[From the Anglophone section of the freely available Frankfurter Allgemeine
Zeitung's website:]
Giving Wings to Music
By Michael Gassmann
LÜNEBURG. Scholars of Johann Sebastian Bach are stumped when it comes to
Lüneburg, where the composer lived from 1700 to 1702. Direct sources that
indicate what Bach did with his time among the northern moors from the age
of 15 to 17, or what he might have learned here, are slim. What we do know
is that the orphaned Bach arrived here at age 15 from Thuringian Ohrdruf,
where his oldest brother Johann Christoph had raised and educated him. Upon
arrival, he joined the church choir at St. Michael's school. He left Ohrdruf
on March 15 and beginning in April, his presence in Lüneburg is documented
in the expenses register of choirmaster August Braun.
It is one of two pieces of existing evidence pertaining to Bach's time in
Lüneburg; the other is the obituary for the composer written in 1754 by Carl
Philipp Emanuel Bach. It reports on how Bach's voice broke shortly after he
arrived in Lüneburg, information that has caused much lively discussion
among Bach researchers. The choir usually admitted only impoverished young
men with treble voices, although in Bach's era there were also a few adult
male voices in the ensemble. So how did Bach spend his time in Lüneburg
after his voice broke? Some researchers believe he concentrated on the
violin, others think he probably left the town for Hamburg or Celle to
broaden his musical horizons. Finally, there are those who posit that he was
immediately admitted to the choir as a bass singer, since there was a
shortage of male voices at the time.
Not in dispute is the fact that his years in Lüneburg had a profound
influence on Bach's musical development. The question is where those
influences came from. He would certainly have heard and talked to Georg
Böhm, the well-known organist at neighboring St. John's church. The duke in
nearby Celle kept a French orchestra at court, which would have presented
Bach with an opportunity to become familiar with French instrumental styles.
And finally, the French dance instructor at the academy for young nobles in
Lüneburg would undoubtedly have influenced the city with imported musical
styles.
But the most direct influence on Bach was probably his immediate
surroundings -- St. Michael's school and church, known for its dedication to
music. The church and monastery were founded in the 10th century and did not
switch to Protestantism until the second half of the 16th century.
But it was the oldest of its institutions, St. Michael's school, which set
the tone in the strictest sense of the term. Singers for the various church
choirs were drawn from the student body and the choirmaster dedicated
himself to the musical education of students and also helped train eight
concert soloists. Bach was immersed in the full flowering of St. Michael's
musical commitment. An important element to this was the school's music
library, with roots that can probably be traced back to the founding of the
monastic order. This library was St. Michael's musical memory, and Bach
could draw from it every day. That daily experience of singing texts from
that extensive storehouse probably brought him in closer contact with the
music of the era than anything else in Lüneburg.
By the end of the 18th century, however, the era of chorales was rapidly
coming to an end, and it was finally abandoned altogether in 1796. St.
Michael's school was closed in 1819. There was no further interest in the
music library and the collection was scattered to the four winds, with only
a small portion ending up in Lüneburg's city archives. Thankfully, two
inventories of the library's contents initially survived. The originals have
since been lost, but copies are available to researchers.
What they document is a rich, international musical culture. The composers
in the repertory came not only from northern Germany -- Saxony, Thuringia
and Brandenburg -- but also from southern Germany, from Italy, Austria,
Poland, Denmark, Sweden and the Netherlands. The 1,204 titles documented
represent approximately 10,000 individual works -- a vast collection,
including names such as Johann Pachelbel, Heinrich Schütz and Claudio
Monteverdi.
The year 2000 was the Year of Bach, commemorating the 250th anniversary of
his death, and the St. Michael's congregation decided it was a perfect
opportunity to reconstruct the library as documented in the two catalogs. It
was a chance to regain a central piece of Lüneburg's musical history and at
the same time, put it back into practice. After all the identification,
copying and editing work was done, it could be used to restore a tradition
of living music. But most of all, it was a chance to finally answer the
question: "What was it that Bach learned in Lüneburg?" The city put together
a team of researchers, including Pastor Wolfgang Koch, choirmaster Tobias
Gravenhorst, city librarian Friedrich Jekutsch and musicologist Stefan
Rossberg. A festival of music from the library's repertoire was mounted.
Jekutsch first reconstructed the list of what was in the choir library and
published it in 2000 as a catalog listing the names of the composers and a
statistical analysis. The team was able to identify 253 pieces that are
available today as manuscripts or published scores. This means that about
800 titles have either been lost or else one has not been able yet to
determine if they still exist. A full reconstruction might be impossible.
A CD of some of the works will be issued soon. It was recorded at St.
Michael's by Tobias Gravenhorst with Hannover's Hofkapelle orchestra and his
own, first-rate chamber choir. The CD contains pieces by better known
composers like Johann Krieger, Sebastian Knüpfer and Johann Schelle, but
also by lesser known musicians: Wolfgang Carl Briegel, Christian Flor,
Vincenzo Albrici and Giuseppe Peranda. It is amazing that the pieces are
often written for as many as five, six, seven, 10 or even 14 or 16 voices.
Clearly, vocal resources were not a problem in Lüneburg at the time. The
library catalog even contains a piece written for 31 voices.
It would be an exaggeration to claim that all of the pieces on the CD are
masterpieces that have been wrongly consigned to oblivion. But as a whole,
they give us insight into the diversity and the high level of musical
culture in Lüneburg's municipal, church and educational institutions around
the turn of the 18th century.
This is the music that Bach must have performed. The rules for vespers and
matins issued in 1656 dictated that at one place in the Sunday mass, there
should be "a little music-making," and if this was not possible, then at
least a short motet was to be sung after the reading of the psalm "so that
there may be a difference between this and a village church."
Thus it was municipal pride that gave wings to the music, just as it always
had and has across Germany. Bach was able to immerse himself in this musical
culture and undoubtedly benefited from it. At the very least, we can be
certain that he had it immediately to hand. It is, of course, not possible
in the final analysis to reconstruct how the mind of a genius might turn all
that to his advantage, transform it into his own idiom. But scholars are on
the case.
Mar. 27
© Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung 2002
Paul Moor (Berlin)
<Texas-Paule@Sigmund-Freud.Org>
Telefon: (030) 8639-5784
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