Contemporary Views of Bach

Contemporary Views of Bach

Toward the later part of J.S. Bach's life, he worked at St. Thomas' Church in Leipzig. He continued playing as its organist and composing in his polyphonic style of music. However, a new French style galant was emerging. It viewed music in a totally different way than Bach.

Bach was considered the preserver of the old to his contemporaries. And as he aged, his music became more abstract from the contemporary French style galant invading Leipzig. Consequently, according to Gerhard Herz in his book Essays on J.S. Bach, he never became fashionable and his musical style became isolated. Bach's contemporaries distinguished him as an "uneducated and outdated master" (Herz 10). They blamed him for having "stood on the shoulder of the past generations instead of participating in building the present and future of music" (Herz 10).

Max Graf, author of Composer and Critic described Bach's situation as a "lonely island on which Bach had been writing his scores was surrounded by the inexorably rising waters of new music" (Graf 75). For example, Bach's Art of Fugue written during the musical style galant was "dismissed as an anachronism by the progressive majority of his time" (Herz 150). During his time, as Max Graf explains, Leipzig was very receptive to new ideas and "Bach must have felt himself a stranger there, for on every side he met with uncongenial modern ideas" (Graf 73). The new French music entering Leipzig was very different from Bach's "great polyphonic compositions of the past (Graf 74). Thus, Sebastian, a more prolific composer than his son was considered the "old Bach" after his death and Philipp Emanuel was called the "great Bach" (Herz 150).

Much of Bach's life was teaching. Even with his exceptional musical talent he needed a job and taught at a few different places. Therefore, much of the information that I have been gathering has been reported from his contemporary students. They were all quality musicians and not all of them only praised Bach for his wonderful talent and skill. For example, after Bach's death, Johann Friedrich Reichardt criticized Bach's vocal works saying that they "betray too great a lack of genuine good taste, of knowledge of language and poetry, and thus have entirely the conventional form of their period, so that they can hardly maintain their currency" (Wolff 353). In that, Reichardt was talking about how Bach's works became too old-fashioned to deserve to maintain prevalence in the classical period. He shared the similar view of Gottsched and Scheibe, a well known critic of Bach.

The issue of Bach being unfit for the classical period was also brought up by his sons. For example, Johann Christian may have referred to his father as "the old wig" (Schonberg 50). Schonberg also states in his The Lives of Great Composers, that Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach "seems to have been a little embarrassed by the old-fashioned quality of Bach's music." (Schonberg 51) Because of this, C.P.E. Bach had disposed of the plates of his father's The Art of Fugue. Nevertheless, Sebastian's sons respected him and C.P.E. mainly along with his three brothers "spread his name and fame." (Schonberg 51)

Scheibe was a contemporary and famous critic of the music of Sebastian Bach. According to Herz, he was one of the most eminent German music critics during new Age of Rationalism. Gerber, a composer and pupil highly respectful of Bach, agreed that "there is no doubt that Scheibe belongs among the principal theorists and music estheticians" (Herz 11). Scheibe was highly influenced by his instructor Gottsched and measured Bach "according to his master's standards which were in the scales of contemporary French rationalism." Gottsched believed that naturalness should "be raised to the throne it deserves" (Graf 78).

Bach's contemporaries admired the artistic components of his creations but Gottsched, on the other hand, criticized Bach for "darkening beauty with overelaborate art" (Graf 80). Scheibe, Gottsched's devoted pupil, claimed similarly that Bach "transcended Nature by using too much Art" (Herz 13). He found Bach's music "too heavy, too full of religious mysticism and polyphonic thoughtfulness, too massive in construction, and too passionate" (Graf 76). This became a widely agreed thought of Bach and in his age, this "compact, massive, polyphonic style of Bach's received more disapproval than praise" (Herz 11). He was said to have employed too many means to achieve his musical goal.

According to Scheibe's standards Bach's music was artful, but not rational. Scheibe's warrant was that "musical composition must please the reason" and that "musicians must be equipped with reasoning power" (Graf 78). He was a firm believer in programmatic music and expression of meaning that Bach did not fit. Scheibe, like his teacher Gottsched, also insisted that "sounds must fit words" (Graf 78). Bach's music did not do this for him. Although Bach may have "aroused admiration" for his craftsmanship, "by no means will he touch his listeners and make an impression that will move them" (Herz 12).

Bach was so technically oriented that Scheibe declared that "Bach judged according to his own fingers, thinking and composing with the keyboard instrument in mind" (Herz 12). Thus, Bach's works, "extremely difficult to execute, lose their naturalness" (Herz 12).

All in all, Bach failed according to Scheibe because Scheibe believed that "music demands the approval of the ear as well as that of intellect (Herz 12). Although Bach was extremely keen musically, Bach failed because of his "preference for polyphony and the wealth of dissonance in his compositions" as well as "his melodies that were embellished by far too many ornaments" (Herz 12). Scheibe concluded that this made for a "turgid and confused style and to an obscuring of the text causing the listener literally to lose his mind" (Herz 13). However, the reason for Bach's methods must be understood at a deeper level. Partly because of his education, Bach belonged to the baroque period that caused his style to be alienated. "The cultural soil in which Bach was rooted was fundamentally different from that of his contemporaries" (Herz 7).

Bach was a master of harmony. He explored harmony beyond the then known limits. Bach created harmonies and was constantly "industriously investigating the harmonic potential of music."