J. S. BACH
In all the arts, there are those who work in one medium only, and those who work in several. Of the former, Chopin comes to mind, in music with his exclusive focus on the piano: it would be hard to imagine him composing an opera, even though his temperament was both dramatic and sentimental. Similarly, in painting, Constable spent his working life doing landscapes: he left no self-portrait, let alone any portraits of other people.
By contrast, there are composers and painters like Mozart and Picasso whose enormous output dealt in many genres. The world would be much poorer if Mozart had confined himself to the string quartet, or if Picasso had been nothing but a ceramicist.
The same is true in literature: readers can be grateful that Goethe was a dramatist, lyric poet, and author of scientific studies; but his versatility need not be viewed as of itself superior to the one-track genius of Dostoevsky or Ibsen.
What is obvious, though, is the wider appeal of the diverse artist — not necessarily deeper, but demonstrably wider. Tchaikovsky is variously loved, not always by the same people, for his ballets, operas, symphonies, art-songs, and chamber music, whereas Wilbye has only one public, those who love his madrigals.
The artist whose name has become a byword for diversity is, of course, Leonardo da Vinci. In many fields, he was as good as any of his specialized contemporaries, and better than most. But no one has ever suggested that his stature was such as to dwarf everyone else who was then around. There were great painters active in his time, and great sculptors and architects. He was their peer, but he did not put them in the shade.
That total supremacy has only happened once, in any of the arts: in music. The first half of the eighteenth century was graced by several highly talented composers: George Frederick Handel, Giovanni Battista Pergolesi, Domenico Scarlatti, Georg Philipp Telemann, Antonio Vivaldi. Set beside Johann Sebastian Bach, they are all pygmies. They may not have known this themselves, for during his lifetime he had no international reputation: the cultural meccas were Italy, France, and England; he was just an obscure organist in Thuringia.
Posterity knew better. Mozart revered him, as did Mendelssohn later, and Schumann and Brahms. For as it turned out, not only was this Bach by far the greatest composer of his time, he was also by far the greatest composer of all time. Anyone who might venture to dispute that claim, in favour of someone else, would have to nominate a composer who could surpass Bach in technical virtuosity and in profundity of content — and let us not trivialize the matter by suggesting Gustav Mahler.
As a professional musician, Bach had a clear idea of what he was worth, in terms of pay and working conditions. But there is no reason to suppose he had any notion of himself as some kind of creative giant. All the evidence suggests that his attitude was merely that of a devout Lutheran serving his God as best he could, a modest craftsman of good local repute, hired out to minor princelings and municipal churches in one of Europe’s backwaters.
Fifty years later, a concept of the artist as Romantic Genius began to corrupt Western culture, and the dire effects are still with us. Time was, the artist used to be an artisan plying an honest trade. Nowadays, he is Creating Art; and the capital letters are important to him, if not to the bus-driver who takes him to work.
It is a far cry from what made Bach tick. Simply put, he had work to do and he did it. At the Thomaskirche in Leipzig, where he ended up, his workload was enormous: there was the weekly cantata to compose and conduct; music had to be provided for special occasions, notably the Passion music on Palm Sunday; and the church services regularly required organ music to be composed and played. These tasks could have been carried out, and were carried out elsewhere, by any journeyman composer who was both fluent and industrious. But Bach brought to his duties a unique combination of matchless talent and profound religious commitment. He served his employers conscientiously at all times; but the ground bass of his music-making was devout service to God.
For most composers, that much music would have been enough for a lifetime — over two hundred cantatas have survived, two enormous Passions and the B minor Mass, a wealth of organ pieces, and many occasional scores for various liturgies. Somehow, though, Bach found the time to compose a large body of secular music as well: orchestrally, the Brandenburg concertos, several solo concertos, and suites; for chamber ensemble, the Musical Offering; for keyboard, the forty-eight preludes and fugues in the Well-Tempered Clavier; non-religious vocal works; and in a final summing up, the Art of Fugue.
Taken together, his two bodies of work, the sacred and the secular, add up to an astounding achievement — not just in quantity, but in range and depth. To pay tribute to the whole of it demands the insight and knowledge and empathy of an Albert Schweitzer, whose two-volume biography is a classic of its kind. The three poems here appended make no attempt to honour Bach comprehensively. They simply address three aspects of the man: his devotion to God; his grieving devotion to the soprano Maria Barbara, his first wife, who died young; and his devotion to music.
Words of tribute, however, can only hint at the greatness to be honoured. The truest tribute lies elsewhere, in churches and concert-halls: in good performances of the music itself — always its own proof.
