The Inspired Artisan

Whatever the magic in his music, Bach considered himself not a frenzied genius but a master craftsman. By the time of the High Baroque the affective musical toolkit had become highly specialized. The procedures were well codified, and the skilled composer knew exactly how to use them all.

" 'Le génie n'est autre chose qu'une grande aptitude à la patience.' Thus did Buffon in his inaugural speech at the French Academy in 1753 express an idea that was a favorite with Bach, too, who used to say, in homelier fashion, 'I have had to work hard; anyone who works just as hard will get just as far.' In these words he harked back to the heritage of his family. Music was a craft. It could be taught, and it could be learned. Assiduity must lead to perfection. To have talent was a matter of course: had not everybody, for instance, five healthy fingers on each hand, just like Bach?" [D&M, p.37]

Bach saw himself as a member of a declining guild, looking anxiously at the oncoming New Age of Ars Gratia Artis when music would have no higher purpose, when anyone who aspired to be a musician could simply call himself one and hang out a shingle. It is little wonder so much of his correspondence concerns money (as Peter Schickele's A Bach Portrait so humorously reveals). In Goedel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid (a stultifyingly convoluted trip through the mind of a computer scientist with illusions of literacy) Douglas Hofstadter claims that Bach's having improvised (or so the story goes) the six-part ricercar that concludes the Musical Offering was as difficult as playing 60 games of chess simultaneously, blindfolded, and winning every one. It appears that Bach conceived of his own skill in very much those terms.

Epilogue

In the new epistemology of science melancholy lost not so much its meaning as its purpose. It reverted to a condition to be endured, and now in an emerging free marketplace, to be treated. Books on its identification and cure--music often noted as particularly effective for relief--became all the rage; Burton's The Anatomy of Melancholy went through five editions before he died in 1640 and four more after. The understanding of human psychology was as elusive then as now, and the slightly shocking symptomatologies of melancholy people which accompany the careful taxonomy in Burton's tome and others appealed to both medicinal and prurient interest in an entirely legitimate presentation. Composers and pharmacists alike peddled the prescriptions--even the cover of the Anna Magdelena Bach notebook was inscribed with the legend, "Der Anti Melancholicus." But as the Baroque Era gave way to the Age of Reason music too lost its purpose. The mechanical universe, a clockwork of forces and causes, had no more place for divine frenzy. Poetic furor would be rediscovered by the Romantics, but in the service of entirely worldly ends. The magic itself disappeared.

"The moral philosophy of the Age of Enlightenment took possession of the time-honored impregnable fortress of theology. With this, the preeminent position of religion was broken. In the wake of this tradition-destroying movement music was taken out of the comprehensive structure of theology and turned over to an enlightened mankind as an independent art. Removed from its limited yet useful position, the function of instrumental music, devoid of word and sect, became problematic. When, in the course of the Eighteenth Century, the princely courts, second home to music besides the church, decayed and vanished as art centers, music lost its environment, that is, its very meaning and purpose. With the vanishing power of church and court, music lost its true reason to exist and function. 'Sonate, que me veux-tu?' said Fontenelle, a nephew of the great Corneille, highlighting with this sentence the whole problem of l'art pour l'art. What purpose has a liberated music in a world ruled by reason, existing only for its own sake?" [Herz, p.20]