Since its revival in the 19th century, Bach’s music has been an object of veneration. This reverence stoked, even as it was fueled by patriotic fervor in German-speaking Europe. It could not be contained by national borders still to be drawn and redrawn by the century’s wars and those that came after. In the decades around 1800, England’s vibrant curation and performance of Bach’s music, a development bolstered by German immigrants to the island two hundred years before Brexit, marked the first phase of an expansion that would become global.
Even as the topmast of a tricentenary appears on the horizon of a rapidly rising ocean, the uses and—as Russell Stinson suggests in a chapter from The Afterlife of Bach’s Organ Works on Hollywood’s exploitation of the composer’s music—abuses of the oeuvre grow and grow. The diasporic afterlives of his works are now spread across a vast and varied geography, both real and virtual. This sixth of Stinson’s Bach books for Oxford University Press continues his exploration of untrodden, but also oft-visited, regions with reach and rigor that occasionally allow him a longer view from the historian’s crow’s nest. A resourceful and rigorous researcher, Stinson is adept at tracing the publication histories of Bach’s organ works, the evolution—and deformation—of well- and little-known anecdotes and linguistic turns, and the collaborations and collisions of Bach-loving organists as well as other musicians.
Few, if any, of Bach’s 19th-century devotees were more ardent than Karl Gottlieb Freudenberg, whose memoir of 1870 Stinson surveys with a sure guide’s eye and ear for the telling detail and its persistent echoes.
Enterprising and combative, Freudenberg played his organ exams in 1823 for a Berlin panel that included A. W. Bach (no relation to J. S.) and Singakademie Director C. F. Zelter, two major figures in the musical life of the Prussian capital and both teachers of the young Felix Mendelssohn. Freudenberg seems to have played well under all this pressure but, after he had finished, he stormed out of the hall in a manner, Zelter complained, of “unsurpassed rudeness.” (86) Perhaps self-criticism, disappointment, and nerves made Freudenberg break decorum. His memoir also stages a vivid scene in which the anti-Semitic A. W. Bach jealously and vindictively enjoins Freudenberg not to give Mendelssohn a Bach manuscript in his possession. Freudenberg would have none of his teacher’s bigotry and duly supplied Mendelssohn with his copy of the Prelude and Fugue in E Minor, BWV 533. Mendelssohn acknowledged Freudenberg’s collegiality in his own copy of the piece made in Berlin on December 9th, 1822.
Freudenberg set off on his European travels a few years later. In Vienna he met Beethoven, who trotted out his oft-deployed pun that Bach (which means brook in German) should be called Ocean. The rebaptism would, in German, give us J. S. Meer, a fine enough name, but one that would deprive him and us of the musical signature B-A-C-H, a motive whose afterlife Stinson also assiduously attends to. In St. Peter’s in Rome, Freudenberg heard Frescobaldi’s music and rated it far inferior to Bach’s. Other nations-to-be had their own musical patriots.
After taking up a post as organist in Breslau, Freudenberg presented a recital in 1841 in honor of the respected Berlin music theorist, A. B. Marx; the program included the Toccata in F Major, BWV 540, a piece that Marx had, Stinson points out, called “mighty” in the first volume of his formidable Die Lehre von der musikalischen Komposition published four years earlier. Marx’s admiration for the piece perhaps inspired Freudenberg to perform the showstopper for the eminent visitor. Later in the decade, a fractious Freudenberg jostled with Germany’s leading organ virtuoso, Adolph Friedrich Hesse, for Liszt’s attention on that musical celebrity’s visit to Breslau where both organists lived, worked, and bickered.
Like Mendelssohn, Freudenberg had a particular affection for the chorale prelude “Schmücke dich o liebe Seele” from the Great Eighteen. Mendelssohn played it in his landmark Bach recital in Leipzig in 1840, and Stinson suggests that Freudenberg could well have learned the piece from Mendelssohn’s edition of 1846. For Freudenberg, “Schmücke dich” was “a gospel from his musical bible” (92). This was not merely a metaphor but a statement of belief.
One might think that membership in the Bach Cult required unswerving faith like this. Yet some swerved. Not all could bring themselves to praise every last number in the Bach corpus as it was inexorably cataloged, published, and performed across the 19th century.
Stinson tells us that the Leipzig organist Carl Ferdinand Becker (1804-1877) thought that the subject of the Fugue in E minor (BWV 533/2)—the same piece coveted and contested by Freudenberg, A. W. Bach, and Mendelssohn—was “scurrilous” [skurril]. The fugue subject of the Toccata, Adagio, and Fugue (BWV 564) was for “merrymaking in the home”; to play it in the church would have been “to sin … in a tasteless way against Bach.” (71) Bach’s youthful, Northern-inspired works were not cottoned to by more than few buttoned-up, woolen-waistcoated organists of the Wilhelmine period. Pomp must have its proper circumstance: the fast and fantastical were for behind closed doors, not before God and fellow Lutherans.
Yet Becker and his Bachian brethren could, on occasion, loosen those suit buttons. Becker and his pupil Hermann Schellenberg, who succeeded his teacher as organist at Leipzig’s Nicolaikirche in 1854, did the Fantasia and Fugue in G minor (BWV 542) as a duet with a double pedal. At the bench, demeanor was not always staid and reverential. Schellenberg would throw up his hands at the console when playing pedal solos just to make sure that his listeners out in the church knew that the fancy stuff was the result of footwork alone. Yet Stinson informs us that Schellenberg didn’t think much of the two pedal solos that kick-off, literally, the Toccata in F so admired by Marx. Such divergent opinions and postures animate Stinson’s book.
Schellenberg, Becker and others aired their views not just in performance, but in the 19th-century social media platforms that are Stinson’s vital sources for these interlocking tales—periodicals like Urania and Cecilia, and the more matter-of-factly titled Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung (General Musical Newspaper) and Neue Zeitschrift für Musik (New Musical Magazine). Stinson also scours manuscripts and consults letters in European and American libraries and archives, and he unearths rich rewards in exemplars of 19th-century published editions with annotations that document performance practices and aesthetic predilections very different from those that prevail today.
The penultimate of the book’s five chapters listens critically to Bach’s music as deployed in three Academy Award-winning films (The Godfather, The Silence of the Lambs, and Schindler’s List). These reflections take us away from the piety sought by those Protestant organists of yore, turning instead towards mass murder and the darkest nationalist, racist impulses that some have detected in Bachist ideology right from its early 19th-century beginnings.
A final chapter—a potpourri of transcription traditions of Bach’s music—returns to a safer civility.
I am long a member of the Bach congregation, even if I am often seen squirming in my pew. Unexpectedly, I met myself in the Afterlife. Stinson’s opening chapter includes a generous review—warning: self-serving product placement coming—of my Bach’s Feet (Cambridge University Press, 2012). He graciously corrects a few of what must be my many errors and broadens some of my claims with his commanding knowledge of the organ works’ reception both in Germany and England.
Stinson and I participated in a Westfield Center study tour of Bach organs in August of 1989 when German borders were about to be redrawn yet again. One afternoon, during a rest stop at a roadhouse somewhere in Thuringia, an earlier edition of this reviewer ordered Kirschwasser in halting German at a table crowded with leading scholars, organists, and builders. Russell gently informed me that Kirschwasser was schnapps, not flavored water, though he didn’t want to deny me a tea-time bracer if I really wanted one. This book has that same generous, modest quality—erudite but unassuming.
I have my doubts that the Kirschwasser vignette will make it into 22nd-century collections of the curious ways of Bach worshippers of the postmodern past. But I do know that Stinson has been immensely, fruitfully busy in the thirty-five years since that trip through what turned out to be the last days of the GDR. The journey is not yet done. Endless are the Bachian afterlives still to tell of.
