WHY BACH'S ORGAN HAD NO STOPS:Fatherhood and Musical Hermeneutics in Bach

by Poundie Burstein

Most great composers are not known for their parenting abilities. A number of them, such as Handel, Haydn, Beethoven, Schubert, Chopin, Bruckner, and Brahms, have had no children at all. Many of those who have had children would not exactly have been candidates for parents of the year. For instance, in great contrast to their own doting dads, Mozart and Liszt were more or less absentee fathers. This is not surprising. After all, marginal musicians such as Leopold Mozart and Adam Liszt could certainly spare the time to take care of their talented children. Wolfgang Mozart and Franz Liszt, on the other hand, had more important things to attend to.

The one great composer who breaks with this pattern is Johann Sebastian Bach. To the many of us, it might seem that his child bearing is almost as prodigious as his compositional ability. With the help of two wives, J. S. Bach fathered twenty children in all, ten of whom survived to adulthood.

An old joke offers an explanation for Bach's numerous offspring: "Why did Bach have so many children? Because his organ had no stops!" Underlying this joke is the modern notion that nobody in their right mind could actually have wanted to have all those kids. Surely, we think, had Bach lived in this post-Margaret Sanger era, he could have avoided these twenty whining, bratty mistakes that kept him from his more important job of composing.

However, it is unlikely that Bach himself would have shared this attitude. For him, children were not an unwelcome distraction from other responsibilities. On the contrary, his role as a parent was a central part of his life and was intimately entwined in his aesthetic outlook. Indeed, understanding Bach's attitude towards parenting can in turn help us understand his musical attitudes in general.

Indicative of the importance Bach placed on his progeny was the enormous pride he had for his children. When it came to his own accomplishments, Bach was unduly modest. His friends would have to coax him into recounting his own triumphs, such as his victorious keyboard contest against the harpsichordist Marchand. When it came to bragging about his kids, on the other hand, Bach showed no such reluctance. Though he wrote some of the some of the most exciting music ever, Bach could be as tiresome a bore as anybody when it came to trumpeting his children's accomplishments.

This is evident in a 1730 letter he sent to George Erdmann, an acquaintance from his school days who had become the Imperial Russian Residence Minister. Bach wrote to Erdmann in a desperate attempt to find a new job. Curiously, he spends almost a third of this letter prattling on about his children. Anybody who has been cornered by a proud parent with a walletful of snapshots can sympathize with Erdmann as he read the following from Bach: "Now I must add a little about my domestic situation. . . From my first marriage I have three sons and one daughter living, whom Your Honor will graciously remember having seen in Weimar. For the second marriage I have one son and two daughters living. My eldest son is a Studiosus Juris, and one of the other two is in the prima class and the other in the secunda, and the eldest daughter is also still unmarried. The children of my second marriage are still small, the eldest, a boy, being six years old. But they are all born musicians, and I can assure you that I can already form an ensembles both of vocalists and instrumentalists within my family, since my present wife sings a good, clear soprano, and my eldest daughter, too, joins in not badly. I shall transgress the bounds of courtesy if I burden Your Honor any further . . ." One can just see Erdmann rolling his eyes.

Bach didn't merely sire his children. He took an active interest in their development and education, especially in the area of music. Surely, Bach must be reckoned as one of the greatest music teachers of all time. Many of his children became successful musicians, and at least two of them--Carl Philipp Emanuel and Johann Christian--are regarded as major composers in their own right. Bach also served as a type of musical father to many other students, a number of whom likewise became leading musicians in their day. Amazingly enough, in addition being an ideal mentor to highly talented students, Bach evidently also had patience in dealing with the not-so-brilliant as well. For instance, among his pupils was his mentally retarded son, Gottfried Herder Bach. That one of the greatest musical minds of all time should have had the patience to teach a mentally handicapped student is almost incredible; but then again, so much about J. S. Bach challenges normal comprehension.

Bach's teaching legacy continues in the form of his compositions. Many of his greatest works were used as teaching tools, including the English and French Suites, the Well-Tempered Clavier, and the Inventions and Sinfonias. On the title page of the Inventions and Sinfonias, Bach explicitly states that the pedagogical use of the compositions is their primary function: "Upright Instruction / wherein the lovers of the clavier, and especially those desirous of learning, are shown a clear way not alone (1) to learn to play clearly in two voices but also, after further progress, (2) to deal correctly and well with three obbligato parts; furthermore, at the same time not alone to have good inventions but to develop the same well and, above all, to arrive at a singing style in playing and at the same time to acquire a strong foretaste of composition." Likewise, he noted that a main use of the Well-Tempered Clavier was for "the profit of the musical youth desirous of learning."

Many music lovers might find it strange that these deathless masterpieces were considered by their author to be tools of learning. Nowadays, one doesn't perform the Well-Tempered Clavier in order to learn play the piano; one learns how to play the piano in order to play the Well-Tempered Clavier. A composer such as Handel never would have spent so much effort to compose pieces in order to teach a bunch of snot-nosed kids how to play the keyboard. But to Bach, it was vital to develop the skills of ones successors and pass down to them knowledge in the form a living tradition. Indeed, this desire lies at the core of Bach's musical approach.

Related to his interest in his children is Bach's fascination with his family's genealogy. Typically, it is the lesser members of clan who are most concerned with their family tree. For instance, we would not be shocked if we were to discover that Johann Egydius Bach, a provincial schoolmaster, bragged about his distant relationship to Johann Sebastian. It is much odder, however, when we learn that Johann Sebastian Bach took interest in noting his own relationship to Johann Egydius. This interest can only be explained by the great importance Bach placed upon family.

Perhaps Johann Sebastian's interest in his lineage stems from desire to make amends for his own neglect as a child. Both his parents died when he was still young. He was raised by his elder brother in a somewhat tense environment. A particularly anguishing event occurred when his elder brother refused to let him study from a book of music by celebrated composers. When Johann Sebastian tried to copy out the music at night, he was punished. This was a traumatic experience that Bach remembered until the end of his days. It is not unlikely that this unsuccessful attempt to come become acquainted with his musical predecessors represented a larger desire for young orphan to get in touch with his own lost forebears. Though his brother cruelly quashed this attempt, later on Bach would reenact his efforts to get in touch with his past through own compositions.

Understanding Bach's interest in his lineage can help explain the conservatism of his musical style. It seems strange to some that his compositions, though unquestionably great, were nevertheless so ingrained in an older tradition. It is often wrongly assumed that great artists should establish their artistic identities on the ruins of their predecessors, creating radically new musical languages. Accordingly, biographies of great artists usually focus on incidents in which an inventive genius is initially stifled by narrow-minded authority figures. Eventually, however, the young genius triumphs by destroying the old order and thereby creating new artistic paths.

The musician whose life most readily lends itself to such an Oedipal scheme is Beethoven. Throughout his life, Beethoven fought not only with his real father, but also with various father figures: arguing with his teacher Papa Haydn, snubbing nobility in Teplitz, crossing off a dedication to Napoleon. This combative stance can indeed be sensed in Beethoven's music, which seems deliberately to confront and challenge musical traditions and norms.

It is not so easy to fit the biography of Bach's life into a series of struggles against authority figures, however. To be sure, Bach's life was not without conflict, and he did at times fight with authorities. For the for the most part, however, he was an obedient servant, and he certainly was one of the few great composers who did not feel a need to rebel against his parents. (Not coincidentally, the greatest clash in his life involved a problem involving his young students: he objected to a rector's choice of a leader for a junior choir. Surely no other great composer would spend such effort on such a concern. To Bach, however, the musical development of young people was worth fighting for.)

Many people--feeling that a revolutionary attitude is essential to great art--argue that though Bach's music is stylistically conservative, it is nonetheless radically innovative in other ways. But this argument begs the question. The fact remains that Bach was a not member of the avant-garde of his time. The problem lies not with Bach's conservatism, but with the modern, mistaken notion that radicalism and stylistic innovation are essential elements of great art.

J. S. Bach did not seek to overthrow the style of his predecessors and establish a radically new artistic voice. Rather, he sought to assimilate and absorb the art of forbears and in turn pass it down to his own successors. In great contrast to later generations of composers, Bach himself downplayed the role of flashes of inspiration in his compositional process. Instead, he argued that his art derived from hard work and the ability to develop the materials at hand.

In sum, his desire to continue a lineage was central to Bach's life as well as his art. His offspring were not a hindrance to his art. Rather, his observance of the Biblical command to "be fruitful and multiply" lay at the very heart of Bach's desire to compose. Both fatherhood and composition allowed Bach to get in touch with his forbears and pass their legacy onto succeeding generations. In this sense, Bach's desire to have children was extension of his compositional art, and vice versa.

Poundie Burstein is Assistant Professor of Music Theory at Hunter College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.