The music world owes a great debt to the Christian Church. For several hundred years the Church has been a huge supporter and inspiration for music and it’s composers. For example, Johann Sebastian Bach who wrote the famed Toccata and Fugue in D minor (featured here) among almost a thousand other compositions. His entire life he served as organist and Choir Director for about 8 different churches in Germany, both Catholic and Lutheran. Each successive church was larger and his pay better. In his lifetime, Bach never made a penny off his published music, but made a decent living from his Church pay. He married twice and fathered 21 children (when did he have time to compose?).
Many wondered why Bach was such a prolific composer. The story goes that the priest at each of his Churches required Bach to write a new Prelude and Fugue for each Sunday service so the parishioners would not be bored. I could imagine some tense Saturday nights as Bach worked feverously to finish some music for the following morning. From the time Bach was a little boy (born 1685) to his death at 65 in 1750, Bach and music were synonymous.
Such illustrative composers as Handel, Pachelbel, Haydn, Buxtehude, Brahms, Liszt, Strauss, Mendelssohn etc were supported by the Church either in a working capacity or with money grants. Here is a YouTube video of one of Bach’s most famous creations for tomorrow’s Sunday Church service.
Bach – Toccata & Fugue in D minor
As an illustration of the influence of the Church on another piece of music, I offer a major piece of music by Gabriel Faure, a French Church Organist and Choir Director. Like Bach, Faure was supported in his life by regular appointments as Organist in France’s larger Cathedrals. Faure lived from 1845 to his death in Paris in 1924. By far his most famous work is his Requiem, or Catholic Mass for the Dead. Faure wrote the Requiem in his most prolific composing period in the late 1800’s
No one knows what caused Faure to compose the Requiem, in his words “it was just there and all I had to do was write it down”. His is the way I feel about certain pieces of music, there is no earthly basis for the music, it must be the hand of G-d reaching down with a Gift for us. This has always been my feeling when listening to the Requiem. Large scale works, like the Requiem, with a full orchestra and choir are incredibly difficult to compose and often require months of diligent daily work to detail out the notes for each 30-50 different instruments in the orchestra from French horns to violins as well as each of the notes sung in harmony by tenors to sopranos. While I have not completed an actual inventory of the notes in the Requiem, my guess is somewhere in the neighborhood of 1.5 million individual notes.
My favorite part of the Requiem is Pie Jesu and here is a duet of the portion of the Requiem sung by Charlotte Church (an intriguing young singer) and her friend.
For those of you have the time, here is a link to the full 35 minutes of Faure’s Requiem
Faure Requiem