Bach and The Tuning of the World. Jens Johler

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       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 for a change, going into an inn and eating as much as they could, at his expense, to mark the occasion. It would be his treat.

      ‘It’s your birthday?’ Erdmann asked.

      ‘The twenty-first of March,’ said Bach. ‘I’m fifteen now. Although …’ In truth, he wasn’t completely certain if he was actually fifteen now. To be precise, he was eleven days short, ever since the calendar had been converted, at the beginning of the year, from the Julian to the Gregorian system, which had been in use in Catholic countries for a hundred years at this point – but the adjustment had made it necessary to drop eleven days from the year. So the eighteenth of February was not followed by the nineteenth, but by the first of March. Eleven days rubbed out, just like that, perdu!

      ‘It’s really a matter of debate,’ he said, ‘as to whether I’m fifteen today or only on the first of April.

      ‘Then what we ought to do is celebrate it twice,’ said Erdmann.

      ‘You’d like that, wouldn’t you?’ said Bach.

      There were some tables free at the ‘Zur Linde’ inn. They picked a table in the rear of the room that was lit by candles and oil lamps. Bach ordered roast rabbit and wine. After the second glass, he told his friend about the manuscripts his brother had stuck into his knapsack. These were copies of keyboard pieces that his brother had kept in a locked cabinet. Sheet music by Pachelbel, Böhm, Buxtehude, and even some by Italian composers. Bach had made clandestine copies of them by moonlight, and when his brother had found this out, he had confiscated the pages and locked them up again in the cabinet.

      ‘Why’s that?’ Erdmann asked.

      ‘Why’s what?’

      ‘Why did he confiscate them?’

      ‘Because he told me not to,’ Bach said.

      ‘And why did he do that?’

      ‘Because they’re precious. He paid a lot of money for copies like that. And the more there are of them, the lower their price.’

      ‘Got you,’ said Erdmann. ‘But after all, you are his brother …’

      ‘Certainly am,’ said Bach. ‘That’s why he gave them back to me.’

      The innkeeper had meanwhile stepped up to their table, and put two more glasses of wine down.

      ‘With all respect, Mr Innkeeper,’ said Erdmann, ‘we didn’t order this.’

      ‘They come courtesy of the cloth merchant over there,’ the innkeeper said, nodding his head in the direction of a well-dressed patron. ‘He asks whether you gentlemen might play a little music. A song on the lute … accompanied by the fiddle? Maybe also a little singing? A song?’

      Well, after all, why not? They had had a good meal and drunk a bit – but not so much that they wouldn’t be able to play music anymore. And who knows, maybe the innkeeper might let them stay overnight for free if their music made the patrons consume more wine.

      They unpacked their instruments and set themselves up in the centre of the room.

      ‘The fancy took me,’ Erdmann sang, ‘to ride to the woods, where the air is filled with the song of birds …’

      Bach sang the second voice part and fiddled melodious figures around it.

      There was somewhat restrained applause.

      Erdmann didn’t take too long before playing the second song: ‘You’re the goldsmith’s daughter, and I’m the farmer’s son …’

      The applause grew stronger. Some of the patrons had sung along to a couple of lines, and the mood lifted perceptibly; it became more cheerful, and soon people wouldn’t let them stop. New requests for songs were shouted out to them, so many all at once – and Erdmann knew them all: ‘Winter is gone’ or ‘A monk went to the Upper Country, and got to know a nun –’, which was a pretty lewd song. Bach felt pretty ashamed as he heard: ‘He led her to the altar, where he read her a Psalter –’, followed by ‘He led her to the bell-pull rope, where he dinged her five hours in scope …’

      No, that definitely went too far, and the more so as the guests were now hooting and bellowing their own obscene additions. Bach struck up a gypsy dance he had picked up at a peasants’ wedding near Ohrdruf, with breathtakingly quick runs and swiftly changing staccato and legato passages, stamping on the wooden floorboards with his feet. As soon as they had started, one of the guests grabbed the waitress and started cavorting with her in a circle so wildly you feared they would get dizzy and fall to the ground; but they didn’t fall, they just flung their arms around each other’s necks when it ended, and laughed, and the other guests were happy with them and clapped their hands; and in the general ruckus, the cloth merchant shouted: ‘Encore! Encore! The next round is on me!’

      ‘Board and lodging are free,’ СКАЧАТЬ