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Musical Times, Spring 2000 by Williams, Peter

Some questions about JS Bach and his organ music

BACH-admirers not particularly involved in his organ music might appreciate that the manner in which an understanding of this repertory has grown in the last few decades, and the type of questions it raises, are characteristic of the whole of his music. Arguments about organ registration and `correct' organs are similar in kind to arguments about the `correct' size of the choir for the B minor Mass; questions about origins of any of the big collections of organ music are not so different from questions about the Well-tempered clavier book 2;(1) an exploration of the influences behind his original praeludia and sonatas for organ can easily be paralleled by study of the sonatas and concertos for strings. These activities all depend on what we take to be `evidence', always a tricky question in any historical study but especially so here, since for Bach, evidence is scanty, usually indirect or even contradictory, and in any case only part of the reason why people believe one thing rather than another.

Many feel that they have a special relationship with this composer, understand something about him others might not, feel convinced that in this or that piece he is expressing or symbolising something others have not sensed. So if I look at some of the topics raised by revising my previous books on the organ-music of Bach,2 I do so not in a spirit of narcissism but to raise questions typical of the oeuvre as a whole. In these days of easy research, there is more than ever a need for ideas to be opened up, not closed by some persuasive assertion that such-and-such `must be so', based upon `clear evidence from the sources'. The very notion of historical proof has had its day.

Chorales

Gradually it has become clearer that `chorale prelude' is a misleading term for many, even a majority of Bach's chorale settings for organ, and further, that how or where in the service so much of this music was performed is not as obvious as used to be assumed. No amount of `evidence' from service orders, hymn books, descriptive reports or the terminology itself makes absolutely clear what the organist did, at (say) Weimar in 1715 or Leipzig in 1730. Since the organ chorales differ so much in length and weight, how can they have the same function? Since they were being composed over five decades of a busy life, how could they mean to express much the same thing in much the same way? Of course, similar questions could be asked about the vocal works, from the earliest cantata to the last entry made in the B minor Mass, and one of the regrettable details in today's more popular writing about Bach - CD programme-notes and the like - is a general tendency to talk about this composer as if his life was a short as Schubert's.

In two particular respects typical of the major collections - Well-tempered clavier book 2, Art of fugue, Leipzig Chorales, B minor Mass - is the set of exquisite organ-chorales now always known as the Orgelbuchlein (`Little organ book'). The first is that, like them, it seems not to have had a title, though, unlike them, it did eventually receive one from the composer, added some years after work on it had stopped. The second is that, like them, its function seems less clear than used to be thought. Liturgical? Didactic? Pedagogic? Pious? Private? Public? For the true Lutheran, these are not incompatible, and the titlepage of the Orgelbuchlein implies various things including the last (Public): it speaks of the believer's duty to his fellow-man.

But in recognising that all these major collections of music share a complexity of purpose -- clearly, the Well-tempered clavier is not merely about temperament (if at all), and the Art of fugue not merely a how-to guide in counterpoint - we are no nearer knowing what exactly was the function of the Orgelbuchlein chorales, if anything. Were they preludes to a hymn sung by a congregation, and, if so, commoners in a parish church or gentry in a court chapel? (That must have made a difference.) Were they interludes between verses of the hymn, and, if so, sung by congregation or choir? Or interludes replacing hymn-- verses, like the old alternatim? Or actual organ accompaniments for the sung hymns? I suspect that many more organ chorales were accompaniments for hymn-singing than we now appreciate: hymn books with melody were rare, and somehow the organist had to play and harmonise the tune. Hence those four-part chorales with little organ runs between the lines? But not only they: in many churches, the tradition for an intonation before and solo interludes between the lines of the hymn was so strong that many much longer chorales, particularly those before the sermon or communion, may represent hymns as sung.

Or were the more elevated chorale settings meditations, played anywhere in the service, including beforehand? Or postludes after the final verse? Or after the service? Or were they - additionally or alternatively - works of private devotion, like various other musical genres based on pious texts? The plan of the Orgelbuchlein, moving over the Church Year from Advent I to Hymns for the Dead, was no more obviously a plan for public devotion (liturgy in church) than for private (observance at home). In any case, I doubt if the Lutheran Bach shared our categorical distinction between public and private any more than that he did that between sacred and secular.