Musical Novel

Unless Thou Bless Me, Chapter 16: Return to Arnstadt

Fantasy on the life of Johann Sebastian Bach

Photo by Paulo Felipe Assis on Unsplash

Readers are encouraged to read the entire novel, “Unless Thou Bless Me: A Fantasy of the Life of Johann Sebastian Bach.” Each chapter contains links to the previous and following chapters. The link to the previous chapter is https://medium.com/new-literary-society/unless-thou-bless-me-chapter-15-rondeau-ii-22e205722fa5.

The link to Chapter 1 of Unless Thou Bless Me is https://medium.com/new-literary-society/unless-thou-bless-me-chapter-1-ca8bdceba9b0.

Arnstadt, Germany 1705–06

People came into the Neukirche family group by family group, taking their accustomed pews. Friends nodded at one another from beside wives of husbands and children, while enemies stonily ignored each others’ presence . It was the same as hundreds, maybe thousands of previous Sunday mornings in Arnstadt.

They all sat back after a short silent prayer and relaxed, waioting for the gentle, reassuring notes of the organ to prepare them for the liturgy.

Instead, a dark, deep bass note…was it a single bass note? A sound was emitted from the pipes of the organ unlike anything ever heard in the Neukirche before.

Had there been a change of organists?

Johann Ernst Bach had replaced his cousin without the change having been noticed by the congregation back in October. Now Johann Sebastian Bach had returned from Lubeck without fanfare or incident, and this morning was seated at the organ manuals, out of sight of the congregation. This morning he had determined that they would notice a difference.

He started out the introductory music with what Dietrich Buxtehude called a ‘pedal trill.”

“Why not free the shorter fingers of the left hand for other, more interesting things,” the elder man had said. “Let the feet take care of the entire bass line.”

Buxtehude demonstrated. He began to do a solo on the pedals that someone else might find difficult using his left hand. “Pedal trills,” he said, “was my idea. They make a very striking sound, do they not?”

The note was so deep and low that trilling it rapidly gave it a ghostly, mutterring quality that was unheard of in Bach’s experience of the organ.

“Take the day, Johann Sebastian,” Buxtehude had said. “Experiment with it. Try to develop more independence of the feet from the hands, so you’ll be able to add another complete voice to your composition. Figure out some exercises, I’m sure you’ll think up some good ones. And I’ll check on you tomorrow, to see how it’s going, probably give you a few pieces to work on involving a lot of obbligato pedal action.”

The instruction had payed off. Bach had worked on the pedals unrelentingly every day, using the small organ of the Marienkirche — the large one having fallen into disrepair after Buxtehude’s organ mass on the next-to-last Sunday in Trinity. Soon his feet were freeing his hands to create more unique and elaborate harmonies in the upper registers.

The congregation of the Neukirche, shocked out of complacency by the deliberately outrageous opening bars of Bach’s prelude, with not as thrilled about this development as he was. He was in no mood to duck a fight. Things were going to change here in Arnstadt, regardless of who complained…

He waited at the door of the Wedemann house after having knocked for nearly a minute, for he was so impatient to see his cousin that he would have raised her from the dead, had she passed on during his absence.

In a half-hour, though, she returned with a bundle in her hand from the marktplatz. When she saw him, she started, but recovered herself enough to set down her load and, in an unwonted display of passion, ran up to him and embraced him for all she was worth. She kept her face buried in his collar and neck.

They came apart, both a little dazed, even shaken, from this sudden, wordless display of passionate love. Now it was necessary to regain equilibrium, to try to communicate in disregard of what had just happened.

“Wh — why have you been away so long?”

“I…To…Buxtehude let me take part in the Abendmusiken, Maria Barbara.”

She smiled for a second, then frowned again. “And you didn’t write, not send any kind of word.”

“I never knew just how long I was going to stay. Every time I made up my mind to come home, something else came up, and I would put it off for a week…and you know how slow the post is.”

He was just too wrapped up in what he was doing, She thought.

“All of us here have been wondering if you were still alive or not! For all we knew, you could have been killed by robbers, or died from that awful wet weather they have up there. I even thought you might have gotten a job up there and were beginning to forget us!”

“Oh, I would never do anything like that…”

In a flash of resentment tempered by love, she said, “You’re terrible!”

He only stood there, unable or unwilling to defend himself.

“Do you want to come in?”

“Very much.”

She picked up her bundle and walked past him to open the door. He followed her into the house. Nothing had much changed since the last time he had been here. He looked at her more closely. She had changed some. There was a hint of care about her young eyes, and for once he saw an effect of himself on someone else, the effect of himself on a woman.

“Can you forgive me, my friend?” he asked, letting her know that he saw what she meant.”

“Music is everything to you, once you get involved in it.”

“Cousin, never have I had an experience like this in Lubeck. I was not only a student of Buxtehude. We became friends. For the first time in my life, I felt totally right about the things I look forward to in the future. He made me feel such strength such as no one else but him could have provided. The foremost musician of our day, Maria, and a wonderful old man, at peace with himself, the people of his parish, and with God, a man of no pretensions. He was everything I could have expected him to be, yet he was most unexpected in his personality.”

“You found him unlike yourself.”

“Yes…what made you say that?”

“Because we expect people who share our loves to be like ourselves.”

“Well, you’re right there. Where I have trouble and detractors, he has harmony and well-wishers. Still, we got very close.”

“It’s strange,” she sighed, “how two people who approach the world in such different ways can see, sometimes at a glance, the worth of one another.”

He regarded her for a few moments. “How have you been, Maria?”

She shrugged. “Getting along, as always. I…I missed you plenty.”

“I thought of you often…”

“You did?”

“Oh yes! How can you doubt that?”

“I believe you. It’s just that I guess, uh, I thought that if a man like you can stay away so long, going after something that absorbs him, who does he need? I mean, what part can anyone else play in your life that would be vital? I thought about that a lot.”

“There, I think, you misjudge me, Maria. Take Buxtehude, for example. He and his daughter…”

“He has a daughter?” she said with suppressed alarm.

“Yes, a kind, sensitive woman of thirty, who’ll be married soon,” he said in a way that reassured her. “Anyway, they’ve lived alone with one another for so long, and he truly cares for her, so much that she is as much a part of his life as music is. You see, he’s done everything he ever wanted to do in music. He found that it was only half of a life.”

“You know,” the old man had said, “I can tell by watching you that you throw yourself into this business with all the passion of someone in love, physical love.”

“I get excited,” Bach had answered. “I can’t think of anything else that musters everything I have as much as this.”

“Well, there’ll come a day, young Herr Bach, when you’ll find something missing. Then you are going to let someone else into your life, because without that someone else, you’ll lose the sense of the kind of creature you really are. You’ll become lost in a desert of notes and sounds, and music will be the death of you, not your life.”

“So,” Bach continued, “if it has worked that way with him, it may with me as well.”

Maria nodded, without commenting. She saw her fears in a different perspective now. It wasn’t so much that Johann Sebastian wouldn’t need someone else. She envied him his self-sufficiency and his passion for something. Other people were to be, and always had been her lot. Like most women of her time, her concerns and passions were channeled outside of herself and away from the world of objective things and towards the looking for a husband, the anticipation of the care for children, and the welding together of the community by a thousand gossamer threads…

For the sixth time during the service, Reverend Treiber scowled up at the organ gallery. Only the more observant of the parishioners caught this, though a good proportion of the congregation did much the same thing every time the sound of one of Buxtehude’s fugues or one of Bach’s strange new fugues and chorales burst upon their ears, with all sorts of unpredictable rendings of the tonal fabric and outrageous stop pulling.

As he played, he avoided thinking about anything else but the music. He allowed no consideration of strangeness or unpopularity to soften a note or change the schedule of pieces.

“Well,” he had said to Buxtehude, “how in God’s name can I reconcile my aims in Music with the preferences of the clergy and the congregation?”

“You see I have no trouble with that sort of thing,” Buxtehude had replied.

“Yes, but you have an exceptional congregation…”

“True. True, I have been luck. But there are many good congregations in Germany. The popularity of the Abendmusiken just goes to show this.”

“Nevertheless, Arnstadt isn’t one of them.”

“Have you given them a chance? I mean, have you really exposed them to the sort of thing you consider good?”

“No, because I already know the outcome of that experiment.”

“If you haven’t performed it, it’s you who are making it hard on yourself to achieve your aims. Wouldn’t it be easier on you to let them try to inhibit you than to inhibit yourself and constantly grow in anger at them? Seems like a confrontation is inevitable. If it doesn’t go well for you, why then you must find antoehr place that suits you better. At this point, either you or Arnstadt is going to have to change a little.

“And I don’t think you will change in this very soon,” Buxtehude added as an afterthought.”

Photo by Europeana on Unsplash

“Herr Bach, it causes me great upset to see you here before our Consistorium once again. As you know I personally was responsible for obtaining the organ of the Neukirche, and you came to this city by virtue of my urging in large part. I have been hurt and embarrassed bu the continuing controversies surrounding your work here. Just what do you have to say for this…this three-month delinquency, this abandonment of duty, pure and simple? Just where have you been and from whom did you have permission to leave for so long?”

“Herr, I have been in Lubeck, as you well know, since it was yourself, Herr, who approved the action of the Dominus Superintendent…”

“Ah,” said the Dominus Superintendent, “but your leave was for a single month. Instead, you have been absent for four times that long.”

“Quite frankly, I had hoped that my substitute, Johan Ernst Bach, had done such a good job that no one would enter a complaint on that accout. And reports are that everyone was satisfied there.”

Without pursuing Bach further on that point, Feldhouse said, “Reprove him for having made many curious variations in the chorale, and having mingled many strange tones in it , and for the fact that the congregation has been confused by it.

“In addition, it is quite disagreeable that no concerted music has been performed as was requested during our last hearing, simply because he doesn’t get along with the students. A Capellmeister cannot be engaged just on his account. If he doesn’t want to do this, we’ll find someone who will.”

Johann Sebastian smarted from the threat, but kept his dignity, which had never seemed quite so solid, either to himself or to those who were reproving him.

“Gentlemen, all I require on that is to be provided with a competent conductor, and we would have excellent music here.”

“We want a declaration of your intentions on this score within eight days.”

Johann Sebastian did not declare himself within eight days, or eight months for that matter.

“Herr Bach, I hardly need to tell you that you have been asked to declare yourself on the matter of making music with the young scholars as you have been instructed to do. If you consider it to be no disgrace to be connected to the church and to accept your salary, then you also mustn’t be ashamed to make music with the students assigned to do so. It is the intention that these shall practice, in order that one day they will be better fitted for music.”

Bach appeared unmoved.

“Well, what do you say?”

“I’ll send you my reply in a few days, in writing.”

“All right, then. We shall take action upon it. Furthermore, we would like to know by what right you have invited a strange maiden into the choir loft to make music with you there.”

“I have discussed the matter long ago with Magister Uhle, and have his express permission.”

Johann Sebastian did not declare himself in writing until…

TO THE EVERYWHERE MOST HONORED and MOST HIGHLY ESTEEMED CONSISTORIUM of the TOWN OF ARNSTADT.

I must ever be grateful for the manner in which your honors engaged me to take charge of the new organ of the Bonifatius Kirche.

Now God has brought it to pass that an unexpected change should offer itself to me, in which I see the possibility of a more adequate living and a more compatible outlook on the regulation of church music on the part of parishioners. In this regard, I wish to return to you the keys to the organ for which I have received responsibility from you…

For further reading of “Unless Thou Bless Me”:

The link to the next chapter of “Unless Thou Bless Me”, Chapter 17, is (in progress).

© Kenneth LaPensee, 2025. All rights reserved.

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