• Boulder Bach Festival Website
  • Join Us on Facebook
  • ColoradoGives.org Profile
  • Boulder Bach Newsletter

Boulder Bach Beat

~ Boulder Bach Beat hopes to stimulate conversations about the ways Bach’s music succeeds in building bridges between populations separated by language, culture, geography and time.

Boulder Bach Beat

Tag Archives: Sigiswald Kuijken

Neve Shalom Synagogue

25 Wednesday Feb 2015

Posted by Edward McCue in Bach's Works, Other Artists, World View

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

architect, Bach Before & After, Bernar Motola, Beyoğlu, Daily Sabah, Elyo Ventura, Galata, Gülşah Dark, Istanbul, Jews, Neve Shalom Synagogue, Rav Rafael Saban, refugee, Sigiswald Kuijken, Sonatas and Partitas for solo violin, synagogue, Turkish, violin

The dome of Neve Shalom Synagogue

The dome of Neve Shalom Synagogue

The construction of Neve Shalom Synagogue, the central and largest Sephardic synagogue in the Galata neighborhood of Istanbul, today encompassed by the Beyoğlu district, was completed in 1951 by architects Elyo Ventura and Bernar Motola. At its opening, Chief Rabbi Rav Rafael Saban expressed his wish that it would be “not only a place to pray, but a place where the rich and poor, the young and old, the ignorant and the learned could gather and meet in a spirit of brotherhood and sincere equality.” In 1992 a prayer of thanks was offered to the Turkish nation on the five hundredth anniversary of their acceptance of the Jewish refugees who had been driven from their original homes into these new lands.

On 26 February 2015, as part of the the music series “Bach Before & After,” Sigiswald Kuijken will present a program featuring Bach’s Sonatas and Partitas (BWV 1001-6) at Neve Shalom Synagogue.

Gülşah Dark– Daily Sabah

Bach in Valletta

04 Sunday Jan 2015

Posted by Edward McCue in Bach's Predecessors, Bach's Successors, Bach's Works, Other Artists, World View

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Cappella Mediterranea, countertenor, dance, Dmytro Sukhovienko, Ensemble Villancico, European Union Baroque Ensemble, Floriana, flute, Geronimo Abos, Gluck, Handel, Iestyn Davies, Il diluvio universale, Joanne Camilleon, Kölner Akademie, Leonardo García Alarcón, London, Lukas Foss, Malta Philharmonic Orchestra, Maltese, Michelangelo Falvetti, Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, Passacaglia Baroque Ensemble, Peter Stark, piano, Rebecca Hall, Robert King, Sigiswald Kuijken, St. John Co-Cathedral, St. John Passion, St. Publius Church, Suites for Unaccompanied Violoncello, Teatru Manoel, The King’s Consort, Valletta, Valletta International Baroque Ensemble, Valletta International Baroque Festival, violoncello da spalla

St. Publius Church in Floriana

St. Publius Church in Floriana

The third edition of the Valletta International Baroque Festival 2015 starts on 10 January 2015 with twenty-one events over fifteen days in seven venues.

The 2015 Festival is dedicated to the memory of Maltese composer Geronimo Abos as 2015 is the tercentennial anniversary of his birth. His music will be performed by Die Kölner Akademie, Passacaglia Baroque Ensemble and the Valletta International Baroque Ensemble.

The Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment returns to perform the glorious Bach St. John Passion (BWV 245) in St. John’s Co-Cathedral. This will be offset by Michelangelo Falvetti‘s magnificent Il diluvio universale, performed by the Cappella Mediterranea under the baton of Leonardo García Alarcón at St. Publius Church in Floriana, a new addition to the list of venues for 2015.

The Malta Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by Peter Stark, will present an innovative program of twentieth century works inspired by the Baroque which includes a flute concerto by Lukas Foss performed by the orchestra’s own flautist Rebecca Hall.

The Festival program also includes music ranging from Baroque piano transcriptions of music by Bach, Handel and Gluck, performed by Dmytro Sukhovienko, sacred and profane Baroque music from the Americas performed by Ensemble Villancico, and Handel concert arias presented by Robert King conducting The King’s Consort and countertenor Iestyn Davies.

Bach features strongly in this Festival. His Suites for Unaccompanied Violoncello (BWV 1007-12) are performed by the world-renowned Sigiswald Kuijken on a violoncello da spalla, and his Goldberg Variations (BWV 988) by local pianist Joanne Camilleon. The European Union Baroque Ensemble will perform music by Handel and his London friends, and the Festival’s resident ensemble, the Valletta International Baroque Ensemble, will perform at two concerts.

The Festival also includes events specifically for children and culminates with the Baroque Festival Ball to be held in Teatru Manoel on Saturday, 24 January 2015.

Bach in Istanbul

09 Thursday Oct 2014

Posted by Edward McCue in Bach's Predecessors, Bach's Works, Other Artists, World View

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli, basilica, Benjamin Alard, Dario Castello, Genügsamkeit, harpsichord, Heinrich Scheidemann, Ich ende behende, Istanbul, Istanbul Bach Days, Italian, Kuijken Ensemble, Marie Kuijken, Monteverdi, Purcell, Seufzer Tränen Kummer Not, Sigiswald Kuijken, soprano, St. Anthony of Padua Church, Today's Zaman, Turkish, violin

IstanbulcropOn 16 October 2014, the Kuijken Ensemble will perform at St. Anthony of Padua Church in Istanbul as part of the Turkish capital’s yearly Bach Days.

Violinist Sigiswald Kuijken will be joined by harpsichordist Benjamin Alard and soprano Marie Kuijken in the program “Towards Bach” that will feature works by Castello, Monteverdi, Scheidemann and Purcell as well as Bach’s Sonata (BWV 1019) and the soprano arias Genügsamkeit (from BWV 144), Seufzer, Tränen, Kummer, Not (from BWV 21) and Ich ende behende (from BWV 57).

St. Anthony of Padua Church, a minor basilica, was built in the early twentieth century by the local Italian community. Before he was elected to the papacy, Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli was attached to the church when he was the Vatican‘s ambassador to Turkey.

– Today’s Zaman

Bach Psychology

17 Monday Mar 2014

Posted by Edward McCue in Audio Recordings, Bach's Life, Bach's Predecessors, Bach's Successors, Bach's Works, Books, Films, Other Artists, Video Recordings

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Alzheimer's disease, Archiv Produktion, aria, Bach: The Learned Musician, Beethoven, Brahms, British Broadcasting Corporation, Busoni, cantata, Cantata Pilgrimage, cantor, Caravaggio, CD, Chaconne in D minor, Charles Ives, Chopin, Christoph Wolff, computer, concerto, counterpoint, dance, Davitt Moroney, deafness, dynamics, Eisenach, emotions, English Baroque Soloists, Eric Siblin, First World War, Freud, fugue, Giulio Cesare, Glenn Gould, Handel, Hannibal Lecter, harmony, hermeneutics, Holy Roman Empire, Johan Huizinga, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, John Butt, John Eliot Gardiner, Joseph Kerman, Kapellmeister, Leipzig, Leopold Stokowski, liturgical year, Los Angeles Review of Books, Magnificat, Mahler, Martin Geck, Martin Luther, Masaaki Suzuki, Mass in B minor, Mendelssohn, mental health, metaphysics, Michael Markham, Modernism, Mondrian, Monteverdi Choir, Mozart, Music in the Castle of Heaven, Nadia Boulanger, National Geographic Magazine, NBC Radio Orchestra, Nikolaus Harnoncourt, Oedipus, Ohrdruf, opera, Orchestre Révolutionaire et Romantique, Otto Klemperer, Palestrina, Passacaglia in C minor, passion, Paul Elie, performance practice, Peter Williams, Philippe Herreweghe, psychology, Pythagoras, Rachmaninoff, radio, Reinventing Bach, Rembrandt, rhythm, Richard Taruskin, Robert L. Marshall, Romanticism, rubato, Schumann, Second World War, serialism, Sharbat Gula, Sigiswald Kuijken, Sodom, St. John Passion, St. Matthew Passion, Steve McCurry, Stravinsky, Susan McClary, tautology, Telemann, tempo, The Silence of the Lambs, Thirty Years War, Thuringia, timbre, tone color, transcription, Trinity Sunday, vibrato, Vivaldi, Wagner, Wilhelm Furtwängler, YouTube

PsychologycropThere is an unofficial marker in the timeline of canonical classical music. It falls around 1800, during Beethoven’s lifetime, separating composers for whom biography matters to non-academic listeners from those for whom it doesn’t. It is assumed the listener needs to know about the lives of post-1800 composers: about the onset of Beethoven’s deafness and resulting feelings of alienation in order to understand the storming anger in his music, about Chopin’s sense of exile in order to properly feel the longing expressed in his, about Schumann’s struggles with mental illness in order to properly feel the spasms between passion and introversion in his, about Mahler’s faith and disillusionment in order to feel the weight of existential crisis in his. It grows out of our desire to find personal meaning in art, to find some message encoded in all those notes. We need to believe we know what our composers were about before we can trust that we’re receiving their ideas properly. To get it wrong is somehow to do them an injustice. It certainly simplifies the process of listening. We know, with Beethoven, Chopin, Schumann, and Mahler, what sort of mood we are supposed to be in even before the music begins to play. But it also simplifies and often distorts the historical record, reducing the complicated lives of our heroes to a series of mythological icons. Elsewhere in this publication [Los Angeles Review of Books], I’ve wondered if this is a problem worth worrying over: “A thousand battalions of Mozart scholars cannot erase the image of Miloš Forman’s Amadeus. But should they try?” With the publication of John Eliot Gardiner’s Bach: Music in the Castle of Heaven, a new quasi-biography of Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750), we’re situated comfortably on the other side of the 1800 line, back during the musical “Baroque” where we have a chance to see the problem at its thorniest, focusing on the composer who proves its most difficult test case.

For today’s classical music audiences one of the most problematic aspects of music before circa 1800 is answering the simple question “why did they make this piece of music I’m about to listen to?” The answers, for Beethoven and all composers succeeding him are comfortably familiar: Music is testimony of the self or the world of the self. It is done for Art (capital A), for the Inner Spirit, for the memory of the persecuted, to expose the existential anxiety of it all, etc. The early Romantics reached back a little bit and quickly salvaged Mozart (who, after all, should have lived to see 1800) by projecting testimony back onto him – of Oedipal strife and a difficult personality – fairy tales that still make up his mythic badge (“drunken child savant”), providing a framework for listeners to have satisfying emotional experiences when listening to him. But further beyond the wall mythology gets more difficult. As entertaining as Vivaldi’s music is, and as intense as his life may have been, who seeks out his music to experience the artistic integrity of his personal testimony? No one cares what Palestrina’s relationship with his father was like, or whether or not Handel believed in authoritarian order when he wrote Giulio Cesare. So much of the daily reality surrounding the music of the more distant past gives us less heartfelt, less Romantic, less personally-resonant answers to the question “why do it?” (for the King, for the paycheck, for the Pope’s pleasure cruise) that the profundity of the music can seem to suffer for its lack of subjective, creative angst that we seem to crave and they perhaps did not.

Thus much pre-1800 music is today relieved of being much more than “mood” music. Our approach to the music of the Renaissance, for instance, often becomes caught in a circular logic that keeps us at a distance. It is beautiful, yes? It is expressive, yes? And so what does it express? Beauty. And why is it beautiful? Because it is so expressive. But what does it express? . . . and on and on. The music of the Baroque, on the other hand, often represents extreme emotional states. It is not, however, the conduit of the composer’s own feelings, but of the “official” emotional posture required for whatever event, patron, institution or (for the opera) story they were writing. Emotional states, during the enlightenment, were just another natural phenomenon to be illustrated and represented, like winds or water or birdsong. As Joseph Kerman put it “Baroque composers depict the passions. Romantic composers express them.” The idea of personal expression had to wait for a few big cultural rifts. First, the freeing of composers from the Ancien Régime system of patrons and institutions, making them independent artists following no one’s taste but their own or their public’s. Second, the Napoleonic cult of the individual commanding that the artist, no less than the philosopher, look inward. As Johann Gottlieb Fichte pitched the new Romantic creed in 1792: “Turn your gaze away from all around you, and inwards on to yourself.” Once again, Mozart and Beethoven were the earliest prototypes of the new musical artist who would not or could not submit to the whims of church or aristocratic patronage and who instead struck out on their own, misfits, outlaws, non-conformists misunderstood by their era. This is all as much mythology as history, a plotline we internalized so long ago it will likely never be shaken.

And so biography for Pre-Romantic composers has often seemed superfluous to the experience of listening – merely academic, and usually pretty hopeless. Among the pre-1800 masters, Bach biography in particular is a prickly and thankless calling. It requires one to fuss endlessly over minor details, or at least to pretend to. It entails teasing phantom details from in-between precious few lines of actual primary sources, most of which are notoriously dull and legalistic. It requires you to do this while knowing that these same precious few, dull, legalistic sources have already been pored over by dozens of prior adherents to produce dozens of contradictory hagiographies and incompatible mythologies leaving us little more than a name-symbol accompanied by a jumble of tepid modifiers. To Christoph Wolff‘s recent Bach: The Learned Musician, we can add a few more alternately dismissed or embraced by Gardiner: the “exemplary Teuton,” the “working-class hero-craftsman,” the “bewigged, jowly old German Capellmeister,” the “incorrigible cantor.” If none of these monikers sounds terribly appealing or particularly dramatic to you, as opposed to say, Beethoven: The Stormy Napoleonic Revolutionary, or Mahler: The Disillusioned Neurotic Spiritualist, then you are starting already to see another problem with Bach biography. When you combine the stubborn refusal of the historical record to yield much of anything tantalizing, the expectation that none of it makes it into his music anyway, and the cowing complexity of that music, the end result is not a familiar emotional character-type but a cold distance, a sense that he and his world are unreachable and irrelevant to the listening experience. Yet Bach receives more biographical attention than any composer before Mozart and remains his chief rival for sheer quantity. Unlike the other canonic masters, the popularity of Bach studies shows no sign of letting up. The early twenty-first century has already seen more attempts to figure him out, of both the strict academic variety (along with Christoph Wolf’s biography, there are substantial essays and monograms by Robert L. Marshall, Peter Williams, and John Butt) and user-friendly “crossover” variety (Davitt Moroney, Martin Geck, Paul Elie, Eric Siblin) than any of the other candidates, including those like Mozart and Beethoven whose source material is richer in detail and drama. This mania for redundant parsing of the same scant material remains an unusual situation. Understanding it is key to figuring out what, if anything, Gardiner’s attempt has to offer.

His goal, on one hand, is humanization, to bring Bach closer to us. And, having throughout his life as a conductor absorbed any and all research on his favorite composer, he acknowledges many of the problems:

Even to his most ardent admirers Bach can seem a little remote at times: his genius as a musician – widely acknowledged – is just too far out of reach for most of us to comprehend. But that he was a very human human being comes across in all sorts of ways: not so much from the bric-à-brac of personal evidence such as family letters and first-hand descriptions, which are few and far between, but from chinks in his musical armour-plating, moments when we glimpse the vulnerability of an ordinary person struggling with an ordinary person’s doubts, worries and perplexities.

The anxiously modified tautology “he was a very human human being . . . ” gives you some sense of what Gardiner fears he is up against. More than any other composer, Bach illustrates the problem of articulating the emotional mechanisms of music. There is a long tradition of disappointing hermeneutics lurking there. The mainstream of Bach reception has been characterized by a frustrating poetic reticence, a dissonance between strong claims that his music is emotive and deeply moving coupled with a refusal or inability to identify the source of that emotion in terms other than its exhaustiveness or its impressive contrapuntal achievement. The poetic potential of his music is usually tied to its stylistic breadth and technical complexity, an exercise in the monumental and the logical, which impresses only insofar as it remains aloof from emotional particularity. That distance has proven useful. The vagueness of those powerful emotions everyone claims to feel, their being tied to something so seemingly unnameable, has allowed each generation to remake Bach in whatever image suits them. It is, in other words, what makes possible that most ubiquitous and banal claim about Bach’s music: that it is “Universal.” That cardinal cliché is difficult for any biographer of a “great” to avoid, and Gardiner is no exception, finding in Bach’s sacred music, “a universal message of hope that can touch anybody regardless of culture, religious denomination or musical knowledge.”

Such platitudes, of course, tell us nothing except how easy it has been to renew Bach’s music decade by decade. As anyone surveying the last hundred years will realize, and as Paul Elie pointed out last year in his Reinventing Bach, the twentieth century belonged to the miraculous Leipzig cantor. While other composers had their moments, and the center of the concert hall canon might seem to tilt every so often between earlier and later Romantics, by the beginning of the twentieth century it had been decided that Bach would always stand as the monad, the font, the Grossvater of us all. The image of Bach as prototype has been a cultural obsession since the 1830s when the Romantics first rediscovered his great settings of The Passion of Christ. That revival, beginning with Felix Mendelssohn’s historic performance of the St. Matthew Passion (BWV 244b) in 1829, the first time it had been heard since Bach’s own lifetime, succeeded in doing two things for Mendelssohn’s generation: it extended the German canon back a century, proving that “deep” music had always been a Teutonic thing, and it made a literal merger between Art and Religion for a generation that increasingly saw the concert hall as a site for their most spiritual and philosophical experiences.

Since that moment, Bach has been the official center of gravity that binds together the musical universe. It’s not an empty honorific. “In Bach,” according to Mahler, “the vital cells of music are united as the world is in God.” For Brahms his music represented “a whole world of the deepest thought and most powerful feeling.” The nineteenth century turned his off-putting complexity and biographical distance into a mechanism for confronting the sublime, that ultimate proof of Romantic ideals. Whether it was the tangle of a solo keyboard fugue, or the glacial face of the opening chorus in the St. John Passion (BWV 245), his music was a test, a mountain to be climbed so that one might, with pain and awe, glimpse and reach out to touch the highest possible points mortally attainable.

By the third decade of the twentieth century, the sublime had met up with the mass market mechanisms of radio and recording. His most famous works were packaged for maximum virtual mountaineering, the keyboard works played in lush, gargantuan transcriptions by the likes of Rachmaninoff and Busoni or clothed in the grandest garb of all, the oversized Wagnerian symphony orchestra. If the mountaintop is too far away, and too steep a climb, then the NBC Radio Orchestra would snip off the peak and send it to your living room where it would still seem plenty big. The transcriptions by Leopold Stokowski of works like the Chaconne (BWV 1004) for solo violin or the  Passacaglia and Fugue (BWV 582) for organ were gorgeous, plodding wooly-mammoths that marked a moment of maximal popularization for Bach: Gothic Bach, Unfathomable Bach. This was the Bach world that John Eliot Gardiner was born into and would eventually help to replace.

His career as a conductor of the Monteverdi Choir, The English Baroque Soloists and the Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique falls squarely into a newer phase of Bach reception, an epochal shift in what Bach symbolized and eventually what he sounded like. This new Bach, the Bach that has reigned in the cultural imagination for the last seventy-five years, which musicologist Susan McClary has dubbed “Pythagorean” Bach, emerged as part of the stark turn away from Romanticism following World War I. The modernist rejection of “subjectivity” and personal psychological confessionals in art led to something of a downfall for Wagner, Mahler, and most of the great nineteenth-century Romantics. But the disillusioned post-war avant-garde found intellectual solace in the alienating distance between Bach and the human. Unlike Wagner, and Beethoven, and Schumann, Bach was untainted by personal psychology and corruptible human desire. He again benefited from having no historical personality, seeming to float above it all in a positivistic paradise where music and number intersected free of the original sin of emotion. His difficult and seemingly flawless counterpoint could serve as a crucible for what mattered in the years of Modernist formalism: Truth, objectivity, incorruptible processual integrity. The chores of complicated composing rules seemed to the modernists the best protection from backsliding into old bad (read: Romantic) habits. For Stravinsky, Bach’s fugues were “a pure form in which the music means nothing outside of itself.” Even as multiple generations or artists turned for comfort to the play of abstract forms, Bach managed to remain the center of the musical universe.

Even the radical post-World War II composers of total serialism, chance music, and computer music could not fault the pristine precision of his counterpoint. Gothic Bach had given way to Harmony-of-the-Spheres Bach, a different kind of metaphysics, but one no less rooted in the sublime – The Mathematical Sublime. Think no further than the close bond between Bach and Glenn Gould, that next great mythic icon of modernist detachment. To twist Gardiner’s tautology, Gould was one of the least human human beings to have ever been. Like everyone else, he found himself in Bach, imagining him as an artist “withdrawing from the pragmatic concerns of music-making into an idealized world of uncompromised invention.” This, of course, is precisely what Gould did in 1964 when he retired from live performance to concentrate his efforts exclusively within the precision-bubble of the recording studio, freed from the concert hall and its stink of the human and the social. Gould, too, is now central to our mythology of artist types and, in the popular imagination, Bach has remained the music for that type: esoterics and ascetics and Beautiful Minds. It is the music to which Hannibal Lecter plans his meticulous escape in The Silence of the Lambs. It is the music obsessively plinked out by the father of Allison Janney’s character on The West Wing, of course a mathematician, of course seeking structure through the spreading disorder and isolation of Alzheimer’s Disease. Music, Math, and Discipline. Clarity, Structure, and Complexity.

It is necessary to revisit Bach’s complicated reception history because it is out of all of this that Gardiner hopes to bring back to human form his “very human human being.” It is a tall order, and a motivation one may not immediately trust considering how much Gardiner’s own recordings have helped to solidify the modernist view. As he relates it in Music in the Castle of Heaven, he experienced that version of Bach early on in his studies with Nadia Boulanger who preached the Stravinskyan catechism of discipline and order: “She insisted that the freedom to express yourself in music, whether as a composer, conductor or performer, demanded obedience to certain laws.” His own recordings, part of the wave of “historically informed” interpretations using original instruments and claiming to resurrect the performing styles of Bach’s own era, have come to define the sound of Bach for the current generation of listeners. Those initial claims to “authentic reconstruction” have long been put aside, and we have (most of us) come to admit that we like this sound not for its historical authenticity but for how well it matches up with our own Mondrian-esque view of Bach: sleekness, clarity, momentum, almost superhuman precision (with Gardiner’s Monteverdi Choir often at tempos that take the breath right out any mere humans foolish enough to try and sing along). Gardiner’s interpretations are only the most successful of an entire generation of conductors (along with those of Sigiswald Kuijken, Phillipe Herreweghe, Nikolaus Harnoncourt, and Masaaki Suzuki among others) whose sound lays bare the abstract lines in Bach’s counterpoint by eliminating all of the distractions of older, Romantic performing styles: too much vibrato, too much rubato, too much dynamic swelling, not to mention too many performers. It would be impossible to overestimate how important Gardiner’s recorded legacy is to contemporary Bach reception. As novel and shocking as his recordings may have seemed to my own teachers who grew up on Otto Klemperer and Wilhelm Furtwängler, I am just young enough that his 1990 Mass in B minor (BWV 232) recording on Archiv was the first I heard, as was his St. Matthew Passion, and most revelatory to me, his recording of Bach’s Magnificat (BWV 243a). Today, for my students, Gardiner’s Bach is “normal” Bach, and those earlier conductors seem shocking, impossibly foreign, as from a lost and bizarre era.

The book, then, surprises. Given this reputation for clarity and precision, it is surprising that Gardiner’s inner dialog with the composer is such a humanely messy concoction of the spiritual and the psychological. One wonders if the motivation for the book is not to provide something of a correction to his own public reception. That a great performer may look back on his career and fear that everyone has missed his point all along must be daunting. Though one suspects that the thirty-year-old Gardiner, caught up in the heady days when the “authentic performance movement” was laying siege to record labels, might have written a different book. Much of Gardiner’s current view seems to have been born of the extraordinary project he undertook in 2000, dubbed the Bach Cantata Pilgrimage. While hardly as austere an experience as the name implies (it was backed by a major record label and documented by a BBC camera crew), it was still a powerful testament to our continuing Bach obsession – a full year spent living life as an itinerant cantor, moving from one church to another throughout Europe, preparing and rehearsing two complete, often unfamiliar, Bach cantatas each week along with a number of other Bach monuments, some two hundred total pieces of difficult music all conforming to the liturgical calendar that was the composer’s own constantly ticking task master. That intensity of focus, of having one’s international conducting career turned for a year into the comparably claustrophobic vocation of Lutheran cantor, in short the pretense of “walking in the composer’s shoes,” seems to have shaken loose a lot in Gardiner. He speaks of it like an evangelist bringing back answers from the desert:

Following Bach’s seasonal and cyclical arrangement of cantatas for an entire year provided us with a graphic musical image of the revolving wheel of time to which we are all bound . . . solving the enigma of how this music brimming over with vigour and fantasy could have emerged from beneath the wig of that impassive-looking cantor . . .

The punishing pace of creativity and the picturesque settings seem to have provoked a sort of vision quest, part time-travel fantasy and part genuine insight into how distant a figure as Bach might actually be. It is no surprise, then, that the most satisfying sections of the book are those where Gardiner lets us into that inner dialog by reconstructing his thoughts during moments when he is swimming in the music during rehearsal or performance. Some of this talk is very much in line with the Pythagorean orthodoxy:

to convey what it feels like to be in the middle of it – connected to the motor and dance rhythms of the music, caught up in the sequential harmony and the intricate contrapuntal web of sounds, their spatial relations, the kaleidoscopic colour-changes of voices and instruments . . . the way it exposes to you its brilliant colour spectrum, its sharpness of contour, its harmonic depth, and the essential fluidity of its movement and underlying rhythm.

So far so Gould: sequences, spatial relations, colors, contours, lines. But as the book progresses, Gardiner reveals another layer of his current thinking about the composer, through both his perspectives on those same dull primary sources, which unfortunately he chooses to revisit in great detail, and through his favorite individual passages of the cantatas and Passions, which happily he does in just as much detail. The biographical half of the book shines in those sections when he imaginatively recreates the feel of the places Bach lived, penning him in a much smaller and uglier world than one might wish to imagine. Gardiner’s biographical Bach is impressively small: not a German but a Thuringian, not part of a Lutheran community but part of a family-clan, not a citizen of the Enlightenment but an overworked and alternately obsequious and litigious crank mired in the petty squabbles of provincial town life. Remote from the big thinking that usually makes up the intellectual context of Baroque studies, Bach’s world as presented by Gardiner is decidedly un-sublime. While far too conjectural in its details to be taken as an authoritative biography, it is a welcome antidote to the sweeping historical movements which usually serve as the “context” of important artist’s lives: The Enlightenment, The Baroque, The Holy Roman Empire. Bach’s world is too small for such big frames. Gardiner usefully reminds us that it is entirely possible to live “in the Enlightenment” without knowing it or showing many signs of it. It is a common sense point that some academic writers of epistemological “top-down” history might heed more often.

With a Huizinga-esque flair, Gardiner depicts Bach’s milieu in terms calculated to pull him off the mountaintop of “pure music.” From the rough and tactless scrounging required of preceding generations of the great “Bach Clan” to survive the gray landscape of the Thirty Years War (“the malaise which through most of the previous century had blighted the struggles of their parents’ and grandparents”), to Bach’s own dingy coming of age in the brutish boy’s schools of Eisenach and Ohrdruf with their Caravaggiesque gangs of knife-wielding ruffians (“brawls . . . [that] . . . developed unchecked while the burghers stood by, impotently wringing their hands . . . [over the] territorial division of the town between these embryonic Jets and Sharks or Mods and Rockers”), all the way to the petty arguments that made up much of his life in a Leipzig run by “a formidable alliance of secular and religious powers whose methods of subjugating employees had been honed over time and who were expert at making life difficult . . .,” Gardiner shows a consistent flair for the drab and depressing.

As in Huizinga’s history writing, the rough detail in this portrait of a querulous, often petty cantor and his dour world is meant to shock and alienate the reader. In breaking the composer out of his abstract cocoon, Gardiner also manages to break down the stereotype of the detached ascetic inhabiting a world of pure intellect. But that distance, once achieved, and the reader’s predictable recoil from the grubby reality offered up, is actually just a step toward Gardiner’s next goal, to locate in Bach some basis for a tragic persona that can serve as a framework for reading his works psychologically and autobiographically. The goal is not without merit. For listeners, it promises a renewed emotional resonance between we moderns and Bach’s sacred music that goes beyond the old saws of purity or complexity. The tactics, however, are predictable and problematic. To pull Bach, and only Bach, across the 1800 wall and into the world of authentic testimony, Gardiner needs to pick and choose when to allow him to be a very human human being living in his very small human world, and when to allow him the luxury of transcending that world in order to communicate his “universal” message. It is a difficult needle to thread.

The Bach that emerges is heavily marked by that rougher, darker setting. But the resulting scars are arranged into a familiar pattern, that of the romantic outsider. He is orphaned, death-obsessed, outlaw, non-conformist, a sullen misfit. He is “battle scarred” from disputes with both civic and court authorities, scars that include the memory of imprisonment and the threat of destitution. He rejected the career path of his more successful contemporaries toward the soulless but profitable theater music of larger urban centers out of pure artistic integrity (“not from any Lutheran prudery but simply because the music he heard there left him cold”). Instead he propagated “mutant” musical forms that were largely misunderstood by his own audiences and bosses. He is set upon by smaller musical minds who question his lack of a university education. Thus even Bach, the supreme technician (and posthumous terrorizer of conservatory students the world over), is able to fill the Romantic role of the unschooled, or at least un-institutionalized, outsider. He stands alone as a complex psychological figure among a collection of shallow and imperious straw men: despots, bureaucrats, venal patrons, abusive pedagogues, jealous academics, frivolous popular composers (Telemann serves as the main foil here), and audiences craving easy delights. Bach alone is allowed the luxury of introspection and depth because Bach alone is tasked with having something important to say to us directly. The personal flaws of this “imperfect man” selected for our inspection are consistently of the anti-hero variety. He is, in short, every bit the visionary and martyr we’ve come to expect from artistic hagiography. The process is completed when Gardiner makes the final turn so familiar to us from our side of the 1800 wall, revealing that the ultimate primary source for Bach’s biography is the testimony of “the music itself.”

The music gives us shafts of insight into the harrowing experiences he must have suffered as an orphan, as a lone teenager, and as a grieving husband and father. They show us his fierce dislike of hypocrisy and his impatience with falsification of any sort; but they also reveal the profound sympathy he felt towards those who grieve or suffer in one way or another, or who struggle with their consciences.

Much of this is merely an extension of the call made over ten years ago by Robert L. Marshall for bolder attempts at Bach Biography. There is much resonance between Gardiner’s portrait of Bach and Marshall’s suggested method, to extend back to Bach the posthumous Freudian couch sessions practiced so provocatively (and questionably) by Maynard Solomon in his biographies of Mozart, Beethoven, and Schubert. Both Marshall and Gardiner fixate on Bach’s experience of loss. Marshall goes so far as to posit that an obsession with death and human frailty, not to mention a deep attraction to Lutheran orthodoxy, might be explained as a retreat from the anxiety of being twice orphaned, first by parental death, and then by brotherly abandonment. It is a method that requires inflating poorly documented, sometimes partially guessed, bits of biographical detail with intense emotional consequences. Gardiner’s musical analyses flow freely from this font. Simply put, Bach’s personal experience of loss, coupled with his fervent immersion in Lutheran doctrine, led him to a uniquely honest understanding of shame, of temptation, and of the desire for redemption. Such themes, of course, never go out of fashion and were staples as well of Baroque opera and of the sacred works of Vivaldi, Telemann, and scores of other composers. But Gardiner singles out Bach for an “authentic” religious conviction in contrast to the shallowness of his more theatrical contemporaries. To revisit and rewrite Kerman’s formula, “Baroque composers depict the passions . . . except for Bach, who expresses them.” One of us after all. This coupled with Bach’s unmatched willingness to forgo the beautiful and the pleasurable in favor of uncomfortable moments of pain, rage, and revulsion separates him from those others. At its best such diagnoses invest old music with a new and contemporary psychological power, a process that leaves one conflicted, offending the historian while stirring the concertgoer. Being both myself, I’ve long since learned to stop worrying and enjoy the resulting neurotics made out of Mozart, Beethoven, Mahler, Ives, et al., and so I am fully prepared to do the same for Bach. But we should never forget who the patient on the couch really is.

Gardiner’s task is made easier by the predictability of the resulting trope. We all know the artist type that we expect to be born of such angst. The gateway from slim source material to mythological archetype is a bit like Platform Nine and Three-Quarters at King’s Cross Station. It will always be there for you if you run confidently enough at it. In Music in the Castle of Heaven, this dimension of testimonial expressivity remains Bach’s special prerogative among Baroque composers, a special status essential to the book’s final and most substantial argument, that among the music of that entire era Bach’s sacred vocal works are uniquely relevant to our modern condition.

Gardiner provides us two different vantage points on Bach’s testaments. Based on his experience during the Bach Cantata Pilgrimage, he is the perfect guide to walk us through a diachronic survey of an entire year’s cycle. It is an ambitious analysis offering glimpses of a composer responding to the challenge of producing a new sacred composition every week – a complex of moving Rembrandtian musical portraits of humans in distress. For a few cantatas and for the two extant Passion settings he gives us extreme close-ups, visiting with each movement and scene at a level of detail that allows us to luxuriate in the conductor’s vision of his newer darker Bach. His reading of Christ Lag in Todesbanden (BWV 4) demonstrates the surprising zeal of a twenty-two-year-old’s commitment to Lutheran eschatology. The text and governing melody, harshly ritualistic and tribal, are by Luther himself.

No innocence could be found.
Thus it was that Death came so soon
And seized power over us –
Held us captive in his kingdom,
Alleluia!

Bach’s musical setting weeps, wails, and roars with striking realism even as it astounds in its intricate textures. The result is a grim reminder of how effective Luther’s language and Bach’s music can be at bringing abstract theological concerns down into the world of everyday mortality:

Timeframes overlap here: first that of pre-regenerate man, then those of the Thuringians of both Luther’s and Bach’s day, scarred by their regular brushes with pestilential death.

Gardiner uncovers (or injects) much that is new and worth the reader’s time. The St. John and St. Matthew Passion settings get particularly engaging analysis, fitting to their position in Gardiner’s view as the greatest example of music’s ability to mimic tragedy and to force passive listeners into a recognition of their culpability in the world they inhabit:

[they] . . . animate the conventions of tragic myth and tragic conduct . . . leading his listeners to confront their mortality and compelling them to witness things from which they would normally avert their eyes.

These close readings have a lot to offer. They are rich in technical detail for those that want that in a music book, and bold in their emotional lunges for those who will skip past the shop talk of rhythms and counterpoints. But Gardiner’s hope is for more than mere compellingness. It is for relevance. His book is a failure if it cannot frame Bach’s Passions as something more than historical artifacts of a proto-enlightenment. That is the reason he doesn’t go too far into that world before pulling up. Others have already delved farther into what Gardiner almost sheepishly calls “the delicate issue of religious belief,” questioning the ability of today’s audiences to connect to a music so deeply rooted in convictions that many of us do not share or may even outright reject. Richard Taruskin offers that if one digs far enough into the real historical Bach, one finds a worldview worth truly recoiling from, a world of enforced consensus, absolutist ideology, anti-individualism, misogyny, and small-minded bigotry: “pre-Enlightened – and when push came to shove, a violently anti-Enlightened–temper. . . . Such music was a medium of truth, not beauty, and the truth it served – Luther’s truth – was often bitter. . . . Even when Bach is not expressing actively anti-Enlightenment sentiments . . . his settings are pervaded with a general antihumanism.” This, according to Taruskin, is why “only a handful of Bach’s cantatas can be said to have really joined the modern performance repertory, and a thoroughly unrepresentative handful at that.”

Gardiner offers us some relief from that “abandon ship” position, coaxing us to dip a toe into real history, just enough to give us something more real than Pythagorean Bach or Mountaintop Bach, just enough to darken the mood a bit for audiences who like their music pathological but not demagogic. History, in Music in Castle of Heaven, is in the service of contemporary experience. It must bend to achieve Gardiner’s goal, which is to convince us that Bach’s sacred vocal music remains socially relevant. It contains, after all, vivid and relatable depictions of very human human beings at their most pathetic, guilty, ashamed, supplicating, desperate. Gardiner believes above all else that exposure to these works is good for us in a way that even Bach’s own instrumental music cannot match. Simply put, it fosters empathy:

although Bach is habitually required to deal with such towering universal themes as eternity, sin and death, he shows he is also interested in the flickers of doubt and the daily tribulations of every individual, recognising that small lives do not seem small to the people who live them.

The extent of this belief is on stark display on the CD covers to the recordings that coincide with the Bach Cantata Pilgrimage. Released by Gardiner’s own label, each CD features a photograph by Steve McCurry, best known for National Geographic’s famous cover photo of twelve-year-old Sharbat Gula. The CD covers all attempt to repeat the power of that iconic image, a single person staring directly at the camera and thus, challengingly, into the eyes of the listener/holder of the CD. What changes from photo to photo is ethnicity, gender, traditional clothing or makeup. Like Gula, known across America and Europe not by her name but by a reductive formula – “The Afghan Girl” – (direct object + ethnicity + gender = human), the people in the photographs are all easily reduced to interchangeable symbols of exoticness. They are ethnically and geographically diverse, with the notable absence being the white European or American that one might presume is Gardiner’s expected Bach CD purchaser. If their ethnicity does not establish their “otherness,” then their indigenous dress, makeup, or ceremonial posture certainly does – a cascade of very human humans, all very different than you. Shuffle the deck of humanity and buy the complete box set! It is easy to read this exercise as naively exploitative orientalism. But I am willing to give Gardiner the benefit of an earnest belief that these images press the same issue as the music, asking us to confront the ultimate test of empathy – distance. It is easy to feel for the person near you, or the person who most resembles you. The consequences of their suffering are clearer and closer. The true test is how compelled one is to act on behalf of someone far away, who does not resemble you, and who you will never meet. It is a bold and clumsy attempt to make a strong claim that Bach’s sacred music has powerful work to do still today, the highest order of work, of making the world a better place all the way from the private to the global:

for beleaguered humanity at all times and in all places – from instances of false accusation in private or domestic life to the outrages under regimes of torture.

Music in the Castle of Heaven seems meant to complete a triad: striking musical performances, provocative visual imagery, and now a book-length exploration of these works, step by step, psychological trauma by trauma. But this brings us back to where this essay began, prompting the question of why it requires so many pages of biographical backup? Why the need to establish that the message we receive from this astounding music is rooted in Bach’s own psyche and endorsed by his own intentions? Twenty years ago, during the great “authentic performance” debates, this same question was asked of performers like Gardiner who claimed “historical verisimilitude” as a justification for their new performance style rather than simply admitting that they played the way they wanted to because they (and we) liked the sound. Gardiner’s own rhetoric was called into question back then as an example of the poietic fallacy, the idea that the only, or most valid, meaning of a musical work is one derived from the composer’s own thought process. It is a habit that leads us to credit our own feelings to someone else – someone whose mind we cannot hope to read, but whose authority we crave – the composer or author as lawgiver. The debate is long settled so far as performance is concerned, and performers in the new style have (mostly) accepted that, as Taruskin sneakily commended them, “being the true voice of one’s time is . . . roughly forty thousand times as vital and important as being the assumed voice of history.” But reading Music in the Castle of Heaven, it seems as if Gardiner, the author, learned nothing from the trials of Gardiner, the performer, or at least thought he might slip old habits by in another form.

Take for a final example his readings of Cantatas 178, 179, and 135, the texts of which center on spiritual hypocrisy (from BWV 178: “wicked men . . . conceiving their artful plots with the serpent’s guile” and from BWV 179: “Likeness of false hypocrites, We could Sodom’s apples call them, Who, with rot though they be filled, On the outside brightly glisten.”). The music is filled with strident, heavily articulated orchestral slicing, fiery long-winded chewing-outs for melodies, and unexpected harmonic thunderclaps. For Gardiner, the one thing that is missing is personal testimony:

such sustained defiance that one asks whether there is a submerged story here – of Bach operating in a hostile environment. How much more satisfying, then, for him to channel all that frustration and vituperative energy into his music. . . . This is superb, angry music executed with a palpable fury, with Bach fuming at delinquent malefactors. One can picture the city elders, sitting in the best pews, listening to these post-Trinitarian harangues, registering their intent and starting to feel increasingly uncomfortable as these shockingly direct words – and Bach’s still more strident and abrasive music – hit home.

Perhaps. Certainly the notion reinforces Gardiner’s own Bach mythology, Bach again as prototype, this time of the outsider anti-hero – proto-Beethoven. It is attractive. But whatever satisfying defiance this music parallels in modern listeners – anger at hypocritical corporate double-speak or outraged moralizing at ignorant power-wielding political hacks – is both self-evident in the sound and already built in to our cultural moment. It does not require the backing of Bach’s imaginary diary or visions of puffed-up Leipzig burghers.

In the end, the book is an argument for these difficult works to be kept alive, sprinkled with a fear that in our age of spiritual skepticism, and our new $.99/track digital music marketplace, Bach’s shorter instrumental works (and heaven forbid Vivaldi’s brilliant and breezily accessible concerti and arias) may be better built to thrive. But the case for relevance, and the call to keep the cantatas from fading, will be made between Bach’s music, his performers, and us. The answer to the question “why should we listen to this?” does not have to coincide with the answer to the question “why did he write it?”

If one has any doubts, look around at how many different Bachs are coexisting today, when more than a century of shifting performance styles and emotional perspectives are all streaming together on Youtube: Romantic Bach, Modern Bach, Gothic Bach, Pythagorean Bach, ascetic Bach, Lutheran Bach, audacious virtuoso Bach. You can choose whichever you’d like today, and a different one tomorrow. They all once claimed to be “the real” Bach – proof of how the process of reception is the history that matters. Just be aware, when reading Music in the Castle of Heaven, that John Eliot Gardiner’s tragic orphan-empath is only one Bach among those many. No more or less accurate to the “true” past, but perhaps more prepared to survive the immediate future.

Michael Markham – Los Angeles Review of Books

Sigiswald Kuijken’s Life with Bach

15 Monday Apr 2013

Posted by Edward McCue in Audio Recordings, Bach's Life, Bach's Works, Books, Other Artists

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Abide with Us, Bleib bei uns denn es will Abend werden, cantata, Dutch, English, French, German, Herz und Mund and Tat und Leben, Italian, Japanese, La Petite Bande, Sigiswald Kuijken, Spanish, Uitgeverij Lannoo

KuijkencropWhen the Belgian ensemble La Petite Bande (LPB) learned last year that the Flemish government was discontinuing its subsidies, founder Sigiswald Kuijken began to work with his ensemble’s leadership to formulate an original plan that would allow LPB to continue its groundbreaking work in the  performance of early music. As part of this effort, Kuijken has decided to dedicate himself to the writing of a book about his personal experiences with the music of J. S. Bach and to closely examine aspects of the composer’s life that have enlightened his career.

With the title of Abide with Us, taken from the name of Bach’s cantata Bleib bei uns, denn es will Abend werden (BWV 6), the book will be published by the Flemish publisher Lannoo in Dutch, French, English, German, Spanish, Italian and Japanese in order to connect with LPB’s extensive network of international supporters. Abide with Us, as well as a special recording of Herz und Mund und Tat und Leben (BWV 147), will be offered to LPB donors during a two-year online appeal.

– “Support La Petite Bande” Foundation

Bach, the Misunderstood Musician

06 Thursday Sep 2012

Posted by Edward McCue in Bach's Life, Bach's Predecessors, Bach's Successors, Bach's Works, World View

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

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 Future of La Petite Bande

09 Saturday Jun 2012

Posted by Edward McCue in Audio Recordings, Bach's Predecessors, Bach's Successors, Bach's Works, Other Artists, World View

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Accent Records, Benjamin Alard, cantata, French, Gluck, Gustav Leonhardt, Handel, harpsichord, Haydn, La Petite Bande, Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme, Louis XIV, Lully, Mozart, organ, Sigiswald Kuijken, St. John Passion

For some time it has been speculated that Sigiswald Kuijken, founder and leader of the Belgian period instrument orchestra La Petite Bande, might decide to dissolve the ensemble and retire, but instead, at the request of the other musicians, Kuijken has opted for only a gradual reduction in involvement and has asked harpsichordist and organist Benjamin Alard to help him organize the upcoming season. As a result, La Petite Bande is scheduled to accompany Alard in the organ concertos by George Frideric Handel in April 2013.

The orchestra takes its name from the orchestra at the court of Louis XIV and was originally assembled for a recording of Jean-Baptiste Lully‘s Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme, under the direction of Gustav Leonhardt. The success of that recording caused the ensemble to begin presenting regular concerts, even though it was not originally intended that La Petite Bande would become a permanent orchestra.

Initially concentrating on French music, the orchestra’s repertoire has greatly expanded over the years to include music by the Italian masters of the Baroque as well as Bach, Handel, Gluck, and even Haydn and Mozart. Today, just as when first established in 1972, all members of La Petite Bande are internationally renowned specialists in the field of early music.

La Petite Bande will complete its series of “Bach Cantatas for the Liturgical Year” for Accent Records by the end of 2012. For these recordings, Sigiswald Kuijken has chosen to employ a vocal quartet, rather than a larger chorus, together with a minimal instrumental scoring, in order to better reveal the fine musical texture of the cantatas. With respect to its recent performances and recording of the St. John Passion (BWV 245), one journalist noted that “all of the details of interpretation resulted in a sound of such great unity that one is led to believe that there might well be no other option.”

In spite of its very successful program of concerts and recordings, however, La Petite Bande cannot survive without significant government support, and the recent negative assessment of their application for an additional four years of underwriting puts the future of La Petite Bande in doubt. An online petition, urgently requesting that the international community of early music supporters informs the Flemish Government of its appreciation of the unique artistic message of La Petite Bande, is available here.

The Suites for Violoncello

27 Friday Apr 2012

Posted by Edward McCue in Audio Recordings, Bach's Life, Bach's Works, Festival Events, Organology, Other Artists, Video Recordings

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Anna Magdalena Bach, Boulder Bach Festival, Cöthen, cello, da gamba, da spalla, dance, First Congregational Church, La Petite Bande, Ryo Terakado, Sergey Malov, Sigiswald Kuijken, Sonatas and Partitas for Violin, suite, Suite in D Major, Suite in G Major, Suites for Unaccompanied Violoncello, viola, violoncello, violoncello da spalla, Zachary Carrettin

Bach’s six Suites for solo violoncello (BWV 1007-12) are among the most frequently performed compositions written for an unaccompanied stringed instrument. Each suite consists of six dance movements, and the entire collection is carefully conceived as a cycle as opposed to an arbitrary series of pieces.

Violoncello da spalla by Dmitry Badiarov

Most likely composed during Bach’s Cöthen period, the lack of an autographed manuscript results in uncertainty as to whether the suites were composed before or after the 1720 Sonatas and Partitas for solo violin (BWV 1001-6), and the vagueness of the early use of the term “violoncello” (“small large viol”) does not suggest whether the pieces were to be played on an instrument held da gamba (between the legs) or da spalla (on the shoulder).

Bach’s second wife, Anna Magdalena, prepared a copy of the suites and indicated that the sixth was to be performed on an instrument with a fifth string tuned a perfect fifth above the top string of our modern cello. Cellists wishing to play this Suite in D Major (BWV 1012) on a four-string cello must employ high positions to execute many of the notes, while performers of period instruments can choose either a five-string Baroque cello held da gamba or a da spalla form of the instrument.

Sigiswald Kuijken has recorded all six suites on the violoncello da spalla, as has Ryo Terakado, also of La Petite Bande. Sergey Malov, violinist, violist and relative newcomer to the violoncello da spalla, offers an online performance of the gigue from the Suite in G Major (BWV 1007).

Boulder Bach Festival concertmaster Zachary Carrettin will perform the entire Suite in G Major on viola at a Benefit Concert at 6:30pm on 24 May 2012 at First Congregational Church in Boulder.

Archives

  • March 2015
  • February 2015
  • January 2015
  • December 2014
  • November 2014
  • October 2014
  • September 2014
  • August 2014
  • July 2014
  • June 2014
  • May 2014
  • April 2014
  • March 2014
  • February 2014
  • January 2014
  • December 2013
  • November 2013
  • October 2013
  • September 2013
  • August 2013
  • July 2013
  • June 2013
  • May 2013
  • April 2013
  • March 2013
  • February 2013
  • January 2013
  • December 2012
  • November 2012
  • October 2012
  • September 2012
  • August 2012
  • July 2012
  • June 2012
  • May 2012
  • April 2012
  • March 2012
  • February 2012
  • January 2012
  • December 2011

Categories

  • Audio Recordings
  • Bach Excursions
  • Bach's Life
  • Bach's Predecessors
  • Bach's Successors
  • Bach's Works
  • Books
  • Festival Events
  • Films
  • Interviews
  • Memorials
  • Music Education
  • Organology
  • Other Artists
  • Uncategorized
  • Video Recordings
  • World View

Bach Resources

  • A Bach Chronology
  • About Boulder Bach Beat
  • BWV Catalogue
  • The Liturgical Calendar at Leipzig

Meta

  • Register
  • Log in
  • Entries feed
  • Comments feed
  • WordPress.com

Blog at WordPress.com.

Cancel
Privacy & Cookies: This site uses cookies. By continuing to use this website, you agree to their use.
To find out more, including how to control cookies, see here: Cookie Policy