Bach: Music in the Castle of Heaven

by Gardiner, John Eliot

  Grateful as I was, life at the boulangerie was suffocating, and I hankered for the opportunity to apply all this rigorous theory and discipline to some hands-on conducting experience in the real world of professional music. To the disgust of Mademoiselle, who expected that, like many of her American pupils, I would remain with her to study Théodore Dubois’s Traité d’harmonie for at least another five years, I applied for the job of apprentice conductor to the BBC Northern Orchestra in Manchester. This was a highly accomplished, somewhat hard-bitten orchestra who made it abundantly clear how fortunate you were as a fledgling conductor to be standing in front of them: you could expect no favours and would either sink or swim. My main practical assignment was to conduct a different concert overture at the start of each programme. If the piece lasted, say, twelve minutes, I would be allocated a maximum of nine minutes in which to rehearse it before the live broadcast. The trick with a wonderful sight-reading orchestra like this was to know what to prioritise, when to intervene and what to leave to chance and the extra spurt of adrenalin and focus that came when the red light went on. It was a valuable training ground and taught me the rudiments of how to make best use of costly rehearsal time.

  Back in London things were on the move with the Monteverdi Choir. By extending our repertoire forwards chronologically and geographically northwards from the Venetian composers (the Gabrielis and Monteverdi) to the Germans (Schütz and Buxtehude) and to the English Restoration composers (Blow, Humfrey and Purcell), we were heading inexorably towards a confrontation with those twin colossi, Handel and Bach. Over the next ten years (1968–78) I was fortunate in being able to recruit a top-notch modern chamber band to work alongside the choir – the Monteverdi Orchestra – comprising some of the very best freelance chamber musicians on the London scene. These players showed me extraordinary trust through their willingness to experiment, undertaking not just travels to the wilder shores of the Baroque by means of oratorios and operas which were then virtually unknown, but also stylistic explorations involving the use of outward-curved Baroque bows, notes inégales, mordents, inverted mordents, coulés and ornamental twiddles of all sorts.

  Then suddenly we hit a brick wall. The fault was neither theirs nor mine, but that of the instruments we were using – the same as everyone else had been using for the past hundred and fifty years. However stylishly we played them, there was no disguising that they had been designed or adapted with a totally different sonority in mind, one closely associated with a late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century (and therefore anachronistic) style of expression. With their wire or metal-covered strings they were simply too powerful – and yet to scale things down and hold back was the very opposite of what this music, with its burgeoning, expressive range, calls for. To unlock the codes in the musical language of these Baroque masters, to close the gap between their world and ours, and to release the wellspring of their creative fantasy meant cultivating a radically different sonority. There was only one thing for it: to re-group using original (or replica) Baroque instruments. It was like learning a totally new language, or taking up a new instrument but with practically no one to teach you how to play it. It is hard to convey what ructions, disappointments and excitements this entailed. Some felt it to be a terrible betrayal; to others, including most of the singers in the Monteverdi Choir, it was an inexplicably backward step. But a few brave souls took the plunge with me: they bought, begged or borrowed Baroque instruments, and we became the English Baroque Soloists.

  That was in 1978. More intrepid pioneers had got there ahead of us of course. It might have felt so at the time, but mine was not a lone voice. Among my Cambridge contemporaries were both Christopher Hogwood – later recognised as one of the most influential proponents of the historically informed early-music movement – and the charismatic ‘Pied Piper’, David Munrow, who, in a career lasting barely ten years, did more than anyone else to popularise early music in Britain. Along with Trevor Pinnock, the distinguished harpsichordist, they too had formed their own period-instrument bands – the English Concert (1972) and the Academy of Ancient Music (1973). Actually the real Amundsens were the Dutch, Austrians and Flemish – explorers such as Gustav Leonhardt, Nikolaus Harnoncourt and the Kuijken brothers, all of whom had already been experimenting with period instruments for several years before that. Then in their wake came a trickle of British freelance musicians, who are among the most flexible and pragmatic in the world: they saw the opportunities and soon acquired the taste.

  Taste, but as yet not much technique – a failing seized upon by some of the conventional old-timers, particularly in the symphony orchestras, who began to sense the slight breeze of a challenge to their monopoly and now, rather gratifyingly for them, found an easy target to criticise. But people were quick to realise there really is a difference in performance between those who are committed to re-making music and inhabiting it afresh, and those bent on just dispatching it with efficiency and technical skill. Initially, as with all breakaway movements, its pioneer leaders – many of them self-taught – were prone to overstate their case and to leave dangling in the air the misleading thought that by getting the instruments right you got to the ‘truth’ of the music. Again the problem was one of models, or rather the lack of them. It was a heady time, the air abuzz with controversy and passionate self-defence. No one knew for certain how these old instruments were really meant to sound. Never before had practising musicians needed to become so erudite. But two performers can assiduously read the same eighteenth-century violin tutor or treatise and still come to alarmingly divergent conclusions in the interpretation of it. It just goes to show that research into performance practice is quite distinct from performance itself, and, as Richard Taruskin was quick to point out, sound scholarship does not necessarily result in good music-making.c Inevitably there was much imitation and much refutation: one person’s audacious experiment could easily be rubbished by some and received as Gospel by others. Mannerism ruled the day, with sickly swells and bulges galore, particularly among the string players. (I was often reminded of Mademoiselle’s quizzical inquiry of one pupil prone to exaggerated phrasing: ‘Why do you make your music in hammocks, my dear?’)

  For the greater part of those few years I found the whole experience nerve-racking. I mourned the easy technical fluency and surefootedness of my disbanded Monteverdi Orchestra and its open-minded players. I was dismayed by the technical fallibility of these new ‘old’ instruments, which were turning out to be treacherous to master for all concerned. Squawks and squeaks were endemic, and the sound of snapping hygroscopic gut E strings filled the air. Conducting them suddenly felt like driving an old banger with dodgy brakes and steering. But slowly the instruments began to yield up their secrets to the players and to guide us all to pathways of fresh expressive gestures and sounds. Some observers were inclined to fetishise these instruments, as though they alone led to the holy grail of ‘authentic performance’ and were its sole guarantors. But, while I delighted in the new expressive potential and palette of colours, I could never forget that we were using them not as an end in itself but as a means – to get closer to the transparent sound world of Baroque composers, and (in the overused analogy beloved of music critics) to remove the layers of dirt and varnish that had accreted over time.

  At any rate, it was with this raw and untried ensemble that I accepted my first invitation to perform at the Ansbach Bach Festival in 1979, then considered to be the Mecca, or Bayreuth, of Bach performance in Europe. It had been Karl Richter’s launchpad in southern Germany, and now its platform was being offered to a relatively untried Englishman and his group. Our approach was seen to be radically ‘different’ and provoked controversy. Since the nineteenth century, Bach had been revered in Germany as the Fifth Evangelist, his church music corralled in the support of modern evangelical Lutheranism. Listening to us, the conservative defenders of a largely fictitious and self-aggrandising Bach performance tradition found the ‘old’ instruments foreign to their tastes �
�� which was only to be expected, and a reaction that we became used to over the next twenty years. Perhaps what surprised them more, however, was the concentrated care we gave to the pronunciation and projection of the text – the declamation of the German words directed towards bringing out the rhetoric and drama – and what some listeners identified as a sense of occasion in our performances. It felt good to contribute in a positive way towards demystifying Bach’s image in the land of his birth. We were immediately invited to return to the Bachwoche Ansbach for five concerts in 1981 and subsequently to record all the major Bach choral works for Germany’s top label, Deutsche Grammophon.

  At about the same time we embarked on an ambitious ten-year assignment based on annual visits to the Göttingen Festival, of which I had been appointed artistic director. This was to revive the dramatic oratorios and operas of Handel, whose music, even more than that of Bach, had undergone an astonishing process of bowdlerisation over the years – even a partial appropriation by the Nazis in the 1930s as a vehicle for patriotic propaganda – and was now in urgent need of reappraisal. Here, too, we encountered mild scepticism at first, but soon found that German attitudes towards Handel were less entrenched than those in England, his adopted country (and than they were towards Bach). Gradually we were greeted with a more open-minded response – a mixture of astonishment and patriotic pride – to our interpretation of this magnificent, partially known repertoire. Alongside these European concert appearances, our recordings of a whole range of works – some old war-horses like Messiah and the Christmas Oratorio, but also forgotten masterpieces like Rameau’s Les Boréades and Leclair’s Scylla et Glaucus – found favour with audiences and started to win international recognition.

  Though increasingly busy as a guest conductor in opera houses and with symphony orchestras, I found myself coming back to my home base with fresh enthusiasm: the English Baroque Soloists provided a living laboratory in which to test new theories, to exchange views and approaches, and were now showing a willingness to strike out on new paths away from what were becoming the sapping orthodoxies of period-instrument style. Suddenly you could hear the music leap from the confines of its encasement. The moment these old instruments were let loose on music that had once been the exclusive preserve of the scaled-down modern symphony orchestra, what for years had seemed ‘ye olde’ and remote now sounded new-minted. It felt fine to ruffle a few feathers if it meant we could discover and share insights into the music we all cared about so much.

  From the 1980s onwards our repertoire was constantly expanding. The bicentenary of the outbreak of the French Revolution was the moment when the Orchestre révolutionnaire et romantique was born, using many of the same players as the English Baroque Soloists, but playing turn-of-the-century instruments. Together we moved forwards – from Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven to Weber, Berlioz, Schubert, Mendelssohn, Schumann and Brahms, even to Verdi, Debussy and Stravinsky. It was an enthralling process of re-discovery, giving the lie to the hoary old notion of a single, inexorable developing tradition within Western classical music, and to an enervating mid-twentieth-century tendency to iron out crucial temperamental and stylistic differences between composers by playing everything on the same ‘instrument’: the standard modern symphony orchestra. Our aim was always to strip away layers of accreted performance practice to reveal each of these composers – and each significant work of each composer – in their individual plumage, testing the ability of this ‘old’ music to survive in our time. The quest was (and is) to locate the sharp and vivid colours at its core and to re-discover that élan vital in the music that appeals to us now. Surprisingly often, centuries-old music turns out to feel more modern than whole swathes of music from the last hundred years.

  But time and again I found myself drawn back to the music of Bach as to a lodestone. Just as I had discovered earlier how valuable it was to come to grips with Monteverdi in order to understand the way music and words could be fruitfully combined in all forms of dramatic music, so I now came to realise that to make headway as a conductor I would first need to study and to learn to perform the music of Bach, for it forms the very bedrock of what we loosely refer to as classical music. Without an understanding of him I would forever be groping in the dark when interpreting Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven and their Romantic successors, very few of whom managed to resist his influence. Although I had been mulling over it for years, it was not until the autumn of 1987 that I found the opportunity (and the courage) to conduct the Matthew Passion for the first time. It was in East Berlin, and in the audience were GDR soldiers weeping quite openly. Perhaps on that side of the border this most universal of music had become fossilised in some prescribed – and largely spurious – local tradition. By approaching it afresh, free of ritualised clichés, we were unwittingly opening the floodgates for an emotional response to it.

  But it was not all one-way traffic: two years earlier members of the Leipzig Radio Chorus appeared at a rehearsal of Handel’s Israel in Egypt that I was preparing with the Monteverdi Choir in the western gallery of Leipzig’s Thomaskirche. This led to an impromptu performance of Bach’s motet Singet dem Herrn sung by both choirs, making a lasting impression on all the participants. Then, in 1987, there was a tour of the B minor Mass in Japan, memorable for the concentrated response of a largely Buddhist and Shinto audience.

  But increasingly I felt there was something incomplete in my understanding of how Bach the man connected to his unfathomable music. Even after living with the main choral masterpieces for so long, there were vital pieces of the jigsaw still missing. If I had been an accomplished keyboard player I might have found what I was looking for in the vast and endlessly fascinating repertoire that includes the Goldberg Variations and the Well-Tempered Clavier. But, as a choral man and someone who has always responded to words, I felt the key for me must lie in the nearly 200 church cantatas to have survived; I was certain that they contained individual buried truffles, although as yet I had unearthed only a few of them. To get an idea of the cantatas’ importance in the estimation of Bach’s sons and pupils, one has only to look at the list of his unpublished works in his obituary: they chose to place ‘No. 1: Five Full Annual Cycles of Church Pieces for All the Sundays and Feast-Days’ almost in banner headlines at the head of his work-list. This led me to question why Bach had lavished so much time and care on them, and why, in an initial two-year spurt of frenzied creativity, he composed well over a hundred in Leipzig, doggedly refusing to share the punishing weekly burden of composition with others. Given that they were written in Dickens-like weekly instalments, one wanted to know just how consistent they were in terms of overall quality: if, as Theodor Adorno claimed, ‘Bach was the first to crystallize the idea of the rationally constituted work’,2 do the cantatas qualify? Are they genuinely significant? Can they escape their original literary and liturgical origins and limitations and bridge the gap between his culture and ours? This set me off wondering what might be the most effective way of performing them now – how to release them from the dead hand of nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Lutheran evangelism on the one hand, and the secular piety of typical concert-hall fare on the other.

  I find it difficult to pinpoint exactly when the idea of the Bach Cantata Pilgrimage first arose. What had started out as an intuition born of a lifelong fascination with Bach only gradually acquired shape and substance before growing into a coherent practical endeavour.d It seemed that no one had previously attempted to perform them within a single calendar year in their exact original liturgical positions. In 2000 we would be celebrating the birth of the founder of one of the world’s great religions and the 250th anniversary of Bach’s death. What more appropriate way to do so than via the work of its greatest musical advocate, with performances of all the cantatas concentrated within a single year? Bach’s Lutheran faith is encapsulated in this extraordinary music. It carries a universal message of hope that can touch anybody regardless of culture, religious denomination or musical knowledge. It spring
s from the depths of the human psyche and not from some topical or local creed.