Summer is the time of family reunions. The big Bach family and had big family reunions, full of fun and music. So reported Johan Sebastian Bach’s first biographer, Johann Nickolaus Forkel, writing a half century after his subject’s death, but drawing extensively on information gained from the Great Man’s two eldest sons, both of whom had participated in such gatherings and had heard tell of those of yore.
According to Forkel, the music making at these events began with the singing of religious chorales, but these pieties quickly made way for improvised revels that involved “lewd songs” worked into a free-wheeling, even formless format known as the Quodlibet. These were stylistic mash-ups full of parody and self-parody; double, even triple, entrendres; sarcasm aplenty and solecisms galore; foolish fake fugues and pompous, ponderous declamations; poetical nonsense, non sequiturs and narrative non-starters. A single, now-incomplete manuscript, the Quodlibet, (BWV 524) is the only surviving historical residue of these escapades.
There seems to be much in this bawdy business about reproduction—buns and Bachs soon to be in the oven, if that is what is being intimated by obscure puns and running gags seeming to turn on Back (as in bake) and the similar sounding family name. The humor boasts of, even enacts, the Bachs’ prolific musicianship and their robust reproductivity, if this mocked-up mockery of piece is taken seriously as a social document, one committed to paper by J.S. Bach acting as stenographer of his clan’s hijinks or maybe offering his own notated tribute to the joyful practice.
This kind of madcap smut was apparently widely popular, and not just with the Bachs. One musical moralist published a treatise in 1706, probably just around the time that the Bach Quodlibet was hatched and patched together. The writer, Martin Fuhrmann, fulminated against the genre, disparaging “it is a musical-beggar’s coat of all sorts of humorous and even quite irksome tunes, scotched together, regardless of whether they belong together or not. These kinds of songs hardly deserve to appear alongside the other honest vocal genres and insinuate themselves into the proceedings in fool’s get-up.”
Fuhrmann’s screed concludes with “a heartfelt plea to the consciences of Christian composers never again to compose a scandalous quodlibet … Instead of counting such quodlibets filled with loathsome dirty jokes among his musical effects, he will, to the honor of music too noble and too sacred to be wantonly prostituted and profaned, immediately offer them instead to the Persian god whose altar is in our kitchens. [i.e., pitch all quodlibets into the oven].”
The Bach Quodlibet escaped the flames, though maybe someone in the family ripped off the title-page in order to hide, at least partially, the it’s scurrilous identity. The title that the piece is known by is only a guess.
Though we can thank Forkel for not heeding contemporary attacks on quodlibets and suppressing his account of the family’s tomfoolery, it does seem that the biographer was eager to establish the Bachs’ piety through chorale-singing before allowing us a glimpse of their frolics.
Yet Lutheran repeatedly confounds anachronistic notions separating the sacred and the secular. Trained in polyphonic singing at the same Latin School in the town of Eisenach where Johann Sebastian Bach would later study during his early boyhood, Martin Luther was also attuned to the colorful folk music of his time and place. He wrote hymns and sang them with his fine tenor voice but must have participated in, or at least heard, quodlibets too. He certainly would have been no enemy of this sort of thing, as his famously scatological humor, aired in polemics and personal communications, makes abundantly, brazenly clear.
Music for Luther—and Bach—did not suppress sensuality but embraced it. In the early years of the Reformation, Luther levelled an assault on celibacy for the clergy, quipping that Catholics “could have just as easily banned shitting.” He married the former nun Katharina von Bora, in his redoubt in the Augustinian Monastery in Wittenberg in June of 1525, the city in which eight years before he had nailed his 95 Theses to the door University Church. The union produced children. The age difference the couple was fifteen years, about that between Bach and his second wife, Anna Magdalena Wilcke. The Luthers’ 500th wedding anniversary would have been marked last month.
Luther’s humor often indulged in scatological. In his Table Talk, a collection of utterances made at dinner with friends and family, he remarked to his wife shortly before his death that, “I’m like a ripe stool and the world’s like a gigantic anus, and we’re about to let go of each other.” Shitting and laughing—and singing—were vital pleasures. On other occasion around his table, Luther said that “It is pleasing to the dear God whenever thou rejoicest or laughest from the bottom of thy heart.”
There is much laughter in Bach’s music, both profane and sacred. On the last page of Forkel’s biography Bach is praised as the greatest musical wit of his age. In contrast to the quodlibets referred to earlier in the book, Forkel is positing a sublime humor, clever and considered, light but also profound in its erudition and technique.
But is the security wall between earthly dirt and sacred purity as high and sturdy as many Bach scholars and devotees have long liked to think? Or is this supposed barrier permeable or maybe nothing more than a mirage?
Listen to the rollicking unison motto, the peels of trumpeting of glee, the chortles of the timpani in the sinfonia to his early Der Himmel lacht! Die Erde Jubilieret. This is just one Bach’s paean to the uplift and downdraft of humor: the deep laughter rolling down from the skies and meeting the kindred jubilation rising from below like two ecstatic weather systems.
The human chorus follows the instrumental introduction, joining in the celebration with jubilant laughter even as the music careens towards death:
Heaven laughs! Earth exults
and all she bears in her lap;
the Creator lives! The Highest triumphs
and is freed from the death’s bonds of death.
He who has selected the grave for rest,
the Holy One, cannot be corrupted.
This confrontation of joy with mortality might also seem to make for a kind of a Quodlibet, a collision of irreconcilables. Yet the earthy balm of laughter and sensual love is no less real, pleasurable and necessary even for its transitoriness. In that laughter at being digested and evacuated by the earth resounds an irrepressible lust for life.
(David Yearsley is a long-time contributor to CounterPunch and the Anderson Valley Advertiser. His latest albums, “In the Cabinet of Wonders” and “Handel’s Organ Banquet” are now available from False Azure Records.)
Be First to Comment