Something Old

    
Not everything worth reading is hot off the press. In this section, we recommend "something old" that is still well worth reading. "Something Old" can mean anything from a venerable and antique classic to a good book first published year ago. 

“THE LITTLE CHRONICLE OF MAGDALENA BACH” by Esther Meynell (First published under a pseudonym in 1924; then published in 1925 under her own name)

 

Very well – see me as an eccentric if you will, but I have this awful habit of  trying to catch up with books which have sat on my over-crowded shelves for eons and which I have never read. Case in point is Esther Meynell’s The Little Chronicle of Magdalena Bach. So I got to it and read it, sometimes while listening to CDs of Bach’s works. Is it a masterpiece? Not at all, but in its day it was very popular and sold very well. Who was Esther Meynell [born 1878 – died 1955]? Before she was married she was Esther Moorhouse, but she married a man whose cousins were the well-known literary Meynell family [I won’t go on about them]. She wrote many books, mainly guides to quaint rural areas, but she was also interested in classical music and she wrote a number of short books about composers. The Little Chronicle of Magdalena Bach is told in the first person by Magdalena, the second wife of Johann Sebastian Bach, who outlived him. The opening dedicates the book To All Who Love Johann Sebastian Bach. So here is the life of Bach as seen by his wife. And one interesting thing is that this novel, written by an English woman, was translated and published in Germany where it was also much admired. But, at the very end of the novel, there is what I would call a warning. It reads “Those familiar with the known and authenticated facts of Bach’s life will realise that certain episodes in this book are imaginary.” Ah yes. If we are alert we will realise that The Little Chronicle of Magdalena Bach is partly fiction. The Little Chronicle of Magdalena Bach was written by a prim and polite lady, Esther Meynell, whose tastes were more of the Romantic era rather than of the 20^th century. But let us be charitable. In its own way it is charming, and it does tell us much about Bach’s work and achievements.

Magdalena begins by telling us that she is writing after her husband has died at the age of 67. She is 57 years old and she lives in Leipzig. Bach’s first wife was Maria Barbara who had given birth to seven children, some of who had died in infancy, and Maria Barbara had also died. Magdalena tells us that the first time she saw Bach was when he was playing the great organ in St. Katharine’s Church in Hamburg where he was Capellmeister and, she says “his brilliance with the pedal-board was as though they were wings”. Magdalena’s father was a trumpeter and her family were all musicians. Magdalena herself was a soprano and had sung in royal courts. But she was unsure of Bach when he first spoke with her. She says “Now I could not claim that he was handsome – few of the Bachs are that – but he had a countenance that set forth the power of his mind.” [Page 11] In 1721 he proposed to her. They married. And from this point on, she speaks of Johann Sebastian Bach as if he is a saint. She also notes that, while she regarded his The Well-Tempered Clavichord as beautiful, he saw it as mere practice for his students.

Magdalena then goes back to talking about Bach when he was young and before she knew him. He was born in Eisenach. He wrote oratorios on Saints Matthew, John, Mark and Luke before she knew him. He always cried when he wrote about Golgotha. She first heard his St. Matthews Passion in Leipzig on Good Friday – but at first his St. Matthews Passion was not regarded as his best work. He learned Latin thoroughly, as every scholar then did, and life-long he read the works of Martin Luther. As a boy he had a fine voice as a choirboy.  As a youngster he played the violin in inns for pennies [or rather the German equivalent]. Soon he was adept at the Organ and he had the advantage of having “large hands” – meaning that he could spread his fingers across the key-board…. And while all this seems true, Magdalena can’t help telling us a sheer fantasy tale about young Bach being hungry and after a long walk and having no money or food, and he had to eat a fish that had been thrown out a window. And lo! The fish had swallowed a coin, so he was able to buy some real food…. Anyway, back to reality, Bach got his first post as an organist when he was 19, at Arnstdt. He was greatly impressed  by the chorales of Buxtehude which he heard at Lubeck but, she says, he once almost got into a fight when he was accosted in the street; and he also was very annoyed when a woman wanted him to set her mediocre poetry to music. And naturally he was often angry when choirboys did not practice. It was about this time that he married Maria Barbara. At the age of 22 he moved to Muhlhausen, then moved to the court of Duke Whilhelm of Saxe-Weimer, where he became the Court Organist. He greatly admired the music of Handel but Handel had moved to England – even though he was a Saxon too – and so he consoled himself by reading whatever scores of Handel he could get. He could be very severe with Organ builders who were lax and did not produce the type of sound that he demanded. He moved from Saxe-Weimer to Cothen -  and it was in Cothen that his first wife died.  

She turns to telling us of his life with her [Magdalena]. She says he sometimes smoked and sometimes he wrote works for Magdalena, but he was very diligent . She says: “Save for such brief interludes, through all our married life I never knew him to waste time, which he always said was one of the most precious gifts and would have to be accounted for before His throne. Day after day he taught, he composed, he conducted, he played the Organ, the clavier, the viola, and other instruments, he instructed his family, and whenever he had spare time he would read in the many books he had slowly collected, especially in those books of theology, which so interested him, though my weaker mind found them somewhat difficult, not to speak of some of them being in Latin.” [Page 35] Yet there were also times when: “There were certain things about him that made me afraid at times , especially at first – a rock-like sternness that underlaid his kindness, but more than all a strange longing he had all his busy life for the end, for death. I only glimpsed it now and then, for I think he felt it frightened me, and I was younger than he and much less brave.” [Page 61]. To put it another way, he was obsessed by the rule of God.

Magdalena looked after the surviving children of the late Maria Barbara, “So I had a complete little family to mother from the very first, and, owing probably to the kind example of their father, these young ones soon began to love me and to confide in me their little pleasures and troubles, though Friedemann, as the biggest boy and responsible companion of his father was at first a little more aloof from me.” [Page 74] Friedemann was to be a rascal in every way for the rest of his life – at one point, too tired to write a sonata commissioned for another city, he simply past off one of his father’s works as his own. Yet Friedemann and his brother Emanual were to be Bach’s greatest offspring. As Magdalena says, for years after her husband’s death, Friedemann and Emanual were admired more than the forgotten Johann Sebastian Bach…. and of course they are both still admired. Magdalena says Bach never wrote any music without showing his work to her before anybody else. As the years went by Magdalena gave birth to 13 children, so Bach had sired 20 children. But much later she says: “All this time our young family increased around us, though alas, when the cradle had been replenished it was so often made empty again by the grudging hand of death. There were times, I confess, when I felt it cruel to bear children but to lose them – all the hopes and love buried in the little graves beside which Sebastian and I have often stood hand in hand, silent.” [Page 159]. Child mortality was terribly common in the 18^th century - and earlier and later.

And at this point we have two of those rather too-true-to-be-true comments that Magdalena sometimes makes about Bach. She says of Bach “… he was deeply attached to his family, and cared much for the society of his children. Occasionally he would flare up if they made too great a noise with their playings when his mind was full of music…” [Page 78] She also says “Even in our bedchamber there was a clavichord and I have known him to rise up at midnight and, wrapping an old cloak about him, play very softly for an hour or more. It never disturbed the sleeping children, only sleeping their dreams….” [Page 181]. Frankly I can’t believe that Bach didn’t often blow his stack when his children were being rowdy as he was trying to write or compose, and I would be very surprised if some of his children didn’t like their father making noises when the midnight hour was approaching.

Bach and his large family left Lothen and went to live in Leipzig in 1723, where Bach spent his last 25 years. He was at first upset by the poor singers he was to direct and he found the main organ in Leipzig to be inadequate. He had difficulty with the boys at St.Thomas Schule, where he put down the law that every choir should have at least three trebles, three alti, three tenors and three basses, and they should all be scholars. He very nearly got into a fight with Herre Gorner who was playing the organ so badly that – says Magdalena – Bach  “flew into a rage, snatching off his wig, flung it at Gorner’s head, telling him that he could have done better to be a cobbler than an organist.”  Bach was interested in an early version of the pianoforte, but he rejected it because he found the hammer-action to have heaviness to the touch. He became the Director of the city’s Musical Union. He did not like amateurs who wanted to be given lessons when they had no talent, but he did take in many who did have at least a little talent.

Magdalena says “There was a curious contradiction about Sebastian: in the things of daily life he was careful and meticulous and economical, in the making of music he had a marvellous prodigality and richness. But it must not be forgotten that this richness, though truly the gift of God, was based on hard and unceasing work and study all his youth, indeed, fully until he was thirty years of age – or, I might say with greater truth, till the day of his death. His mind never slumbered in the lethargy of self-satisfaction, and he never ceased the task of revision of his music – he was engaged on that work of his dying – and I always felt the words of Ecclesiasticus belonging to him, ‘For a dream cometh through the multitude of business.’ ” [Page 150] There is no doubt that he was a very religious man. She lists all the major works that Bach had achieved. They were organ music, chamber music, church cantatas, great Latin Masses, five different sets of music related to Gospel accounts of Our Lord’s Passion, suites, partitas, and many others. But in his last years, he lost his sight. Being blind, he wasn’t able to perform in front of the King of Prussia in Berlin. He died on July 29, 1750.

I am not an expert on the life of Bach, so I accept most of what Esther Meynell says about the central facts of Bach’s life, and I found The Little Chronicle of Magdalena Bach    to be very informative in many ways as well as being very charming. But all the time I am aware that Magdalena’s writing was fiction – a diary that never was. I think it is likely that the lives of Bach and Magdalena with a very, very large family would have had more quarrels and arguments than Esther Meynell suggests. But it does not deter me from listening to more of Johann Sebastian Bach.

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Footnote: I am a barbarian. I have never played a musical instrument and I cannot read musical notes. By contrast my wife teaches piano and she has to explain to me what certain musical terms mean. But one thing we have is our love for classical music… and good jazz. Sometimes I rile-up our [adult] children by telling them that the only music worth listening to is classical music and jazz – but of course I am a little bit of a hypocrite as there are some pop songs I like, not to mention old-time ditties and show tunes. Still, classical and jazz music are our greatest delight. And sometimes, when we are driving along in our car listening to the Concert Programme, we might come in halfway to a classical work, and then we play a game of seeing what the name of classical work is. Sometimes she gets it first and sometimes I get it first. So at least I know what classical music sounds like and am well acquainted with it. By the way, back in the 1960’s many jazz-men decided that Johann Sebastian Bach was one of their heroes. Old Bach, they said, was the first guy to really swing. Too true.