THE shadows of Christmas Eve stretch across the cobblestone court yard of the St. Thomas school in Leipzig. Along the first floor, where the choirmaster lives, the windows glow with candlelight. A young Hausfrau, surrounded by half a dozen children and pregnant with another, bustles through the cluttered rooms preparing dinner. Her husband is busy copying the parts of his latest cantata, which he must soon rehearse with his musicians and singers for next morning's service, at the church across the courtyard.
First, though, there are prayers to be said, friends to chat with, a roast goose to be eaten. Papa even allows himself an extra glass of his favorite Rhenish wine, which he calls a "noble gift of God." After the meal, he eases his thick frame down before a harpsichord in the parlor. Crowding about the creche and the candlelit tree, the party joins in singing a carol or one of Luther's mighty hymns. Then Papa—head thrown back, fingers marching over the keys in a steady, stately rhythm—begins to improvise, outlining a succession of daring harmonies, guiding the simple theme through a contrapuntal labyrinth of variations. The melody emerges transformed: elaborate, yet plain; passionate, yet rigorously logical. It is a prayer to God in sound.
Thus might Johann Sebastian Bach and his family have celebrated Christmas nearly 250 years ago. In its joyous expression of a faith that was as natural as breath, that scene seems to be more than a millennium away from 1968, when the season celebrating the Saviour's birth is a time of commercial convulsion. Even many of those yearning for piety find Jesus elusive, a shadowy problematical name in history rather than a symbol of ultimate reassurance. Seen through the scrim of contemporary anxiety and unbelief, everything about the Bach-family Christmas seems to be a quaint anomaly.
Everything, that is, except the music, which looms far larger today than it did in Bach's own time. In 18th century Germany, Bach had a national reputation as a virtuoso organist. Yet as a composer, he attracted mostly condescending notice—even his son Johann Christian, one of the four Bach children who distinguished themselves as composers, referred to him as "the Old Wig." Today, of course, Bach is universally ranked among the transcendent creators of Western civilization. Choral works that he turned out for rowdy schoolboys to sing in drafty provincial churches are cherished by the world's finest choruses. Keyboard exercises that he jotted down for his children and students still beguile and challenge great virtuosos. Instrumental pieces that he com posed to curry favor with obscure princelings are judged among the glories of all chamber music.