Peter Williams - Bach: A Musical Biography

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Peter Williams 2016

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First published 2016

Printed in the United Kingdom by TJ International Ltd. Padstow Cornwall

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ISBN 978-1-107-13925-1 Hardback

Like the earlier versions, this book includes newly translated excerpts from the composers Obituary of 1754, now increased in number and used more fully as a thread through the maze of fact and conjecture about him. An aim of the Obituary too was to give a major emphasis to the composers keyboard activities. It is about these that its few anecdotes are told at some length, from the first (the confiscated notebook) to the last (playing the piano to the King of Prussia). It appears also to make use of printed reports of Bachs public appearances as a player.

The document now usually called Bachs Obituary, or Nekrolog , was first entitled a Memorial ( Denkmahl ) and later Some Reports and Thoughts ( Einige Nachrichten und Gedanken : Forkel 1802). Though Memorial is a more appropriate term, I have kept to Obituary because of its familiarity. I have also followed its very convenient plan of writing about a composer by largely separating off chronological narrative (Part I) from critical observations (Part II). The closing epilogue here corresponds, in a sense, to the Obituarys third section, which was a cantata-text in Bachs honour.

Drafted in the months following his death, ready by March 1751 but not published until some three years later (Dok. III, p. 7), the Obituary joined two other memorials in a musical periodical edited by a former Leipzig student, Lorenz Mizler, who twenty years earlier had dedicated his university dissertation to Bach, among others. (See Obituary in the list of references.) The two other capellmeisters (qv) being honoured by Mizler are less well known now but were significant figures of the time, G. H. Bmler and G. H. Stlzel, members of Mizlers Society for Musical Sciences to which, like Bach, they made musical contributions of one kind or another. A delay of four years for such a memorial as Bachs was not then unusual and need not imply low public interest, for Bmler had died much earlier (1745) and Stlzel also before Bach (1749). Nevertheless, given that someone is being uniquely described as world-famous, one wonders whether there had been some difficulty in getting it published or whether it had been written for some other, unrealized purpose.

Each of the Obituarys two sections is attributed in the documentation to a former Bach pupil: the biographical part to the composers second surviving son Carl Philipp Emanuel (here Emanuel), the evaluatory part to his pupil and Emanuels colleague in Berlin, Johann Friedrich Agricola (here Agricola). There follow some memorial verses, laid out as a cantata-text and written by Georg Venzky, another member of Mizlers society but closely connected neither with Leipzig nor, it seems, the composer. (The two accompanying obituaries also closed with a cantata-text in homage, but by Mizler.) Like any biography, the Obituary had an agenda, relating some touching incidents told presumably by the hero-subject himself while ignoring others less touching; and it gives details that its university-educated authors would find important about a man they understood only in part. In effect, they laid a path trodden by his admirers ever since, so that what they say and, especially, do not say has become and still is to this day a crucial part of the Bach picture.