keyboard works begun by the father about 1720 that suggest the son’s facility and presage his later reputation as a virtuoso organist. After graduating from the University of Leipzig, having studied mathematics, philosophy and the law, W. F. accepted a position in Catholic Dresden in 1733, prior to the Halle appointment. However, his prickly, unstable personality led to strained relationships with his employers, and he simply walked away from the job in Halle. He spent the next six years there, and later in Braunschweig and Berlin, cobbling together a living as a freelance teacher and composer. He earned the scorn of posterity by giving away or selling many of his father’s manuscripts, of which he was designated a principal custodian, leading to the loss of a significant portion of that legacy. Toward the end of his life, suffering both poverty and ill health, he even claimed some of his father’s music as his own and in at least one instance signed his father’s name to one of his own works.
Please set aside any despair over that sad tale as you listen to this jubilant outburst of praise, with its complex counterpoint and brilliant orchestration, surely the work of a most gifted individual.
While the father would probably have been sorely disappointed had he witnessed the instability of W.F., we know that he was immensely proud of the enormous success of C.P.E., perhaps best manifested in that notable visit of J.S.B. to Berlin in 1747 when the son, who served King Frederick the Great in various capacities for thirty years, presented his aging father to the court, an encounter that resulted in one of the monuments of father Bach’s final years, “The Musical Offering.” C.P.E., like his brothers represented on this program, also graduated from the University of Leipzig, reflecting their father’s insistence that the sons should enjoy the advantages of a university education denied him. C.P.E. basked in the opulence of the Berlin court and its splendid musical establishment staffed with a number of notable performers and composers (the king was an accomplished amateur flutist and C.P.E., served as his keyboard accompanist), but eventually his situation became strained, and in 1767 he was appointed Director of Music of the prosperous commercial city of Hamburg, where he established himself as one of the most important musicians of his day, one whose work was much admired by Haydn, although they never met. He wrote an enormous amount of music of all sorts, as well as an important treatise on performance practice, his “Essay on the True Art of Playing Keyboard Instruments.”
The substantial work we present you dates from 1749, and may have been written in support of his application for title of Court Music Director to Frederick’s sister. One scholar also speculates that it perhaps was submitted with his unsuccessful application to succeed his father in Leipzig. However, it was probably not performed until Bach’s move to Hamburg. Those of you who know the father’s setting from about 1730 of the same language in the same key (dictated by the limitations of the unkeyed trumpets available in that day) will recognize some passing references to the earlier piece. However, the son’s writing for his quartet of soloists is even more extravagant, and the concluding double fugue for chorus is literally breath-taking (especially for the singers) in its breadth. You will first hear a full fugue based on a clearly defined subject, followed by an equally obvious but quite different subject for the “Amen,” after which the two are deftly combined, leading to a mighty climax. Notice also that the father re-introduced his opening music to support “Sicut erat,” or “As it was in the beginning,” while the son returns to his opening music in support of the “Gloria Patri.” Also, that the son muddles the structure of the biblical text a bit with a clearly defined second section of the brilliant alto and tenor duet.
Scholars speak of two idioms present during the period under discussion, the “empfindsamer Stil,” or “sensitive” idiom, the goal of “Empfindsamkeit” being the direct, “natural” and subjective expression of emotion. Also, “Sturm und Drang,” or “Storm and Stress,” an attitude that had its origins in literature, but was then applied to music of dramatic intensity and contrast. Expect to find elements of both in this wonderfully colorful piece.
Bill Osborne