Adversaries Sharing a Love of Bach

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Niklas Frank, author of In the Shadow of the Reich

In the dock at the Nuremberg trials of 1945 and 1946: Hans Frank, born in Karlsruhe; once Adolf Hitler’s lawyer and governor general of Poland for the Third Reich, now charged with crimes against humanity for his part in the murder of three million people, including those in the death camps at Treblinka, Sobibór, Bełżec and Majdanek.

For the prosecution: Hersch Lauterpacht, who grew up in the Austro-Hungarian empire, near the city now known as Lviv in Ukraine, and who, after studying law in Vienna and London, went on to teach at Cambridge. He was a key figure in developing the idea of “crimes against humanity”, laying the foundation stones for international law and the modern laws of war. In his 40s, he was part of the British prosecution team at the trials of Frank and others.

There were strange connections between the two men, on opposite sides in the courtroom. The area in which Lauterpacht had grown up had been invaded by the Germans in June 1941. Lauterpacht was in England during this period and had been unaware that most of his family had been among the three million exterminated on Frank’s orders.

And there is this: as the trial proceeded, Lauterpacht would repair to listen to his favorite piece of music, from which he took inspiration for this onerous task: St. Matthew Passion (BWV 244b) by Johann Sebastian Bach. Meanwhile, Frank, in his cell, discussed with the prison psychiatrist and summoned up in his head – seeking not only solace but affirmation – St. Matthew Passion.

Each man heard in the great masterwork – in the same sublime solos and chorales – an entirely different, indeed contradictory, message; two opposed promulgations in the same score, two contrary cries in the same edifice of beauty.

Human rights lawyer Philippe Sands came across this unsettling coincidence while researching a book about his own family, to be published in 2016. He has now turned this compelling discovery, and other circumstances around the trial of Hans Frank (for example, also working for the prosecution was Raphael Lemkin, who had studied in Lviv – in the 1920s, when it was part of Poland and called Lwów – and had recently coined the term “genocide”. Sands believes that his family, too, had been obliterated on Frank’s orders), into a remarkable event to be staged at the end of this month by one of Britain’s leading young directors of opera, Nina Brazier. It combines narrative, which Sands will read with Vanessa Redgrave, images and music (from Bach via Ravel to Leonard Cohen), with Sands’s friend from childhood, French bass-baritone Laurent Naouri, accompanied by Guillaume de Chassy on piano.

Among the more extraordinary elements will be a “hymn” written to Hans Frank by Richard Strauss, the text for which appeared in a book by Frank’s son, Niklas, who has himself been involved in preparations for the performance. “We became immediate friends,” says Sands of Niklas, “after an initially strange handshake with the man whose father murdered my grandfather’s family, and three million other people.” There will also be never-before-seen film from the Kraków ghetto found in Niklas Frank’s family archive.

Philippe Sands is an Anglo-French lawyer with Jewish family origins around what is now Lviv also. He is best known for his books Lawless World, which detailed the illegality of Tony Blair’s war in Iraq, and Torture Team, about instructions for interrogation from US secretary for defense Donald Rumsfeld that led to calls for him and others to be indicted for war crimes. On a wall at his home beside Hampstead Heath in London hangs a map of the small town of Zhovkva, whence his great-grandmother came, from the same street as Hersch Lauterpacht.

Sands’s staging tells how Lauterpacht left for England, Lemkin for America and then converged home, in their way, to the trials at Nuremberg. (Sands’s own career has proceeded in the slipstream of the work of Lauterpacht and Lemkin.) Hans Frank was Adolf Hitler’s lawyer in cases dating back before the Führer’s rise to power, a loyalty for which he was appointed governor general of Poland in October 1939, to which he promised: “We bring art and culture.” He also guaranteed that “the Jewish problem will be addressed”.

Frank was a man of letters, a talented pianist and friend of Strauss. The remarkable book by his son is unprecedented in Holocaust literature (published by Alfred Knopf in America as In the Shadow of the Reich, but incomprehensibly refused by British publishers) and a monument to his German generation’s reckoning with the Shoah. It is a visceral challenge to the father, whom the text addresses in the second-person singular like an open letter, but also describes him thus: “You could play Chopin so beautifully. You loved Beethoven. You were friends with Richard Strauss.” At the end, as the Red Army rolls back the Wehrmacht’s conquests, “even in the chaos of battle, culture and the arts maintained their same important place on your scale of values”. Towards the end of the Reich, recalls his son, Frank was even chastised by Heinrich Himmler for “gluttonous and inappropriate behavior, with those theatre and opera performances of yours”.

Sands’s narrative includes Frank’s inauguration of a new theatre, “sanctuary of art” in Lviv; Frank wanted rising star Herbert von Karajan to conduct the opening night’s performances of Beethoven’s Leonora Overture and the Ninth Symphony. (He got instead “an unknown Austrian conductor,” Fritz Weidlich.)

In his engrossing book, Niklas quotes from his father’s diary: “This evening I was . . . at the great festival concert which [Wilhelm] Furtwängler conducted at the Philharmonic Hall for the German People’s Winter Benefit for the Needy.” Hitler, Hermann Goering and Joseph Goebbels were also there. “It was a powerful, profound, thrilling experience,” writes Frank Sr., “to hear this true giant of a conductor recreate the overture to Der Freischütz, Brahms’s Fourth Symphony and Beethoven’s Seventh. A magnificent evening of consecration. With indescribable emotion, I felt the years I have experienced pass before me, accompanied by this glorious music.”

So what did Hans Frank the war criminal and Hersch Lauterpacht who wrote the law on crimes against humanity hear in Bach’s St. Matthew Passion? “I do not stake any claim to expertise in music,” Sands says. “I’m an amateur enthusiast, and not even that when it comes to Bach. But I’ve read and thought a lot about this, and there is an interpretation whereby Bach used the passion of Matthew to register a Lutheran affirmation of the creativity of the individual against the Catholic commitment to the centrality of the group, the whole. It’s about the direct relationship between the individual and God in which, one may infer, Lauterpacht found an inspiration for his idea of individual human rights.

“I wonder about Frank,” muses Sands. “Whether he was an intelligent and cultured man, and if he was, did he really understand St. Matthew Passion? Frank may have heard in these glorious chorales an assertion of the collective, the rights of nation over those of the individual, which was the basis for his defense, such as it was. But there’s an irony here, because Bach writes in such a way as even the chorus sings in the first person singular – ‘ich.’ This is the individual celebrant communing with the deity, which opposes the Catholic idea of communion through celebration.”

In open court, Frank said: “I bear the responsibility” and: “I am possessed by a deep sense of guilt.” In his cell, Frank converted to Catholicism – to the derision of his son, whose book goads the father on his final pleas for divine mercy, for himself and family. Sands is less immediately dismissive: “It’s debatable why he converted, but having done so, he invokes the St. Matthew Passion as an affirmation of his conversion. Which is strange: he must have known that Bach and his intellect were Lutheran. I think Frank’s conversion was a strategic one and as such it reminds me of Blair. They were incomparable, of course, and we assume they converted in good faith, but in a way, Catholicism is the easy way out to self-absolution, and that is one of the things Bach takes issue with in this music.”

Sands explains how he and Laurent Naouri had to choose a section from the St. Matthew Passion to illustrate the obsession of each man. “For Lauterpacht I wanted Geduld, Geduld!” Sands says, “which means ‘patience’, but Laurent said it wasn’t in his range.”

“We chose Gerne will ich mich bequemen,” Laurent says: “‘Gladly would I, fear disdaining/ Cross and cup, without complaining’ – which is about determination and patience. And for Frank, it has to be Erbarme dich – ‘Have mercy . . . regard my bitter weeping’ – praying that he will live. I think he probably knows that he won’t [Frank was executed in 1946], but there is a part of him attuned to this music, some last feeling of hope.”

But did Hans Frank believe his own defense? If anyone can be the judge of that, it would be Sands, who has faced people in Frank’s shadow when he has acted for Human Rights Watch against General Augusto Pinochet, or cases in international courts involving Yugoslavia or Sierra Leone, and who now confides what everyone wonders about trial law: “When you are involved in a case, there’s a moment where you may come to believe your own arguments, however implausible. Frank was a courtroom lawyer too, and in a courtroom there can be this suspension of disbelief. I think Frank as a defendant may well have gone through that process, of not necessarily believing his own argument, but believing it enough to think it might get him off the hook. I don’t think he believed he was innocent, but I think he may have thought he was not sufficiently culpable to warrant the death penalty.” Sands befriended an interpreter from the trial, Siegfried Ramler, who told him: “I looked Frank in the face and thought, ‘This is a man who knows he has done wrong.’ He was looking for mercy, but not exoneration.”

Niklas Frank is a man of wit and charm; the dry humor that charges his book with bitterness makes his conversation agreeable. He became a war correspondent for  Stern magazine and we were both in Iraq and former Yugoslavia, though we never met. I talk to him about finding concentration camps run by Bosnian Serbs in 1992 and he talks about “finding books, some in German, left in abandoned houses in empty Serbian villages” after the Croatian offensive around Knin during 1995. “There,” says Frank, “even the animals were dead. I felt like the loneliest man in the world.”

Niklas Frank was born in 1939 and, as he says: “My memories of the Third Reich were those of a child.” He recalls “a harmonium in the attic at our home in Bavaria, up a narrow staircase. I watched him play. He would improvise a great deal and the music always seemed sad to me, as though he knew what his end would be.”

Hans Frank “was so well educated,” says his son. “He was a close friend of Strauss; he knew every kind of classical music and he loved it. When Strauss discussed music with my father, he was on his own level.” In his book, Niklas recounts how such exciting movements as expressionism and naturalism “passed you by,” but in conversation relates how he found something unexpected in the programming of concerts sponsored by his father in occupied Kraków: “There was work there that was not just the usual cliche of Bach and Beethoven. There was modern music from the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century, which would have been considered decadent in Berlin – but this was Kraków. It’s there, being played, and I was astonished to find it.”

To perform such new music, Hans Frank had wanted as his programmer and concertmaster a man called Friedrich Franz Stampe, of whom Goebbels, who controlled the arts, disapproved, “but my father petitioned Goebbels and – amazingly – succeeded.”

The heating system at Laurent Naouri’s home in Paris, where he, Sands and Nina Brazier are rehearsing, has broken, so he has adjourned, as must our conversation, to a hotel on Boulevard Raspail. He gets directly to the point, without so much as a coffee between him and his argument: “Hans Frank was a great pianist; when he had to make a decision, he would play a while on the piano – something beautiful to help him with his thoughts. And it comes as a shock to think of Frank doing this – that he was a mass killer, but he had sensibility, a soul.”

“But the meaning of music is wide open,” Naouri explains. “Most music moves between tension and release, tension and release. Everything is built around the dominant seventh and the tonic, building pressure and the orgasmic conclusion. And this is primal, it affects all beings, whatever their ideology. Why would the same music move Lauterpacht and Hans Frank? Because they are both human beings. They both get hungry and both need food; they both experience these moments of tension that need to find rest. This has nothing to do with morality – it’s physical.”

I ask Naouri about Nazism and the cult of the sublime irrational. “What Bach composes in the St. Matthew Passion is rational,” he replies. “What is irrational is the feeling of sheer beauty that comes out of it. Not how the music was done, but why it does this to us.”

Niklas Frank writes in his book: “Here’s something I don’t want to suppress: a song for you, written by Richard Strauss. Yes, Strauss sang a song for you and accompanied himself on the piano. You were standing next to him, in his home, struck dumb in your vanity, flattered by the fact that this world-famous composer, for you alone, only you, had made up this little ditty and turned it into a song. You hum the melody and I’ll write the text: ‘Who enters the room, so slender and swank?/ Behold our friend, our Minister Frank/ Like Lohengrin sent by God, our master/ To save us all from every disaster . . . ’ What’s he thanking you for, Father? I have yet to discover that,” concludes the author. The song will never have been performed – apart from a dry run at the Hay Festival – until Sands’s event at the end of this month.

Niklas explains: “When my mother died, on my twentieth birthday in 1959, I said to myself, ‘I’ll work through all the papers and pictures, lots of stuff.’ Luckily she had always copied out letters she wrote to my father, by hand that is, words between her and her husband at the time of the Nuremberg trials.

“And suddenly, in the letters she is very excited, as if every danger to his life was passed: a Swiss newspaper had reported Strauss as having written this song to Hans Frank. And she was so excited: Strauss is now saving her husband! We will be free! She was so convinced that in another letter, she plans another child with him.”

Niklas Frank believes the song predates the war. “These are not stupid people,” he argues, “and it’s funny.” He recreates the scenario: “My father is passing by Garmisch, where Strauss lives, and telephones to plan a call at short notice: ‘I’m nearby, why don’t I drop by?’ Strauss thinks up a little welcome, a surprise for his friend. He writes his little song. My father opens the door and there is Strauss at the piano, singing this gay verse. It’s easy-going, an afternoon piece. I think it’s obviously during peacetime; such an occasion wouldn’t make sense during the war.”

The Frank family tried to ascertain whether any music survived, to be told by Schott, publisher of most of Strauss’s music, that it did not. Niklas Frank is unconvinced: “Strauss was a vain character and would never have thrown away even the smallest piece of music. I believe it has been hidden.” Sands was told “it has disappeared.”

But whether the music was lost or is hidden, it does not exist for performance at the Purcell Room. “Could we reconstruct it?” Sands asked Naouri. “We could try,” replied Naouri. “I wrote to a friend, Frédéric Chaslin, a composer, conductor and master of spoof,” he now recalls. “Chaslin brilliantly pastiches Debussy and I asked him to do the same with Strauss. Two days later, back came the score, the full kitchen sink, more Strauss than Strauss!

“It’s not black and white with Strauss,” says Naouri. “He was noted to be in favor of the regime, but he had Jewish relatives. He intervened with the government to keep Stefan Zweig as a librettist. He did what he could for the Jews he knew.” Quotes from his diaries register contempt for a “criminal . . . anti-culture regime”.

In January 1993, Vanessa Redgrave convened a rally at the Thalia Theater in Hamburg to mark the sixtieth anniversary of Hitler’s seizure of power, at which Holocaust survivors and deportees from Bosnia shared a platform, to denounce the gulag of camps in Bosnia, siege of Sarajevo and continued desecration by neo-Nazis of memorials built by Germany to Jews murdered during the Shoah.

Now, Redgrave and I sit outside a cafe near Twickenham Studios in London, while she smokes, drinks coffee and talks about these entwinements across history, of horror and defiance, that propel her work, and command her interest and involvement in Sands’s piece.

After a long opening conversation about Bosnia and the world today, she poses the question that pervades this work: “How and why is it possible that the Nazis knew classical music, and listened to classical music, while the crematoria were aflame? It runs though my head all the time.”

But Redgrave is a proud heretic and adds: “Is all this so far from what we’ve been talking about? How do those politicians in the UK sit in a concert hall and enjoy Beethoven while all this is going on? What do they think they are listening to after what they do?” Her eyes dart from behind spectacles, with righteous rage. “Mass murder was committed in Bosnia, with concentration camps, the torture of rape. Outrageous antisemitic acts of arson in Germany, in 1992/3, coincided with lethal attacks against Turkish immigrants. Then came Srebrenica, which was later defined as genocide. Were not European governments complicit?”

Then she invokes the defiance of art, and her profession, the kind of resistance that made for Rock Under the Siege, lunchtime concerts of chamber music and Waiting for Godot in Sarajevo: “I remember that both in Sarajevo during the siege, and in Kosovo, the artists and musicians played music and performed to strengthen survival and resistance. At all times music and theatre: to help civilians suffering intolerable hunger and war or the violence of occupation.” However, she adds: “The essential horror is that the perpetrators of war, siege, murder and occupation apparently also need, appreciate and promote music! To assist them in mass murder! Which is why I am glad Philippe has asked me to join him for A Song of Good and Evil.”

“I think,” posits Sands, regarding Redgrave’s last point, kernel of his piece, “that we find this unsettling because we want to hope that beauty, the notion of beauty, only makes us better people, that great art is good for humanity. This story shatters that illusion. It illuminates how bad people, too, appreciate beauty – and use it.”

Why, I asked Niklas Frank, could people such as his father love Bach, Beethoven, Schubert, music of such beauty? “I have never found an answer,” he replied.

Ed Vulliamy – The Guardian

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The Von Trapps Are Back

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The newest von Trapps of Sound of Music fame

A divided staircase in the middle of an elegant entrance hall painted white. Crystal chandeliers, parquet floors, gold brocade-upholstered furniture, views through spacious windows of manicured lawns leading to a lake. And a baker’s half-dozen of children continually popping up to harmonize.

That, of course, is Sound of Music world, first glimpsed in the 1965 film version of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Broadway show, and by now embedded in the brains of most inhabitants of the actual world. The house is the movie studio version of the von Trapp villa near Salzburg, Austria, and the children are the movie studio version of the von Trapp children.

Picture, by contrast, a mostly unfurnished four-bedroom town house in northeast Portland, Oregon. The neighborhood is called Hollywood, which is ironic, because this is real life. The bedrooms are occupied by the real grandchildren of one of the real von Trapp children immortalized in the movie. That would be Kurt, “the incorrigible one,” whose name was actually Werner. The house is unfurnished partly because the four siblings – Sofia (known as Sofi), Melanie, Amanda and August, who range in age from twenty-five down to nineteen – haven’t lived there very long, but mostly because they use the house to rest their heads at night and eat a bowl of cereal in the morning. They spend the rest of their time doing a very Sound of Music-y thing. Singing.

They’ve been singing together since they were mere babes, and doing their public “shtick,” as Sofi calls it, for about thirteen years: most of their lives, that is.

The road to the town house in Holly­wood started with a decision made years ago by the von Trapp kids’ father, Stefan – son of Werner, grandson of Captain von Trapp (otherwise known as Christopher Plummer), step-grandson of Maria (Julie Andrews). He had grown up in Vermont with a bunch of cousins, and ultimately decided the atmosphere and the real and cinematic bloodlines were a bit oppressive. With his wife, Annie, he moved far away – to Kalispell, Montana, where he learned stonemasonry skills, opened a business, and had three girls and a boy. Werner would visit in the summer – to the kids he was always “Opa,” German for “grandpa” – and teach them the Austrian folk songs he had sung as a child. One summer he was too ill to make the trip, and the kids recorded their first homemade CD so he could hear it back in Vermont.

In 2001, the New Age pianist George Winston heard the children sing at a festival in Montana and was impressed enough to have them open for him while he was touring the state. Gradually, they began to get gigs of their own. At the start, their set list consisted of Austrian folk songs and Sound of Music selections. August, who joined his sisters when he was seven, wearing lederhosen to their dirndls, was first soprano.

Stefan had done masonry work for television-series wildlife guru Jack Hanna, who has a house in Montana, and through him became friendly with Wayne Newton, whom the kids knew from the Chevy Chase movie Vegas Vacation. Newton gave them what Amanda calls “amazing advice.”

“It was right when August’s voice was changing,” Melanie says, “and so you asked him –” Sofi picks up the story: “Somehow, I asked him how he went through his voice change. Obviously, he had such a high voice. And he said he just kept singing the high notes and he was able to keep his falsetto.” “It was good advice,” August says, “but man, it was hard. I never knew when my voice would, like explode. It was like a time bomb.”

Touring the country, the siblings began to comprehend the magnitude of the Sound of Music story, and what it meant to people. “After the show, people would come up to us and would be like, ‘I met your grandmother. . . . I heard her sing in this hall fifty years ago,’” Melanie says. “That’s when we started to kind of understand that we were carrying on something.”

“We would hear people say, ‘I saw The Sound of Music when I was six years old, and it made me realize what I was going to do with my life,’” Amanda says. “And then they would thank us for something we almost had nothing to do with. That weight of importance always rested on us. We knew it wasn’t just about ourselves.”

But only recently have they hit the big time. In March, they released a new CD, Dream a Little Dream, and embarked on a twenty-four-city tour, both projects collaborations with the eclectic musical group Pink Martini. The CD features guest appearances by Wayne Newton, Jack Hanna (also a musician), Paddy Moloney and the Chieftains. And, on the Sound of Music songs The Lonely Goatherd and Edelweiss (not real Austrian folk songs, as many think, but Rodgers and Hammerstein concoctions), Charmian Carr, who played Liesl in the film.

It may seem odd, but it’s nonetheless true that the von Trapp family was famous before The Sound of Music. The Rodgers and Hammerstein musical opened on Broadway in 1959 and was based on a 1949 book, The Story of the Trapp Family Singers, by Maria von Trapp. This is the same Maria played by Mary Martin on stage and Julie Andrews on screen, a postulant who was hired by Captain Georg Ritter von Trapp, a widower, as a tutor for one of his children (not a governess for all of them, as in the musical), and ended up marrying him. (That part was true.) As early as 1935, with the encouragement of and under the direction of an Austrian priest, Franz Wasner, Maria and her stepchildren formed a vocal group that performed professionally at the Salzburg Festival; in 1937 they went on a tour of Europe and even made a television appearance on the BBC.

The following year, the Nazis annexed Austria. Because the von Trapps’ former home, the city of Trieste, had become part of Italy, the family possessed Italian passports and used them to get on a train out of the country, eventually settling in the United States. (The musical’s exodus on foot over the mountains is another invention by the librettists, Howard Lindsay and Russel Crouse.) Within the year, accompanied by Father Wasner, they made their first tour of the United States, capped off by a well-received concert in New York’s Town Hall. The New York Times observed, “There was something unusually lovable and appealing about the modest, serious singers of this little family aggregation as they formed a close semicircle about their self-effacing director for their initial offering, the handsome Mme. von Trapp in simple black, and the youthful sisters garbed in black and white Austrian folk costumes enlivened with red ribbons. It was only natural to expect work of exceeding refinement from them, and one was not disappointed in this.”

The family lived for a time in Merion, Pennsylvania, and eventually settled in Vermont. But from the beginning, the Singers – eventually including the three children of Maria and the Captain – spent a good part of the year touring the country, offering audiences in Iowa or New Mexico exotic and ultimately heartwarming sights and sounds. In a typical concert, the family opened with sacred selections, perhaps a Gregorian chant and a Bach piece, then did an instrumental portion (recorders, spinet and viola da gamba), followed by madrigals. After intermission, they changed into their trademark Austrian outfits – dirndls for the girls, lederhosen for the boys – and did a set of Austrian folk songs, a demonstration of crowd-pleasing yodels and finally a selection of international folk songs.

Part of the appeal of the Trapp Family Singers – they judiciously dropped the “von” after settling in the United States – was the contrast they offered to happenings in their native country and neighboring Nazi Germany. The New York Times, reviewing their “picturesque” 1940 holiday Town Hall concert, commented that they “afforded the large audience a glimpse into an Austria, not of storm troopers, but of devout families who sing and make music at home in the evenings.” Feature reporters found they made good copy as well. One 1946 article reported, “In the hotel dining room, the Baroness Maria von Trapp, a tall, strong blue-eyed woman in radiant health, dressed like her daughters and like them, without make-up, firmly pressed our hand, and then introduced us to the Baron, a twinkling-eyed man who looked like Santa Claus with a mustache instead of a beard.”

The tour eventually expanded to as many as one hundred twenty-five performances a year, and according to William Anderson, author of The World of the Trapp Family, became “the most heavily booked attraction in concert history.” He doesn’t cite a source for that assertion, but with their annual tour, RCA Victor recordings, occasional television appearances and Maria’s best-selling memoir, there’s no doubt the von Trapps were a significant cultural institution.

However, by the arrival of the new decade of the ’50s, some of the siblings were marrying and having children and getting into professions like medicine and forestry, making it necessary for non-family ringers to don the dirndls and lederhosen on stage. There was also a sense, among some observers, that the act had worn a little thin. “No matter what they were up to, the Trapps did their work in a tentative, unbending manner – smiling nervously now and then – and the audience, to judge by the applause that followed each number, was pleased by this show of diffidence,” wrote Douglas Watt of the New Yorker, reviewing the 1951 Christmas concert. Watt wasn’t charmed. “There was so much gemütlichkeit in the air that it began to grow stuffy, and I left before they got to the carols.”

The group finally disbanded after a farewell tour, featuring In stiller Nacht [by Brahms], in the beginning of 1956. By that time the Captain and one of his daughters had died. Some of the siblings dispersed around the country and the world, but Maria continued to operate a ski lodge in Stowe, Vermont, and many of her children and their families were nearby. (The lodge is still operated by her son Johannes and his family. Maria died in 1987, and the last of her stepchildren, also named Maria, in 2014.)

A German film based on the family story was released in 1956, and eventually caught the attention of musical comedy star Mary Martin. She decided it would be a perfect vehicle – with Martin herself playing Maria, of course, and a score consisting of the Trapp family repertoire. She brought on a producer, Leland Hayward, commissioned the team of Lindsay and Crouse to write a script, and approached Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein (with whom she’d had a spectacular success in South Pacific) to come up with a single original song. Rodgers describes his reaction in his autobiography, Musical Stages: “If they wanted to do a play using the actual music the Trapps sang, fine, but why invite a clash of styles by simply adding one new song? Why not a fresh score? When I suggested this to Leland and Mary they said they’d love to have a new score, but only if Oscar and I wrote it.”

Write it they did. The show opened on Broadway in 1959 and was a smash hit, despite some critical carping about its sentimentality. The London production the following year was an even bigger success, and even bigger than that was the Julie Andrews film. It won the Academy Award for Best Picture and grossed a whopping $126 million at the box office.

The film has never really ended its run, of course, being presented in recent years in karaoke-style sing-alongs where audience members dress as characters and even song lyrics. (A brown paper package tied up in string is a popular choice.) In December 2013, NBC presented a live television version of the musical with Carrie Underwood as Maria. Although the reviews were, as always, mixed, the production got fabulous ratings.

The consensus among the family Trapp was that the musical got the heart of the story right, though there was and is some grumbling about that escape hike, the changing of names (and sometimes gender) of some of the siblings, and, especially, the depiction of the warm, Santa Claus-like Captain as a patrician meanie.

But none of that mattered. The film catapulted the family from renown to full-blown celebrity, and there was nothing they could do about it. From time to time, the Trapp Family Singers got out the dirndls and lederhosen and put on a reunion concert. But there was no follow-up, as everyone by that time had demanding lives.

It would not be until the 1970s that the music coursing through the von Trapp DNA would again get expressed in a concerted manner. First came Werner’s daughter Elisabeth von Trapp, who strapped a guitar on her back as a teenager and ever since has traveled the country as a folk singer.

Then came her Montana nieces and nephew. The touring and performing was fun for a while, but about four years ago, with the sisters at college age, they decided, as Sofi says, “to stop singing, and go to school, and kind of pursue our own dreams.” They each enrolled in a different college, and August started attending high school in Chicago. “It was our first time being with kids our own age,” Amanda says. (The siblings were home-schooled.) Then, in 2010, they got a call from a producer from Oprah, asking if they would appear on a special Sound of Music forty-fifth anniversary show. And how could they turn down a chance to sing Edelweiss with Julie Andrews, Christopher Plummer and the rest of the surviving cast from the film?

After the show aired, there were offers from all around the world. Again, the touring started. Again, it began to wear on them. One of the last concerts on their contract came in December 2011: singing with the Oregon Symphony at Portland’s Christmas tree-lighting ceremony.

“The symphony called up and said, ‘We’ve got the von Trapps,’” recalls Thomas Lauderdale, the founder and leader of Pink Martini, who is a lifelong Portland resident. “‘Can they be on stage with you?’ And it was, you know, I mean, I just sort of flipped out, I was so excited.”

Lauderdale, who is forty-three, has spiked white-blond hair and usually wears a bow tie, had grown up as a big fan of The Sound of Music. In fact, Pink Martini performed The Lonely Goatherd, a yodeling showcase from the musical, at the second concert it ever did. When he met the von Trapps, he found himself impressed by more than their bloodlines and their pipes. “They were paying a different kind of attention than most people are ever paying,” he said. “I think it has to do with them not having watched television as kids. There’s a certain look in people who haven’t grown up watching TV. There’s a different gaze.”

Lauderdale’s perception was on target. “No, we didn’t have a TV,” Melanie says. She’s the second oldest, at twenty-four, and, like her brother and sisters, personable, fresh-faced, modest and nice. “Our dad didn’t grow up watching it, and neither of our parents were into the whole TV thing. I mean, we watched Bill Nye the Science Guy once in a while.” Later, it emerges that none of the siblings has heard of Pee-wee Herman.

Lauderdale thought their sound was terrific, too. “The way they sing comes from the way they’ve grown up together, been in the same room together all these years,” he says. “I don’t think that exists anywhere in the world, this combination of talent, experience, family history and parents with the wisdom not to park them in front of televisions. It was an amazing thing to behold.”

Then, in April 2012, Lauderdale asked them to join Pink Martini for a symphony show in Indianapolis. It was there that the idea of making an album together began to develop. “It was kind of the second time we’d really hung out with Thomas,” Amanda says, “and he slid the sheet music for Dream a Little Dream over across the table towards me. He had no way of knowing it, but that song was my lullaby growing up.”

Lauderdale had the notion that August would strum the ukulele on the song, a Tin Pan Alley standard from the early ’30s. The only trouble was, August had never played the ukulele. “At first, it was really difficult,” he says. “But eventually you just keep at it, and your fingers mold into getting used to it.”

Dream a Little Dream, with Amanda on lead vocal, Thomas on uke and Sofi on melodica, is the title track of the disc. In Stiller Nacht is on it. The rest of the lineup emerged by inspiration and serendipity. “I asked a lot of questions,” Lauderdale says. “‘Who all do you like? Who do you listen to? Who would you love to work with?’ At the top of the list was the Chieftains.” It turns out that Paddy Moloney’s venerable Irish group once shared management with Pink Martini, and the siblings journeyed to Dublin to collaborate with them on Thunder, one of three haunting New-Agey songs composed by August on the CD. (“My hope in reality,” says the lyric, “comes flowing from my dreams.”) There’s a cover of the ABBA song Fernando, Hushabye Mountain from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, and carefully curated songs from China, Japan, Israel, France and Rwanda.

And how could there be a von Trapp album without including any songs from The Sound of Music? In fact, Dream a Little Dream has two, The Lonely Goatherd and Edelweiss, and a guest vocalist on both is Charmian Carr, the original “sixteen going on seventeen” Liesl. Not long after making the film, Carr moved from acting to a career as a decorator, but she never stopped participating in Sound of Music events. At a 2000 singalong at the Hollywood Bowl, she met Lauderdale. While making Dream a Little Dream, he invited Carr to participate and she accepted without hesitation. Not only did Carr feel the von Trapps’ sound was “exquisite,” she says from her home in Encino, California, but she formed a quick and deep bond. “I told them they felt like my own children,” she says.

In Portland, Amanda von Trapp says that singing with Carr was one of the high points of making the record. “Here are five people in the studio who would have no connection otherwise,” she says. “It’s so distant, but so close. She represented this story that our grandparents went through. And everybody loves this story, and her role especially, being Liesl.”

The granddaughter of the brother of the person Carr played on screen pauses. “It was a little surreal,” she adds.

Ben Yagoda – Smithsonian Magazine

The Music of Rebellion

Tags

Abraham, Amsterdam, archeologist, Arthur Rubinstein, Avraham, Baruch Spinoza, Beit Midrash, Bible, Concerto in D minor, consumerism, David Cardozo Academy, Glenn Gould, Halacha, Inquisition, Jews, Karl Richter, kosher, Marrano, matzah, Mitzvah, Moses, Moshe Rabeinu, Mount Sinai, Nathan Lopes Cardozo, National Socialists, Nazis, philosophy, Protestant, Shabbat, Shlomo Rodrigues Pereira, synagogue, Talmud, Torah, Winston Churchill, yarmulke

Winston Churchill once sent a very long letter to a friend. At the end he wrote: I am sorry but I had no time to write a short one.

It takes eighteen minutes to bake a matzah and it comes out flat. JDOV gave me twelve minutes to speak about my life and my love for Judaism and told me that it must sound like Bach’s Concerto in D minor (BWV 1052).

So here we go.

But let’s first listen to Bach.

I was born in 1946 in Amsterdam, by breech delivery. It was very painful. My mother endured it with iron strength. We nearly did not make it. It was the same iron strength that she showed when she saved the lives of all of my father’s family, all Jews, from the hands of the Nazis.

My parents were a mixed marriage: my father Jewish, my mother not.

These two facts – breech delivery and being born from a mixed marriage – set the stage for my life. I see everything upside down and always as an in-outsider. I see great beauty where others see only the ordinary. I see problems where others believe that everything is fine. For me, the average is astonishing.

Our name is Lopes Cardozo. That is a real Jewish name – not Goldstein or Rabinowitz. Those are “goyishe” names.

On my father’s side we come from Spain and Portugal, after the Inquisition, in 1492. We are anusim, Marranos. Our forefathers were raised as Christians, and only in Holland could they start to live a Jewish life again.

My father was a very proud Jew. He could not stop speaking about it. But it had no religious meaning.

My mother lost her parents when she was very young and moved in with my father’s family, so she grew up in a strong, secular, socialistic, but culturally very strong Jewish family and society. Friday night was holy, with lots of delicious food, although they were as poor as church mice. They did not eat kosher, but no treif meat would ever enter the house. Jewish expressions, customs, and jokes were the daily language.

My father was an ardent admirer of Spinoza, the great Jewish philosopher in Amsterdam in the seventeenth century who walked out on Judaism and was banned by the rabbis. It is the most well known Jewish ban ever. It made him world famous; I am still trying to get a similar rabbinic ban, but to no avail. It would considerably raise the sale of my books.

Spinoza got me thinking. He attacked the Jewish tradition vigorously. There is no God, he said, at least no biblical God. The Torah is not divine, not godly. In fact, it is primitive and nearly meaningless. Judaism is a lot of nonsense, he declared. And so I wanted to know what he was attacking. Why did he have no good word for the Jewish tradition? And what is this Jewish tradition actually all about?

So I started to read without end, speaking with rabbis – Orthodox and Reform; philosophers – religious and non-religious; as well as atheists and believers.

To make a long story short: I became so fascinated with the Jewish tradition that I went to the chief rabbi of Amsterdam, Chacham Shlomo Rodrigues Pereira, and told him to convert me, since I was the child of a mixed marriage – and so he did.

I was sixteen. Many years later my mother also converted, after I convinced her of the beauty of Judaism. My parents got married three months before I was married to a very nice lady sitting here in the audience – all by the same rabbi in the Sephardic Synagogue in Amsterdam.

I learned twelve years in Chareidi yeshivot, and I have a Ph.D in Philosophy. I love yeshivot, but I never felt that they gave me the full picture. Judaism is much greater than what yeshivot teach.

Let me tell you what happened to me when I was learning in yeshiva. A non-Jewish friend came to visit me and asked to see the Beit Midrash. So I put a yarmulke on his head and told him to come in. He expected a large hall with all the students whispering, like in a university library.  But what did he encounter? Three hundred young fellows walking around nervously, shouting at each other as if the world was coming to an end.

In total shock, he asked me. “What is this, a demonstration against the Queen of England?” ”No,” I said, “they are discussing what God actually said three thousand years ago at Mount Sinai.” “You still don’t know?” he asked. “No,” I said. “Indeed, we still don’t know, and that’s why we are still alive after four thousand years, and because of that we outlived all our enemies. A tradition that keeps arguing with itself will stay alive and grow.”

Now listen to Johann Sebastian Bach.

It is God speaking to us in music – with so many options for how to play it, without end. Like the rabbis speak about God’s words with so many interpretations. Remember Glenn Gould, Richter, Arthur Rubinstein and so many others. Such were Abaya, Rava and many other sages in the Talmud – each one playing totally different music, but simultaneously, with strict adherence to the music notes, to rigid rules of musical genius. An iron fist, and an uncompromising dedication to detail, resulting in a phenomenal outburst of emotion.

That, my dear friends, is what happened at Sinai. God gave heavenly musical notes at Sinai for us to play on our souls. Strict notes, but to be played with infinite passion. To listen to Bach is like being struck by an uppercut under the chin and staying unconscious for the rest of the day. And so it is with the Torah. It is like an archeologist forced to go to rock bottom in search of all the hidden possibilities; to exert himself in order to unearth them and find infinite treasures.

God owes a lot to Bach. He put God in the center of our world. Where would God be without Bach?

But Bach’s music is more than that. It is a rebellion. A rebellion against all earlier forms of music. Against making music sterile, stagnated, boring and flat. It opened new dimensions that people did not want to see or hear.

The same is true about Judaism. It is a religious protest against complacency, spiritual boredom and mediocrity.

Religion means to live in utter amazement, in astonishment. To live like Bach. To walk around in total wonder. And to know what to do with that wonder. To translate it into deep feelings and the solid side of the human deed: The Mitzvah, the Halacha.

Halacha teaches us how to live life in utter amazement. Just as Bach did.

After Moshe Rabeinu [Moses], Bach was the greatest halachist who ever lived in modern times – the iron fist, the heavenly explosion, the rebellion and the strict adherence to rules and detail.

And what did we do with Judaism? We denied Bach’s music to play the central role in Halacha any longer. And so we made it flat and boring.

We tell our children to obey, to conform, to fit in. Not to disturb the establishment. Not to challenge religious and secular beliefs. And by doing so, we have nearly killed Judaism.

Eating kosher is a rebellious act. An act of disobedience against consumerism that encourages people to eat anything as longs as it tastes good. When we go to synagogue, it is a protest against man’s arrogance in thinking that he can do it all himself. Observing Shabbat is an attack on society in a world that believes our happiness depends on how much we produce.

Avraham [Abraham] was the first ultimate rebel who destroyed idols. And so were the prophets.

And so is the Torah – a rebellious text declaring war on a world that has still not learned how to live a spiritual life of incredible greatness while standing firm with its feet on the ground.

And so are we Jews. To be a Jew is to forever swim against the mediocrity of this world. We are a nation of protestors. We are the real protestants. But we forgot who we are.

And therefore I decided to become religious. I love rebellion and spiritual war. I can’t live in boredom.

I will continue to play Bach, the rebellious man of Halacha who introduced me to God and the Torah.

So, just listen to Bach and hear the music of the Jewish tradition.

Nathan Lopes Cardozo – David Cardozo Academy

Holocaust Survivor Lives for Music

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Alice Herz-Sommer, Beethoven, Chopin, concentration camp, Dachau, Holocaust, Jews, London, Malcolm Clarke, National Socialists, Nazis, Nick Reed, piano, Prague, prisoner, propaganda, The Algemeiner, The Lady in Number 6, Theresienstadt, Zach Pontz

Alice Herz-Sommer

At 109 years old, Alice Herz-Sommer can make multiple claims: she is the world’s oldest pianist, as well as its oldest Holocaust survivor. Now she’s also a leading lady, the centerpiece of a film charting her remarkable life, The Lady in Number 6.

Herz-Sommer lives alone in a tiny flat in central London to this day, sitting down daily at her piano, practicing her beloved Bach and Beethoven. But her life wasn’t always so pleasant.

When thirty-nine, Herz-Sommer was sent, along with her six-year-old son Raphael, to Theresienstadt, the concentration camp near Prague used by the Nazis as a propaganda set depicting good treatment of the Jews of Europe during their campaign of terror. There she entertained prisoners and Nazis alike, playing Bach and Chopin along with other musicians forced into captivity.

Despite her ordeal, and despite the fact that her husband Leopold perished in Dachau, Herz-Sommer has been able to maintain a buoyant personality in the years since.

“She just on all things has this philosophy that is incredibly positive. She’s just naturally, instinctively somehow along her journey picked up this process where her brain is always in a positive loop,” said the film’s producer, Nick Reed.

“People who have seen the film are just amazed that this woman has been able to take something like the Holocaust and turn it into a positive,” Reed adds. “I think the experience was really able to show her what matters, which is your health and human relationships. There’s no malice, no hatred, no negativity, everything is just processed into the beauty of the world.”

Reed and Oscar-winning director Malcolm Clarke have compiled a short film, using rare archival footage and interviews, that not only showcases Herz-Sommer’s sanguine approach to the world, but also her passion for music, an artistic medium she refers to in the film as her “God.”

“It started off as an exploration of this amazing woman and what you realize along the way is that she’s even more amazing, ” Reed says.

Zach Pontz – The Algemeiner

Art Installations Made of Sound

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Anne Strauss, auction, Barbara London, barracks, bell, Berlin, Caleb Kelly, cello, chapel, Chernobyl, Christian Marclay, Christie's, color, computer, cyberspace, David Bowie, Day Is Done, Documenta, Ethan Sklar, Forty Part Motet, funeral, Glasgow, Governors Island, horn, Jacob Kirkegaard, Janet Cardiff, John Cage, loudspeaker, Manhattan, Metropolitan Museum of Art, motet, MP3, Museum of Modern Art, National Socialists, New York, Op Art, painting, performance art, photography, pitch, podcast, poetry, sculpture, Seth Kim-Cohen, ship's horn, siren, Sotheby's, sound art, Soundings: A Contemporary Score, Spem in Alium, Spotify, Stephen Vitiello, Study for Strings, Susan Philipsz, Tanya Bonakda, Taps, television, The Cloisters, Theresienstadt, Thomas Tallis, Tom Eccles, Tristan Perich, trumpet, uterus, video, viola

Janet Cardiff sound installations

Note the sound of your computer’s fan amid distant sirens. Hear your spouse in the next room, playing the Bowie channel on Spotify while chatting on the phone with your mother-in-law. Farther off, a TV is tuned to the news and a stereo plays Bach, while a mouse skitters inside a wall.

And know that every one of those sounds can now be the subject of art, just as every vision we see and imagine, from fruit in a bowl to the color of light to melting clocks, has been grist for painting and sculpture and photos. Sound art has been on the rise for a decade or two, but it may have at last hit the mainstream: On Saturday, the Museum of Modern Art [opened] its first full sonic survey, “Soundings: A Contemporary Score,” while two major sound installations are to go up in New York in the fall.

“The art of sound questions how and what we hear, and what we make of it,” the curator Barbara London writes in her catalog essay to the Modern show – which means the movement has purchase on a lot that matters. Perched in an office high above MoMA’s garden, where her exhibition will insert stealthy recordings of bells, Ms. London explained that artists are more than ever drawn to sound art, maybe because it sits on the exciting double cusp, as she said, of both music and gallery art. Her new show (or should we call it a “hear”?) reflects the “apogee,” as she put it, that sound art has now reached.

Ms. London’s survey will include those recorded bells, by the American soundster Stephen Vitiello, as well as recordings made near Chernobyl by Jacob Kirkegaard, a Dane, and a grid of 1,500 small speakers, each playing a different tone, by the young New Yorker Tristan Perich. It will also feature the Glasgow-born Susan Philipsz, whom the larger art world has taken to heart.

At the Modern, Ms. Philipsz will be reprising a 2012 work from Germany’s Documenta, the twice-a-decade festival that is one of the world’s most prestigious artistic events. Her Study for Strings riffs on an orchestral piece composed in 1943 at the Theresienstadt concentration camp for musicians there. For her recording, Ms. Philipsz has redacted the parts for all the instruments except one cello and one viola, leaving plangent silences between those two players’ scattered notes – and, of course, evoking the erasure of musicians and artists by the Nazis.

“For the public, sound art it still a fairly new and also a very, very accessible medium,” said Tom Eccles, the curator of a new Philipsz commission this fall in New York. “On a very basic, basic level,” he added, “sound is one of our first experiences – in the uterus, in fact.”

Ms. Philipsz’s new piece, called Day Is Done, will be the first permanent work of contemporary art on Governors Island, a former military site just south of Manhattan whose public spaces are being revamped with a budget so far of $75 million. Ms. Philipsz is mounting four old-fashioned “trumpet” speakers – the kind you’d see in an old ballpark – across the facade of a sprawling old barracks, and for an hour every evening, they will broadcast the notes of the bugle call Taps. The tones of the ghostly melody will pass from speaker to speaker, fanning out across the island’s open spaces.

At a test run one cold day in the spring, the piece evoked the era when Taps would have been played daily on the island, while it also triggered thoughts of military funerals and loss of life. (On 11 September 2001, those on the island were able to see the collapse of the twin towers.)

Day Is Done also evokes New York’s maritime presence. Visiting from her home in Berlin for the test run, Ms. Philipsz said that after the recording had played on site for the first time, “we thought it was still on.” She added: “But it was the sound of a ship’s horn. We were so happy.”

Mr. Eccles pointed out that with a piece like Day Is Done, “you don’t have to recognize it as art, immediately” – meaning that any knee-jerk resistance to contemporary art is less likely to kick in. “A sound work allows you to do something quite complex that might be unacceptable in another medium,” he said.

That could be because of the role MP3s and podcasts now play in our lives and because of our new comfort with the immaterial world of pure data, which makes immaterial sound art seem less esoteric. Sound waves floating through air may not seem any more exotic than information flowing through cyberspace.

There’s yet another ambitious sound piece about to open in New York. On 10 September 2013, the Metropolitan Museum will present Forty Part Motet, an installation by the Canadian Janet Cardiff that may be one of the best works, in any medium, of the last decades and the first work in sound at the Metropolitan. A piece like Ms. Cardiff’s “opens people’s eyes to a different art form that they wouldn’t expect to see at the Met,” said Anne Strauss, the project’s curator. “It’s something we can provide more easily, than, say, performance art.”

We were meeting far uptown in Manhattan, in a twelfth-century chapel at the heart of the Met’s Cloisters branch, now celebrating its seventy-fifth year as a home for medieval art. The forty speakers of Cardiff’s piece will be installed in a ring in that chapel, each one transmitting the sound of a single musical part from the choral extravaganza Spem in Alium, composed around 1570 by Thomas Tallis. Ms. Cardiff’s piece manages to take one of the most imposing masterpieces of Western music and reduce it to modest human elements. As you sidle up to any one speaker, the single voice you hear seems frail and at sea, and that stands in touching contrast to the grand effect that comes when you stand in the work’s center and hear all forty parts combined. Wherever Forty Part Motet gets installed, a visitor or two often leaves in tears.

The market has noticed sound art’s achievements. “I kind of resigned myself that I would never make any money,” Ms. Philipsz said. In fact, she’s now doing fine. She sold all three copies of her first installation at Tanya Bonakdar, the New York gallery that took her on in 2007. According to the gallery director, Ethan Sklar, her piece in the show at the Modern, also in an edition of three, is priced at almost $150,000. Mr. Sklar spoke of the appeal of Ms. Philipsz’s art to “collectors and institutions who are looking for the strongest and most challenging work.”

It also doesn’t hurt, he pointed out, that there are fewer headaches in storing and shipping a Philipsz data disc than some massive sculptural piece, although her sound fills space just as impressively: “You can have an epic work that comes down to a box.”

But it is still early days in the marketing of sound art. Both the auction houses Sotheby’s and Christie’s say that they have not sold a single sonic work, whereas they’ve begun to get good prices for major videos. Sound art’s vaguely unworldly air may actually increase its appeal.

“It’s not really commodified at this moment, which makes it approachable,” Ms. London said. “All of these works have a poetry, and a fleetingness.”

The mainstream’s embrace of sound art may mask something peculiar: that even as the field reaches new heights, it’s also in crisis. Art-trained figures like Ms. Philipsz and Ms. Cardiff, who build work around the sounds that we care most about – and who resist the whole idea of a coherent genre called “sound art” – are up against a sonic old guard, sometimes including younger figures, that one artist has referred to as the “honk-tweet” school.

Aligned with experimental music rather than visual art, the honk-tweeters are interested in strange beeps and buzzings for their own sakes. They craft what the sound artist, theorist and blogger Seth Kim-Cohen refers to as purely cochlear, rather than fully mindful, sound art.

In June, Mr. Kim-Cohen chided the survey at the Modern for including such work, which he described as the sonic equivalent of Op Art, a movement in painting “that does not demand (or merit) serious critical response,” as he has written. “Surely,” he blogged, “if the (visual) art world is now willing to embrace sound, it should do so according to the same criteria of quality and engagement that it demands of other media.”

Caleb Kelly, a scholar who recently published a book called Sound, compiling a range of essays on the art form, said he believes that pieces like Ms. Cardiff’s Motet, or the riffs on Hollywood soundtracks by the Swiss art star Christian Marclay, will still matter in a century, whereas today’s honk-tweeters (“dial twiddlers,” Ms. Philipsz calls them) will likely disappear, if they keep doing retreads of John Cage’s postwar innovations.

Sound artists like to point out that while you can close your eyes to an image you hate, you can’t close your ears to a noise. That gives them power but also puts them at risk. If a honk or a tweet does no more than annoy, visitors will vote with their feet.

Blake Gopnik – The New York Times

The Kunst of the Keller Quartet

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acoustics, Budapest, Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, cello, counterpoint, ECM Records, fugue, Judit Szabó, Keller Quartet, Kings Place, Michael Church, National Socialists, polyphony, saxophone, tempo, The Art of Fugue, The Independent, timbre, vibrato, viola, violin, violoncello

The Keller Quartet

The story of Bach’s pen slipping from his lifeless fingers while composing The Art of Fugue (BWV 1080) – which ends in mid-bar, notes hanging in the air – may be apocryphal, but this work will always be one of music’s sacred mysteries.

It is thought he began it at a time when his overriding interest lay in the technicalities of counterpoint – how to achieve “natural” polyphony while obeying mechanical rules – and that he went back to it when musical dramaturgy was uppermost in his mind. His son Carl Philipp Emanuel tried to drum up interest in it by pointing out that his father had encoded his name in the unfinished final fugue, but the sheet music didn’t sell and he had to dispose of the printer’s plates as scrap metal. Since then the work has exerted ever-increasing fascination – the Nazis flourished it as being iconically German – and Bach’s keyboard scoring has been trumped by scorings for a wide variety of instruments, including saxophones.

If the most successful transpositions have been for string quartet, that’s for two good reasons: these instruments bring out the voices in high relief, and their combined sound can generate the choral effects which Bach was often implicitly striving for. And to hear the Budapest-based Keller Quartet play this work in the perfect acoustic of Kings Place on 1 May 2013 was an unforgettable experience. Any lingering keyboard thoughts were banished in the first few bars by the muscular dissonances and by the sheer glow of their sound, and as each successive fugue added its variation – inverted, back to front, inside out – the structure attained magnificence. The timbre was vibrato-free, the tempi were vivid and varied, and though the sound of Judit Szabó’s cello sometimes stood out as a particular delight, the synergy was ideal. One had the sense, as the four bows finally froze in mid-air, of having assisted at a performance for the gods. Anyone interested can catch this ensemble (with two cast-changes) playing the same work twenty years ago for ECM Records, and with the same poise.

Michael Church – The Independent