The name of Bach is the greatest in Protestant church music,—there are many who do not hesitate to say that it is the greatest in all the history of music, religious and secular. The activity of this man was many-sided, and his invention seems truly inexhaustible. He touched every style of music known to his day except the opera, and most of the forms that he handled he raised to the highest power that they have ever attained. Many of his most admirable qualities appear in his secular works, but these we must pass over. In viewing him exclusively as a composer for the Church, however, we shall see by far the most considerable part of him, for his secular compositions, remarkable as they are, always appear rather as digressions from the main business of his life. His conscious life-long purpose was to enrich the musical treasury of the Church he loved, to strengthen and signalize every feature of her worship which his genius could reach: and to this lofty aim he devoted an intellectual force and an energy of loyal enthusiasm unsurpassed in the annals of art.
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Johann Sebastian Bach is one of the monumental figures in the religious history of Germany, undoubtedly the most considerable in the two centuries following the death of Luther. Like Luther, of whom in some respects he reminds us, he was a man rooted fast in German soil, sprung from sturdy peasant stock, endowed with the sterling piety and steadfastness of moral purpose which had long been traditional in the Teutonic character. His culture was at its basis purely German. He never went abroad to seek the elegancies which his nation lacked. He did not despise them, but he let them come to him to be absorbed into the massive substance of his national education, in order that this education might become in the deepest sense liberal and human. He interpreted what was permanent and hereditary in German culture, not what was ephemeral and exotic. He ignored the opera, although it was the reigning form in every country in Europe. He planted himself squarely on German church music, particularly the essentially German art of organ playing, and on that foundation, supplemented with what was best of Italian and French device, he built up a massive edifice which bears in plan, outline, and every decorative detail the stamp of a German craftsman.

The most musical family known to history was that of the Bachs. In six generations (Sebastian belonging to the fifth) we find marked musical ability, which in a number of instances before Sebastian appeared amounted almost to genius. As many as thirty-seven of the name are known to have held important musical positions. A large number during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries [285] were members of the town bands and choruses, which sustained almost the entire musical culture among the common people of Germany during that period. These organizations, combining the public practice of religious and secular music, were effective in nourishing both the artistic and the religious spirit of the time. In Germany in the seventeenth century there was as yet no opera and concert system to concentrate musical activity in the theatre and public hall. The Church was the nursery of musical culture, and this culture was in no sense artificial or borrowed,—it was based on types long known and beloved by the common people as their peculiar national inheritance, and associated with much that was stirring and honorable in their history.

Thuringia was one of the most musical districts in Germany in the seventeenth century, and was also a stronghold of the reformed religion. From this and its neighboring districts the Bachs never wandered. Eminent as they were in music, hardly one of them ever visited Italy or received instruction from a foreign master. They kept aloof from the courts, the hot-beds of foreign musical growths, and submitted themselves to the service of the Protestant Church. They were peasants and small farmers, well to do and everywhere respected. Their stern self-mastery held them uncontaminated by the wide-spread demoralization that followed the Thirty Years’ War. They appear as admirable types of that undemonstrative, patient, downright, and tenacious quality which has always saved Germany from social decline or disintegration in critical periods.
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Into such a legacy of intelligence, thrift, and probity came Johann Sebastian Bach. All the most admirable traits of his ancestry shine out again in him, reinforced by a creative gift which seems the accumulation of all the several talents of his house. He was born at Eisenach, March 21, 1685. His training as a boy was mainly received in choir schools at Ohrdruf and Lüneburg, attaining mastership as organist and contrapuntist at the age of eighteen. He held official positions at Arnstadt, Mühlhausen, Weimar, and Anhalt-C?then, and was finally called to Leipsic as cantor of the Thomas school and director of music at the Thomas and Nicolai churches, where he labored from 1723 until his death in 1750. His life story presents no incidents of romantic interest. But little is known of his temperament or habits. In every place in which he labored his circumstances were much the same. He was a church organist and choir director from the beginning to the end of his career. He became the greatest organist of his time and the most accomplished master of musical science. His declared aim in life was to reform and perfect German church music. The means to achieve this were always afforded him, so far as the scanty musical facilities of the churches of that period would permit. His church compositions were a part of his official routine duties. His recognized abilities always procured him positions remunerative enough to protect him from anxiety. He was never subject to interruptions or serious discouragements. From first to last the path in life which he was especially qualified to pursue was clearly marked out before him. His genius, his immense physical and mental energy, and his high sense of duty to God and his employers did the rest. Nowhere is there the record of a life more simple, straightforward, symmetrical, and complete.
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In spite of the intellectual and spiritual apathy prevailing in many sections of Germany, conditions were not altogether unfavorable for the special task which Bach assigned to himself. His desire to build up church music did not involve an effort to restore to congregational singing its pristine zeal, or to revive an antiquarian taste for the historic choir anthem. Bach was a man of the new time; he threw himself into the current of musical progress, seized upon the forms which were still in process of development, giving them technical completeness and bringing to light latent possibilities which lesser men had been unable to discern.

The material for his purpose was already within his reach. The religious folk-song, freighted with a precious store of memories, was still an essential factor in public and private worship. The art of organ playing had developed a vigorous and pregnant national style in the choral prelude, the fugue, and a host of freer forms. The Passion music and the cantata had recently shown signs of brilliant promise. The Italian solo song was rejoicing in its first flush of conquest on German soil. No one, however, could foresee what might be done with these materials until Bach arose. He gathered them all in his hand, remoulded, blended, enlarged them, touched them with the fire of his genius and his religious passion, and thus produced works of [288] art which, intended for German evangelicalism, are now being adopted by the world as the most comprehensive symbols in music of the essential Christian faith.[73]

Bach was one of those supreme artists who concentrate in themselves the spirit and the experiments of an epoch. In order, therefore, to know how the persistent religious consciousness of Germany strove to attain self-recognition through those art agencies which finally became fully operative in the eighteenth century, we need only study the works of this great representative musician, passing by the productions of the organists and cantors who shared, although in feebler measure, his illumination. For Bach was no isolated phenomenon of his time. He created no new styles; he gave art no new direction. He was one out of many poorly paid and overworked church musicians, performing the duties that were traditionally attached to his office, improvising fugues and preludes, and accompanying choir and congregation at certain moments in the service, composing motets, cantatas, and occasionally a larger work for the regular order of the day, providing special music for a church festival, a public funeral, the inauguration of a town council, or the installation of a pastor. What distinguished Bach was simply the superiority of his work on these time-honored lines, the amazing variety of sentiment which he extracted from these conventional forms, the scientific learning which [289] puts him among the greatest technicians in the whole range of art, the prodigality of ideas, depth of feeling, and a sort of introspective mystical quality which he was able to impart to the involved and severe diction of his age.

Bach’s devotion to the Lutheran Church was almost as absorbed as Palestrina’s to the Catholic. His was a sort of cloistered seclusion. Like every one who has made his mark upon church music he reverenced the Church as a historic institution. Her government, ceremonial, and traditions impressed his imagination, and kindled a blind, instinctive loyalty. He felt that he attained to his true self only under her admonitions. Her service was to him perfect freedom. His opportunity to contribute to the glory of the Church was one that dwarfed every other privilege, and his official duty, his personal pleasure, and his highest ambition ran like a single current, fed by many streams, in one and the same channel. To measure the full strength of the mighty tide of feeling which runs through Bach’s church music we must recognize this element of conviction, of moral necessity. Given Bach’s inherited character, his education and his environment, add the personal factor—imagination and reverence—and you have Bach’s music, spontaneous yet inevitable, like a product of nature. Only out of such single-minded devotion to the interests of the Church, both as a spiritual nursery and as a venerated institution, has great church art ever sprung or can it spring.
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Bach’s productions for the Church are divided into two general classes, viz., organ music and vocal music. The organ music is better known to the world at large, and on account of its greater availability may outlive the vocal works in actual practice. For many reasons more or less obvious Bach’s organ works are constantly heard in connection with public worship, both Catholic and Protestant, in Europe and America, and their use is steadily increasing; while the choral compositions have almost entirely fallen out of the stated religious ceremony, even in Germany, and have been relegated to the concert hall. In course of time the organ solo had grown into a constituent feature of the public act of worship in the German Protestant Church. In the Catholic Church solo organ playing is less intrinsic; in fact it has no real historic or liturgic authorization and gives the impression rather of an embellishment, like elaborately carved choir-screens and rose windows, very ornamental and impressive, but not indispensable. But in the German system organ playing had become established by a sort of logic, first as an accompaniment to the people’s hymn—a function it assumed about 1600—and afterwards in the practice of extemporization upon choral themes. Out of this latter custom a style of organ composition grew up in the seventeenth century which, through association and a more or less definite correspondence with the spirit and order of the prescribed service, came to be looked upon as distinctively a church style. This German organ music was strictly church music according to the only adequate definition of church music that has ever been given, for it had grown up within the Church itself, and through its very liturgic connections had come to make its appeal to the worshipers, [291] not as an artistic decoration, but as an agency directly adapted to aid in promoting those ends which the church ceremony had in view. Furthermore, the dignity and severe intellectuality of this German organ style, combined with its majesty of sound and strength of movement, seemed to add distinctly to the biblical flavor of the liturgy, the uncompromising dogmatism of the authoritative teaching, and the intense moral earnestness which prevailed in the Church of Luther in its best estate. It was a form of art which was native to the organ, implied in the very tone and mechanism of the instrument; it was absolutely untouched by the lighter tendencies already active in secular music. The notion of making the organ play pretty tunes and tickle the ear with the imitative sound of fancy stops never entered the heads of the German church musicians. The gravity and disciplined intelligence proper to the exercise of an ecclesiastical office must pervade every contribution of the organist. This conception was equally a matter of course to the mass of the people, and so the taste of the congregation and the conviction of the clerical authorities supported the organists in their adherence to the traditions of their strict and complex art. This lordly style was no less worthy of reverence in the eyes of all concerned because it was to all intents a German art, virtually unknown in other countries, except partially in the sister land of Holland, and therefore hedged about with the sanctions of patriotism as well as the universally admitted canons of religious musical expression.
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This form of music was evolved originally under the suggestion of the mediaeval vocal polyphony,—counterpoint redistributed and systematized in accordance with the modern development of rhythm, tonality, and sectional structure. Its birthplace was Italy; the canzona of Frescobaldi and his compeers was the parent of the fugue. The task of developing this Italian germ was given to the Dutch and Germans. The instrumental instinct and constructive genius of such men as Swelinck, Scheidt, Buxtehude, Froberger, and Pachelbel carried the movement so far as to reveal its full possibilities, and Bach brought these possibilities to complete realization.

As an organ player and composer it would seem that Bach stands at the summit of human achievement. His whole art as a player is to be found in his fugues, preludes, fantasies, toccatas, sonatas, and choral variations. In his fugues he shows perhaps most convincingly that supreme mastery of design and splendor of invention and fancy which have given him the place he holds by universal consent among the greatest artists of all time. In these compositions there is a variety and individuality which, without such examples, one could hardly suppose that this arbitrary form of construction would admit. With Bach the fugue is no dry intellectual exercise. So far as the absolutism of its laws permits, Bach’s imagination moved as freely in the fugue as Beethoven’s in the sonata or Schubert’s in the lied. Its peculiar idiom was as native to him as his rugged Teuton speech. A German student’s musical education in that day began with counterpoint, as at the present time it begins with figured bass harmony; the ability to write every species of polyphony with ease [293] was a matter of course with every musical apprentice. But with Bach, the master, the fugue was not merely the sign of technical facility; it was a means of expression, a supreme manifestation of style. By the telling force of his subjects, the amazing dexterity and rich fancy displayed in their treatment, the ability to cover the widest range of emotional suggestion, his fugues appeal to a far deeper sense than wonder at technical cleverness. Considering that it lies in the very essence of the contrapuntal style that it should be governed by certain very rigid laws of design and procedure, we may apply to Bach’s organ works in general a term that has been given to architecture, and say that they are “construction beautified.” By this is meant that every feature, however beautiful in itself, finds its final charm and justification only as a necessary component in the comprehensive plan. Each detail helps to push onward the systematic unfolding of the design, it falls into its place by virtue of the laws of fitness and proportion; logical and organic, but at the same time decorative and satisfactory to the aesthetic sense. There is indeed something almost architectonic in these masterpieces of the great Sebastian. In their superb rolling harmonies, their dense involutions, their subtle and inevitable unfoldings, their long-drawn cadences, and their thrilling climaxes, they seem to possess a fit relation to the vaulted, reverberating ceilings, the massive pillars, and the half-lighted recesses of the sombre old buildings in which they had their birth. In both the architecture and the music we seem to apprehend a religious earnestness which drew its nourishment from the most hidden depths of the soul, and which, even in its moments of exultation, would not appear to disregard those stern convictions in which it believed that it found the essentials of its faith.
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A form of instrumental music existed in the German Protestant Church which was peculiar to that institution, and which was exceedingly significant as forming a connecting link between organ solo playing and the congregational worship. We have seen that the choral, at the very establishment of the new order by Luther, became a characteristic feature of the office of devotion, entering into the very framework of the liturgy by virtue of the official appointment of particular hymns (Hauptlieder) on certain days. As soon as the art of organ playing set out upon its independent career early in the seventeenth century, the organists began to take up the choral melodies as subjects for extempore performance. These tunes were especially adapted to this purpose by reason of their stately movement and breadth of style, which gave opportunity for the display of that mastery of florid harmonization in which the essence of the organist’s art consisted. The organist never played the printed compositions of others, or even his own, for voluntaries. He would no more think of doing so than a clergyman would preach another man’s sermon, or even read one of his own from manuscript. To this day German unwritten law is rigorous on both these matters. The organist’s method was always to improvise in the strict style upon themes invented by himself or borrowed from other sources. Nothing was more natural than that he should use the choral tunes as his [295] quarry, not only on account of their technical suitableness, but still more from the interest that would be aroused in the congregation, and the unity that would be established between the office of the organist and that of the people. The chorals that were appointed for the day would commonly furnish the player with his raw material, and the song of the people would appear again soaring above their heads, adorned by effective tonal combinations. This method could also be employed to a more moderate extent in accompanying the congregation as they sang the hymn in unison; interludes between the stanzas and even flourishes at the ends of the lines would give scope to the organist to exhibit his knowledge and fancy. The long-winded interlude at last became an abuse, and was reduced or suppressed; but the free organ prelude on the entire choral melody grew in favor, and before Bach’s day ability in this line was the chief test of a player’s competence. In Bach’s early days choral preludes by famous masters had found their way into print in large numbers, and were the objects of his assiduous study. His own productions in this class surpassed all his models, and as a free improviser on choral themes he excelled all his contemporaries. “I had supposed,” said the famous Reinken, who at the age of ninety-seven heard Bach extemporize on “An Wasserflüssen Babylon” at Hamburg,—“I had supposed that this art was dead, but I see that it still lives in you.” In this species of playing, the hymn melody is given out with one hand or upon the pedals, while around it is woven a network of freely moving parts. The prelude may be brief, [296] included within the space limits of the original melody, or it may be indefinitely extended by increasing the length of the choral notes and working out interludes between the lines. The one hundred and thirty choral preludes which have come down to us from Bach’s pen are samples of the kind of thing that he was extemporizing Sunday after Sunday. In these pieces the accompaniment is sometimes fashioned on the basis of a definite melodic figure which is carried, with modulations and subtle modifications, all through the stanza, sometimes on figures whose pattern changes with every line; while beneath or within the sounding arabesques are heard the long sonorous notes of the choral, holding the hearer firmly to the ground idea which the player’s art is striving to impress and beautify. This form of music is something very different from the “theme and variations,” which has played so conspicuous a part in the modern instrumental school from Haydn down to the present. In the choral prelude there is no modification of the theme itself; the subject in single notes forms a cantus firmus, on the same principle that appears in the mediaeval vocal polyphony, around which the freely invented parts, moving laterally, are entwined. Although these compositions vary greatly in length, a single presentation of the decorated choral tune suffices with Bach except in rare instances, such as the prelude on “O Lamm Gottes unschuldig,” in which the melody is given out three times, with a different scheme of ornament at each repetition.
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That Bach always restricts his choral elaboration to the end of illustrating the sentiment of the words with which the theme is illustrated would be saying too much. Certainly he often does so, as in such beautiful examples as “O Mensch, bewein’ dein’ Sünde gross,” “Schmücke dich, meine liebe Seele,” and that touching setting of “Wenn wir in h?chsten N?then sein” which Bach dictated upon his deathbed. But the purpose of the choral prelude in the church worship was not necessarily to reflect and emphasize the thought of the hymn. This usage having become conventional, and the organist being allowed much latitude in his treatment, his pride in his science would lead him to dilate and elaborate according to a musical rather than a poetic impulse, thinking less of appropriateness to a precise mood (an idea which, indeed, had hardly became lodged in instrumental music in Bach’s time) than of producing an abstract work of art contrived in accordance with the formal prescriptions of German musical science. The majority of Bach’s works in this form are, it must be said, conventional and scholastic, some even dry and pedantic. Efforts at popularizing them at the present day have but slight success; but in not a few Bach’s craving for expression crops out, and some of his most gracious inspirations are to be found in these incidental and apparently fugitive productions.

In order to win the clue to Bach’s vocal as well as his instrumental style, we must constantly refer back to his works for the organ. As H?ndel’s genius in oratorio was shaped under the influence of the Italian aria, direct or derived, and as certain modern composers, such as Berlioz, seize their first conceptions already clothed in orchestral garb, so Bach seemed to think in [298] terms of the organ. Examine one of his contrapuntal choruses, or even one of his arias with its obligato accompaniment, and you are instantly reminded of the mode of facture of his organ pieces. His education rested upon organ music, and he only yielded to one of the most potent influences of his time when he made the organ the dominant factor in his musical expression. The instrumental genius of Germany had already come to self-consciousness at the end of the seventeenth century, and was as plainly revealing itself in organ music as it did a century later in the sonata and symphony. The virtuoso spirit—the just pride in technical skill—always keeps pace with the development of style; in the nature of things these two are mutually dependent elements in progress. In Bach the love of exercising his skill as an executant was a part of his very birthright as a musician. The organ was to him very much what the pianoforte was to Liszt, and in each the virtuoso instinct was a fire which must burst forth, or it would consume the very soul of its possessor. And so we find among the fugues, fantasies, and toccatas of Bach compositions whose dazzling magnificence is not exceeded by the most sensational effusions of the modern pianoforte and orchestral schools. In all the realm of music there is nothing more superb than those Niagaras of impetuous sound which roll through such works as the F major and D minor toccatas and the G major fantasie,—to select examples out of scores of equally apt illustrations. But sound and fury are by no means their aim; Bach’s invention and science are never more resourceful than when apparently driven by the demon of unrest. In [299] order to give the freest sweep to his fancy Bach, the supreme lord of form, often broke through form’s conventionalisms, so that even his fugues sometimes became, as they have been called, fantasies in the form of fugues, just as Beethoven, under a similar impulse, wrote sonate quasi fantasie. Witness the E minor fugue with the “wedge theme.” In Bach’s day and country there was no concert stage; the instrumental virtuoso was the organist. It is not necessary to suppose, therefore, that pieces so exciting to the nerves as those to which I have alluded were all composed strictly for the ordinary church worship. There were many occasions, such as the “opening” of a new organ or a civic festival, when the organist could “let himself go” without incurring the charge of introducing a profane or alien element. And yet, even as church music, these pieces were not altogether incongruous. We must always keep in mind that the question of appropriateness in church music depends very much upon association and custom. A style that would be execrated as blasphemous in a Calvinist assembly would be received as perfectly becoming in a Catholic or Lutheran ceremony. A style of music that has grown up in the very heart of a certain Church, identified for generations with the peculiar ritual and history of that Church, is proper ecclesiastical music so far as that particular institution is concerned. Those who condemn Bach’s music—organ works, cantatas, and Passions—as unchurchly ignore this vital point. Moreover, the conception of the function of music in the service of the German Evangelical Church was never so austere that brilliancy and grandeur [300] were deemed incompatible with the theory of religious ceremony. It may be said that Bach’s grandest organ pieces are conceived as the expression of what may be called the religious passion—the rapture which may not unworthily come upon the believer when his soul opens to the reception of ideas the most penetrating and sublime.

Certainly no other religious institution has come so near the solution of the problem of the proper use of the instrumental solo in public worship. Through the connection of the organ music with the people’s hymn in the choral prelude, and the conformity of its style to that of the choir music in motet and cantata, it became vitally blended with the whole office of praise and prayer; its effect was to gather up and merge all individual emotions into the projection of the mood of aspiration that was common to all.

The work performed by Bach for the church cantata was somewhat similar in nature to his service to the choral prelude, and was carried out with a far more lavish expenditure of creative power. The cantata, now no longer a constituent of the German Evangelical worship, in the eighteenth century held a place in the ritual analogous to that occupied by the anthem in the morning and evening prayer of the Church of England. It is always of larger scale than the anthem, and its size was one cause of its exclusion in the arbitrary and irregular reductions which the Evangelical liturgies have undergone in the last century and a half. There is nothing in its florid character to justify this procedure, for it may be, and in Bach usually is, more closely related to the [301] ritual framework than the English anthem, in consequence of the manner in which it has been made to absorb strictly liturgic forms into its substance. Bach, in his cantatas, kept the notion of liturgic unity clearly in mind. He effected this unity largely by his use of the choral as a conspicuous element in the cantata, often as its very foundation. He checked the Italianizing process by working the arioso recitative, the aria for one or more voices, and the chorus into one grand musical scheme, in which his intricate organ style served both as fabric and decoration. By the unexampled prominence which he gave the choral as a mine of thematic material, he gave the cantata not only a striking originality, but also an air of unmistakable fitness to the character and special expression of the confession which it served. By these means, which are concerned with its form, and still more by the astonishing variety, truth, and beauty with which he was able to meet the needs of each occasion for which a work of this kind was appointed, he endowed his Church and nation with a treasure of religious song compared with which, for magnitude, diversity, and power, the creative work of any other church musician that may be named—Palestrina, Gabrieli, or whoever he may be—sinks into insignificance.

Bach wrote five series of cantatas for the Sundays and festal days of the church year—in all two hundred and ninety-five. Of these two hundred and sixty-six were written at Leipsic. They vary greatly in length, the shortest occupying twenty minutes or so in performance, the longest an hour or more. Taken together, they [302] afford such an astonishing display of versatility that any proper characterization of them in a single chapter would be quite out of the question. A considerable number are available for study in Peters’s cheap edition, and the majority are analyzed with respect to their salient features in Spitta’s encyclopedic Bach biography. Among the great diversity of interesting qualities which they exhibit, the employment of the choral must be especially emphasized as affording the clue, already indicated, to Bach’s whole conception of the cantata as a species of religious art. The choral, especially that appointed for a particular day (Hauptlied), is often used as the guiding thread which weaves the work into the texture of the whole daily office. In such cases the chosen choral will appear in the different numbers of the work in fragments or motives, sometimes as subject for voice parts, or woven into the accompaniment as theme or in obligato fashion. It is more common for entire lines of the choral to be treated as canti firmi, forming the subjects on which elaborate contrapuntal choruses are constructed, following precisely the same principle of design that I have described in the case of the organ choral preludes. In multitudes of cantata movements lines or verses from two or more chorals are introduced. There are cantatas, such as “Wer nur den lieben Gott,” in which each number, whether recitative, aria, or chorus, takes its thematic material, intact or modified, from a choral. The famous “Ein’ feste Burg,” is a notable example of a cantata in which Bach adheres to a hymn-tune in every n............