by Larry Herz
Like many classical choral organizations, The Boston Cecilia has periodically risen to the challenge of the great Bach works: B Minor Mass, St. Matthew and St. John Passions, and in one memorable concert, all six Motets.
The relationship between these pieces of music and today's leading choruses is older and richer than you might guess. They were a crucial part of the development of serious amateur choruses. Looking back to the beginning of "public music", we'll review some of this and speculate about its meaning for the present.
Serious classical music was a product of two streams of wealth for most of its history. It was an outgrowth of worship in the cloister (but developed to high polish only in centers of ecclesiastic wealth such as cathedrals), and a luxury fostered by the aristocracy for social and religious occasions. In the case of court chapels, these worlds overlapped. With the rise of a bourgeois class, towns were sometimes able to support chapel music as a municipal expression of popular musical enthusiasm. It was in such a situation that Bach found himself for most of his life. Although he wrote the Brandenburg Concertos as an application for court sponsorship (and failed), he succeeded as Kappelmeister at the Thomaskirke in Leipzig, where the town authorities paid for a church choir school, choir, and orchestra. Bach's famous use of small numbers of singers and musicians for his weekly cantatas was less his choice than a subject of complaints to the town - how he would have loved to conduct Boston Cecilia! When he had larger forces at his disposal, such as in the B Minor Mass or the Passions, how well he used them!
After J.S. Bach's death, his sons moved from Leipzig and from the Baroque style to follow their fortunes in the new sensibility which would become the Classical Period. But a large collection of J.S. Bach's musical scores remained at the Thomas School, which continued to perform his motets despite the change in musical fashion in the larger European world. The young Mozart heard one of these performances in 1789 and was impressed. In Berlin, a cult of Bach appreciation developed around Princess Amalia of Prussia (sister of Frederick the Great), a composer and esthete of the higher forms of counterpoint. Her Bach library became a great resource for the coming Bach revival of the 19th c. Individual organists who had studied with or had known Bach continued training students in his habits and style, and performing his organ works in church.
Mozart first met the works of Bach in 1782 at the Vienna Court Library. “I go every Sunday at noon to Baron van Swieten and there nothing is played but Handel and Bach." His wife Konstanze loved their counterpoint and begged her husband to write fugues in this style, which he did. Beethoven's teacher Neefe in Bonn introduced him to keyboard works of Bach in 1783, and Beethoven's skill at performing the Art of the Fugue was immediately publicized.
In the early 19th century, several emerging trends began to prepare the way for a Bach revival. The classes and guilds of European society were succeeded by the free middle class, which began to enjoy more wealth and leisure than its predecessors. The Seven Years' War and Bavarian War of Succession had sapped the courts of the zest and funding for music which had sustained the composers of prior centuries. As courts lost their orchestras, serious musicians looked for new opportunities. When in 1810 the Gewerberfreiheit laws deprived town fiddlers, trumpeters, and pipers of guild protection, they began to swell the ranks of the new opera orchestras. The age of Rationalism, for which Bach was an exemplar of the highest discipline of musical craft, began to yield to Romanticism, which would come to see Bach as an inspired devotional composer and a towering hero of the German cultural heritage. In Romantic music criticism, Mozart was compared to Rafael and Bach to Michelangelo and Newton.
The Berlin Opera was able to offer the first subscription concert series. The Prussian King's harpsichordist, increasingly idle, began gathering Berlin students for weekly group singing at what became the Berlin Singakademie. In this format, the middle-class citizens of both sexes, instead of paying professional musicians to perform for them, began to learn, interpret, and later perform music for themselves. The Berlin Singakademie became so famous that visiting celebrities like Beethoven and the Crown Prince attended rehearsals when in town. This middle-class pursuit generated popular enthusiasm for Handel's works in the concert-halls and Palestrina's works in church. Rehearsal of Bach's music at the Singakademie began in 1794 with Motet #1, and covered several of the motets that same year. The Passions followed. By 1813, the singers were tackling the B Minor Mass. None of these rehearsals were preparation for a public performance, since this music was deemed too difficult for the public to appreciate. Goethe experienced some of this music, and was stricken: "as though eternal harmony were conversing with itself, as might have happened in God's bosom just before he created the world." Nietzsche expressed very similar feelings about Bach. Felix Mendelssohn was most impressed after hearing one of the motets performed in 1822 by the Cacilienverein (Cecilia Society!). Finally in 1828, the Credo from the Mass in B minor was performed for the public in Frankfort by a total of 172 musicians. In 1829, Mendelssohn presented the St. Matthew Passion in abbreviated form in Berlin. The public proved up to the challenge, and enthusiastically demanded repeat performances that year and every year thereafter in ever-increasing numbers of cities. The Bach Revival became one of the sustaining elements of amateur choral repertoire around the world.
Classical music groups in America continued the civic performance tradition, beginning with the Stoughton Musical Society in 1786 and later Boston's Handel & Haydn Society and Cecilia Society.
The transition between Court and guild music and music performed by average citizens is an unfinished story. Classical music survived the end of the nobility's support because an emerging citizenry could indeed appreciate and support complex and profound musical experience. Will it survive TV, CDs, cocooning, file-sharing, and Reality Shows? You get to vote.