The Acolyte
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
J.M. Coetzee, the Nobel Prize-winning author, has written of a boring summer afternoon in 1955 when, as a 15-year-old in Cape Town, he was frozen in his tracks by the musical sounds emanating from a neighbor’s house. “I dared not breathe,” he remembered. “I was being spoken to by the music as music had never spoken to me before.” The work was Johann Sebastian Bach’s “Well-Tempered Clavier.” That afternoon in the garden, he declared, “everything changed.”
Mr. Coetzee is hardly alone among those for whom the power of Bach’s music was life-transforming. Martin Buber, facing a crisis of faith in his youth, was considering suicide when he had a sudden insight into “the fragile possibility” of a just human existence. “Bach helped me,” he reported. If Western classical music could name a high priest, it would be Bach. And the “Well-Tempered Clavier” would be its bible.
Tonight at Carnegie Hall, pianist Daniel Barenboim will perform Book One of this masterpiece (the entire work comprises two books of 24 preludes and fugues, assembled 20 years apart). Judging from his new recording of the work on Warner Classics, this will be a recital not to miss. Whether it will be life-changing is another question, but Mr. Barenboim’s Bach should at the least be an exquisite musical experience.
What is it about Bach that stirs such strong reactions? For one thing, his is music of extraordinary imagination, written at a time when a clockmaker God still commanded a well-ordered universe. Bach envisions musical possibilities with an almost inhuman ease and unfolds them with breathtaking beauty and logic. Melodic strands are taken up in one register of the instrument, then in another – tossed back and forth or staggered so that one entrance interrupts what another has already begun. Themes are played forward and backward and stood on their heads in mirror form. Amazingly, in Bach’s hands all these individual instrumental “voices” blend into the most thrilling harmonies.
Inherent in Bach’s music are the qualities cited by his contemporary, the philosopher Emmanuel Kant, as necessary in great art – attributes such as formal completeness and law-like coherence. How to convey all this to an audience – especially to an audience of non-musicians – is an important question facing any interpreter. At a recent performance of Bach’s “Art of Fugue” at St. Bartholomew’s, the splendid harpsichordist Bradley Brookshire used projections of the score on a large screen, with color-coded notation, to help the audience follow Bach’s intricate musical web. Despite Mr. Brookshire’s brilliant use of rhythmic variety and instrumental color, this was indeed helpful, given the harpsichord’s clangorous tendencies.
The piano offers other solutions. Bach did not seem to have a particular keyboard instrument in mind for the “Well-Tempered Clavier,” and we are long past the day when the piano was deemed unacceptable for its performance. Indeed, Bach knew the early piano and made some use of it; he even acted as an agent in the sale of a piano toward the end of his life. Yet today’s pianist has the advantage of expressive possibilities unknown to keyboardists of Bach’s era, and Daniel Barenboim uses them all to great advantage.
He’s had a lifetime to prepare. “I really grew up with it as a child,” he recently told me. “It was hammered into me. And when I went to Paris to study with Nadia Boulanger, she forced me to transpose the pieces. I’d come to a lesson and she would say of a piece in F, ‘Play it in G Sharp.’ She tried to develop the independence of the music from its particular tonality in the brain of the student. And it was in fact very important to be able to hear it in different keys. By approaching the music as a structure beyond the specific notes on the page, I learned what a transition was and how a modulation came about, as well as why it was important and how it altered the emotional temperature of the music at that moment.”
Mr. Barenboim’s recording takes these into consideration, but his interpretive stance is very nuanced, changing dramatically from piece to piece. In the first prelude, for example, his sound is harp like, with substantial use of the sustaining pedal and a dramatic shape strongly tied to the music’s patterns of harmonic tension and release. The second prelude is dry and fast, the third exceedingly tender.
“Bach very rarely wrote tempo indications or dynamics,” he explained. “I think there were two reasons: He thought everyone would have a sense, more or less, of how to play this music, and, also, the music lends itself to very different ways of playing. I remember Glenn Gould saying that he played every piece in three completely different ways. The two recordings I enjoyed the most and learned the most from were those by Edwin Fischer – who still remains, on the piano, the model of Bach playing – and the wonderful Wanda Landowska on the huge Pleyel harpsichord.”
In working on the “Well-Tempered Clavier,” the pianist made use of several printed editions of the work, finding in the one by Sir Donald Tovey a good analysis; in the one by Carl Czerny, a window on how the music was played in Beethoven’s time; and in the one by Ferrucio Busoni, a wealth of imaginative ideas and wonderful solutions for fingering the music.
On the subject of Bach’s greatness, he offers a broad historical view. “Why was he such a powerful influence?” he asks. “I don’t know. But I think that the importance of a composer does not necessarily go hand in hand with the beauty of his compositions.”
He made his point by comparing two early 19th-century contemporaries. “Mendelssohn wrote wonderful music; think how much poorer we would be without the Octet, the Violin Concerto, the ‘Songs Without Words.’ And yet, if Mendelssohn had not existed, the history of music would have developed more or less the way it had. He was not a pivotal influence. Take someone like Berlioz: much less perfect – his craftsmanship is not to be compared with Mendelssohn’s. The quality of the work is uneven. But historically, he was 10 times more important. Without Berlioz there would have been no Wagner, and without Wagner there would have been no 20th century.”
Then, of course, there are the few composers who “wrote both the highest quality music and were also pivotal figures in history.”
“I think Bach is certainly one of the people who influenced everything that happened after them,” Mr. Barenboim said. “Bach managed on the one hand to summarize everything that was written before him, and yet he also looked to the future. For example, take the B minor fugue of the first book, which in its chromaticism already looks toward Wagner.”
The genius and power of Bach – especially the “Well-Tempered Clavier” – “comes from the fact that there is a constant movement between parts that are simple and parts that are highly complex,” according to Mr. Barenboim.
“The complexity gives the music its ambiguity, and therefore its richness. One moment you are not sure where things are heading, and in the next moment, simple, pure harmonies give you a feeling of great peace. The combination gives the music a very lifelike quality. There can be no real form without emotional content, and no emotional content without form.”
I was struck by how close Mr. Barenboim came, in assessing the magnitude of Bach’s achievement, to the expression of the writer J.M. Coetzee. “In Bach nothing is obscure, no single step is so miraculous as to surpass imitation,” he wrote. “Yet when the chain of sounds is realized in time, the building process ceases at a certain moment to be the mere linking of units….” There is something ineffable, even miraculous in the outcome. “Bach thinks in music,” he concludes. “Music thinks itself in Bach.”