Heaven and earth
Robin Holloway
Idon’t really like Radio Three’s recent venture into blockbuster one-man blowouts. It’s a bit sophomoric and anorakish, and the completism can reduce even the greatest composers to wallpaper. Bach is unquestionably one of the greatest. But during ‘Bach Christmas’ it often seemed as though one were switching on into the same piece extended on an endless loop: might as well have been Telemann! This impression was compounded by a tendency to prefer jogtrot ‘sewing machine’ performances. Many minutes must have been shaved off the project by going for modern high-speed baroque. In fairness, I must add that of course I couldn’t hear everything, and did catch some diversity of interpretative style and many moments of thrilling beauty.
Most missed was a sense of Overview (something frequently achieved elsewhere on the network with far more modest means — e.g., This Week’s Composer). In its absence, I’ll tempt hubris by trying one myself.
Albeit universal, Bach is also human (though a friend recalls a graffito from the Sixties declaring ‘Bach is God’) and doesn’t extend to the utmost of his divine creator’s range. What he clearly does contain comes in three main categories. In secular instrumental music — suites, partitas, concertos, for keyboard, solo violin or cello, orchestra — physical energy prevails; the robust body rhythms of this dance-based corpus, its cheerfulness, with outbreaks of festivity; its tone of small-court ceremonial, provincialtown society, family comity, though in no way lacking tenderness, lyricism, inwardness, is fundamentally extrovert. In religious vocal music, the range is infinitely wider and deeper: from epic in subject and scale (both Passions and the huge B-minor Mass) to small-scale devotional intimacy (particularly in the earliest cantatas — Weimar, Cöthen — perfect instance the actus tragicus with its florilège of biblical touchstones as personally revealing as those chosen by Brahms for his Requiem); and plenty in between, including the four smaller masses and the vast mass of church cantatas. Here the scope is as great as the music: occasions brilliant or funerary, spiritual utterance in many shades, strenuous battle-pieces wherein Satan is routed and the city of God rises bright and strong, theological dialogues (between Hope and Fear usually) of exquisite feeling, images of expectant virgin-brides and contented mothers, renditions of sin, guilt, unworthiness that can attain tragic expression.
And, third, his works of learning: literally educational in little musettes, passepieds, minuets, marches, etc. for his own children, from which they (subsequently everybody) can progress to little fugues and inventions in two, then three parts; thence to ever more ambitious compilations of theory and practice, the two incomparable volumes of 24 preludes and fugues each; thence to quasi-scientific demonstration — e.g., the Goldberg Variations; thence visionary speculation The Musical Offering; The Art of Fugue wherein a mortal maker renders his ablest hommage to the author of the celestial motions.
All three aspects interpenetrate without incongruity, strain, imbalance to achieve flawless integration.
So what does Bach seem not to have? For people who dislike this music, it is deficient in wit, lightness of being, surprise, grace, charm, elegance; and wholly lacking sensuousness, hence sensuality, hence eroticism and passion.
Both charges can be contradicted. Think of the sheer deliciousness of some of the three-part Inventions, the sheer delicacy of the French Suites: then the positively Stravinskian mental agility combined with sparky fun in some of the fugues from the ‘48’ (e.g., A-major Bk I; F-major Bk II) and many such numbers from the enormous collection of organ music (especially when played on dulcet period instruments sporting tinkling cymbalsterns). For charm, elegance, grace (abounding, actually, throughout the canon, often in unlikely corners), one need go no further than the arias and ensembles in the Magnificat, whose melting suavity would enhance any operatic stage. Surprise? Well, not like Haydn: but it was Stravinsky, again, who pointed out that, where Handel always produces the expected, Bach will always produce the exceptional note or move.
True, there is nothing sensual/erotic as such. But every lulling invitation to death as sweet welcome repose is implicitly as amorous–ecstatic as Isolde and Tristan on their flowery bank: every writhing worm of contrition eating into the soul foretells Tristan’s delirium, Amfortas’s torment, Parsifal’s empathetic anguish. In such places Bach’s affective vocabulary, chromatic in contour and harmony, is way outside the norms of his epoch. One would say ‘before its time’, and ‘only fulfilled by Schubert, then Wagner, then Wolf’, except this way of thinking ahead is so pointless. Bach has already realised and fulfilled to the full in his own idiom, and with his own time’s characteristic subject matter, aspects of music intrinsic to its nature and possibilities. Whether the context be erotic admission of guilt, amorous longing for heavenly repose, voluptuous submission to punishment, or a Hymn to the Night, an Invocation to Frau Venus, or a Poem of Ecstasy.
Only rationalist bigots are fooled by the superficial repulsiveness of the bloody pietistic metaphors Bach sets with such zest into thinking that this is what they’re really about. Musical utterance has been traducing and transcending its texts and pretexts these eight centuries or so! And this process (inevitable, in fact, and probably for the best) decidedly includes most great song, opera, oratorio even.
Chez Bach, all this interpenetrates, too, with the aspects of his output that don’t divide opinion. His celestial mechanics are earthy, robust, dance-y, as well: the Goldberg canons, intricate cerebrations, alternate with exuberant virtuoso display and cheery dances; each half contains a melodious cantilena of searching expressivity, the first calm, the second twisty with passionate sin/guilt/voluptuosity; and the Quodlibet invokes warm family togetherness with the riotous good humour of a Breughel. Every note, here and everywhere, is absolutely practical. The Art of Fugue is laid out as abstract demonstration, but lies naturally under the fingers at the keyboard in the most normative and grateful manner: the canons in the Offering are set out as puzzles, but they, too, are essentially performing music once solved; and it all sounds so marvellous! His quest for the inexpressible/inextinguishable/ unattainable is not an assault on the heavens or a theoretical abstraction; he finds everything needful to hand at his feet, on the fruitful earth.
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