FRANK MORANA
AmerOrganist 37/1

From among the many books on Bach to have appeared in recent years, three titles stand out as being of especially far-reaching consequence to organists and choirmasters. What is “new” in each case may vary, but it is uniformly surprising that no comprehensive book-length treatment of Bach’s pre-eminent collection of organ chorales has ever before appeared in any language; that, on the subject of one-on-a-part vocal scoring in Bach, the jury has been out for 20 years but only now has a book-length study finally appeared; and that the Langloz collection of 60 short-score preludes and fugues attributed to Bach has been known to scholars for over a century but has never before been made available to players in a discursive yet practical format.

In J. S. Bach’s Great Eighteen Organ Chorales, Russell Stinson notes that many factors serve to weaken the view of this collection as a unified work: (1) the chorales were included in the same source that contains the Six Sonatas and Canonic Variations, but they have no collective title; (2) the first 13 chorales were entered c. 1739–42 but the next two were not entered until at least four years later; (3) the last three chorales, “Jesus Christus unser Heiland” (BWV 666), “Komm Gott Schöpfer,” and “Vor deinen Thron” were not entered by Bach; (4) “Jesus Christus unser Heiland” (BWV 666) and “Komm Gott Schöpfer” were entered only after Bach’s death; (5) “Vor deinen Thron” appears after the Canonic Variations, physically displaced from the other chorales. The name “Great Eighteen” has become traditional only in 20th-century America, but as Stinson acknowledges, “the sense of familiarity imparted by this tradition is somehow quite significant.”

Although the 18 chorales were entered in their “definitive” versions in Leipzig, they were not composed at Leipzig, but at Weimar (and in some cases, possibly earlier), and for nearly all of them, early versions were independently transmitted. The question of whether the Leipzig manuscript itself might also present physical evidence of continuing correction, emendation, and reworking on Bach’s part—that is, compositional process as opposed to calligraphic process—has not previously been explored, and Stinson describes numerous instances of rhythmic and tonal changes within the manuscript itself. (Though perhaps significantly, Bach made no revisional compositional extensions after the first three chorales.) Similarly, no printed edition has ever completely and literally reproduced Bach’s own headings for each of the chorales, which Stinson also provides.

The attempt to draw parallels between Bach’s great collections is inevitable, and if the 18 chorales tend to be overshadowed by Clavierübung III, Stinson argues that they deserve an equal status on musical grounds, even though no unified architectonic structure presents itself, as in Clavierübung III. He suggests that, for the manuscript collection, Bach “purposely chose certain chorale types (the ornamental chorale and the chorale motet) because he had not used them in the Clavierübung, and that he purposely avoided others (the chorale fughetta and chorale canon) because he had used them there.” But an impediment to more a intensive comparison resides in the inherent incompleteness of the work: “the Great Eighteen chorales suggest a work in progress—a work that, for whatever reasons, was never properly completed.” We do not know, for example, whether the inclusion of the last three pieces was actually done at Bach’s own behest. The four-year gap between nos. 13 and 14 and the absence of any revisional compositional extensions after the first three chorales lead Stinson to conjecture that Bach’s own enthusiasm for the project may have waned––an explanation, incidentally, that he also offers with respect to the unfinished state of the Orgelbüchlein in his earlier monograph on that work (New York: Schirmer, 1996).

The meaning of “choir” in Bach’s concerted vocal music has generated much polemic in recent years, but to its merit, Andrew Parrott’s Essential Bach Choir builds reasoned arguments in a logical way, sorting out issues such as Bach’s role as a music director, the kinds of vocal repertoire that existed within his milieu, the distinction between vocal concertists and ripienists, the evidence for copy-sharing, Bach’s own prescribed deployment of vocal ripienists, his memorandum to the Leipzig town council in which he enumerates the vocal forces that he requires, the availability of supernumerary singers in Leipzig, typical instrument-to-singer ratios in 18th-century Germany, and issues of balance between instrumental and vocal sound.

Bach’s responsibilities as a performer of choral music in Leipzig involved four choirs, but three of the choirs were led by prefects. The choirs were graded according to their ability in performing the various types of church music then current&mdashchants, hymns, motets, and concerted music. The least-skilled choir sang chants and hymns only; the next choir sang motets in addition; another choir sang some concerted music on feast days; but only the elite “first choir” regularly performed Bach’s own compositions. The chant, hymn, and motet were a conservative, antiquated repertory that was already in place in Leipzig before Bach’s arrival, while concerted music, a new and progressive repertory, was always the principal focus of Bach’s choral activity. Concerted music differed radically from the motet in its historical genesis, florid style, and instrumental character. The vocal concertist was a more highly trained musician than the motet singer (and typically, an accomplished instrumentalist), while the role of the motet singer in concerted music might be that of a vocal ripienist—a dispensible supernumerary who sometimes reinforced select passages in the essential concertist’s part. But throughout Bach’s entire output of over 200 cantatas, masses, oratorios, and passions, the vocal parts (whether chorus, aria, or recitative) nearly always consist of single-copy concertist parts only. Ripienist parts exist in some 14 instances altogether, but in only two of those instances are the ripienists actually deployed in any continuous, unvariegated doubling of SATB chorus-parts. It is a fundamental misconception to equate the 18th-century distinction between concertists and ripienists to the 19th-century division between soloists and chorusters. Parrott likens the latter tradition in Bach to the practice of performing string quartet music with a full complement of orchestral strings—in both cases, these are significant departures from the intended medium.

Beyond the immediate practical and pedagogical purpose of William Renwick’s edition and facsimile of the Langloz Manuscript, another new view of Bach emerges: was he as much the inveterate contrapuntist as popular perception would have us believe? Counterpoint, it will be recalled, is music construed “horizontally,” while harmony represents an opposite pole, that of music construed “vertically.” Historically, a decisive embracing of the “vertical” in music occurred in Western Europe at the outset of the 17th century, and with it, the pervasive influence of figured bass, also known as general bass, or thoroughbass. Figured bass was more than a technique—it was an outlook on music-making itself that dominated composition as well as improvisation for 200 years. The very period in question used to be called the Generalbass period, long before the term “baroque” was used. The fugue is one of the foremost techniques from this period, yet it has traditionally come to be regarded as a quintessentially contrapuntal medium. Does this notion of fugue emanate from the 17th–18th centuries—or from closer to our own time?

The Langloz Manuscript, Mus. ms. P 296 (Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin) consists of a set of 38 fugues attributed to J. S. Bach, and a second set (contiguously numbered) of 15 preludes and fugues, three preludes, and four more fugues. It was copied-out by August Wilhelm Langloz (1745–1811) in 1763, possibly during a period of study with J. C. Kittel, an influential disseminator of Bach’s works, and one of Bach’s last pupils. While the attribution to Bach remains questionable, there is no doubt that this collection originates within Bach’s own time, place, and musical sphere. What is significant is that the fugues are notated on single staves, with some individual voice-entries (or pairs of entries) written-out in appropriate clefs, but with each composition otherwise denoted entirely in figured bass (or, when the bass is tacit, with figures that apply to the other voices). (See illustration.) This so-called partimento style “illustrates a harmonic rather than contrapuntal conception of fugue . . . a method of conceptualizing fugal composition and improvisation as an extention of thoroughbass rather than as an extention of counterpoint.” The 20th-century tradition of fugue is founded in Gedalge, Cherubini, Albrechtsberger, and Fux, but C. P. E. Bach tells us that J. S. Bach specifically disregarded Fux in his teaching: “He started his pupils right with what was practical, and omitted all the dry species of counterpoint that are given in Fux and others.” To the extent that Bach’s compositional process can be traced through surviving composing scores in over 120 church cantatas, it is demonstratable that even his most intricate textures were composed fundamentally in terms of melody and bass. The antiquated polyphonic style was well known to Bach—it was part and parcel of the utilitarian church service music repertoire both at Leipzig and at Weimar—but as a composer, he adopted this style only experimentally in about a dozen works. Other examples of partimento fugue have been known from within Bach’s musical sphere, but the quantity and quality of the present collection re-emphasizes the importance of the “vertical” element in Bach in a new and dramatic way. In view of the Langloz Manuscript, the image of Bach as “the inveterate contrapuntist” who revelled in layering one voice upon another seems less and less tenable.

© The American Organist

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