Bach and The Tuning of the World. Jens Johler
Earth, the moon and the apple – was connected by a mysterious force. Gra-vi-ty: he tested various intonations of the word to get nearer to its meaning; he elongated the syllables, stretching them; he varied melody and rhythm; and the more lavishly he did so, the more he got caught up into the word; he stamped his feet, clapped his hands, snapped his fingers … until he noticed that Erdmann was looking at him with irritation.
‘Gravity,’ he said one final time, in an austere voice, with a gesture of apology.
Erdmann interpreted this as an encouragement, and began talking about Johannes Kepler, an astronomer who had postulated certain laws about the movement of the planets.
While listening to his friend with one ear, Bach heard the distant call of a cuckoo, and asked himself what it meant that it first sang a minor, then a major third. It sounded like farewell and loss.
Shortly before dusk, they arrived in Langensalza. A little boy, barefoot, in ragged clothes, followed on their heels. He showed them the high tower of the market church, and proudly explained to them that the stagecoaches, which had only recently started to stop here, went from Moscow straight through to Amsterdam. When they got to the house of Erdmann’s uncle, they gave the boy a pfennig, and he immediately scampered away, as though he wanted to get the money to safety.
The uncle’s house looked grey and bleak. Built of wooden beams and clay bricks, it had small crooked windows and a roof made of grey shingles. A cobbled courtyard could be seen through a high archway next to the house, and beyond it the smithy.
Erdmann’s uncle was the town’s blacksmith. He was a strong man with a powerful head and sad eyes. Reluctantly he showed Bach and Erdmann a place for them to sleep, and summoned them into the kitchen for the evening meal.
They ate the bread soup and the cabbage with millet gruel in silence. The house seemed to be ruled by some form of black magic that muted all words, all sounds, all thoughts. Bach could only feel a tormenting numbness in his head. Erdmann obviously felt the same. The uncle, however, thawed a little after a glass of brandy, without offering them any. ‘Who is your father?’ he asked Bach.
‘Ambrosius Bach, the town musician in Eisenach,’ he replied, but his father was no longer alive. He died five years ago, he said. First his mother, then his father.
His own wife had died too, the uncle said. Six months ago.
Bach nodded. He knew this already from Erdmann. The uncle had no children. He was all alone now.
When he hit the red-hot iron with his hammer in the morning, the uncle said, he sometimes didn’t know who or what he was hitting … May God forgive him.
Bach remembered how his mother had died. He stood next to the bed where she was laid out and imagined she was moving slightly, that she was breathing. ‘Wake up,’ he whispered, ‘wake up.’ He couldn’t believe it wasn’t in her power to do so. He was nine years old then. His father died a couple of months later. Still, he had had the good fortune not to be placed in an orphanage. His brother, who was the organist in Ohrdruf even then, took him in.
The uncle asked why hadn’t both continued at school in Ohrdruf.
‘They stopped the free meals for us,’ Erdmann explained. In Lüneburg, they would get everything for free. Accommodations, meals, classes. For that, they had to sing in the matins choir.
‘What nonsense all this is,’ said the uncle, and it wasn’t clear whether he meant the cancellation of the subsidized meals in Ohrdruf or singing in the matins choir in Lüneburg.
They slept on straw sacks in a room adjoining the kitchen. As he was falling asleep, Bach thought back on his time in Eisenach. What a joy it had been to hear his father play the little fanfares on the trumpet from the balcony of the town hall, or play at St George’s Church under the direction of the Cantor. What a joy it was to walk up with him to the Wartburg, where Luther had once found sanctuary, and to listen to him talking about how all creatures had their own melody – human beings, animals, even the plants. What a joy it was to play music together, along with all the apprentices and journeymen, who were always willing to show him what they could do on the violin, the lute, the trumpet, the clavichord. And what a joy it was to hear Uncle Christoph play the great organ – he who had mastered the laws of the fugue so perfectly that he could play five different voices concurrently without any difficulty at all. To be able one day to play as his uncle could – that had been Bach’s greatest wish from the very beginning.
Powerful hammer blows shook the house in the morning. Still half asleep, Bach imagined his own head to be lying on the anvil, and that the next blow was poised to split his head open. He leaped from the straw sack, slipped into his trousers and waistcoat, buckled on the knapsack, threw the violin over his shoulder and hurried outside.
Erdmann was ready to depart, waiting for him in front of the house.
‘Pythagoras,’ he said.
Bach threw him a questioning look.
‘Forging hammers,’ Erdmann said. ‘That’s how Pythagoras hit upon the secret of harmony.’
‘Ah, yes,’ Bach said. ‘I’ve heard about that.’
The further they walked into the countryside, the more people they met on the road. Farmers riding to their fields on donkeys or pulling sluggish farm horses by the reins. Children in ragged clothes, of whom it was hard to tell whether they were tramping to work in the fields, or else orphans seeking their fortune in the world before being picked up and imprisoned in the workhouse. Journeymen on the road, clad in their traditional garb. And time and again, beggars and thieves, distinguishable by their one amputated hand, or even their amputated hand and foot. On one occasion they overtook a lame man and a blind man, the blind man supporting his lame companion, who himself led his blind friend. Bach would have liked to give them alms, but he hardly had anything himself. Grand carriages rushed past them every now and again, and they had to protect themselves against any passing coachman who took it into his head to snap his whip on their backs just for fun. Individual riders also tore by them at full gallop, expecting that they would jump aside in time. Dodgy characters sometimes crossed their way, throwing covetous glances at their instruments – Bach’s violin and Erdmann’s lute. When asked for directions – which happened more than once – they had to confess they didn’t know their own way around there either. But at least Erdmann had written a list of the places they had to pass through on their way to Lüneburg. It was a pretty long list, and a pretty long journey.
2. Wicked Witchcraft
At around noon on Saturday, they arrived at the border of the Duchy of Brunswick-Lüneburg. They showed their passports and accompanying letters from Cantor Elias Herda and the invitation from St Michael’s Monastery in Lüneburg. They were allowed to pass. Carriages stood idle on both sides of the barrier, and couldn’t go on. The width of the roads – two bare and parallel cobbled ribbons – was different in the two countries. So the coachmen had their hands full, replacing axles, and adjusting their carriages to the track width. The latter depended on where they came from and where they wanted to go. Meanwhile, the passengers stood by the wayside, offering unsolicited advice.
Erdmann and Bach joined them, and Erdmann began to reflect out loud upon the fragmentation of Germany into so many tiny principalities. Each of them with a little Sun King! Each with its very own track width! But wait and see! Towards the end of this saeculum, Germany will be just as unified as England or France! Then this nonsense will stop. Then new roads will be built that are uniform for the entire country, in straight lines, at right angles to one another, constructed according to the Laws of Reason. He would bet his life on it!
The passengers around them turned, looking at both wayfarers suspiciously. Who were they? What were they doing here? How dare they deliver such inflammatory speeches here?
Bach seized Erdmann by the sleeve of his rust-coloured jacket and pulled him vigorously away.
The next night, exactly a week after they had first set off, Bach suggested, just