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Johann Sebastian Bach is the ultimate composer's composer,
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influencing countless others who followed him, from Mozart
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to Mendelssohn, Beethoven to Brahms,
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and not just in classical music.
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From Duke Ellington, to the Beatles.
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Musicians in jazz and pop have also fallen under his spell
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and learnt from his techniques.
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Bach is still the benchmark, a musical gold standard.
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We know very little about Bach's life.
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There are only a few facts to go on, and our image of him
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is skewed by statues and paintings of a stern,
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forbidding figure in a frock coat and a powdered wig.
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But then there's the music.
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# Herr
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# Herr
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# Herr... #
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The music tells us something completely different about him.
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It's full of energy, full of dance, full of life.
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Over a lifetime of getting to know, singing and conducting Bach's music,
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I've formed a series of hunches about his personality and character.
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In this film, I want to test them out with fellow Bach enthusiasts
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and scholars, and performs some of his most important works, to see
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what they can tell us about the extraordinary man who composed them.
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He really throws everything at it.
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You know, it's just such an overwhelming exploration
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of what is to be a human being.
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I think he's a scientist at work, and instead of using
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the language of mathematics, he's a scientist using music.
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The level of inspiration on which he works is, I think,
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unparalleled in the rest of music.
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Such splendour and wonderfulness, that, on its own,
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would convince me that there was a God
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if I felt inclined to take that conclusion from it.
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In this film, I want to build a new statue of Bach, to see
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if we can detect a beating heart
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and a more approachable personality underneath the wig.
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My own engagement with Bach began as a small child
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growing up on a farm in Dorset.
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Just before the war,
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a refugee from Nazi Germany arrived with a painting in his rucksack,
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one that his great-grandfather had bought in a junk shop.
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He asked my father to look after it for him.
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It was one of only two portraits painted of JS Bach in his lifetime.
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So I passed it every day of my life, until I was ten,
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when the painting was sold and moved to Princeton, New Jersey.
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This is the first time I've seen it since 1953.
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What's so striking to me, seeing it again, is the intensity of his gaze.
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Those eyes. It's just extraordinary, they're so penetrative.
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I still feel there's a division between the upper half
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of his face and the bottom half.
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The upper half is so intense, it's got that beetle-browed,
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slightly myopic look.
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Below that, you see somebody quite different,
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somebody much more approachable, somebody who enjoyed
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the good things of life, a bon viveur, who enjoyed his tobacco
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and his wine and his beer,
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and there's plenty of records of what he drank.
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And the father of 20 children and two wives.
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We know pitifully few hard facts about Bach.
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There's very little to go on, and only a handful of personal letters.
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But, as in any good detective story, it's often the gaps,
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the seeming contradictions in the tale,
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that are as suggestive and intriguing
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as the hard evidence available.
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We do know that Johann Sebastian was born on 21 March 1685,
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in Eisenach, in the middle of modern-day Germany.
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This is the so-called Bachhaus, now a museum devoted to him.
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Until recently, it billed itself as the house where Bach was born
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and where he grew up. We now know that's definitely not the case.
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As with so much of his life,
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exactly where Bach was born remains a mystery.
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Johann Sebastian was baptised here, at two days old,
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in St George's Church in Eisenach.
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Later, he sang here in the choir.
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As a child, he's said to have had an unusually fine treble voice.
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200 years before him, there was another chorister
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who stood in exactly the same place.
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Now that was Martin Luther.
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And Luther created a revolution here in this part of Germany.
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Bach's whole life was to be
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profoundly influenced by Luther's Reformation.
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Luther set in train a new way of worship.
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It totally transformed the role of language and music in church.
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Bach's own music was filtered through his strongly held
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Lutheran beliefs and upbringing.
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Luther preached his Reformation here in the Georgenkirche in 1521.
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Then he disappeared.
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Actually, he hadn't gone far.
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In fact, in the greatest of secrecy, Luther was in hiding up here
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in the Wartburg, the imposing castle that looms above the town of Eisenach.
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His Reformation had made Luther the most wanted man in Europe.
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So, this is the little room where Luther lived.
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For ten months here he was holed up, imprisoned, really, for his own good,
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because he was on the run from the Pope, from the Emperor.
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He was desperately constipated.
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"The Lord has struck me in the rear," he said.
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And he thought that the devil was pelting him
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with walnuts from the ceiling.
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Luther decided that his best weapon
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to use against the devil was black ink.
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And, in a matter of weeks, he sat down at this desk
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and he wrote a translation, from the Greek,
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of the New Testament.
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And it wasn't just any old German, he decided that he needed
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to amalgamate 18 different dialects and, in effect,
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he established the roots of the German language as we know it.
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Not only did Luther want the Bible to be in the language of the people,
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he also wanted them to be able to join in the music,
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something that, in the Catholic church,
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was much more the province of trained choirs.
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Luther was convinced that music added extra expression
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and eloquence to the biblical text.
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"The notes make the words come alive," he wrote.
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"In fact, without music, man is little more than a stone."
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So, the words appealed to the intellect,
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and the music appealed to the passions.
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And, besides, why should the devil have all the good tunes?
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Luther and his followers made sure he didn't.
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They choraled secular tunes that everybody knew,
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including quite earthy love songs, and then set them to new words
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so that the congregation could belt them out in church.
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Hymns, or chorales, written by Luther
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and his followers became absolutely central to Protestant worship,
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and of course to the music of Bach.
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The impact of the reformer Luther
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on the impressionable young Bach was immeasurable.
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It shaped his whole view of the world,
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it bolstered his sense of worth
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as a craftsman musician, and reinforced his service to the Church.
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It's such an announcement,
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a proclamation of the arrival on Earth of the Christ child.
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Relish the words. Relish them.
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So, "Brich an..."
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Bach's destiny was to become a musician.
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Music was the family business.
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In this part of Germany, in the heart of the Thuringian forest,
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the Bach family were thick on the ground.
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They provided a support system to each other,
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and they carved up the different roles of organist and cantor,
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and Hausmann - the head of the local wind band - between them.
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And, in fact, they became almost
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so important here that the word Bach and musician became synonymous.
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MUSIC: "Quodlibet, BWV 524" by JS Bach
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The Bach clan knew how to let their hair down,
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and often got together for raucous family celebrations.
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Sebastian, the youngest of eight brothers and sisters, was thus
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surrounded by music at home, in church and in school.
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I have in my hands what was probably the most precious book of Bach's childhood.
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It's certainly the one he used every day of his life
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until he left Eisenach.
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It's the Eisenachisches Gesangbuch, the songbook used in church
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and used in school.
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It has wonderful copper engravings which show David and Solomon in the Temple,
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surrounded by their temple musicians,
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and the connections that Bach
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must've made in his mind, between his family
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of the most famous musicians in the area, with a long,
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dynastic lineage going all the way back to Solomon.
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Because he wrote so many masterpieces of sacred music,
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in the 19th-century,
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religiously-inclined writers
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liked to picture Bach as a saintly figure,
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a kind of fifth Evangelist
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to match the goody two-shoes image of his childhood.
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But, in recent years, this picture has started to change.
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This is a book containing the records of Bach's school performance,
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and it gives us his syllabus of classes that he attended,
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and it also shows that, for example, in the third year,
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he came 46th out of 89 pupils,
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and what's more, it tells us that he missed 96 separate classes.
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This is a fascinating document,
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because it's somehow slipped under the radar.
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It's a report on school conditions in the Latin school
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where Bach was a pupil, and it shows the lack of textbooks,
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the overcrowding, the cheeking of the masters,
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the throwing of bricks through the windows,
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all sorts of proto-hooliganism
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and it's been, kind of, neatly ironed out of all the biographies,
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so it's really interesting to come to light now.
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Since the fall of the Berlin Wall and the reunification of Germany,
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more documents have come to light that greatly enhance
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our knowledge of Bach.
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In particular, the Bach Archives in Leipzig have made huge strides
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in discovering more about the composer's working methods,
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and, for the first time, opened their doors to researchers.
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All the significant documents about Bach, many originals,
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some copies, are here.
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When Bach was 50, he suddenly got a fascination for family roots
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and family trees, genealogy,
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so, he wanted to give himself legitimacy in some way.
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And here's an example, and it shows the whole Bach family,
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starting with the legendary figure of Veit Bach,
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who arrived from Hungary in the middle of the 16th century,
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and it goes all the way through to Bach himself,
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who's over here, and then his children, and his grandchildren.
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You'll notice every single member of the Bach family is a man.
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All blokes, not a single woman.
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But mothers, sisters
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and aunts must have participated in the family music-making.
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So, was it nature or nurture that we have to thank for the genius of Bach?
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When he was 50, he did a family tree and he also assembled
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pieces of his ancestors' music, and there was one person
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that he singled out as being a profound composer,
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and another one who he singled out as being an able composer,
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but there obviously wasn't anybody of enormous quality
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until he came along,
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and yet he was one of five brothers, four brothers - how come, he,
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and not the others, popped up above the parapet?
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He's such a good example, because he really undermines
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any simplistic explanation of his genius, of genius.
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I mean, if you had a genetic explanation,
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the genes would have gone throughout the Bach family - in fact,
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why did they take so long to generate Bach,
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you know, so many generations,
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and I think all of these more general explanations,
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on the basis of genes, or even on the basis of the musical culture
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that surrounds him, do not deliver the singular genius he was.
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And it's a pity in a way,
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we can't accept the singularity of people who are manifestly unique.
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We can't bear the idea that genius is unexplained.
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But that's not to say Bach was self-taught.
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His father's cousin, Johann Christoph,
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was the profound composer he referred to.
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His music, only recently rediscovered,
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is the link between Bach and the earlier German tradition.
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Johann Christoph may also have been Sebastian's first teacher
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at the organ, an instrument he made his own.
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But Johan Christoph's life was a cautionary tale.
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In a sense, the life of Johann Christoph Bach
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exemplifies the problems that musicians had at the time.
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They shuttled between the service of the Church, or of the court,
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or occasionally of the municipality, and in Christoph's case,
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he had all manner of domestic problems - he was shunted,
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also, from pillar to post here in the town,
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the town wouldn't give him a proper dwelling,
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he had illness in his family, he was underpaid and he was
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thoroughly querulous and miserable about it, and died in penury.
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But there is another side to it, and this is one that Sebastian
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may well have picked up from his elder cousin.
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Which is, that as a composer, you can channel all that frustration,
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and disappointment into music,
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and the marvellous thing is about Johann Christoph's music,
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and Sebastian's music, is that it has this wonderfully consoling
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and uplifting quality to it.
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Most of all, Bach's music offers us balm and comfort in bereavement.
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The subject of death appears again and again in his music,
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as it did in his own life.
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This is the town cemetery,
249
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and Eisenach's old city walls are here on the right,
250
00:17:05,920 --> 00:17:11,640
and just beyond it is the school where Bach went, the old Dominican cloister.
251
00:17:11,640 --> 00:17:16,280
Somewhere here, in unmarked graves, are those of his parents,
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00:17:16,280 --> 00:17:20,200
Elisabeth and Ambrosius.
253
00:17:20,200 --> 00:17:23,640
Elisabeth died when Bach was scarcely nine years old.
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And then nine months later, his father, Ambrosius, died, as well.
255
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Bach, as the youngest son,
256
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and member of the parish choir, had to witness the whole event
257
00:17:36,800 --> 00:17:39,400
and sing while the ceremony was going on,
258
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and the slow tolling of the bells,
259
00:17:42,280 --> 00:17:46,800
and as the coffin was lowered into the grave,
260
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he and his fellow choristers sang Luther's words,
261
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"Mitten wir im Leben sind" -
262
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"In the midst of life, we're in death."
263
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His whole world must have collapsed.
264
00:18:01,720 --> 00:18:06,840
His first wife was to die at the age of just 35.
265
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Even in an age of high infant mortality, of his 20 children,
266
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only ten were to reach adulthood.
267
00:18:16,840 --> 00:18:19,400
After his parents died,
268
00:18:19,400 --> 00:18:22,160
Sebastian and his elder brother Jakob went to live with a sibling
269
00:18:22,160 --> 00:18:26,840
they hardly knew, Johann Christoph, 14 years older than Sebastian.
270
00:18:26,840 --> 00:18:31,320
He was a church organist at Ohrdruf, only 30 miles up the road,
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00:18:31,320 --> 00:18:33,760
but it could have been a world away.
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00:18:34,800 --> 00:18:38,440
I have come across documents in the local archives that show that
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00:18:38,440 --> 00:18:41,120
conditions in Sebastian's school in Ohrdruf were
274
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every bit as deplorable as in the one he had left behind in Eisenach.
275
00:18:45,280 --> 00:18:48,400
Roughianism and loutish behaviour were rife here, too,
276
00:18:48,400 --> 00:18:51,640
and there was a sadistic teacher.
277
00:18:51,640 --> 00:18:54,680
But, curiously, Bach's grades improved.
278
00:18:54,680 --> 00:18:57,160
Bach was the youngest son of quite a big family,
279
00:18:57,160 --> 00:19:00,520
and then suddenly he lost both parents before his tenth birthday.
280
00:19:00,520 --> 00:19:04,640
He then went to live with his elder brother.
281
00:19:04,640 --> 00:19:08,000
How much of a trauma can it have been?
282
00:19:08,000 --> 00:19:10,200
What you're describing is a triple bereavement.
283
00:19:10,200 --> 00:19:13,520
There is losing the parents, losing the home, new town,
284
00:19:13,520 --> 00:19:19,280
new place, I would say that is pretty difficult for any child.
285
00:19:19,280 --> 00:19:22,760
We do have a lot of research showing that this kind of
286
00:19:22,760 --> 00:19:27,360
early bereavement and uprooting can scar people for life.
287
00:19:27,360 --> 00:19:31,240
Do you think his school grades are relevant and interesting here,
288
00:19:31,240 --> 00:19:33,560
because, when he was in Eisenach,
289
00:19:33,560 --> 00:19:39,600
when he was still with his parents, he played truant an awful lot.
290
00:19:39,600 --> 00:19:41,840
After he moves into his elder brother's house,
291
00:19:41,840 --> 00:19:44,960
his school grades rocket, they go way up,
292
00:19:44,960 --> 00:19:46,880
so there's a big change there,
293
00:19:46,880 --> 00:19:49,360
do think that's to do with the orphanhood?
294
00:19:49,360 --> 00:19:53,160
Again, I'm speculating. But what I'm hearing here is that there was
295
00:19:53,160 --> 00:19:55,440
a horrible, horrible environment in the school,
296
00:19:55,440 --> 00:19:58,480
but maybe there was a little protection from the home.
297
00:19:58,480 --> 00:19:59,880
Then he loses the home.
298
00:19:59,880 --> 00:20:02,720
So now the whole world is a dog-eat-dog situation.
299
00:20:02,720 --> 00:20:06,520
There's only one person he can rely on, and that's himself.
300
00:20:06,520 --> 00:20:10,320
Which would explain why he has to be good at school now, doesn't he?
301
00:20:10,320 --> 00:20:14,800
He has to, because, basically, if you show weakness,
302
00:20:14,800 --> 00:20:16,680
if you are weak, you suffer and you go under.
303
00:20:19,280 --> 00:20:22,480
At the age of 15, Bach was awarded a singing scholarship
304
00:20:22,480 --> 00:20:26,160
at a school in Luneburg, 230 miles to the north.
305
00:20:26,160 --> 00:20:29,760
He walked the whole way with a schoolfriend, Georg Erdmann,
306
00:20:29,760 --> 00:20:32,880
who would re-enter the Bach story 30 years later.
307
00:20:40,520 --> 00:20:45,000
Bach spent three years in Luneburg, from the age of 15 to 18.
308
00:20:45,000 --> 00:20:48,120
His voice would have broken almost as soon as he got there,
309
00:20:48,120 --> 00:20:50,680
so what was he doing in the meantime?
310
00:20:50,680 --> 00:20:53,320
This is one of the great puzzles of Bach's life.
311
00:20:53,320 --> 00:20:56,400
One thing we do know is that, while he was at Luneburg,
312
00:20:56,400 --> 00:20:59,720
Bach was acquainted with one of Germany's leading musical figures,
313
00:20:59,720 --> 00:21:03,480
Georg Bohm, a composer and renowned organist,
314
00:21:03,480 --> 00:21:06,800
also born in Thuringia, like Bach himself.
315
00:21:10,880 --> 00:21:15,840
This is a letter Carl Philipp Emanuel wrote to Bach's first biographer,
316
00:21:15,840 --> 00:21:18,880
Johann Nikolaus Forkel,
317
00:21:18,880 --> 00:21:23,640
telling him all the bits and pieces he could remember about his father.
318
00:21:23,640 --> 00:21:29,400
The particularly interesting thing is when he refers to his former teacher,
319
00:21:29,400 --> 00:21:31,960
Georg Bohm, he crosses it out.
320
00:21:34,560 --> 00:21:37,720
Why, having written that Bohm was his father's teacher,
321
00:21:37,720 --> 00:21:40,880
did Emanuel think better of it and erase the reference?
322
00:21:42,800 --> 00:21:46,880
In 2005, a suggestive new clue came to light.
323
00:21:48,480 --> 00:21:50,560
Some leaves of organ tablature,
324
00:21:50,560 --> 00:21:53,800
for many years wrongly catalogued in a German library,
325
00:21:53,800 --> 00:21:57,360
were rediscovered by Leipzig Bach archivist Michael Maul.
326
00:21:58,480 --> 00:22:04,160
When I read the Latin phrase at the end of the manuscript,
327
00:22:04,160 --> 00:22:11,800
"Copied after a manuscript of Georg Bohm in the year 1700 in Luneburg."
328
00:22:11,800 --> 00:22:15,640
I know one person who was in 1700 in Luneburg
329
00:22:15,640 --> 00:22:19,800
and was very interested in very good organ music.
330
00:22:19,800 --> 00:22:21,680
And that's the young JS Bach.
331
00:22:21,680 --> 00:22:26,160
After comparing the manuscript with the other examples,
332
00:22:26,160 --> 00:22:30,680
we can be absolutely sure that no-one else than Bach
333
00:22:30,680 --> 00:22:32,440
is the writer of these manuscripts.
334
00:22:32,440 --> 00:22:35,520
This is the missing piece in the puzzle, isn't it?
335
00:22:35,520 --> 00:22:40,600
It says that he wrote this on paper belonging to Georg Bohm.
336
00:22:40,600 --> 00:22:46,120
He went and maybe became a student or an apprentice to Georg Bohm.
337
00:22:46,120 --> 00:22:52,640
- Yes.
- After his supervision, he wrote out this very difficult piece,
338
00:22:52,640 --> 00:22:55,960
which proves that he played this music. So he was already a virtuoso.
339
00:23:01,240 --> 00:23:04,760
Did Emanuel suddenly remember that his father, for some reason,
340
00:23:04,760 --> 00:23:08,000
didn't wish his relationship with Georg Bohm to be known?
341
00:23:08,000 --> 00:23:10,480
Did he acknowledge that he learnt from other people?
342
00:23:10,480 --> 00:23:13,120
Did he acknowledge their greatness?
343
00:23:13,120 --> 00:23:15,880
This is fascinating, because when he made remarks
344
00:23:15,880 --> 00:23:21,400
about possible teachers, his son, Emanuel, just erased them.
345
00:23:21,400 --> 00:23:23,000
So Bach didn't want that to be known.
346
00:23:23,000 --> 00:23:27,000
He wanted everybody to know that he'd done it entirely on his own,
347
00:23:27,000 --> 00:23:28,800
off his own back.
348
00:23:28,800 --> 00:23:31,680
If he had this assumption that you have got to have power
349
00:23:31,680 --> 00:23:34,120
and you should never show weakness,
350
00:23:34,120 --> 00:23:37,320
he would be very poor in acknowledging those sources.
351
00:23:37,320 --> 00:23:42,200
At the age of 18, Bach, as well as being a virtuoso organist,
352
00:23:42,200 --> 00:23:44,400
was a competent violinist.
353
00:23:44,400 --> 00:23:49,400
In 1703, he left Luneburg to return to the family stamping ground.
354
00:23:49,400 --> 00:23:52,760
In Arnstadt, only 30 miles from where Sebastian was born,
355
00:23:52,760 --> 00:23:55,240
the city fathers had put a tax on beer,
356
00:23:55,240 --> 00:23:58,000
to pay for a brand-new organ for the Neukirchen.
357
00:23:59,400 --> 00:24:01,280
Bach was hired to test the new organ
358
00:24:01,280 --> 00:24:05,440
and to play it in audition in front of the thirsty citizens.
359
00:24:05,440 --> 00:24:09,440
He landed the job on more money than his father had ever earned.
360
00:24:09,440 --> 00:24:13,840
But there was a catch the council insisted he provide new music.
361
00:24:15,800 --> 00:24:19,680
All he had at his disposal was a rag, tag and bobtail band
362
00:24:19,680 --> 00:24:21,960
made up of mature students.
363
00:24:21,960 --> 00:24:24,400
Thus, Bach began his career as a composer,
364
00:24:24,400 --> 00:24:27,840
but not in exactly auspicious circumstances.
365
00:24:27,840 --> 00:24:30,120
He wrote a cantata, his first,
366
00:24:30,120 --> 00:24:34,800
in which there's a very important bassoon obbligato,
367
00:24:34,800 --> 00:24:38,320
a solo for the bassoon, in three of the movements.
368
00:24:38,320 --> 00:24:40,120
It was a banana skin.
369
00:24:42,600 --> 00:24:45,320
The bassoon part starts innocuously enough,
370
00:24:45,320 --> 00:24:48,400
honking away at a steady old lick.
371
00:24:48,400 --> 00:24:52,760
But then comes a bassoonist's worst nightmare.
372
00:24:52,760 --> 00:24:54,280
HE PLAYS VERY QUICKLY
373
00:25:02,560 --> 00:25:06,800
In the space of about two-and-a-half bars, he sends the bassoon
374
00:25:06,800 --> 00:25:10,200
through a whole list of different keys,
375
00:25:10,200 --> 00:25:13,680
involving very, very complicated fingerings.
376
00:25:13,680 --> 00:25:18,680
Deliberately or not, Bach had set a trap for his resident bassoonist.
377
00:25:18,680 --> 00:25:23,440
He was writing for a fellow called Geyersbach
378
00:25:23,440 --> 00:25:27,600
who, in rehearsal, made a complete hash of it.
379
00:25:27,600 --> 00:25:31,400
And Bach was exasperated to the point where he called him
380
00:25:31,400 --> 00:25:35,240
a "Zippelfagottist", which can be translated variously
381
00:25:35,240 --> 00:25:39,840
as a nanny goat bassoon or a greenhorn bassoon.
382
00:25:39,840 --> 00:25:43,520
But, in reality, Bach was calling him a prick.
383
00:25:45,360 --> 00:25:47,000
Yet another translation is
384
00:25:47,000 --> 00:25:51,120
"Bassoonist breaking wind after eating a green onion."
385
00:25:51,120 --> 00:25:53,160
However Geyersbach understood the term,
386
00:25:53,160 --> 00:25:54,720
he didn't like what he was hearing.
387
00:25:57,440 --> 00:26:02,480
The insult clearly rankled, and Geyersbach plotted his revenge.
388
00:26:02,480 --> 00:26:07,520
He and his cronies, well-oiled after a party at a christening,
389
00:26:07,520 --> 00:26:13,000
sat in wait for Bach, here in the town square.
390
00:26:13,000 --> 00:26:17,680
Bach was making his way back from playing music at the castle,
391
00:26:17,680 --> 00:26:22,120
Neideck Castle, and was taken completely by surprise.
392
00:26:22,120 --> 00:26:25,280
Geyersbach came up to him and demanded an apology,
393
00:26:25,280 --> 00:26:29,440
and then took his cudgel and hit Bach, smack across the face.
394
00:26:29,440 --> 00:26:32,800
Bach, in self defence, drew his rapier
395
00:26:32,800 --> 00:26:35,600
and there was a scuffle, a major scuffle.
396
00:26:35,600 --> 00:26:39,640
It was only the other students who eventually stopped the whole thing.
397
00:26:42,880 --> 00:26:46,680
No doubt to Bach's fury, the Church council sided with Geyersbach,
398
00:26:46,680 --> 00:26:48,480
according to the records.
399
00:26:48,480 --> 00:26:51,240
And that was far from the last of the problems.
400
00:26:51,240 --> 00:26:54,800
Bach was accused of introducing strange harmonies
401
00:26:54,800 --> 00:26:58,000
into his organ music which upset the old dears of the parish.
402
00:26:58,000 --> 00:27:01,400
He played either far too long or not long enough,
403
00:27:01,400 --> 00:27:04,160
and he slipped off down to the pub.
404
00:27:04,160 --> 00:27:08,720
Once, he smuggled a strange girl into his organ loft to make music.
405
00:27:08,720 --> 00:27:11,120
The final straw came
406
00:27:11,120 --> 00:27:14,520
when he asked for four weeks' leave to visit the renowned organist
407
00:27:14,520 --> 00:27:19,360
Buxtehude, walking the whole 260 miles up to Lubeck.
408
00:27:19,360 --> 00:27:23,800
In fact, he was away four months, not four weeks,
409
00:27:23,800 --> 00:27:27,480
and was airily dismissive when he was asked to explain himself.
410
00:27:27,480 --> 00:27:32,680
What we now see is patterns of behaviour that had their origins
411
00:27:32,680 --> 00:27:36,520
in the unhealthy environment of his early schooling,
412
00:27:36,520 --> 00:27:38,960
first in Eisenach and then in Ohrdruf.
413
00:27:38,960 --> 00:27:44,800
Patterns of anger, patterns of dealing with authority
414
00:27:44,800 --> 00:27:47,520
in a very surly and uncompromising way,
415
00:27:47,520 --> 00:27:52,240
impatience, and a kind of self-assuredness
416
00:27:52,240 --> 00:27:54,720
that was bound to rub people up the wrong way.
417
00:27:54,720 --> 00:27:56,760
# Gott!
418
00:27:56,760 --> 00:27:59,200
# Gott!
419
00:27:59,200 --> 00:28:01,400
# Gott ist mein Koenig. #
420
00:28:02,600 --> 00:28:06,560
Bach is commemorated in Arnstadt by this curious recent statue
421
00:28:06,560 --> 00:28:08,800
in "Jack the Lad" pose,
422
00:28:08,800 --> 00:28:11,680
perhaps in a nod to his feisty and fractious stay here.
423
00:28:16,920 --> 00:28:21,000
His time in Arnstadt came to an end when, in 1707,
424
00:28:21,000 --> 00:28:24,960
he was offered a new post 50 miles up the road in Muhlhausen.
425
00:28:26,360 --> 00:28:29,560
The city had been thriving but it was Bach's bad luck
426
00:28:29,560 --> 00:28:34,400
to arrive just after a disastrous fire had wreaked havoc in the city.
427
00:28:34,400 --> 00:28:37,120
Caught up in a local dispute between the clergy,
428
00:28:37,120 --> 00:28:41,760
Bach moved on in less than a year, but two significant things happened.
429
00:28:41,760 --> 00:28:45,800
First, aged 22, he married his cousin, Maria Barbara.
430
00:28:45,800 --> 00:28:49,800
And then, he wrote one of the most important documents we have.
431
00:28:49,800 --> 00:28:54,400
Here's a letter that Bach wrote to the Muhlhausen town council
432
00:28:54,400 --> 00:28:59,520
explaining the reasons why he handed in his resignation,
433
00:28:59,520 --> 00:29:02,520
and the interesting thing from our point of view is that he defines
434
00:29:02,520 --> 00:29:07,320
his "Endzweck" as he called it, his final ambition, his goal in life.
435
00:29:08,720 --> 00:29:13,520
The key phrase is "a well-regulated church music to the glory of God".
436
00:29:15,840 --> 00:29:18,680
Germany was on the brink of the Enlightenment.
437
00:29:18,680 --> 00:29:21,400
The Scientific Revolution had been in full swing
438
00:29:21,400 --> 00:29:24,640
for over a century, but superstition was still rife.
439
00:29:24,640 --> 00:29:28,600
Here, as late as the 1730s, witches were being burned at the stake.
440
00:29:29,720 --> 00:29:33,160
The Thirty Years' War had ended in 1648, and in its wake
441
00:29:33,160 --> 00:29:35,920
came a strong revival of Lutheranism.
442
00:29:35,920 --> 00:29:38,240
Bach took it upon himself to lay down
443
00:29:38,240 --> 00:29:42,800
the New and the Old Testament Commandments with renewed force.
444
00:31:18,640 --> 00:31:24,000
In 1708, Bach left Muhlhausen for the elegant Court of Weimar.
445
00:31:24,000 --> 00:31:27,000
This was a real turning point. For the first time in his life,
446
00:31:27,000 --> 00:31:30,160
he was able to call on good quality musicians.
447
00:31:30,160 --> 00:31:32,760
But as so often in his career, there was a snag.
448
00:31:32,760 --> 00:31:37,280
In fact, there were two of them. Weimar was ruled by a pair of dukes,
449
00:31:37,280 --> 00:31:41,840
an uncle and nephew team. It was a recipe for disaster.
450
00:31:41,840 --> 00:31:47,000
The musicians were employed by both, but the uncle made it known
451
00:31:47,000 --> 00:31:50,320
to the musicians that if they played for his nephew,
452
00:31:50,320 --> 00:31:53,560
they would be liable to be flogged, dismissed out of hand.
453
00:31:53,560 --> 00:31:56,000
In fact, there was one poor horn player who was
454
00:31:56,000 --> 00:31:57,880
dismissed on the spot,
455
00:31:57,880 --> 00:32:01,600
flogged, and then eventually hung as an example -
456
00:32:01,600 --> 00:32:03,720
terrible example - to all the other musicians,
457
00:32:03,720 --> 00:32:05,800
what would happen if they stepped out of line.
458
00:32:14,880 --> 00:32:18,360
One might imagine that in such a fraught, tense situation,
459
00:32:18,360 --> 00:32:21,560
nothing creative could've come out of Bach's time in Weimar,
460
00:32:21,560 --> 00:32:23,440
but of course, the opposite is true.
461
00:32:23,440 --> 00:32:26,440
It was a hugely stimulating time for him.
462
00:32:26,440 --> 00:32:29,840
His first encounter with the Italian music of Vivaldi
463
00:32:29,840 --> 00:32:34,560
and of Corelli and so on. And from Bach's own compositional activity,
464
00:32:34,560 --> 00:32:36,840
it was an enormously important time.
465
00:32:36,840 --> 00:32:41,720
We got the beginnings of his really, really important keyboard works,
466
00:32:41,720 --> 00:32:45,280
and not only that, his cantatas - amazing cantatas -
467
00:32:45,280 --> 00:32:48,680
that he started to write for Weimar,
468
00:32:48,680 --> 00:32:51,680
for the Capella and performed up in the Himmelsburg.
469
00:33:00,760 --> 00:33:04,760
Originally, a cantata was a small, intimate Italian piece
470
00:33:04,760 --> 00:33:08,520
for a solo voice and a couple of instruments.
471
00:33:08,520 --> 00:33:11,720
But soon, it was taken over by German composers in the century
472
00:33:11,720 --> 00:33:15,720
before Bach and was associated with the Lutheran liturgy.
473
00:33:17,120 --> 00:33:19,280
But by the time Bach came along,
474
00:33:19,280 --> 00:33:23,000
it had grown into something almost gargantuan.
475
00:33:23,000 --> 00:33:28,160
His 200 pieces last anything from 25 to 30 minutes each,
476
00:33:28,160 --> 00:33:32,560
occupied a place somewhere between the reading of the lesson
477
00:33:32,560 --> 00:33:36,720
and the sermon, and they reflected the theme of the day, as it were.
478
00:33:38,800 --> 00:33:44,000
You pity the unfortunate preacher who had to follow music as eloquent as this.
479
00:34:33,320 --> 00:34:37,280
Bach demonstrates his fantastic ability to set a scene.
480
00:34:37,280 --> 00:34:40,640
In this case, Jesus knocking at the door of the human heart.
481
00:35:43,640 --> 00:35:46,000
Bach wrote more than 20 cantatas in Weimar,
482
00:35:46,000 --> 00:35:50,920
but having proved his early mastery of the form, he suddenly stopped.
483
00:35:50,920 --> 00:35:53,120
The court's musical director had died,
484
00:35:53,120 --> 00:35:56,280
and when the resulting vacancy was filled by his son,
485
00:35:56,280 --> 00:36:01,600
a musical nullity, and not by Bach, his reaction was to down tools.
486
00:36:01,600 --> 00:36:03,320
He simply stopped composing.
487
00:36:06,000 --> 00:36:07,760
It went from bad to worse.
488
00:36:07,760 --> 00:36:10,800
When Bach asked to leave his employ, the fiery Wilhelm Ernst
489
00:36:10,800 --> 00:36:13,320
had him thrown into jail.
490
00:36:13,320 --> 00:36:16,120
Bach thus became one of the few composers in history
491
00:36:16,120 --> 00:36:18,400
to do hard time.
492
00:36:18,400 --> 00:36:21,480
Some of his music, technically the property of his employer,
493
00:36:21,480 --> 00:36:23,760
may have stayed on at Weimar.
494
00:36:23,760 --> 00:36:27,520
70 years later, the Himmelsburg burned to the ground
495
00:36:27,520 --> 00:36:29,520
and Bach's music was lost for ever.
496
00:36:31,880 --> 00:36:33,440
After a month in prison,
497
00:36:33,440 --> 00:36:37,720
Bach headed off to the job he'd been hankering after all along,
498
00:36:37,720 --> 00:36:39,840
that of Kapellmeister.
499
00:36:39,840 --> 00:36:44,800
He joined a music-loving prince, Leopold, at the castle in Kothen,
500
00:36:44,800 --> 00:36:47,360
not far from Weimar, as his music director.
501
00:36:47,360 --> 00:36:50,560
And it was the beginning of a wonderful, new phase in his life.
502
00:36:50,560 --> 00:36:55,520
Five-and-a-half years of relative trouble-free composition.
503
00:36:55,520 --> 00:36:59,320
The first time in his life where he's away from the Church,
504
00:36:59,320 --> 00:37:02,680
he's in a secular environment because he doesn't have to
505
00:37:02,680 --> 00:37:05,360
write church music, Prince Leopold is a Calvinist,
506
00:37:05,360 --> 00:37:08,600
there's no requirements of Lutheran Church music at his court.
507
00:37:08,600 --> 00:37:11,680
Bach is settled with his family and he has a sympathetic
508
00:37:11,680 --> 00:37:17,000
and extremely music-conscious and music-enthusiastic boss.
509
00:37:17,000 --> 00:37:21,000
Bach completed the famous Brandenburg Concertos at Kothen,
510
00:37:21,000 --> 00:37:24,400
as well as a set of solo cello suites which are today
511
00:37:24,400 --> 00:37:26,240
amongst his most popular works.
512
00:38:36,760 --> 00:38:41,960
Just as Bach was for once happy and settled, tragedy struck.
513
00:38:41,960 --> 00:38:44,680
While he was on a trip to Bohemia with the Prince,
514
00:38:44,680 --> 00:38:47,800
the only time Bach ever left Germany,
515
00:38:47,800 --> 00:38:49,960
his wife Maria Barbara died unexpectedly,
516
00:38:49,960 --> 00:38:53,760
and was buried before he returned and could be told of her death.
517
00:38:53,760 --> 00:38:55,840
Their marriage seems to have been a happy one
518
00:38:55,840 --> 00:38:59,000
and this sudden bereavement was another crushing blow for Bach.
519
00:39:00,560 --> 00:39:04,800
No-one knew better than he how terrifyingly unpredictable
520
00:39:04,800 --> 00:39:06,200
an assignation with death could be.
521
00:39:06,200 --> 00:39:08,800
THEY SING IN GERMAN
522
00:39:36,440 --> 00:39:39,280
A year-and-a-half after his first wife died,
523
00:39:39,280 --> 00:39:41,200
Bach married Anna Magdalena,
524
00:39:41,200 --> 00:39:45,400
a professional singer at the Koten court, 16 years his junior.
525
00:39:45,400 --> 00:39:47,760
She was to bear him another 13 children,
526
00:39:47,760 --> 00:39:50,560
seven of whom died in infancy.
527
00:39:51,920 --> 00:39:54,480
For his new wife, and at her request,
528
00:39:54,480 --> 00:39:58,200
Bach gathered together the music of the Anna Magdalena notebooks.
529
00:39:58,200 --> 00:40:01,160
Also at Koten, he began the 48 preludes
530
00:40:01,160 --> 00:40:03,800
and fugues of the Well Tempered Clavier.
531
00:40:03,800 --> 00:40:07,400
It's typical of Bach that to test out a new tuning system,
532
00:40:07,400 --> 00:40:11,400
he wrote two pieces for each key, major and minor.
533
00:40:11,400 --> 00:40:16,320
For me, the driving thing for Bach must have been this obsessive rigour.
534
00:40:16,320 --> 00:40:18,920
This is someone who, I think,
535
00:40:18,920 --> 00:40:22,320
in writing a collection of keyboard works in every key,
536
00:40:22,320 --> 00:40:25,560
I think it's not just that that's available to him.
537
00:40:25,560 --> 00:40:28,920
I think he couldn't possibly have done it any other way.
538
00:40:28,920 --> 00:40:32,600
He would have had to explore every single key and done it again twice.
539
00:40:34,480 --> 00:40:37,920
Bach's inventiveness is proved by a puzzle contained in the music
540
00:40:37,920 --> 00:40:40,400
he's showing us in the famous portrait
541
00:40:40,400 --> 00:40:41,920
I passed every day as a child.
542
00:40:41,920 --> 00:40:44,960
On the face of it, the piece is straightforward enough.
543
00:40:44,960 --> 00:40:49,000
It's incredibly simple, it sounds almost like a nursery rhyme.
544
00:40:57,360 --> 00:41:00,200
But that's the version that we see
545
00:41:00,200 --> 00:41:03,160
as he shows it to us in the portrait.
546
00:41:03,160 --> 00:41:05,920
But from his perspective, what do we see?
547
00:41:05,920 --> 00:41:09,680
Well, if you turned the music up the other way round,
548
00:41:09,680 --> 00:41:13,280
and read it backwards, what you get is this.
549
00:41:22,000 --> 00:41:25,000
In other words, what's in my head and what you see
550
00:41:25,000 --> 00:41:27,400
and what you hear are two different things?
551
00:41:27,400 --> 00:41:30,400
Yeah, I think he's got it like a secret smile.
552
00:41:30,400 --> 00:41:34,320
He's not quite looking at it, is he? He knows something that we don't.
553
00:41:34,320 --> 00:41:38,440
I love the fact it took 100 years for people to start working it out.
554
00:41:38,440 --> 00:41:40,840
The clue is in the title.
555
00:41:40,840 --> 00:41:43,560
It's a piece not for three, but for six voices.
556
00:41:45,160 --> 00:41:50,160
If you move the reverse version by a bar,
557
00:41:50,160 --> 00:41:53,160
you get this incredible six parts, um,
558
00:41:53,160 --> 00:41:55,200
bit of pop music, really.
559
00:42:08,160 --> 00:42:10,960
It's so simple, it's so complex.
560
00:42:10,960 --> 00:42:16,240
Do you subscribe to the view that a lot of his music is numerological,
561
00:42:16,240 --> 00:42:20,120
that it is reflecting not simply just his own name,
562
00:42:20,120 --> 00:42:23,360
but actually that he as a starting mechanism
563
00:42:23,360 --> 00:42:25,960
would rule the paper
564
00:42:25,960 --> 00:42:29,440
and measure out the number of bars he was actually going to use?
565
00:42:29,440 --> 00:42:31,360
Or is that just baloney?
566
00:42:31,360 --> 00:42:34,720
I think it was a hugely creative,
567
00:42:34,720 --> 00:42:37,440
structural mechanism for him.
568
00:42:37,440 --> 00:42:40,600
But that was an intuition
569
00:42:40,600 --> 00:42:42,960
that he had around numbers
570
00:42:42,960 --> 00:42:45,120
and the appeal of numbers for him.
571
00:42:45,120 --> 00:42:49,240
And I think he had an almost obsessive enjoyment of pattern,
572
00:42:49,240 --> 00:42:51,880
which for me is the mark of a scientist as well.
573
00:42:51,880 --> 00:42:55,800
Scientists look for and respond to pattern in nature.
574
00:42:55,800 --> 00:42:57,600
When they find it, they try and categorise it
575
00:42:57,600 --> 00:43:00,240
and put walls around it, and then they try and break the rules.
576
00:43:00,240 --> 00:43:03,360
That's the fun bit, playing with the pattern that they find.
577
00:43:03,360 --> 00:43:07,000
I think it's an intuition that he has, not as a mathematician as such,
578
00:43:07,000 --> 00:43:08,880
but more broadly as a scientist.
579
00:43:10,280 --> 00:43:13,920
In his own lifetime, Bach was far more famous as a performer
580
00:43:13,920 --> 00:43:16,440
than as a composer.
581
00:43:16,440 --> 00:43:18,240
He wrote many pieces for the organ,
582
00:43:18,240 --> 00:43:22,360
an instrument on which he was renowned as an improviser of genius.
583
00:43:22,360 --> 00:43:25,760
He also stretched the boundaries of another instrument he performed on,
584
00:43:25,760 --> 00:43:29,480
writing a series of solo dance suites for the violin.
585
00:43:31,360 --> 00:43:34,880
They are light years ahead of anything that was written
586
00:43:34,880 --> 00:43:37,560
for the solo violin ever before.
587
00:43:37,560 --> 00:43:41,000
He just takes the violin into a completely different realm.
588
00:43:42,200 --> 00:43:45,360
And asks from the violin to do very "un-violinistic" things.
589
00:43:45,360 --> 00:43:48,120
Like triple stops, quadruple stops,
590
00:43:48,120 --> 00:43:52,800
um, polyphonic writing, fugues.
591
00:43:52,800 --> 00:43:54,920
You know, fugues were written for harpsichord
592
00:43:54,920 --> 00:43:56,840
and for organs and orchestras,
593
00:43:56,840 --> 00:43:58,480
but not for one solo violin.
594
00:44:27,960 --> 00:44:30,360
That is storytelling too.
595
00:44:30,360 --> 00:44:33,720
It's a story, if you like, about four notes, D, C, B flat and A.
596
00:44:35,880 --> 00:44:38,360
But it's also a soliloquy.
597
00:44:38,360 --> 00:44:41,800
It's a very dramatic argument,
598
00:44:41,800 --> 00:44:44,840
in a similar way to Hamlet's To Be Or Not To Be,
599
00:44:44,840 --> 00:44:48,320
where you've got a voice arguing with itself
600
00:44:48,320 --> 00:44:51,960
and listening to the counter arguments
601
00:44:51,960 --> 00:44:54,680
and arguing with the counter arguments
602
00:44:54,680 --> 00:44:57,920
and speaking against the counter arguments and so on.
603
00:45:10,760 --> 00:45:12,320
There's the continual wonder
604
00:45:12,320 --> 00:45:14,920
that he brings it about in the way that he does,
605
00:45:14,920 --> 00:45:18,240
which seems to me an absolute miracle.
606
00:45:18,240 --> 00:45:23,320
A piece of such splendour and wonderfulness
607
00:45:23,320 --> 00:45:27,120
that it on its own would convince me that there was a God
608
00:45:27,120 --> 00:45:30,880
if I felt inclined to take that conclusion from it.
609
00:46:18,800 --> 00:46:23,520
Aged 38, Bach was now at the very peak of his powers.
610
00:46:25,600 --> 00:46:28,520
But his lifetime's goal, his Endzweck,
611
00:46:28,520 --> 00:46:32,960
of writing a well-regulated church music to the glory of God,
612
00:46:32,960 --> 00:46:36,160
had been on hold for the past six years.
613
00:46:39,000 --> 00:46:41,960
The opportunities for writing church music to a high standard
614
00:46:41,960 --> 00:46:46,800
only came to Bach very, very rarely in his life.
615
00:46:46,800 --> 00:46:49,000
It didn't come in Arnstadt, it didn't come in Muhlhausen,
616
00:46:49,000 --> 00:46:53,400
it came for a while in Weimar, but not at all in Kothen,
617
00:46:53,400 --> 00:46:56,880
because in Kothen he was working in a Calvinistic court,
618
00:46:56,880 --> 00:46:59,320
and then he had his big break.
619
00:47:00,480 --> 00:47:04,720
Suddenly he saw an opportunity to put his life's ambition into effect.
620
00:47:05,720 --> 00:47:08,520
In 1723, there was a vacancy in Leipzig,
621
00:47:08,520 --> 00:47:12,680
one of the most important cultural centres in Germany
622
00:47:12,680 --> 00:47:14,600
and a thriving cosmopolitan city.
623
00:47:14,600 --> 00:47:17,800
Kantor of the Thomasschule,
624
00:47:17,800 --> 00:47:20,240
one of the oldest and most prestigious choir schools in Europe,
625
00:47:20,240 --> 00:47:22,640
founded in 1212.
626
00:47:22,640 --> 00:47:24,840
This was a full-on boys choir,
627
00:47:24,840 --> 00:47:28,400
the younger ones singing treble and alto,
628
00:47:28,400 --> 00:47:31,280
the older ones tenor and bass, and playing instruments.
629
00:47:33,400 --> 00:47:35,200
It was a great opportunity,
630
00:47:35,200 --> 00:47:39,000
but there were problems in plenty awaiting him.
631
00:47:39,000 --> 00:47:43,400
Besides music, Bach's duties would also include teaching
632
00:47:43,400 --> 00:47:45,120
the boys other school subjects.
633
00:47:45,120 --> 00:47:47,840
But he drew the line at teaching them Latin.
634
00:47:47,840 --> 00:47:50,120
What's more, only a thin party wall
635
00:47:50,120 --> 00:47:53,160
would separate the boys' dormitories and classrooms
636
00:47:53,160 --> 00:47:55,600
from Bach's own private living quarters.
637
00:47:57,400 --> 00:48:00,480
Bach's determination to see his church music project through
638
00:48:00,480 --> 00:48:03,280
eventually overcame his reservations.
639
00:48:03,280 --> 00:48:06,280
In April 1723, he showed up at the Leipzig City Hall
640
00:48:06,280 --> 00:48:09,000
to be interviewed, and offered a job.
641
00:48:09,000 --> 00:48:13,600
So despite all his misgivings, Bach decided to throw in his lot
642
00:48:13,600 --> 00:48:17,200
and to accept the title of Thomaskantor
643
00:48:17,200 --> 00:48:20,960
and Director Of The City Music here in Leipzig.
644
00:48:20,960 --> 00:48:27,120
So he signed his contract and he swore fealty on the Holy Bible.
645
00:48:30,280 --> 00:48:32,760
One of the councillors is on record as saying,
646
00:48:32,760 --> 00:48:35,400
"Since the best man couldn't be obtained,
647
00:48:35,400 --> 00:48:37,440
"mediocre ones would have to be accepted."
648
00:48:37,440 --> 00:48:40,800
The truth is that neither party to this contract could have guessed
649
00:48:40,800 --> 00:48:42,920
what they were letting themselves in for.
650
00:48:42,920 --> 00:48:46,720
In Bach's own words, "hindrance and vexation".
651
00:48:46,720 --> 00:48:48,880
From the moment he set foot in Leipzig,
652
00:48:48,880 --> 00:48:51,920
Bach found himself caught in the political crossfire
653
00:48:51,920 --> 00:48:54,760
between different factions on the city council.
654
00:48:54,760 --> 00:48:58,560
Music, since it carried with it an element of cultural prestige,
655
00:48:58,560 --> 00:49:01,720
formed a part of those political tensions.
656
00:49:01,720 --> 00:49:05,320
On the one hand, on the city council were those loyal to the elector,
657
00:49:05,320 --> 00:49:07,600
who wanted a modern Kapellmeister,
658
00:49:07,600 --> 00:49:11,800
one who could bring real international prestige to the city.
659
00:49:11,800 --> 00:49:13,840
And they were Bach's natural allies.
660
00:49:13,840 --> 00:49:16,400
But opposed to them were the estates party,
661
00:49:16,400 --> 00:49:20,800
who wanted a traditional Kantor, tied into the school system
662
00:49:20,800 --> 00:49:23,440
with all its regulations, and all its teaching duties.
663
00:49:23,440 --> 00:49:26,240
And that throttled Bach's room for manoeuvre.
664
00:49:28,520 --> 00:49:32,800
Before these problems boiled to the surface, Bach set to work.
665
00:49:32,800 --> 00:49:34,160
It used to be thought that his cantatas,
666
00:49:34,160 --> 00:49:36,840
well over 200 of them, and the two great passions
667
00:49:36,840 --> 00:49:40,160
were composed over the whole 27 years he spent in Leipzig.
668
00:49:41,720 --> 00:49:45,640
But in the 1950s, an astonishing discovery was made.
669
00:49:45,640 --> 00:49:47,400
By a careful examination
670
00:49:47,400 --> 00:49:49,880
of the watermarks on the original scores and parts,
671
00:49:49,880 --> 00:49:53,200
scholars discovered that the greater part of the cantatas and passions
672
00:49:53,200 --> 00:49:55,320
were actually produced
673
00:49:55,320 --> 00:49:58,800
in a white-hot frenzy of just three years.
674
00:49:58,800 --> 00:50:02,280
How he kept up that rhythm, how he managed to sustain
675
00:50:02,280 --> 00:50:05,320
that level of intensity and creativity
676
00:50:05,320 --> 00:50:07,720
is just beyond belief.
677
00:50:07,720 --> 00:50:10,800
Particularly when you consider Bach's living conditions.
678
00:50:11,920 --> 00:50:13,960
This is a model of the Thomas School.
679
00:50:13,960 --> 00:50:17,000
The original building was torn down in 1902.
680
00:50:17,000 --> 00:50:20,680
Here, Bach and his family lived right next to the schoolboys.
681
00:50:20,680 --> 00:50:22,960
There wasn't enough room for all the kids
682
00:50:22,960 --> 00:50:24,480
and they slept two to a bed.
683
00:50:24,480 --> 00:50:28,160
There must have been a heck of a lot of background noise.
684
00:50:28,160 --> 00:50:32,560
And he had to concentrate to produce these phenomenal pieces,
685
00:50:32,560 --> 00:50:37,560
and then to supervise their copying out...in his own room?
686
00:50:37,560 --> 00:50:39,160
I think so.
687
00:50:39,160 --> 00:50:42,520
You wonder how he could ever have had any sort of private life
688
00:50:42,520 --> 00:50:45,400
in this sort of outfit,
689
00:50:45,400 --> 00:50:47,600
the conditions being so cramped, and the noise!
690
00:50:47,600 --> 00:50:49,800
And the descriptions of mice and rats
691
00:50:49,800 --> 00:50:52,360
running up and down the staircases as well.
692
00:50:52,360 --> 00:50:57,160
Yeah, they probably had a different concept of private life back then.
693
00:50:57,160 --> 00:50:58,720
Must have done!
694
00:51:00,360 --> 00:51:04,800
Bach didn't just have to write 25 minutes of new music each week.
695
00:51:04,800 --> 00:51:07,160
He also had to get it copied into individual parts for the musicians
696
00:51:07,160 --> 00:51:08,920
to sing and play from.
697
00:51:08,920 --> 00:51:11,760
His already cramped lodgings now had to accommodate
698
00:51:11,760 --> 00:51:14,560
not just his large family, but also cousins
699
00:51:14,560 --> 00:51:18,480
and live-in apprentices to help with the never-ending copying out.
700
00:51:19,880 --> 00:51:23,960
In the pressure cooker atmosphere of the Thomasschule,
701
00:51:23,960 --> 00:51:27,000
and this devastating pace Bach had set himself,
702
00:51:27,000 --> 00:51:29,160
things started to go wrong.
703
00:51:29,160 --> 00:51:33,400
If you look at this, you'll see there's a frenzy in the writing.
704
00:51:33,400 --> 00:51:37,600
It's almost as though he hardly has time to actually put the beams
705
00:51:37,600 --> 00:51:40,480
of the semiquavers and demisemiquavers into the page.
706
00:51:40,480 --> 00:51:43,440
They look like bamboos in a hurricane.
707
00:51:43,440 --> 00:51:46,400
And here's something interesting.
708
00:51:46,400 --> 00:51:49,200
Because this is one of his favourite copyists,
709
00:51:49,200 --> 00:51:52,400
and Bach leaning over to see what he has copied
710
00:51:52,400 --> 00:51:57,760
notices that his name has been misspelt. B-ACCH.
711
00:51:57,760 --> 00:52:01,360
He gives him a hell of a cuff across the earholes,
712
00:52:01,360 --> 00:52:04,840
and the ink flies across the page.
713
00:52:04,840 --> 00:52:07,240
And here's another example -
714
00:52:07,240 --> 00:52:11,000
a cousin, Johann Heinrich, came to Leipzig,
715
00:52:11,000 --> 00:52:14,640
and Bach put him to work immediately in the sweatshop of copying.
716
00:52:14,640 --> 00:52:17,480
He's made a complete hash of it.
717
00:52:17,480 --> 00:52:22,160
He's written out the chorale in the wrong clef and mis-transposed it.
718
00:52:22,160 --> 00:52:25,840
So he has to cross it all out, and Bach himself has to leap in
719
00:52:25,840 --> 00:52:28,680
and write out the chorale neatly at the end.
720
00:52:28,680 --> 00:52:31,320
I mean, what a plonker!
721
00:52:31,320 --> 00:52:35,320
Here, you can see Bach painstakingly trying to repair the damage,
722
00:52:35,320 --> 00:52:38,240
against the clock, to make sure that there weren't terrible errors
723
00:52:38,240 --> 00:52:40,760
on the music stands when it came to their
724
00:52:40,760 --> 00:52:43,200
one and only rehearsal before the cantata was performed.
725
00:52:53,240 --> 00:52:56,200
Bach had constantly to adjust his music to the talents
726
00:52:56,200 --> 00:52:58,800
and skills of his available musicians.
727
00:52:58,800 --> 00:53:01,760
But also he had to lure in university students
728
00:53:01,760 --> 00:53:04,320
in exchange for private music lessons.
729
00:53:04,320 --> 00:53:09,360
There's something about Bach's orthography, his handwriting,
730
00:53:09,360 --> 00:53:13,560
which suggest already the gesture, the direction of a phrase.
731
00:53:13,560 --> 00:53:15,440
In some cases, Bach was forced to
732
00:53:15,440 --> 00:53:18,920
pay for extra musicians from his supplementary earnings,
733
00:53:18,920 --> 00:53:21,640
made from playing at weddings and funerals.
734
00:53:30,560 --> 00:53:34,400
At the end of each frantic week, Bach unveiled his latest cantata.
735
00:53:35,800 --> 00:53:39,120
What the Leipzig congregation made of these towering works,
736
00:53:39,120 --> 00:53:41,360
frustratingly, we simply don't know.
737
00:53:42,640 --> 00:53:45,960
All we do know is that plenty of people would have heard them.
738
00:53:45,960 --> 00:53:49,720
Leipzig was known as "the city of churches".
739
00:53:49,720 --> 00:53:52,720
It's been estimated that on a normal Sunday,
740
00:53:52,720 --> 00:53:56,800
of a population of 30,000, 9,000 parishioners
741
00:53:56,800 --> 00:54:01,120
and members of society were crammed into these two churches.
742
00:54:01,120 --> 00:54:03,360
The Thomaskirche, the Nikolaikirche,
743
00:54:03,360 --> 00:54:06,880
and bulging from the seams of the other churches in the town.
744
00:54:08,600 --> 00:54:11,400
Thus, every week, Bach had an audience
745
00:54:11,400 --> 00:54:14,920
10 or a dozen times bigger than in any opera house.
746
00:54:14,920 --> 00:54:17,720
Unfortunately, people at the main churches tended to behave
747
00:54:17,720 --> 00:54:21,440
as if they were in an opera house, much to the fury of the clergy.
748
00:54:22,480 --> 00:54:23,760
The preachers often think
749
00:54:23,760 --> 00:54:26,680
they don't listen carefully to the sermons, that's for sure.
750
00:54:26,680 --> 00:54:30,400
You get all kinds of complaints about people flirting in church,
751
00:54:30,400 --> 00:54:34,400
people sleeping in church, people throwing paper aeroplanes in church.
752
00:54:34,400 --> 00:54:39,800
- Yes.
- Taking snuff in church.
- Dogs coming into church.
- Absolutely.
753
00:54:39,800 --> 00:54:42,400
And some churches employed special dog whippers to get the dogs out.
754
00:54:42,400 --> 00:54:45,600
- Really?
- And earlier on you had complaints about people
755
00:54:45,600 --> 00:54:48,400
taking pigs through church because it's the quickest way
756
00:54:48,400 --> 00:54:50,960
from where the pig was to market, and so on.
757
00:54:50,960 --> 00:54:55,400
So I think our sense of proper behaviour in a church is different.
758
00:54:55,800 --> 00:54:58,360
So, there must have been a huge amount of noise,
759
00:54:58,360 --> 00:55:01,800
and one of the problems - that's one of the few things
760
00:55:01,800 --> 00:55:05,000
we really do know - is that people drifted in and out,
761
00:55:05,000 --> 00:55:08,360
before the sermon, after the sermon, during the music.
762
00:55:08,360 --> 00:55:10,200
It must have been chaos.
763
00:55:10,200 --> 00:55:13,200
Everything was very, very stratified here socially,
764
00:55:13,200 --> 00:55:17,000
so the ladies were seated down here, below,
765
00:55:17,000 --> 00:55:20,680
the men were in the two galleries, both sides,
766
00:55:20,680 --> 00:55:24,160
and the hoi polloi were at the back with the riff raff.
767
00:55:26,120 --> 00:55:29,360
And the music, of course, came from the back of the Church,
768
00:55:29,360 --> 00:55:31,480
up in the organ gallery.
769
00:55:31,480 --> 00:55:33,920
And it was raining down on the congregation,
770
00:55:33,920 --> 00:55:38,480
but exactly at the moment where the ladies made their grand entrance.
771
00:55:38,480 --> 00:55:41,160
And given the fact this is Germany,
772
00:55:41,160 --> 00:55:44,000
there was a huge amount of social greetings...
773
00:55:44,000 --> 00:55:47,240
Wie geht es Ihnen, gnaedige Frau? That sort of thing.
774
00:55:47,240 --> 00:55:50,440
..while the ladies took their seats and then gazed up
775
00:55:50,440 --> 00:55:53,640
adoringly at the preacher about to give his sermon.
776
00:55:54,800 --> 00:55:58,200
And the hubbub during Bach's music must have been excruciating.
777
00:55:58,200 --> 00:55:59,240
Poor man.
778
00:56:00,680 --> 00:56:03,760
This, then, is the congregation who first heard the masterpiece
779
00:56:03,760 --> 00:56:07,840
Bach presented at the Nikolaikirche on Good Friday 1724.
780
00:56:07,840 --> 00:56:10,400
It was his first passion oratorio,
781
00:56:10,400 --> 00:56:13,760
the central jewel of his necklace of cantatas, a musical
782
00:56:13,760 --> 00:56:17,880
retelling of the story of Jesus' arrest, trial and crucifixion.
783
00:56:17,880 --> 00:56:21,720
There had been passions before, but nothing so radical,
784
00:56:21,720 --> 00:56:25,520
so complex or as ambitious as Bach's John Passion.
785
00:56:25,520 --> 00:56:29,160
He ingeniously blends orchestral and choral writing
786
00:56:29,160 --> 00:56:33,680
into a thrilling amalgam of storytelling, meditation and drama.
787
00:56:33,680 --> 00:56:36,280
Can I just have the cello and bass, please?
788
00:56:36,280 --> 00:56:38,640
Violas start. Bar one.
789
00:56:42,560 --> 00:56:46,320
That's OK. Now, can we just add the violins, please?
790
00:56:52,520 --> 00:56:55,400
Good, that's it. Right, thank you.
791
00:56:55,400 --> 00:56:59,840
And just flutes and oboes, please. And one...
792
00:57:10,240 --> 00:57:13,400
It's like nails being driven into bare flesh.
793
00:57:17,720 --> 00:57:18,880
That's it. That's it.
794
00:57:18,880 --> 00:57:21,640
In this opening chorus, he does something which none of
795
00:57:21,640 --> 00:57:27,800
the other people had done, which is to set up a huge dynamic tension
796
00:57:27,800 --> 00:57:31,400
between this turbulence in the orchestra going on
797
00:57:31,400 --> 00:57:35,840
and this tremendous acclamation of Christ in majesty.
798
00:59:20,800 --> 00:59:22,720
Bach was not trying to write an opera.
799
00:59:22,720 --> 00:59:26,920
Bach's purpose was to draw the listener in. To recreate
800
00:59:26,920 --> 00:59:32,840
in front of their ears and eyes the drama of Christ's crucifixion.
801
00:59:32,840 --> 00:59:37,160
And his St John Passion is an extraordinary amalgam of theology
802
00:59:37,160 --> 00:59:41,800
and music, religion and politics, drama
803
00:59:41,800 --> 00:59:44,800
and wonderful presentation of storytelling.
804
00:59:44,800 --> 00:59:48,800
So we sense the tension that is already in St John's gospel,
805
00:59:48,800 --> 00:59:54,840
that between the light and darkness, between sin and good work
806
00:59:54,840 --> 00:59:57,280
and faith and doubt.
807
01:00:16,400 --> 01:00:18,720
John is particularly remarkable
808
01:00:18,720 --> 01:00:22,120
because you could say that in his account of the Passion,
809
01:00:22,120 --> 01:00:26,920
everybody else suffers and is perplexed and agonised,
810
01:00:26,920 --> 01:00:30,400
and Jesus is utterly stable.
811
01:00:30,400 --> 01:00:32,560
I mean, he's not suffering, he's not under things,
812
01:00:32,560 --> 01:00:35,240
he sort of stands there over and above them.
813
01:00:35,240 --> 01:00:38,400
- Zen-like.
- He's extremely enigmatic.
814
01:01:14,600 --> 01:01:18,280
I mean, in the middle you have Christ's sacrifice,
815
01:01:18,280 --> 01:01:23,520
in which he takes upon himself human sin and gives people back grace.
816
01:01:23,520 --> 01:01:25,160
That's in the middle.
817
01:01:25,160 --> 01:01:30,960
And then, on one side of that, there are the individuals in the text,
818
01:01:30,960 --> 01:01:32,840
particularly Pilate.
819
01:01:32,840 --> 01:01:37,280
Then, on either side of that, there is community,
820
01:01:37,280 --> 01:01:40,880
- there's the mad community...
- The mob.
- ..of the chorus. The mob.
821
01:01:40,880 --> 01:01:45,480
Hysterical, paranoid, and utterly deranged, really.
822
01:01:45,480 --> 01:01:51,400
On the other side is the present community, which is in order
823
01:01:51,400 --> 01:01:55,800
and sings these sculptural, monumental chorales.
824
01:01:55,800 --> 01:01:56,840
So there you have...
825
01:01:56,840 --> 01:02:00,560
As you say, he ticks all the boxes, he includes the whole thing,
826
01:02:00,560 --> 01:02:04,320
the whole human thing, individual, social.
827
01:02:04,320 --> 01:02:09,120
- And it's a reflection of Lutheran... ordered society?
- It is.
828
01:02:56,440 --> 01:02:59,720
Today the St John Passion is accepted as a masterpiece,
829
01:02:59,720 --> 01:03:03,840
but at its first performance it didn't please the Leipzig clergy,
830
01:03:03,840 --> 01:03:05,000
ever suspicious
831
01:03:05,000 --> 01:03:08,840
and alert to the danger of music stealing their thunder.
832
01:03:08,840 --> 01:03:12,400
Bach was forced to revise it radically over the next year,
833
01:03:12,400 --> 01:03:15,920
and only towards the end of his life was it once again performed
834
01:03:15,920 --> 01:03:18,800
in a version close to its original.
835
01:03:38,160 --> 01:03:41,880
Without so much as a break, Bach began another round of cantatas.
836
01:03:41,880 --> 01:03:45,200
This time the cycle was based on iconic chorales,
837
01:03:45,200 --> 01:03:48,800
and Bach had to write a new work each week.
838
01:03:48,800 --> 01:03:51,800
The cycle is breathtaking in the variety of its moods,
839
01:03:51,800 --> 01:03:54,760
intensely serious at one moment, cheeky at the next.
840
01:04:56,880 --> 01:04:59,120
Measure him against any of his contemporaries,
841
01:04:59,120 --> 01:05:02,800
and there's one thing that makes Bach stick out from all the rest.
842
01:05:02,800 --> 01:05:06,800
He didn't write an opera, not a single opera.
843
01:05:07,480 --> 01:05:12,400
And yet, at the time, opera was really the gold currency,
844
01:05:12,400 --> 01:05:15,160
it was the thing that established careers.
845
01:05:15,160 --> 01:05:19,800
It brought with it fame, it brought with it success,
846
01:05:19,800 --> 01:05:23,640
it brought with it a lot of money, and Bach would have none of that.
847
01:05:23,640 --> 01:05:26,440
In fact, he talked rather disparagingly of those
848
01:05:26,440 --> 01:05:29,760
little ditties that you could hear at the Dresden Opera.
849
01:05:31,200 --> 01:05:36,520
And yet his music is intrinsically as dramatic, if not more dramatic,
850
01:05:36,520 --> 01:05:40,360
than that of any of the opera composers of the day.
851
01:05:40,360 --> 01:05:45,000
Vivaldi, Scarlatti, Telemann, none could match Bach in this respect.
852
01:05:45,000 --> 01:05:46,400
Only Handel came close.
853
01:05:47,560 --> 01:05:51,160
Everything Bach had learned up to now, dramatic scene-setting
854
01:05:51,160 --> 01:05:53,320
to underpin the Gospel narration,
855
01:05:53,320 --> 01:05:56,600
and subtle musical power to convey contrition and remorse,
856
01:05:56,600 --> 01:05:58,800
was poured into his St Matthew Passion,
857
01:05:58,800 --> 01:06:03,960
first performed at the Thomaskirche Leipzig on Good Friday 1727.
858
01:06:28,800 --> 01:06:32,200
The St Matthew Passion is even more atmospheric than the St John.
859
01:06:32,200 --> 01:06:36,840
Lasting around two-and-a-half hours, it's even more monumental in scale,
860
01:06:36,840 --> 01:06:39,640
with a double choir and a double orchestra.
861
01:06:51,680 --> 01:06:54,400
He speaks with the voice of someone
862
01:06:54,400 --> 01:06:56,720
whose belief is absolutely rock solid.
863
01:06:56,720 --> 01:06:59,400
Goes right to the roots of his being.
864
01:06:59,400 --> 01:07:04,720
He believes every word of this, it is true, that it is completely true.
865
01:07:04,720 --> 01:07:09,720
And...there's a solidity, a firmness to what comes through
866
01:07:09,720 --> 01:07:14,160
in the Passions that I have seen very rarely anywhere else.
867
01:07:47,120 --> 01:07:51,200
You wonder, well, where is there room for Bach's own voice?
868
01:07:51,200 --> 01:07:54,960
It's difficult to answer, but I feel there are moments,
869
01:07:54,960 --> 01:07:58,160
chinks in the drama, where you feel that Bach himself
870
01:07:58,160 --> 01:08:01,600
is very much present and very much making the decisions.
871
01:08:09,840 --> 01:08:13,800
So you've got a, er, crotchet, to turn round completely,
872
01:08:13,800 --> 01:08:16,960
180 degrees, from being an absolutely foulmouthed mob
873
01:08:16,960 --> 01:08:20,440
into being contrite and responsible and tender.
874
01:08:20,440 --> 01:08:22,840
And bewildered - who's hit you?
875
01:08:22,840 --> 01:08:25,320
We don't understand. Go.
876
01:08:40,360 --> 01:08:46,440
The choir have to switch into being the community, the believers.
877
01:08:48,720 --> 01:08:51,840
And it's in that moment that I feel Bach is saying,
878
01:08:51,840 --> 01:08:55,400
"This suffering is unbearable. We have to stop it.
879
01:08:55,400 --> 01:08:59,560
"We have to show our sense of moral outrage."
880
01:09:13,960 --> 01:09:17,960
The emotional centre of the Matthew Passion is Erbarme Dich,
881
01:09:17,960 --> 01:09:22,200
Peter's plea for forgiveness, having denied his Christ.
882
01:09:22,200 --> 01:09:26,160
In comes the violin, announcing, "Erbarme dich,"
883
01:09:26,160 --> 01:09:31,480
and the violin with no words at all can convey, in a way that
884
01:09:31,480 --> 01:09:37,680
the human voice could not convey, this concentration of lamentation,
885
01:09:37,680 --> 01:09:42,680
of grief, of contrition, of utter abject horror, in a way,
886
01:09:42,680 --> 01:09:46,800
and yet taking on to a spiritual level,
887
01:09:46,800 --> 01:09:52,440
because the voice line of the violin becomes an agency of...
888
01:09:52,440 --> 01:09:56,480
of compassion and forgiveness, and that's before the singer's sung a note.
889
01:12:13,480 --> 01:12:15,960
Three years after the St Matthew Passion,
890
01:12:15,960 --> 01:12:19,480
Bach's relationship with his masters began to fall apart.
891
01:12:19,480 --> 01:12:22,120
In 1730, he wrote what he called an "Entwurf,"
892
01:12:22,120 --> 01:12:24,920
a memorandum to the Leipzig council,
893
01:12:24,920 --> 01:12:28,120
complaining bitterly that he could no longer operate.
894
01:12:28,120 --> 01:12:29,920
He hadn't sufficient musicians,
895
01:12:29,920 --> 01:12:33,440
and too few of quality to perform his work.
896
01:12:33,440 --> 01:12:36,400
Several months later, Bach took up his pen again.
897
01:12:37,720 --> 01:12:41,360
And this is the most poignant document of all for me.
898
01:12:41,360 --> 01:12:45,760
It's the only truly personal letter we have of Bach's,
899
01:12:45,760 --> 01:12:50,720
in which he's writing to his old pal, Georg Erdmann.
900
01:12:50,720 --> 01:12:55,320
He was the guy that Bach walked from Ohrdruf to Lueneburg with
901
01:12:55,320 --> 01:12:58,440
when they were both in their early teens.
902
01:12:58,440 --> 01:13:02,280
And Bach is just pouring out all his frustration about why
903
01:13:02,280 --> 01:13:06,400
the council had not responded to this Entwurf,
904
01:13:06,400 --> 01:13:09,880
this statement of his intentions.
905
01:13:09,880 --> 01:13:12,160
And Bach tells Erdmann,
906
01:13:12,160 --> 01:13:19,120
"My life is full of hindrance and vexation and I see no future for myself and my family here."
907
01:13:19,120 --> 01:13:23,160
One of the features that you might expect to see in this
908
01:13:23,160 --> 01:13:28,280
inflexible persona, if you like, is that he would never be guilty.
909
01:13:28,280 --> 01:13:31,680
No matter what happened, it's always somebody else's fault.
910
01:13:31,680 --> 01:13:36,280
- Does that ring?
- Yes, it does. Because he's never to blame.
911
01:13:36,280 --> 01:13:40,120
He always has a reason. And his motto...
912
01:13:40,120 --> 01:13:43,200
I don't know whether it's his motto but something that's like a mantra
913
01:13:43,200 --> 01:13:44,680
that comes up and up and again,
914
01:13:44,680 --> 01:13:49,280
is that "My life is lived always with fixation and hindrance."
915
01:13:49,280 --> 01:13:54,280
I have brought you something here, which is a textbook definition,
916
01:13:54,280 --> 01:13:57,000
and this is paranoid personality disorder,
917
01:13:57,000 --> 01:13:59,320
and these are the characteristics.
918
01:13:59,320 --> 01:14:03,400
"Pervasive suspicion of others, distrusting their motives.
919
01:14:03,400 --> 01:14:07,200
"Others seen as deliberately demeaning or threatening,
920
01:14:07,200 --> 01:14:09,960
"constantly expect to be harmed or exploited,
921
01:14:09,960 --> 01:14:12,440
"very sensitive to perceived slights,
922
01:14:12,440 --> 01:14:17,280
"fear and avoidance of anything that could make them feel or seem weak."
923
01:14:17,280 --> 01:14:19,800
That's a perfect description.
924
01:14:21,440 --> 01:14:26,200
The one thing that we do know is that there is an association with
925
01:14:26,200 --> 01:14:28,440
bullying and abuse in childhood.
926
01:14:30,360 --> 01:14:33,400
Thanks to the bone-headedness of the city fathers
927
01:14:33,400 --> 01:14:36,200
and the obvious flaws in Bach's own character,
928
01:14:36,200 --> 01:14:39,440
his output of religious music now began to dwindle away.
929
01:14:40,880 --> 01:14:44,000
St Thomas's Church didn't deserve those cantatas.
930
01:14:44,000 --> 01:14:47,000
Nobody deserved those cantatas, but least of all St Thomas's Church.
931
01:14:47,000 --> 01:14:49,160
That's the striking thing about a great artist,
932
01:14:49,160 --> 01:14:53,560
is they deliver absurdly over contract -
933
01:14:53,560 --> 01:14:56,600
heartbreakingly over contract - and that is the thing that
934
01:14:56,600 --> 01:15:00,760
I think is most impressive and very deeply moving about him.
935
01:15:00,760 --> 01:15:02,960
There he is, worrying about his children,
936
01:15:02,960 --> 01:15:05,400
who are popping off one after the other,
937
01:15:05,400 --> 01:15:06,880
worrying about their education,
938
01:15:06,880 --> 01:15:10,160
trying to keep the town councillors less irritated,
939
01:15:10,160 --> 01:15:15,000
and so on and so forth, and at the same time, he just delivered...
940
01:15:15,000 --> 01:15:19,920
this work that, 250, 260 years later, is supreme in the canon.
941
01:15:22,480 --> 01:15:25,840
Bach now gravitated towards the other main centre of music-making
942
01:15:25,840 --> 01:15:29,280
in Leipzig, the thriving coffeehouse scene.
943
01:15:29,280 --> 01:15:30,720
Here was a different audience,
944
01:15:30,720 --> 01:15:34,680
a more relaxed ambience in which to make music with better musicians
945
01:15:34,680 --> 01:15:37,640
from the university, eager to learn from the master.
946
01:15:41,680 --> 01:15:44,880
But Bach didn't completely give up on sacred music.
947
01:15:44,880 --> 01:15:48,880
Indeed, his new secular style found its way into religious pieces
948
01:15:48,880 --> 01:15:50,520
of unbuttoned high spirits.
949
01:16:26,480 --> 01:16:27,680
Throughout his life,
950
01:16:27,680 --> 01:16:31,120
Bach had much more than his fair share of heartbreak.
951
01:16:31,120 --> 01:16:34,960
That direct experience of personal grief comes over in his music,
952
01:16:34,960 --> 01:16:37,440
but never in a saccharine or morbid way,
953
01:16:37,440 --> 01:16:41,280
but as consoling, soothing, uplifting.
954
01:16:41,280 --> 01:16:44,880
In many ways, you can imagine he's creating a lullaby for himself,
955
01:16:44,880 --> 01:16:47,360
which, again, becomes a lullaby for all of us.
956
01:16:47,360 --> 01:16:53,360
A profound lullaby which comforts him and through him, comforts us.
957
01:18:19,360 --> 01:18:22,400
The thing that to me is so touching
958
01:18:22,400 --> 01:18:25,840
and powerful in the expression of the music is the way that
959
01:18:25,840 --> 01:18:29,360
Bach seems to focus all that distress
960
01:18:29,360 --> 01:18:32,280
and private grief in his own life,
961
01:18:32,280 --> 01:18:35,560
the loss of parents, the loss of children, the loss of a wife,
962
01:18:35,560 --> 01:18:39,800
always the difficulties that he was experiencing,
963
01:18:39,800 --> 01:18:43,680
and yet, the music that comes out of it is so ineffably consoling
964
01:18:43,680 --> 01:18:49,600
- and...touching.
- And nowadays, we look at the texts,
965
01:18:49,600 --> 01:18:53,120
and with this constant longing for death,
966
01:18:53,120 --> 01:18:59,200
this anticipation with joy of one's final demise, it seems bizarre to us
967
01:18:59,200 --> 01:19:04,880
and yet it's with, as you say,
968
01:19:04,880 --> 01:19:06,920
Bach's private grief, it was commonplace.
969
01:19:06,920 --> 01:19:08,920
- EVERYBODY'S private grief.
- Absolutely.
970
01:19:08,920 --> 01:19:12,640
Everybody was losing their families, their babies, their wives.
971
01:19:12,640 --> 01:19:14,680
And, you know, this is surely
972
01:19:14,680 --> 01:19:18,400
the prime purpose of religion at that time,
973
01:19:18,400 --> 01:19:21,400
was to give a consolation in the face of this baffling reality.
974
01:19:22,840 --> 01:19:26,120
With his disagreements with the council dragging on and on,
975
01:19:26,120 --> 01:19:28,440
Bach now had a new power struggle.
976
01:19:28,440 --> 01:19:31,160
This time, with the headmaster of the Thomas School who was
977
01:19:31,160 --> 01:19:34,400
bitterly opposed to all the emphasis on music in school.
978
01:19:36,240 --> 01:19:39,440
In Bach's desire to put an end to his woes in Leipzig,
979
01:19:39,440 --> 01:19:42,920
we find the origins of one late religious masterpiece,
980
01:19:42,920 --> 01:19:44,720
the B minor Mass.
981
01:19:44,720 --> 01:19:47,760
Just try and think how different this is from Messiah.
982
01:19:47,760 --> 01:19:50,240
Messiah, you've got the angels wafting in on a cloud
983
01:19:50,240 --> 01:19:53,120
and they come in and they sing and then disappear, all very gently.
984
01:19:53,120 --> 01:19:57,160
Here, it's a stomp. It's much more kind of Bruegel than Botticelli,
985
01:19:57,160 --> 01:20:00,240
it's not wiffy-waffy at all. OK, off we go. Yep?
986
01:20:09,440 --> 01:20:11,120
Bach was angling for a new job,
987
01:20:11,120 --> 01:20:13,440
or at the very least an honorary title,
988
01:20:13,440 --> 01:20:16,720
at the court in Dresden, which was Catholic,
989
01:20:16,720 --> 01:20:19,400
so despite his unwavering commitment to Lutheranism,
990
01:20:19,400 --> 01:20:22,880
Bach, ever practical, saw there was an opportunity for composing
991
01:20:22,880 --> 01:20:24,920
a Latin Mass on a grand scale.
992
01:21:26,880 --> 01:21:29,400
Bach didn't get his hoped-for move to Dresden,
993
01:21:29,400 --> 01:21:31,680
although he did get the honorary title,
994
01:21:31,680 --> 01:21:35,160
and for the next 15 years, we lose all trace of the B minor Mass.
995
01:21:38,760 --> 01:21:42,800
And then suddenly, we have a Missa Tota,
996
01:21:42,800 --> 01:21:47,680
a complete Catholic Mass with the magnificent Credo and the wonderful
997
01:21:47,680 --> 01:21:52,720
Agnus Dei and the touching way it ends with the Dona Nobis Pacem.
998
01:21:52,720 --> 01:21:56,200
This was Bach's compendium of all the style
999
01:21:56,200 --> 01:22:00,360
since he was a young composer up to the most recent music
1000
01:22:00,360 --> 01:22:07,680
that he composed. It was his version of Ars Perfecta, of art perfected.
1001
01:22:07,680 --> 01:22:10,840
This is Bach at his most playful, most jazzy
1002
01:22:10,840 --> 01:22:13,960
and most exotic, and it's ebullient, and that's what we need to feel
1003
01:22:13,960 --> 01:22:17,800
because there's something really folky about this music.
1004
01:22:17,800 --> 01:22:19,160
Let's see if we can get that through.
1005
01:24:07,720 --> 01:24:11,800
A question that can never be solved is what Bach himself
1006
01:24:11,800 --> 01:24:14,440
thought of his work, but we do have one clue that suggests
1007
01:24:14,440 --> 01:24:17,680
he saw himself and his music as inextricably linked.
1008
01:24:18,800 --> 01:24:23,960
He loves inscribing his own name - B-A-C-H, the family name -
1009
01:24:23,960 --> 01:24:26,920
into his music in all sorts of contexts.
1010
01:24:26,920 --> 01:24:32,600
And you can only do that in German because H doesn't exist in English,
1011
01:24:32,600 --> 01:24:36,880
it's not a note on the piano, but in German, B is B flat, isn't it?
1012
01:24:36,880 --> 01:24:42,200
- PLAYS SEQUENCE OF SINGLE NOTES
- A, C, B natural, which is H.
1013
01:24:42,200 --> 01:24:46,680
So that's the little kind of family motto that's in there.
1014
01:24:46,680 --> 01:24:49,560
PLAYS MORE COMPLICATED PATTERN
1015
01:24:49,560 --> 01:24:53,960
# B, A, C, H. #
1016
01:25:00,640 --> 01:25:03,000
One of Bach's most famous last works,
1017
01:25:03,000 --> 01:25:06,720
The Art Of Fugue, breaks off in mid-flow.
1018
01:25:06,720 --> 01:25:09,960
The reasons why this happened have long been debated.
1019
01:25:09,960 --> 01:25:13,200
I thought what we'd do is actually go just from where he inscribes
1020
01:25:13,200 --> 01:25:16,120
his own name, B-A-C-H,
1021
01:25:16,120 --> 01:25:19,280
because that's what's so extraordinary about this piece,
1022
01:25:19,280 --> 01:25:23,840
is that he finds a way halfway through this whole composition
1023
01:25:23,840 --> 01:25:28,160
to put his name in and then to develop it, so we've got two fugues
1024
01:25:28,160 --> 01:25:32,360
going on and then suddenly, it comes to an abrupt halt.
1025
01:25:32,360 --> 01:25:37,120
And according to Carl Philipp Emanuel, he stopped then
1026
01:25:37,120 --> 01:25:41,160
because he died, that was it. It's just chilling.
1027
01:25:42,760 --> 01:25:43,880
Let's try it.
1028
01:26:31,320 --> 01:26:35,000
- My fantasy is that it's completely...
- Deliberate.
- ..deliberate.
1029
01:26:35,000 --> 01:26:37,720
And that actually, it's that unfinished business.
1030
01:26:37,720 --> 01:26:41,120
That, "I've written my music for the future
1031
01:26:41,120 --> 01:26:43,720
"and someone else is going to carry on now."
1032
01:27:10,440 --> 01:27:17,600
Bach died aged 65 in Leipzig in the Thomasschule on 28th July, 1750.
1033
01:27:17,600 --> 01:27:22,400
Two successive eye operations performed by an English quack doctor
1034
01:27:22,400 --> 01:27:24,800
seemed to have finished him off.
1035
01:27:24,800 --> 01:27:29,640
After his death, his works fell out of favour, though not with everyone.
1036
01:27:29,640 --> 01:27:33,760
His music was passed from hand to hand and Haydn, Mozart
1037
01:27:33,760 --> 01:27:36,720
and Beethoven all marvelled at it.
1038
01:27:36,720 --> 01:27:39,800
Only in 1829 when Mendelssohn performed a devoted
1039
01:27:39,800 --> 01:27:42,920
but stylistically mangled version of the Matthew Passion
1040
01:27:42,920 --> 01:27:46,480
did Bach begin to regain the public's affection.
1041
01:27:46,480 --> 01:27:47,840
CHORAL SINGING
1042
01:28:06,120 --> 01:28:09,400
Bach's legacy is assured.
1043
01:28:09,400 --> 01:28:12,400
If Monteverdi was the first composer to find musical expression
1044
01:28:12,400 --> 01:28:16,320
for human passion, and Beethoven, what a terrible struggle it is
1045
01:28:16,320 --> 01:28:20,960
to be human and to aspire to be godlike, Mozart, the kind of music
1046
01:28:20,960 --> 01:28:26,360
we'd hope to hear in heaven, Bach is the one who bridges the gap.
1047
01:28:26,360 --> 01:28:31,160
He helps us to hear the voice of God but in human form, ironing
1048
01:28:31,160 --> 01:28:35,600
out the imperfections of humanity in the perfection of his music.
1049
01:28:48,360 --> 01:28:53,360
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90073
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