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FEATURE
Bach,
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By Alan Rich
If I had to demonstrate the communicative power of Johann Sebastian
Bach's music with only one work, I would surely choose one of the church
cantatas. These are the works, above all others in Bach's voluminous legacy,
that most vividly define the unassailable niche he occupies in the realm of
the arts: his skill at composition, his unwavering faith in Higher Powers,
and the genius whereby he applies the one in the service of the other.
The further miracle of these works--the 200-or-so that survive out of probably
twice that number--is the extraordinary beauty, originality and complexity
of the greatest of them measured against the circumstances of their
creation, music ground out on order, week after week, to serve the uses of
a church at which Bach was a salaried minion. Yes, there are cantatas that
come across merely as the competent products of a busily engaged craftsman,
as there are dull plays by Shakespeare and occasional clumsy brushwork by
Michelangelo; with all three towering figures, the flub percentage is
wondrous small.
Right now I'm under the spell of the Cantata No. 8, thanks to a
superb recording newly at hand on the Harmonia Mundi label. (The numbering
of the cantatas, by the way, has nothing to do with order of composition,
but only with the sequence in which they were first published more than a
century after Bach's death.) The text, which begins "Dearest God, when will
I die? My time is running out," propounds one of the central tenets in the
Lutheran canon: earthly death not as a tragedy but a release to a more
"blessed, joyful dawn."
As with most of the cantatas composed during his tenure at Leipzig's Thomas-Church, Bach designed the work as a gloss on the chorale tune by Caspar Neumann specified for that particular Sunday, Trinity XVI. The text, fashioned by one or another of the merely adequate poets serving the church, is, similarly, a gloss on the words of Neumann's chorale, heavily laden with the dense interweave of metaphor and symbol that constituted churchly poetry in the Baroque (and may still).
The miracle is Bach's ability to rise beyond the encumbrance of
this workaday text, and also in the fact that he accomplished this at Leipzig week after week. Join me in sampling what happens at the start of this
particular magical, awe-inspiring work. Two oboi d'amore
(deeper-pitched than an oboe, but not as honky as an English horn) wind
their deep-bronze tones around one another to spin out a haunting, slow
melody in triplets that seems to extend toward far horizons. Over their
melodic line from time to time a piccolo goes "ding ding ding," fast
repeated notes like a distant summoning bell. The melody stops, then starts
again, still with the insistent "ding" from the piccolo; this time the
chorus joins in with its opening text, sung to another flowing triplet
melody in elegant, smooth counterpoint to the oboes' tune.
Listen with delight and awe, in just the opening phrase of this new melody, to the way Bach sets the word "sterben" ("to die"): a dissonance, a chromatic shudder, a harmonic progression that seems for one wink of the eye to look ahead toward Romantic harmonies as yet undreamed. Actually, this new melody is a flowing, elegant, somewhat garrulous variant of Caspar Neumann's simple,
hymnlike chorale tune that, in its unadorned form, will round off the work
some 20 minutes later.
Be amazed at the way Bach has built this first movement by combining four separate lines into music rich and warming, full of its own range of fantasy: the tune for the oboes, the piccolo, the flowing melody for the chorus, with the notes of the chorale embedded into that line. Quite a few of Bach's
cantatas are constructed in this "striptease" manner; they start off with a chorus or ensemble in which an actual chorale melody is wrapped in elaborate counterpoint, and arrive eventually at that melody in its bare essentials.
The world gave Bach a pretty good wingding back in 1985, his 300th
birthday, but it will surely find time to celebrate again in 2000, the 250th
anniversary of his death. He needs these frequent celebrations, for at least
two reasons. One is to make up for the decades after his death when his
music was virtually unknown until Felix Mendelssohn's famous revival of the
"Saint Matthew Passion" in 1829. Another is to make up for the years
after that, when Bach's music circulated in lurid reharmonizations and
reorchestrations that sought to recreate him as an eager precursor of
Romanticism.
But that history of mistreatment says something about the timelessness of Bach's music, and its resilience. His music survives the tamperings of the Victorian monster choruses, the irresistible pandemonium of Leopold Stokowski's transcriptions of organ works and choruses for
Wagner-sized orchestra, Wendy Carlos' sci-fi synthesizer versions,
Bach-as-scat by the Swingle Singers, the prissy rhythms in Wanda Landowska's
"Goldberg Variations" on an "authentic" harpsichord or the visionary
intensity of Glenn Gould's two performances on an "inauthentic" Steinway
grand, either or both of which I hear as modern man's self-defining
statement on Bach. On the new Harmonia Mundi recording of three cantatas,
Belgian conductor Philippe Herreweghe's performance of the first movement of
No. 8 runs 6' 41"; Helmuth Rilling's on Haenssler Classic runs 4' 34";
both are the work of eloquent, dedicated specialists in this music.
When we listen to music--listen, I said, not merely bathe in--we are almost always made conscious of its place in time. We hear Haydn
and Mozart as the fruition of Classicism's sublime logic; we hear Beethoven
as the fuse kindling Romanticism, Stravinsky's "Rite of Spring" as
modern music's powderkeg. I hear Bach's music, however, beyond any
chronological identity. Music like the cited opening of the Cantata No. 8,
or the violent confrontations in the opening chorus of the "St. Matthew
Passion," or the end of the "Crucifixus" from the B minor Mass --where a
harmonic sideslip at the sepulchral bottom of the voices (range defines the
exact meaning of grief for all time) exists apart from any sense of time
frame. There have always been imitators, but never a successor. Bach
endures, not in some kind of scholarly vacuum, but as music's great
self-renewing force.
(Alan Rich is the music critic of LA Weekly and the former chief music critic of Newsweek, the New York Herald Tribune and Los Angeles Herald Examiner. His recent books include the four volumes of "Play-by-Play" (Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, including cd's of complete works) and "American Pioneers" in Phaidon's 20th-Century Composers series.)
©1998 Alan Rich, all rights reserved
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