A Singer’s Guide to the Great Composers: Bach

Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750) is considered one of the greatest composers of all time, and his music has featured frequently in my career over the past 40 years. I have recorded the St Matthew Passion with the Dunedin Consort on Linn Records and have sung the St John Passion all over Germany with Ensemble Kontrapunktus, his Mass in B Minor in Italy and Spain with the English Concert, his Christmas Oratorio in Salzburg, his Magnificat in Jerusalem and several solo cantatas in Rome and Germany, in addition to performances all over England, Canada and Scotland. As I noted in the article about Purcell, the great advantage to me of singing with many of the world’s finest baroque orchestras was the chance to sing at Baroque Pitch (415 hz), a semitone lower than modern pitch. This has been particularly advantageous with the music of Bach, as the German master was not a natural composer for the voice. By this, I mean that, like Beethoven, he heard the music in his head, as if played by an instrument, and did not fully grasp the nuances of human voice production. The combination of this instrumental style coupled with the fact that tuning has crept up by a semitone from Bach’s time to modern days, makes his music difficult to sing generally, and trickier at modern pitch. It may seem bizarre to complain about this genius, but I think if you asked any professional singer whose work was the most difficult to sing, the answer would come as Bach, with Beethoven a close second! A composer who wrote literally hundreds of pieces for voice is still acknowledged to have written music that is fiendishly hard to sing. You cannot lose concentration for a second when singing Bach’s music, or you might fall off the precipice of his extraordinary musical structure. However, when in the midst of a performance, you feel privileged beyond measure to be part of this wonderful creation, and all the difficulties fade away in the sublime perfection of his music.

Like Purcell, Bach was born into a musical family, in Eisenach in Germany, a town known for its mediaeval castle, the Wartburg, scene of the legendary Singing Competition made famous by Richard Wagner in his opera, Tannhäuser, and as the place where Martin Luther translated the New Testament from Greek into German. His father, Johann Ambrosius Bach, was the director of the town’s musicians, all his uncles were professional musicians, and apparently the young Johann, on his own initiative, having been orphaned by the age of 10 and forced to live with his elder brother, enrolled in St Michael’s School in Lűneburg. After graduation, he took up various musical posts in Germany, including becoming Kapellmeister at the court of Leopold, Prince of Anhalt-Kőthen in 1717.

During one of these sojourns, when he was working as organist in the town of Arnstadt, south of Weimar, he took time off to visit the famous composer Buxtehude in Lübeck, nearly 300 miles away, a journey largely undertaken on foot. Buxtehude had a post as organist in the city and his fame spread far and wide as player and composer, such that eminent students often visited him for advice and teaching. Handel went there in 1703 and Bach spent nearly three months, listening and learning, an experience that affected him greatly.

He spent several years working in Weimar, a lovely city in the heart of what used to be East Germany until 1989. I have occasionally sung concerts in Weimar and was astonished to find how important a place it was. As well as being one of the many cities Bach worked in, it was the home of the great German writers Goethe and Schiller (you can visit both their houses and imagine convivial evenings spent there), it was where Franz Liszt lived and worked and it was where artists and architects like Klee, Kandinsky and Gropius founded the Bauhaus Movement. After the First World War, it was where Germany’s first democratic constitution was signed, giving its name to the ill-fated Weimar Republic, overthrown by the Nazis in 1933. All this, and a lovely theatre, made Weimar one of the most extraordinary cities I have ever visited, and I felt particularly lucky that my first trip there was just after the Wall dividing Germany came down, and I was able to see all the amazing sites before mass tourism had changed its appearance.

The same applies to my first experiences of Halle and Leipzig in the early 90s, cities dear to the lovers of Handel and Bach. The locals no doubt were delighted at the changes made after unification, in terms of infrastructure and personal freedom, but for the outsider, it was fascinating to see a country which had been preserved from the 1940s almost untouched by Western technology and consumerism. I returned to Weimar around 2007/8 and found it had been beautifully restored to its former glory, but was now rather like any other German city in atmosphere and appearance. Nonetheless, I would advise anyone interested in the development of Western civilisation and culture to visit this most astonishing of cities.

Mention of Leipzig, takes us back to Bach! He spent most of his later years there, having been employed as Thomaskantor in 1723. His duties were many – teaching at the Thomas School at the Thomaskirche, organising music for services at the church and several other churches in Leipzig, composing music for these services, and teaching the children singing and Latin with the help of four deputies. A cantata was required for each Sunday and additional church holidays and festivals, and, from the outset, he set himself to compose these personally, in annual cycles. He was always complaining about being underpaid and overworked, but still found time to write non-liturgical music and play the organs around Leipzig. In 1729, he took over the directorship of the Collegium Musicum, a secular performance ensemble which had been started by Telemann, who had studied at Leipzig University and had dominated the city’s music for several years before moving on finally to Hamburg. The Collegium was set up to provide a musical outlet for the city’s students and was led by prominent professional musicians. It was a private society and performed regularly at venues such as the Cafe Zimmermann, a coffeehouse in the centre of Leipzig, where many of Bach’s secular works, especially the instrumental and keyboard concertos, received their first performances. These instrumental pieces are wonders of music, both the concertos and also the solo works for instruments such as violin, cello and keyboard. In my Desert Island Discs article on the Singer’s Life Blog, I included the Bach Double Violin Concerto as one of my all-time favourite pieces, and there are many more that could be added.

Some of my best memories as a singer involved singing music by Bach: early in my career, I was engaged frequently as Christus in the Matthew and John Passions, both with choral societies in Britain and with early music ensembles in Europe. It was a great privilege to sing those deeply moving words as part of the passion story, even as a non-believer, especially in the St Matthew, where the bass is accompanied by an ethereal halo of strings. I also loved singing those two roles, as the other bass soloist has to sing several fiendish arias while I sat looking serene and calm. However, sometimes I had to sing all the choruses as well as the solos, which was a much harder evening, and quite challenging in stamina terms. It was also difficult when I sang these 8 voice passions in Germany, as both the basses were quite strong singers, and the poor conductor spent most of the rehearsals telling us we were too loud, or too fast, or too flat, or too anything really. Mind you, better too much than too little! 

I wrote in A Singer’s Life about the performances of Bach’s Mass in B Minor which I sang in Cremona and Turin with Trevor Pinnock and the English Concert, alongside Catherine Wyn-Rogers,  Nancy Argenta and Reiner Trost, and I am happy to refer to them again as the greatest concerts I have ever appeared in (and there have been a lot!). It’s a funny thing that somehow, with all their difficulty and the impossibility to relax during their performance, the works of Bach that I have sung are among my most treasured memories in a lifetime of great music. As with all works of exceptional art, you have to prepare well and then give everything you have got when the time comes to interpret that art in public.

I still find it fascinating that the two titans of their age (and any age really), Bach and Handel, never met, although the two cities most associated with them, Leipzig and Halle, are only 27 miles apart, nearer than Edinburgh to Glasgow -  quite extraordinary.  Bach tried to visit once, but Handel, who was on a brief visit to his hometown, had left the day before. What would their conversation have been like? Handel had stopped living in Halle in order to pursue his career abroad, notably in England and Ireland, and Bach only arrived in Leipzig when Handel was away, but still…

In his last years, Bach immersed himself in composition, working on the Goldberg Variations and the Art of Fugue, as well as the idea of creating a mass from various pieces he had written. In some ways, his contemporaries saw him as almost an old fogey, dwelling in the past and working on old material. His health declined and he grew more and more blind, until an operation to improve his sight by the British surgeon, John Taylor, now recognised as something of a charlatan, went wrong and he died on 28th July 1750, at the age of 65. His sons preserved his memory, but, as composers themselves, were more intent on pursuing the challenges of the new music that was becoming trendy, the beginnings of the Classical style to be perfected by Haydn and Mozart.

It was not until Felix Mendelssohn performed the St Matthew Passion in 1829 in Berlin that Bach began to be seen as more than an interesting relic of the 18th century, but his star has risen ever since, and it is safe to say that the name of Johann Sebastian Bach will be for ever held in awe by all those who treasure music.

There are many fine recordings of all Bach’s vocal music available, and other than my recording of the Matthew Passion on Linn Records with the Dunedin Consort, which you should acquire as a matter of course, naturally (one of Radio 3’s recommended recordings), it is up to you to choose between the modern versions on original instruments, or the more old fashioned, more romantic versions, often with great singers like Fischer-Dieskau, Schreier, Janowitz and Schwarzkopf, conducted by the likes of Karajan and Klemperer. I myself have examples of both, as Bach’s music can take any number of different interpretations.