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Crafts were handed down in family clans, and in music the Bach clan was one
of the most extensive, providing the region of Thuringia in central Germany
with musicians for many generations. Most of the Bachs were lowly town
musicians, or Lutheran church organists; only a few of them gained court
positions. Johann Sebastian, who was himself taught by several of his relatives, trained four sons who became leading composers of the next
generation. Bach's early career was like that of many German musicians at the time Before he was twenty, he took his first position as a church organist in a little town called Arnstadt, then moved to a bigger town called Muelhausen. Then he worked his way up to a court position with the Duke of Weimar. As a church organist, Bach had to compose organ music and sacred choral pieces, and at Weimar he was still required to write church music for the ducal chapel, as well as sonatas and concertos for performance in the palace. The way his Weimar position terminated tells us something about the working conditions of court musicians. When Bach tried to leave Weimar for another court, Coethen, the duke balked and threw him in jail for several weeks. At Coethen, where the prince happened to be a keen amateur musician but was not in favor of elaborate church music, Bach concentrated on instrumental music. In 1723 Bach was appointed Cantor of St. Thomas's Church in Leipzig, an important city in what is now East Germany. He not only had to compose
and perform, but also organize music for all four churches in town. Teaching
in the choir school was another of his responsibilities. Almost every week, in
his first years at Leipzig, Bach composed, had copied, rehearsed, and performed a new cantata - a work for soloists, choir, and orchestra containing
several movements and lasting from fifteen to thirty minutes.
Bach chafed under bureaucratic restrictions and political decisions by
town and church authorities. The truth is he was never appreciated in Leipzig. Furthermore, at the end of his life he was regarded as old-fashioned by
modern musicians, and one critic pained Bach by saying so in print. Indeed,
after his death Bach's music was neglected by the musical public at large.
though it was admired by composers such as Mozart and Beethoven. The"rediscovery" of Bach was hastened by a performance of his Passion "According
to St. Matthew" by the young Felix Mendelssohn in 1829.
Bach had twenty children - seven with his first wife, a cousin, and thirteen
with his second, a singer, for whom he prepared a little home-music
anthology, The Note-Book of Anna Magdalena Bach. The children were
taught music as a matter of course, and also taught how to copy music; the
performance parts of many of the weekly cantatas that Bach composed are
written in their hands. From his musical response to the sacred words of
these cantatas, and other works, it is clear that Bach thought deeply about
religious matters. Works such as his Passions and his Mass in B Minor emanate
a spirituality that many listeners find unmatched in any other composer.
Bach seldom traveled, except to consult on organ construction contracts
(for which the customary fee was often a cord of wood or a barrel of wine).
His last two years were spent in blindness, but he continued to compose by
dictation. Before this time, he had already begun to assemble his compositions
in orderly sets: organ chorale preludes, organ fugues, preludes and
fugues for harpsichord. He also clearly set out to produce works that would
summarize his final thoughts about Baroque forms and genres; such works
are the Mass in B Minor, the thirty-three Goldberg Variations for harpsichord,
and "The Art of Fugue", an exemplary collection of fugues all on the
same subject, left unfinished at his death.
Bach was writing for himself, for his small devoted circle of students,
perhaps for posterity. It is a concept that would have greatly surprised the
craftsmen musicians who were his forebears.
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Georg Friedrich Haendel - he anglicized his name to George Frideric Handel
after settling in England-was one of the few composers of early days who
did not come from a family of musicians. His father, who was sixty-three
when Handel was born, was a barber-surgeon and a valet at a court near
Leipzig. He disapproved of music, and the boy is said to have studied music
secretly at night, by candlelight. In deference to his father's wishes, Handel
studied law for a year at Halle, one of Germany's major universities, before
finally joining the orchestra at Hamburg, Germany's main center of opera.
From then on, it was an exciting, glamorous life. Still in his teens, Handel
fought a duel (about who was to get top billing) with another Hamburg musician.
In 1706 he journeyed to the homeland of opera and scored successes at
Venice, Florence, and Rome. Though he became a court musician for the
Elector of Hanover, in northern Germany, he kept requesting (and extending)
leaves to pursue his career in London, a city that was then beginning to rival
Paris as the world capital.
Here Handel continued to produce italian operas, again with great success.
He also wrote a flattering birthday ode for Queen Anne and some big
pieces to celebrate a major peace treaty; for this he was awarded a substantial
annuity. In 1717, after the Elector of Hanover had become George I of England,
Handel got back into his good graces by composing music to be played
on boats in a royal aquatic fete on the River Thames-the famous Water
Music.
As an opera composer, Handel had learned to gauge the taste of the public
and also how to flatter singers, writing music for them that showed off
their voices to the best advantage. He now also became an opera impresario-today we would call him a "promoter'' - recruiting singers and negotiating
their contracts, planning whole seasons of opera and all the while composing
the main attractions himself: an opera every year, on average, between 1721
and 1743. He also had to deal with backers - English aristocrats and wealthy
merchants who supported his opera companies, and persuaded their friends
to take out subscriptions for boxes.
Handel made and lost several fortunes, but he always landed on his feet,
even when Italian opera went out of style in Britain, for he never lost a feel
for his audience. After opera had failed, he popularized oratorios - retellings
of Bible stories (mostly from the O1d Testament) in a semioperatic, semichoral
form. Opera audiences, who had been ready to identify opera's virtuous
Roman emperors with local princes, were now delighted to identify
oratorio's virtuous People of israel with the British nation.
Handel was a big, vigorous man, hot-tempered but quick to forget,
humorous and resourceful. When a particularly temperamental prima donna
threw a scene. he calmed her down by threatening to throw her out the window.
At the end of his life he became blind-the same surgeon operated
(unsuccessfully) on both him and on Bach-but he continued to play the
organ brilliantly and composed by dictating to a secretary.
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