The Inspired Genius of Johann Sebastian Bach by Richard Wall

"Truth may be the first casualty of war, but culture is always another. Those who are indifferent to its destruction are apt to be indifferent to the destruction of life itself," writes Joe Sobran in a recent article on the looting of Iraq.

If of late you’ve had a little too much of the philosopher Leo Strauss and his followers – the ones who failed or did not care to prevent the looting which has taken place in Iraq – take a break from the cultural and media wars. I recommend sitting down quietly to listen to the glorious music of Johann Sebastian Bach (1685–1750).

"Over 250 years after his death," writes the Catalan musician and conductor Jordi Savall, "the mysterious current of Bach’s genius continues to transport us to the depths of the human spirit. [His music] provides the inexhaustible impulse for a spiritual and aesthetic journey into those sublime realms where the human and the divine communicate and are sometimes united in harmony."

Heady words, but no exaggeration for anyone who has experienced the frisson that runs down the spine when listening to Bach’s music. It is an invidious task to recommend any of it in particular. To connoisseurs and Bach aficionados who are reading this I therefore apologize, since no choice of this sort would ever command a consensus, but for those who might like to experiment, or perhaps revisit the music, I have picked three introductory items: the Violin Concertos (BWV 1041–1043), the Easter Oratorio (BWV 249), and The Preludes and Fugues of The Well-Tempered Clavier (Part 1 BWV 846–869, Part 2 BWV 870–893).

For further exploration, I have compiled a suggested discography at the end of this article. In addition, the Internet is a rich source of material on Bach. There are many excellent websites detailing and cataloguing his life and work, some offering music samples for downloading, and I have listed a few of these as well.

For preference, your audition should be uninterrupted, as in a live concert. Of course, modern living is not conducive to this, but it is still a worthwhile goal. No phones, no getting up to order a pizza or cook supper in the middle, and visits to the little room should be got over before you start. Otherwise, as a good school friend of mine once said to me and I have never since forgotten, every time you interrupt, stop the music, or walk out, you are insulting the composer. To say nothing of diminishing the experience and your own enjoyment of whatever you are listening to.

I say this half in jest, and half seriously, because Bach’s music, like the best of art and culture, is in the true sense inspired by the divine. It is a journey in search of ultimate consolation for the soul, in a material world of trouble and tribulation. Therefore it is best experienced in a straight-through sequential performance, with all its stirring climaxes, moments of deep contemplation or even despair, and waves of elation and joy.

While the experience of listening to recorded music does not match the experience of attending a live concert, audio technology, lately in the form of Digital Radio, Super Audio CD (SACD), and home theatre DVD for example, has been moving us closer and closer to the live performance experience. I count myself fortunate that I grew up in the age of the high fidelity stereophonic sound recording and the long-playing vinyl record. While some say they still prefer vinyl records as giving the more mellow (analog) sound than the (digital) CD, despite the penalty in clicks and scratches, I have for almost all of its 20 years been a dedicated fan of the now universal iridescent compact disc, which makes it possible to listen to music in the way I have recommended above with a high degree of clear and faithful sound.

In Bach’s day, the early 18th century, it was a different matter. The music was written most often for church performance at particular solemn occasions or ceremonies, requiring significant organizational skills to marshal all the necessary human and musical resources, and Bach would probably not have seen any one work performed more than two or three times in his lifetime. This meant that when composing new works he would liberally cannibalise older works (and, as all artists do, pinch ideas from the work of earlier composers as well, such as Vivaldi), and re-arrange or transcribe for another instrument works which had originally been written for one particular instrument, so that several different versions of the same works abound.

It has also meant that, down to our own day, Bach’s works lend themselves to brilliant and infinite improvisation: they can be set to voices as was done by the Swingle Singers in their "Jazz Sebastian Bach" series of the 1960s, to different groups of instruments, or be played by solo instruments, especially the harpsichord, or jazzed up like the work of the Jacques Loussier Trio in his highly listenable-to Play Bach series, which some scandalized lovers of classical music viewed as a sacrilege when they first came out in 1960.

Many other composers and performers have been profoundly influenced by Bach and have paid tribute to his inspiration in their own adaptations and variations on his works – the names of Felix Mendelssohn, who was responsible for reviving the music of Bach in the 19th century and incorporated Bach’s chorale "Now thank we all our God" in his second symphony, and the Brazilian composer Villa Lobos with his haunting and beautiful Bachianas Brasileiras, are just two which spring to mind.

That we have such a rich legacy of passionately intense and inventive music today is due in no small measure to Bach’s ability to transcend the limitations of his own human (and financial) condition. Dr. Percy Scholes, the original editor of the classic one-volume Oxford Companion to Music, first published in 1938, places his life as a composer in its material context thus:

According to Scholes, ‘he experienced a good deal of that tribulation that often comes from contact between the clerical outlook and the artistic temperament.’ In 1723, Bach, who had been Kapellmeister – official composer – twice before, had taken a step down in career terms, to become the Cantor (Precentor or Choirmaster) of St. Thomas school and Director of Music in the churches of Leipzig.

A remarkable example of Bach’s divine inspiration during this period is the haunting Cantata for Solo Bass voice of 1727, "Ich habe genug" (I have enough/It is enough), BWV 82, with its famous aria, "Ich freue mich auf meinem Tod" (I look forward to my death). ‘The entire score,’ writes Italian musicologist and Bach specialist Alberto Basso, ‘is suffused with an intimate and personal tone… the cantata becomes a contemplation on death considered as a liberation from the afflictions of this world.’

Afflictions which, for Bach as for most of us, included keeping body and soul together in this short earthly lifespan. In 1733 the reigning monarch in Saxony, the Elector August the Strong, died. A period of mourning was decreed during which, for five months, no musical performance was allowed. Bach took advantage of this time for creative work, and produced the early part of what was to become his Mass in B Minor, which he planned to dedicate to the new Elector and send in to him with a request to be appointed to the (better-paying and more secure) position of HofKapellmeister – Court Composer. He wrote in the following terms:

The career guidance industry was not even in its infancy here. No-one to help with an upbeat résumé and summary of skills and achievements either. Despite this masterpiece of grovelling to supreme officialdom, Bach was not to get his appointment by decree until over three years later, in late 1736. To celebrate it he gave an organ recital at the Frauenkirche in Dresden, an occasion at which the famous Georg Silbermann organ was inaugurated.

From this time until his death in 1750, Bach was to remain settled at Leipzig, and would compose or complete some of his most intense and most inspired music, such as the three works which have come to be regarded as his musical monument – ‘The Art of Fugue,’ ‘Musical Offering’ and the ‘Mass in B Minor.’

These are intense and difficult pieces of music which reflect his turning in on himself in his later years, when he tried to collect together what he himself already saw as a legacy for the future, and when, although betraying ‘few signs of having grown tired of his job,... he spent his time on things which interested him, even if there was no immediate necessity to write them,’ as eminent Bach scholar Christoph Wolff has written. He says of the B Minor Mass:

"Setting the text of the mass means, above all else, giving direct musical expression, without periphrasis or ambivalence, to invocation, praise and the confession of faith. Such an undertaking could not but be close to Bach’s heart, for it was the supreme opportunity to unite his creed as a Christian with his creed as a musician in a single statement. But that statement had to meet his own very high standards of perfection, and so it is no wonder that it took him more than 15 years, from 1733 to 1745, to complete. There was, after all, no deadline: in this task the only obligation Bach acknowledged was his personal responsibility to his Creator, to tradition and to posterity."

It is a cruel irony of history, but no surprise to those who know what war and barbarism can do to culture, that the same Frauenkirche where Bach inaugurated the organ in 1736 was destroyed by the Allied firebombing of Dresden in 1945, a militarily unnecessary operation which, using conventional weapons (not WMD), killed 135,000 human beings – almost twice the number of people who died at Hiroshima.

For many years the Frauenkirche was left in ruins, its ‘hot stones’ and moon landscape a memorial to those who died, as Kurt Vonnegut has so aptly described them in his classic, sad, funny and serious masterpiece and ‘book of the Dresden experience,’ Slaughterhouse 5. But now the church is being rebuilt, and a webcam view of progress on the construction site is available on the Internet.

Posterity is fortunate indeed to have the legacy of J S Bach, but sadly, as all the human and cultural atrocities of war in the 20th and 21st centuries show, it has not learned to be any more civilized.

Nor are the state officials of today any better able than their predecessors were in 1945 to discriminate as to when to conduct ‘operations’ with fancy names which are militarily unnecessary.

And, unlike Bach the composer and creative genius, whose works really have taken him into the realms of immortality, they certainly do not know when it is appropriate or not to invoke the name of God. I am thinking here of Mr. Blair’s statements that he is ready to answer to his Maker for the invasion of Iraq.

Compared to the infinite journey to the depths of the soul which Bach’s music offers us, what kind of legacy to posterity are the hot and radioactive stones of that poor bombed and looted land?

Orchestral:	*Catalog/Performers ()**
Violin Concertos, BWV 1041-1043	Harmonia Mundi GD77006 La Petite Bande Sigiswald Kuijken
Brandenburg Concertos 1-6, BWV 1046-1051	Nos 1-3: Archiv 471 720-2 Nos 4-6: Archiv 474 220-2 The English Concert Trevor Pinnock
Works for Organ and Orchestra, BWV 1052a, 1053a, 1059 and Sinfonia BWV29	Calliope CAL 3720 André Isoir
Double Concertos for Harpsichords, BWV 1060-1062	Archiv 463 725-2 (5CD) The English Concert Trevor Pinnock
Concertos for 3 and 4 Harpsichords, BWV 1063-1065	Archiv 463 725-2 (5CD) The English Concert Trevor Pinnock
Orchestral Suites 1-4, BWV 1066-1069	Decca Eclipse 448 231-2 Stuttgart Chamber Orchestra Karl Munchinger

Choral Works:
Mass in B Minor, BWV 232	Archiv 415 514-2 Monteverdi Choir John Eliot Gardiner
Easter Oratorio, BWV 249	Harmonia Mundi HMC 901513 Collegium Vocale Philippe Herreweghe
Magnificat, BWV 243a	L’Oiseau-Lyre 414 678-2 Academy of Ancinet Music Simon Preston
St. Matthew Passion, BWV 244	Archiv 427 648-2 Monteverdi Choir John Eliot Gardiner
St. John Passion, BWV 245	Archiv 419 324-2 Monteverdi Choir John Eliot Gardiner

Cantatas:
Jauchzet Gott in allen Landen, BWV 51
Erfreut euch, ihr Herzen, BWV 66
Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott, BWV 80
Ich Habe genug, BWV 82	Harmonia Mundi/HMA 151365 Peter Kooy

Organ Works
Trio Sonatas BWV 525, 526, 529 Fantasia in G Major BWV 572	Archiv 431 705-2 Ton Koopman Elektra/Nonesuch (complete organ works edition – 16CD)
Toccata and Fugue in D Minor, BWV 565	Sony Classics SBK 46551 E Power Biggs

Solo Keyboard Works
English Suites, BWV 806-811	Sony Classics SK 60276 /SK 60277 Murray Perahia
French Suites, BWV 812-817	Decca/London 433 313-2 Andras Schiff
Partitas BWV 825-830	Decca/London 411 732-2 Andras Schiff
The Well-Tempered Clavier – Part 1, BWV 846-869 and Part 2, BWV 870-893	Decca/London 414 388-2/417 236-2 Andras Schiff
Italian Concerto BWV 971	DG 419 218-2 Angela Hewitt
Goldberg Variations BWV 988	DG 439 978-2 Wilhelm Kempff

Other Works
Suites for Solo Cello, BWV 1007-1012	Archiv 449 711-2 Pierre Fournier
Sonatas for Violin and Harpsichord, BWV 1014-1024	Archiv 427 152-2 Reinhard Goebel/Robert Hill
Musikalishes Opfer (Musical Offering), BWV 1079	Alia Vox AV9817 Hesperion XX Jordi Savall
Die Kunst der Fuge (The Art of Fugue), BWV 1080	1) Harmonia Mundi 1951169 Davitt Moroney, Harpsichord
	2) Alia Vox AV9818 Hesperion XX Jordi Savall

Some Bach websites (*):

(*) I have no affiliation with any of these websites, artists or labels. I have personally listened to and enjoyed the versions of the works in question listed here, but there are many excellent alternative versions of practically all of them. Not all catalog numbers may be correct for all regions of the world, and some of the versions listed may have been deleted from current catalogs.

Richard Wall (send him mail) is a freelance translator specializing in the social sciences, who lives in Estoril, Portugal.