The Youthful Johann Sebastian Bach

Johann Sebastian Bach, one of the fathers of modern harmony, was born in 1685 (a few decades after the Pilgrims landed on Plymouth Rock--though I could be wrong about this) and lived to the age of about 65. Though by modern standards, this was a rather brief existence, because of the limited number of distinct portraits of him that are available (actually just one original portrait, of Bach at the age of about 50) we have an image of the composer as a grumpy-looking, serious, dried-up, aged, authoritarian fellow, a father of 20 children (21, if you count P. D. Q. Bach, which you should not, if you know what's good for you) and the teacher of numerous other young men. From his letters, we also get a plaintive whining tone, which has attached itself to the perception of Bach by those who know of him mostly as an important historical musician, rather than a beloved composer of miraculous, inspired pieces.  

In contrast, for those whose perception of Sebastian Bach (the Bach family was enormous, and to them, he was Sebastian, since there were lots of Johanns in the family) is based on his actual music--rather than his reputation or his letters-- the personality that comes through is entirely different. To us (and I count myself among this blessed number) he was a guy who lived for music, who knew he had far better musical instincts than anyone else whom he was acquainted with, just as confident of his abilities as Mozart was to be a few decades later, but who had little leisure in his busy day in which to dwell on his own brilliance. There were a few things that he could thank God for besides his talent: that he had a wonderful and talented wife, who gave their children a measure of her own gifts in addition to those of their father, and the fact that he earned his living essentially in the service of music. (One shudders to think what his life would have been like if he had to paint houses for a living, for example. P.S: Not that housepainting is an unpleasant occupation. Rather that Bach would have had no access to an organ, for instance.) Among other things, this meant that he usually had at his disposal moderately good musical instruments on which to play. That many of Bach's mature musical works are somber and serious cannot be doubted, even if they were imbued with the amazing melodic, harmonic and rhythmic energy that keeps them an important part of the 21st-century repertoire. It is possible to contrast badly-played Bach with more rhythmically interesting Romantic period composers to the detriment of Bach, but this is not to say that rhythmic sophistication was absent in Bach. Quite the contrary. Some critics give Bach credit only for his harmonic skills; this is also a mistake, since Bach's melodic skills are unsurpassed, even in comparison with such fabulous melodists as Chopin, Mendelssohn and Rachmaninov. The reason I was suddenly inspired to actually write about a composer who is easily my favorite today, of all days, is that I was trying to play one of my favorite organ fugues, opus S. 545 in C major. The catalog of Bach’s works is not chronological, but rather based on categories; the entire set of cantatas were catalogued first, and so on. (The organ fugues seem to have been catalogued by key, so that 543 is A minor, I believe, 544 is b minor, and 545 is C major.) I first heard the C major fugue on NPR early on a Sunday morning, and it seemed to me that I had heard it before. To this day I do not know whether I might have heard it as a child, but it seemed somehow interesting. Having listened to it for years, now, I begin to realize that it is a very youthful composition; it is drenched with youthful optimism, romance, happiness, pride, grandeur, a carefree quality that is utterly and captivatingly naïve and infectious. The writing is redolent with parallel sixths, where the parts go together in the same direction, the highest ‘voice’ going in parallel with the ‘tenor’ or the ‘alto’ voice. (If you need an example, the first few notes of (the verse of) “If I fell” by the Beatles is one.)  

This three-minute fugue is widely available in any collection of Bach organ preludes and fugues; in particular the CBS recording by E. Power Biggs is a good one; it has good pace, and the Harvard baroque organ has a nice clear tone. I have uploaded a MIDI-based sound-file made into a video, which will serve as a minimally acceptable substitute for a good performance. In an actual performance, the organist will vary the tone enough, so that it is a little easier on the ear. In this one, the software gives a uniform organ tone, which you have to endure for the sake of finding out what I’m talking about. Above all (in my opinion--I'm not a scholar, and I don't know, off the top of my head, what year this fugue was composed according to the scholars), this fugue shows Bach as a young man. This work could only have been written by someone in his twenties, in my humble opinion; someone whose native optimism has not yet been dented by the vicissitudes of 18th-century life. Listen and see whether you agree!


Archimedes