Observations on the life and works 3

‘A light and playful manner of thinking’

This, the second part of the Obituary’s comment quoted in the section
above, sounds yet again like a defence against accusations: nobody would
have accused Telemann of undue seriousness. It needed saying, however,
to those who had heard Bach playing only majestic organ works, or to
those for whom he was the hero of difficult counterpoint and who knew
little of his dance-music and tuneful miniatures. The very difficulties in the
keyboard music, printed or manuscript, must be at least partly responsible
for its being no better known or admired than it was, this at the time when
swathes of German-speaking regions, including the northern Hanseatic
cities, have left such meagre evidence that they were ever aware of his
compositions.
Although the Obituary’s anecdotes give a varied picture of a virtuoso
performer and respected figure, its picture is so very incomplete. When it
refers to ‘some comic vocal pieces’ (einige komische Singstiicke) it is giving
a poor idea of Bach as the composer of such deft masterpieces as the
‘Peasant Cantata’ (1742), which Emanuel certainly, and Agricola possibly,
knew. If Bach slighted such pieces himself, in his own mind or in speaking
about them, there is no sign of this in the music itself and, on the contrary,
the ‘Peasant Cantata’, and to a lesser extent the Coffee and ‘Phoebus and
Pan’ Cantatas, give one some idea of the success he could have had with
comic operas or intermezzi, had the opportunity arisen. As it is, the
comedy and ambiguities in these three cantatas are not so far from those
in J. A. Hasse’s various Dresden intermezzi, or even Pergolesi’s La Serva
padrona, which was performed in Dresden in February 1740. Music of
Bach such as this suits picaresque dramas whose very nature exudes the
racy and the suggestive, giving any responsive composer some good
opportunities. Were it ever established that Bach knew La Serva padrona
one could guess what musical ideas he soon picked up there for his
‘Peasant Cantata’ when he came to write its overture-medley in three
sections (thin scoring, no counterpoint!), its 2/4 arias (one with unusual
phrase-lengths), arias with changing beat and tempi, a final perky duet, and
many other incidental details.
The world these various works inhabit is not far even from Pepusch’s
Beggar’s Opera (1729), and it is not impossible that Bach had become as
familiar with folk or popular music in popular shows as Pepusch
(a Berliner) had in London when selecting the songs for the play. Various
kinds of ballad operas and plays with music, often picaresque, could be met
with in the bigger cities of Europe including those of Protestant Germany.

In 1743, a year between two of Bach’s visits to Potsdam, one English ballad
opera was brought there to the King of Prussia, and in 1752 another,
translated and adapted, came to Leipzig, surely not the first. There are no
signs of Bach’s interest in any of this beyond a few indirect hints, but these
are significant, as when he introduces three popular tunes in the last of the
‘Goldberg Variations’. All three tunes do what is required of them: they fit
the harmony and combine ingeniously, but they also have a suggestive
element in their words, as was common in quodlibets. They are sublimated
in fluent four-part harmony and are handled so that the Aria’s bass-line is
intact, but whatever they do, they were chosen by someone with an ear for
a good popular tune.
It is certainly possible, however, that Bach avoided, and even expressed
distaste for, actual theatre music and staged presentations. There is no clear
evidence either way. For both him and Picander (librettist of the ‘Peasant’
and Coffee Cantatas as well as St Matthew Passion) there can have been no
puritan need to evade the racy in either music or text if the occasion or
location was suitable. Picander, in calling his volume of texts ‘serious,
playful and satirical verses’ (Ernst-Schertzhaffte und Satyrischer Gedichte),
was naming three literary categories familiar at the time, using terms
actually repeated by the Obituary authors (ernst, schertzhaft). The point
was that higher, middle and lower styles each had a place and were each
worthy of professional attention. Yet only an astonishingly versatile com-
poser could have been writing the ‘Peasant Cantata’ and movements in the
Art of Fugue over the same period, apparently, and neither of these very
long after the ‘Goldberg Variations’. A breathtaking trio of masterworks,
and none of them for church!
Style varies according to context, and for a skilful poet or composer
there is no problem in having a character in the ‘Peasant Cantata’ sing
‘how nice it is to cuddle a bit’ (wie schon ein bisschen Dahlen schmeckt) and
following it with a saucy snatch of familiar melody, one of the tunes used in
the last of the ‘Goldberg Variations’. There must have been some tittering
at that point in the work, since according to the recitative the new landlord
knew as much and probably more about such things as the village girls and
boys. Significant, perhaps, is that in the score Bach mentions by name the
chamberlain’s representative, someone for whom Picander gives only
initials, being tactful for a text that was to be printed. But the jokes are
always to be heard in the music itself: when the characters finally go off to
the tavern, trailing after the dudelsack like a pied piper, they sing a bourrée
that apes a church cantata’s final chorale, or would if sung at half the speed
and harmonized appropriately.

Part of the point of the ‘Peasant Cantata’, from its astonishing potpourri
overture (scored for a barn-dance trio) onwards, is to contrast the courtly
with the peasantly, much as the ‘Phoebus and Pan’ cantata contrasts the
merely literate man with the truly imaginative artist. Such characterization
in music would serve an opera-composer well. The court chamberlain
himself for whom the ‘Peasant Cantata” was written in 1742, Carl Heinrich
von Dieskau, was evidently a man of culture, becoming Directeur des
Plaisirs (including musical administration) at the royal court in Dresden
a few years later. As a dedicatee of some published lute-music by a Bach
pupil (Rudolph Straube), von Dieskau might have been a more significant
figure in the life of the composer than is now known about, though
presumably not in connection with church music.
How tactful the ‘Peasant Cantata’s’ street-songs were is still uncertain
since not all have yet been identified. That is also the case with the three
tunes brought in at the end of the ‘Goldberg Variations’, again raising a
smile if one recognizes what is going on. (The tune known traditionally as
the Bergamasca was said by Bach’s pupil Kittel to be about cabbage and
turnips: B] 1994, p. 175.) The ‘Peasant Cantata’ contrasts two elegant,
extended, courtly ABA arias with its rather roguish songs, including
polonaises in the overture and an aria, a hunting song (with horn in G),
a minuet published in an old dance-manual (Nuremberg, 1716), and a
famous ‘international’ theme, Les Folies d’Espagne. The quoting of
Les Folies, an old eight-bar theme, is particularly interesting, since it is in
B minor like Couperin’s in the Troisiéme Livre (1722) and not in D minor
as in the usual treatments of the theme, from Corelli to C. P. E. Bach. Did
the composer know Couperin’s book and if so, was he alluding slyly to
Couperin’s title, ‘La Virginité’?
In all these instances, one has rather to search out the humour, as when
being directed to ‘search and you shall find’ in one of the Musical Offer-
ing’s canons (see p. 433). The Coffee Cantata, another genuinely secular
work showing every sign of great care, relies on purely musical subtleties
such as three-bar phrases to suggest the wayward girl’s first aria, and more
three-bar phrases plus a mixolydian flavour (qv) in the rondeau-finale. It is
not easy to believe that the only time this work left Leipzig to be performed
elsewhere was at Frankfurt in 1739 (see Dok. V, p. 161); surely it circu-
lated? Both these jolly cantatas, in the way they contrast current types of
music, are Bach’s version of the running jokes found in other German
writings, some of which involve music and musicians, such as Printz’s and
Kuhnau’s tales about ‘beer-fiddlers’ (Musicus curiosus, 1691) and incompe-
tents pretending to be Italian virtuosi (Der musicalische Quack-Salber,

1700). F. E. Niedt had fun mocking German organists incapable of playing

figured bass (Musicalische Handleitung I, 1700), and pictured in the music
of the ‘Phoebus and Pan’ Cantata, BWV 201, are the ass’s ears of the
pedant Midas (Example 25). It is difficult to say what is the funniest thing
about this: the braying violin, the repetitive bass, the text (why both ears?)
and what seems anyway to be a non sequitur. Whatever later admirers
have claimed about Bach, this is not the work of a composer thinking only
of duty, death, Luther, money and invertible counterpoint.
The tone of the ‘Peasant Cantata’ is clearly of a piece with the many,
barely veiled sexual double entendres in the Wedding Quodlibet, BWV 524
(copied, perhaps composed, by young Bach in his early twenties). Anna
Magdalena Bach’s wedding verses in her album of 1725 are milder but still
with double entendres as well as amour tendre. Similarly, it would not be
out of character for Bach to have been responsible for producing a par-
ticularly banal song in Sperontes’s Songbook of 1736 that made some fun
of two Leipzig women poets, Mariane von Ziegler and Luise Gottsched,
and then replacing it — if he did - in the revised edition, having had second
thoughts (see NBA III/3, KB, pp. 106ft.). Not that one has to be prurient to
tease or joke, as can be seen in the teasingly formal phraseology in a letter
of 1741 when Bach acknowledges the gift of some venison from a family
friend at the court of Weissenfels, proof of ‘Your Honour’s invaluable

favour’ of which ‘I never entertained the faintest doubt’, and which has
been meanwhile ‘eaten by us to the health of Your Honour (Dok. I,
p- 110). There is also something witty in quoting one of Luther’s sayings —
‘its key will be seen at the end’ - in connection with a certain canon (Dok.
I, p. 222),* for the end Luther had in mind was eschatological and not the
final cadence of a clever canon.
In inappropriately using formal language music can soon be funny, as in
the aria in the ‘Coffee Cantata’, ‘Médchen, die von harten Sinnen’ (‘Obstin-
ate girls are not to be won over easily’). This uses a chromatic bass familiar
from church cantatas whose texts suggest something far more fearful or
shaming than a young girl’s passion for coffee: acts contrary to the will of
the Heavenly Father not of her earthly father. Coffee-houses, already
criticized by Bach’s predecessor in 1709 (see Schering 1941, p. 196), always
had the potential to be disreputable in any country at that period, at least if
young women somehow come into the picture. The extant autograph of
the cantata (1734), on its cover called by Emanuel himself ‘a comic
cantata’, dates from a few months after a certain A. W. Plaz (Platz),
professor of botany in the university, had discussed the dangers of too
much coffee-drinking in one of his public disputations, De potus cofe abusu
noxio, 1733. By then the cantata’s poet Picander had already published his
text, making a link between a girl’s disobedience to her father and her
search for a husband. Bach’s Coffee Cantata leaves us to suspect — or
rather, to be quite sure — that in her elegant melody, the soprano is sighing
over the sweetness not of coffee but something else. What, we are not quite
sure, but comparable euphemisms were familiar at the time.
The Obituary said that it was ‘particularly when playing’ that Bach was
‘comfortable with a light and jocular manner of thinking’ (zu einer leichten
und schertzhaften Denkart bequemen). Is this its warning against taking his
late learned publications as representing the whole man? Was Agricola, as
an eye-witness, reporting what and how Bach played in less formal settings,
such as brilliant harpsichord music in the Collegium or at home? Does

‘playing’ (Spielen) mean only keyboard music, and this only around the
years 1740, the period with which Agricola was familiar? Schertzhaft
(‘jocular’) could be a synonym for allegro (‘light, cheerful, bright’) and
imply that Bach’s playing was effortless, bright, uplifting, the opposite of
stodgy. The final variations of the ‘Goldberg’ are easy to understand as
light and jocular, while at other moments in this work (such as the three
variations in the minor), and also here and there in WTC2 (the preludes in
F sharp minor and G minor), a performance in the spirit of the music
surely results in something not at all jocular but closer to a meditative
organ-chorale.
In Agricola’s original remark, ‘serious’ need not mean ‘grave’, nor
‘jocular’ mean ‘frivolous’. When familiar everyday sounds are incorporated
in various pieces, such as the posthorn in the early Capriccio in B flat, the
hunting horn in Cantata No. 208, or the trumpet-signals in Cantatas
Nos. 214 (birthday music) and 127 (Day of Judgment), the result is neither
grave nor frivolous, more a matter of exploring the old formulae. The
various horn and trumpet calls associated with the military, watchmen,
hunts, proclamations, royalty and so forth appear more cleverly and subtly
in various works of Bach than one would think possible with so basic a
musical topic. Example 26 has two totally different ways to use one such
everyday motif: the first is a trumpet call to prepare for Advent (a motif

heard fourteen times in the cantata movement concerned), the second is

counterpoint to a gavotte for wind-trio (heard four times).
Two points about the dozen or so different times this motif occurs in the
Bach worKklist are first, that it is rethought each time and in a spirit the
opposite of grave; and secondly, if today the composer’s allusion is some-
times puzzling (why is it there in Example 26(b)?), it may not have been so
to citizens of the time. They must have had associations with the regular
trumpet-calls heard in the city of Leipzig, night and day, in the streets and
elsewhere, along with other ambient sounds even including, very likely, the
noises off when they were trying to rehearse.®
The Obituary’s remark was made to counter any reputation Bach’s serious
music had among everyday musicians, especially those engaged in the
musical confections being marketed in the 1740s and 1750s. But it brings
us very little nearer envisaging his own approaches to performance, above all
in the mature works where the intended Affekt is by no means always
obvious or exclusive. Playful, even frivolous, elements in Bach’s personality
have been discerned by many an admirer, but playful elements in the music
itself tend to become lost in the later world of respectful awe.

4 Quoting this was not unique: G. F. Kauffmann does in his Harmonische Seelenlust, 1733-7 when a certain chorale
ends on an imperfect cadence (qv).
5 Platz in Zedler’s Lexicon (1741), vol. 28, cols. 785-6. At much the same period, in
correspondence between Jonathan Swift and his friend Vanessa, coffee served as a code for their encounters, in a
‘special sexually-charged sense of intimacy’ (D. Nokes, Jonathan Swift: A Hypocrite Reversed, London, 1985, p. 258). A
song in Sperontes’s Singende Muse (1736) also involves coffee.
That Bach was a great coffee-drinker is suggested by the household goods listed on his death, which included five coffee
pots of different sizes, the large silver one retained by his widow (along with the large silver teapot: Dok. II, pp. 492f.,
502).