Bach and The Tuning of the World. Jens Johler
that he may bring the harmony of our instruments in accord with the harmony of our mind and soul, such that the harmony of the mind and the soul will chime with the harmony of the cosmos. Musica instrumentalis, musica humana, and musica mundana: All becomes One. Because where there is Oneness, there is God.’
During his speech, the Master had been walking up and down with measured steps. Now he stopped.
Bach expected Böhm to sit down again at the harpsichord in order to improvise a melody, an imitation of the harmony of the spheres perhaps, something weird, unearthly, strange like before. But Böhm just stood there as though he’d been touched with a magic wand and frozen forever in this posture: head tilted to one side, eyes directed upwards to the right, right hand held still halfway in the air, with a slightly outstretched forefinger as if he were listening and at the same time pointing to the sounds he was hearing.
Bach didn’t move either, out of respect and reverence for his teacher. He sat there patiently, and waited; except that, after some time, all sorts of places on his body started to itch, and he wanted to scratch his nose, his knee, his head. He was tempted to cough, or murmur an excuse, but didn’t dare to. Finally, a little shudder went through Böhm. Surprised, he looked to Bach and angrily barked at him. ‘So you’re still here, are you? What do you want? The lesson’s over! Get back to school immediately. Out with you!’
On the way home, in the evening, at night, and over the following days, Bach incessantly mused over who the third in the triad might be. Pythagoras – Boethius – and …? He had a hunch, but wasn’t certain. He wondered if he should talk to Erdmann about it, but for now he wanted to keep to himself Böhm’s words, which had deeply moved him, to let them unfold in his mind and soul without immediately philosophizing about them. All the more impatiently did he long for the next lesson.
What made the wait a little easier for him was that his assistance was twice requested by Thomas de la Selle, Dancing Master to the Nobility. His duties allowed, or obliged, him to accompany the dances of the aristocratic students – their minuets and sarabandes, allemandes and gigues, chaconnes and passacaglias. And Master Thomas de la Selle, a pupil of the great Lully, satisfied with Bach’s playing, praised him, eventually paying him a small retainer.
His next lesson with Böhm at last approached, once again at St John’s Church. After they’d been sitting at the organ for some time, and had busied themselves with playing some choral fantasies, Bach could no longer restrain himself.
‘Who was the third?’ he asked.
‘The third?’
‘Pythagoras – Boethius – and …?’
‘Oh, yes,’ Böhm said with a wicked smile. ‘You want the entire triad. Now then: one thousand years separated Pythagoras from Boethius, and yet they were kindred souls. Another thousand years separate Boethius from Johann Kepler.’
Ah, him, Bach thought.
In his five books on world harmony, Bach learned from his teacher, the Imperial mathematician, astronomer, and astrologer had given proof that the same harmonies govern the heavens and the Earth. The proof that all the proportions that we know from our instruments also exist up there, in the relations between the planets and their paths. Pythagoras intuited it, Boethius desired it, but Kepler calculated it. ‘Here,’ he said, and fetched a book that had been lying open on a bench. ‘Here,’ he repeated, and read: ‘Perfect harmonies consist in the following: Between the convergent movements of Saturn and Jupiter, the octave. Between the convergent movements of Jupiter and Mars, the double octave with the minor third. Between the convergent movements of Earth and Mars, the fifth …
‘I don’t want to discuss in detail the way Kepler calculated these cosmic harmonies,’ Böhm said, returning the book to its place. ‘But the fact is that he sought them – and he found them! His concern was for the same unifying concept that Pythagoras had discerned two thousand years before him, and which Boethius did a thousand years later: harmony up there in the cosmos, harmony down here on Earth – in our instruments and in our hearts. In other words: the harmony of the world.’
He let the words fade away in the room, sat down at the organ, gave the bellows treader a sign, and struck a mighty C-major chord, dispersing and pursuing it through all octaves before beginning a furious improvisation on all three keyboards as though they were the symbols of musica mundana, musica humana, and musica instrumentalis. The deep sounds boomed with primeval force. In the middle registers, the melodies and figures tumbled into one another, harmonized on the strong beats, then scattered apart again, and the high and highest passages rose aloft on a Jacob’s ladder of sounds and harmonics to the heavens, way up into infinity. That was what music could do; that was what music was meant to be. None of your jolly bar-room fiddling, or nimble-fingered virtuosity, no dazzling fairground acrobatics, or fire-eating, or tight-rope walking – or rather, all that did belong there as well, yes, all that, too. But it was not what ultimately mattered. What mattered was the harmony of the world.
7. Adam Reincken
Hamburg!
Never in his life had Bach seen such mighty fortifications. No wonder the city had got through the Thirty Years War with almost no damage. The freedom and wealth of the Hanseatic League were, then as now, protected by this formidable bulwark. The price for it, though, was that the crowds in the city grew ever bigger.
It was nightmarish. They had hardly climbed out of the carriage when Bach had to fight an overwhelming sense of dizziness. The city was spinning round, the pavement wobbled, his heart was racing. He would have liked to turn back immediately, but Böhm had promised to introduce him to Adam Reincken, the celebrated organist of St Catherine’s Church.
They walked through the streets of the city, which was teeming with people. The city lay between two rivers and was cross-hatched by an abundance of canals they called ‘fleets’. Böhm walked in front, Bach behind him. He carried his knapsack on his back and his master’s heavy travel bag, transferring it from his right and left hand. The pavements were regularly laid with wooden planks, rotten in places, so you had to be careful where you stepped. And there was such a bewildering multitude of things to see! City Aldermen, riding by in elegant clothes, and cheerfully greeted on all sides; young women in modest high-necked dresses, their eyes cast downwards yet stealing flirtatious glances at passers-by; merchants going to the stock exchange in their carriages; noble ladies being carried in litters on their way to their tailor or perfumer. But there were porters, craftsmen, and labourers, too, and many, many poor people, clad in rags, who communicated in a language that Bach did not understand. The prevailing Babel of languages and voices jarred his nerves. This was not the normal jumble of dialects he knew from the weekly markets in Eisenach, Ohrdruf, and Lüneburg, but a hodge-podge of English, French, Italian, Dutch, and even Russian. Where was the keynote here, where the harmonic centre?
‘The keynote in this city is called money,’ said Böhm. ‘Pennies, shillings, florins, thalers, ducats, louis d’ors – the average Hamburg resident isn’t picky when it comes to money. These gentlemen are called money bags for a reason. They trade in pepper and other spices; and what they get for them fills their bags. Of course, they also trade in everything else that can be bought and sold. The greatest sin in this city is to be poor.’
In front of the magnificent town hall, which was counted among the city’s finest buildings, with its seven mighty double windows and its high tower, a woman had been set in the stocks at a rough stone pillar behind an iron grille. On her shaven head she wore a straw wreath, as a sign that she had committed adultery. Bach wondered what Erdmann would have said about it. Probably that such punishments were a disgrace, and that such things would no longer exist in a hundred years’ time.
The stock exchange was behind the town hall; then came a bridge over a fleet; and, shortly afterwards, they stood in front of St Catherine’s. Bach wanted to walk in immediately to take a look at the famous organ with the four keyboards, but Böhm didn’t let him.
Instead, he brought him to a section of the