Imagine, instead, what it feels like to stand chest-deep in the ocean, waiting to snorkel. What you see are the sparse physical features visible to the naked eye: the shore, the horizon, the surface of the sea, maybe a boat or two, and perhaps the bleached outline of fish or coral just below, but not much else. Then you don your mask and lower yourself into the water. Immediately you enter a separate, magical world of myriad tints and vibrant colours, the subtle movement of passing shoals, the waving of sea anemones and coral – a vivid but wholly different reality. To me this is akin to the experience and shock of performing Bach’s music – 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. Above water there is dull quotidian noise; below the surface is the magical world of Bach’s musical sounds. But even once the performance is over and the music has melted back into the silence from which it began, we are still left with the transporting impact of the experience, which lingers in the memory. Strong, too, is the sense of a mirror being held up to the man who created this music in the first place – one that vividly reflects his complex and rugged personality, his urge to communicate and share his view of the world with his listeners, and his unique capacity for bringing boundless invention, intelligence, wit and humanity to the process of composition.
Emphatically, Bach the man was not a bore.
* * *
a In a speech to mark the bicentenary of Bach’s death Paul Hindemith referred to Bach’s ‘clam-like reticence toward his work’ – so different to that of Beethoven or Wagner, whose attitude towards many of their creations we know. As Hindemith rightly said, ‘Having this statue constantly before our eyes [that banal figure of a man in a frock coat, with a wig he never takes off] has impaired our view of the true stature of Bach, both of the man and of his work’ (Hindemith, J. S. Bach. Ein verpflichtendes Erbe – Festrede am 12 September 1950 auf dem Bachfest in Hamburg (trs. as J. S. Bach: Heritage and Obligation, 1952)).
b For example, the Bach-Archiv in Leipzig (in cooperation with the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, the computing centre of Leipzig University, and other partners, and funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft) is working on a project named Bach Digital aimed ‘at digitising every existing Bach autograph in the world and thus to make the culturally most valuable pool of Bach sources available to a wider circle of users’.
c But, as Robert Quinney has pointed out to me, keyboard instruments were Bach’s bread and butter, and the music for organ and clavier can give us a particular insight into the workings of his mind. As with all expert improvisers, Bach’s brain and fingers were connected with a febrile instantaneousness (working together literally extempore); we can readily believe that the keyboard music retains a charge of this ‘real-time’ creation, unmediated by the painful compositional process to which so many other composers have been subject – Bach’s habit of revising music notwithstanding. And text is never far from his organ music, whether that of the chorales on which the preludes elaborate, or in the uncanny speech-like profile of many of his fugue subjects.
d Peter Williams, one of the most perspicacious of Bach’s recent biographers, warns ‘The exquisite world of imagination opened up by any powerful music is itself problematic, for it tempts listeners to put into words the feelings it arouses in them and so to visualise a composer’s priorities and even personality. There must be few people who have played, sung, listened to or written about Bach’s music who do not feel they have a special understanding of him, a private connection, unique to themselves, but ultimately coming from their idea of what music is and does. This might be quite different from the composer’s’ (Peter Williams, The Life of Bach (2004), p. 1). He is of course quite right.
e The literature here is extensive, led by Laurence Dreyfus, Bach and the Patterns of Invention (1996), David Schulenberg, The Keyboard Music of J. S. Bach (1992) and Peter Williams, The Organ Music of J. S. Bach (second edition, 2003).
1
Under the Cantor’s Gaze
In the autumn of 1936 a thirty-year-old music teacher from Bad Warmbrunn in Lower Silesia suddenly appeared in a Dorset village with two items in his luggage: a guitar and a portrait in oils of Bach. Like old Veit Bach, the founder of the clan, escaping from Eastern Europe as a religious refugee almost four centuries earlier, Walter Jenke had left Germany just as Jews were being banned from holding professional posts. He settled and found work in North Dorset, married an English girl and, with war imminent, looked for a safe home for his painting. His great-grandfather had purchased a portrait of Bach in a curiosity shop sometime in the 1820s for next to nothing. Doubtless he did not know at the time that this was – and still is – by far the most important Bach portrait in existence.a Had Jenke left it with his mother in Bad Warmbrunn, it would almost certainly not have survived the bombardment or the evacuation of Germans from Silesia in the face of the advancing Red Army.
I grew up under the Cantor’s gaze. The celebrated Haussmann portrait of Bach1 had been given to my parents for safekeeping for the duration of the war, and it took pride of place on the first-floor landing of the old mill in Dorset where I was born. Every night on my way to bed I tried to avoid its forbidding stare. I was doubly fortunate as a child in that I grew up on a farm and into a music-minded family where it was considered perfectly normal to sing – on a tractor or horseback (my father), at table (the whole family sang grace at mealtimes) or at weekend gatherings, outlets for my parents’ love of vocal music. All through the war years they and a few local friends convened every Sunday morning to sing William Byrd’s Mass for Four Voices. As children my brother, sister and I grew up getting to know a grand miscellany of unaccompanied choral music – from Josquin to Palestrina, Tallis to Purcell, Monteverdi to Schütz, and, eventually, Bach. Compared to the earlier polyphony, Bach’s motets, we found, were a lot more difficult technically – those long, long phrases with nowhere to breathe – but I remember loving the interplay of voices, with so much going on at once, and that pulsating rhythm underneath keeping everything afloat. By the time I was twelve I knew the treble parts of most of Bach’s six motets more or less by heart. They became part of the primary matter in my head (along with folksongs, ribald poems in Dorset dialect and heaven knows what else, stored in my memory) and have never left me.
Then, during my teens, I came to know some of his instrumental music: the Brandenburg Concertos, the violin sonatas and concertos (with which, as a distinctly average fiddle-player, I often struggled – and usually lost – between the ages of nine and eighteen, at which stage I switched to the viola), some of the keyboard pieces and several cantata arias for alto, of which my mother was very fond. Even now I cannot hear arias such as ‘Gelobet sei der Herr, mein Gott’ (‘The Lord be praised’) or ‘Von der Welt verlang ich nichts’ (‘I ask nothing of the world’) without a lump in my throat, remembering her voice floating across the courtyard from the mill-room. But my early apprenticeship in Bach, the nurturing of a lifelong engagement with his music and a longing to understand the stern Cantor at the top of the stairs, I owe to four remarkable teachers – three women and one man – who helped to determine the kind of musician I was to become.
The man was Wilfred Brown, the great English tenor, who visited my school when I was fourteen, singing both the Evangelist and the tenor arias in a performance of Bach’s John Passion. I was so captivated that, unpardonable in a principal second violin, at one point I stopped playing altogether and just gawped. As an interpreter of Bach’s Evangelist, Bill Brown was nonpareil. His singing was characterised by an extraordinary subtlety of inflection and word-painting, and by a pathos that was inseparable from his own Quaker beliefs and the humility they brought, something I recognised from my mother’s Quaker upbringing. Later on he offered to give me singing lessons from the time I was sixteen until I was twenty-two, sometimes travelling to Cambridge to do so and always refusing a fee.
Imogen Holst, daughter of Gus
tav and amanuensis to Benjamin Britten, was a regular visitor to my parents’ home and sometimes led their choral weekends and gave singing lessons to me and my sister. She, I suppose more than any other musician I had encountered at that early stage, stressed the importance of dance in Baroque music. This was so clearly visible in her own interpretation and her way of conducting Bach that someone once filmed her just from the waist downwards while conducting the B minor Mass. To this day, thanks to Imo, I feel that the worst interpretative sin (committed with painful regularity even now) is to plod in Bach; denying or resisting the rhythmical elasticity and buoyancy of his music ensures that its spirit shoots out of the door. In speaking touchingly of her father, she stressed the indispensability of music, that it was a part of life that ‘can’t be done without’.
Letting Bach dance was one lesson well learnt; the other was how to make him ‘sing’. This sounds so obvious and so much easier than it is in practice. Not all of Bach’s melodies are singer-friendly or melodious in the way that, say, Purcell’s or Schubert’s are. Often angular, the phrase-lengths uncomfortably long, peppered with little curlicue flourishes and ornaments, they require a lot of purpose, underpinned by iron breath-control, before they can truly sing. And that applies not just to the vocal lines, but to the instrumental ones as well. This I learnt from my violin teacher, Sybil Eaton, a pupil of the celebrated Greek violinist and musicologist Minos Dounias. Sybil certainly ‘sang’ when she played the fiddle, but, through her inspirational teaching and sheer love of Bach, she was also able to help her pupils to take melodic wing, whether we were playing concertos, solo partitas or obbligato parts to arias from the Passions or the cantatas.
The person who crystallised all these ideas for me was Nadia Boulanger, justly recognised as the most celebrated teacher of composition in the twentieth century. When she accepted me as a student in Paris in 1967, she had just turned eighty and was partially blind, but with all her other faculties in tip-top order. Her way of teaching harmony was founded on Bach’s chorales, which she regarded as models of how to establish a beautiful polyphony – with each voice being accorded equal importance while still playing a different role in the four-way conversation, now advancing, now retreating: contrapuntally conceived harmony, in other words. She insisted that the freedom to express yourself in music, whether as a composer, conductor or performer, demanded obedience to certain laws and the possession of unassailable technical skills. One of her favourite sayings was ‘Talent [by which I think she meant technique] without genius is not worth much; but genius without talent is worth nothing whatsoever.’
Confined for two years to an unvarying diet of harmony and counterpoint exercises and solfège (the particularly nasty but effective French system of ear-training), I metaphorically kicked and scratched like a cornered animal. On at least one occasion, from sheer frustration, Hindemith’s Elementary Training for Musicians ended up in the gutter – thrown out of the window of my bed-sit in the 4th arrondissement. But I owe her a colossal debt. She had a way of challenging every preconception as well as a knack of exposing one’s shortcomings, technical or otherwise, quite mercilessly. She saw something in me that I did not even see in myself. It was only after I had left the boulangerie that I realised that what had seemed like torture at the time was actually an act of kindness, equipping me to avoid certain professional embarrassments in the future. And, despite her severity, she was extraordinarily generous, even bequeathing to me her unique collection of transcriptions of Renaissance and Baroque music (from Monteverdi to Rameau), including scores and parts of her favourite Bach cantatas, all meticulously annotated – some of my most treasured possessions.b
How was I to translate this painfully acquired theory and ear-training into actual sound when standing in front of a choir and orchestra? Luckily by this stage (1967–8), while I was a student in Paris and Fontainebleau, from time to time I had access to an ‘instrument’ in London – the Monteverdi Choir. It had all started back in 1964 when I was in my third year at Cambridge. My tutor, the social anthropologist Edmund Leach, authorised me to take a year off from the History tripos to sieve through the possible directions my life might take and, crucially, to find out whether I really had it in me to become a full-time musician. Ostensibly I was there to read Classical Arabic and medieval Spanish; in practice the task I set myself was to perform Monteverdi’s 1610 Vespers, a work that, although I had first heard it as a child, was still very little known and had never before been performed in Cambridge. Despite the dual handicap of my relative inexperience as a conductor and my little formal musical training up to that point, I had set my heart on conducting one of the most challenging works in the choral repertoire. I spent the best part of that year studying the original part-books on microfilm and, with the encouragement of the Professor of Music, Thurston Dart, preparing a new performing edition. I also ended up doing everything involved in planning a public performance in King’s College Chapel – from assembling and training the choir and orchestra, to having the tickets printed and putting out the chairs.
Vibrant colour contrasts and passionate declamation seemed to me to be the hallmark of this music. The test for me was whether I could draw any of that from a group of student singers trained in a totally different tradition. To that extent the Monteverdi Choir started life as an anti-choir – in reaction to the well-mannered euphony and blend which characterised the celebrated chapel choir at King’s in my day, whose mantra was ‘Never louder than lovely’. Their style was summed up for me by a performance, at Boris Ord’s memorial service, of Jesu, meine Freude – that most extended and interpretatively challenging of Bach’s motets – sung in English with effete and lip-wiping prissiness: ‘Jesu …’ (pronounced Jeez-ewe), followed by a huge comma and expressive intake of breath, ‘…priceless treasure’ (pronounced trez-ewer). I seethed. How had the wonderfully exultant music that I had known since I was a child come to be treated in such a precious, etiolated way? Was this not like adding a layer of face powder and a few beauty spots to the dour old Cantor’s portrait?
My first attempt at performing Monteverdi’s masterpiece took place in March 1964 with some of the same performers. It fell a long way short of the ideals I had set for it, yet people who heard it were encouraging, even enthusiastic. For me it was not just a test of skill, but the epiphany I had been searching for. The decision was made: better to follow an overwhelming passion, even one that would need years of study and practice and with absolutely no guarantee of success, than to pursue safer career paths for which I might already have had the rudimentary technical qualifications. I was encouraged to persist in my rebellion against the vestiges of Victorian performance and to find a more permanent footing for the Monteverdi Choir. My starting-point, then as now, was to bring passion and expressivity to the vocal music of the Baroque, and, as appropriate, to the nationality, period and personality of the composer. In a typical programme, such as we gave in the Cambridge Festival in 1965, devoted to music by Monteverdi, Schütz and Purcell, we set out to enable listeners to hear the idiosyncratic approach of each master sung in the original language, to follow each composer as he experimented with music based on recitation over a figured bass line and revelled in the new expressive range it offered. It was heady stuff, and our efforts were doubtless crude and exaggerated; but at least they did not sound half-baked or indistinguishable from Anglican pieties during a wet November Evensong.
I was desperately short of working models. Nadia Boulanger no longer conducted. Nor did Thurston Dart, from whose Sherlock Holmes-like approach to musicology I had learnt a great deal in the postgraduate year that I studied with him after he moved to King’s College, London. I did, however, have the luck to observe the distinguished keyboard virtuoso and conductor George Malcolm. George knew how to draw dazzling performances of a most un-English ardour from his choir at Westminster Cathedral, and, amazingly, he took the trouble to travel up to Cambridge to hear my first Vespers performance. Here was a true master and, I felt, a ki
ndred spirit, whose approbation and encouragement at that stage made all the difference to me, although he had virtually given up choral conducting.
Then, at a friend’s invitation, I went to hear Karl Richter conduct his Munich Bach Choir in 1967. Richter was acclaimed as the foremost exponent of Bach’s choral music at the time, but even his muscular LP recordings of cantatas hadn’t prepared me for the oppressive volume and sheer aggression of the motet Singet dem Herrn as delivered by seventy lusty Bavarians from the gallery of the Markuskirche. This was a world apart from the mincing ‘holy, holy’ approach of King’s or the Bach Choir in London in their annual Good Friday Matthew Passion outing at the Royal Festival Hall, but hardly more inspiriting. Nor did Richter’s thunderous approach to the Goldberg Variations next day on a souped-up Neupert harpsichord, given in the Musikhochschule (Hitler’s former residence), do much to restore my faith. Here, as in most of the live performances or recordings that I had access to, Bach came over as grim, sombre, po-faced, lacking in spirit, humour and humanity. Where was the festive joy and zest of this dance-impregnated music? A few years later I heard a performance of the John Passion under Benjamin Britten, a very fine conductor who combed out the separate strands of Bach’s elaborate counterpoint before my ears, revealing the work’s drama from the inside. Yet, even so, to me it sounded fatally ‘English’. I felt a similar disappointment when I first heard Mozart played in Salzburg and Vienna in 1958: the elegant surface of the playing seemed to overlay and disguise the turbulent emotional inner life of the music.
My own start was hardly promising. In the hot summer of 1967, when most of Nadia Boulanger’s composition class decamped from Paris to the Palais de Fontainebleau to be joined by the crème de la crème of the Juilliard and Curtis schools of music, she decided that it was time for me to conduct something under her scrutiny. She set me the challenge of Bach’s Bleib bei uns, that touching Easter cantata (BWV 6) which tells the story of the two disciples encountering their risen Lord on the road to Emmaus. The American Conservatory at Fontainebleau was not like Cambridge University, with its considerable reserves of choral scholars and eager student singers. Apart from one talented mezzo, there were absolutely no singers at all – just a bunch of recalcitrant ‘peenists’ (as they habitually referred to themselves). These I had to recruit, cajole and transform into a four-part ensemble capable of passing muster in Bach’s magical eventide opening chorus, in order to establish my credentials as a conductor to my teacher. Until that point Mademoiselle, as everyone called her, had never heard or seen me conduct, though she seized on every occasion to remind me that my harmony and counterpoint exercises were ‘a tragédie without name’. If you have ever heard a group of American pianists (who could all, no doubt, toss off a Chopin étude or Liszt prélude at the drop of a hat) trying to sing in four parts in German, you will know what I, and they, suffered. The ‘orchestra’ consisted solely of my fellow student and countryman Stephen Hicks, playing on an out-of-tune organ (he had first introduced himself to me in Mademoiselle’s class as ‘Stephen ’icks, best organist in West Molesey’). As well as conducting this motley ensemble I also had to sing the tenor recitative and play the viola obbligato in the alto aria, while Stephen manfully filled in all the rest on the organ. Came the day and the Jeu de Paume was packed with sweltering students. A few very elderly ladies in black sat in the front row, with my Venerable Teacher in the middle. The performance began, and the VT instantly fell sound asleep. In fact I doubt whether she heard a single note of it, which, all things considered, was perhaps just as well.
Bach: Music in the Castle of Heaven Page 3
