Horatio Clare, Something of His Art: Walking to Lübeck with J.S. Bach

I read Horatio Clare’s book The Light in the Dark: A Winter’s Journal a couple of weeks ago. It’s a memoir of a winter in Yorkshire, living with seasonal affective disorder, and I loved Clare’s prose. I ordered Something of His Art: Walking to Lübeck with J.S. Bach because I liked The Light in the Dark so much. I knew nothing about this short book—I hadn’t noticed the subtitle—and when it arrived, I was happy that it tells the story of a walk.

In 1705, J.S. Bach, then an 18-year-old organist at the Neue Kirche in Armstadt, a town in Thuringia, in southern Germany, walked 230 miles almost directly north to the free imperial city of Lübeck, on the River Elbe, where he intended to study with Dieterich Buxtehude, the organist and musical director of that city’s Marienkirche. Bach obtained four weeks leave from his employers at the Neue Kirche, but in the end, he spent three months working with Buxtehude, one of the most important composers and musicians then in Germany. Lübeck, too, had a far more active music scene than provincial Armstadt, and young Bach was nothing if not ambitious. He hoped that the time he spent with Buxtehude would transform his career, and according to Clare, it did.

More than 300 years later, Clare, accompanied some of the time by a BBC radio producer and sound engineer, walked the route historians think Bach took on his journey. Clare describes Bach’s journey, and his own, as pilgrimages:

The expedition was a pilgrimage of a sort, a pilgrimage for his art of a kind that was common in European culture then: the wandering scholar and the itinerant musician were both familiar figures, and cherished in Germany, where the need of young craftsmen to travel in order to learn from older masters was understood and respected. Perhaps every long-distance walk is a pilgrimage, whether the walker is a believer or not. The reconnection with ourselves through immersion in the world is inevitably therapeutic, and the deeper pleasure comes from a counterpoint: the similarity of each day in their greater rhythms and the diversity of each moment. Our walk is a pilgrimage, too. In following what we know and can guess of his footsteps, we hope to draw as close to that young man as it is possible to do across three centuries. It will change us in some of the same degrees it changed him; we will be fitter, more springy, our eyes refreshed, our horizons expanded and our internal landscapes renewed. Despite the years between us we will see and feel much of the same world that Bach did; under the same horizons we will encounter the same paths, trees, plants, birds and animals. We will be crossing one of the most fascinating and perhaps the most significant of modern European states. (18)

Of course, the intervening centuries have changed much: there are fewer birds now, and much of Thuringia’s forests have been cut down, but Clare’s journey does engage with the same landscapes, and his account moves back and forth between what Bach would have encountered then and what Clare finds now. 

The five-part BBC documentary about Clare’s walk is available here; I haven’t listened to it yet, but I intend to, motivated by this book, which I enjoyed very much. Clare isn’t a Bach historian or biographer, but he knows a great deal about baroque music, and Bach’s music in particular, partly because he got through a bout of depression when he was at university with the help of Bach’s cello suites. I was amazed by Clare’s wide-ranging intellect and realized how many gaps exist in my own education—about Bach, yes, but about so many other things as well. I’m not young any more—I’m at least a decade older than Clare—but my time isn’t up yet, and I can continue learning, perhaps by planning projects like Clare’s. And, perhaps, if I continue to write, my prose will improve, becoming more like his. Something of His Art isn’t quite as beautifully written as The Light in the Dark, but it’s close, and close is just fine. I hadn’t thought that 2021 would begin with the discovery of a new favourite author, but I’m happy that it has.

Works Cited

Clare, Horatio. Something of His Art: Walking to Lübeck with J.S. Bach, Little Toller, 2018.

———. The Light in the Dark: A Winter Journal, Elliott and Thompson, 2018.