Page 116 - ESSENTIAL LISTENING TO MUSIC

Figure 6.7
Looking across the parishioners’ pews and toward the high
altar at Saint Thomas’s Church, Leipzig, as it was in the mid- nineteenth century. The pulpit for the sermon is at the right. In Bach’s day, nearly 2,500 people would crowd into the church.
Most important, in this final movement of the can- tata the members of Bach’s congregation joined in the singing of the chorale tune. Martin Luther had ordained that the community should not merely witness but also participate in communal worship. At this moment, all of the spiritual energy of Leipzig was concentrated into this one emphatic declaration of faith. The coming Christ re- veals to all true believers a vision of life in the celestial kingdom.
To get a sense of Bach’s music in his community (Figure 6.7), consider this: Every Sunday Bach’s church would be packed with nearly 2,500 worshipers, about one in every twelve residents of the city. Oddly, the role of music in eighteenth-century Leipzig was little different from the one it plays in the modern-day secular world of the arena rock concert where a crowd gathers and sings along with the band. Music is enjoyed not merely for pleasure and entertainment, but also for social bonding. By singing along we tacitly exclaim: “I share your values, you share mine.”
In his last decades, Bach withdrew from the weekly grind of producing a new cantata for every Sunday and retreated into a realm of large-scale contrapuntal proj- ects, including The Well-Tempered Clavier and the en- cyclopedic The Art of Fugue. Bach left the latter work
incomplete at the time of his death in 1750—the result of a stroke following a botched surgical operation to remove a cataract. Ironically, the same eye sur- geon who operated on Bach also operated on Handel at the end of that com- poser’s life—with the same unsuccessful result.
George Frideric Handel (1685–1759)
Bach and Handel were born in the same year, 1685, in small towns in central Germany. Other than that commonality, and the fact that they shared the same incompetent eye doctor, their careers could not have been more different. While Bach spent his life confined to towns in the region of his birth, the cosmopolitan Handel traveled the world—from Rome, to Venice, to Hamburg, to Amsterdam, to London, to Dublin. Though Bach was most at home playing organ fugues and conducting church cantatas from the choir loft, Handel was a musical entrepreneur working in the theater, by training and temperament a composer of opera. And though Bach retreated into a world of esoteric counterpoint and fell into obscurity at the end of his life, Handel’s stature only grew larger on the international stage. During his lifetime he became the most famous composer in Europe and a treasured national institution in England.
94 chapter six late baroque music: bach and handel
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