伟大的作曲家 巴赫.doc

When the biologist Lewis Thomas was asked what message he thought mankind should take to other civilizations in space, he replied: “I would send the complete works of Johann Sebastian Bach.” But that would be boasting. “There is no music of greater emotional depth than this, but it is of the highest order. Music can be intellectually complex and yet completely intriguing and overwhelming emotionally.” “If there had been no Bach, it probably would have been no further history of music as we know it. There would not have been Mozart as we know him, there would not have been Beethoven as we know him, there would not have been romantic era as we know it. Every period of music has been informed to some extent by the example of Bach.”“I cant imagine a world where you wouldnt play Bach, hes just too important.”When Johann Sebastian Bach died in 1750, he was mourned more as an organist and keyboard player than as a composer, and for almost 100 years after his death, his work was known mainly to connoisseurs and professional musicians. Yet today, the resonant power of his work and the depth of his influence is regarded as one of the greatest achievements in the history of music.Bach believed that the aim and final reason of music should be none else but the glory of God and the recreation of the mind. His sacred and secular music is seen as both the culmination of the baroque era and the beginning of the modern age - perhaps the most performed musical accompaniment to the Christian rites of passage of birth, marriage and death in Western culture.“Bach is the first great modern composer. He was able to articulate the inner self of modernity. And we are modern people. When we listen to Bach therefore, we listen as it were to a father figure, to somebody who forged our culture at a deeper level than the purely cerebral or the philosophical and gives to our fragmented lives a gravitas, a high seriousness, a sense of significance that takes us beyond the muddled presence, and helps us to touch something timeless and eternal. that is yet also deeply Western.”The youngest of eight children, Bach was born in Eisenach, in the central German region of Thuringia, in 1685. At the time, Thuringia was a loose assembly of small states, dukedoms, principalities and free cities. Almost every local ruler boasted his own band of court musicians and each city had its own official music makers. Italian, French, German, Polish and English musical styles could be heard from Dresden to Erfurt. And Bach himself came from an extremely musical family - perhaps the greatest family of German musicians of the 17th and 18th centuries.“Theres this great sense that the whole family played and composed for each other. This is a very early piece, Capriccio on the Departure of a Beloved Brother which was written when one of Bachs brothers, we think may have gone to fight in the army in Sweden. And Its a very simple, rather delectable piece, with the call of the post-horn in it. You can tell its a very, very simple early harmonic style.”Bachs father, Johann Ambrosius, was both a trumpeter and violinist, employed by the town council and the ducal court of Eisenach. while his uncles and brothers worked as keyboard players, organists and chamber musicians throughout Thuringia and Saxony. There were musical gatherings and galas in both the family home and at the town church of St. George, giving Bach a formidable musical education.“This is one of the few pieces going back to Bachs lifetime that we can touch today. This is the place where Bach was baptized. Two days after his birth, on the 23rd March in 1685, his parents, Elisabet and Ambrosius Bach, stood around this font, and also his godparents, Sebastian Nagel, who gave Bach his name, held him over this font. This place also reminds us of his Lutheran faith, and also the tradition of Lutheran church music, because music became an essential element of Christian worship service in the Lutheran tradition.”Eisenach was at the heart of Reformation Europe. In 1521 , Martin Luther had fled from Catholic authorities in the Wartburg castle where he translated the Bible into German and wrote some of his greatest hymns. Luther was not only the founder and guiding spirit of the Reformation, but a man whose poetry and musical composition, had a profound influence on Bach throughout his life. Bach made notes in the margins of his own copy of the Lutheran Bible, observing here that “Where there is devotional music. God, with his grace, is always present”.“For Bach, for Luther, for the Protestants in general, the route to the divine was now limited to scripture. There were no more sacraments. There was no really great elaborate liturgy. All these formal things which had given men and women a gateway to the Divine before the Reformation. Now the one link that human beings could have with their God, was through Gods word in revealed scripture. And I think that this pre-occupation with the word of God, with scripture alone which is one of the hallmarks of the Protestant Reformation, I think we see that, at the essence of Bachs great religious quest in his music, to try to give a profound and transcendent dimension to Gods word.”Bachs secure family upbringing came to a sudden end in 1694 with the death of his mother and in 1695 with the death of his father. Almost at once, Bach was on his own.“He lost his parents at the age of ten, and I think that trauma, that shadow in experience, formed his outlook on the world for the rest of his life. He felt abandoned. He felt the world would be a deceitful, untrustworthy place. This worked very well with his religious understanding as a Lutheran where the same attitude towards the world is preached. In many ways what he then was going to do with his music was to, in a sense, create his own world, his own better world, a perfect world. In a sense, he himself is going to become a creator.”After the death of his parents, Bach was taken in by his elder brother Johann Christoph, an organist, who gave him his first formal keyboard lessons. His fine singing voice secured him a scholarship at a school for poor boys at Luneburg, and by the age of 18 he had acquired his first official employment as organist at the Neukirche in Arnstadt. Bach had secured the post at Arnstadt by testing the new organ. The church authorities had been so impressed at his play, they him the job on the spot. But they soon found that the brilliant young organist had a musical ambition that was hard to control, and were particularly upset by the surprising variations he added to Lutheran hymn tunes.“When Bach was at Arnstadt, he was a young man, a genius, absolutely bubbling with musical ideas, new harmonies, and of course with a tremendous technique. So playing hymns must have been a very boring thing to do. And yet the congregation wanted straightforward leadership rather like this. But Bach had different ideas, and in between one line and another, he would get from one chord to another rather like this, which could be a bit off-putting for a congregation which was there to let off steam on a Sunday morning singing their hymns. The overall effect was something like this, perhaps.”At Arnstadt, Bach was determined to develop his skills as a keyboard virtuoso. At the age of 20, he took a months leave of absence and walked 200 miles to study and perform with the Danish organist Dietrich Buxtehude there in Lubeck. Buxtehudes technique, showmanship, and dramatic sense of composition had a considerable influence on the young Bach.“The style, lets say the generation just before Bach all the keyboard players came into existence, one of the major things was excitement, surprise. People who were watching at the feet of the organist said, my God, how can somebody play so fast? I mean the major organs at that time had enormous pedal towers, these pedal towers could really make noises, and people were using it. And if it was brought to the harpsichords, I mean, I think for Dieter Buxtehude, the same kind of surprise was there. Surprise by stopping, let people wait, hang on your lips, and then finally the answer comes.”Bach stayed with Buxtehude for four times as long as the authorities had allowed. When he returned to Arnstadt, they were furious. They complained that he was both willful and stubborn, that hed gone to the wine cellar during a sermon, and that he had been unnecessarily involved in a sword fight with a student after accusing him of playing the bassoon like a goat. They also censured Bach for inviting a strange maiden into the choir loft. This was almost certainly his cousin, Maria Barbara whom he married at the little church in Dornheim on October 17th, 1707. Their marriage had music at its heart, and two of their children, CPE Bach and Wilhelm Friedemann. were to become great composers in their own right.Bach and Maria Barbara began their married life in Muhlhausen, 20 miles north of Eisenach. Here, at the age of 22, Bach wrote his first cantatas. Aus der Tiefen and Actus Tragicus. But he complained about the lack of regular performances of church music on Sundays. And found it difficult to work with the Pastor, Adolf Frohne, who liked his church music simple and unadorned. After only a year, Bach left Muhlhausen to become organist and chamber musician, in the court orchestra of Duke Wilhelm Ernst of Weimar. The duke was devoted to the arts. and the court exposed Bach to a far greater range of international music. particularly when, after a visit to Amsterdam in 1713. His musical son brought back a selection of scores by a composer. whose style was to have a dramatic influence on the 28-year-old Bach, the music of Antonio Vivaldi.“What Vivaldi taught him was very important, he taught Bach how to begin a piece dramatically, but in fact one of the problems with the Vivaldis Concertos was that they begin dramatically, but they dont really handle the music very well after that. But Bach, who had this wonderful feeling for continuity and synthesis. Its not until he knew Vivaldi that he knew how to begin a piece with a very dramatic and above all with very characteristic theme, and its these extraordinary characteristic themes that we find later in Bach. Things like that which I mean these wonderful beginnings with a kind of dramatic flourish. He got that from Italian music.” With Bach, the baroque music came to fulfillment, and his complex interweaving of differing musical themes is the finest example of counterpoint in Western music.“Bach was basically, a contrapuntal composer. Contrapuntal texture is, if you like. a tapestry made up of all sorts of different colored threads. And so each individual thread has its own beauty and its own independence, it has its own reason for being. But if you weave them all together, they make a wonderful glorious whole, this tapestry of counterpoint.”“He has changed the rules. He has found new areas. He has developed a fantastic way of structure. The chords, the harmonies are very rich. Thats also something very important in Bachs music. Is that if you take that Chorale No.1, for instance, so you have nearly one harmony every half bar. Thats seven harmonies with twelve notes. This is very rich.”At the court in Weimar, Bach composed organ fugues, chamber pieces, orchestral suites and cantatas. Music was written both for the chapel and for princely entertainment. with the same melodies and popular dance rhythms, appearing in both courtly and devotional works.“I think the secular or sacred division in Bachs case can be over-exaggerated. As far as festive music is concerned, whether he is celebrating the elector or the kings name day, or hes praising God. It is done from a very hierarchical social point of view, with him as the servant of either the Christian God or the secular Lord on earth. I dont by that mean that Bach invested a sort of religious aura to his worldly leader in any sense at all. But that ceremonial music was ceremonial music, and was based on dance, pulse and based on the capacity of the instrument, so it has its disposal to sound at their best. Hence the use of D Major as the natural trumpet key. And in Bachs days, natural trumpets were capable of scaling the heights in terms of the tessitura and the stratosphere. And of course its the key in which the strings resonated the most, so it has the most opulent sound to it of any key, and that applies to secular or sacred, it doesnt matter.”Bach stayed at Weimar for nine years. But when he was denied the position of Kapellmeister, the musical director responsible for all court music, he sought a post elsewhere, impatient to leave, he asked for release from his duties at Weimar in a manner so antagonistic that the Duke had him imprisoned for a month, for too stubbornly forcing the issue of his own discharge. In 1717, at the age of 32, he moved to the princely court at Kothen, as musical director. Here Bach was concerned chiefly with chamber and orchestral music, and once described the years at Kothen as the happiest in his life. It was here that he revolutionized the development of keyboard music. with his composition of The Well-Tempered Clavier, a collection of 24 Preludes and Fugues written, as he inscribed on the title page for the profit of the musical youth desirous of learning. “The Well-Tempered Clavier was written in response to a change in tuning. What had happened up to this time was that the keyboards were tuned precisely in thirds and fifths. which was marvelous as long as you played a limited range of keys. and if you look at early works by William Byrd, for example. most of them seem to be in C major and they make up for this by having fantastic variations. What happened with Well-tempered tuning was essentially it was such a compromise. You tune in octaves. And in between the octave you would divide into twelve semitones, which meant that nothing was exactly right, but it was bearable to play in every single key for the first time. And so Bach set about this fantastically ambitious scheme of writing preludes and fugues in every single key, which I dont think it had ever been done before, well it meant you instead of just writing in C major, C minor, G major or G minor. you were suddenly writing in keys as obscure as E Flat minor, or B Flat minor. I mean this is really new. So he started with the first book with the C major prelude, and then he moved from that to C Minor so youd have, and then hed move up to a new key, C Sharp major. So you were going step by step up, up, up, up, and writing fugues also in all these keys.”“Mozart, Beethoven, Chopin, Schumann - they played this music every day. And much later, Bartok and Pablo Casals too, and it is, as they said, the Old Testament of music. And I feel very much the same way, I play the Well-Tempered Clavier every day of my life, Just two or four or six preludes and fugues every day, different ones. Its a wonderful way to start the day, Its like taking a shower and cleansing yourself, Its something so pure to the spirit, the soul, and even physically, I dont have to do stupid pianistic exercises, which are a waste of time. because this gives you all the sensation of movements when you play a movement like It gives you all the feeling of dexterity, and you feel like dancing and bouncing and you are happy to be alive.”“The bass of Bach are fantastic, if you take the Air on the G String, its very simple, but it is already jazzy because you have the bass coming up and down, and there is a singing bass. Its not only the bass which plays the bass notes. This is singing, If you forget about the theme of the Air on the G String, you have the bass, you have the bass, and it follows. Never stops, always continuing. This is one of the particularities of Bachs music. There is no part which are not interesting by itself. Even though I just play that without the theme, its interesting. Everything has got value, and so on.”“There wasnt any much differences at that time between a performer and a composer, if you performed you also composed, and Bach knew this music taught you how to compose and showed you what the possibilities were, and thats in fact the way it was used for a century after his death. Mozart, Beethoven, Schumann, Chopin, Weber, Liszt. all of them learned how to compose by playing Bach on the piano.”In May 1720, when he was 35, Bach accompanied Prince Leopold to Carlsbad. leaving his wife to look after their four surviving children. When he returned in July he learned that Maria Barbara had fallen ill and died, possibly as a result of her seventh pregnancy, and had already been buried. The news only reached him when he entered his own house. She was 35 years old. A widower with four young children, Bach could not live alone for long. The following year, on December 3, 1721 , Bach married Anna Magdalena Wilcke, the daughter of a court trumpeter and a fine soprano. The marriage combined both romantic and musical fulfillment and lasted 29 years.“You need to think of a rather dynamic relationship. There must have been a quite a bit of give and take among two professional musicians. Anna Magdalena as the singer who, you know, have considerable professional experience, and she might have told her husband often on, you know, this is unsingable. or Id like the melody to go this way rather than that way, and he would then respond. I think Bach is a musician who tried to bring out the best in his companions and in his colleagues.”“Bach has the reputation of his time and in fact he still does, of having written enormously difficult music. He himself described his music as incomparably more difficult, than that of his contemporaries. And it was. When he writes music for voices or even for wind instruments, he almost forgets that his players and singers have to breathe at times. He simp