J. S. BACH Jonathan Berkahn - Victoria University - Victoria ...

Kittel, and Krebs himself. 76 Inevitably, professional pride and musical standards
declined. Near the end of his book Der angehende praktische Organist, Krebs’s
fellow Bach-student Johann Kittel contrasts the content of a fine musical education
with the miserable reality of many organists’ lives, and makes a plea for the practical
recognition of this problem:
Many organists utterly lack this general artistic understanding. Their entire skill is limited to
the meagre dispatch of a chorale, or the performance from memory of an easy Vorspiel or
Nachspiel without stumbling or stopping. Of a single man, the organist, the school-teacher,
perhaps the sexton as well, who has enjoyed no academic education, no entry in higher
circles, where art and fine taste chiefly flourish; whose entire subsistence perhaps for life is
through spirit- and heart-demeaning labour, and who is afflicted by wretched domestic
poverty—certainly let us not require any more of such a man. ...so long as adequate
emoluments fall from the powers that be no more than they have until now, so long especially
as public educational institutions for school-teachers and organists, and financial assistance
(by which an educated man can live and continue his studies without lowering himself and
gradually going to seed) receive no more consideration than previously—then good counsel
alone will be of very little assistance. 77
As the century passed, organists and organ music became increasingly
distanced from the mainstream of musical life. Liturgical expectations, together
with the limitations of the instrument, and perhaps the innate conservatism of
many organists, meant that galant idioms were only adopted in a belated and
76 A recurring theme of Landon’s Haydn: chronicle and works (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 1976-80) is how precarious, in the days before social welfare, life was for any professional
musician; as the example of Bononcini, Porpora, Ordoñez, and Mozart amply show—musicians who
didn’t die in poverty seem almost to have been in the minority. On the other hand the occupation of
organist, during the second half of the century, was unlikely to offer the opportunities for fame and
fortune that other kinds of public musical activity did. See F. Scherer, ‘Servility, opportunity, and
freedom in the choice of music composition as a profession’, Musical Quarterly 85/4 (Winter 2001),
718-734, and A. Edler, Der nordelbische Organist: Studien zu Sozialstatus, Funktion und
kompositorischer Produktion eines Musikerberufes von der Reformation bis zum 20. Jahrhundert
(Kassel: Bärenreiter, 1982).
77 J. C. Kittel, Der angehende praktische Organist (Erfurt, 1801-1808), Pt.III, p.95.
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