Incomplete And Utter History Of Classical Music

TOCCATA AND FEUD

? ? what's bubbling in 1729? Who is damned? Who is faintly praised? The South Sea Bubble is well and truly burst, Catherine the Great has succeeded Peter the Great - nice to see she took his name - and Moll Flanders is still one of the public's favourite books, some seven years after its release. You can possibly see why. Handel, himself, has relinquished his right to be first to the deckchairs by becoming a British citizen. Bach, of course, still hasn't left Germany, although he has now moved pretty far afield for him: down the road fl The tuning fork, incidentally, was invented by a brass player. If anyone was going to feel the need for an implement to keep you in tune, it's not surprising that it was a brass player. to Leipzig.

Johann Sebastian is in a bit of a feud situation with the Church authorities, not helped, no doubt, by the fact that he was the last choice for the Leipzig job. He was less preferred than the exceedingly dull Telemann, and even less preferred to the exceedingly unknown Graupner. Who he? Ed. (In fact, who Ed?) Bach found himself in trouble with his employers on more than one occasion, and I think, to look at it fairly, there was right and wrong on both sides. Bach's jobs were ridiculously labour-intensive, with music to write and arrange for so many different places and events. But, equally, he could, by all accounts, be a bit tough to get on with. On one occasion, he applied for a new job and got it, neglecting to tell his new employer only one vital fact - he already had a job, and they didn't want to let him go. He ended up being placed under house arrest to prevent him skipping to his next gig.

The good thing, though, is that all Bach's wrangling with the powers-that-be does not appear to have affected his writing. A stream of great works just seem to pour forth from him like sweat from a mere mortal. One of them is the marvellous St Matthew Passion, in which Bach used not only the St Matthew version of the Passion but also the odd extra verse written by a man writing under the name of Picander, who was in fact a postman from Leipzig. As you can imagine, a man as committed to the Church as Bach would have put all his resources into a dramatic setting of the crucifixion and resurrection of Christ. The 'oratorio Passion' was a particularly German affair, having grown out of the liturgical Lutheran Passion music, pioneered by early musical setders such as Schiitz/

Bach, though, tailored the Passion to his own needs. He increased the amount of non-biblical texts, putting increasing demands on poets such as Picander - Postman Pic, to his friends - to provide him with original but no less fitting words. In the St Matthew Passion, or, to give it the name Bach gave it, the Passio Domini nostriJ.C. secundum Evangelistam Mattaeum, the great man had increased the new fl German composer, born in Saxony, who worked mainly out of Dresden. He loved his Passions as well as his opera. His 'The Seven Words of Christ' - not to he confused with a Haydn piece of a similar name -sets words from all four gospels beautifully. bits from twelve to twenty-seven biblical verses. It was to be the last of his great Passions, and was performed at St Thomas's Church, I,cipzig, on Good Friday, 1729. That was its first performance. Sadly, it had to wait another hundred years for its second performance, conducted by one Felix Mendelssohn in Berlin, but that's another story. It's a big piece, if you ever come to take it in, but more or less every bit is gorgeous, particularly if you are a Bach junkie, and none more so than the glorious 'O sacred head, sore wounded'.

As for Georg Frideric, he'd had a minor opera out the year before - Tolomeo, which contains the yummy 'Silent Worship' - but he was more likely than not basking in the glow afforded to the four anthems he'd written just two years earlier for the coronation of George II. In fact, basking in the glow afforded one of them in particular, the first, which went by the now almost household name of Zadok the Priest (but don't forget Nathan the Prophet!^). In fact, they're so popular, they've been performed at more or less every coronation since. If only he could collect the royalties-^ on it.