Four-Limbed Performance

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Anna Magdalena Bach, Arnolt Schlick, bassline, Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, color, counterpoint, CounterPunch, dance, David Yearsley, flute, fugue, galant, oboe, organ, ornamentation, pedal, polyphony, prelude, Prelude and Fugue in E minor, Prelude and Fugue in E-flat Major, St. Thomas School, trio sonata, violin, Wilhelm Friedemann Bach, woodwind

For some five centuries the trio has been the true test of an organist. The mode of playing in which each hand takes a single voice while the feet are responsible for the bass line had already enjoyed a long history before the 1720s when Johann Sebastian Bach set about revolutionizing the genre. The early modern German masters of organ polyphony, chief among them the blind virtuoso Arnolt Schlick, honed their virtuosity in three-part textures interweaving independent lines; in contrast to the sometimes overwhelming effect of their more expansive polyphonic experiments of six (or more) parts, the trio produced a contrapuntal fabric whose clarity not only allowed for the expression of nuance, but also exposed the slightest technical or musical weakness in the performer.

Schlick and has contemporaries had treated the organ trio largely as if it were a vocal piece, with little crossing of the voices and only short bursts of figuration or ornament. Bach almost certainly knew none of the trios of Schlick’s generation, although he was acquainted with numerous seventeenth-century examples of three-part writing at the organ, likewise derived essentially from vocal models. But Bach’s trios bear only a distant relation to their precursors, instead meeting, and often surpassing, the technical demands of contemporary ensemble trio sonatas of his time. Using all four limbs, one virtuosic organist had to do the duties of three instrumental virtuosos.

The organ was the ultimate tool for such an undertaking. The central German instruments known to Bach were equipped with an array of registers that imitated contemporary strings and woodwinds. In Bach’s trios each hand was assigned to a separate keyboard and therefore a distinct sound, while the feet had yet another in the pedal. The treble lines might be rendered as if on oboe and violin, or as a pair of complementary flutes above the bass, or in any number of combinations from the endless possibilities offered by Bach’s organs.

With the aid of such a palette of colors, Bach could make the trio sing. But he could also make it dance. His trios were as much physical as musical: the organist’s entire body had to be attuned to the pathos and sweetness of adagios and the insouciant athleticism of allegros. This physicality was a crucial part of Bach’s musical identity, and contemporaries and students praised the speed and accuracy of his feet, either alone, or with his hands. His obituary published in 1754 – a document whose title described the deceased expressly as “A World Famous Organist” – claimed that, “With his two feet, [Bach] could play things on the pedals that many not unskillful clavier players would find it bitter enough to have to play with five fingers.” The essential feature of German organ playing was the independence required of hands and feet, in contrast to the mostly supportive underpinning provided by the pedals of other European traditions. This independence was exposed at its most relentless and most refined in Bach’s trios.

The main sources for the six Trio Sonatas (BWV 525-530) are two manuscripts stemming from the Bach family: an autograph copy probably made around 1727; and another copy in the hand of Anna Magdalena Bach, later divided and the missing section then re-copied by Wilhelm Friedemann Bach. These manuscripts suggest just how important the trios were in the musical life of the Bach family and Bach’s students, not least in the formation of one of the greatest organists of the next generation – Bach’s first son, Wilhelm Friedemann. After J. S. Bach’s death, the organ trios were held up as the ultimate test of true organ playing. In the list of organ works in Johann Nikolaus Forkel’s 1802 Bach biography, a work that relied largely on information gathered from Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach and Wilhelm Friedemann, the trios “for two claviers and obbligato pedals” come as the final entry, and the prime carrier of Bach’s musical and familial legacy: “Bach composed [the trios] for his eldest son, Wilhelm Friedemann, who, by practicing them, had to prepare himself to become the great performer on the organ that he afterward was. It is impossible to say enough of their beauty. They were composed when the author was in his most mature age and may be considered as his chief work of this description.” A later eighteenth-century history of Leipzig’s Thomasschule praised Bach as the greatest organist of his day and described Wilhelm Friedemann as the son who inherited the organ art most directly. The account goes on to claim that Bach’s organ music “surpassed all that had previously been written for the instrument.” The trios were the clearest expression of a technique that demanded unwavering independence: “the left hand had to be as capable as the right, and he treated the pedal as its own voice.” Other Bach devotees praised the timeless modernity of the trios; some three decades after his father’s death C. P. E. Bach asserted that the trios “are written in such galant style that they still sound very good, and never grow old, but on the contrary will outlive all revolutions of fashion in music.” For C. P. E. Bach the collection was the crowning proof of the pedal’s importance in organ playing.

But for all their galant finesse, there are pitfalls at every turn and the slightest hitch will be noticed. Things can go immediately and irrevocably wrong as in no other genre: it is impossible to fake your way through a trio sonata movement.

None of this is to gainsay the impact and difficulty of Bach’s great preludes and fugues. Because my performance of the six sonatas had to be divided between two CDs, I took the opportunity to enclose each of the two sets of three sonatas with one of Bach’s monumental free works. Bach himself adopted this conceit at least once, framing the magisterial collection of chorale preludes of the Clavierübung III (1739) with the Prelude and Fugue in E-flat Major (BWV 552). Bach would certainly not have minded that work’s removal from its original published context so that the prelude could introduce the first trio sonata (BWV 525) in the same key, and the fugue provide an apocalyptic peroration after the sprightly last movement of the D-minor sonata (BWV 527).

When considered in light of Bach’s vaunted (and sometimes vilified) taste for harmonic and contrapuntal complexity, the six sonatas are not especially rich in chromaticism or shocking intervallic relations. There are unforgettable exceptions: among the most arresting is the stabbing angularity of the second fugal theme in the third movement of the C minor Sonata (BWV 526/3); and the half-steps descending amidst arabesques at the close of the middle movement of the final sonata (BWV 530/2). The generally diatonic harmonic approach (even if inflected with many unexpected Bachian turns and twists) and the cantabile profile of the themes led C. P. E. Bach to cherish the collection’s galant refinement.

Any deficiencies in the Bachian diet of chromaticism are made up for with the Prelude and Fugue in E minor (BWV 548); the prelude establishes the key of the ensuing sonata in E minor (BWV 528), and the fugue offers a sprawling coda after the final movement, a bright fugal frolic, of the last sonata in G Major (BWV 530). The angular chromaticism of the subject of the great “Wedge” fugue is itself singular: thrillingly transgressive, the piece is not a retreat from fashion and favor but a challenge to both. Heard against such sublime experiments, the trio sonatas can hardly be accused of pandering to prevailing fashion but instead show that the task of training organists in the art of four-limbed performance can be, in Bach’s hands and feet, a tremendously imaginative and challenging exercise in gracefulness and poise, both musical and physical.

David Yearsley – CounterPunch

A Piano Lover’s Reader

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A Pianist’s A–Z: A Piano Lover’s Reader, Alfred Brendel, Beethoven, cantata, chorale prelude, clavichord, coloratura, concerto, counterpoint, Faber & Faber Ltd, Fantasia in A minor, fantasy, fugue, Goldberg Variations, Handel, harpsichord, Mozart, opera, oratorio, partita, piano, polyphony, Schubert, suite, toccata, tone color, transcription

Alfred Brendel‘s new book, A Pianist’s A–Z: A Piano Lover’s Reader, will include the following entry on Bach when it is published in September 2013 by Faber & Faber Ltd:

When Beethoven, talking about Bach, exclaimed that to do him justice, the master’s name should not have been Bach (brook) but Meer (the sea), his remark was relevant not only to the surpassing abundance and diversity of more than a thousand compositions but also to the creative power that had come together in this supreme exponent of the most widely extended family of professional musicians ever. I see Johann Sebastian Bach as the grand master of music for all keyboard instruments: the initiator of the piano concerto, the creator of the Goldberg Variations (BWV 988), the master of the solo suite and partita, of chorale preludes, fugues, and cantatas.

When, in the postwar years, Bach’s piano works were assigned exclusively to the harpsichord or clavichord, young pianists were deprived of the main source of polyphonic playing. To most of us, the assumption that Bach doesn’t fit with the modern piano is an outmoded viewpoint. On present-day instruments one can individualize each voice and give plasticity to the contrapuntal progress of a fugue. The playing can be orchestral, atmospheric, and colorful, and the piano can sing. To curtail in such a way a composer who himself had been one of the most resolute transcribers of works by himself and others might seem misguided even to practitioners of “historical performance.”

Alongside the boundless wealth of Bachian counterpoint the free-roaming creator of fantasies and toccatas must not be forgotten. In the spectacular Fantasia in A minor (BWV 922), to give just one example, no bar reveals where the next one will go.

Since the second half of the twentieth century something miraculous has happened: the complementary figure of George Frederic Handel has reemerged. The opportunity to familiarize myself with a multitude of Handel’s works has been, for me, one of the greatest gifts. The drama of his operas and oratorios, his vocal invention (by no means inferior to Mozart’s or Schubert’s), the fire of his coloratura, and his characteristic clarity and generosity now make him stand beside the figure of Bach as comparable in stature.

– The New York Review of Books

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

The Powers of Bach

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Amsterdam, Bach Collegium Japan, Berkeley, BIS, cantata, Choir and Organ, Dutch, English, German, Gustav Leonhardt, harpsichord, Japanese, Juilliard Baroque Orchestra, Kobe University, Leipzig, Masaaki Suzuki, Messiah, Netherlands Radio Chamber Philharmonic, Netherlands Radio Choir, Nicolaus Harnoncourt, organ, Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra, piano, Piet Kee, polyphony, San Francisco, Schola Cantorum, Ton Koopman, Yale School of Music

Last June, the German city of Leipzig awarded Japanese conductor Masaaki Suzuki the prestigious Bach Medal 2012. Suzuki, an internationally renowned Bach specialist and founder of the Bach Collegium Japan (BCJ), received the medal for “significant contributions” to “the dissemination of the works of Johann Sebastian Bach in his homeland Japan through his work as organist, harpsichordist and conductor.” The jury stated that: “concerning the repertoire of Bach, which has always been much-appreciated in Japan,” Suzuki has “created an awareness for a scientifically and historically oriented performance practice in Japan and the entire Asian region.”

The inclusion of Suzuki in an impressive group of honorees (among them: Gustav Leonhardt, Nicolaus Harnoncourt, and Ton Koopman) came as a surprise to no one, yet things were different in 1995, when Suzuki released the first volume of BCJ’s complete Bach cantatas. The Swedish independent label BIS made a disc, reportedly from a single recording session. That new arrival on the international early-music scene was met with skepticism and even some latent hostility: How, listeners wondered, could someone from an ancient Eastern culture adequately comprehend Bach, the epitome of Western classical music? And the question “how dare he?!” hovered right below the surface.

“We were very surprised that they thought that Japan and Bach don’t go together,” says Suzuki. “And it is actually a complete misunderstanding. Bach’s music is a universal language that can easily overcome any kind of cultural border. He is one of the most famous European composers in Japan. Every child who starts playing the piano plays Bach at some point, and everybody who goes to a conservatory has to study Bach. Nobody is a stranger to Bach’s music.”

In an interview with Choir and Organ in 2005, Suzuki explained how the Japanese quickly developed an enormous appetite for all aspects of Western culture, especially music, once the country opened up to the West. From the early seventeenth century until late in the nineteenth, Japan was officially closed to the West, and only the Netherlands had limited access to it. After World War II, the interest in Western art music merely increased.

Niels Swinkels spoke with Masaaki Suzuki on his arrival in the Bay Area from Amsterdam, where he conducted a number of concerts with the Netherlands Radio Chamber Philharmonic and the Netherlands Radio Choir.

Niels Swinkels (NS) In a recent YouTube interview for the Early Music Festival in Utrecht, you responded in perfect Dutch. Then I remembered that, after you graduated from Tokyo University of the Arts, you went to Amsterdam to study harpsichord with Ton Koopman and organ with Piet Kee. No wonder you speak the language so well!

Masaaki Suzuki (MS) I studied in Amsterdam between 1979 and 1983, but during this last visit I realized that my Dutch is not really sufficient anymore [switches to excellent Dutch]. My Dutch is good enough for everyday use, but not good enough for an interview about music [laughs].

NS You are in San Francisco for a series of concerts with Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra, a Bach Christmas program, and two performances of Messiah. Is this your first time with Philharmonia Baroque?

MS Yes, this is the very first time. I have been in Berkeley twice, with my own ensemble. The first time was in 2003 with the whole group – choir and orchestra – and the second time was 2006 or 2007, with a kind of chamber ensemble. I haven’t been here since, so that is quite a long time.

NS You probably already know some of the musicians in Philharmonia Baroque?

MS Well, actually, yes, I have worked with several of them already. And all the vocal soloists are alumni from the Schola Cantorum at Yale. I picked them myself.

NS At Yale University, you are visiting professor of choral conducting and conductor of the Schola Cantorum. How long have you held that position?

MS I was there in October and this was my third year. I go there every spring and autumn for a few weeks. We do at least one big project, in addition to smaller things like chamber music and so on. Every year, we do a program together with the Juilliard Baroque Orchestra, and every other year we do an international tour. We were in Italy last year, and next year we go to Japan and Singapore. I am very thrilled about that.

NS Your parents were both amateur musicians, and Christians. How has your Christian background influenced your perception of Western music in general and Bach’s music in particular?

MS Without this background I probably wouldn’t have come to this field at all. When I was in middle school, I started playing the organ every Sunday during worship. I enjoyed it very much, and tried to play all of Bach’s organ works, but the organ was actually only a small, pedal-pumped harmonium; it was impossible to play Bach on that. So I decided that I had to play a real organ, and took lessons in high school. My first teacher was a Belgian Catholic priest who was also a musicologist, specializing in fifteenth and sixteenth-century polyphonic music. I wouldn’t have started this without my religious background. I have always felt a familiarity with Christian music and culture, and not only the worship. I can’t say that I am very religious, but I believe in God.

I believe in the power of music, and especially in Bach’s sacred works.

NS I have heard you talk about the consoling, nourishing power of music.

MS In Japan, so many people have been hurt by disasters like tsunamis and earthquakes. They were really consoled by the music and the text translations of the Bach cantatas. Quite ironically, right before we started recording in 1995, we had a big earthquake in Kobe. Following the disaster, the chapel in which we were recording [at Kobe University] was one of the few concert venues in which you could still perform. All the other concert halls in Kobe city were either damaged or used for storage of dead bodies. We postponed the project, of course, but in the meantime we had a couple of charity concerts for the victims of the earthquake. Many people told us how the music spoke to them. I believe in the power of music, and especially in Bach’s sacred works. This kind of suffering hasn’t changed since Bach’s time. In the eighteenth century death was probably closer to everyday life; Bach had twenty children but only a few made it to adulthood. Death was much more normal in those days, but people’s feelings about the death of a family member or a friend haven’t changed.

NS Can you explain Bach’s universal appeal?

MS When you perform German cantatas in German, it is not easy for any kind of foreign audience. In Asian countries like Japan, even English doesn’t work so well. European languages are very difficult for our audience, but we can provide a Japanese translation to the audience members and then we get a chance to talk and think about the context of the text. Bach’s music helps a lot. Sometimes you can understand the context of a cantata without knowing the text itself, because the music is so powerful.

NS What is your part in the appreciation of Bach in Japan?

MS We have given Japanese audiences the opportunity to hear live Bach performances. There are many people in Japan who have listened to LPs and CDs for a long time. I have had many reactions and letters from older people who are really fond of Bach’s music – people who have been listening to this or that recording for fifty years but still didn’t have the opportunity to experience a live, professional performance of a Bach cantata. There used to be only amateur choirs and ensembles playing this repertoire. We were the first professional ensemble to really concentrate on Bach.

NS How far along are you with your cantata project?

MS Volume 52 has just been released, and we actually have only one more project recording. Volume 54 has already been recorded, and volume 55 will be the last one of the church cantatas, which makes me a little sad. We will just keep going with the secular cantatas for a couple of years, and in between we will also do Lutheran masses. We will, of course, continue with live performances.

NS Can you compare your own Bach cantata project with others, such as Gustav Leonhardt and Nicolaus Harnoncourt, who in 1971 started recording the first complete cycle of Bach cantatas on period instruments?

MS The Harnoncourt and Leonhardt recordings were sort of my starting point. They were very important to me. For them, it was much more difficult to do the cantatas than for us; they didn’t have new Bach editions or new research and so on. They actually developed and discovered a lot of things during their projects. It actually took us the same number of years to record the cantatas – about eighteen years. Of course, once you are finished, you always want to start again, but then you would need another eighteen years.

Niels Swinkels – San Francisco Classical Voice

Bach, the Misunderstood Musician

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Augustus the Strong, Auschwitz, Barthold Heinrich Brockes, Berlin, Berlin Cathedral, chorale, circumcision, David Conway, Easter, Frederick the Great, Günter Grass, Good Friday, Hamburg, Handel, Jews, Johann Philipp Kirnberger, John Locke, Leipzig, Martin Luther, Mendelssohn, Muslims, National Socialism, Nazis, Nobel, Oxford University, passion, polyphony, Prussia, Richard Eichenauer, Rick Erickson, Sigiswald Kuijken, Sing-Akademie zu Berlin, St. John Passion, St. Matthew Passion, St. Thomas Church, St. Thomas School, Telemann, University of Leipzig, Wagner, Wilhelm Friedemann Bach

The year 2012 is unlikely to go down well in the annals of Jewish-German relations.

In June, a German court ruled that religious circumcision of minors is a criminal act. Two months earlier, Germany’s largest-selling daily broadsheet had published a poem by Nobel prize-winning author – and former SS recruit – Günter Grass, accusing Israel of endangering world peace.

A month before that, parishioners of Berlin’s Cathedral threatened to leave their church should it allow an Easter performance of Johann Sebastian Bach’s St. John Passion [BWV 245]. The libretto had been altered by three Jews to make it less “Judeophobic.” They had replaced passages depicting Jews calling for Jesus’s crucifixion with extracts from Jewish liturgy and Muslim poetry. In the event, the altered version went ahead.

Of the three events, the Bach boycott was perhaps the most predictable. Germany, Jews, and music have often proved an unhappy combination. From Richard Wagner’s bitter diatribe against Jews in music to the forcing of musically proficient prisoners to form an orchestra at Auschwitz, the music of Germany has seldom given Jews much cause for celebration.

From Wagner to the orchestra at Auschwitz, Germany, Jews and music have often proved an unhappy combination

Add to this mix Martin Luther, founder of the denomination to which Bach belonged, and it becomes still more volatile. Among Luther’s works, in Bach’s extensive theology library, was his notorious essay, On the Jews and their Lies, which declared: “Be on your guard against the Jews, knowing that wherever they have their synagogues, nothing is found but a den of devils. . . . [T]hey are nothing but thieves and robbers . . . one should toss out these lazy rogues by the seat of their pants . . . eject them forever from this country.” [Rick Erickson notes: “In his Bach’s St. John Passion and the Jews, Michael Marissen reports that ‘Lutheran church bodies have officially repudiated Luther’s anti-Jewish writings.'”]

Given how widely known Bach’s Lutheranism was, it is small wonder the Nazis adulated him. To mark the two hundred fiftieth anniversary of his birth in 1935, they helped stage a Reich Bach Festival in Leipzig, where Bach spent his last three decades as cantor of the choir school of the Thomas church and director of church music. It was there he composed his most celebrated choral works, including the St. John Passion.

Of the Leipzig celebrations, a newspaper at the time reported: “The Führer followed the austere music of Bach seriously . . . It is a music in harmony with his spirit – austere, disciplined to its core, and German through and through.” This was also the view of Nazi musicologist Richard Eichenauer, who asserted that: “The fugue is blond and blue-eyed.” Eichenauer also said: “The nature of the German chorale in its great era during the religious wars contained nothing specifically Christian in musical terms, but rather something generally and eternally German, i. e., that elemental joy in combat, a characteristic of Nordic man.”

In such a context, some might applaud the three Jews who revised the St. John Passion. Others might wonder why any Jew would bother at all with Bach’s music.

In fact, there is no reason why Jews should not embrace Bach and his St. John Passion. In some ways, they have more reason than most, Jews having played such a decisive role in preserving it for posterity as well as in elevating Bach to his current position among the world’s best known and most widely performed composers.

The St. John Passion is regarded as antisemitic not just through depicting Jews as calling for the death of Jesus, but doing so in a particularly frenzied and discordant manner. However, one should not rush to judgment without some understanding of the nature and history of Christian liturgy.

For a millennium before the Reformation, the liturgy for the Christian Holy Week (the seven days before Easter) included readings from all four gospels of the so-called “Passion” – the arrest, trial and crucifixion of Jesus. Traditionally, the evening service for Good Friday was given over to reading the account of the Passion according to John.

In time, these Easter readings from John’s gospel became subject to ever more elaborate musical setting. By the time of Bach’s appointment at Leipzig in 1723, part of his duties involved providing a musical setting of the St. John Passion for the Good Friday service.

Unlike Telemann and Handel, Bach could not simply avail himself totally of the 1710 libretto by Barthold Heinrich Brockes. This was because Brockes had partly précised John’s text, whereas Bach was under instructions to reproduce unaltered in his church music all scriptural passages from which he drew. It is John’s gospel that states Jews called for Jesus’ death. So the way Bach depicts Jews in his St. John Passion proves nothing more than that he was adhering to the terms of his employment contract.

In Bach’s day, few Lutherans took seriously their founder’s teachings about Jews. Most of the better educated ones, among whom Bach was decidedly one, were tolerant of and accommodating towards them. For example, in April 1715, the Hamburg Senate issued a proclamation relating to Easter renditions of John’s Passion. It asserted that: “The right and proper goal of reflection on the Passion must be aimed at the awakening of true penitence . . . Other things, such as violent invectives and exclamations against . . . the Jews . . . can by no means be tolerated.”

Their accommodating attitude towards Jews was shared by many of Leipzig’s better educated Lutherans, as is illustrated by a document discovered only in 1994. This is a report, dated 14 May 1714, written and signed by theologians at the University of Leipzig. The report’s existence had long been known of, but not its contents.

The report had been commissioned by Augustus, Elector of Saxony and King of Poland, who had wanted to know, as its title indicates, Whether the Jews Use Christian Blood, in their ceremonies. Many suspect the Leipzig theologians were consulted because Augustus knew in advance they would exonerate the Jews. He needed theological ammunition against his less enlightened subjects who were calling for the banishment of Jews – on whose loans and tax receipts he was reliant.

In no uncertain terms, the report denied there was any evidence that Jews used Christian blood and plenty of reason to suggest they would have considered its use anathema. Among the report’s signatories were two highly progressive Leipzig theologians. One, its principal author, had studied at Oxford during the 1690s, becoming a keen follower of John Locke and translating the English philosopher’s 1693 tract on education. The other, who outlived Bach in Leipzig by two years, venerated that first theologian and also possessed a portrait of the Rabbi of Amsterdam.

It is inconceivable they would not have known and fully agreed with Locke’s 1689 Letter Concerning Toleration, which championed tolerance towards Jews, even supporting their being accorded full citizenship rights, along with Muslims.

Bach seems to have been no less devoid of antisemitism. Although unable to alter John’s account of the Passion, he had discretion over what additional material to include in its musical setting. While he drew on Brockes’s libretto, Bach refrained from borrowing any of its non-gospel passages that some consider hostile to Jews. Instead, the passages he added firmly locate the blame for Jesus’s death in the sinful behavior of all errant humankind. Jews go entirely unmentioned in his St. Matthew Passion [BWV 244], composed two years later; that gospel’s account having not mentioned them by name.

Bach also identified with the Levite musicians of the Temple, whose job was to summon the Divine Presence through music. In his copy of the Bible, he wrote appreciative comments next to verses from the Book of Chronicles alluding to this. And, upon turning fifty, the normally taciturn composer compiled a family tree showing how far back in his male lineage professional musicianship ran. Some have seen in this act a symbolic fulfillment of the biblical injunction for the Hebrews to engage in family reunion in the fiftieth “Jubilee” year.

At the time of Bach’s death in 1750 some fifteen years later, however, it might have seemed that the musical offerings of this Lutheran “Levite” had fallen on deaf ears. Few of his compositions had been published; manuscript copies were scarce and expensive; his polyphonic style unfashionable; and his choral works unperformed.

For the next eighty years, Bach’s musical flame was largely kept alight by a small coterie of Berlin Jews, members of the Itzig and Mendelssohn families. In 1804, union between them was forged through the marriage of Abraham Mendelssohn, son of the philosopher Moses, to Lea Salomon, daughter of the Berlin banker Jacob Salomon and Bella Itzig.

Bella was one of sixteen children of Daniel Itzig, court banker to Frederick the Great of Prussia and a close friend of Moses Mendelssohn. Among Bella’s ten sisters was a younger sister Sara, who married another prominent Berlin Jewish banker, Samuel Solomon Levy.

During their childhoods, Bella and her elder sister Hanna received musical instruction from Johann Philipp Kirnberger, one of Bach’s foremost students. Sara was taught by Bach’s eldest son, Wilhelm Friedemann, and became an accomplished performer of Bach’s keyboard works – and an avid collector of his manuscript scores. After ceasing to perform publicly in 1816, Sara Levy donated her large collection of musical scores to the Berlin Sing-Akademie, a choral, later musical, society established in 1791 by Carl Fasch, assistant to Bach’s second son.

After Fasch’s death in 1800, directorship of the Sing-Akademie passed to his pupil, Carl Friedrich Zelter, who later taught composition to the children of Abraham and Lea Mendelssohn, Fanny and Felix. Abraham and Lea may have met at the informal Sunday gatherings of the Sing-Akadamie, both having joined in their teens.

Like her aunt, Lea Mendelssohn was a keen lover of Bach’s music, as was her husband Abraham. After the death of its last custodian in 1805, Bach’s estate was auctioned. From it, the couple purchased the bulk of Bach’s manuscript scores that they donated to the Sing-Akadamie. The music it thereby acquired included more than one hundred unique autograph scores of Bach’s works among which is likely to have been a manuscript copy of the St. Matthew Passion. For shortly after the donation, Zelter began to perform excerpts at the Sing-Akademie.

Felix Mendelssohn joined the Sing-Akademie in 1819 aged ten, quickly developing such a keen interest in the St. Matthew Passion that his grandmother arranged for a professional copy to be made for a birthday present.

Six years later, in April 1829, Felix Mendelssohn put on and conducted the first public performance of Bach’s St. Matthew Passion since the death of its composer. So well received was it that a second performance was hastily arranged. Practically all of Prussia’s most eminent public figures attended one or other performance. Together they cemented Bach’s reputation in Germany.

To secure their residency rights, rather than out of religious conviction, Abraham Mendelssohn had all his children converted to Lutheranism while young. But Felix, against his father’s advice, never repudiated his Jewish roots or his grandfather’s surname. After his triumphant performance, Felix reputedly quipped to an actor friend who had sung the part of Jesus: “And to think that it must be an actor and a Jew-boy who had to restore the greatest Christian musical work.”

The Nazis made no distinction between race and religion. In their endeavor to erase from Germany all trace of the contribution of Jews to its musical heritage, they removed in 1936 the memorial statue of Felix Mendelssohn from outside of the Leipzig concert hall.

On that basis alone, Jews today should not emulate their practice by ignoring or doctoring the music of Germany’s non-Jewish composers, especially Bach’s. Given how prominent a role Jews have played in preserving and promoting it, they should instead have no compunction in celebrating and enjoying it – with passion.

David Conway – The Jewish Chronicle

The Passion Tradition

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alto, aria, bass, chant, Eyn Sermon von der Betrachtung des heiligenn leydens Christi, Good Friday, Holy Week, Johann Kuhnau, Johann Walter, Leipzig, Martin Luther, New Church, oratorio, passion, polyphony, recitative, Reformation, soprano, St. John Passion, St. Matthew Passion, St. Nicholas Church, St. Thomas Church, Telemann, tenor, Vespers

The Holy Week tradition of reading a Gospel narrative of the trial, crucifixion and burial of Jesus, called a “passion,” dates back at least to the fourth century. During the Middle Ages, the passion was chanted, rather than just spoken, and specific voices began to assume the roles of Jesus (bass), the Evangelist (tenor) and the crowd (altos and sopranos). Eventually, polyphonic settings were composed for various passages,  and by the time of the Reformation, through-composed passions were entirely polyphonic.

Martin Luther disapproved of many of these practices, and in his 1520 pamphlet Eyn Sermon von der Betrachtung des heiligenn leydens Christi, he declared, “The Passion of Christ should not be acted out in words and pretense, but in real life.” Despite his admonition, sung passion performances were widespread among the newly established Lutheran churches, and Luther’s collaborator, Johann Walter, wrote the simple responsorial passion used in Leipzig’s churches until Georg Philipp Telemann broke with tradition in 1717 at the Good Friday morning service at the New Church. Telemann’s passion oratorio, with its arias, recitatives and instrumental accompaniments, was an immediate success and paved the way for Bach’s predecessor, Johann Kuhnau, to gain permission to perform his own two-part concerted passion, before and after the sermon, at the Good Friday Vespers at St. Thomas Church in 1721.

Thus the stage was set for Bach’s introduction of his St. John Passion (BWV 245) at Good Friday Vespers at Leipzig’s St. Nicholas Church in 1724 and his St. Matthew Passion (BWV 244) at St. Thomas Church on Good Friday in 1727.