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Schweitzer on Bach



I've recently completed a read of Albert Schweitzer's book on J.S. Bach, and will here offer a brief observation.

The Germany of Bach's prime, especially the 1730s and 1740s, had its own music critics. Among these was a fellow named Johann Adolph Scheibe, the son of an organ builder and the kapellneister of the King of Denmark, who edited a magazine called Kritische Musikus.

Scheibe saw himself as the literary champion of a distinctively German style of music, one that would break away from the Italian models. The Italian influence was toward artifice and complexity. The German impulse was toward naturalness and simplicity, to Scheibe's way of thinking.

This theory made it "impossible for him to do justice to Bach," Schweitzer wrote. Bach was much too complicated, and thus too Italian, for his taste. Although of course acknowledging Bach's talents (because Scheibe was not altogether an idiot) he did conclude that Bach, tragically, had fallen "from the natural to the artificial, and from the lofty to the obscure ... one wonders at the painful labor of it all, that nevertheless comes to nothiong, since it is at variance with reason."  We can hear the on-rushing note of the Enlightenment there, trying to shut out or shout down the magnificance of the Baroque.

A friend of Bach's named Birnbaum lept to Bach's defense. Scheibe replied to Birnbaum,. and then Birnbaum replied to that. The whole exchange helped Bach's reputation, in part because Scheibe's tone was manifestly prickly, and earned its target some sympathy.

In the course of the controversy, Scheibe said that Bach was not "particularly well up in the sciences that are especially required of a learned composer. How can one be quite without blemishes in his musical work who has not, by knowledge of the world, qualified himself to investigate and understand the forces of nature and reason?" That would be a good example of what one means by a prickly tone.

Schweitzer is rather indignant about that latter remark, and he argues that Bach was not "the inferior of any of the musicians of the epoch. The Latin schools at Ohrdruf and Luneburg which he had attended enjoyed a first-rate reputation," etc.

At any rate, this line of attack seems somewhat at odds with Scheibe's complaint that Bach was full of Italianate complexity. One would expect an advocate of "naturalness" to be delighted for a musician of Bach's obvious attainments to prove to be an uneducated savant. He would be mots 'natural' in some sense, surely, if he had just been raiused in the woods by wolves.

The takeaway from all of this is that "nature" and "natural" are among the most perplexing words in every language in which they appear. With that I will conclude.
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