Bach Research in 3D: Computer Reconstruction of Johann Sebastian Bach’s Palace Church a Success

Pipedreams Organ Tour, April 21-May 3, 2002, Part 2

Mary Ann Dodd is Colgate University Organist Emerita. Her lectures and performances have often featured the music of contemporaryAmerican composers. She is presently at work on a book about the life and timesof organist Leonard Raver.

Day Four

Morning arrived all too quickly--cloudy and chilly--but by
now we were getting used to that. We were to spend the entire day in
Leipzig--no packing, no luggage to wrestle--and we would sleep in our same beds
again tonight. I was more than ready for a relatively "low-key" day
and looking forward to it. What I would soon learn is that there is absolutely
nothing "low-key" about the city of Leipzig!

Early in the Middle Ages, before the end of the ninth
century, Leipzig was settled by Slavs, who named it Lipsk (City of Limes).
Located at the crossroads of ancient trade routes and at the confluence of
three important rivers--Pleisse, White Elster and Parthe--Leipzig has been,
from the very beginning, an important center for commerce, publishing,
learning, technology and the arts. It has survived the devastation of many wars
and hostile occupations. Over the centuries, it has continued to preserve,
restore, and reconstruct, never losing sight of its identity. Today, the city
exudes an atmosphere of energy and vitality as it forges ahead on the cutting
edge of the future. From the very beginning, it has prospered and--rather like
the Energizer bunny--it just keeps going, and going, and going! And so it came
as no surprise to learn that Leipzig's motto is "Leipzig kommt!"

Leipzig Gewandhaus

There is so much here to see and to explore that one could
spend weeks and barely scratch the surface. The possibilities are dizzying. But
our time was short, and we were here to pay homage to J. S. Bach and some of
the other great musicians associated with Leipzig. What better place to start
our tour than at the famous Gewandhaus?! Located on the south side of the
Augustusplatz and opposite the Leipzig Opera House, which can be seen reflected
in its large glass windows, this is the third home of the Gewandhaus Orchestra,
the oldest civic orchestra in Germany, founded in 1743. The new building, built
in close cooperation with conductor Kurt Masur, was dedicated in 1981. It is
well worth the visit even if one never ventures beyond the breathtaking,
spacious lobby whose open tiers and stairways are dominated by a large and
dramatically colorful ceiling mural, said by some to be the largest in all of
Europe.

We were headed for the Great Hall and a demonstration of its
four-manual, 92-rank Schuke organ. The hall itself is a large, multi-sided
amphitheater seating 1900 people. The organ is visually stunning, mounted high
on the wall above and behind the gallery seating area, which faces the rear of
the stage. The action is mechanical, and--just as we saw at the Berlin
Konzerthaus--there is a second, electric-action console for onstage use. We were
greeted by the Gewandhaus organist, who turned out to be none other than
Michael Schönheit, who had so graciously demonstrated the little Ladegast
in Merseburg Cathedral only the day before. On this occasion we were treated to
the entire Widor Fifth Symphony--a good choice to put the organ through its
paces and an opportunity, for those who wished, to move around and hear the
instrument from every possible vantage point.

St. Nicholas Church

From there we made our way to the church of St. Nicholas,
easily identified by its triple towers. Nikolai Church is the city's oldest
church, dating from c.1165 when it sat at the crossroads of two important trade
routes. St. Nicholas is the medieval patron saint of merchants and travelers,
and even today the church sits at the center of the city among banks and office
buildings, open to visitors from all over the world. Both exterior and interior
have been altered over the years, reflecting the trends and tastes of the
times. At present, both church and organ are undergoing restoration, so an
organ demonstration was not possible. The lavishly decorated interior is indeed
splendid and more than one could possibly assimilate in one brief visit. For
me, the enormous galleries on three sides of the nave seemed to invoke those masterpieces
of Bach, the music of which had once filled this very space.

The organ started out as a large, four-manual Ladegast of
eighty-four stops with an open 32' in the case. Built between 1858 and 1862, it
was rebuilt by Sauer in 1902/03. Now, one hundred years later, it is being
restored as closely as possible to its original state by the Eule firm.

We cannot leave this sacred spot without taking a moment to
remember the events of October 9, 1989--events which forever altered the course
of history. It was here, on this very spot, led by Kurt Masur, among others,
that the more than 2000 people who had filled St. Nicholas for the Peace Prayer
Service were joined in the streets outside by more than ten thousand
demonstrators, all holding lighted candles. After forty years of oppression
under the GDR, this non-violent, bloodless revolution turned the tide and paved
the way for the reunification of Germany. I treasure the memory of the brief
time I was able to spend in the Church of St. Nicholas, and I find hope and
comfort in the knowledge that the prayers for peace continue in this very
special place.

Out on the sidewalk again and back to the present, we had
the luxury of some time on our own. We had been offered a guided tour of the
University of Leipzig's Musical Instrument Museum, which we had the option of
taking either before or after lunch. This important collection features 5000
exhibits spanning five centuries. For some of us it felt good to stretch our
legs and shed our tourist guises. After an alfresco coffee break and a little
more walking around, we encountered others from our group on their way to
lunch. We decided to join them, and that is why I cannot tell you about the
Musical Instrument Museum, because I never got there.

Just in front of The Old Stock Exchange is the famous statue
of Goethe, whose gaze is eternally fixed on the entrance to the Mädler
Passage, Leipzig's most magnificent arcade and the only one to have survived
the centuries intact. Just inside the entrance, marked by two unusual
sculptures, is the ancient stairway leading down to one of Leipzig's most
famous and historic restaurants--Auerbach's Keller, the barrel cellar
immortalized by Goethe in a famous scene from Faust. We were seated in a rear
corner at a table in front of a long banquette. Surrounded as we were by dark
wood paneling and soft lighting, the ambiance was deliciously warm. The large
room seemed to be filled nearly to capacity, and our table kept expanding as
others from our group joined us. My recollection of the meal is hazy, but I do
recall a delicious stein of beer and a hearty, hot soup. There may have been a
dozen of us at the table. It was a wonderful opportunity to get better
acquainted with some of our fellow travelers and to simply relax and soak up the
atmosphere of this timeless place. I remember thinking to myself: so this is
Gemütlichkeit! Service was slow and somewhat hampered by the size of our
group and our marginal--to say the least--German. By the time we had settled
our checks and were once more out on the street again, it was too late to join
the museum tour. Nourished and refreshed, we went our separate ways. We would
gather later on at the Thomaskirche for a demonstration of the organs by Ulrich
Böhme.

Thomaskirche

St. Thomaskirche is easily identified by its extremely
steep-pitched tower and the much-photographed statue of Bach in the small
square just to the south. The church occupies the site of an earlier church for
the Augustinian Monastery founded in 1212 by Margrave Dietrich with--as legend
would have it--a choir of twelve boys. At the time of Bach's 27-year tenure
(1723-1750), there were fifty-four boys, and today the choir consists of one
hundred boys and young men who give weekly performances of the cantatas, motets
and oratorios of Bach. Originally buried at St. John's Church, which was
destroyed in World War II, Bach's remains have since been removed and were
reburied here in 1950. His final resting place is in the choir room directly
under the chancel. Needless to say, the church has become a very popular
tourist attraction, generating an atmosphere more akin to a museum than to a
house of worship.

Although the basic architecture of the church has remained
unchanged since the end of the fifteenth century, many alterations and additions
have occurred over the years, reflecting current styles and tastes. After the
reunification of Germany in 1990, and after nearly one hundred years of
neglect, a total restoration of the church was undertaken and completed just in
time for the Bach anniversary in July of 2000. Included in the project was the
installation of a brand-new "Bach" organ built by Gerald Woehl.
Public funding for this 5.5 million dollar undertaking was provided by the
European Union, the German Federal Government, the State of Saxony and the City
of Leipzig. There were private donations as well. A four-manual instrument of
61 stops, the organ was designed in accordance with the principles of
eighteenth-century, middle-German organ building. The casework was inspired by
that of the Scheibe organ in the Pauliner (University) Church in Leipzig, which
Bach had examined in 1717. The specification is based on that of the
Georgenkirche in Eisenach (Bach's hometown), an instrument that the young Bach
would have known well, as it was designed by his uncle, Johann Christoph Bach.
The new Woehl organ sits in the center of the north balcony across from the
Bach window.

In addition to the new instrument, St. Thomaskirche has a
second, older, three-manual organ of 88 stops built by Sauer in 1889 (considerably
enlarged in 1908). Midway through the twentieth century it succumbed to the
"Baroque" craze, but in 1988 it was returned to its original state.
It sits in the rear (west) gallery. It has a rich, warm, romantic sound, and it
is this instrument that would have been played by Straube and Ramin, among
others. Ulrich Böhme, who demonstrated the organs for us, has been the
organist of St. Thomaskirche since 1985. He played the Bach Pièce
d'Orgue on the Woehl, and on the Sauer,
some Mendelssohn.

There was a little more free time at our disposal before we
gathered for an early dinner. Our day in Leipzig ended as it had begun--at the
Gewandhaus where we heard the famous orchestra, under the direction of Roger
Norrington, perform Ralph Vaughan Williams' Fifth Symphony
style='font-style:normal'> and Brahms' First. Filled with people, the huge
amphitheater bore little resemblance to the nearly empty space we had occupied
only a few hours before. The atmosphere was one of eager expectancy. Our group
was dispersed to various locations throughout the Great Hall so that it was
easy to imagine that we were simply Leipzigers out for an evening of fine
music. Often, in my lectures, I have spoken of the synergistic triumvirate of
composer, performer and listener. But never have I experienced it as I did on
this particular occasion. The audience seemed to be every bit as focused on the
music as were the musicians themselves. Listening in the Great Hall of the
Gewandhaus is clearly not a passive activity. Our collective ears were on the
edges of our seats. Music was happening here, and all of us were involved in
the process. It was an evening to remember. And then it was back to our hotel
to pack, to sleep and to prepare for an early departure the next morning.

Day Five

It was hard to leave Leipzig behind knowing how many of its
treasures--landmarks, architecture, monuments, museums and libraries--still
remained to be explored. Back on the bus once more, we headed out of the city
and toward the open countryside. Our final destination on this Friday would be
Eisenach, Bach's birthplace. But first we had some very interesting stops to
make along the way.

Rötha

First stop on our agenda was Rötha, a picturesque small
town of very narrow streets. It offered a pleasant contrast after the lively
hustle and bustle of Leipzig. We were about to see and hear our first
Silbermann organ. Photographs and recordings--wonderful as they are--cannot
begin to capture the actual visual and aural experience. St. Georgenkirche
dates back to the twelfth century. The architecture is eclectic, and it has
been rebuilt many times. The twin-towered edifice dominates the surrounding
landscape and is at once sturdy and elegant. When I stepped inside the church,
I felt as though I had entered another dimension. Although it was another dark
and gloomy day, the interior was bright, filled with a diffusion of soft,
golden light and a subtle, not unpleasant smell that seemed to invoke things
ancient and holy. One tended to speak in hushed tones. The space is not vast by
any means. The gothic-style windows are tall and narrow and of plain glass. The
impression is of elegance and simplicity with lots of dark wood and white
plaster. The nave opens into a rather spacious choir, and the eye is
compellingly drawn to a sumptuous altarpiece with frescos of the Crucifixion
and the Last Supper.

The organ, of two manuals and 23 stops, was built between
1718 and 1721 by Gottfried Silbermann. Dedicated in 1721 by Kuhnau, Bach's
predecessor at St. Thomaskirche, it is in meantone tuning and has reeds only in
the pedal. Although I would not have described the sound as
"silvery," it was indeed bright and, at the same time, very rich.
These small instruments are noteworthy for their economy and yet amazing
variety of sounds. A former cantor, Mrs. Schoedel, played the Bach A Major for
us, and then we were on our own. Those who wished to play needed no urging and
started queuing up immediately. It is perhaps interesting to note that this
particular instrument served as the model for the Marilyn Mason Organ at the
University of Michigan built by Fisk. Yet another Silbermann can be found in
Rötha at the Marienkirche--a one-manual instrument of eleven stops.

St. Wenzelskirche, Naumburg

Back on our bus once more, we headed for St. Wenzelskirche
in Naumburg. It was pleasant to ride through the peaceful, rural landscape. The
country here is quite flat, and we passed small farms, grazing cattle,
carefully tended gardens and fields of winter wheat, occasionally punctuated by
large automotive centers off in the distance.

Naumburg was founded in 1028. The medieval gates and
fortification walls still stand around the old city with its narrow, cobbled
streets. The City Church of St. Wenzel has been in existence since 1426. The
organ we have come to see and hear is a 1746 Hildebrandt of three manuals and
fifty-three stops. The instrument was drastically altered during the nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries. Miraculously spared in the WW II Allied bombing
of Naumburg, it suffered from years of neglect during the subsequent Communist
regime. By the time of the Reunification in 1990, the organ had deteriorated so
badly that it was barely playable. In 1992 the City of Naumburg and the Friends
of the Hildebrandt Organ convened an international symposium which recommended
the restoration of the organ to its 1746 condition. The cost of the project,
which was entrusted to the Eule firm, was estimated at 2.5 million dollars. The
Rückpositiv was tackled first and completed in 1996 in time for the 250th
anniversary of the organ, and the entire restoration was completed in the year
2000. It was re-dedicated on the first Sunday in Advent with a solemn worship
service and a dedicatory recital played by Ulrich Böhme, organist of St.
Thomaskirche.

What is it about this historic instrument that has generated
so much international excitement and attention? And why has this particular
instrument come to be regarded by many as the ideal "Bach" organ?

In 1723, shortly after coming to St. Thomas, Bach took his
choir to the nearby village of Störmtal to perform a cantata he had
written for the dedication of a new organ in the village church. It was on this
occasion that Bach first met the builder, Zacharias Hildebrandt, who had apprenticed
for five years under Gottfried Silbermann. The Störmtal organ, still
extant today, was examined by Bach and pronounced to be "an excellent and
durable instrument, very worthy of praise." The two men soon became
lifelong friends, and in 1735, Hildebrandt moved his workshop to Leipzig.

In 1743, Bach's advice, among others, was sought by the city
council of Naumburg in regard to the Wenzelskirche organ--a Thayssner
instrument built in 1700. Although two other builders had been consulted, the
contract for a new instrument went to Hildebrandt. When the organ was completed
in 1746, Bach played it, examined it, and wrote glowingly about it. Moreover,
there is good reason to believe that Bach himself collaborated with Hildebrandt
on the design of the instrument.

What are some of the characteristics that set this
instrument apart from other more typical middle-German instruments of the first
half of the eighteenth century? Consider the following: multiple color stops at
low pitches and a steady, copious wind supply; a spacious chest layout
affording easy and convenient access to all of the pipes; a complete and
well-developed pedal division; 16' stops in the manual divisions and two 32's
in the pedal; well-tempered tuning; a large and complete Rückpositiv; divisions
that achieve their distinction not by placement or Werkprinzip, but by the
individual scaling of each of the principal choruses--all of this espoused by
Bach and well documented.

As we gathered expectantly at the entrance to the church,
Michael said: "Take several deep breaths, because when you go into the
church, your breath will be taken away." He was right. Nothing could have
prepared us for the sight of the interior of this splendid gothic building with
its lavish baroque decoration, and then to let our eyes travel upward past the
first two galleries and then to the uppermost gallery and that sumptuous organ
case. The organ case, with its gorgeous decorations by the woodcarver Johann
Goericke, has been retained from the Thayssner. The keyboards and stops are
also original. Inside the white cabinet doors, the "interior" of the
console is painted a rich "bluer-than-blue" color.

The organist, Irene Greulich, played for us--Bach, of
course--and the sound was magnificent. The plenum was rich and brilliant with
plenty of that gravitas of which Bach was so fond.

This instrument stands, among many other things, as a model
of historically informed restoration. Archival documents and photographs
provided much important information. The preservation and restoration of this
very special instrument is surely no small miracle. To stand in this place
which has stood for more than half a millennium, to see, hear, touch, and
actually play this historic instrument is a spiritual experience to be
treasured and long remembered.

Our time at St. Wenzelskirche passed quickly, and all too
soon it was time to come back down to earth again. It was already early
afternoon, and after a quick lunch, we were back on the bus headed for
Eisenach, the birthplace of Bach. But first, our itinerary called for a visit
to Buchenwald.

Buchenwald

Buchenwald Concentration Camp is located just north of the
city of Weimar atop Ettersberg Hill. Buchenwald means beech tree wood, and at
one time this must have been a lovely spot. Legend has it that Goethe spent
many pleasant contemplative hours here beneath his favorite tree. Today, only
the stump remains of "Goethe's Oak," which was damaged by bombs in
1944 and later cut down. Buchenwald was not originally planned as a place of
genocide. Nevertheless, more than 250,000 people were held captive here, of
whom more than 50,000 died. Near the end, as many as 1500 prisoners a day were
sent to the crematorium. At the time of the liberation and the arrival of the
US Army on April 11, 1945, around 21,000 prisoners including 900 children and
young people remained in the camp.

Our tour, with Sonja as our guide, began at the top of the
hill at the entrance to the gate building, which is flanked on either side by
the arrest houses. Two of the twenty-two watchtowers remain, and the
crematorium is near by. Many artifacts remain in the buildings and about the
grounds, offering mute testimony to the atrocities committed here. The more
than fifty camp barracks that lined the hillside below in neat rows are no
longer standing, but the location of each is marked by a stone which displays
the block number, and the outlines of each building are shown by layers of
broken stone. As I stood at the top of the hill, taking in the stark scene
spread out below me, I was reminded that only four days ago I had stood in a
place of similar topography--Sansoucci Palace. Sansoucci had been all warmth
and color and light. Here at Buchenwald, all was cold and gray and dark. I'm
sure that on occasion the sun does indeed shine on Buchenwald. But at that
moment it seemed to me that sunshine--in this awful place of despair and
death--might easily be regarded as profane. Our usually lively and congenial
group was subdued and silent as we made the long descent to the Storehouse at
the bottom of the hill where the prisoners had been relieved of their clothing
and all personal effects. Today it is a museum with a permanent exhibition of
documents and relics depicting the grim history of Buchenwald and commemorating
the lives of the thousands who perished here. Our tour lasted nearly two hours.
There was much to see and to try to understand. How does one comprehend the
incomprehensible? The atmosphere of such a place is indescribable. As we left
the museum, a cold, steady, drenching rain had begun to fall. Finally, it was
time to make the long ascent back to the top of Ettersberg Hill, where warmth
and transportation and normalcy awaited us.

Bach House

And so we continued on to Eisenach, a bit weary and
bedraggled. After settling into our hotel where we were given dinner, we ended
our day with an evening arranged just for us at the Bach House. The house in
which Bach was actually born no longer exists, but today this house is
officially recognized as the Bach family home. There is much of interest to see
here, and the house is furnished as authentically as possible, and many
instruments of the period are on display. Having explored the museum a bit, we
were invited to make ourselves comfortable. Our amiable hosts, dressed in
authentic attire, treated us to a private concert using several of the period
instruments in the collection. It was an informal and relaxed occasion, and the
music was lovely. One could easily imagine that we had been transported back in
time to a musical evening at the Bach's. It was an extraordinary end to an
extraordinary day.

Day Six

Saturday morning came all too quickly, but what a delight to
wake up in the city of Bach's birth. Here we were in the heart of Bach country
with four organs and a castle awaiting our pleasure. By the time we had climbed
aboard our bus, we were primed and ready for our next adventure.

Wartburg Castle

Destination: Wartburg Castle. Dating back to 1067, this
medieval castle sits high atop a 1230 foot cliff overlooking the city of
Eisenach below. Complete with drawbridge, half-timbered ramparts, and dungeons
in the southern tower, Wartburg is one of the best preserved castles in
Germany. Although largely Romanesque and Gothic, some original sections from
the feudal period still remain. Legend has it that the Great Hall, which dates
back to 1160, provided the setting for the famous minstrels' competition
immortalized by Wagner in Tannhäuser. It has also been suggested that
perhaps Martin Luther had this magnificent structure in mind when he wrote
"A Mighty Fortress."

It was here, in 1521, that Martin Luther, excommunicated and
condemned as a heretic, took refuge for three hundred days under the protection
of William the Wise. Transformed from a pious monk to a bearded "Knight
George," Luther wore cloak and dagger and hunted the woods. It was during
these solitary days of voluntary captivity that he translated the New Testament
from Greek to German. Up until that time there had been no uniform written
language, and it was Luther's synthesis of the many dialects with which he was
familiar that came to define the German language as it is known today. The
rooms, in which Martin Luther lived and worked, have been preserved. For more
than four hundred years, they have been the object of countless pilgrimages,
and the names of many pilgrims--dating back to the 1600s--have been carved into
the walls.

Also inside the castle are many authentically restored and
furnished rooms filled with the art and artifacts of another age--frescos,
paintings, mosaics, tapestries, pottery, stone carvings and medieval clothing.
The whole experience was very much like entering a magical time machine, and we
were reluctant to leave.

Arnstadt

But we could not afford to linger. And so it was back to the
bus and on to the town of Arnstadt with its charming market square and uneven
cobblestone streets. It was here, in 1703, that Bach took on his first regular
employment as organist of the New Church.

Arnstadt was the hometown of Bach's grandfather, and many
Bachs were born, christened and buried here. Founded in 704 and granted a city
charter in 1266, Arnstadt is the oldest town in Thuringia. Located on the edge
of the Thuringian Forest, it was, in Bach's time, a thriving trade center of
3800 inhabitants. The New Church--one of three--was built between 1676 and 1683
on the site of the ruin of St. Boniface's, a medieval edifice, which had been
destroyed by fire in 1581. It took sixteen years to raise enough money for the
organ, and the contract went to the renowned organ builder, Johann Friedrich
Wender of Mühlhausen. A modest instrument of two manuals and 21 stops, the
organ was completed in 1703. The young Bach, only eighteen years old, recently
graduated from St. Michael's in Lüneburg, and now in the employ of Duke
Johann Ernst of Weimar, was invited to Arnstadt to conduct the official organ
examination. He was also invited to perform the inaugural recital, which
perhaps served as an informal audition for the organist position, which he
would assume in August of that same year. What a feather in young Sebastian's
cap, and what a testimony to his knowledge of organbuilding and his
considerable keyboard skills. Christoph Wolff, in his biography of Bach, Johann
Sebastian Bach: The Learned Musician, writes: "For the first time in his
life, he [Bach] had free reign over a fine instrument with no technical
defects, a luxury most organists of the time could only dream of." Bach
remained in Arnstadt for three years--years which were extremely important to
his development as an organ virtuoso and composer. It is not without
significance that the new instrument was tuned in the "new"
well-tempered tuning system developed by Werckmeister. Bach's duties were
minimal and he had lots of time to practice on a fine new instrument and to
study all of the organ repertoire he could get his hands on. It was here that
he confused the congregation with his wild hymn improvisations, clashed with
the town authorities over his job description, and overstayed his leave when he
made his famous pilgrimage to Buxtehude in Lübeck.

Unfortunately, the organ has been the victim of many
modifications over the years, and aside from the case, very little of the
original instrument remains. However, in the year 2000, it was reconstructed by
Otto Hoffmann and returned to something close to the original design in time
for the Bach sesquicentennial. Today the church is known as the Bachkirche, and
it was indeed a thrill to stand in the nave of this historic place. The wooden
building is plain, but elegant, with double galleries on three sides. The organ
sits high in the third (west) gallery under the barrel-vaulted ceiling, with
small galleries on either side of the choir loft for instrumentalists. Since
there is no Rückpositiv, the organist at the console sits in plain view.
On a typical Sunday, Bach might have had a congregation of as many as 1500
worshipers. After the demonstration by organist Gottfried Preller, those who
wished were free to try the instrument for themselves. However, we had a
schedule to keep and could not tarry long.

Waltershausen

Back on the bus once more with our "Bach's"
lunches, our next stop was the Parish Church of Waltershausen. The church tower
dates back to the fifteenth century and has been rebuilt many times over the
centuries. Today only part of the original tower still remains. The foundation
stone for the church was laid by Frederich II in 1719, and the church was
dedicated in 1723.

Nothing about the exterior prepares the visitor for the
amazing sights and sounds which lie in store. To step inside the church is to travel
back in time and enter another dimension. I was struck, as I had been earlier
at the St. Georgenkirche in Rötha, by the otherworldly quality of the
light in the vastness of this splendid interior. I found it mesmerizing. One's
eyes are drawn upward past the eight vertical pillars to the remarkable fresco
on the ceiling, which gives the distinct impression of a rounded ceiling vault,
when indeed the ceiling is quite flat. There are double galleries like those we
had seen at Arnstadt, except that the Bachkirche has a relatively long and
narrow nave, whereas the nave here is much wider. The three boxes in the first
gallery at the rear were reserved for the duke, the judges and the residents of
Tenneberg Castle. I had the feeling that they might walk in and take their
seats at any moment. Beautiful artwork adorns the walls, and one could spend
hours taking it all in.

But we were here to see, hear and play the organ of three
manuals and 47 stops built by Heinrich Gottfried Trost between 1724 and 1730.
It was at that time that Trost left the project even though the organ remained
unfinished. It was not finally completed until 1753. By now it came as no
surprise to learn that the instrument had undergone considerable alteration and
modification during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The original
organ, as well as the church, has recently been restored. The organ sits high
above the altar and the pulpit in its elaborately carved case. Organist
Theophil Heinke demonstrated for us. Visually magnificent as the instrument is,
nothing had prepared us for the remarkable sound, which was quite unlike
anything I had ever heard. Colorful, bold and bright, the sound is never harsh
or shrill. The plenum is gutsy, with gravitas, but never overwhelming. The music
seemed to surround us with a clarity and presence ideal for the polyphony of
Bach. There is a preponderance of colorful 8' stops--wide flutes and narrow
strings--including an especially luscious doppel flute. On the other hand,
there are only two mixtures and relatively few and mild reeds. It is an
instrument far removed from the Werkprinzip and the ideals espoused by the
organ reform movement. Harald Vogel, in an article for the Westfield Center
Newsletter, has praised this very successful restoration for bringing us ever
closer in our ongoing search for the ideal Bach organ. In any case, it is
understandably the pride and joy of the people of Waltershausen. It was for me
perhaps the highpoint of the tour. It was hard to take our leave.

Erfurt

And then it was back on the bus and on to Erfurt Cathedral.
Erfurt is the largest city in Thuringia with a population today of 200,000. One
of the oldest cities in Germany, it was first mentioned by St. Boniface in the
eighth century. It was here, in the year 1501, that Martin Luther came to study
at the university and later took his monastic vows at the Augustinian
monastery. It was also here that Bach's father and mother were born. In fact,
during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, a whole dynasty of Bach musicians
flourished in and around the city of Erfurt.

Although archaeological evidence has been found of a
ninth-century church, construction 
on the Cathedral that stands today was not begun until the year 1153.
Over the centuries, many alterations and additions have been made, combining
both Romanesque and Gothic elements. Today the Cathedral is a treasure house of
religious art from the medieval, Romanesque and Renaissance periods. It is
arguably one of the most beautiful churches in all of Germany.

On this particular day, Saturday, April 26, we were not
certain exactly what to expect since only the day before, at the Gutenberg High
School, an expelled student had opened fire, killing eighteen people including
himself. What we found was a city in crisis--overwhelmed by shock and grief.
People had flocked to the cathedral in huge numbers, and crowds of people were
thronging the streets and the square. The entrance to the cathedral is high
atop a hill, approached by a huge, terraced flight of steps. The steps were
deeply flanked on either side by candles, flowers, messages and other mementos.
The cathedral was filled with mourners. Apparently a special mass had taken
place earlier. We were unable to climb up to the organ loft, and the organist,
Silvius von Kessel, was unable to play for us the organ demonstration he had
planned. There are two organs in the cathedral--a 1963 Schuke II/29, and a 1992
Schuke, III/63. Herr Kessel improvised for us on the larger, newer of the two
instruments, concluding with a very moving performance of the Bach O Mensch,
bewein. The improvisation was quite lovely and, by necessity, rather subdued. I
found myself pleasantly surprised by the rich principal sound and the warmth of
this modern instrument. I was seated near one of the side aisles, and the sight
of the grief-stricken, tear-stained faces of those young boys and girls as they
filed out of the church is a sight I will long remember.

By now our group was visibly drooping. It had been a very
long and full day, and our brief sojourn in the Cathedral had been emotionally
draining. But we had one more stop to make before our departure from Erfurt. A
cold and rainy walk through the congested streets brought us to the
Predigerkirche where we were to hear yet another Schuke (1978) instrument--a
rebuild of an 1899 instrument of 56 stops. The organ was demonstrated for us by
organist Matthias Dreissig. Johann Pachelbel had been organist here from
1678-90, and we were treated, among other things, to a lovely Pachelbel chorale
prelude on Vater Unser.

Back aboard our bus once more, we settled down for the drive
back to Eisenach, most of us more than ready for a quiet dinner and early bed.

Day Seven

We awakened to the pleasant prospect of a leisurely Sunday
morning. Our departure was not scheduled until late morning, and there was time
for a leisurely breakfast and a stroll around the Market Square with its
historic landmarks and picturesque half-timbered houses. Those who wished had
the option of attending the early service at the Georgenkirche where Bach was
baptized in 1685. The organ there today is a modern 1982 Schuke, III/60.

St. George Church

The parish church of St. George is an ancient structure
dating back to 1162 and rebuilt many times since. It has witnessed a lot of
history. It was here, in 1221, that Count Ludwig IV of Wartburg Castle was wed
to Elizabeth, daughter of Hungarian King Augustus II. When Count Ludwig died
six years later on his way to a crusade, the countess left the castle to
embrace a life of poverty and charity for which she was later canonized as St.
Elizabeth. As a boy, Martin Luther sang in the choir at St. George's and
studied in the Latin School, as did J. S. Bach nearly two hundred years later.
In 1521, Luther preached here twice on his way to and from the Diet of Worms.
Beginning with Johann Christoph Bach in 1665, all of the organists of St.
George's would be Bachs for the next 132 years!

Most of us know Eisenach as Bach's birthplace and St.
George's as the place he was baptized. But that was only the beginning. It was
here that the young Bach learned his trade, and learned it well from the ground
up. In 1671, Bach's father, Ambrosius, moved from Erfurt to Eisenach in order
to become the director of town music. What must it have been like for the young
Sebastian growing up in a large household surrounded by professional
musicians--family, assistants, and apprentices. The market square was the
center of all of this musical activity with regular and frequent performances
at the town hall, at the ducal court, and at the church. One can imagine the
young boy transporting, maintaining and repairing all manner of musical
instruments as he learned to perform on them as well. Collecting music and
copying scores and parts must also have been part of his duties. Bach's cousin,
Johann Christoph, organist of St. George's, was probably the most famous
musical Bach in Thuringia at that time. Renowned for his virtuosity and his
improvisational skills, he almost certainly must have given Bach his first
organ lessons. And what a role model to his young cousin Johann Christoph must
have been. The old organ had seen better days, and the young Bach must have
spent many hours inside the old organ helping with tuning and repairs as plans
for the new instrument, to be built by the local builder Stertzing, began to
take shape. By the time the actual construction of the organ was under way,
Bach was no longer living at home. But the influence of this firsthand
experience on Bach's knowledge of organbuilding and his ideas about organ
design can hardly be overestimated.

Mühlhausen

Much remained in Eisenach to explore and to reflect upon,
but we had promises to keep, and it was time to be on our way. Our first stop
would be at the Divi Blasii Church in Mühlhausen, the post for which Bach
left Arnstadt in 1707, remaining only one year before going on to Weimar. The
winding road from Eisenach to Mühlhausen took us through the lovely,
forested hills of the Thuringian countryside. We passed through small villages
nestled in green valleys with freshly tilled soil and flowering trees. The
ubiquitous half-timbered houses with their red-tiled roofs were becoming a
familiar sight. One descends down into Mühlhausen, population, 44,000--a
lively, commercial city that managed to survive WW II unscathed.

Mühlhausen was a free, imperial city, independent of
princely rule since the thirteenth century. Second only to Erfurt in size, it
too is a city of churches with at least thirteen spires gracing the skyline.
Some of the original fortifications and gates from the twelfth century still
remain and mark the boundaries of the original town. St. Blasius, with its twin
towers, is a compact, but elegant Gothic cathedral dating from the thirteenth
century. At the time of Bach's arrival it already had a distinguished tradition
of church music as well as an important music library, which must have been an
added incentive to the young Bach. It was a step up for him professionally in
every way, offering more income, more responsibility, and greater opportunities
than he had had at Arnstadt. The organ, built by Jost Pape of Göttingen,
dated from the mid-sixteenth century and had been extensively rebuilt and
enlarged (1687-1691) by Bach's old friend Friederich Wender, builder of the new
organ at Arnstadt. It was a fairly large two-manual instrument of 30 stops with
a Rückpositiv. Though it served Bach well, there were some defects--not so
surprising considering the fact that major parts of the instrument were almost
150 years old. Bach, accordingly, began to make imaginative plans for major
improvements and renovations. Bach submitted the plans for this ambitious
project when he was only six months into the job. That they were almost
immediately approved by the powers that be is a testimonial to how proud and
pleased the city and church officials were with their new organist. Bach, of
course, did not remain in Mühlhausen for the completion of the rebuilding
project, but the fact that his plans have survived has been an invaluable
source to scholars. It was a busy and successful year in every way for the
twenty-two-year-old Bach. Inspired by his visit to Buxtehude in Lübeck,
Bach took advantage of the new opportunities for vocal composition and enhanced
his rapidly growing reputation with some spectacular performances of large-scale
cantatas, at least one of which found its way into print. He and his new bride,
Maria Barbara, left Mühlhausen in 1708 very much appreciated and having
made many new friends.

The organ today is a modern instrument by Schuke of three
manuals and 40 stops built according to the original specification, which Bach
drew up for the church council back in 1708. Herr Sterchbarth was on hand to
demonstrate the instrument for us. Those who wished tried it for themselves,
and then it was back to the bus and our "Bach's" lunch, and on to our
next stop, the  "Bach"
organ in the Stadtkirche St. Marien in Bad Berka.

Bach Organ

In 1743, Heinrich Nicolaus Trebs, resident organ builder at
Weimar, built an organ for this church according to a specification created by
his good friend and colleague, Bach. Over the years the instrument has been
altered and rebuilt many times. The present instrument, which retains the
original case, was built in 1991 by Gerhard Böhm of Gotha. The intention
has been to restore the organ, in as much as possible, to its original
condition. The Gothic-style nave, though not large, has double galleries and a
tall, vaulted ceiling. The organ is a modest instrument of two manuals and 28
stops with a sound which I would describe as surprisingly sweet and gentle.
Bernd Müller played an interesting program for us designed, it would seem,
to demonstrate the organ's versatility. We heard music from many different
styles and periods--Gottfried Homilius to Gordon Balch Nevin and everything in
between, concluding with the Bach Toccata in D Minor. There was some open
console time for us, and then it was back to the bus and on to Weimar.

Weimar

Nestled in a scenic river valley, just over the hill from
Buchenwald where we had been only two days before, Weimar is a small, thriving,
industrial city of 60,000 people. Because of its rich intellectual and cultural
history, it possesses n abundance of monuments, museums and libraries and has
become a popular tourist mecca. The artistic and intellectual associations are
mind-boggling: Schütz, J. G. Walther, Cranach the Elder--and the Younger,
Goethe, Schiller, Liszt, Wagner, Nietzsche, Strauss, Brahms and--more
recently--Walter Gropius' Bauhaus movement. And so the list goes on. At one
time it was suggested that Goethe had made Weimar the literary capital of the
world.

But we had come to Weimar to pay homage to Bach. It was here
that Bach spent ten years of his life, fathered three famous sons--among other
offspring--composed thirty church cantatas, and created most of the great organ
works which we cherish. In Bach's day, Weimar had a population of around
5,000--at least a third of whom were in the employ of the ducal court. Of the
original buildings, only the tower and gate remain to remind us of earlier
times. The ducal castles have disappeared, including the chapel in which Bach
once worked. His house no longer stands, but the site--just off the market
place--has been marked by a commemorative tablet. In Weimar, it seems that Bach
has been upstaged by Goethe, whose presence continues to dominate the scene.

We were scheduled for a guided tour of the Liszt House
(every  celebrity except Bach seems
to have a "House" in Weimar). Since the Liszt house could only
accommodate half of us, there was time to stroll about a bit. The day was cold
and damp and dreary, and the city seemed strangely silent and subdued even for
a Sunday. We were not all that far from Erfurt, and perhaps that may have been
the reason. As the afternoon drew to a close, we gathered in the old market
square and split up into smaller groups to find dinner on our own. And then it
was back on the bus and on to Altenburg for the night. By the time we arrived,
it was well after dark, and most of us were more than ready to collect our
luggage and call it a day.

But Fate had other plans in store for our tired and somewhat
bedraggled little group. It would seem that somewhere in the land of
"tourdom," a communication glitch had occurred. Our small hotel had
been anxiously awaiting our arrival for nearly three hours. Extra staff had
been brought in, and an elaborate and sumptuous buffet had been prepared and
beautifully laid out for us. When our genial hosts learned that we had already
eaten in Weimar, the disappointment was quite palpable. We were all tired, and
no one could possibly have been hungry. I freshened up and returned to the
lobby to make a phone call home with absolutely no intention of having a second
supper. But by the time I had finished my call, the magic had begun, and people
were drifting back down and into the dining room. Who could resist?! A
misbegotten dinner was rapidly transforming itself into an impromptu party with
much mingling and good conversation all around. It struck me as being a bit
like the welcome "interval" at a long concert--time to relax, time to
process that which had already transpired, and time to gather a "second
wind" for the remainder of our adventure yet to come. Gemütlichkeit
prevailed, and by the end of the evening, I was already looking forward to
tomorrow.

This article will be continued.

Ennis Fruhauf holds Bachelor of Music and Master of Music degrees from the University of Michigan (1967, 1968), and a Doctor of Musical Arts degree from the University of Southern California (1973). He has held occasional church music positions, college and university teaching appointments, and is currently publisher, editor, music copyist, arranger, and composer for Fruhauf Music Publications (since 2004).

Ricercare (Ital.), “. . . ricercare is a verb, meaning to investigate, query, inquire, search out with diligence . . . testing the tuning, probing the key . . . .” (Johann Gottfried Walther, Musikalisches Lexikon, Leipzig, 1732);¹ and as a noun: “. . . Thus in Bach’s time it served almost exclusively for the title of a strict and, in its polyphonic texture, highly elaborate fugue.”²

Introduction

Ah, well, it is perhaps a tale to be retold yet once more, an instructive yarn well worth spinning anew, offered up here as an autumn fantasy, one with an exceedingly wry afterglow. The occasions and events in question took place some 300 years ago. And in spite of unexpected setbacks that overshadowed the final outcome, the adventure might after all be credited with having led to the creation of an unusual composition for organ, one that might otherwise have never come to light in the same context. 

The tale is of Johann Sebastian Bach’s trip to Dresden in the autumn of 1717, undertaken at the urging of the royal Saxon court chapel’s violinist-concertmaster, Jean-Baptiste Volumier. Bach was charged, in essence, with the mission of upholding the honor of his homeland’s keyboard music tradition against a figurative incursion launched by one of France’s eminent composers, Louis Marchand (1669–1732), Organiste du Roi. Marchand was on an extended leave from Paris at the time, touring Germany with a display of his keyboard and compositional talents, and currently seeking favor from the royal Dresden court. Bach also hoped to win favor and a remunerative purse, while at the same time pitting his skills against Marchand in an international venue. 

The composition in question is Bach’s legendary Pièce d’orgue (thus titled in more than one manuscript source), a three-section work, at the heart of which is a finely crafted extended fantasy for keyboard, presumably for pipe organ with pedals. It is a living time capsule—one of few words and many notes—that offers up a vibrant slice-of-life drawn from the travels of an adventurous composer in his early thirties, who was hard-pressed by circumstances on his home front, while also on a quest for recognition and honor abroad.

Bach’s arrival coincided with the day of Marchand’s tests, trials, and demonstrations. Concertmaster Volumier took the initiative of arranging for Bach to overhear portions of these recitals from a concealed vantage point. It has been recorded that by the end of his contest, Marchand had indeed won the day and would continue his sojourn victoriously, having received meritorious and remunerative recognitions.

What might have taken place in the course of the evening that followed is a subject for speculation, perhaps even for imagination. Is it possible that these two notable exemplars of Germanic and French keyboard artistry might have been able to escape the rigors of international diplomacy, that they might have found time to meet in one of the city’s spacious church sanctuaries, one where they might also find a pipe organ installation that would provide a viable proving ground for their dueling skills? Just imagine what could have been . . . .

A Fantasy  

(Extract from an anonymous personal diary, Journals, dated October/November, 1717)

. . . It was already past dusk when the two principal parties of the contest arrived at the door leading up to the organ loft. There were three of us surveying the scene from a distance, gathered together in a tight knot and hidden from view in the shadows of the front chapel. We recognized Concertmaster Wolumyer of Dresden as he entered, followed by Concertmaster Bach, who was accompanied by two of his Weimar students. The French King’s Organist-Composer, Louis Marchand, arrived soon after, in company with two attachés assigned to his visit. Apparently Bach was to launch the evening’s music-makings, and indeed, as we watched he turned to M. Marchand, greeted him cordially, withdrew a vellum music manuscript from his folio and held it out to his elder colleague. M. Marchand graciously received the score, opened it, and proceeded to peruse the contents. Although their conversing tones were lost in the acoustical ambiance of a lofty nave, it was apparent that Bach was to begin the evening’s music-making with his recrafted Pièce d’orgue, written and ornamented in the French manner. We would hear it now with the addition of two outer movements. 

As we watched, the trio from Weimar separated from the others, making their way up to the dimly candle-lit organ loft and taking their places at the console. Bach had been allowed time to familiarize himself with the instrument earlier in the day, and his two flanking assistants were well coached in advance. Soon enough the first notes of an arpeggiated tonic chord broke the silence, ever so light in touch and sounding out on clear stops: we heard a single line of dancing arpeggios and passaggios in a compound triple meter, falling and rising, rippling through the gamut of the keyboard. This was the newly added Très vitement, a sparkling warm-up exercise for the fingers, leading up to the five-voice Gravement. Contrary to the French tradition of a Grand plein jeu registration, tonight the Gravement began on one of the instrument’s gentlest registers. We heard a low tonic pedal note, then a G-major chord in the manuals, with the soprano tonic pitch suspended over to the first quarter-note of the next beat, and four descending scale notes in succession. This motivic pattern migrated from one voice to another, delicately ornamented internally, and at each successive cadential gesture. Also of note, at major cadences a new stop or set of stops would be added by the two flanking registrants. By shifting from one manual to another and progressively engaging manual and pedal couplers, a tightly imitative ricercar with a brief compound motif for a subject was being transformed into a majestic paean, echoing gloriously through the nave’s acoustical environment. This was Bach in his native setting, ‘testing the lungs’ of a church’s instrument as he had done from year to year in the course of his many investigative journeys. In the final line of the Gravement, we heard a new voice enter in the manuals, further intensifying the texture and leading up to an abruptly dramatic pause on an unresolved deceptive cadence. After a momentary silence, the Lentement resumed on foundation stops, beginning with arpeggiations of the Gravement’s closing chord, sounded over a bass line that descended step by chromatic step to an extended dominant pedalpoint and final closing cadence in G Major.

There was a stillness and silence that followed the last chords as they faded into the upper reaches of the nave. We sat quietly, awed and deeply moved by the music we had just heard and calmed by its lingering aura. Within moments it became evident that Bach was preparing registrations for his next selection. Even though we had been advised in advance that he would likely play one of his newest keyboard compositions, a single-movement fantasy in D minor for clavier, nothing could have prepared us for the intense drama that was to follow . . . . 

[End of Journals extract.]

Who could fathom what might or might not have transpired in the course of such an evening? If it had even taken place, who might possibly divine what Bach would have played, or what selections Marchand could have chosen from his repertoire. There is no indication that the two of them resorted to swordplay—whether improvising with epées, or instead on keyboards, each of them with assistants in alert attendance. Nor is there evidence to suggest that Marchand carried an inked copy of Bach’s Fantasy with him back to Paris and the royal library. And if fate had denied Bach an opportunity to perform his recently penned chromatic Fantasy in D Minor³ for Marchand at an organ console, it could well have been included in his harpsichord recitations on the following day.

Varied accounts of Bach’s letter of invitation addressed to Marchand in which he proposed a public contest indicate that the two of them were to meet at the private mansion of Count Joachim Friedrich Flemming for a public display of their musical prowess. Alas for Bach, his competitor—perhaps wisely—chose to bow out of the tentative commitment, traveling on to his next port of call in the early hours of the designated morning. In spite of Marchand’s unanticipated absence, the public hearing was to take place after all: Bach’s impressive solo performance on that day won him royal recognition as hoped, and his meeting with Count Flemming would prove invaluable in the coming years. Alas, his prize purse of 500 talers was waylaid in the course of its delivery. And in the event Bach had traveled to Dresden with a hand-copied score of the Fantasy in G in his possession, it rode back with its composer on the return trip. More importantly though, a doorway had been opened that would offer future return visits, valuable musical associations, activities, and honors.

Discussion

Could it be that the middle movement of the Fantasy, as we know it today, might have evolved from on-the-spot improvisations performed on some of the various church organs Bach visited in his many travels? Could the music of an earlier version of the mid-section have offered an idealized means of “testing the lungs of an instrument”—a ricercare, or a seeking-out—by starting with quiet stops and gradually adding registers at subsequent cadential breaks and convenient moments? It is easy enough to imagine that a far more sophisticated end product, impeccably written in five- and six-voice tightly imitative counterpoint in the manner of a classic ricercata, was eventually honed for solemn occasions and processionals and found its way to ink and paper. An earlier manuscript of the central movement, one with French markings and an abbreviated ending, is cited as a possible compositional byproduct of Bach’s exposure to French keyboard music studied and copied in Weimar’s music library.⁴ Could Bach have added the improvisatorial framing introduction and closing sections (with their French titles) at a later date, in anticipation of his supposed meeting with Marchand? 

The Gravement is written in common meter with alla breve note values (i.e., two half-notes per measure). The quasi-motivic subject that serves to generate 157 measures of tightly knit counterpoint is generically no more or less than a suspended quarter- or half-note, followed by four descending pitches, the two units serving interchangeably as a head and a tail. It is freely imitated in tight succession, as well as in multiple paired overlapping entries. A secondary structural event can be found in the fantasy’s numerous staircase-like scalar progressions of whole-note pitches in the pedal line, employed with dramatically telling effect.⁵ Overall, the Gravement is neither fugue nor fancy, rather it is a one-of-a-kind ricercar-like construction, albeit perhaps an imitative fantasy, but one that is uniquely imbued with un esprit français.

There are additional elements throughout all three movements that hint strongly at Bach’s emulation of a classical hexachord fantasy, a formalized contrapuntal structure emanating from sixteenth-century practices. Hexachordal elements are present freely in the six-note groupings of the Très vitement’s compound meter,⁶ in the six diatonically related keys traversed in the course of the Gravement’s tonal excursions, and finally in the hexachordal arpeggiations of the Lentement.⁷ It is worth noting that the title, Fantasy, would appear to have been applied by cataloguers of subsequent generations, but not by the composer. Above and beyond formalized or traditional concepts, and viewed as a single entity, Bach’s storied BWV 572 is in essence a grand tone poem, a broadly proportioned triptych of three contrasting sections—two linear outer panels framing an impeccably woven central tapestry. 

Coda

In support of a progressive registrational plan for the Gravement, there are numerous authentic and half cadences throughout the contrapuntally textured movement that facilitate the addition of stops and couplers, or shifts from one manual to another.⁸

There is the anomalous presence of a low pedal B-natural (measure 66), a note not normally found on Germanic pedalboards but occasionally present in French manual and/or pedal dispositions. While such an insignificant deviation could easily be glossed over, it is cited here in support of a Francophile leaning and interpretation, one that is already abundantly apparent in the French titles of the opus and its individual movements. 

There is also the matter of a quasi-legendary pedagogical lineage to be considered in the course of these closing words. A multi-generational succession of teachers—one of many that can be traced from Bach into the 20th century—extends from a late Leipzig organ student, Johann Christian Kittel (1732–1809, Erfurt), through Christian Heinrich Rinck (1770–1846, Darmstadt), to Adolph Friedrich Hesse (1809–1863, Breslau); and from Hesse continuing through Jacques Nicolas Lemmens (1823–1881, Belgium, Paris), to Alexandre Guilmant (1837–1911, Paris), and to Charles-Marie Widor (1844–1937, Paris); passed on in turn by Guilmant and Widor to Marcel Dupré (1886–1971, Paris). Notable from Dupré—and relevant to this discussion—is his recorded version of the Fantasy, registered and performed in an accumulative and glorious manner on the Cavaillé-Coll instrument of St. Sulpice, Paris, during his tenure as titular organist.⁹

And now, to end this autumn reverie of what-ifs—much in the same manner as it began—on an inquisitive note: Is it possble that the tradition of a broadly romantic and accumulative interpretation could have been passed on and survived intact in its passage through such a fragile and tenuous teaching tradition, spanning over six generations from 1750 to the latter twentieth century, and onward?

Notes

1. Johann Sebastian Bach, The Learned Musician, Christoph Wolff (W. W. Norton & Company, 2001), p. 330. 

2. Ibid., p. 329.

3. Eventually Fantasy in D Minor, S. 903 (without Fugue).

4. Notably Nicolas de Grigny’s Livre d’orgue (1699, Paris, reissued 1711), Bach’s hand copy dating from ca. 1713.

5. See Example 2.

6. See Example 1.

7. See Example 5.

8. See  Examples 3 and 4.

9. See http://www.marceldupre.com/ CD: Mercury Living Presence recording of Marcel Dupré: Bach (Six Schübler Chorales, Fantasy in C Minor, Fantasy in G Major) Saint-Sulpice, 1959, available in CD reissues.

A Selected Bibliography

David, Hans T., and Arthur Mendel, ed. The Bach Reader, A Life of Johann Sebastian Bach in Letters and Documents. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1945, 1966.

_____________. The New Bach Reader, A Life of Johann Sebastian Bach in Letters and Documents, revised and expanded by Christoph Wolff. New York & London: W. W. Norton & Company, 1998.

Gaines, James R. Evening in the Palace of Reason. New York: Fourth Estate, Harper Collins Publishers, 2005.

Gardiner, John Eliot. Bach, Music in the Castle of Heaven. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2013.

Geiringer, Karl. Johann Sebastian Bach, The Culmination of an Era. New York: Oxford University Press, 1966.

Griepenkerl, Friedrich Conrad, and Ferdinand Roitzsch, ed. Johann Sebastian Bach, Orgelwerke, Vol. IV. New York: C. F. Peters Corporation, 1950.

Widor, Charles-Marie, and Albert Schweitzer, ed. Johann Sebastian Bach, Complete Organ Works, Vol. III. New York: G. Schirmer, Inc., 1913.

Wolff, Christoph. Bach, Essays on His Life and Music. Cambridge (MA) & London: Harvard University Press, 1993.

____________. Johann Sebastian Bach, The Learned Musician. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2001.

An apologia and acknowledgements

In order to provide a degree of continuity and to avoid undue interruptions in the flow of the text, end notes have been kept to a minimum. All details and factual accountings have been extracted from the sources cited above; they are often repeated in more than one source, sometimes with degrees of variation that have required editorial pruning. The Journal entry is a fictitious creation, a work of imagination. In his Evening in the Palace of Reason, James R. Gaines offers an exemplary format for overlapping multiple perspectives and layers of narration, and for combining recorded facts with speculative premises and intuitions to produce an animated account of historical events. His model has provided a structural guidepost for the essay featured here, offered informally as an example of speculative musicology. There are sure to be lacunae great and small in these words, for which all due apologies are offered.

Renate McLaughlin has had a lifelong interest in organ music. She retired from a career as mathematics professor and university administrator in order to study music. She is now a senior, majoring in organ performance, and is looking forward to graduate school next fall.

Introduction

Religious conflicts brought about the Thirty Years War (1618–1648), which devastated Germany. Reconstruction took at least one hundred years,1 encompassing the entire lifetime of J. S. Bach. The Treaty of Westphalia (1648), which ended the war, gave each sovereign of the over 300 principalities, which make up modern Germany, the right to determine the religion of the area under his (yes, they were all male) control. This resulted in a cultural competition among the numerous sovereigns, and it also led to the importing of French culture and its imitation (recall that Louis XIV, the “Sun King,” reigned from 1643 to 1715). Bach encountered French language, music, dance, and theater throughout his formative years. In the cities where Bach lived, he would have heard frequent performances of minuets, gavottes, courantes, sarabandes, etc.2
Christoph Wolff has provided additional evidence for Bach’s acquaintance with French music and French customs. In connection with the famous competition between J. S. Bach and Louis Marchand, scheduled to take place in Dresden in 1717, Wolff wrote that Bach would most likely have won the contest.3 Bach knew thoroughly the stylistic idioms of the French keyboard repertoire; and his own keyboard suites integrated genuine French elements from the very beginning. He consistently applied French terminology, but he also blended in Italian concerto elements (example: the prelude to BWV 808). Further, he incorporated polyphonic writing and fugal textures, especially for the concluding gigues. As we know, this highly anticipated contest with Marchand never took place, since Marchand unexpectedly and secretly left Dresden.

J. S. Bach’s life—a short version4

The towns where Johann Sebastian Bach lived and his key roles there can be summarized as follows. The context provided by this list is important, because Bach wrote the English and French suites fairly early in his career.
Eisenach: born March 21, 1685
Ohrdruf: 1695–1700, stayed with older brother
Lüneburg: 1700–1702, Choral Scholar
Arnstadt: 1703–1707, Organist (New Church)
Mühlhausen: 1707–1708, Organist and Town Musician (St. Blasius)
Weimar: 1708–1717, Ducal Court Organist and chamber musician, then Concertmaster
Cöthen: 1717–1723, Capellmeister for Prince Leopold
Leipzig: 1723–1750, Cantor and Director Musices (the dual title reflects the split in the town council of Leipzig)
Leipzig: died July 28, 1750

The keyboard music (other than organ music) by J. S. Bach

Bach wrote most of his music for keyboard (clavichord and harpsichord) during his years in Cöthen (1717–1723).5 He served the court as Capellmeister and director of chamber music (the highest social standing during his entire career!). An elite group of professional musicians stood at his disposal,6 and his duties focused on secular chamber music. Since the court belonged to the reformed church, Bach’s employer expected neither liturgical music nor organ music. It is clear from the prefaces that Bach wrote his keyboard works for didactic purposes—for members of his family and for his students. Additional evidence for this is that the Clavierbüchlein for Friedemann (1720) and the Clavierbüchlein for Anna Magdalena (1722) include material from the suites, but in rudimentary form and not in a systematic order.7
Howard Schott also noted that the French Suites (BWV 812–817) and the English Suites (BWV 806–811) belonged to the domestic musical repertoire of the Bach family.8 He continued with the assertion that the English suites are more Gallic in style and feeling than their French brethren. To mix things up a bit more, the preludes in the English suites are in Italian concerto-grosso style.9
On December 3, 1721, shortly after her wedding as Bach’s second wife, Anna Magdalena Bach started a notebook of keyboard compositions.10 She recorded the title page and a few headings, but Bach himself wrote the musical entries. They included five short but sophisticated harpsichord suites, which would later become the French Suites, BWV 812–816.
The undisputed surviving harpsichord and clavichord works written during the Cöthen years are:11
Clavier Book for Wilhelm Friedemann
Clavier Book for Anna Magdalena
The Well-Tempered Clavier
15 Inventions
15 Sinfonias.
Further evidence that J. S. Bach wrote the keyboard pieces listed above, as well as the French and English suites, as pedagogical pieces for his family and his students (and not to gain favor with particular members of the royalty) was provided by one of Bach’s students, H. N. Gerber. Gerber studied with Bach in Leipzig and left an account of Bach as a keyboard teacher. According to Gerber, keyboard students started with the Inventions and the French and English suites, and they concluded with the 48 preludes and fugues in the Well-Tempered Clavier.12
Current scholarship indicates that the English Suites were composed in Bach’s Weimar years (1708–1717), and the French Suites were composed later, during his years in Cöthen.13

French Suites and English Suites

In the Baroque era, a suite consisted of a collection of dance tunes linked by the same key and often with some common thematic material. Concerning the origin of the suite, Bach scholar Albert Schweitzer believed that the dance suite was created by wandering musicians in the early 17th century who strung together music from different countries. Town pipers adopted this music and played sets with at least four movements: the allemande (German origin), courante (French origin), sarabande (Spanish origin), and gigue (English origin). Keyboard players adopted these dance suites from the pipers and developed the suites further.14
Bach brought the suite to its peak by giving each movement a musical identity and personality.15 Each of the six English suites and six French suites includes the expected allemande, courante, sarabande, and gigue. (Details on the courante are discussed later in this article.) Each English suite begins with a prelude, which is followed by an allemande. Each French suite begins with an allemande. Each suite, English and French, ends with a gigue. Some movements in some of the English suites have doubles written out—these are the ornamented versions that a Baroque performer would have played on the repeats.
It is interesting to observe how our knowledge about J. S. Bach’s suites has increased in recent years by comparing what has been written about them at different times. The following comments, listed in chronological order, start with wild guesses and uncertainty and end with reasonable certainty about what we must currently regard as the truth.
(1) Writing in 1950, Alfred Kreutz, the editor of the English Suites for C. F. Peters Corporation, followed Forkel in asserting that the English Suites were written for a noble Englishman. But he also conceded that if the English Suites had been commissioned, we should be able to find some trace of this. He then mused that the English Suites might vaguely follow some musical work published in England, and he listed works by Purcell, Händel, and Dieupart as candidates.16
(2) Writing in 1954, Bach scholar Albert Schweitzer stated that both the English and the French suites were composed during Bach’s years in Cöthen.17
(3) In 1957, Rudolf Steglich, in his preface to the Henle edition of the English Suites, wrote that Bach referred to these suites as “suites avec préludes.”18 The notation, “faites pour les Anglois,” first appeared in a copy of these suites belonging to Johann Christian Bach, the “London Bach.”19 In the same preface, Steglich stated that the English Suites are more in the style of the young Bach than the “more elegant” French Suites.20 No autographs have survived.
(4) In 1972, the same Rudolf Steglich claimed in his preface to the Henle edition of the French Suites that these suites were written in Cöthen,21 and that the name “French Suites” was attached later. Many copies of the suites (but no autograph) have survived, attesting to the importance of these suites in students’ progress from the Inventions to the Well-Tempered Clavier.
(5) Writing in 2000, Christoph Wolff stated as a fact that the “so-called” English Suites originated in Bach’s later Weimar years,22 and that Bach himself used the perhaps more accurate name “suites avec préludes.” Wolff also asserts that the French Suites were written during Bach’s years in Cöthen.23
So by the 1970s, we appear to have figured out the background of Bach’s English and French suites, in spite of Fuller’s comment that discussion about why twelve of Bach’s suites are called English and French suites will continue for as long as these suites themselves are discussed.24
In total, Bach composed about 45 suites.25 Neither the six French Suites nor the six English Suites were published during Bach’s lifetime, but they were copied by hand by students and music lovers. Generally, only compositions likely to increase Bach’s stature as a virtuoso were published,26 due to the high cost of publication. Handwritten copies of both the French Suites and the English Suites go back to Bach’s early years in Leipzig.27
Manfred Bukofzer devoted an entire chapter in his book, Music in the Baroque Era, to develop the thesis that Bach fused national styles.28 He noted that the titles “English” suites and “French” suites are misleading (as well as not authentic):29 the suites were no longer tied to dance music, and only a skeleton of rhythmic patterns had survived. They had become abstract art music. (By the way, Bukofzer claimed that both sets of suites belong to the Cöthen period, and that on stylistic grounds, the English Suites were composed first.30)
Bukofzer stated that “in the French suites Italian, French, and German styles no longer stand side by side but wholly merge with Bach’s personal style.”31 He also observed that the melodic character of the dances in the French Suites leans toward the Italian style.

A surprise about the courante

Anthony Newman’s book on Bach and the Baroque includes a chapter entitled Dance Music, which incorporates a section on the courante.32 He explains that there are two types of courante in Baroque instrumental music: the corrente of Italian origin and the courante of French origin. The corrente is a quick dance in triple meter, usually 3/8; the courante is a slower dance, described as solemn and majestic, often in 3/2 meter. As a ballroom dance, the minuet replaced the courante by 1660.33 But because of its “rhythmic grace and complexity,” the courante remained popular in instrumental music throughout the Baroque period. Newman considered the courante as the most subtle and complex member of the dance suite. He also pointed out that both the courante and the corrente are often labeled as courante. [See Figures 1 and 2.]
Philipp Spitta also commented on the two styles of courante. He counted Bach’s French Suites and English Suites among Bach’s most important works.34 According to Spitta, the Italian form of the courante (i.e., the corrente) would normally have been replaced by the French form, except that it was too firmly settled to be driven out—“thus there existed side by side two utterly different types [of courante]. It would be well to distinguish once and for all between the corrente and the courante.”35
Webster’s New World Dictionary of Music defines the courante as a stately and courtly old French dance in triple meter, of moderate tempo and with much melodic ornamentation.36 The corrente is defined as an Italian variant of the French courante, with a faster tempo and less florid ornamentation.37 Typically, a courante is notated in 3/2 meter with a tendency to hemiolas that combine 6/4 and 3/2 accent patterns. It also tends toward polyphony. In contrast, a corrente uses a fast triple meter (3/4 or 3/8) and is generally homophonic.38
Four of Bach’s French Suites include correntes (labeled as courantes). They are small masterpieces with more balance and a more obvious sense of continuity than the correntes in the suites for solo violin or solo cello.39 Most have a slow harmonic movement, implying a fast tempo. All of Bach’s English Suites include French courantes.40 All of Bach’s French courantes possess a time signature of 3/2, except for the one in BWV 814 (French Suite III), where the time signature is 6/4.41
In Grove, Little and Cusick state flatly that “many of Bach’s ‘courante’ movements are actually correntes.”42 The mix-up between courantes and correntes may have been caused by early editors. It is interesting that Bach did not use the courante as a basis for works outside the realm of suites: we know of no courante arias or choruses in his other compositions.43
How much our knowledge of performance practices and the history of our music has increased in recent years is made evident in Frederick Dorian’s section on the courante.44 His book was published in 1942 and includes a preface by Eugene Ormandy. In the book, Dorian cited the conflicting descriptions for the courante. For example, Shakespeare called it “swift” and Quantz called it “pompous.” But Dorian ascribed the different descriptions to the development of the courante over time. He gave no hint that there might have been two national styles (Italian and French) that co-existed. Instead, he merely attributed the two different time signatures for courantes/correntes to lighter or heavier accents and considered 80 beats per minute as an appropriate tempo for both types.

Performance considerations

Anthony Newman wrote45 that with only notes on a page, it is almost impossible for a performer to “give the proper energy to the music.” Performers who played under composers who insisted that their music should be played exactly as written report that in actuality the composers did not follow their own instructions (Newman cites Stravinsky as an example).
In the space of less than half a page and without a comment, Fritz Rothschild quoted conflicting sources, which stated that the courante should be played quickly and that it should be played “seriously” [Der Couranten-Tact ist der allerernsthaffsteste [sic] den man finden kann].46 In addition, he gave several musical examples where he marked the locations of the beats in the score47 and clearly did not distinguish a corrente from a courante, indicating a slow tempo for the corrente!
Robert Donington48 observed that while normally in suites the title of a piece is a good indication of how the music should be played, this is not the case with the courante, since the Italian form (quick and “running” character) often is found with the French (solemn character) name.
Little concrete information is available about the tempo at which a courante should be played. All we know for sure is that some courantes are faster than others:49 François Couperin wrote courantes with the tempo notations “noblement,” “un peu plus viste,” “un peu plus gayement;” Nicholas-Antoine Lebègue wrote a “courante grave” followed by a “courante gaye”—all in the French style.
In the courante, notes inégales, when appropriate, are on the 8th-note level.50 According to Little and Jenne, notes inégales may be appropriate in Courante I in the English Suite in A Major (BWV 806).51 [However, I have never heard anyone perform a courante using notes inégales.]
Concerning performance of the courante, Rudolf Steglich, the editor of the Henle edition of the French Suites, paraphrased Mattheson (Bach’s contemporary in Hamburg) and J. G. Walther (Bach’s cousin and author of a musical encyclopedia). Steglich stated that the courante was originally a French ballroom dance “but now (under Italian influence) is a dance tune either in graceful, lightly flowing 3/4 time, or in an equally lilting yet ‘extremely serious’ rhythm. . . .
There is always something pleasing and delightful about it.” He did not mention the fact that the French Suites include both courantes and correntes, which require rather different interpretation!
Questions about ornamentation impact the interpretation of music. Unfortunately, there is no consistency in the surviving copies of the French and English suites, since at Bach’s time the notation for ornaments was not systematized in detail.52
Rudolf Steglich wrote about the courantes in the last three English Suites that they are to be played in flowing movements of three half-notes (not six quarter-notes), and that the change of rhythm to two-part time at the close of the sections is to be observed.53
Alfred Kreutz, editor of the English Suites for Peters Verlag, wrote that he deliberately gave no indications of tempo or dynamics, since this could only be done subjectively due to a lack of sources.54
It appears that the best we can do is to learn as much as we can about Bach’s suites, and the courantes in particular, but then rely on our musical taste, the particular instrument, and the acoustics of the room to do justice to the compositions.

Conclusion

We can accept as a fact that Baroque movements labeled as courante fall into two different categories: the swift corrente of Italian origin with running figuration and slow harmonic motion, and the complex and slower courante of French origin. Exactly how each is performed depends on the knowledge and good taste of the performer. 

Other articles of interest:

Registration and Sonority in J. S. Bach's Continuo Practice

Dear Harpsichordists: Why Don't We Play from Memory

Bach's English Suites in score

Jeffrey K. Chase is a practicing attorney in Ann Arbor, Michigan, with a concentration in the area of estate planning. He is a member of the bar of the United States Supreme Court. Prior to becoming an attorney, he earned a bachelor’s degree in music literature and a master’s degree in musicology. He has been a published feature writer and music critic for The Michigan Daily and The Detroit Free Press and has also written for High Fidelity magazine. Currently he also reviews classical music compact discs for All Music Guide, an online music reference source.

What a special trip the Marilyn Mason University of Michigan Historic Organ Tour 54 this past July 9–22 was, tracing the cities and churches limning the lives and careers of J. S. Bach and Buxtehude and, among others, the organ builders Silbermann, Schnitger, Trost and Marcussen! Entitled “In the Footsteps of Bach and Buxtehude,” it included visits to historic organs in Mühlhausen, Weimar, Eisenach, Arnstadt, Altenburg, Frauenstein, Freiberg, Dresden, Leipzig, Wittenberg, Hamburg, Lübeck, Århus, Odense and Copenhagen. Much was learned and experienced by its fortunate participants.
After arriving in Frankfurt at approximately 7:30 a.m. and after having collected all of the participants flying in from various locations, we boarded a beautiful, very modern bus to commence our journey of exploration.

Mühlhausen, Weimar, Eisenach, and Arnstadt
Our first stop was at St. Blasiuskirche in Mühlhausen, where Bach had worked from 1707–1708 (this year being the 300th anniversary of Bach’s arrival there from Arnstadt). While there, Bach submitted plans for rebuilding the organ.This organ, however, was replaced in the 19th century with a new instrument. But turnabout is fair play, and from 1956–1958 the 19th-century organ was removed; the Alexander Schuke company built a new organ based upon Bach’s plans, but with the addition of five new registers to support the performance of modern organ literature. The casework of this Schuke organ exemplifies the industrial style of the former East German regime and its banal aesthetic.
Then on to Weimar where Bach spent ten years as a musician to the Grand Duke; where Bach was imprisoned in 1716 for requesting to resign from his position to take another; and where, in 1717, Bach was first mentioned in print, being called “the famous Weimar organist.” After checking into the outstanding Elephant Hotel, next door to the building in which Bach lived from 1708–1717 and where his sons Wilhelm Friedemann and Carl Philip Emmanuel were born, we took a short stroll in the rain to visit the Parish Church of Sts. Peter and Paul, where, beginning in 1707, Bach’s relative and colleague Johann Gottfried Walther was organist.
Early the next morning we boarded the bus and departed for Eisenach, where J. S. Bach was born on March 21, 1685. He was baptized at St. George’s Church, where Luther had sung in the choir and had also preached. That baptismal font, which has a pedestal carved like a wooden basket, is still in use today. At that church, located on the Market Square (that day it was market day), we were treated to an organ recital (well attended by the public) performed by the young Denny Philipp Wilke, an organist from Nürnberg, who studied with Latry and van Oosten. Wilke performed Bach’s Prelude and Fugue in D, the Scherzo from Vierne’s Organ Symphony No. 2 and the Franck A-minor Choral on the 1982 Schuke of Potsdam organ. This fall Wilke was scheduled to record a recently discovered transcription by Dupré of Liszt’s Ad nos, ad salutarem undam.
After lunch we visited the Bach Museum (Bach’s birth house), where we heard a talk describing and demonstrating two small period organs, a spinet, a clavicembalo and a clavichord, and in which a crystal drinking cup, the only item remaining from the Bach household, is displayed. One of the rooms is set up as Bach’s composition room in Leipzig presumed to have looked.
Then back in the air-conditioned bus for a drive to Arnstadt to visit St. Boniface Church, containing a 1703 Wender organ (reconstructed by Hoffmann in 1999) on the fourth level. It was to test this organ that Bach came to Arnstadt in 1703. He was so appreciated that he was hired as organist and remained employed here until 1707, when he took his 200-mile walk to Lübeck to hear and learn from Buxtehude, a trip that resulted in his dismissal and move to Mühlhausen. Marilyn Mason’s friend Gottfried Praller demonstrated this Wender/Hoffmann instrument with performances of Buxtehude’s Ciaconne in d and Bach’s Fugue in d. On the third level of this church, now referred to as the Bachkirche, is a 1913 Steinmeyer organ, also reconstructed by Hoffmann in 1999.
Our last stop in Arnstadt was the nearby New Bach Museum containing, inter alia, the console Bach played upon in St. Boniface and some historic holographic music manuscripts.

Altenburg, Frauenstein, and Dresden
The next day, after breakfast, we departed for Dresden, but with two intermediary stops. The first was in Altenburg to view and play the 1735–1739 Tobias Heinrich Trost (1673–1759) organ in the castle church (“One of the great organs of the world,” says Marilyn Mason). Bach played this organ in September 1738 or 1739 and again in October 1739, when Bach’s pupil Krebs was the organist, as he was for the last 25 years of his life. This fine organ was also played by Weber, Liszt, Agricola and Schütz. Today Felix Friedrich, who has edited and published several volumes of Krebs’s work, is the organist. Altenburg is known as the playing card capital of the world, because playing cards are made here, and the castle museum contains an interesting collection of both old and new cards.
The second stop was in Frauenstein, the birth city of the revered organ builder Gottfried Silbermann (1683–1753) and the site where Werner Mueller established the Gottfried Silbermann Museum, which contains, among other things, a reproduction of a one-manual, no-pedal organ in Bremen, and upon which we each shared playing a theme and variations by Pachelbel on Was Gott thut, das ist wohlgetan. While there, we learned that the property has recently been sold to developers, so most likely the museum will be removed to another building.
Now in Dresden, we visited the Dom or Hofkirche (the Dom was the main church in a town) containing a 1755 Silbermann organ, his largest and last, with three manuals and 47 registers, and which was last restored by Jehmlich in 1971. Then we walked past the porcelain mural of the kings of Saxony on the street leading to the Frauenkirche, which, however, we could not visit due to the late time of day. So on to a fine dinner at one of the outside restaurants.

Freiberg, Leipzig, Rötha, and Stürmthal
The next day we traveled to Leipzig via Freiberg to visit Silbermann’s Opus 2 (1714) with three manuals and 44 registers and last restored by Jehmlich in 1983. We also visited the Jakobikirche, just outside the old city wall, where we played a two-manual Silbermann. This church is an old, very plain building but with an active congregation. The priest, rather than an organist, let us in and explained that the congregation can’t afford an organist. Can you imagine: a church with an historic Silbermann organ and no organist! Any volunteers?
In Leipzig we lunched on the Nikolaistraße before entering the Nikolaikirche, whose congregation was a leader in the democratic movement before the fall of the Berlin Wall. This church has a very ornate interior decorated with sharp pointed simulated foliage. We played an 1862 five-manual Ladegast organ reworked over the years by Sauer and by Eule. Currently part of its electronic stop action is by Porsche, whose name is prominently displayed on the beautiful wood of its art deco-like console. From the Nikolaikirche it was a short walk to the legendary Thomaskirche, originally part of a 13th-century monastery and the other main city church, and the one at which J. S. Bach was cantor from 1723 until his death in 1750 and with which he is most closely associated. Because this church is such a tourist attraction, all we could do was look around; the organ here is not a relic of the days of Bach’s tenure, but an 1889 Wilhelm Sauer instrument last restored in 1993. It is here that Bach is buried.
No University of Michigan organ tour to this area would be complete without a stop in Rötha to view the 1721 G. Silbermann organ in the Georgenkirche, because this instrument was chosen by Charles Fisk and Marilyn Mason as the model for what is now known as the “Marilyn Mason Organ” in the University of Michigan School of Music, Theatre and Dance—Fisk and Mason thought it, of all known G. Silbermann organs, best suited to the U-M space.
Next, an unscheduled visit to Stürmthal to tour a country church, where a funeral was in progress. Zacharias Hildebrandt (1688–1757), a protégé of G. Silbermann, built this organ, a one-manual with pedal, but got into trouble with Silbermann because of Silbermann’s perceived competition. Hildebrandt invited Bach to play this bright, high-pitched instrument and Bach wrote Cantata 194 for Hildebrandt.

Wittenberg, Lüneburg, Hamburg, and Neuenfelde
The next day, Saturday, began with a long drive to Hamburg with a first stop along the way in Wittenberg, birthplace of the Lutheran Reformation, to visit the revered Martin Luther sites. We did not play the organ in the castle church, another major tourist attraction and which now has Luther’s 95 statements immortalized in bronze on its doors (the doors upon which Luther nailed his 95 Theses on 31 October 1517 have long since been replaced).
The second stop on the Hamburg journey was in Lüneburg to visit the Michaeliskirche, where Bach had matriculated in the choir school. This triple-naved, Gothic, red-brick hall church with drastically leaning pillars contains an organ with a typical North German case and with pipes from many eras. This was originally the church for a Benedictine monastery, and thus the private church and sepulchral vaults for the reigning families of the Billungs and Guelphs. Tobias Gravenhorst is the current choirmaster. The organ here consists of an old case with new contents last reworked in 1999–2000 by Sauer, which used to be a large firm but now is only a small company. One might speculate whether Bach, as a young boy in the choir school gazing up at the organ case, got the idea of putting “Soli Deo Gloria” at the end of his compositions from the “Soli Deo Gloria” inscription at the top of the organ case. Sunday mornings are, of course, the time when churches are fulfilling their main function as houses of worship for their congregations, so for us Sunday morning is free time.
Sunday afternoon we visited the famous Jakobikirche in Hamburg, where we were hosted by a friendly female organist who knows English well. Reinken was on the city committee in 1693 when the organ was built by Arp Schnitger. Reinken didn’t want this church’s organ to have a 32′ stop because he wanted his church to be the only one in town to have a 32′ stop, but Schnitger foiled him by building two 32′s—a Principal and a Posaune. Bach applied for the organ post here in 1720, but he would have had to pay a fee to get the job. Instead a wealthy man with the money to pay (bribe!) was hired.
This was the organ whose pipes were removed to safe storage during WWII, thus saving this organ when the church and loft were subsequently destroyed. This Schnitger organ, which used to hang higher on the wall, was eventually restored by Jürgen Ahrend in 1950 and again in 1993. It was Schnitger’s habit to reuse pipes, so pipes from the 1500s were incorporated by Schnitger. (This in contrast to Silbermann, who used only new material.) Its temperament is between meantone and Werckmeister III (modified meantone). The faces of its donors are immortalized on the original stopknobs of the original console, which is displayed on a balcony but is not part of the currently functioning instrument. Albert Schweitzer has played this organ, and Marilyn Mason has proclaimed it one of the great organs of the world.
We also visited the Michaeliskirche in Hamburg, the main city church, a rococo room with curved balconies. The gallery organ was built from 1909–1912 by E. F. Walcker of Ludwigsburg. With its five manuals and 163 stops, for a time it was the largest organ in the world. We played music including French pieces that work well on it. The restored organ in the side gallery we did not play, nor did we play a small organ in the choir space. There were many visitors coming and going in this church.
St. Pankratius, a small church with a rural setting in Neuenfelde, is the burial place of Arp Schnitger (1648–1719) and was his home church for a number of years. He built this high baroque-style, two-manual, 34-stop organ for this church in 1688 and the bulletin board invites people to worship on Sunday to the accompaniment of the Schnitger organ.

Lübeck
On Monday, our last day in Germany, we journeyed to Lübeck, the first German city bombed in World War II (in response to the Germans’ bombing of Coventry, England), where we visited four important churches. The first was the Marienkirche, where Ernst-Erich Stender, organist, was our host. This is the church where Buxtehude had worked from 1668 to 1707. Its historic Schnitger organ and the Totentanz organ (named after a painting in the church) were destroyed by bombs in 1942.
The Domkirche, founded by Henry the Lion in 1173, today makes modern use of space. Its Romanesque towers survived the war, but its Gothic portions fell. Its contemporary (1960) stained glass window in the west end is especially beautiful. The 1699 Schnitger organ, originally built here but burned during the war, had been played by Handel, Mendelssohn and Mattheson. A 1970 Marcussen instrument now sits on the north wall. There are raised auditorium seats on the west end where the organ used to be and a small positiv organ is in the choir space. Here also is a charming Baggio di Rosa 1777 Italian one-manual portative organ with pull-down pedals and a bird stop, which has been restored by Ahrend in the Netherlands.
The design of the 13th-century Aegidiankirche is unusual because its pews face the preacher and not the altar. It has a choir screen from the Renaissance with eight panels depicting the life of Christ. Its original organ dated from 1629 and was built by Scherer of Hamburg. The case, not in baroque style, but with small, refined details suggestive of earlier times, was created by a famous Lübecker carver. This is one of the few organs built during the Thirty Years War, in which the independent northern German cities were not obliged to fight. Now, the old cabinetry with its intricate light and dark inlaid wood figures is more interesting than the 1992 Klais instrument it contains.
The Jakobikirche is where Hugo Distler—who had a good sense of history and resisted romantic modifications to the great organ, built by Joachim Richborn in 1673 and last restored by Schuke/Berlin in 1984—was the organist from 1931 to 1937. This organ contains pipes from a Blockwerk from the 1400s; Schuke added a Swell as part of his restoration in 1984. This organ is approximately 20% original and includes an 18th-century pedal division. Interestingly, there are two matching organ cases, north and west, both in swallow’s nest design. The main case is in Renaissance style and the Positiv case is in Baroque style.
The Jacobikirche three-manual, 31-register smaller organ by Stellwagen, built in 1637 and based upon an anonymous builder in 1515, was last restored by Brothers Hillebrand in 1978. With this organ being 70% original, today one hears what would have been the sounds of 1637 and of 1515. The Werckmeister temperament is tuned one step above A=440. Distler had this organ in mind when he composed Nun komm, der Heiden Heiland.

Ulkebøl, Sønderborg, and Aabendraa
The Ulkebøl Lutheran Church was our first stop in Denmark. Although this church has housed an organ continuously since the beginning of the 16th century, its current organ is a Marcussen & Søn dated 1888 set in a Jürgen Hinrichsen angel façade dated 1790. From 1864 to 1920 this part of Denmark had been part of Germany, and during World War II this church’s bells were removed to Hamburg to be melted down for munitions manufacture, but were fortunately rescued just at the end of the war before being melted. Danish churches have ships suspended from the ceiling to as a symbol recalling that human life is sustained by God; the nave is called the church ship. The patron of this church was the Duke of Augustinborg.
From there we bussed to the Sønderborg Castle; however, when we arrived the streets were blocked. We soon learned that this was for the security of the visiting Queen Margrethe, who had arrived in her royal yacht to visit this coastal castle. However she left promptly at 2 pm, and we were granted entrance to hear a recital on this reconstructed Renaissance organ by its organist. Originally there was a 1570 Rottenstein-Pock instrument, which was enlarged to two manuals with nine and five stops, respectively, in 1626; each manual has a slightly different compass. The present instrument is a 1996 Mads Kjersgaard reconstruction set in the original 1570 façade; D-sharp and E-flat are separate pitches because of the (probably) meantone tuning.
From there we were treated to a Marcussen factory tour. Founded in 1806, this firm celebrated its 200th anniversary last year. Still in the ownership of Marcussen’s descendants, it has been in this location in Aabendraa since 1829. Our tour was conducted by a Marcussen relative. We concluded this day in Århus.

Århus, Odense, and Copenhagen
The first stop the next morning was at the Århus Domkirke, the largest church in Denmark. Originally containing a Schnitger organ, the current instrument is a 1928 Frobenius, which has been placed behind the 1730 Kastens console and is the organ on which Gillian Weir recorded the complete works of Franck, Messiaen and Duruflé. Its 8′ Voix humaine is modeled after that in Ste. Clotilde in Paris (César Franck’s church).
After lunch we left for Odense, the birth city of Hans Christian Andersen, and visited St. Canute’s Cathedral, located next to a beautiful city park. This cathedral contains three organs: the smallest and oldest is the Jens Gregersen instrument built c. 1843; the second oldest is the main organ built by Marcussen & Søn in 1965 and using the façade of its 1756 predecessor; and the newest, in the east end of the cathedral, was built by Carsten Lund in 1999. Then on to Copenhagen for a visit to the Church of the Holy Ghost with its 1986 Marcussen & Søn organ; the opulent Jesuskirken, built by the Carlsberg brewing family and containing in front one of the last Cavaillé-Coll organs (dated 1890) built and, in the rear, a 1993–1994 Jensen & Thomsen instrument; and a city tour.

Roskilde
On the penultimate day we visited the impressive Roskilde Cathedral containing a 1991 Marcussen & Søn three-manual, 33-rank organ. We were granted special access to the upper gallery from which to view this magnificent edifice, which is the burial place of many Danish kings and queens and with its wonderful trompe l’oeil paintings of heroic exploits on various side chapel walls.
From there we visited the environmentally friendly chapel organ, an 1882 A. H. Busch & Sønner rebuild at Ledreborg Castle. The resident organist (from Tennessee!) gave a demonstration of this unusual single-manual instrument to which the pedal is always coupled, which has not been electrified and requires an assistant to work the bellows. We returned to Copenhagen to give a public recital at St. Andreas Church.
On Saturday, our last day together, many spent the day shopping and enjoying the city, while others visited the Trinity Church with its three-manual, 53-rank, 1956 Marcussen & Søn organ rebuilt by P. G. Andersen in 1977 and the Garnisonkirche. Our communal dinner, at an historic local restaurant, was a bittersweet gathering, knowing that the camaraderie created by this tour’s participants was a unique organism and never to be duplicated.
Unlike any other instrument, no two organs are the same and, to be fully understood and appreciated, should be personally touched and experienced. Thus, one of the primary values of these tours is to acquaint oneself with the famous historic organs of the world to experience what it is about each that makes it so revered. And on this two-week, multi-city tour of northern and eastern Germany and Denmark, the participants “experienced” approximately 43 organs dating from the 16th through the 20th centuries. But it’s not just about the organs. It’s about the camaraderie with organ aficionados, too.■

H. Joseph Butler is Professor of Music and University Organist at Texas Christian University in Fort Worth, where he also serves as Associate Dean of the College of Fine Arts. He holds a DMA and Performer’s Certificate from the Eastman School of Music, an MM from the New England Conservatory, and a BA from Bowdoin College. He has studied organ with Russell Saunders, Yuko Hayashi, Harald Vogel, Bernard Lagacé, and Marion R. Anderson, and harpsichord with Colin Tilney and Arthur Haas. An active scholar in the area of early keyboard music, he has published articles in The New Grove Dictionary, Organ Yearbook, The American Organist, Bach, Early Keyboard Journal, and The Diapason. His book, The Peter Pelham Manuscript of 1744: An Early American Keyboard Tutor, is published by Wayne Leupold Editions. Dr. Butler has performed widely in the United States, England, and Hong Kong. His latest CD, the first-ever recording of the complete keyboard works of Julius Reubke, in collaboration with John Owings, pianist, is available from Pro Organo Records.

It is well known that Bach aggressively
studied the music of his contemporaries and predecessors as he developed his own personal and unique style. In particular, his work transcribing Vivaldi’s string concertos is often cited as a watershed in Bach’s education. However, a closer look at the concerto transcriptions and their genesis will encourage us to re-evaluate their role in Bach’s stylistic development.
The transcriptions stem from Bach’s Weimar years, probably between 1713 and 1717. It is believed that much of the source material was provided by his patron, Prince Johann Ernst. In 1713, Ernst visited Amsterdam and purchased a large quantity of music, likely including Vivaldi’s newly published Opus 3, L’estro armonico.1 The chart to the right shows the extant concerto transcriptions made by Bach; there are 23 transcriptions from 21 originals.2 Bach was not alone in making concerto transcriptions; from Johann Gottfried Walther, his colleague in Weimar, we have 14 surviving transcriptions.3
The purpose of Bach’s concerto transcriptions has been debated and probed at length. At first, scholars were inclined to believe the words of Johann Nikolaus Forkel, who wrote in 1802 that Bach undertook the transcriptions for the purpose of education.4 However, the extent of Bach’s activity in this area seems to exceed the needs of self-improvement; one does not need to make dozens of idiomatic keyboard arrangements of concertos to learn how to write one for strings. And of course, if the purpose of the exercise were purely educational, there would have been no need to transcribe the works of the teenage Prince Johann, who was himself a student of Walther and Bach. Therefore, it is now widely believed that the transcriptions were actually commissioned by the prince, a theory first advanced by Hans-Joachim Schulze.5
Also difficult to discern is what Bach actually learned from Vivaldi. Forkel wrote that from Vivaldi, Bach learned “musical thinking” and the concepts of “order, continuity, and proportion.”6 As Christoph Wolff has asserted, this statement may be reliable precisely, and ironically, because Forkel had no knowledge of Vivaldi’s music and no way to know what Bach learned from it; therefore, the statement could well originate from Bach’s sons who were in contact with Forkel in the late 18th century.7 Nevertheless, there were many other Italian models at Bach’s disposal, not to mention the works of Telemann, an established master who was close at hand. And it has been observed that Bach was able to create a coherent ritornello form as early as 1708, in the opening movement of Cantata 196.8 Taking all that into account, perhaps it is more interesting to observe what Bach did not learn from Vivaldi: that is, what musical elements did he alter in Vivaldi and subsequently avoid in his own works?
The concertos Bach transcribed from Vivaldi’s Op. 3 provide the best avenue for this study. These works are the most elaborate of Bach’s transcriptions, and they were based on outstanding originals available to Bach in an authoritative published edition. His other Vivaldi transcriptions were made from manuscript sources of varying integrity.9

The source
Op. 3 was Vivaldi’s first publication of orchestral music, an ambitious offering with the brazen title L’estro armonico, “harmonic inspiration.” Vivaldi chose the Amsterdam publisher Etienne Roger for this collection for two reasons: the superiority of Roger’s work and the opportunity to exploit the strong demand for Italian music in Northern Europe. Initial publication in Amsterdam was in 1711; soon thereafter, it was published by Walsh in London (1715 and 1717). Several French editions followed, beginning in the 1730s. Roger reissued the collection no less than twenty times, finally ending production in 1743. Its popularity only rivaled by Corelli’s Op. 6, L’estro armonico established Vivaldi’s reputation throughout Europe.
The publication was exceptional in that it consisted of eight part books: four violin parts, two viola parts, one cello part, and one part for double bass, which included the figures. A more typical concerto publication would be in just five parts, the solo part plus the usual quartet of string parts. In fact, Vivaldi’s later concerto publications were generally à cinque; none are in eight parts. In all cases, production of a score was left to the purchaser.
The eight-part presentation of Op. 3 allowed for considerable variety in solo groups: there are concertos for one, two, or four soloists. In addition, the cello is often emancipated from the continuo and is able to join the soloists in virtuoso passagework. One player per part is sufficient to perform a concerto; solo and tutti contrasts are provided by the doubling in the part writing, not by the use of a large ensemble. The bass part is fully and carefully figured, even in Vivaldi’s frequent unison passages (Illustration 1).
The structure of Op. 3 is ingenious. There are twelve concertos in four groups of three: the first of each three is for solo violin, the second for two violins, and the third for four violins. Superimposed on this scheme is a tonal arrangement in pairs, alternating major and minor keys, with the last pair reversed to end in major. Unfortunately, Vivaldi’s elegant concept is violated by most modern editions10 and obscured by the commonly used Ryom catalogue.11
There is also an intriguing logic to Bach’s approach to the source material. From the twelve concertos of Op. 3, he arranged three solo violin concertos for keyboard without pedal, two double violin concertos for organ with two manuals and pedals, and one concerto for four violins is transcribed for four harpsichords and orchestra. Although there may have been more transcriptions made and subsequently lost, these six arrangements seem to comprise an orderly exploration of the original material.
Manualiter transcriptions
The manualiter concertos are probably the most neglected works in this genre. Robert Marshall makes the case that the classification of these as harpsichord works in the Bach index, and in editions of the keyboard works, is arbitrary, and that they are equally likely to be organ works.12 Various factors support this theory: One, there was a tradition of composing organ pieces both pedaliter and manualiter, sometimes in complementary fashion, as we find in Clavierübung III. Two, performing concertos at the keyboard was especially fashionable on the organ; in fact, the practice may have been first popularized by an organist in Amsterdam, Jan Jacob de Graaf, whose proficiency performing concertos at the organ was praised by Mattheson.13 Three, Bach’s primary role at Weimar was organist, not harpsichordist. Four, the manualiter transcriptions were transposed and adapted to fit the range of the organs played by Bach in the Weimar region, which was four octaves, from C to c′′′. In general, there is a modern tendency to overlook the need for 18th-century musicians to play organ music without pedals; such pieces would have been attractive to gentlemen amateurs, ladies, and young people, as well as professional organists in smaller churches. While there is certainly no reason to exclude one instrument or the other, organists should be aware that the manualiter transcriptions contain some excellent material rarely heard on their instrument.
We can study many of the traits of the manualiter transcriptions by looking at BWV 978 (Example 1).14 The transposition by Bach to F major avoids the note d′′′, which is prevalent in the original. More interesting is Bach’s complete reworking of the bass line; the left hand does not wait for the opening theme to be stated, but enters early with a closely related countermelody. Throughout the manualiter transcriptions, Bach adds passagework in the left hand, leaving the treble mostly unchanged. In mm. 7–11, Vivaldi’s homophonic eighth-note accompaniment is replaced by broken-chord sixteenth-note figuration in the left hand (Example 2). Perhaps a better solution to this problem would be found by a later generation with the Alberti bass.
Another trend in the manualiter transcriptions is Bach’s avoidance of manual changes and dynamic contrast. Note that the original’s echo is gone and the added counterpoint makes a manual change impossible (Example 1, m. 3–4). Throughout the manualiter transcriptions there is no attempt to render solo and tutti contrast with manual changes. There are only occasional dynamic effects requiring two keyboards, and these are for echo gestures within the tutti ritornello, as in Op. 3, No. 12 and BWV 976, m. 2.

Organ transcriptions
The two best-known concerto transcriptions are those for organ with two manuals and pedals, in A minor (BWV 593) and D minor (BWV 596); these are part of the standard concert repertoire for organists and are on a higher level of virtuosity and complexity than the manualiter concertos. In the organ transcriptions, two manuals are consistently and effectively used for dynamics, solo with accompaniment, and solo-tutti contrast. The manual changes are clearly notated and the voice leading and beaming designed to accommodate them. Despite this successful experience adapting Vivaldi’s dynamic effects to the organ, Bach almost universally avoided manual changes and dynamics in his own organ works, the exceptions being the Toccata in D Minor, BWV 538, and the Prelude in E-flat, BWV 552/1. In other organ works, even those that are concerto-inspired, no manual changes are indicated and the counterpoint makes changes awkward.15
Again in the organ transcriptions we see Bach’s tendency to fill in the rests and longer note values with continuous 16ths, perhaps with a bit more finesse than in the manualiter transcriptions. In Example 3, he not only filled in the rests in Vivaldi’s original but also created a quasi-imitative sequence. The challenging sixteenth-note pedal passages Bach added in BWV 593/3, mm. 59–63, lend further weight to the argument that the transcriptions were intended for virtuoso performance rather than theoretical study.
Mm. 51–54 in the first movement of BWV 593 are peculiar for their use of octaves where Vivaldi’s original is fully harmonized, a rare instance where Bach is less full in texture than his model.16 Another oddity is the indication “Organo pleno” in m. 51; most likely, this is a copyist’s error for “Oberwerk.” It does not signal a registration change, but simply a return to the main keyboard with its plenum.
Sometimes exceptional means are used to create a solo and accompaniment (Example 4). It is strange, and perhaps disappointing, that Bach never used this kind of multi-layered symphonic texture in his own organ works.
BWV 596 in D minor is the only keyboard concerto that survives in autograph (Illustration 2, on page 21). It was long thought to be a work of Wilhelm Friedemann Bach because of the inscription “di W. F. Bach” followed by “in manu mei Patris descript” (“written in the hand of my father”). However, in this case “di” means “of” or “owned by”; Wilhelm
Friedemann was claiming ownership of the manuscript, not authorship of the piece. As a result of this misunderstanding, BWV 596 is missing from the Bach Gesellschaft, Peters, and Widor-
Schweitzer editions of the organ works.
The D-minor concerto is perhaps the most interesting of all the Weimar era transcriptions, and if the survival of an autograph is any indication, it may have been Bach’s favorite as well. One remarkable characteristic of the original is Vivaldi’s rigorous and energetic fugue, which exhibits ingenious invertible counterpoint as well as solo/tutti contrast. Surely, this piece served as inspiration for Bach’s concerto movements that synthesize fugue and concerto (e.g., final movements of Brandenburg Concertos Nos. 4 and 5).
The beginning of the concerto has attracted considerable attention for Bach’s unusual registration instructions: Oberwerk Octave 4′, Brustpositiv Octave 4′, and Pedal Principal 8′.17 This registration was not an aesthetic choice, but was contrived for a purely practical reason, to avoid the d′′′ prevalent in the original. Since transposition of the concerto to C minor would have made the fugue, with its fast parallel thirds and sixths, very awkward to play, Bach used 4′ stops and played the opening section an octave lower. This registration should not be considered a model for registering other concerto movements and playing entire movements on a single principal stop. It is a unique exception to the normal registration for concerto fast movements, which is organo pleno.
Bach made an interesting change in this opening passage, rewriting the two solo violin lines to make a strict canon and adding an extra measure where the canon winds down (m. 10).18 This change is unique in Bach’s transcriptions; normally, he maintained the dimensions of the original, neither adding nor subtracting measures. The addition of a canon to this concerto conflicts with the traditional view, stated by Forkel, that Bach used Vivaldi as a guide away from improvised “finger music” toward a more intellectual and organized approach to composition. In this passage, BWV 596 is clearly more cerebral than the model.
At the end of the fugue, Bach made a significant change (Example 5); in order to effect a stronger conclusion, he added more harmonic interest, rhythmic drive, and a Picardy third ending.
Another interesting change is found at the end of the last movement (Example 6). Vivaldi’s tremolo string writing is fruitless on the organ, so Bach used sustained chords in conjunction with a newly added tenor line. The added line is sufficiently violinistic that few organists suspect it is not original to Vivaldi. Bach used nearly the same tenor figuration to replace a tremolo passage in another Vivaldi concerto; see Op. 7, Bk. 2, No. 5 and BWV 594/1, mm. 26–27, 32, 34, etc.

Tonal considerations
That these two movements were altered to end with a major chord is revealing. Such a change is unnecessary in the context of a transcription, and thus represents a purely aesthetic choice made by the arranger. Comparing how each composer ends minor key movements leads to some striking differences. In Op. 3, there are 24 minor-mode movements; none ends with a Picardy third. Further, in the Op. 4, 7, and 8 concertos one searches in vain for a Picardy ending. Bach did not publish any large sets of concertos; nevertheless, we can observe that all six Brandenburg concertos are in major keys—which may be significant in and of itself. Of the minor-key slow movements, only one ends on a minor chord. One ends Picardy and another two end with a Phrygian cadence, more in the manner of Corelli than Vivaldi. Looking at some other organized sets of Bach works from Weimar or soon thereafter, we see that in the Orgelbüchlein and Well-Tempered Clavier I every minor-key piece ends with a major chord, except one (BWV 863/2).
There are other significant tonal differences one could explore; Vivaldi often tends to have all three movements in the same key, and in some cases will have the slow movement of a minor-key concerto in the subdominant, also minor. On the other hand, Bach will more typically use a mediant relationship for the middle movement, exploiting the relative minor or major. Ending a major-key movement, Vivaldi will stay in tonic, without hint of other keys; Bach will usually tonicize the subdominant just before closing. All of this leads to the conclusion that Bach did not emulate Vivaldi in some crucial matters of harmony and tonality.

Orchestral transcription
The last concerto Bach transcribed from Vivaldi’s Op. 3 was the Concerto for Four Harpsichords and Strings in A Minor, BWV 1065, based on concerto No. 10 for 4 violins in B minor. This transcription is much later than those for keyboard solo. Stemming from around 1730, it is a Leipzig work destined for performance by Bach’s Collegium Musicum. Here we find little trace of Bach the learner, as he takes a fine Vivaldi original and puts his own stamp of genius upon it, enriching the texture and harmony throughout. Of particular interest is the poignant chromaticism added to Vivaldi’s diatonic sequence in mm. 82–85, and the 32nd-note keyboard flourish in mm. 90–91, the latter similar to some passages in Brandenburg Concerto No. 5.

Conclusion
In conclusion, there can be no doubt that Bach learned certain elements of composition from working with Vivaldi’s models; indeed, Op. 3 was a musical landmark that influenced most composers in the early 18th century. However, there is sufficient musical evidence in the transcriptions to suggest that Bach was a mature, confident, and highly original composer in the early Weimar years, before he made the concerto arrangements. 

Sunday, July 30, 2000 was the 250th anniversary of the death of Johann Sebastian Bach, and throughout Thüringen there were major celebrations to honor the day.  In Arnstadt, where in 1703 a very young Bach took on the post of organist at the Neue Kirche (now known as the Bachkirche), there was a special religious service that featured the organ and Bach's choral music sung by invited choirs from other parts of Germany. Two days before, on the 28th of July, there had been a performance of the B-Minor Mass in the Bachkirche, which was the culmination of the "Orgel Sommer" festivities, a series of concerts of organ and choral music, starting at the end of June and continuing through all of July.  The "Orgel Sommer" started with a concert at the Bachkirche on June 24 and featured the restored Wender organ of 1703. Arnstadt is an interesting, old German city built around the large Marktplatz and, like many sites associated with Bach, features a statue in Bach's honor. The monument of a young, nonchalant Bach was erected in 1985 by Bernd Göbel during the time of the German Democratic Republic, and has raised controversy because of the lackadaisical nature of the pose. (See illustration.)

Following Bach's footsteps in the northwestern part of Thüringen proved to be an interesting experience, because it showed how attached he was to the area. The ancestors of his family lived in Wechmar, a very small village forty kilometers from Eisenach. Veit Bach, the great-great-grandfather of Johann Sebastian, established his home there in the sixteenth century after having left Hungary because of religious persecution. Along with his son, Hans, he owned a bakery and a mill; the ancestral home is a half-timbered house, now a museum, with ample cooking space suitable for a baker.  The house is in the heart of the village and is now its focal point as well.

Bach was born in Eisenach, where the large sixteenth-century house attests to the family's comfortable means. Johann Sebastian's parents died when he was ten and he was sent to study in nearby Ordruf for five years at the Latin grammar school. He lived with his brother Johann Christoph, who was his senior by fourteen years, and who was the organist at the Michaeliskirche. It was during these years that he learned to play the organ under the tutelage of his brother.

Afterwards, he was a student of music at the Michaeliskloster in Lüneburg for two years, and that is where he received the foundations of a theoretical background in music. In 1703 after the Lüneburg period, he took on the position of organist at Arnstadt for three years, an important responsibility for a young man. The position was pivotal for him in that he had three years to play the newly installed organ, of two manuals and pedal and 21 stops, built by Johann Friedrich Wender of Mühl-hausen in the Neue Kirche.

Before his appointment as organist, Bach, then eighteen years old, had been asked to evaluate the organ, which he found to his approval. This organ has been completely restored to the specifications of the time and gives a very good idea of what Bach had to deal with.  It is rich in 16', 8', and 4' stops and has the basic characteristics that are associated with a baroque organ. It had been combined with a large Steinmeyer organ in 1913, and the two formed an instrument of a completely different character.  What one sees today in the third gallery is the case of the restored Wender organ, richly decorated in white and gold. After the company of Ostheim/

Rhön had been given the contract to reconstruct the Wender organ and to restore the Steinmeyer in 1997, it was decided to add the third balcony where the Wender had been originally and to move the Steinmeyer to the first balcony. As such, we now have two separate organs, and the upper balcony has a copy of the original Wender organ, including the case, with two manuals and pedal, of which 320 of the 1252 pipes are original. With the excellent acoustics of the church, this organ has an astonishingly full and brilliant sound. 

During his career, Bach was known primarily as an organist and his innovative work was not always appreciated by the more conservative elements of the congregation. Bach had developed considerable skills as an organist and was known to improvise a great deal during a service. The parishioners did not necessarily relish what they were hearing, which contributed to his leaving Arnstadt. He left the Neue Kirche for a position at the Divi Blasii Kirche in Mühlhausen for one year in 1707. This was important because he wrote out the specifications for changes in the organ there during that year, and the repairs were done after he left. The following are the specifications that he submitted.

Disposition of the new repairs of the Organ at the Divi Blasii.

1. The lack of wind production should be resolved by putting in three good bellows so that the Oberwerk, Rückpositiv and the new Brustwerk would have a more sufficient air flow.

2. The four old bellows that exist should have stronger wind production for the new 32' Untersatz and should be adapted for the remaining bass voices.

3. The old bass wind chests should be removed and replaced with new ones that conduct the wind such that a stop can be played alone or all of the stops can be played without a drop in air pressure, which was not possible formerly, but which is very necessary.

4. Then comes the 32' Subbaß or the so-called Untersatz in wood, which will give the entire division the best gravitas. This should have its own wind chest.

5. The Posaune should have more capacity and the shallots should be differently set so that a better gravitas is provided.

6. That the new Glockenspiel, desired by the parishioners, in the pedal division have 26 chimes at 4'; these chimes should be paid for by the parishioners and the organ builder will take care of their installation.   As far as the Obermanual is concerned the Trumpet should be removed and replaced by a

7. Fagotto 16' tone, which is useful for all sorts of new inventiones (ideas) and sounds delicate in playing musical compositions. Further, instead of the Gemshorn (which should be removed) comes a

8. Viol di Gamba 8', that can mesh well with the existing Salicinal 4' of the Rückpositiv. And instead of the Quinta 3' (which should also be removed) there comes a

9. Nassat 3'. The remaining stops in the Upper Manual can stay, as well as the entire Rückpositiv, which should be re-voiced during the repairs.

10. What should be in the new Brustpositiv are the following voices:

three principals, namely:

1. Quinta 3' (from good 14-ounce tin)

2. Octava 2' (from good 14-ounce tin)

3. Schalemoy 8' (from good 14-ounce tin)

4. Mixtur 3 ranks

5. Tertia, with which one can have a beautiful Sesquialtera by pulling another stop.

6. Fleute douce 4' and finally a

7.  Stillgedacht 8', that would harmonize with the music, and that would be made from good wood, sounding much better than a metallic Gedacht.

11. Between this Brustpositiv and the Oberwerk there has to be a coupler. And finally for the complete voicing of the entire organ, the tremulant must be put into its correct rate of flutter.1

 When the Schuke company of Potsdam built a new organ for the church in 1995 they followed the specifications that Bach had given at the time of his stay there. The hand-written document that he prepared at the time, translated above, is on view in the Town Hall. This does give a very good idea of Bach's thoughts insofar as organ specifications are concerned. The primary considerations as noted were the addition of a third manual, a Sesquialtera stop, and at least one wooden 32' Untersatz if not the Posaune in the Pedal division. He mentions adding a new Brustwerk to the Oberwerk and Rückpositiv, and that would represent the third manual that he desired. Today's organ has a Hauptwerk, which would have been Bach's Oberwerk, a Rückpositiv on the second manual, and a Brustwerk on the third.  There is a Sesquialtera II on both the Hauptwerk and the Rückpositiv, and the Pedal division has a 32' Untersatz, and a 16' Posaune.  

Mühlhausen is a most elegant city that is being beautifully restored. The Marienkirche stands high in the pedestrian zone from where the gothic arches are easily seen. It is the second largest church of Thüringen, next to the Mariendom of Erfurt, and is a stunning sight as one approaches it from the Ratsstraße. At the entrance of the Divi Blasii Kirche there is a plaque which indicates that Bach was the organist for the year 1707-1708. While at Mühl-hausen he had numerous difficulties because his virtuosity was not appreciated. The pastor, who was a Pietist, downplayed the use of music in the religious services, and Bach ended up developing a friendly relationship with the pastor of the Marienkirche on the other side of town. Even though he was there for only one year, the importance of that year is underscored by  the amount of attention given to his ideas on organ building.

In 1708 Bach married his cousin, Maria Barbara Bach, at the Dorfkirche of Dornheim, four kilometers to the east of Arnstadt. It is assumed that he chose that church because the minister, Lorenz Stauber, was a friend of his. After his marriage  he went to Weimar  in the capacity of court organist, and held the post of Concert Master to the Court from 1714 to 1717. During his nine years in Weimar he composed many pieces for organ and harpsichord and over thirty cantatas. He had the advantage of knowing and working with Johann Gottfried Walther, a cousin of his and a significant composer in his own right. He spent the next six years as Hofkapellmeister in Köthen, where he served at the will of Prince Leopold von Anhalt Köthen. The fact that the Prince had been musically trained was significant in fostering his occupation. He ended his career with the longest stay of all in Leipzig, which started in 1723 and lasted until his death on July 30, 1750.   

Even including the Leipzig phase, it is clear that Bach travelled very little in comparison with his contemporary, Händel. If one adds up the distances in the area of Eisenach, Ordruf, Arnstadt, Mühlhausen, and Weimar, all of which are in Thüringen, one would find that the distances hardly total a few hundred kilometers at most. As such, he was so unlike many other great composers who travelled throughout Germany as well as in other countries. It was rare for a composer not to travel and study in Italy because of the early development of lyrical music in that country. Monteverdi's great operas go back to the beginning of the seventeenth century,  and much was learned from the lyricism of Vivaldi. Mozart is a perfect example of one who learned in this fashion.

The wealth of Bach organs in Thüringen makes this a particularly attractive area to visit. As far as the individual organs are concerned, besides the instrument at the Divi Blasii Kirche in Mühlhausen, the other important ones include:

1. The Wender organ at the Bachkirche in Arnstadt, because it would represent what he had and liked at the time of his appointment. Bach had been asked to evaluate the new organ at the time of its installation in 1703.  Two new recordings which feature the resident Kantor, Gottfried Preller, give ample evidence of the quality of the instrument. The outstanding acoustics of the Bachkirche play a special role in the success of the performances of some of Bach's major pieces.

2. The Hildebrandt organ at the Wenzelskirche in Naumburg is one that Bach had inspected, along with Gott-fried Silbermann, at the time of its installation in 1746, and which he found to his liking. This is an organ of 51 stops on three manuals. Its restoration continued in the fall and a re-dedication of the organ took place in December, 2000.   A recording, that is available at the church, features the restored Rückpositiv. Irene Greulich plays a variety of pieces, but the Partita, Jesu meine Freude by Bach's cousin, Johann Gott-fried Walther (1684-1748), shows off this division to very good effect. What the recording demonstrates in particular are the excellent acoustics of the church.2

3. The Heinrich Gottfried Trost  organ of the Schlosskirche in Altenburg, which Bach knew and appreciated. This organ was installed in 1739. The Hauptwerk and Oberwerk are rich in 8' stops, and the Pedal division has six 16' stops and a 32' Posaune.

4. Another Trost organ at the Stadtkirche in Waltershausen, which was built in 1724-30 but not completed until 1755 by another builder, Johann Heinrich Ruppert, would seem to have the specifications that Bach would have ideally desired. Ewald Kooiman from Amsterdam wrote in the liner notes of his CD "Bach in Waltershausen" that this organ with its combination of gravitas and lovely tone would be the closest to the ideal organ sound that Johann Sebastian Bach was seeking, when compared to all other so-called "Bach Organs," whether from Schnitger or Silbermann.3 Of the 50 stops there are nineteen 8-foot stops in the Hauptwerk, Oberwerk, Brustwerk and Pedal, and three 16-foot stops in the Hauptwerk and four in the Pedal. Of the rest, twelve are 4-foot stops spread out throughout the divisions and these three pitches represent 38 stops of the organ. This is certainly in keeping with the concept of a baroque organ, plus it adds one 32-foot stop in the Pedal division to provide the necessary gravitas.

At Mühlhausen a 32-foot stop for the Pedal was one of the changes that Bach envisioned for the new organ.  The current organ at the Divi Blasii Kirche has 40 stops, rich in 8' and 4' stops in the Hauptwerk, Brustwerk and Rückpositiv, and has three 16' stops and one 32' Untersatz in the Pedal division. Most of the organs in all of Thüringen tend to be between 20+ to 30+ stops--only a few in the entire province are larger. In the city of Erfurt the Mariendom organ has 60 stops, and that of the Prediger-kirche has 56. Both of these organs were built by Schuke of Potsdam and represent installations that were done within the last thirty years.

5. The organ at the Stadtkirche in Bad Berka is important because it was built originally to the specifications that Bach had drawn up. Heinrich Nicolaus Trebs, court organ builder from Wei-mar, built the organ in 1742-43 with 26 stops on Hauptwerk, Oberwerk and Pedal, instead of the 28 stops that Bach had specified, and it is thought that this was done because of lack of space in the west tower. The organ had mainly 8' stops throughout the divisions, and when a new organ was installed in the original case in 1991 by the firm of Gerhard Böhm of Gotha, it pretty much retained the same specifications with the substitution of more 4' stops in the Hauptwerk. There had been alterations and rebuilds over the years for a variety of reasons, and the work in 1991 was intended to put the organ back into its original condition. It does not have a 32' pedal stop. A concert on August 9, 2000,  with the house organist, Bernd Müller, which included music from the seventeenth through the twentieth centuries, showed the versatility of the organ, and a recording on the Motette label by Weiland Meinhold confirmed its qualities by including music by Bach and Töpfer. The Toccata, Adagio & Fugue in C Major, BWV 564, clearly shows how ideal this organ is for Bach's music.   The pedal solos and the clarity of articulation demonstrate the strength of the specifications of the instrument.4

6. The Lukaskirche organ in Mühl-berg, II/26, was originally built and installed in 1729 by Franciscus Volckland of Erfurt. The specifications are very similar to those of the Wender organ at the Bachkirche in Arnstadt, and the organ was fully restored in 1997 by the Fa. Orgelbau Waltershausen. The case is richly decorated in white, blue and gold, and the acoustics of the church are first-rate by any standards, with a sound that is clear and full. At a concert on July 23, Dan Lönnqvist from Finland was outstanding in showing off the qualities of this organ as a Bach instrument. He played the Pièce d'Orgue, BWV 572, and the Fantasy & Fugue in G Minor, BWV 542, and both were outstanding examples of pieces played on an organ of quality in superb acoustics.  The setting could not be better in this church with its magnificent interior of white and gold, including the organ gallery high up in the west tower. A recording available at the church has Jozef Sluys playing a Bach program which features four of the Preludes and Fugues.5

Bach was primarily known as an organ virtuoso and choirmaster during his lifetime and some of his Toccatas and Fugues were written during his early years in Arnstadt and Mühlhausen. There is some thought that he might not be the author of the famous Toccata & Fugue in D Minor, BWV 565.  In 1971 a music scholar first raised this issue, and an article in the Thüringer Allegemeine Zeitung on July 28 quoted the organist of the Bachkirche in Arnstadt, Gottfried Preller, as saying, "I am convinced that the Toccata was not written by Bach. It is not provable by looking at the hand-written notes, but the piece is absolutely untypical of Bach." Preller's thoughts on perceived shortcomings in meter and quality bring him more to the conclusion that the Toccata was written by Bach's student, Johann Peter Kellner, a choirmaster from Gräfenroda, a town not far from Arnstadt. "That the composition comes from Bach's influence is clear. But it does not have Bachian command," he says further. Preller thinks that it would be atypical for Bach to have written a fugue of the type in this composition. The Fugue takes up two thirds of the work, and, in his opinion, is not integrally structured and, in comparison to the dramatic Toccata, is conspicuously bland.6 Preller also said: "We should accept the idea that there will always be a few problematic pieces to deal with . . . as well as the fact that we will never be able to resolve all questions with respect to Bach."7

Similar questions have been raised with respect to the authenticity of a variety of works by recognized masters. This has always been the case and therefore it is hardly surprising that such questions would be raised about some of Bach's works. Nonetheless, there is still no proof that certain works were not his, and with respect to the Toccata & Fugue in D Minor, others would argue that it has everything that one would expect from the pen of a young composer. Karl Geiringer writes that "The theme seems to be inspired by the violinistic technique of playing in quick alternation on two neighboring strings, a device Bach was often to employ in his music for keyboard instruments. The toccata's torrents of sound and dazzling fireworks create a tone poem of passionate subjectivity; yet there is a masterly craftsmanship underlying all this outpouring of emotion. . . . In its intensity and exuberance this is clearly a product of Bach's youth, but there is no groping and uncertainty in it."8

Clearly, if the Toccata & Fugue does not come from the Arnstadt years, it cannot be far removed. There is enough to show that the late works have a consistency about them that really demonstrates the development in the artistic ability of the composer. The contradictory arguments dealing with his works are similar to the ones surrounding his ideas on the organ: it is known that Bach favored having a 32' pedal stop, and yet the specifications that he left for an organ in Bad Berka did not include a 32' stop. When he arrived in Arnstadt,  the newly installed Wender organ did not include a 32' stop, and even when the Steinmeyer was added to the Wender in 1913, the result was a relatively large organ which was rich in 8' and 16' stops but did not include a 32' pedal stop. This is like trying to define exactly what a baroque organ or baroque organ sound should be. A compromise would seem to indicate that the baroque organ should be a three-manual organ of some 30+ stops with a Pedal division that has a 32' Untersatz. The majority of the stops in the Hauptwerk and Oberwerk should be based on 8' and 16' pipes. Without dismissing the need for reed stops, it is clear that they are not prominent. However, one might ask if this is simply for lack of knowledge about them or for a conscious dislike of the reed sound. Did the liturgical needs of the instrument take the lead and therefore obviate the desire for reed stops? Peter Williams picks up this issue in an article in The IAO Millennium Book, which was recently published in England.9 He asserts that there is no concept of "Bach's ideal organ" and that it is incorrect to point to organs that had a direct connection with the composer to address the question.10 He writes "not only would no single organ have shown all of this music at its best but any great composer is likely to work to a platonic ideal that could never exist. In any case, there are problems with giving priority to any of these organs. The first is that Bach never presided over any of the great organs of the day, as his Obituary already reports him as frequently remarking. Furthermore, it is difficult to see how there could be one single ideal instrument, because the repertory itself, from the early chorales and praeludia to the late Leipzig works, spans almost half a century. Not only is this the very period when the organ underwent considerable development and changed as far as it could before nineteenth-century technologies laid out other paths for it, but no great composer is likely to keep the same ideals of sound for half a century."11 In effect Williams is saying that the more we know about the organs of Bach's time, the more questions we have rather than answers as to what the "ideal Bach organ" might be.

We should always remember that Bach's main tasks at Leipzig were to direct the Thomaner Choir School, teach at the school, including Latin, serve as Music Director of the Lutheran churches in Leipzig and to compose and conduct liturgical music on a weekly basis. This represented his job during the last twenty-seven years of his life. Most of the music he wrote was performed during the Sunday services at the Thomaskirche. It is generally assumed that he had the position of organist at the Thomaskirche, but this is simply not true. He was not the organist of either the Thomaskirche or the Nikolaikirche, the other large church in Leipzig, which today contains a restored Ladegast organ of over 90 stops, and he did not have a position specifically related to either one of those churches.

The trip to Thüringen last summer was rich in its discoveries of much of Bach's early surroundings, and underscores once again the quality of genius that one associates with German composers and organ builders over the centuries.

Notes

                  1.              A basically literal translation of the liner notes which gave Bach's original specifications in German from the CD Violet LC8900, Vol. 13, Orgellandschaft Thüringen, Die Schuke-Orgel in der Kirche Divi Blasii zu Mühlhausen, Felix Friedrich.  A slightly differently worded translation is given in The New Bach Reader - A life of Johann Sebastian Bach in letters and documents, ed. by Hans T. David and Arthur Mendel and revised and expanded by Christoph Wolff, W. W. Norton and Company, 1998, pp. 55 and 56.

                  2,              cf.  CD, LC8418 Tonträger Produktion,  Orgelpunkt Zwölf, Irene Greulich am Rückpositiv der Hildebrandt-Orgel zu St. Wenzel in Naumburg. 

                  3.              cf.  liner notes in the CD "Bach in Waltershausen" as mentioned in a flyer of the Stadtkirche, 3 Lutherstraße, 99880 Waltershausen.

                  4.              CD 11851 Motette, Weimarer Orgelmusik,  Wieland Meinhold an der Böhm-Orgel der Stadtkirche zu Bad Berka.

                  5.              cf. CD 87 148 René Gailly, Johann Sebastian Bach auf den Orgeln seiner Heimat (vol. 4), Jozef Sluys, Domorganist Brüssel spielt die Volckland-Hesse Orgel zu Mühlberg.

                  6.              cf. article by Frauke Adrians in the Thüringer Allgemeine Zeitung of July 28th, 2000, p. 3.

                  7.              Ibid.

                  8.              Karl Geiringer, Johann Sebastian Bach, The Culmination of an Era, Oxford University Press, New York, 1966, p. 218.

                  9.              Article by Peter Williams in The IAO Millennium Book, ed. by Paul Hale, Incorporated Associated Organists 2000, pp. 1-14.

                  10.           Ibid. p. 3

                  11.           Ibid.

Other sources of information.  All translations from the German were done by the author.

1.              Bachstätten--Ein Reiseführer zu Johann Sebastian Bach by Martin Petzoldt, Insel Verlag, Frankfurt-am-Main, 2000.

2.              Johann Sebastian Bach, the Learned Musician, by Christoph Wolff, W. W. Norton and Company, New York and London, 2000.

3.              The New Bach Reader - a life of Johann Sebastian Bach in letters and documents, ed. by Hans T. David and Arthur Mendel and revised and expanded by Christoph Wolff, W. W. Norton and Company,  New York and London, 1998.

4.              Oxford Composer Companions, J. S. Bach, ed. by Malcolm Boyd, Oxford University Press, 1999.

5.              Bach by Malcolm Boyd, in the Master Musicians Series, ed. by Stanley Sadie, Schirmer Books, New York 1997.

6.              The IAO Millennium Book, ed. by Paul Hale, Incorporated Association of Organists 2000.

7.              Festchrift zur Wiedereinweihung, Johann-Sebastian-Bach-Kirche zu Arnstadt, Herausgegeben zum Einweihungstag am 16. Januar 2000 vom Kuratorium Bachkirche Arnstadt 2000 und der Evang.-Luth. Kirchgemeinde Arnstadt.

8.              CD, Bach in Arnstadt, 4/2000 Evangelisch-Lutherische Kirchgemeinde Arnstadt, Gottfried Preller spielt an der Wender Orgel (1703) der J.-S.-Bach-Kirche.

9.              CD, Johann Sebastian Bach in Arnstadt,  2000 Orgelbau-Hoffman, Ostheim/Rhön, Gottfried Preller spielt an der Wender-Hoffman-Orgel Werke von Johann Sebastian Bach.

Aldo J. Baggia is Chairman of the Department of Modern Languages and Instructor in French, Spanish, German and Italian at Phillips Exeter Academy, Exeter, New Hampshire. He holds a bachelor's degree from Iona College and the MA from Middlebury College, and has completed graduate work at Laval University and Duke University. He has pursued postgraduate studies in France, Germany, Austria and Spain, and has travelled extensively in Europe. He has written numerous opera reviews for Quarterly Opera Review, Opera, Opera News, Orpheus and Monsalvat. He has written articles and reviews for The Diapason.