The Mass in B Minor did not come from a tabula rasa
0 xbridge colleges are now discouraged by 'the Ministry' from admitting the children of old members. It is 'antisocial favouritism'. Amazing, isn't it, the way in which the pseudo-intellectuals who now compose our ruling class set their face against nature? When some of my grandchildren go to Magdalen, as 1 hope they will, they will be the fourth generation. Talent does not emerge from a tabula rasa, as John Locke absurdly thought (and socialists still believe); it is a compound of genetics and nurturing, and the kind of encouragement (and sacrifices) provided within a family.
1 am writing at present about Johann Sebastian Bach, who came from a family which is, perhaps, the best proof in history of the importance of heredity. Between the mid-16th century, when a baker called Veit Bach learned to play the cittern, and 1843, when Wilhelm Friedrich Ernst Bach attended the ceremony of unveiling the Leipzig Bach monument (donated by Mendelssohn, responsible for bringing the B Minor Mass and the Matthew Passion into the repertoire), some 84 Bachs were musicians of greater or lesser prominence in central Germany, over 300 years and seven generations. The figure 84 is taken from the family history, the Urspung, which Bach himself compiled in 1735. In the Grove Dictionary I counted 79 Bachs worthy of mention, spanning German musical history from the time of Luther to the age of Bismarck.
These Bachs were town trumpeters, choirmasters, instrumentalists, court musicians, conductors and composers; some made musical instruments as well as played on them. A large number were organists, as was Bach himself, who not only played the organ with a creative virtuosity probably never surpassed, but devised major mechanical improvements, instructing organ-makers how to incorporate them; he also had organs restored and rescued under his supervision. Bach was particularly expert at the musical science of registration; that is, getting the most out of the pitches and tones which organs, in varying quantities depending on their size and sophistication, make available, One of his sons, C.P.E. Bach, said, 'No one understood registration as well as he. Organ-builders were terrified when he sat down to play one of their organs and drew the stops in his own manner, for they thought the effect would not be as good as he was planning. Then they heard an effect that astounded them.' Of course, Bach — both as a player and still more as a composer — was a genius so towering as to defy any kind of rational explanation. But it is evident that musical genes ran very deep in the family, reinforced by the upbringing its members had from earliest childhood and the formal instruction they received from parents, uncles and cousins. (They were one of the most philoprogenitive families of which we have records.) Bach himself taught six members of his family as well as his own six sons. For two centuries the Bachs were so common in Thuringian choirand organ-lofts that their name was synonymous with 'musician'. They were modest, aspiring of course to raise themselves above the level of Spielmann, which did not entitle them to citizenship, but rarely setting their sights higher than Kantor, Konzertmeister, Kapellmeister and Stadtpfeifer. They usually married girls from other musical families but always from their own bourgeois class (Bach was told to beware of Buxtehude, whom he admired, as he had at least one plain, unmarried daughter). Two Bachs were identical twins whom even their own wives could not distinguish between, and who had to wear special clothes so family members could tell who was who. But the Bach musicians disappeared as mysteriously as they emerged.
Musical aptitude (and enthusiasm) unquestionably runs in families, especially German ones. There was, for instance, the Hasse family of Liibeck, scores of whom flourished as musicians in the 17th and 18th centuries, rather like the Bachs, being Kantors and organists (and organ-builders) and in some cases composers. Johann Adolf Hasse (1699-1783) was the most admired composer of opera seria of his time, and the lists of his operas, oratorios, cantatas, masses and psalms, plus other works, fills a dozen dense columns in Grove. Fanny Burney's father, the Doctor, said he was 'the most natural, elegant and judicious composer of vocal music, as well as the most voluminous, now alive'. But I have never knowingly heard anything by Hasse. Have you? Not that such silence proves anything. Bach was almost completely forgotten for half a century, and it was only due to the devotion of Mendelssohn that the St Matthew Passion got its first proper performance in 1829. How many considerable works of music are never performed? One shudders at the thought.
Other large-scale musical families were the Hoffrnanns, the Wilches and the Lammerhirts. Then there were the Webers. My guess is that
Carl Maria Weber would now be in the ranks of the greatest composers had not TB carried him off in his thirties (one of a tragic group at that time which included Keats, Bonington and Gericault). The Webers came from a 17th-century family of millers, and they too first flourished musically in Lubeck, where Carl Maria's father was musical director of the theatre and Kapellmeister to the bishop. (The sons of his first marriage studied under Haydn.) Carl's uncle, Fridolin Weber, had four daughters. A book could he written about them, rather like Flora Fraser's delightful new book about George III's daughters, their younger contemporaries. Josepha Weber, the eldest, was a soprano, with coloratura quality, and Mozart wrote for her the role of the Queen of the Night in Die Zaubetflote; he described her as 'a lazy, gross, perfidious woman, and as cunning as a fox'. He also knew her sister Aloysia, said she had 'a beautiful, pure voice', fell in love with her, proposed marriage, was rejected, and then dismissed her as 'false, malicious and a coquette'. Third time lucky he met the third sister, Constance, and married her — happily, I'm glad to say. The fourth and youngest daughter, Sophie — 'good-natured but feather-brained', according to her brother-in-law — was present during his last hours, and wrote a touching account of them many years later, which she gave to his biographer George Nissen. Of course the Mozart family, though descended from bookbinders, were also prolific in musicians, though with not much luck. Mozart's sister, who might perhaps have achieved great things as a composer, died blind, in great poverty.
I suspect that, until the late 19th century, the vast majority of musicians had musical parents, usually professionals of some kind. Elgar, born in a musical instrument shop, was typical. Thus, Beethoven's father was a singer, Brahms's father led a light orchestra, and Bruckner's was a schoolmaster-organist. So was Schubert's. (If we take literature and the arts as a whole, celebrated children of schoolteachers outnumber any other group by far.) But there are a surprising number of exceptions. Schumann's father was a bookseller (like Dr Johnson's and Anatole France's). The Mendelssohns were bankers, though pretty cultured ones, like the Degas family. Haydn's father was a wheelwright. Wagner's father was a police actuary. But as a general rule, genes matter. A member of the present Cabinet is the fifth generation to serve in Parliament — so there!
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