Bach and Albert Schweitzer's Aesthetics

Amy Gordon

What is art? How do we create or address art? These questions confront us time and again, as we can see thinkers struggling with the notions of art and beauty in every time and culture. The question of art (and beauty) and the subjective relation to it became highly specialized within the German philosophical tradition, beginning with Alexander Baumgarten, who first coined the word “aesthetics” as referring to a distinct discipline. This notion of “aesthetics” has continued to fascinate thinkers and “aesthetic theories” have sprung up in abundance, including such names as Kant, Schiller, Schopenhauer, Hegel, Croce, Santayana, and Dewey.

The noted Nobel laureate Albert Schweitzer, whose talents embraced a wide range of fields, also made an indirect contribution to the discussions on aesthetics. Schweitzer, among other things, was a gifted organist who greatly admired the works of Johann Sebastian Bach. He wrote a book on Bach in which he offers a guide to a genuine interpretation of the great composer’s works. In the course of this two-volume tome, Schweitzer shows signs of a definitive aesthetic theory of his own.

Schweitzer opens his book with a distinction between subjective and objective art. Subjective art derives from the personality of the artist and has no reference to its historical period. Subjective artists, for Schweitzer, are a ‘law unto themselves,’ they are independent and original, creating new forms of expression. On the other hand, objective artists produce works in harmony with the forms of expression of their time. Their works are free from the accidents of the author’s personal existence. While in subjective art the formal expression is the medium of the artist, in objective art, it seems that the artist himself is the medium of the ‘spirit of the time.’ “All the artistic endeavours, desires, creations, aspirations, and errors of his own and of previous generations are concentrated and worked out to their conclusion in him.” (Vol.1 p1. This point of view seemed to be influenced by Hegelian ideas). Rather than calling such art ‘impersonal,’ Schweitzer terms it ‘superpersonal.”

Bach is such an objective artist, according to Schweitzer, who enumerates in detail the particular forms of music of his time in which Bach showed himself to be the consummation. He identifies the music of Bach’s time as ‘expressive’ or ‘affektvoll’ music, whose purpose is graphic characterization and realism. (Vol. II p. 2) One complaint Schweitzer will have against the aestheticians is that they took no notice of this movement, but they ‘swept aside these phenomena as merely transitory pathological perversions of pure music.” (Ibid.)

Bach’s art, for Schweitzer, leaves a dual impression, which gives rise to many difficulties. The message that Bach’s works present is really quite current or modern, and yet somehow the feeling remains that his works have no real kinship with post-Beethovian art. (cf. Vol. II p.7) It is modern because it is pictorial, but its manner and means of producing a picture is exceedingly different from more modern music.

The musical aesthetics of Schweitzer’s time were concerned significantly with representation as well as “absolute” music; Schweitzer lists as some of the main issues: tone-painting, program music, and tone-language. Schweitzer will point out that there were tendencies toward representation before and including Bach’s time, and these tendencies were summed up under a general trend called “affektvoll” or “expressive,” which aimed at graphic realism. This is the music in which Bach participated and of which he is the culmination, according to Schweitzer. In taking this position, Schweitzer opposes himself to Spitta, Bach’s leading authority and biographer. Spitta’s fault, according to Schweitzer, was that he felt impelled to uphold Bach’s position as primarily a ‘priest of absolute music,’ even to the extent of dismissing summarily clear examples of graphic expression in Bach. (Schweitzer quotes a passage from Spitta,
bq. “Ready as Bach was to sprinkle his works with picturesque figures, he did not do so as a result of fundamental principles based on a sense of the graphic power of music (…) When we meet with some conspicuously melodious line or some strikingly harmonious tune, that happens to coincide with an emphatic or emotional word, we are too ready to attribute to them a much closer and deeper connection than can ever have dwelt in the purpose of the composer.” (Vol. II p. 3)
While Schweitzer opposes this persistent tendency of Spitta, he also objects to a ‘superficial modernization’, or simplified or anachronistic readings of Bach’s works by using a contemporary framework for interpreting his representative music.

The aim of this essay is not primarily to point out the controversial aspect of Schweitzer’s theory, but to glean Schweitzer’s aesthetics framework from his text on Bach and to provide an interpretation of one of Bach’s works from the Well-Tempered Clavier. Thus, we now turn to a positive formulation of Schweitzer’s original aesthetic theory.