It has been a commonplace shibboleth to place Johann Sebastian Bach as a quasi-dinosaur in his own time, an old-world man out of step with the Enlightenment-sprung currents of the mid-18th century. Certainly his sons saw him as such—“the old wig,” they called him. Later generations treated him as a near-Gothic master, revered him to be sure, but also cast him in bronze and posed him on an unassailably high marble pedestal, all the better to worship him by.
That’s apropos if one’s view of Bach is limited to just the nearfield of central-eastern Germany from the early to mid eighteenth century. Yet it falls woefully short as soon as the field expands. Viewed through a panoramic lens, Bach pops securely into focus as a man of his times, one who belongs to and exemplifies his age, his profession, and his ethnicity. Consider his religious affiliation: he was not only Protestant, but staunchly Lutheran. That in and of itself marks a sea change from masters of the Renaissance, who would have been Catholic to the last man jack. Josquin des Prez didn’t trouble his mind with religious choices; in his day you were Catholic—it being the only Christian denomination in town—or Jewish, in which case a public career in music was almost certainly a closed door. Taking up a position as to one’s theology was an issue for later generations; even as late as the Counter-Reformation it was the Palestrinas and Victorias and di Lassos who held all the cards, Catholics all and employed by an all-encompassing mother Church. It wasn’t until the flowering of the German Baroque, itself a happy offshoot of the Protestant Reformation, that composers such as Samuel Scheidt could start making an international reputation for themselves despite having allied themselves with Lutheranism instead of Catholicism.
Sebastian Bach was as thoroughgoing a Lutheran as one could ever encounter, his theological sophistication such that he could sail through examinations that might well have boggled candidates for the priesthood. Yet he lived and worked in a religiously pluralistic society. During his years in Cöthen he adjusted to the requirements of a Calvinist court; during his 27 years in Leipzig he was in regular communication with the court in Dresden, a Catholic center due to August II “The Strong” who, as King of Poland, had converted to Catholicism. As a practical, working musician, Bach had no choice but to get along with, and acquiesce to the needs of, differing religious traditions. That wasn’t old-world thinking; it was a mindset shared by musicians to this very day. When in Rome, in other words.
Bach’s great contemporary George Frideric Handel walked the walk even more adroitly. Born to the same staunchly Lutheran world as Bach—his near ancestors were pastors and theologicans—Handel was in staunchly Catholic Rome by the time he was 21 years old. He didn’t hang out with pro-Lutheran Germans while he was there; his employers were cardinals Ottoboni, Pamphili, and Colonna, for whom he wrote religious works such as La Resurrezione. Then came religiously pluralistic England, where Handel gracefully conformed to Anglicism. Although Handel’s personal views on religion have not come down to posterity, clearly he sided with orthodox Anglicans, as witnessed by that glorious counter-Deist screed, Messiah. Certainly he exulted in the religious tolerance of his adopted England. Mainwaring tells us that “he would often speak of it as one of the great felicites of his life that he was settled in a country where no man suffers any molestation or inconvenience on account of his religious principles.”
All in all, there’s just no separating artists from the age in which they live. The notion of any of them being “ahead of their times” is puerile poppycock, all gush and no substance. There is no understanding Beethoven without the two major forces of his times: the French Revolution, which flamed into being when Beethoven was 19—the perfect college age for becoming enraptured with revolutionary ideals—and the Napoleonic Era, which dominated Beethoven’s adult life. It is no coincidence that the bitter end of the Napoleonic age, which started with such utopian dreams and collapsed into demagoguery and conquest, also marked the end of the ‘heroic’ period in Beethoven’s music. Late Beethoven, with its twitchy fits followed by forays into brooding introspection, belongs securely to the autumnal Europe that arose in the wake of the Congress of Vienna, as the ideals of the Enlightenment seemed to have gone to ash while its hopes for a society unified in rationalism and individual freedom withered in the dourness of the 1820s. Our Beethoven of the Eroica and Fidelio and the Seventh Symphony could not have arisen in an earlier age. He reflected an era, a place and a time, that existed once and never again. Should you harbor any doubts in that regard, just imagine him born in 1830 in Philadelphia. That alternate-timeline Beethoven would very likely have become a banking or railroad tycoon, perhaps a chronicler of the expansion of the American West or the tragedy of the Civil War. But a musician? No way. In 19th-century America music was mostly housewife stuff. It was not a clear path out of the lower classes, as it was in Enlightenment Germany. No American man with Beethoven’s intelligence, drive, and burning ambition would have given it a moment’s notice, no matter how intense his innate talent.
Artists belong to and reflect their own times. That was great for our ancestors, not so good for us. We’re living in artistically insipid times. A pallid bourgeois mentality has triumphed over fire and originality. The visual arts have gone so far into their own navels that they have tiddly-winked out of any significance to all but balance-sheet bottom-line art collectors. Quality literature has been pickled in a formaldehyde of theory and lit-crit obfuscation. Music is in somewhat better shape, but only by comparison. Viewed on its own, the situation is grim. A half-century of academicism wreaked untold damage on the relationship between composer and audience, and while academicism has gone slinking back into the academy where it belongs, music today has no character to speak of, no defining thusness that gives it inner life. Much of it seems preoccupied with surface effect—computer sound processing, for example, or DJ-style spinning, or novel instrumental effects—all without underlying structure to give that surface meaning. Composers speak gravely of recreating sonic spaces via fragmenting tones and reassembling them in new guises. But too often they’re recreating old-hat stuff, recycling idioms that were established many generations ago by far more imaginative and passionate creators. Even more puzzling is the near-fetishistic obsession with historical “accuracy” in which significant street cred accrues from re-creations of antique performance styles and instruments—almost as though attempting to stop artistic evolution in its tracks. As in music, as in other fields: retro is the name of the game. Even fashion, that poor-relation spinster to the fine arts, has gone into suspended animation: women go strutting around in 1940s dresses and hairstyles; men’s formal styles are locked in the 1930s while casual stuff has remained static for a good thirty years. None of this is healthy. It evinces a culture with no defining present that seeks comfort in a better-defined past. Far too often music critics lambaste audiences and management for focusing on the past rather than embracing the present; stop programming so much Brahms and Debussy, they say, and let’s hear more contemporary music. But it is those critics who are out of step with their times, not the audiences or managers. There’s no Beethoven around these days, no Mozart, no Brahms, no Debussy. Ours is not a time for giants. When the times change—and they will—the artists will arise who are of those times. I only hope that the future will provide more nourishment than our current lackluster, formless, ill-defined, and downright wishy-washy present.