Johann Sebastian Bach is the ultimate composer's composer,
influencing countless others who followed him, from Mozart
to Mendelssohn, Beethoven to Brahms,
and not just in classical music.
From Duke Ellington, to the Beatles.
Musicians in jazz and pop have also fallen under his spell
and learnt from his techniques.
Bach is still the benchmark, a musical gold standard.
We know very little about Bach's life.
There are only a few facts to go on, and our image of him
is skewed by statues and paintings of a stern,
forbidding figure in a frock coat and a powdered wig.
But then there's the music.
# Herr
# Herr... #
The music tells us something completely different about him.
It's full of energy, full of dance, full of life.
Over a lifetime of getting to know, singing and conducting Bach's music,
I've formed a series of hunches about his personality and character.
In this film, I want to test them out with fellow Bach enthusiasts
and scholars, and performs some of his most important works, to see
what they can tell us about the extraordinary man who composed them.
He really throws everything at it.
You know, it's just such an overwhelming exploration
of what is to be a human being.
I think he's a scientist at work, and instead of using
the language of mathematics, he's a scientist using music.
The level of inspiration on which he works is, I think,
unparalleled in the rest of music.
Such splendour and wonderfulness, that, on its own,
would convince me that there was a God
if I felt inclined to take that conclusion from it.
In this film, I want to build a new statue of Bach, to see
if we can detect a beating heart
and a more approachable personality underneath the wig.
My own engagement with Bach began as a small child
growing up on a farm in Dorset.
Just before the war,
a refugee from Nazi Germany arrived with a painting in his rucksack,
one that his great-grandfather had bought in a junk shop.
He asked my father to look after it for him.
It was one of only two portraits painted of JS Bach in his lifetime.
So I passed it every day of my life, until I was ten,
when the painting was sold and moved to Princeton, New Jersey.
This is the first time I've seen it since 1953.
What's so striking to me, seeing it again, is the intensity of his gaze.
Those eyes. It's just extraordinary, they're so penetrative.
I still feel there's a division between the upper half
of his face and the bottom half.
The upper half is so intense, it's got that beetle-browed,
slightly myopic look.
Below that, you see somebody quite different,
somebody much more approachable, somebody who enjoyed
the good things of life, a bon viveur, who enjoyed his tobacco
and his wine and his beer,
and there's plenty of records of what he drank.
And the father of 20 children and two wives.
We know pitifully few hard facts about Bach.
There's very little to go on, and only a handful of personal letters.
But, as in any good detective story, it's often the gaps,
the seeming contradictions in the tale,
that are as suggestive and intriguing
as the hard evidence available.
We do know that Johann Sebastian was born on 21 March 1685,
in Eisenach, in the middle of modern-day Germany.
This is the so-called Bachhaus, now a museum devoted to him.
Until recently, it billed itself as the house where Bach was born
and where he grew up. We now know that's definitely not the case.
As with so much of his life,
exactly where Bach was born remains a mystery.
Johann Sebastian was baptised here, at two days old,
in St George's Church in Eisenach.
Later, he sang here in the choir.
As a child, he's said to have had an unusually fine treble voice.
200 years before him, there was another chorister
who stood in exactly the same place.
Now that was Martin Luther.
And Luther created a revolution here in this part of Germany.
Bach's whole life was to be
profoundly influenced by Luther's Reformation.
Luther set in train a new way of worship.
It totally transformed the role of language and music in church.
Bach's own music was filtered through his strongly held
Lutheran beliefs and upbringing.
Luther preached his Reformation here in the Georgenkirche in 1521.
Then he disappeared.
Actually, he hadn't gone far.
In fact, in the greatest of secrecy, Luther was in hiding up here
in the Wartburg, the imposing castle that looms above the town of Eisenach.
His Reformation had made Luther the most wanted man in Europe.
So, this is the little room where Luther lived.
For ten months here he was holed up, imprisoned, really, for his own good,
because he was on the run from the Pope, from the Emperor.
He was desperately constipated.
"The Lord has struck me in the rear," he said.
And he thought that the devil was pelting him
with walnuts from the ceiling.
Luther decided that his best weapon
to use against the devil was black ink.
And, in a matter of weeks, he sat down at this desk
and he wrote a translation, from the Greek,
of the New Testament.
And it wasn't just any old German, he decided that he needed
to amalgamate 18 different dialects and, in effect,
he established the roots of the German language as we know it.
Not only did Luther want the Bible to be in the language of the people,
he also wanted them to be able to join in the music,
something that, in the Catholic church,
was much more the province of trained choirs.
Luther was convinced that music added extra expression
and eloquence to the biblical text.
"The notes make the words come alive," he wrote.
"In fact, without music, man is little more than a stone."
So, the words appealed to the intellect,
and the music appealed to the passions.
And, besides, why should the devil have all the good tunes?
Luther and his followers made sure he didn't.
They choraled secular tunes that everybody knew,
including quite earthy love songs, and then set them to new words
so that the congregation could belt them out in church.
Hymns, or chorales, written by Luther
and his followers became absolutely central to Protestant worship,
and of course to the music of Bach.
The impact of the reformer Luther
on the impressionable young Bach was immeasurable.
It shaped his whole view of the world,
it bolstered his sense of worth
as a craftsman musician, and reinforced his service to the Church.
It's such an announcement,
a proclamation of the arrival on Earth of the Christ child.
Relish the words. Relish them.
So, "Brich an..."
Bach's destiny was to become a musician.
Music was the family business.
In this part of Germany, in the heart of the Thuringian forest,
the Bach family were thick on the ground.
They provided a support system to each other,
and they carved up the different roles of organist and cantor,
and Hausmann - the head of the local wind band - between them.
And, in fact, they became almost
so important here that the word Bach and musician became synonymous.
MUSIC: "Quodlibet, BWV 524" by JS Bach
The Bach clan knew how to let their hair down,
and often got together for raucous family celebrations.
Sebastian, the youngest of eight brothers and sisters, was thus
surrounded by music at home, in church and in school.
I have in my hands what was probably the most precious book of Bach's childhood.
It's certainly the one he used every day of his life
until he left Eisenach.
It's the Eisenachisches Gesangbuch, the songbook used in church
and used in school.
It has wonderful copper engravings which show David and Solomon in the Temple,
surrounded by their temple musicians,
and the connections that Bach
must've made in his mind, between his family
of the most famous musicians in the area, with a long,
dynastic lineage going all the way back to Solomon.
Because he wrote so many masterpieces of sacred music,
in the 19th-century,
religiously-inclined writers
liked to picture Bach as a saintly figure,
a kind of fifth Evangelist
to match the goody two-shoes image of his childhood.
But, in recent years, this picture has started to change.
This is a book containing the records of Bach's school performance,
and it gives us his syllabus of classes that he attended,
and it also shows that, for example, in the third year,
he came 46th out of 89 pupils,
and what's more, it tells us that he missed 96 separate classes.
This is a fascinating document,
because it's somehow slipped under the radar.
It's a report on school conditions in the Latin school
where Bach was a pupil, and it shows the lack of textbooks,
the overcrowding, the cheeking of the masters,
the throwing of bricks through the windows,
all sorts of proto-hooliganism
and it's been, kind of, neatly ironed out of all the biographies,
so it's really interesting to come to light now.
Since the fall of the Berlin Wall and the reunification of Germany,
more documents have come to light that greatly enhance
our knowledge of Bach.
In particular, the Bach Archives in Leipzig have made huge strides
in discovering more about the composer's working methods,
and, for the first time, opened their doors to researchers.
All the significant documents about Bach, many originals,
some copies, are here.
When Bach was 50, he suddenly got a fascination for family roots
and family trees, genealogy,
so, he wanted to give himself legitimacy in some way.
And here's an example, and it shows the whole Bach family,
starting with the legendary figure of Veit Bach,
who arrived from Hungary in the middle of the 16th century,
and it goes all the way through to Bach himself,
who's over here, and then his children, and his grandchildren.
You'll notice every single member of the Bach family is a man.
All blokes, not a single woman.
But mothers, sisters
and aunts must have participated in the family music-making.
So, was it nature or nurture that we have to thank for the genius of Bach?
When he was 50, he did a family tree and he also assembled
pieces of his ancestors' music, and there was one person
that he singled out as being a profound composer,
and another one who he singled out as being an able composer,
but there obviously wasn't anybody of enormous quality
until he came along,
and yet he was one of five brothers, four brothers - how come, he,
and not the others, popped up above the parapet?
He's such a good example, because he really undermines
any simplistic explanation of his genius, of genius.
I mean, if you had a genetic explanation,
the genes would have gone throughout the Bach family - in fact,
why did they take so long to generate Bach,
you know, so many generations,
and I think all of these more general explanations,
on the basis of genes, or even on the basis of the musical culture
that surrounds him, do not deliver the singular genius he was.
And it's a pity in a way,
we can't accept the singularity of people who are manifestly unique.
We can't bear the idea that genius is unexplained.
But that's not to say Bach was self-taught.
His father's cousin, Johann Christoph,
was the profound composer he referred to.
His music, only recently rediscovered,
is the link between Bach and the earlier German tradition.
Johann Christoph may also have been Sebastian's first teacher
at the organ, an instrument he made his own.
But Johan Christoph's life was a cautionary tale.
In a sense, the life of Johann Christoph Bach
exemplifies the problems that musicians had at the time.
They shuttled between the service of the Church, or of the court,
or occasionally of the municipality, and in Christoph's case,
he had all manner of domestic problems - he was shunted,
also, from pillar to post here in the town,
the town wouldn't give him a proper dwelling,
he had illness in his family, he was underpaid and he was
thoroughly querulous and miserable about it, and died in penury.
But there is another side to it, and this is one that Sebastian
may well have picked up from his elder cousin.
Which is, that as a composer, you can channel all that frustration,
and disappointment into music,
and the marvellous thing is about Johann Christoph's music,
and Sebastian's music, is that it has this wonderfully consoling
and uplifting quality to it.
Most of all, Bach's music offers us balm and comfort in bereavement.
The subject of death appears again and again in his music,
as it did in his own life.
This is the town cemetery,
and Eisenach's old city walls are here on the right,
and just beyond it is the school where Bach went, the old Dominican cloister.
Somewhere here, in unmarked graves, are those of his parents,
Elisabeth and Ambrosius.
Elisabeth died when Bach was scarcely nine years old.
And then nine months later, his father, Ambrosius, died, as well.
Bach, as the youngest son,
and member of the parish choir, had to witness the whole event
and sing while the ceremony was going on,
and the slow tolling of the bells,
and as the coffin was lowered into the grave,
he and his fellow choristers sang Luther's words,
"Mitten wir im Leben sind" -
"In the midst of life, we're in death."
His whole world must have collapsed.
His first wife was to die at the age of just 35.
Even in an age of high infant mortality, of his 20 children,
only ten were to reach adulthood.
After his parents died,
Sebastian and his elder brother Jakob went to live with a sibling
they hardly knew, Johann Christoph, 14 years older than Sebastian.
He was a church organist at Ohrdruf, only 30 miles up the road,
but it could have been a world away.
I have come across documents in the local archives that show that
conditions in Sebastian's school in Ohrdruf were
every bit as deplorable as in the one he had left behind in Eisenach.
Roughianism and loutish behaviour were rife here, too,
and there was a sadistic teacher.
But, curiously, Bach's grades improved.
Bach was the youngest son of quite a big family,
and then suddenly he lost both parents before his tenth birthday.
He then went to live with his elder brother.
How much of a trauma can it have been?
What you're describing is a triple bereavement.
There is losing the parents, losing the home, new town,
new place, I would say that is pretty difficult for any child.
We do have a lot of research showing that this kind of
early bereavement and uprooting can scar people for life.
Do you think his school grades are relevant and interesting here,
because, when he was in Eisenach,
when he was still with his parents, he played truant an awful lot.
After he moves into his elder brother's house,
his school grades rocket, they go way up,
so there's a big change there,
do think that's to do with the orphanhood?
Again, I'm speculating. But what I'm hearing here is that there was
a horrible, horrible environment in the school,
but maybe there was a little protection from the home.
Then he loses the home.
So now the whole world is a dog-eat-dog situation.
There's only one person he can rely on, and that's himself.
Which would explain why he has to be good at school now, doesn't he?
He has to, because, basically, if you show weakness,
if you are weak, you suffer and you go under.
At the age of 15, Bach was awarded a singing scholarship
at a school in Luneburg, 230 miles to the north.
He walked the whole way with a schoolfriend, Georg Erdmann,
who would re-enter the Bach story 30 years later.
Bach spent three years in Luneburg, from the age of 15 to 18.
His voice would have broken almost as soon as he got there,
so what was he doing in the meantime?
This is one of the great puzzles of Bach's life.
One thing we do know is that, while he was at Luneburg,
Bach was acquainted with one of Germany's leading musical figures,
Georg Bohm, a composer and renowned organist,
also born in Thuringia, like Bach himself.
This is a letter Carl Philipp Emanuel wrote to Bach's first biographer,
Johann Nikolaus Forkel,
telling him all the bits and pieces he could remember about his father.
The particularly interesting thing is when he refers to his former teacher,
Georg Bohm, he crosses it out.
Why, having written that Bohm was his father's teacher,
did Emanuel think better of it and erase the reference?
In 2005, a suggestive new clue came to light.
Some leaves of organ tablature,
for many years wrongly catalogued in a German library,
were rediscovered by Leipzig Bach archivist Michael Maul.
When I read the Latin phrase at the end of the manuscript,
"Copied after a manuscript of Georg Bohm in the year 1700 in Luneburg."
I know one person who was in 1700 in Luneburg
and was very interested in very good organ music.
And that's the young JS Bach.
After comparing the manuscript with the other examples,
we can be absolutely sure that no-one else than Bach
is the writer of these manuscripts.
This is the missing piece in the puzzle, isn't it?
It says that he wrote this on paper belonging to Georg Bohm.
He went and maybe became a student or an apprentice to Georg Bohm.
Yes. After his supervision, he wrote out this very difficult piece,
which proves that he played this music. So he was already a virtuoso.
Did Emanuel suddenly remember that his father, for some reason,
didn't wish his relationship with Georg Bohm to be known?
Did he acknowledge that he learnt from other people?
Did he acknowledge their greatness?
This is fascinating, because when he made remarks
about possible teachers, his son, Emanuel, just erased them.
So Bach didn't want that to be known.
He wanted everybody to know that he'd done it entirely on his own,
off his own back.
If he had this assumption that you have got to have power
and you should never show weakness,
he would be very poor in acknowledging those sources.
At the age of 18, Bach, as well as being a virtuoso organist,
was a competent violinist.
In 1703, he left Luneburg to return to the family stamping ground.
In Arnstadt, only 30 miles from where Sebastian was born,
the city fathers had put a tax on beer,
to pay for a brand-new organ for the Neukirchen.
Bach was hired to test the new organ
and to play it in audition in front of the thirsty citizens.
He landed the job on more money than his father had ever earned.
But there was a catch - the council insisted he provide new music.
All he had at his disposal was a rag, tag and bobtail band
made up of mature students.
Thus, Bach began his career as a composer,
but not in exactly auspicious circumstances.
He wrote a cantata, his first,
in which there's a very important bassoon obbligato,
a solo for the bassoon, in three of the movements.
It was a banana skin.
The bassoon part starts innocuously enough,
honking away at a steady old lick.
But then comes a bassoonist's worst nightmare.
HE PLAYS VERY QUICKLY
In the space of about two-and-a-half bars, he sends the bassoon
through a whole list of different keys,
involving very, very complicated fingerings.
Deliberately or not, Bach had set a trap for his resident bassoonist.
He was writing for a fellow called Geyersbach
who, in rehearsal, made a complete hash of it.
And Bach was exasperated to the point where he called him
a "Zippelfagottist", which can be translated variously
as a nanny goat bassoon or a greenhorn bassoon.
But, in reality, Bach was calling him a prick.
Yet another translation is
"Bassoonist breaking wind after eating a green onion."
However Geyersbach understood the term,
he didn't like what he was hearing.
The insult clearly rankled, and Geyersbach plotted his revenge.
He and his cronies, well-oiled after a party at a christening,
sat in wait for Bach, here in the town square.
Bach was making his way back from playing music at the castle,
Neideck Castle, and was taken completely by surprise.
Geyersbach came up to him and demanded an apology,
and then took his cudgel and hit Bach, smack across the face.
Bach, in self defence, drew his rapier
and there was a scuffle, a major scuffle.
It was only the other students who eventually stopped the whole thing.
No doubt to Bach's fury, the Church council sided with Geyersbach,
according to the records.
And that was far from the last of the problems.
Bach was accused of introducing strange harmonies
into his organ music which upset the old dears of the parish.
He played either far too long or not long enough,
and he slipped off down to the pub.
Once, he smuggled a strange girl into his organ loft to make music.
The final straw came
when he asked for four weeks' leave to visit the renowned organist
Buxtehude, walking the whole 260 miles up to Lubeck.
In fact, he was away four months, not four weeks,
and was airily dismissive when he was asked to explain himself.
What we now see is patterns of behaviour that had their origins
in the unhealthy environment of his early schooling,
first in Eisenach and then in Ohrdruf.
Patterns of anger, patterns of dealing with authority
in a very surly and uncompromising way,
impatience, and a kind of self-assuredness
that was bound to rub people up the wrong way.
# Gott!
# Gott ist mein Koenig. #
Bach is commemorated in Arnstadt by this curious recent statue
in "Jack the Lad" pose,
perhaps in a nod to his feisty and fractious stay here.
His time in Arnstadt came to an end when, in 1707,
he was offered a new post 50 miles up the road in Muhlhausen.
The city had been thriving but it was Bach's bad luck
to arrive just after a disastrous fire had wreaked havoc in the city.
Caught up in a local dispute between the clergy,
Bach moved on in less than a year, but two significant things happened.
First, aged 22, he married his cousin, Maria Barbara.
And then, he wrote one of the most important documents we have.
Here's a letter that Bach wrote to the Muhlhausen town council
explaining the reasons why he handed in his resignation,
and the interesting thing from our point of view is that he defines
his "Endzweck" as he called it, his final ambition, his goal in life.
The key phrase is "a well-regulated church music to the glory of God".
Germany was on the brink of the Enlightenment.
The Scientific Revolution had been in full swing
for over a century, but superstition was still rife.
Here, as late as the 1730s, witches were being burned at the stake.
The Thirty Years' War had ended in 1648, and in its wake
came a strong revival of Lutheranism.
Bach took it upon himself to lay down
the New and the Old Testament Commandments with renewed force.
In 1708, Bach left Muhlhausen for the elegant Court of Weimar.
This was a real turning point. For the first time in his life,
he was able to call on good quality musicians.
But as so often in his career, there was a snag.
In fact, there were two of them. Weimar was ruled by a pair of dukes,
an uncle and nephew team. It was a recipe for disaster.
The musicians were employed by both, but the uncle made it known
to the musicians that if they played for his nephew,
they would be liable to be flogged, dismissed out of hand.
In fact, there was one poor horn player who was
dismissed on the spot,
flogged, and then eventually hung as an example -
terrible example - to all the other musicians,
what would happen if they stepped out of line.
One might imagine that in such a fraught, tense situation,
nothing creative could've come out of Bach's time in Weimar,
but of course, the opposite is true.
It was a hugely stimulating time for him.
His first encounter with the Italian music of Vivaldi
and of Corelli and so on. And from Bach's own compositional activity,
it was an enormously important time.
We got the beginnings of his really, really important keyboard works,
and not only that, his cantatas - amazing cantatas -
that he started to write for Weimar,
for the Capella and performed up in the Himmelsburg.
Originally, a cantata was a small, intimate Italian piece
for a solo voice and a couple of instruments.
But soon, it was taken over by German composers in the century
before Bach and was associated with the Lutheran liturgy.
But by the time Bach came along,
it had grown into something almost gargantuan.
His 200 pieces last anything from 25 to 30 minutes each,
occupied a place somewhere between the reading of the lesson
and the sermon, and they reflected the theme of the day, as it were.
You pity the unfortunate preacher who had to follow music as eloquent as this.
Bach demonstrates his fantastic ability to set a scene.
In this case, Jesus knocking at the door of the human heart.
Bach wrote more than 20 cantatas in Weimar,
but having proved his early mastery of the form, he suddenly stopped.
The court's musical director had died,
and when the resulting vacancy was filled by his son,
a musical nullity, and not by Bach, his reaction was to down tools.
He simply stopped composing.
It went from bad to worse.
When Bach asked to leave his employ, the fiery Wilhelm Ernst
had him thrown into jail.
Bach thus became one of the few composers in history
to do hard time.
Some of his music, technically the property of his employer,
may have stayed on at Weimar.
70 years later, the Himmelsburg burned to the ground
and Bach's music was lost for ever.
After a month in prison,
Bach headed off to the job he'd been hankering after all along,
that of Kapellmeister.
He joined a music-loving prince, Leopold, at the castle in Kothen,
not far from Weimar, as his music director.
And it was the beginning of a wonderful, new phase in his life.
Five-and-a-half years of relative trouble-free composition.
The first time in his life where he's away from the Church,
he's in a secular environment because he doesn't have to
write church music, Prince Leopold is a Calvinist,
there's no requirements of Lutheran Church music at his court.
Bach is settled with his family and he has a sympathetic
and extremely music-conscious and music-enthusiastic boss.
Bach completed the famous Brandenburg Concertos at Kothen,
as well as a set of solo cello suites which are today
amongst his most popular works.
Just as Bach was for once happy and settled, tragedy struck.
While he was on a trip to Bohemia with the Prince,
the only time Bach ever left Germany,
his wife Maria Barbara died unexpectedly,
and was buried before he returned and could be told of her death.
Their marriage seems to have been a happy one
and this sudden bereavement was another crushing blow for Bach.
No-one knew better than he how terrifyingly unpredictable
an assignation with death could be.
THEY SING IN GERMAN
A year-and-a-half after his first wife died,
Bach married Anna Magdalena,
a professional singer at the Koten court, 16 years his junior.
She was to bear him another 13 children,
seven of whom died in infancy.
For his new wife, and at her request,
Bach gathered together the music of the Anna Magdalena notebooks.
Also at Koten, he began the 48 preludes
and fugues of the Well Tempered Clavier.
It's typical of Bach that to test out a new tuning system,
he wrote two pieces for each key, major and minor.
For me, the driving thing for Bach must have been this obsessive rigour.
This is someone who, I think,
in writing a collection of keyboard works in every key,
I think it's not just that that's available to him.
I think he couldn't possibly have done it any other way.
He would have had to explore every single key and done it again twice.
Bach's inventiveness is proved by a puzzle contained in the music
he's showing us in the famous portrait
I passed every day as a child.
On the face of it, the piece is straightforward enough.
It's incredibly simple, it sounds almost like a nursery rhyme.
But that's the version that we see
as he shows it to us in the portrait.
But from his perspective, what do we see?
Well, if you turned the music up the other way round,
and read it backwards, what you get is this.
In other words, what's in my head and what you see
and what you hear are two different things?
Yeah, I think he's got it like a secret smile.
He's not quite looking at it, is he? He knows something that we don't.
I love the fact it took 100 years for people to start working it out.
The clue is in the title.
It's a piece not for three, but for six voices.
If you move the reverse version by a bar,
you get this incredible six parts, um,
bit of pop music, really.
It's so simple, it's so complex.
Do you subscribe to the view that a lot of his music is numerological,
that it is reflecting not simply just his own name,
but actually that he as a starting mechanism
would rule the paper
and measure out the number of bars he was actually going to use?
Or is that just baloney?
I think it was a hugely creative,
structural mechanism for him.
But that was an intuition
that he had around numbers
and the appeal of numbers for him.
And I think he had an almost obsessive enjoyment of pattern,
which for me is the mark of a scientist as well.
Scientists look for and respond to pattern in nature.
When they find it, they try and categorise it
and put walls around it, and then they try and break the rules.
That's the fun bit, playing with the pattern that they find.
I think it's an intuition that he has, not as a mathematician as such,
but more broadly as a scientist.
In his own lifetime, Bach was far more famous as a performer
than as a composer.
He wrote many pieces for the organ,
an instrument on which he was renowned as an improviser of genius.
He also stretched the boundaries of another instrument he performed on,
writing a series of solo dance suites for the violin.
They are light years ahead of anything that was written
for the solo violin ever before.
He just takes the violin into a completely different realm.
And asks from the violin to do very "un-violinistic" things.
Like triple stops, quadruple stops,
um, polyphonic writing, fugues.
You know, fugues were written for harpsichord
and for organs and orchestras,
but not for one solo violin.
That is storytelling too.
It's a story, if you like, about four notes, D, C, B flat and A.
But it's also a soliloquy.
It's a very dramatic argument,
in a similar way to Hamlet's To Be Or Not To Be,
where you've got a voice arguing with itself
and listening to the counter arguments
and arguing with the counter arguments
and speaking against the counter arguments and so on.
There's the continual wonder
that he brings it about in the way that he does,
which seems to me an absolute miracle.
A piece of such splendour and wonderfulness
that it on its own would convince me that there was a God
if I felt inclined to take that conclusion from it.
Aged 38, Bach was now at the very peak of his powers.
But his lifetime's goal, his Endzweck,
of writing a well-regulated church music to the glory of God,
had been on hold for the past six years.
The opportunities for writing church music to a high standard
only came to Bach very, very rarely in his life.
It didn't come in Arnstadt, it didn't come in Muhlhausen,
it came for a while in Weimar, but not at all in Kothen,
because in Kothen he was working in a Calvinistic court,
and then he had his big break.
Suddenly he saw an opportunity to put his life's ambition into effect.
In 1723, there was a vacancy in Leipzig,
one of the most important cultural centres in Germany
and a thriving cosmopolitan city.
Kantor of the Thomasschule,
one of the oldest and most prestigious choir schools in Europe,
founded in 1212.
This was a full-on boys choir,
the younger ones singing treble and alto,
the older ones tenor and bass, and playing instruments.
It was a great opportunity,
but there were problems in plenty awaiting him.
Besides music, Bach's duties would also include teaching
the boys other school subjects.
But he drew the line at teaching them Latin.
What's more, only a thin party wall
would separate the boys' dormitories and classrooms
from Bach's own private living quarters.
Bach's determination to see his church music project through
eventually overcame his reservations.
In April 1723, he showed up at the Leipzig City Hall
to be interviewed, and offered a job.
So despite all his misgivings, Bach decided to throw in his lot
and to accept the title of Thomaskantor
and Director Of The City Music here in Leipzig.
So he signed his contract and he swore fealty on the Holy Bible.
One of the councillors is on record as saying,
"Since the best man couldn't be obtained,
"mediocre ones would have to be accepted."
The truth is that neither party to this contract could have guessed
what they were letting themselves in for.
In Bach's own words, "hindrance and vexation".
From the moment he set foot in Leipzig,
Bach found himself caught in the political crossfire
between different factions on the city council.
Music, since it carried with it an element of cultural prestige,
formed a part of those political tensions.
On the one hand, on the city council were those loyal to the elector,
who wanted a modern Kapellmeister,
one who could bring real international prestige to the city.
And they were Bach's natural allies.
But opposed to them were the estates party,
who wanted a traditional Kantor, tied into the school system
with all its regulations, and all its teaching duties.
And that throttled Bach's room for manoeuvre.
Before these problems boiled to the surface, Bach set to work.
It used to be thought that his cantatas,
well over 200 of them, and the two great passions
were composed over the whole 27 years he spent in Leipzig.
But in the 1950s, an astonishing discovery was made.
By a careful examination
of the watermarks on the original scores and parts,
scholars discovered that the greater part of the cantatas and passions
were actually produced
in a white-hot frenzy of just three years.
How he kept up that rhythm, how he managed to sustain
that level of intensity and creativity
is just beyond belief.
Particularly when you consider Bach's living conditions.
This is a model of the Thomas School.
The original building was torn down in 1902.
Here, Bach and his family lived right next to the schoolboys.
There wasn't enough room for all the kids
and they slept two to a bed.
There must have been a heck of a lot of background noise.
And he had to concentrate to produce these phenomenal pieces,
and then to supervise their copying out...in his own room?
I think so.
You wonder how he could ever have had any sort of private life
in this sort of outfit,
the conditions being so cramped, and the noise!
And the descriptions of mice and rats
running up and down the staircases as well.
Yeah, they probably had a different concept of private life back then.
Must have done!
Bach didn't just have to write 25 minutes of new music each week.
He also had to get it copied into individual parts for the musicians
to sing and play from.
His already cramped lodgings now had to accommodate
not just his large family, but also cousins
and live-in apprentices to help with the never-ending copying out.
In the pressure cooker atmosphere of the Thomasschule,
and this devastating pace Bach had set himself,
things started to go wrong.
If you look at this, you'll see there's a frenzy in the writing.
It's almost as though he hardly has time to actually put the beams
of the semiquavers and demisemiquavers into the page.
They look like bamboos in a hurricane.
And here's something interesting.
Because this is one of his favourite copyists,
and Bach leaning over to see what he has copied
notices that his name has been misspelt. B-A-C-C-H.
He gives him a hell of a cuff across the earholes,
and the ink flies across the page.
And here's another example -
a cousin, Johann Heinrich, came to Leipzig,
and Bach put him to work immediately in the sweatshop of copying.
He's made a complete hash of it.
He's written out the chorale in the wrong clef and mis-transposed it.
So he has to cross it all out, and Bach himself has to leap in
and write out the chorale neatly at the end.
I mean, what a plonker!
Here, you can see Bach painstakingly trying to repair the damage,
against the clock, to make sure that there weren't terrible errors
on the music stands when it came to their
one and only rehearsal before the cantata was performed.
Bach had constantly to adjust his music to the talents
and skills of his available musicians.
But also he had to lure in university students
in exchange for private music lessons.
There's something about Bach's orthography, his handwriting,
which suggest already the gesture, the direction of a phrase.
In some cases, Bach was forced to
pay for extra musicians from his supplementary earnings,
made from playing at weddings and funerals.
At the end of each frantic week, Bach unveiled his latest cantata.
What the Leipzig congregation made of these towering works,
frustratingly, we simply don't know.
All we do know is that plenty of people would have heard them.
Leipzig was known as "the city of churches".
It's been estimated that on a normal Sunday,
of a population of 30,000, 9,000 parishioners
and members of society were crammed into these two churches.
The Thomaskirche, the Nikolaikirche,
and bulging from the seams of the other churches in the town.
Thus, every week, Bach had an audience
10 or a dozen times bigger than in any opera house.
Unfortunately, people at the main churches tended to behave
as if they were in an opera house, much to the fury of the clergy.
The preachers often think
they don't listen carefully to the sermons, that's for sure.
You get all kinds of complaints about people flirting in church,
people sleeping in church, people throwing paper aeroplanes in church.
Yes. Taking snuff in church. Dogs coming into church. Absolutely.
And some churches employed special dog whippers to get the dogs out.
Really? And earlier on you had complaints about people
taking pigs through church because it's the quickest way
from where the pig was to market, and so on.
So I think our sense of proper behaviour in a church is different.
So, there must have been a huge amount of noise,
and one of the problems - that's one of the few things
we really do know - is that people drifted in and out,
before the sermon, after the sermon, during the music.
It must have been chaos.
Everything was very, very stratified here socially,
so the ladies were seated down here, below,
the men were in the two galleries, both sides,
and the hoi polloi were at the back with the riff raff.
And the music, of course, came from the back of the Church,
up in the organ gallery.
And it was raining down on the congregation,
but exactly at the moment where the ladies made their grand entrance.
And given the fact this is Germany,
there was a huge amount of social greetings...
Wie geht es Ihnen, gnaedige Frau? That sort of thing.
..while the ladies took their seats and then gazed up
adoringly at the preacher about to give his sermon.
And the hubbub during Bach's music must have been excruciating.
Poor man.
This, then, is the congregation who first heard the masterpiece
Bach presented at the Nikolaikirche on Good Friday 1724.
It was his first passion oratorio,
the central jewel of his necklace of cantatas, a musical
retelling of the story of Jesus' arrest, trial and crucifixion.
There had been passions before, but nothing so radical,
so complex or as ambitious as Bach's John Passion.
He ingeniously blends orchestral and choral writing
into a thrilling amalgam of storytelling, meditation and drama.
Can I just have the cello and bass, please?
Violas start. Bar one.
That's OK. Now, can we just add the violins, please?
Good, that's it. Right, thank you.
And just flutes and oboes, please. And one...
It's like nails being driven into bare flesh.
That's it. That's it.
In this opening chorus, he does something which none of
the other people had done, which is to set up a huge dynamic tension
between this turbulence in the orchestra going on
and this tremendous acclamation of Christ in majesty.
Bach was not trying to write an opera.
Bach's purpose was to draw the listener in. To recreate
in front of their ears and eyes the drama of Christ's crucifixion.
And his St John Passion is an extraordinary amalgam of theology
and music, religion and politics, drama
and wonderful presentation of storytelling.
So we sense the tension that is already in St John's gospel,
that between the light and darkness, between sin and good work
and faith and doubt.
John is particularly remarkable
because you could say that in his account of the Passion,
everybody else suffers and is perplexed and agonised,
and Jesus is utterly stable.
I mean, he's not suffering, he's not under things,
he sort of stands there over and above them.
Zen-like. He's extremely enigmatic.
I mean, in the middle you have Christ's sacrifice,
in which he takes upon himself human sin and gives people back grace.
That's in the middle.
And then, on one side of that, there are the individuals in the text,
particularly Pilate.
Then, on either side of that, there is community,
there's the mad community... The mob. ..of the chorus. The mob.
Hysterical, paranoid, and utterly deranged, really.
On the other side is the present community, which is in order
and sings these sculptural, monumental chorales.
So there you have...
As you say, he ticks all the boxes, he includes the whole thing,
the whole human thing, individual, social.
And it's a reflection of Lutheran... ordered society? It is.
Today the St John Passion is accepted as a masterpiece,
but at its first performance it didn't please the Leipzig clergy,
ever suspicious
and alert to the danger of music stealing their thunder.
Bach was forced to revise it radically over the next year,
and only towards the end of his life was it once again performed
in a version close to its original.
Without so much as a break, Bach began another round of cantatas.
This time the cycle was based on iconic chorales,
and Bach had to write a new work each week.
The cycle is breathtaking in the variety of its moods,
intensely serious at one moment, cheeky at the next.
Measure him against any of his contemporaries,
and there's one thing that makes Bach stick out from all the rest.
He didn't write an opera, not a single opera.
And yet, at the time, opera was really the gold currency,
it was the thing that established careers.
It brought with it fame, it brought with it success,
it brought with it a lot of money, and Bach would have none of that.
In fact, he talked rather disparagingly of those
little ditties that you could hear at the Dresden Opera.
And yet his music is intrinsically as dramatic, if not more dramatic,
than that of any of the opera composers of the day.
Vivaldi, Scarlatti, Telemann, none could match Bach in this respect.
Only Handel came close.
Everything Bach had learned up to now, dramatic scene-setting
to underpin the Gospel narration,
and subtle musical power to convey contrition and remorse,
was poured into his St Matthew Passion,
first performed at the Thomaskirche Leipzig on Good Friday 1727.
The St Matthew Passion is even more atmospheric than the St John.
Lasting around two-and-a-half hours, it's even more monumental in scale,
with a double choir and a double orchestra.
He speaks with the voice of someone
whose belief is absolutely rock solid.
Goes right to the roots of his being.
He believes every word of this, it is true, that it is completely true.
And...there's a solidity, a firmness to what comes through
in the Passions that I have seen very rarely anywhere else.
You wonder, well, where is there room for Bach's own voice?
It's difficult to answer, but I feel there are moments,
chinks in the drama, where you feel that Bach himself
is very much present and very much making the decisions.
So you've got a, er, crotchet, to turn round completely,
180 degrees, from being an absolutely foulmouthed mob
into being contrite and responsible and tender.
And bewildered - who's hit you?
We don't understand. Go.
The choir have to switch into being the community, the believers.
And it's in that moment that I feel Bach is saying,
"This suffering is unbearable. We have to stop it.
"We have to show our sense of moral outrage."
The emotional centre of the Matthew Passion is Erbarme Dich,
Peter's plea for forgiveness, having denied his Christ.
In comes the violin, announcing, "Erbarme dich,"
and the violin with no words at all can convey, in a way that
the human voice could not convey, this concentration of lamentation,
of grief, of contrition, of utter abject horror, in a way,
and yet taking on to a spiritual level,
because the voice line of the violin becomes an agency of...
of compassion and forgiveness, and that's before the singer's sung a note.
Three years after the St Matthew Passion,
Bach's relationship with his masters began to fall apart.
In 1730, he wrote what he called an "Entwurf,"
a memorandum to the Leipzig council,
complaining bitterly that he could no longer operate.
He hadn't sufficient musicians,
and too few of quality to perform his work.
Several months later, Bach took up his pen again.
And this is the most poignant document of all for me.
It's the only truly personal letter we have of Bach's,
in which he's writing to his old pal, Georg Erdmann.
He was the guy that Bach walked from Ohrdruf to Lueneburg with
when they were both in their early teens.
And Bach is just pouring out all his frustration about why
the council had not responded to this Entwurf,
this statement of his intentions.
And Bach tells Erdmann,
"My life is full of hindrance and vexation and I see no future for myself and my family here."
One of the features that you might expect to see in this
inflexible persona, if you like, is that he would never be guilty.
No matter what happened, it's always somebody else's fault.
Does that ring? Yes, it does. Because he's never to blame.
He always has a reason. And his motto...
I don't know whether it's his motto but something that's like a mantra
that comes up and up and again,
is that "My life is lived always with fixation and hindrance."
I have brought you something here, which is a textbook definition,
and this is paranoid personality disorder,
and these are the characteristics.
"Pervasive suspicion of others, distrusting their motives.
"Others seen as deliberately demeaning or threatening,
"constantly expect to be harmed or exploited,
"very sensitive to perceived slights,
"fear and avoidance of anything that could make them feel or seem weak."
That's a perfect description.
The one thing that we do know is that there is an association with
bullying and abuse in childhood.
Thanks to the bone-headedness of the city fathers
and the obvious flaws in Bach's own character,
his output of religious music now began to dwindle away.
St Thomas's Church didn't deserve those cantatas.
Nobody deserved those cantatas, but least of all St Thomas's Church.
That's the striking thing about a great artist,
is they deliver absurdly over contract -
heartbreakingly over contract - and that is the thing that
I think is most impressive and very deeply moving about him.
There he is, worrying about his children,
who are popping off one after the other,
worrying about their education,
trying to keep the town councillors less irritated,
and so on and so forth, and at the same time, he just delivered...
this work that, 250, 260 years later, is supreme in the canon.
Bach now gravitated towards the other main centre of music-making
in Leipzig, the thriving coffeehouse scene.
Here was a different audience,
a more relaxed ambience in which to make music with better musicians
from the university, eager to learn from the master.
But Bach didn't completely give up on sacred music.
Indeed, his new secular style found its way into religious pieces
of unbuttoned high spirits.
Throughout his life,
Bach had much more than his fair share of heartbreak.
That direct experience of personal grief comes over in his music,
but never in a saccharine or morbid way,
but as consoling, soothing, uplifting.
In many ways, you can imagine he's creating a lullaby for himself,
which, again, becomes a lullaby for all of us.
A profound lullaby which comforts him and through him, comforts us.
The thing that to me is so touching
and powerful in the expression of the music is the way that
Bach seems to focus all that distress
and private grief in his own life,
the loss of parents, the loss of children, the loss of a wife,
always the difficulties that he was experiencing,
and yet, the music that comes out of it is so ineffably consoling
and...touching. And nowadays, we look at the texts,
and with this constant longing for death,
this anticipation with joy of one's final demise, it seems bizarre to us
and yet it's with, as you say,
Bach's private grief, it was commonplace.
EVERYBODY'S private grief. Absolutely.
Everybody was losing their families, their babies, their wives.
And, you know, this is surely
the prime purpose of religion at that time,
was to give a consolation in the face of this baffling reality.
With his disagreements with the council dragging on and on,
Bach now had a new power struggle.
This time, with the headmaster of the Thomas School who was
bitterly opposed to all the emphasis on music in school.
In Bach's desire to put an end to his woes in Leipzig,
we find the origins of one late religious masterpiece,
the B minor Mass.
Just try and think how different this is from Messiah.
Messiah, you've got the angels wafting in on a cloud
and they come in and they sing and then disappear, all very gently.
Here, it's a stomp. It's much more kind of Bruegel than Botticelli,
it's not wiffy-waffy at all. OK, off we go. Yep?
Bach was angling for a new job,
or at the very least an honorary title,
at the court in Dresden, which was Catholic,
so despite his unwavering commitment to Lutheranism,
Bach, ever practical, saw there was an opportunity for composing
a Latin Mass on a grand scale.
Bach didn't get his hoped-for move to Dresden,
although he did get the honorary title,
and for the next 15 years, we lose all trace of the B minor Mass.
And then suddenly, we have a Missa Tota,
a complete Catholic Mass with the magnificent Credo and the wonderful
Agnus Dei and the touching way it ends with the Dona Nobis Pacem.
This was Bach's compendium of all the style
since he was a young composer up to the most recent music
that he composed. It was his version of Ars Perfecta, of art perfected.
This is Bach at his most playful, most jazzy
and most exotic, and it's ebullient, and that's what we need to feel
because there's something really folky about this music.
Let's see if we can get that through.
A question that can never be solved is what Bach himself
thought of his work, but we do have one clue that suggests
he saw himself and his music as inextricably linked.
He loves inscribing his own name - B-A-C-H, the family name -
into his music in all sorts of contexts.
And you can only do that in German because H doesn't exist in English,
it's not a note on the piano, but in German, B is B flat, isn't it?
PLAYS SEQUENCE OF SINGLE NOTES A, C, B natural, which is H.
So that's the little kind of family motto that's in there.
PLAYS MORE COMPLICATED PATTERN
# B, A, C, H. #
One of Bach's most famous last works,
The Art Of Fugue, breaks off in mid-flow.
The reasons why this happened have long been debated.
I thought what we'd do is actually go just from where he inscribes
his own name, B-A-C-H,
because that's what's so extraordinary about this piece,
is that he finds a way halfway through this whole composition
to put his name in and then to develop it, so we've got two fugues
going on and then suddenly, it comes to an abrupt halt.
And according to Carl Philipp Emanuel, he stopped then
because he died, that was it. It's just chilling.
Let's try it.
My fantasy is that it's completely... Deliberate. ..deliberate.
And that actually, it's that unfinished business.
That, "I've written my music for the future
"and someone else is going to carry on now."
Bach died aged 65 in Leipzig in the Thomasschule on 28th July, 1750.
Two successive eye operations performed by an English quack doctor
seemed to have finished him off.
After his death, his works fell out of favour, though not with everyone.
His music was passed from hand to hand and Haydn, Mozart
and Beethoven all marvelled at it.
Only in 1829 when Mendelssohn performed a devoted
but stylistically mangled version of the Matthew Passion
did Bach begin to regain the public's affection.
CHORAL SINGING
Bach's legacy is assured.
If Monteverdi was the first composer to find musical expression
for human passion, and Beethoven, what a terrible struggle it is
to be human and to aspire to be godlike, Mozart, the kind of music
we'd hope to hear in heaven, Bach is the one who bridges the gap.
He helps us to hear the voice of God but in human form, ironing
out the imperfections of humanity in the perfection of his music.
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