Moving in mysterious ways
Jeremy Sams
Bach and the Dance of God Wilfred Mailers (Faber £1 5) Bach described his music as 'harmonious euphony for the glory of God'. This is the point of departure for Professor Me Ilers for whom it is no mere formula hut a passionate and personal credo. Calling on his own vast and eclectic culture (from Augustine to Zarlino) he seeks to show through his analyses of the cello suites, the '48% the St John Passion, the B minor Mass, the Goldberg Variations, and two late organ works that all Bach's music is a demonstration and depiction of the Divine. This thesis is the fruit of 30 years of teaching; it is no arid exposition, but, rather, an impassioned sermon illustrating a firmly-held belief by reference to the sacred texts.
This position of exalted confidence has been reached by spirited leaps that even the most energetically faithful would be slow to follow. The most far-reaching is his assumption that so-called 'absolute music' (Bach's secular instrumental works) can be imbued with meanings inferred from such overtly expressive music as the Passions, where specific texts and intentions can make musical metaphors manifest. He deduces, for example, from the words and music of the St'John Passion that the keys of G minor and E flat major 'represent', respectively,. 'the tragic turbulence of life' and 'the certitude of Christian _Grace'. These find ings are applied to an arguably nonreligious work, a cello prelude, and its coda in E flat which follows a cadence in G minor is seen as a 'resurrection".
Thus the secular works must, as it were. be converted to Christianity. In the chapter on the cello suites this is either hinted at (the sarabande is 'solemn. sometimes even sacral'; the allemande is 'serious, even at times sacramental'), or simply asserted. (it's not merely acoustical accident that makes this secular music sound overwhelmingly impressive when played in an ecclesiastical building"). The religious significance of the 'Well-tempered Clavier is more subtly proposed. Temperament (in the musical sense) is seen as a pollution of the pure church modes, therefore 'an allegory of the Fall'. The tuning fork becomes the pitchfork; the Devil has all the best harmonies. Bach's search for godly perfection in harmonic polyphony is thus 'a demonstrate° of the workings of Christian Grace more revealing than any theological text'. And this is the confidently struck keynote of the subsequent analyses of the '48', over which Professor Metiers modulates freely from hypothesis to assumption, and thence to tendentious conclusions.
Musical analysis and theologipal dissertation have so little in common that their forcible yoking gives us a decidedly bumpy ride. The analyses seem to be at their most telling in the chapters on the St John Passion and the Mass where Bach's obvious religious intent leaves Professor Metiers and his undoubted insight free to examine the complex interaction of words and music. Elsewhere, however, the investigations are shot through with theological supposition and preconception. This does not necessarily invalidate them, but to have one eye so firmly fixed on the infinite seems, paradoxically, to limit one's horizons.
Professor Mellers seeks to bridge the gap between music and theology with Christian symbolism. Christ, it seems, can be thought of theologically as a fish, ('swimming phallus-like through the unknowing waters') and also be heard musically as a leaping lion or a cooing dove. Orchestral instruments, too, become sounding symbols. Thus two oboi d'amore 'may symbolise harmony between the Catholic and Protestant churches' and two bassoons, or faggotti, are related to 'the two trees — that of life and that of good and evil.' The central symbol of Christianity, the sign of the cross, is, for Professor Metiers, literally crucial, but he is unable to endow it with commensurate musical significance. The crossshapes identified in the St John Passion and in the D-A-D (God the father'?) key structure of the Gloria seem equally explicable in purely sonorous terms. And when he claims that Bach's music is, like most music, at once horizontal and vertical, and that this musical signature (the German notes BACH) can be joined up to form a cross, therefore Bach 'knew that he was able to carry that cross on our behalf', then readers may find they have more crosses than they can bear.
Professor Mellers's most audacious leap is into the limbo of numerology. There is certainly a great deal of evidence to suggest that Bath knew and used number symbolism, but when practically every number has some mystical significance, and any word can be mathematically expressed by the sum of its letters (a = 1 and so on), then it is perilously easy to do one's sums without knowing where to draw the line. Can it really be said that the six-part Sanctus was 'probably Suggested by the six-fold wings of the Seraphim in Isaiah,' or that an 11-note theme in the F minor Sinfonia represents the ten commandments — plus one? The arithmetic is at its most ingenious in the Credo from the Mass where a passage of 45 bars, followed by 84 is seen to total 129 which is 3 x 43 (the alphabetical number of CREDO), whilst 84 itself is 12 x 7— or the Apostles multiplied by the holy number of the Church (but also, revealingly, the alphabetical number of the author himself). This is strange scholarship, as easy to mock as to propose, at once unprovable and irrefutable; an avenue that should be explored, but one that has no logical end and no clear direction. It is Professor Mellers's personal faith that cements the assumed and the demonstrable, and if Bach is your Holy Writ, then here is the perfect concordance.
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