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William L. Hoffmann wrote (August 6, 2020):
The prosperous city of Leipzig provided Bach with two important civic institutions that shaped his musical universe: the Thomas School with its cantor position and the community with a growing musical environment for its music director. Together they enabled Bach to fulfill his calling of a "well-regulated church music to the glory of God" which, serving as the springboard to his legacy, brought both recognition and the flowering of classical music. Recent studies by two younger, impressive Bach scholars, Michael Maul1 and Jeffrey Sposato,2 have furnished a wealth of new material on the cultures and practices of the school and the community, providing a more complete portrait of the embattled leader of music in Leipzig during the first half of the 18th century and a rich thread involving the continuum of music-making from the 17th to the 19th centuries in that Saxon community. Maul, senior scholar at the Bach-Archiv Leipzig and a prolific author, has helped to greatly advance Bach research with contextual studies in various fields while actively participating in English language scholarly pursuits such as the biannual American Bach Society (https://www.americanbachsociety.org) Conference and the Bach Network dialogue meetings as well as the Bach Cantatas Website study, "Bach's Pupils" (https://www.bach-cantatas.com/Other/Pupil-List.htm). Sposato, a musicology professor at the University of Houston, "in a number of ways extends my presentation of Leipzig’s church music under Bach’s successors," says Maul (Ibid.: xvi). "Michael Maul’s Bach’s famous choir was initially motivated by his inquiry into why ‘the chronological list of the St Thomas cantors is made up almost exclusively of famous and historically significant musicians’ (p. 1), his answers being drawn from key German source texts reproduced in full in the two-volume Dokumente zur Geschichte des Leipziger Thomaskantorats, (Carus, Vol.I, ed. Maul)," says Bach scholar and reviewer Ruth Tatlow.3 The earliest well-known cantors were Seth Calvisius (https://www.bach-cantatas.com/Lib/Calvisius-Sethus.htm) and Johan Hermann Schein https://www.bach-cantatas.com/Lib/Schein.htm), who molded the fine choir, followed by noted composers Sebastian Knupfer (https://www.bach-cantatas.com/Lib/Knupfer-Sebastian.htm), Johann Schelle (https://www.bach-cantatas.com/Lib/Schelle-Johann.htm), and Johann Kuhnau (https://www.bach-cantatas.com/Lib/Kuhnau-Johann.htm), whose music is now being revealed in detail through publications and recordings. Says Tatlow: <<The five chapters inevitably cover the expansive timeline unequally: Chapter I ‘From monastery to municipal music school, 1212–1593’; Chapter II ‘How the St. Thomas School became a music school, 1594–1640’; Chapter III ‘Famous throughout the whole world of music, 1640–1701’; Chapter IV ‘Odd authorities with little interest in music: the St Thomas school in crisis, 1701–1730’; Chapter V ‘School for scholars, or ‘conservatory of music’, 1730–1804’. By page 236 Bach has died, leaving the final sixty pages to cover [Cantors] Gottlob Harrer, Johann Friedrich Doles and Johann Adam Hiller before the epilogue brings the story briefly to today.>> <<The scope of the content is vast. The 300-page text is complemented by one hundred pages of reference material, consisting of twenty pages of Appendices listing Cantors, Rectors, Overseers of church and school, a Timeline of the St Thomas Choir and St Thomas Cantorate, Income and expenses of the St Thomas School, Cantors of St Thomas School 1810 to present; and eighty pages of endnotes, bibliography and two indexes. There are also 68 high quality black and white gloss plates on 48 full pages, which serve as documentary evidence. Intriguing as these bewigged images may be, I found the characters more alive in Maul’s narrative.>>
Thomas School History Themes
"Maul weaves throughout his story certain threads that explain the vicissitudes experienced by the school and choir over the centuries: the relationship to the town government; the support of the townspeople; the tensions or amity between the school’s head, the Rector, and the third-ranked Cantor; arguments about whether St. Thomas’ should be primarily a training institution for young singers or an academic school; and the role the choir played in the city’s life," says Raymond Erickson.4 Two facets of the Thomas School history uncovered by Maul, says Erickson, are the importance of Choir I for the Sunday morning music and a new set of rules approved by the governing Leipzig Town Council just before Bach's appointment in 1723, downgrading the importance of music and Bach's salary which hamstrung him. The conditions under which Bach lived and practiced his art increasingly reveal forces beyond his control — or anyone else's? — which suggest the significance of the old French adage on the definition of history as the mort-main or "dead hand" trick that the dead play on the living.
"After the original German publication in 2012, Maul’s golden touch for discovering new sources continued," Tatlow points out. "Rather than updating the text for this English version, Maul adds a ‘Note on the English edition’ [xiv]. Chief among his new finds is a 1751 letter that he discovered in 2013 by a former St Thomas choir prefect, Gottfried Benjamin Fleckeisen (https://www.bach-cantatas.com/Lib/Fleckeisen-Christian-Gottlob.htm), who ‘claimed that for two whole years' (apparently sometime between 1743 and 1747) he functioned as the de facto St Thomas cantor in place of the capellmeister—doubtless Johann Sebastian Bach […] I have presented an extensive analysis of Fleckeisen’s letter and its implications in Bach Jahrbuch 2015 […] English translation by Barbara Reul online in https://www.bachnetwork.org/ub12/ub12-maul.pdf (p. xvi)."
Cantors Schelle, Kuhnau Impact Bach
Two Bach cantor predecessors, Schelle and Kuhnau, helped inform recent understanding of their contributions that impacted Bach. Schelle composed a cycle of sermon-oriented chorale cantatas, writes Marcus Rathey,5 and initiated the use of printed text booklets for the main services, says Sposato, Ibid.: 93). Kuhnau, a talented organist and scholar, wrote "A Treatise on Liturgical Text Settings (1710)," where his "objective is always to interpret the meaning and significance of the sacred words as accurately as he can, and to delight and move the spirit of the listener," says Carol K. Baron,6 which Bach particularly observed in his harmonizations of chorale texts. Another important factor shows that in 1634 "regulations for St. Thomas School were published that officially established musical talent as the sine qua non for admission, which fact no doubt inspired Heinrich Schütz, the Court Capellmeister in Dresden, to dedicate his Geistliche Chormusik (1648) to the Leipzig Town Council and their 'famous choir'," says Erickson (Ibid.: paragraph beginning "Just as enlightening . . . .").
Given the importance of Lutheran orthodoxy in the development of church music in Leipzig, as well as its Roman Catholic liturgical underpinnings from the governing Saxon state, the tenure of Bach (1723-50) reinforced these factors and helped create a century following with continuing sacred influences as the community moved from the dominance of the church and other private venues such as the court and wealthy patrons to the public concert hall, an historical trend throughout Europe. "Leipzig After Bach portrays a stolid, middle-class German city, comfortable in its relatively conservative religiosity and intellectualism, which moves gradually through the cultural issues posed by the Enlightenment into a world easily recognizable to those of us who attend both church and musical entertainments," says Valerie Walden in her review of Sposato's book.7 The topics include "how Leipzig’s 18th-century theologians zealously guarded Luther’s teachings, the connections between politics and music performance, and why Lutheranism and Catholicism remained so closely integrated, the continued reliance on Catholic traditions by Lutherans being anything but rebellious." "The illustrations, musical examples, and tables in Leipzig After Bach are excellent and well integrated with the text," says Walden (Ibid.). In particular are Table 1.2, "Feasts Celebrated in Leipzig's St. Thomas and St. Nicholas Churches" (75f), and Table 2.1 , "Latin Mass Settings" (99f) (see https://www.amazon.com/Leipzig-After-Bach-Church-Concert/dp/0190616954: "Look inside").
Leipzig Milestones, Influences
Particularly relevant is Leipzig's acceptance of the Reformation in 1739, as described in Sposato (Ibid.: 22-26). Sposato is able "to weave a rich narrative history of this period, and to explicate the traditions of the musical culture that connected Bach's legacy to Mendelssohn," says reviewer R. Larry Todd.8 "And another, equally significant contribution is to trace the symbiotic relationship between musical life in the church and concert hall, and to show how Seneca the Younger's maxim chosen by Hiller for the Gewandhaus Concerts in 1781 - 'res severa est gaudium verum' ('a serious matter is a true joy,' Epistulae morales ad Lucilium, 23) - continued to inform Leipzig musical life down through the generations and, indeed, to serve as a 'model for classical concerts as we experience them today'," he says (278). Two important Sposato findings are the interaction of Leipzig town and gown, "that influenced each other to the extent that concert programs and church services often resembled each other in form and in content," says reviewer Jason B. Grant.9 The other is that these two civic forces, instead of the impetus traditional courts and opera houses elsewhere in 18th century Germany, united with public subscription concerts growing out of the development of university student Collegia music ensembles and visiting troupes during the winter, spring, and fall trade fairs.
Two important contextual influences during Bach's time are still being explored: the decline of the German church cantata annual cycle (Wikipedia), replaced in Leipzig with Latin church music such as the Te Deum and the Missa: Kyrie-Gloria, and the influence of progressive galant-style music, as Sposato relates, which impacted on Bach. Georg Philipp Telemann had lead the way in the development of the church cantata, creating a cottage industry of 26 annual cycles, including three of extended cantatas (oratorios) from 1700 to 1750) for various municipalities and courts, copying music and publishing text booklets. In Hamburg, "Only after 1750, as he approached seventy, did Telemann start limiting his production of new church cantatas," says Steven Zohn in his new Telemann composer compendium research guide.10 Instead, about 1755, "he began composing a series of sacred vocal works for the concert hall, starting with Der Tod Jesu, he says (Ibid.: 33), the most popular poetic Passion to a text of Carl Wilhelm Ramler, replacing settings of the Brockes Passion (https://www.bach-cantatas.com/Other/Brockes-Passion-List.htm).
Composers Telemann, Stölzel Influences
Telemann as Hamburg director of music for the five principal churches and cantor of the Johanneum school (1721-67), with public concerts of occasional music of celebration and sorrow (https://www.bach-cantatas.com/Lib/Telemann-Georg-Philipp.htm), also had similar responsibilities to Bach in Leipzig, setting the compositional standards with modifications from Bach. The Leipzig music director and cantor was content to compose three annual cycles of church cantatas and began presenting selective cantatas of Telemann in early Trinity Time of mid-1725 (https://www.bach-cantatas.com/LCY/1725.htm) when Bach took a half-year's break composing weekly service cantatas. In 1726 during composition of his third cycle, Bach substituted 18 cantatas of Johann Ludwig Bach (JLB 1-18) during Epiphany/pre-Lenten, Easter, and the first half of Trinity season (https://www.bach-cantatas.com/LCY/1726.htm). After 1729, Bach increasingly curtailed weekly cantata performances, presenting reperformances primarily during Easter season of 1731 and 1735, and possibly his chorale cantata cycle for the 1732-33 season while also selectively presenting cantatas for feast days. It appears that "Bach's musical-liturgical seasons of 1534/35 [sic] and 1735/36 were dominated by two different cantata cycles based on texts by Benjamin Schmolck and set by Gottfried Heinrich Stölzel," says Sposato (Ibid.: 93f). The first of his some 12 cycles was the Gotha Capellmeister's two-part "Saitenspiel" (String-Music) cycle of 1720, and the latter being the "Namenbuch" (Namebook) double cantata cycle of 1731-32 (see "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gottfried_Heinrich_Stölzel: "Cantatas"). The exact Leipzig dates of performances have not been determined, except for the two extant text booklets for the 13th to the 19th Sunday after Trinity 1735 in the String-Music cycle while no date has been determined for the Namebook cycle in Leipzig, says HanJoachim-Schulze.11 The works are more concise with Pietist-like sentiments, new texts set to well-known chorale melodies, suggesting "that a significant change in repertoire was already underway in Bach's second decade as Thomaskantor, Sposato says (Ibid.: 94). Thus, "part of that change included an increase in the performance of concerted mass settings," says Sposato (Ibid.), a genre also found extensively with Stölzel (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gottfried_Heinrich_Stölzel: "Kyrie–Gloria masses"), in place of musical sermon cantatas. As Schulze had written earlier: "Which long-term changes took place in Bach’s performance repertoire, we are now only beginning to understand. Whether Bach himself composed a complete 4th or even 5th yearly cantata cycle must therefore come into question even more now. By performing works by other composers, Bach could at least be temporarily relieved from some of his duties as composer and performer of church music so that he could pursue other musical interests and attempt to obtain invitations for private trips, organ examinations or performances outside of Leipzig. It is possible that he changed his mind regarding the nature of his duties in Leipzig and redefined them entirely so that his church music duties were no longer among his primary objectives.
Bach Poetic Passions
"Meanwhile, Bach after 1729 had turned to composing extended works for the Christological cycle of feast days and on Good Friday 1734 presented a poetic Passion oratorio of Stölzel, "Ein Lämmlein geht und trägt die Schuld" (A Lamb goes uncomplaining forth, Wikipedia, YouTube). Tatjana Schabalina's 2007 discovery of the text book showed that a poetic Passion oratorio had been performed in Leipzig instead of just gospel narrative oratorio Passions.12 This gives credence to the Leipzig tradition of progressive contemplative Passion performances, beginning in 1717 at the New Church with Telemann's Brockes Passion, followed by possible performances in the 1720s and 1739, as well as Telemann's Seliges Erwagen in the late 1720s, shows Andreas Glöckner.13 In the 1740s, in addition to presenting his own narrative Passions, Bach produced two pasticcio Passions: a 1743-48 hybrid after C.H. Graun's Passion cantata, "Ein Lämmlein geht und trägt die Schuld," entitled "Wer ist der, so von Edom kömmt" (http://www.bach-cantatas.com/Vocal/BWV1088.htm, with additional music of Telemann, Kuhnau, J. C. Altnikol, and Bach (http://www.bach-cantatas.com/Vocal/BWV1088-Gen.htm), and the 1747-48 pasticcio of the Keiser-Bruhns St. Mark Passion with seven arias from Handel's Brockes Passion, HWV 48 (Wikipedia: "Leipzig 1747–1748 (BNB I/K/2", Carus-Verlag. In conjunction with these two pasticcio Passions, Bach is thought to have presented performances of the original C. H. Graun Passion cantata, after 1730, and the Handel Brockes Passion in 1746, finds Hans-Joachim Schulze. The documents on the Thomaskantorat after 1750 show that there were no significant structural changes there until the turn of the century. In this respect, they are mainly relevant for Bach's term in office (1723-1750).
Missa: Kyrie-Gloria, Collegia musica Influences
The Missa: Kyrie-Gloria, begun as a Catholic musical form of in lieu of a complete Mass Ordinary, became in Lutheran Germany in the second half of the 17th century the Kurzmessen (short masses) which flourished in the first half of the 18th century "as a Catholic/Lutheran crossover," says Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missa_brevis). In Bach's time as a Missa brevis, it was composed by Buxtehude, Theil, Kuhnau, and Zachow and later by Telemann and Stölzel as well as the Dresden Court composers Zalenka, Caldara and Harrer, Bach's successor in Leipzig. While Bach was completing his Mass in B-Minor in 1749, the Dresden Court Prime Minister, Count Heinrich von Brühl, championed his Kapellmeister Harrer for the Leipzig Cantor's post and he auditioned on 8 June at the Three Swans Inn to become the frontrunner. Parallel with the flourishing of the Lutheran Mass was the growth of the two Leipzig Collegia musica ensembles, established by university students Telemann in 1701 and Johann Friedrich Fasch in 1708, with weekly performances (Ordinaire Concerte) at Zimmermann's and Richter's coffeehouses. Bach in 1723 "worked quickly to establish a strong relationship with [Georg Balthazar] Schott and his ensemble," and succeeded him in 1729 when he moved to Gotha, directing the "Bachische" Collegium "until as late as 1746," says Sposato (Ibid.: 84f). In 1743 a group of Leipzig city leaders established the Großen Concert new concert society, modeled after the Collegia musica, and Bach student Doles (1715-97) became its first music director. Because of Leipzig's church musical dominance, the performances were called Concerts Spirituels and the Three Swans Inn was the permanent home since its second season. Progressive Italianate music came to dominate Leipzig public musical life, including annual Lenten poetic Passions of Johann Adolf Hasse and Johann Adolf Scheibe on Monday of Holy Week, says Sposato (Ibid.: 88f), while even Brockes Passions were performed in churches on Palm Sunday and Good Friday. Cantor Harrer's new era of Leipzig church music (until 1755) brought an infusion of Latin church music in "an almost weekly occurrence for which he assembled a cycle of masses equivalent to the Bach cantata cycles," says Sposato (Ibid.: 110). This mass repertoire includes the Palestrina 'Missa sine nomine" (which Bach had performed) and others of Palestrina, as well as five Telemann chorale masses and the Dresden music of Harrer, Fux, Bononcini and Ristori. Besides Latin masses and annual Passions, the annual town council installation cantatas were continued but supplemented with Psalm settings and concerted Te Deum settings, he says (Ibid.: 113). "Doles tenure remains the longest in the history of the cantorate, and, more important, spanned a period of significant political and liturgical change," he says (Ibid.: 115). Bachian Postscript
Had Bach survived his eye surgery, he may have continued providing annual presentations of the Passions at Good Friday vespers and Town Council installation cantatas in late August. He could have taken advantaged of the Großen Concert public concerts established in 1743, successor to his Leipzig Collegium musicum and forerunner of the Gewandhaus Orchestra, established in 1781 and lead by Hiller, who was Doles' successor in 1791. Bach also could have participated in performances of his Christological Cycle of Mass movements, feast day oratorios, and chorale cantatas, assisted by prefects at the Thomas School, and the realization of performances in various media of his late polyphonic instrumental collections, possibly assisted by musically-talented sons Emanuel, Friedemann, Johannn Christoph Friedrich, and Johann Christian.
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY
1 Michael Maul, Bach's Famous Choir: The Saint Thomas School in Leipzig, 1212-1804, Eng. trans. Richard Howe (Woodbridge GB: Boydell Press, 2018), Amazon.com, https://boydellandbrewer.com/bach-s-famous-choir.html; updated translation of "Dero berühmbter Chor": die LThomasschule und ihre Kantoren (1212 - 1804) (Leipzig: Lehmstedt Verlag, 2012); see also Maul, Dokumente zur Geschichte des Thomaskantorats, Vol. 1, Von der Reformation bis zum Amtsantritt Johann Sebastian Bachs (Leinfelden-Echterdingen: Carus, 2016), Carus-Verlag; Volume II by Hans-Joachim Schulze, see below. 2 Jeffrey S. Sposato, Leipzig After Bach: Church and Concert Life in a German City (1750-1847) (Oxford University Press, 2018), Amazon.com: "Look inside").
3 Ruth Tatlow, Andreas Werckmeister’s Musicalische Paradoxal-Discourse AND Bach’s Famous Choir: the Saint Thomas School in Leipzig 1212–1804, in Svensk tidskrift för musikforskning, Swedish Journal of Music Research (2019), http://musikforskning.se/stm-sjm/node/257. 4 Raymond Erickson, Book Review: "Bach’s Famous Choir," in Early Music America (May 20, 2019), https://www.earlymusicamerica.org/web-articles/book-review-bachs-famous-choir/.
5 See Marcus Rathey, "The Chorale Cantata in Leipzig: The Collaboration between Schelle and Carpzov in 1689-1690 and Bach's Chorale Cantata Cycle," in BACH, Journal of the Riemenschneider Bach Institute (Berea OH, Vol. 43, No. 2, 2012: 46-92), Jstor). 6 Carol K. Baron, Introduction to Kuhnau, "A Treatise on Liturgical Text Settings (1710)," in Bach's Changing World: Voices in the Community, ed. Carol K. Baron (University of Rochester (NY) Press, 2006: 221), Google Books. 7 Valerie Walden review, "How Leipzig Fared Post-Bach," in Early Music America (August 2018), https://www.earlymusicamerica.org/web-articles/how-leipzig-fared-post-bach/.
8 R. Larry Todd review, "Jeffrey S. Sposato. Leipzig after Bach," in BACH, Journal of the Riemenschneider Bach Institute (Berea OH, Vol. 50, No. 2, 2019: 308-313), UNM University Libraries. 9 Jason B. Grant, "A Review of Jeffrey S. Sposato’s Leipzig After Bach," in BACH Notes, newsletter of the American Bach Society, No. 29, Fall 2018: 5), American Bach Society: Bach Notes 29.
10 Steven Zohn, The Telemann Compendium, Boydell Composer Compendium Series (Woodridge GB, Boydell Press, 2020), 13), Amazon.com.
11 Hans-Joachim Schulze, "Ein weiterer Kantatenjahrgang Gottfried Heinrich Stölzels in Bachs Aufführungsrepertoire? (Is there another cantata cycle by Gottfried Heinrich Stölzel that belonged to Bach’s performance repertoire?), Eng. trans. Thomas Braatz, in Bach Jahrbuch 95 (2009: 95-116), http://www.bach-cantatas.com/Articles/Stolzel-Bach-Glockner-Eng.pdf.
12 Tatjana Schabalina, "Texte zur Music" in Sankt Petersburg. Neue Quellen zur Leipziger Musikgeschichte sowie zur Kompositions- und Aufführungstätigkeit Johann Sebastian Bachs," in Bach Jahrbuch 94 (2008), https://journals.qucosa.de/bjb/article/view/2227/2153: "Discussions in the Week of March 31, 2013"). 13 See Andreas Glöckner, "Johann Sebastian Bachs Aufführungen zeitgenössischer Passionsmusiken," in Bach Jahrbuch 63 (1977: 75-119), English summary, "Bach and the Passion music of his contemporaries," in Musical Times 116 (1975: 613-16); also "Neuerkenntnisse zu Johann Sebastian Bachs Aufführungskalender zwischen 1729 und 1735," in Bach Jahrbuch 67 (1981: 43-75).
14 Hans-Joachim Schulze, Dokumente zur Geschichte des Thomaskantorats, Vol. II, Vom Amtsantritt Johann Sebastian Bachs bis zum Beginn des 19. Jahrhunderts (Edition Bach- Archiv Leipzig: Evangelische Verlagsanstalt, 2018), Google Translate, |
