Discussions - Part 1

White's Musical Servitude: Austro-Italian Music: Fux, Bach, Handel

William L. Hoffman wrote (February 16, 2021):
Reception history and social context are two significant, newer areas in the pervasive field of historical musicology (Wikipedia), particularly as reception history and contextual studies apply to the works of Bach through received compositional influences and contexts such as the social, political and cultural religious in which the music was composed and first heard. Until now, the topic of Bach reception history has been confined to the response of succeeding generations to the Bach legacy. "Music embraced social and cultural trends, especially within "a new appreciation of the uniqueness of things" with "a genuine sense for history come to life," says Gerhard Herz in the first significant publication in 1935 involving the concept of music reception history.¹ Music began to acquire "a new spiritual content," stressing "freedom and originality," he says (Ibid.: 68). Bach's Lutheran orthodoxy with a personal emphasis on piety evolved into a Romantic religiosity "with faith anchored in the realm of longing" within "the free middle class which now became the bearer of culture." Bach as the master craftsman in polyphonic form and four-part harmony acknowledged in the previous half-century (1750-1800) became one of history's great composers and "part of the national culture of the German people," Herz observes (Ibid.: 70). The initial pursuit of musical reception history began with the 19th century Bach Revival or Awakening, initially focusing on his organ and keyboard works, most transmitted through copies of students and members of Bach circles,² followed by the vocal works (cantatas, motets, Masses, Passion oratorios).

Post-Modern Reception History

Today, contextual reception history is focusing on the specific, direct influences of Bach compositional contemporaries in Irish musicologist Harry White's new book of concepts of authority and imaginative autonomy through the agency of Fux and Caldara influencing Bach and Handel,³ specifically, "a comparison between Bach's arias and those of Johann Joseph Fux, as well as a generic and stylistic comparison between BWV 232 [the B-minor Mass] and the mass settings of Fux and Antonio Caldara," says White. Several initial responsory threads are countenanced in White's study of authority and autonomy in the work-concept of these composers: historical Bachian spirituality, the musical impact of counterpoint, and the emerging comparison of Bach and Handel, which began at their centenary in 1785. White's ideas were shaped by his previous essay, "Evangelists of the Postmodern: Reconfigurations of Bach since 1985,"⁴ which examines the Bachian perspective of three leading "new" musicologists: the Post-Modern Evangelists of the emerging Susan McClary, the music philosopher Lydia Goehr and the venerable Richard Taruskin — all non-Bach specialists. This involves reconfigurations over the last 30 years since the watershed 1985 Bach Tercentenary, with "post modern attenuations," White says (Ibid: 87) in contrast to the current contemporary, parallel trajectory dealing with the "New" Bach scholars, notably John Butt, says White.

With their "innovative and pioneering" "influential reconfigurations of narrative in western musical culture," says White (Ibid.), these polemical critiques "collectively reflect the more general trajectory of Anglo-American musicology of the past generations." Meanwhile, Butt's Bach's Dialogue with Modernity⁵ is a "strategic recovery of the imaginative autonomy of individual works [Passions] by Bach in the wake of such readings" by the three "Evangelists of the Post-Modern." "A convenient example of this progressive understanding" of Bach is the recent series of essays on the B-minor Mass, BWV 232, says White (Ibid.: 103).⁶ It "unmistakably affirms the historical integrity" of the music with "textual scholarship, numerical and proportional analyses, stylistic, scrutiny and documentary study" as a single entity with self-standing text, and refuting previous criticism of Friedrich Smend and Taruskin. "If BWV 232 is intelligible as an autonomous musical work because of empirical research, might we not want to reconsider other works by Bach in the light of these findings?," White asks. "An increasing conflict between autonomy, cultural meaning and historical significance lies at the very nerve center of Bach reception since 1985," says White (Ibid.: 106). The 'Old' B"lost its singularity of meaning no later than 1945" while the "New" Bach Testament "is a much more plural enterprise" and "a continuity of meaning." "Despite the dramatic reconfigurations of his music over the past thirty years, a study of Bach's reliances in relation to the musical imagination of his contemporaries is long overdue." Thus is "the need for a comparative study of Bach (a notoriously difficult prospect, I know)" which "I have attempted to redress this lacuna in The Musical Discourse of Servitude," says White.⁷

Johann Joseph Fux

White's work is a musical discussion of the concept of the Austrian Baroque composer Fux (1660-1741, https://www.bach-cantatas.com/Lib/Fux-Johann-Joseph.htm) breaking the bonds of indentured musical servitude to the Habsburg Viennese Court of the Holy Roman Empire (Wikipedia), thereby also emancipating composers Bach and Handel into an enlightened modernity that freed the musical imagination while shifting the course of Western Early Music further north and west where it had originated in Medieval Burgundy before moving south and east to Italy, then reversing course. Until now, Fux was known almost exclusively as the author of Gradus ad Parnassum, a 1725 musical treatise on counterpoint, which became the single most influential book on the Palestrina style of Renaissance polyphony and a direct influence on the later stile antico of Bach. Fux's Austrian Baroque Roman Mass ordinary and Italian oratorio compositions had a direct impact on the autonomy of Bach and Handel, particularly the da capo repeat aria, a mainstay of the first half of the eighteenth century, beginning in opera seria and blossoming in German cantatas, both sacred and secular, the latter Bach called drammi per musica. White explores and refines the governing musical "authority" and individualized "work" concepts of musicologist Goehr which he shows Fux shared and freely inspired in Bach and Handel. White establishes a continuity of discourse between the three leading Late Baroque practitioners as well as between the servitude of common practice and emerging autonomy (individuality) of a work-based practice in the musical imagination.

White sets the stage in his Preface and Acknowledgements. He bases his book's title, "The Musical Discourse of Servitude," on a quote from Book VI of Milton's Paradise Lost, where, with the pending War in Heaven, Satan ponders the prospect of "servility with freedom to contend" (Line 168), now with Fux as the focal point in "the progression from servility to freedom," says White (Ibid.: x). White in constructing a typological dominance of musical servitude that "allows us to understand the music of Bach and Handel as (in part) an emancipation from this typology, the compositional practice which Fux represents in this study is decisive." Fux's music shows "unremitting evidence of stylistic hegemony in its adherence to a north Italian compositional practice which also obtains with striking authority in the music of Bach and Handel," says White (Ibid: xf). European composers between 1700 and 1750 in response created "a vast and prolific adherence to generic models on which the self-standing autonomy of individual musical works was of far less account," he says (Ibid.: xi). White responds to Goehr's "strategic deconstruction of Bach as a composer of musical works" (http://bach-cantatas.com/Topics/Encountering-Bach-Today.htm: paragraph beginning "Much of White's article. . .")⁸ which "attributes to Bach the autonomy of a work-based practice in the last phase of his career as a composer, just as it recognizes Handel's invention of the English oratorio as a different, but no less acute, signature of imaginative autonomy after decades of enchantment (and obedience to) the stylistic evidences of Italian opera." In contrast, White develops "a very different reading of the late Baroque, because it envisages therein a coherence of musical discourse in which the relations between servitude and autonomy exist in a continuum." Consequently, Viennese liturgical practice "engendered not only a formidable corpus of music but a coherent (and often intransigent) concept of stylistic hegemony which remained paramount in the first half of the 18th century." In particular the Mass ordinary and Italian oratorio drew Fux "into spheres of musical engagement which also preoccupied Bach and Handel respectively, if to remarkably different ends." White sees this "engagement as a progression from liturgical governance to imaginative autonomy (and thereby from a genre-based practice to a work-based one), for the first time" (Ibid. xif). Consequently, White's three protagonists (Fux, Bach, Handel), "with a fourth [Caldara] waiting in the wings as a vital intermediary between Fux and Bach) vitally articulate a cultural meaning for church music in the late Baroque which would otherwise remain latent," he says (Ibid.: xii). "Within the folds of his [Fux's] own musical discourse, servility contends with freedom," authority with individuality. While Milton in Paradise lost "so anticipates my own arguments about the struggle between corporate servitude and imaginative freedom," his Samson Agonistes "was to prove formative in Handel's evolution of the English oratorio."⁹

Introduction, Austro-Italian Baroque

In his background summary Introduction, "Servitude, Autonomy, and the European Musical Imagination," White suggests that "Anglo-American reception history has drawn a veil over the late Austro-Italian Baroque" involving the music of Fux and others in "their wider historical significance" (Ibid.: 1).¹⁰ This reception history "is shaped by considerations of the individual works at the expense of musical meaning on a wider scale, particularly in relation to cultural history," he says (Ibid.: 3), especially "the importance of genre and composer studies in relation to music in Vienna which feature in the first and second chapters of this book": 1. "The Minstrelsy of Heaven: Servility, Freedom and the Dynastic Style" (Vienna Court); and 2. "The Virtuoso of Submissiveness: Fux and the Concept of Authority." Goehr agued that the concept of a composer's autonomy and independence as a governing compositional principal practice was not attained historically until the French Revolution, thus suggesting that "Bach did not intend to compose musical works." Responds White (Ibid.: 4): "the late works of Bach not only affirmed beyond any reasonable doubt his own awareness of the musical work as a coherent unity which virtually confers autonomy on compositions such as the Mass in B Minor, the Musical Offering, and the St. Matthew Passion"¹¹ but also that these works involve "a normative compositional practice" "regulated by an 'authority concept'," based on Goehr's "work concept." Beginning in 1997, White found examples of the "self standing nature" of Fux compositions and the "related concepts of license, political authority, generic jurisdiction, and stylistic ordinance which controlled his musical imagination." White's interest in the relationship of musical authority to autonomy in compositional practice and the dissemination of music in early 18th century Europe suggested some degree of continuity between a musical culture of governing and individual autonomy, "rather than insist upon their irreconcilability. I was also in search of a continuity of musical practice between Vienna and Leipzig and between Fux and Bach," based on subjective musical practice and cultural meaning.

Viennese Court Authority, Influence

At the Viennese court, White observes "the corporate nature of Habsburg musical discourse" with its "intimacy between political discourse and religious authority which governed musical practice in Vienna to an astonishing degree" (Ibid. 5), leads to Mozart's Viennese operas in "a progression from servile poetics to an emancipated humanism" (Ibid.: 6). Of "prime significance between 1700 and 1750 is the emergence of the Da carepeat aria," "notably in London," says White (Ibid.: 7), and "the abiding authority of the Lutheran hymn in Leipzig, specifically in regard to Bach's conception of the musical subject,¹² both as a means of acknowledging this authority and (ultimately) usurping it." The supplanting of "social and musical agencies of authority" in the late works of Bach and Handel (oratorios) are resolved under the banner of autonomy, "along an axis that originates in servitude" with "a longing for musical form within the parameters of servitude itself." The Hofmusikkapelle in Vienna, with its "corporate retinue of poets, composers, singers, instrumentalists and stage designers," through a "line of succession, as it were, from the emperor downwards," observes White (Ibid: 8), found nowhere else in its cultural hegemony, "governed the nature of musical discourse in every conceivable respect." The court's approach to musical style is "one of the most prominent features of musical servitude," he says, and subsequently, this "Italian practice would remain unaltered for almost 50 years and become stagnated in turn." Yet, it is "this very condition of generic and stylistic conservatism which allowed the production of so much music across Europe" with "regional variations and interventions in the matter of style (as in the case of Bach," says White (Ibid.: 8f). White's "first serious quest to relate the Austro-Italian Baroque to a more general theory of early eighteenth century musical culture before the collapse of absolutism," he says (Ibid: 10), "in this introduction is to plot the outline of this quest and to enlist (and justify) the dramatis personae who populate it." White's study of the typology of musical servitude embraces "the imperative of Italian musical culture at the Habsburg court." This "also affirms a prodigious intimacy between German absolutism, the spiritual governance of Roman Catholicism, and the (proverbially) international luster and prestige of Italian musical discourse," says White (Ibid.: 11), conditions under which Bach thrived and which ultimately led to the supremacy of classical music in Vienna until the beginning of the 20th century.

Encountering Lutheranism, Milton, English Bible

The Habsburg Vienna apotheosis of authority entailed two factors, says White (Ibid.: 12). His Chapter 1 shows "the principals genres of sacred and secular music flourished in liturgical genres that also engaged the apparatus and musical techniques of salon and theater pieces in the production of oratorios (and related genres) in Vienna, and it also countenanced the gravities of modal counterpoint (alongside this secular apparatus) in its liturgical enterprises," culminating in Bach's B-minor Mass. Second, "the prominence of church music in this study is its pervasive significance in early to mid-eighteenth century European culture, irrespective of denominational boundaries. While serious opera had no impact on Bach as a Lutheran musician, the Italian "musical paradigms transcended the linguistic, political, and religious boundaries of Roman Catholic Europe," he observes. The "formal, expressive, and generic intransigence of Italian musical discourse gradually dissolves as it encounters new agents of meaning and engagement." "The route map of European musical servitude in its progression from authority to autonomy lies north and then far west of the imperial city" of Vienna, says White (Ibid: 12). When this Italian music sovereignty "encounters the German vernacular of bourgeoise Lutheranism or the English of Milton and the King James Bible, 'the servitude of devotion' is no more." This occurs when Bach "exhausts the generic integrity and technical capacity of Italian musical practice to breaking point"¹³ and "when Handel abandons almost a lifetime's devotion to Italian opera [in 1732] in order to invent a new dramatic genre through the medium of English," says White (Ibid.: 13). Emblematic of "these singular occurrences" that reshape cultural servitude is Satan's remarks of the celestial choirs in Paradise Lost,¹⁴ that the "minstrelsy of Heaven" "contends servility with freedom," "as both their deeds compared this day shall prove." Bach and Handel achieve "imaginative autonomy," where Bach "invokes at every turn the sovereign the solid authority of religious conviction as the licensing agent of his musical discourse" while Handel "affirms throughout his English career" "a decisive complicity between the Protestant Interest and the complexion of British political life." These are influenced in Vienna by "the exponents and generic exemplars of musical servitude examined in the opening chapter of this book" in the contest between "servility and freedom" at the imperial court and "its foremost representative in the domain of church music, Johann Joseph Fux." Here, Fux and his student and deputy, Antonio Caldara (in White's Chapter 5), were the dominant composers of church music between 1715 when Fux was appointed Hofkapellmeister and 1735 when the prolific Caldara died.

Chapter 2, Fux: Virtuoso of Submissiveness to Authority

White's Chapter 2, "The Virtuoso of Submissiveness: Fux and the Concept of Authority," shows Fux's obedience as "a zealous advocate" to Viennese authority (Ibid. 14), especially in his sacred music beyond secular expression and "elevated as the true source of intelligible and well-made compositional practice," he says (Ibid.: 15). Fux's music "animates this typology and endows it with a significance that extends to Bach and Handel. The stile antico later works of Bach, the "Progressive,"¹⁵ are sanctioned in the stile antico works of Fux, as Bach found in the latter's Gradus ad Parnassum with its emulation of Palestrina style.¹⁶ Fux also shows an "undeviating adherence to the formal exigencies of the Da capo aria in his Italian oratorios," says White (Ibid.: 16), including "a sustained and concentrated engagement with thematic development," that is "so prolifically enlisted by European poets and composers between 1680 and 1740," White shows (Ibid.: 17). "Its currency as a central domain of the musical imagination in London and Leipzig is no small matter in this respect." White in Chapter 2 offers a comparison of textual affinities in three Da capo arias each by Fux and Bach, respectively, "to illustrate the continuity as well as the distinction between servitude and autonomy as agents of musical discourse," which continues in Chapter 3, "The Steward of Unmeaning Art: Bach and the Musical Subject." White's comparisons in Chapter 2 (89ff) involve the following: nautical simile arias in Fux's King Herod aria, "Fra due nembi e fra due venti (Between two clouds and two winds, trans. Harry White) in the 1714 John the Baptist oratorio (K291), with Bach's aria "Gleichwie die wilden Meereswellen" (Just as the wild waves of the sea [Psalm 124: 4-5], trans. Francis Browne) in 1724 Trinity +8 Cantata 178, "Wo Gott der Herr nicht bei uns hält" (If the Lord God does not stay with us, Psalm 124:1); the obbligato hope/despair arias, Fux's "Se pura più nel core" (If purer in heart), Nicodemo's bass trio aria with bassoon) in the1728 Sepolcro¹⁷ (Passion) oratorio (K 300), and Bach's soprano trio aria with oboe d'amore, "Valet will ich dir geben" (Farewell I shall bid to you) in 1723 Trinity +16 Cantata 95, "Christus, der ist mein Leben" (Christ is my life); and two arias of preoccupation with sin, Fux's Mary Magdalena continuo aria, "Di lagrime amare" (Of bitter tears) from the same Fux Passion oratorio, and Bach's opening alto aria, "Widerstehe doch der Sünde" (Stand firm against sin), from the 1714 Weimar Cantata 54 for Trinity +7.

ENDNOTES

¹ Gerhard Herz, Johann Sebastian Bach: im Zeitalter des Rationalismus und der Frühromantik; zur Geschichte der Bachbewegung von ihren Anfängen bis zur Wiederaufführung der Matthäuspassion im Jahre 1829 (Kassel: Bären, 1935); English edition," Johann Sebastian Bach in the Early Romantic Period," in Essays on J. S. Bach (Ann Arbor MI: UMI Research Press, 1985: 67); Herz publications, see Bach Bibliography Bach-Bibliographie.
² See Bach Cantatas Website (BCW) Discussion, "Bach Organ: 19th Century "Revival," Publications, Mendelssohn," http://www.bach-cantatas.com/NVD/Organ-Revival-19.htm).
³ Harry White, The Musical Discourse of Servitude: Authority, Autonomy and the European Musical Imagination, 1700-1750 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020); Amazon.com: "Look inside."
⁴ Harry White, "Evangelists of the Postmodern: Reconfigurations of Bach Since 1985," in Understanding Bach, 12, 85–107 (Bach Network UK 2017), Bach Network UK; White biography, https://people.ucd.ie/harry.white; discussed at length in "Encountering Bach Today: Historical, Listening, Post-Modern," BCW Discussion, January 30, 2021, http://bach-cantatas.com/Topics/Encountering-Bach-Today.htm.
⁵ John Butt, Bach's Dialogue with Modernity: Perspectives on the Passions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010); Amazon.com: "Look inside."
⁶ Exploring Bach's B-minor Mass, eds. Yo Tomita, Robin A. Leaver and Jan Smaczny (Cambridge: University Press, 2013); contents, Cambridge University Press.
⁷ See http://bach-cantatas.com/Topics/Encountering-Bach-Today.htm, last paragraph beginning "In a recent personal communication . . . ."; bibliography, Bach-Bibliographie.
⁸ Lydia Goehr, The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works – An Essay in the Philosophy of Music (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992, Oxford Scholarship Online); Amazon.com: Look inside."
⁹ My graduate term-paper, "Milton's Paradise Lost: A Renaissance Oratorio" (English 403, Milton; Eastern New Mexico University; January 14, 1970), examines the epic poem as a 17th century Italian musical oratorio in its structural and textual elements, with each book a min-oratorio, particularly Book VI, the War in Heaven.
¹⁰ In the initial discussion of White's work is a recounting of major Bach studies and musicological perspectives found at "Encountering Bach Today: Historical, Listening, Post-Modern, http://bach-cantatas.com/Topics/Encountering-Bach-Today.htm: see White's essay, "New Bach Studies: Evangelists of the Modern."
¹¹These Bach major works are described from a contemporary perspective in Christoph Wolff's Bach's Musical Universe: The Composer and His Work (New York: W. W. Norton, 2020), Amazon.com; contents, Google Books: Mass in B Minor, https://www.bach-cantatas.com/Books/B0221-5.htm: "Mass in B Minor: Importance, Genesis, Legacy"; Musical Offering, "The Canons of the Musical Offering" (Ibid.: 305-309), and the St Matthew Passion, https://www.bach-cantatas.com/Books/B0221-3.htm: "St. Matthew Passion: Substitution Sacrificial Atonement." See also, Bach's Major Vocal Works: Music, Drama, Liturgy (New Haven CT : Yale University Press, 2016); Amazon.com: "Look inside", https://www.bach-cantatas.com/Books/B0216.htm.
¹² See Wolff (Ibid., https://www.bach-cantatas.com/Books/B0221-2.htm: "Chorale Cantata Cycle: Part 1") singles out Bach's chorale cantata cycle of major vocal works as "The Most Ambitious of All Projects" (Chapter 4, Chorale Cantatas throughout the year: 117-151).
¹³ Perhaps beginning as early as 1725 with Bach's parody Easter Oratorio, BWV 249.4 (Bach Digital), the first of his feast day oratorios, this in Italian style with four characters — Mary (Jesus' mother), Mary Magdalene, Peter, and John — instead of a gospel narrator in German style with a closing choral, here in BWV 249.4 based on a pastoral Arcadian (Wikipedia) serenade with four symbolic shepherd characters in commentary (http://www.bach-cantatas.com/Vocal/BWV249-Gen5.htm: particularly "Easter Oratorio Italian Tradition") in poetic Da capo arias and dance music in a summa or Gospel harmony of the events of Easter Sunday.
¹⁴ White, Musical Discourse (Ibid., Amazon.com: "Look inside," "Contents Preface and Acknowledgments ix."
¹⁵ See Robert L. Marshall, "Bach, the Progressive," in The Music of Johann Sebastian Bach: The Sources, Style, and Significance (New York: Schirmer, 1989, especially BWV 232: 40-44); https://academic.oup.com/mq/article-abstract/74/3/451/1378677?redirectedFrom=PDF.
¹⁶ See Christoph Wolff, "Bach and the Tradition of the Palestrina Style," in Bach: Essays on His Life and Music (Cambridge MA: 1991: 88ff); Google Books.
¹⁷ The Sepolcro works of Fux are discussed in Johann Joseph Fux and the Music of the Austro-Italian Baroque, essays ed. Harry White (London: Routledge, 1992); Amazon.com: "Look inside," "Contents."

—————

To come: Harry White's Musical Discourse of Servitude, Introduction to Chapters 3-5 and Conclusion.

Harry White's Musical Discourse of Servitude, Introduction to Chapters 3-5 and Conclusion

William L. Hoffman wrote (February 25, 2021):
The final three chapters (Nos. 3-5) of Irish musicologist Harry White's new study of the reception history involving Johann Joseph Fux's impact on Bach and Handel explore¹ Bach's musical subject and two major works, Handel's oratorio Samson and Bach's B-Minor Mass. White lays the groundwork in his Introduction with summary of his first two chapters: Chapter 1, "The Minstrelsy of Heaven, Servitude, Freedom, and the European Musical Imagination," examines the Viennese court authority and influence primarily on its Kapellmeister Fux ihis Mass liturgy and secular oratorios as they impact Bach and Handel in their Lutheran and English Protestant worlds. Chapter 2, "The Virtuoso of Submissiveness: Fux and the Concept of Authority," shows Fux's obedience to Viennese authority through his use of stile antico in Latin liturgical settings and the Da capo repeat aria in his sacred oratorios which White compares to three Bach Da capo cantata arias.

Chapter 3, "The Steward of Unmeaning Art: Bach and the Musical Subject."

"The turn from Fux [Johann Joseph, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johann_Joseph_Fux) to Bach represented by Chapter 3 of this study," says White (Ibid.: 17), shows Bach in its title as "The Steward of Unmeaning Art: Bach and the Musical Subject." This is a reference to Bach as the representative of "all unmeaning art and contrivance," according to Charles Burney,² which today is the subject of debate in reception history concerning "its allegiance to Bach as the shining exemplar of an emancipated musical imagination," says White (Ibid.: 18), who sides "with a vigorous affirmation of Bach's musical autonomy." In the dialectic "between a musical imagination entirely suborned to the exactions of church and state and one persistently absorbed by its own inherent capacity," White explores in Bach's compositional practice "the relationship between authority and Bach's own quest for the musical subject in his later works." Here Bach favors working "through individual genres in cycles" in various factors such as using the emergence of the instrumental ritornello counterpoint in relation to the vocal emphasis on the Lutheran hymn, his "drastic reduction" in cantata production with "the corresponding increase in the scale and proportion of individual compositions," the "extremism and stylistic signatures" in his late fugal studies, and "the intimate address" found in his late chorale preludes, observes White (Ibid.: 18f). "Bach's generic exhaustiveness" and exploitation of individual genres underpinned with instrumental counterpoint "attests a symbolic authority of his own making which counters his lifelong acknowledgement of musical and extra-musical authority" "as they reclaim the work-concept as an outgrowth of Bach's musical imagination," he says (Ibid.: 19). The continuity of discourse between Fux and Bach also occurred "within the domain of Bach's compositional practice." While "Bach did not invent a single genre," says White, there is "the impression that he reduced several of them to a state of nervous exhaustion" involving polyphony.³ Handel's contribution to musical autonomy is found in his "agency of English oratorio, a genre which he devised, developed and consummated" through which he "liberated musical drama from the constraints of Italian practice" manifested in drammi per musica (opera seria, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opera_seria). The "English resistance to opera would abide," White says (Ibid.: 19f), while the autonomy of his oratorios involved "a decisive development in the history of the European musical imagination" (Ibid.: 20).

White's descriptions of certain Bach genre reduced to "nervous exhaustion" can be considered in the context of the benchmark year 1750, marking the death of Bach and the end of the Baroque era, which finds "a history of dispossession, to judge by the state of church music in Germany after Bach's death," says White (Ibid.: 19). This also involved "a rejection of artifice and rhetoric in European music at mid-century,⁴ that entailed not only a stupefied silence in the aftermath of Bach's monumentality and (contrapuntal) extremism," but also exposing the "threadbare extravagances of the opera house and the stilted reactions of a distended and increasingly remote Italian practice which had held sway for more than sixty years." On the positive side of classical music history is Karol Berger's 2007 book, Bach’s Cycle, Mozart’s Arrow: An Essay on the Origins of Musical Modernity,⁵ from the circular sphere of traditional, repetitive connections and reaffirmations to the advancing intellectual sphere of presumed progress and seeming perfection. Berger's book is an exhaustive (420-page) study of the pan-musical currents generated by Bach, nurtured to maturity by Mozart and the First Viennese School (Wikipedia and transformed by Mahler's disciples at the beginning of the 20th century in the Second Viennese School (Wikipedia).

Chapter 4, "A Darkness Which Might be Felt: Handel, Fux, and the Oratorio."

Handel reception history generally involves an attenuation of his "achievement as a dramatist in favor of his (profound) significance as a figure in English cultural life" as a pleasing public entertainer, says White (Ibid.: 20), his fourth chapter, "A Darkness Which Might be Felt: Handel, Fux, and the Oratorio." This chapter opens with a comparison of Bach and Handel⁶ which began with Burney's slanted assessment favoring Handel, an historical assessment which "promotes a comparison between Bach and Handel in which the high seriousness and extremism of Bach and the contingency and popularity of Handel's musical imagination mutually eclipse each other. In this eclipse, Handel's darkness (to coin a phrase) is all the more profound. Handel is the poet of opportune circumstance and public occasion, Bach the complex oracle of the soul (a pairing which also originates with Burney whose sunny appraisal of one is the converse of all that 'unmeaning art and contrivance" he discerns of the other)," says White (Ibid.: 20f). White describes Handel's genius (Ibid,.: 21) as "spectacle and pictorial grandeur and for soaring soundscapes," "baroque in their ceremony and excess," with music that "attains a majesty and proportion correlative to the vast domes and cupolas which it was originally intended to adorn (and continues to summon." In his progression from the ancient history and mythology of Italian opera seria to Old Testament English oratorio, Handel "achieves more than an imaginative and brilliant synthesis of previous disparate generic models. In some, he "abandons the Baroque balance of affections in favor of "full-blown tragedy," particularly in collaborator Newburgh Hamilton's libretto setting of Milton's closet drama, Samson Agonistes, with its dramatic unities of action, place, and time, particularly Handel's first act, all "written in the fertile late summer and autumn of 1741, immediately prior to Handel's departure for Ireland" and the premiere of Messiah. In the closing part of Chapter 4, White examines Handel's oratorio Samson⁷ from the tragic perspective with a preoccupation for light and darkness as well as his "relationship with and emancipation from Italian oratorio" (Wikipedia) with a comparison between Handel and Fux. The White book's cultural theory of servitude throughout finds an initial, "vital continuity of musical discourse" between both, yet with Handel's imaginative autonomy in transcendence, a reflection of Satan's perspective in Milton's Paradise Lost.

Chapter 5, "Steps to Parnassus: Fux, Caldara, and Bach"

The same pursuit of the "relationship between generic intransigence and generic transcendence" is found in White's Chapter 5, "Steps to Parnassus: Fux, Caldara, and Bach," and also is central to White's reading of Bach's B-minor Mass "in light of Fux's Mass ordinary settings, his most engaged genre in his long career. While Bach composed only a handful of Mass movement settings, BWV 233-36, and one complete Mass, BWV 232, he remained consistent with his generic adherences to Latin church music, as well as in his some 200 German Lutheran church cantatas, says White (Ibid. 22). While there is a striking contrast between the Fux and Bach Mass settings in their musical discourse of servitude and of imaginative autonomy, Bach's Missa tota, BWV 232, symbolic and expressive autonomy "achieves its emancipatiothrough the agency of a perspective which Fux's [100] settings provide" while achieving a radical intervention. Bach's Mass music provides a retrospective "perspective on the definitive adherences and constraints which shape and delimit Fux's musical imagination." Further, the "progression from servitude to autonomy becomes clearer on account of those musical genres which Bach and Handel share with Fux," the Mass and oratorio, respectively. Sebastian Bach considered Fux "first among those composers he most admired," according to son Emanuel (as repeated by first Bach biographer Nikolaus Forkel in 1802), Sebastian owning a copy of Fux's Gradus ad Parnassum 1725 counterpoint treatise with extensive quotations from Fux's Masses and motets that bolstered "Bach's preoccupation with the stile antico [Wikipedia] in his later writing," says White (Ibid.: 23).⁸ Fux was "an immediate precursor of Bach himself," specifically in the relationship between Fux's Missa Canonica,"a tour-de-force of strict contrapuntal artifice," says White, and Bach's Art of Fugue. In Chapter 5, White posses various questions concerning Fux's Masses in relation to Bach's Mass setting. Did Bach, "the inveterate copyist," arrange or transcribe music of Fux? Did Fux adapt (through parody process) his own Mass music in later settings? Did the Viennese Court's and Fux's Masses directly influence "Bach's radical adjacencies of style in this work,"⁹ specifically through proportional exactitude?¹⁰ Are Bach's "Lutheran Masses" (BWV 233-236), mostly derived through contrafactum (Wikipedia) from Leipzig cantatas, influenced by Fux? Do the "different agencies of transmission" of Fux and Bach Masses infer "a corresponding difference as between liturgical servitude and the sovereign enterprises of an emancipated imagination"? Finally, "can we deepen the mental journey from servitude to autonomy represented by Fux and Bach¹¹ through the agency of Caldara's [Antonio; Fux student and Vice Kapellmeister] engagement with the same genre?" Bach's B-Minor Mass reveals an "autonomy of achievement," "a deliberate (and vast) meditation on the nature of musical discourse as an agent of liturgical discourse," White observes (Ibid.: 24), and a "centrifugal ingathering of church music and secular music in the service of its own imaginative enterprise" (see BWV 232 context, sources, https://www.bach-cantatas.com/Vocal/BWV232-Gen19.htm). Its "intelligible reliances on a musical practice which deepens its meaning and significance in the history of late Baroque musical thought" and its "manifestation of this practice in Fux's Masses" are "an illumination of this history."

Conclusion: "Well, Well, Well: Fux, Bach, and Handel"

In his conclusion to his study, "Well, Well, Well: Fux, Bach, and Handel," White summarizes his findings in the five chapters. "As the primary exponent of the Austro-Italian Baroque, Fux embodies the routine servitude of a musical discourse," he says (Ibid.: 24), "which nevertheless prompted two of its most prominent adherent — Bach and Handel — to emancipate themselves from its formulaic absolutism," so that Bach "could countenance the extremity of his own musical imagination" in his B-minor Mass and Handel could "reinvent musical drama as the discourse of a specifically English tragedy" in his oratorio Samson. In all of this, Bach might be considered a musical subversive.¹²

ENDNOTES

¹ Harry White, The Musical Discourse of Servitude: Authority, Autonomy and the Work-Concept in Fux, Bach, and Handel (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020); Amzazon.com: "Look inside"; also see White's "Musical Servitude: Austro-Italian Music: Fux, Bach, Handel," https://groups.io/g/Bach/topic/white_s_musical_servitude/80689935?p=,,,20,0,0,0::recentpostdate%2Fsticky,,,20,2,0,80689935,, Feb. 16.
² Charles Burney, A General History of Music, citation beginning of Harry White, "Evangelists of the Postmodern: Reconfigurations of Bach Since 1985," in Understanding Bach, 12, 85–107 (Bach Network UK 2017), Bach Network UK.
³ See Christoph Wolff's Bach's Musical Universe: The Composer and His Work (New York: W. W. Norton, 2020), Amazon.com; contents, Google Books; genre, see "Late 1730s Survey/Review: Organ, Concerto, Miss, WTC II Collections," "Harpsichord Concerto Volumes," http://bach-cantatas.com/Books/B0221-4.htm; polyphony, see "Maxim of Learned Musician: Practice Through Imagination, Genius," http://bach-cantatas.com/Books/B0221-5.htm.
⁴ White cites Charles Rosen's The Classical Style: Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven (New York: W. W. Norton, 1971: 47); Amazon.com: "Look inside"; "It is the lack of any integrated style, equally valid in all fields, between 1755 and 1775, that makes it tempting to call this period 'mannerist':" "cultivating a highly individual manner," "the absence of an integrated style," and a period that "could not produce a major style of its own until it had absorbed (partly transformed and partly misunderstood) the work of Handel and Sebastian Bach." Could Bach's "nervous exhaustion" also be symptomatic of some form of mannerism (Wikipedia)?
⁵ Karol Berger, Bach’s Cycle, Mozart’s Arrow: An Essay on the Origins of Musical Modernity (Berkeley CA: University of California Press, 2007 (University of California Press), Amazon.com: "Look inside"; also commentary, http://www.bach-cantatas.com/Other/Mozart-Gen3.htm. For an extended discussion of Bach and Mozart, see: https://www.bach-cantatas.com/Other/Mozart-Gen2.htm.
⁶ This Bach-Handel comparison is discussed at https://www.bach-cantatas.com/Other/Handel-Gen4.htm, followed by discussions of the recent Joseph P. Swain, Listening to Bach and Handel: A Comparative Study (Hillsdale NY: Pendragon Press, 2018: 23ff), Amazon.com).
⁷ See Arthur Jacobs, "England in the Age of Handel: c.1715-c.1740, in Chorale Music, ed. Arthur Jacobs (Baltimore MD: Penguin Books, 1963: 153-59).
⁸ See Christoph Wolff, "Bach and the Tradition of the Palestrina Style," in Bach: Essays on His Life and Music (Cambridge MA: 1991: 88ff); Google Books.
⁹ See Wikipedia, "Bach's Church Music in Latin" (original, transcription, adaptation), Wikipedia.
¹⁰ See Ulrich Siegele, "Some Observations on the Formal Design of Bach's B-Minor Mass," in Tomita, Leaver, and Smaczny (eds.), Exploring Bash's B-minor Mass (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013: 112-24).
¹¹ See Susan Wollenberg, "Vienna under Joseph I and Charles VI" (1711-40), in The Late Baroque: From the 1680s to 1740, ed. George J. Buelow Music and Society (Englewood Cliffs NJ: Prentice Hall, 1993: 32f8f, church music, Fux, Caldara; 332, style, instruments.
¹² See Laurence Dreyfus, "Bach the Subversive," Lufthansa Lecture, London, 14 May 2011; Dreyfus proposes "thinking of Johann Sebastian Bach as a subversive, someone who overthrew a system of beliefs about music, someone who undermined widely acclaimed principles and closely guarded assumptions" (2), and "If, according to these propositions Bach goes about undermining the established order of things — subverting gaudium, logos, proprietas, inventio, natura and pietas — what does he put in their place? Or rather, whom is he placing in charge? Why, it is music herself who takes the reins. . . . (12), Academia.edu.

—————

To Come; White's The Musical Discourse of Servitude, Chapter 1, "The Minstrelsy of Heaven, Servitude, Freedom, and the European Musical Imagination" at the Viennese Court.

Continue on Part 2