Levin – Wolff

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Robert Levin (b. 1947), American pianist and composer

I cannot say that there is a particular work of Bach which is a favourite of mine, and precisely because I am fortunate to know almost all of them. I know a majority of the cantatas by memory, as well as all of the passions and the oratorios and most of the keyboard music, and one is flabbergasted by the invention, by the variety, by all of the nuances – the complete European influences that you find. Elements of Polish and English and French and Italian and Spanish music, that have all mixed into the German mastery of Bach.

No, no, no – my favourite piece of Bach is the one which is in front of me at any given moment.

Everything that any composer seems ever to have found worth saying is to be found in some nook and cranny of the work of Bach. It’s the greatest inspiration, I think, that exists in the world of music.

24 HOURS BACH (28 JULY 2000) – 250TH BACH ANNIVERSARy

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Johann Mattheson (1681-1764), German composer and musicologist

I remember, and a whole large congregation will probably also remember, that a few years ago a certain great virtuoso [Bach], whose merits have since brought him a handsome Cantorate [St. Thomas in Leipzig], presented himself as candidate for the post of organist in a town of no small size [Hamburg], exhibited his playing on the most various and greatest organs, and aroused universal admiration for his ability;

but there presented himself at the same time, among other unskilled journeymen, the son of a well-to-do artisan, who was better at preluding with his thalers than with his fingers, and he obtained the post, as may be easily conjectured, despite the fact that almost everyone was angry about it.

This took place just at Christmas time, and the eloquent chief preacher [Erdmann Neumeister, chief preacher at St. Jacobi Church in Hamburg 1715-1756], who had not concurred in the Simoniacal [buying or selling church offices] deliberations, expounded in the most splendid fashion the gospel of the music of the angels at the birth of Christ, in which connection the recent incident of the rejected artist gave him quite naturally the opportunity to reveal his thoughts, and to close his sermon with something like the following pronouncement:

he was firmly convinced that even if one of the angels of Bethlehem should come down from heaven, one who played divinely and wished to become organist of St. J., but had no money, he might just as well fly away again.

Der musicalische Patriot (1728)

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Bobby McFerrin (b. 1950), American vocal performer and conductor

I can take some of his melodies and say: Wow! When I hear it, it makes me cry. I don’t know why it makes me cry, you know. It just gets into my soul and reaches a certain place.

I remember the first time I heard the second movement of Bachs double violin concerto, I just wept. I thought: Wow, that is really beautiful music.

We need musicians who just wanna play Bach the traditional way with traditional instruments, and then we have other musicians, who wanna take Bachs themes and treat them in extremely different manner, you know, play with the tempos, play with the instrumentation – why not? It’s all valid, it’s all wonderful.

24 HOURS BACH (28 JULY 2000) – 250TH BACH ANNIVERSARY

I’ve always said that if I one day found that I was the head of a music school, I would make sure that every single musician that passed through those doors had at least one year of improvisation before they could graduate, because classical musicians especially seem to have forgotten that the musicians that they venerate were great improvisors. Mozart, Beethoven, Bach – they were great improvisors, and if you take the music away, you know, the paper music, away from them, lots of times they don’t know what to do.

So I think it’s important that they have the flexibility and understand the language of a jazz musician, which is: Being open enough to just try something a little bit different – at least understand the language. Like if I say to an orchestra: Okay, this passage needs to swing – that they would understand what I mean by that, you know. Or: This beat needs to hang over the bar line – that they understand what I’m talking about.There’s just a certain sort of openness and flexibility that jazz musicians are taught from the beginning, that I think is very, very valuable.

documentary in Danish television

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Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy (1809-1847), German composer

If I have written several pieces of sacred music it is because I needed to do so, in the same way as one sometimes needs to read a certain book, the Bible, for example, or some other, and only that book can satisfy one. That these compositions might bear some resemblance to those of Sebastian Bach is something I cannot help, because I wrote them, line for line, under the impressions of the moment, and if the words impressed me in the same way they did the old Bach, I can only be the happier for it; for you do not think, I imagine, that I copy his forms without putting anything into them; a work of such emptiness would be so repugnant to me that I would not be able to compose a single piece to the end.

Excerpt from a letter written 15 July 1831

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Carl Nielsen (1865-1931), Danish composer and conductor

When I showed him the old copy of the Well-tempered Clavichord he said that Bach was so deep and strange that I had better leave him alone till I was a good deal older. Of course I set myself to study Bach that very next day, eagerly, because I could hear from the tone in Outzen’s voice that he had a profound respect for Bach’s music.

I began with the slow preludes, which I played note by note at a snail’s pace. At first they did not strike me as being real music. Where was the melody? And what was the point of the continually recurring figure? There was no tune at all for the right hand, and as I had no idea of the existence of counterpoint this feature made no appeal to me. It was like trying to cut a mighty oak with a small pen-knife, and not even getting through the bark.

But I persevered, and now and then I would get a little glimmer on the clash of a couple of notes which moved me quite differently from all other music I knew. In Red Indian stories I had read how the savages lit a fire by rubbing two sticks together till they began to smoulder. The same thing happened to me. When I had played the little E flat minor Prelude No. 8 some fifty times I suddenly caught fire.

The door was open now, and I could begin exploring an entirely new and strange world. But I left Bach again when Outzen began to teach me the piano, and was in my mid-twenties before I again tackled the Well-tempered Clavichord.

My Childhood (1927)

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Mikhail Pletnev (b. 1957), Russian pianist

The best way, for me, to tell you something reasonable about Bach is – to play.

24 HOURS BACH (28 JULY 2000) – 250TH BACH ANNIVERSARY

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Karl Aage Rasmussen (b. 1947), Danish composer and writer

Seemingly unaffected by the whimsical swings and strides of history, unaffected by three hundred years of constant social, political and technological upheaval, Johann Sebastian Bach’s music lives on in all forms and shapes. Apparently, it is pervaded by a life elixir which constantly rejuvenates its effect on us, it has proved resistant to all assaults and falsifications, misunderstandings, habits, wear and tear.

Bach is addictive. And once addicted, always addicted. Therefore, we expose him to continued, hungry consumption day after day, year after year, apparently without anyone being oversaturated. History’s greatest characters are both connected to their time and raised above it, it is a banality, or almost a definition. But with Bach, it comes to a head. Even with Mozart, the Muses certainly take a nap now and then, timelessness is not self-triggering. With Bach, in a curious way, it comes of its own accord.

Towards the end of Bach’s life, fugues became his escape from an age he no longer understood (the word fugue actually means “escape”). And this is how his fugues can still be heard: as an escape from a brave new world with a constant cry for attention, into a pure, self-contained beauty where you can be moved without feeling pushed.

Many people who have taken piano lessons have begun their musical life cycle with Bach’s Two-Part Inventions. I myself have played them since I was 12 years old, they have the same simple meaning for me as the hymns taught at school have for many poets: A wellspring of my world! I don’t remember that I cherished them, only that they were always there. Later came the hot musical infatuations, short or long affairs, often weird and obscure, in retrospect. But Bach was always there, just like parents. Almost coincidentally, it occurred to me that these small pieces were a kind of rebuses, patterns that turned and rotated, mirrors that mirrored each other, networks that contracted and stretched in the head while playing or listening. And Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier is still to be found in every decent musician’s music collection; not as a kind of Bible, rather as a lifelong hiding and forgetting place where one can shelter from cultural life. Or as a fireplace, whose glows are constantly radiating comfort, light and warmth over the confused spaces of consciousness one is otherwise in.

THE MAGAZINE “KLASSISK MUSIK” – MARCH 2005

Most composer biographies forget to take an interest in that part of the composer’s life dealing with composing. But with Mozart it is particularly difficult, he composed in his head while doing everything else. He was capable of composing one piece while writing down another one. His manuscripts resemble the result of divine dictation, they are without corrections and crossings-out.

However, he experienced one major artistic challenge, namely the encounter with Bach’s music – the only example we have of musical problems that for a while disabled him. In the spring of 1782, Baron van Swieten had acquired copies of Das Wohltemperierte Klavier and Die Kunst der Fuge from Frederick the Great himself, and during the following months interested musicians met every Sunday to study Bach. Today we are used to hear polyphony and Viennese Classic melody/accompaniment side by side, thus it can be difficult to grasp the power of the light that dawned upon Mozart. He headlong plunges into composing fugues, but the few he completes are full of corrections. Even genius doesn’t run on autopilot.

Mozart’s ambitious father had actually brought him up with the mysteries of canon and fugue, though these forms were already antiquated in his childhood (and, by the way, already were when Bach composed his majestic works). But this learning was purely academic, built on pedantic exercises light years away from Bach’s profound and living music. The prodigy Wolfgang could improvise three-voiced fugues, the mature Mozart was proud of being a Kenner, a learned composer. And yet he had to struggle about a year to incorporate the Bach inspiration into his own style. By contrast, the finished stylistic alloy was cast in one piece: the finale of for instance the Jupiter Symphony as polyphonic arithmetic is in no way inferior to Bach, but its spirit is as far from Bach as a newly sprung flower from a wrought iron grille. All gravity and learning has been blown away, and no one who doesn’t already know will realise, that this music is a piece of hazardous musical engineering.

THE MAGAZINE “KLASSISK MUSIK” – SEPTEMBER 2005

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Joshua Rifkin (b. 1944), American conductor and musicologist

I sometimes like to say, that after all, Bach wrote wonderful music, but he’s dead! And we are here, and it’s our job to keep the music alive and to make it meaningful in our time. And those of us who are working with old instruments and with historical practice are doing it out of conviction, that this is the way the music speaks most vividly in our time.

24 HOURS BACH (28 JULY 2000) – 250TH BACH ANNIVERSARY

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András Schiff (b. 1953), Hungarian-born Austro-British pianist and conductor

We know incredibly little about Bach, and maybe that’s a good thing. I find that the biographical details we know about Beethoven or Schubert for example don’t always contribute to a better understanding. The work of Bach exists independently of his life.

It’s wonderful that we still have a relatively large number of manuscripts from Bach. There’s no more beautiful musical calligraphy than Bach’s. I understand his music best of all when I study these manuscripts. Because you can see these wonderful waves, like flowing water. He never writes a straight line but always waves. And so you can imagine how this music flows along. And you rarely find any corrections in these manuscripts. Of course, they’re fair copies, but you really get the impression that this music flowed from his mind.

I then knew that Bach for me was the greatest and most important composer. He has remained so and will always remain so. It’s almost a ritual: Every day when I get up, and if there’s a piano available, I have to play Bach for an hour – that’s how the day begins. I have never enjoyed playing pianistic exercises and etudes and scales, which I found very mechanical and terribly boring and a bit undignified. A bit like chopping wood. Of course, young students have to do that too, you have to have the scales in your hands and the fingering for the different scales. But I don’t think you need that later on. I discovered that Bach’s music gives me all I need. Psychologically and spiritually of course, musically and emotionally – but also purely physically. As I said earlier: there is this volatility and playfulness. There are lots of these elements in the French suites. But you find these from the outset, even in the inventions. To be able to start a day like this cleanses the soul. It’s also very satisfying from an intellectual point of view. You’re always playing polyphony – music in several parts – where all voices are of equal value. It’s like a society in which everyone is equally important.

YOUTUBE VIDEO – ANDRÁS SCHIFF EXPLAINS BACH (2015)

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Friedrich Smend (1893-1980), German musicologist

Bach’s whole work rests upon the foundation of the Reformation. Without Luther, Bach is unimaginable.

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Jiri Stivin (b. 1942), Czech flute player

Bach wrote just the music – notes, notes! No phrasing – just notes, and he felt, that musicians must know how to do it.

It’s the same in jazz! In jazz, you have just some few notes, and everybody change it for themselves.

24 HOURS BACH (28 JULY 2000) – 250TH BACH ANNIVERSARY

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Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872-1958), English composer

When I was a small boy I was brought up almost entirely on Handel, and especially the Handel Festival. I once heard a Bach Gavotte at a village concert and asked whether it was right to put such a name on the same programme as the great masters, and my aunt told me that Bach was quite a good composer: but of course not so good as Handel (this being die accepted view in those days); and with lite strange incuriosity of a child I left it at that and made no further inquiries until I went to school at ten years old. There I was taken in hand by the music master, Mr. C. T. West, whose name I shall always hold in reverence. He soon realized that I did not much care for the Maiden’s Prayer or True Love and one momentous day he brought me a Bach Album edited by Berthold Tours. Here indeed was a revelation; here was something undeniably belonging to no period or style, something for all time. This is where Bach differs from other composers. They, with the exception of a few outstanding Beethoven works, belong to their time, but Bach, though superficially he may speak the eighteenth-century language, belongs to no school or period.

There is a tendency nowadays to “put Bach in his place”. He is labelled as Baroque (whatever that may mean) and according to the latest orders from Germany he is to be performed as “period music” in the precise periwig style. This is all part of a movement to “play Bach as he wrote it”. To do this would be impossible even if we wanted to. Our violins are played on quite a different principle; our horns are soft and our trombones are loud. I should like to see Mr. Goossens confronted with one of those gross bagpipe instruments which in Bach’s time stood for an oboe. The harpsichord, however it may sound in a small room and to my mind it never has a pleasant sound in a large concert room, sounds just like the ticking of a sewing machine. We have no longer, thank Heaven, the Baroque style of organ, which we are told, with very insufficient evidence, was the kind of instrument Bach played upon. (By the way, I see there is a movement afoot to substitute this bubble- and-squeak type of instrument for the noble diapason and soft mixtures of our cathedral organs).

We cannot perform Bach exactly as he was played in his time even if we wanted to, and the question is, do we want to? I say emphatically, No! Some music dies with its period, but what is really immortal endures from generation to generation. The interpretation and with it the means of interpretation differ with each generation. If the music is ephemeral it will disappear with any change of fashion. If the music is really alive it will live on through all the alterations of musical thought.

MUSICAL AUTOBIOGRAPHY (1950)

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Wikipedia – Johann Sebastian Bach (2020)

Bach enriched established German styles through his mastery of counterpoint, harmonic and motivic organisation, and his adaptation of rhythms, forms, and textures from abroad, particularly from Italy and France. Bach’s compositions include hundreds of cantatas, both sacred and secular. He composed Latin church music, Passions, oratorios, and motets. He often adopted Lutheran hymns, not only in his larger vocal works, but for instance also in his four-part chorales and his sacred songs. He wrote extensively for organ and for other keyboard instruments. He composed concertos, for instance for violin and for harpsichord, and suites, as chamber music as well as for orchestra. Many of his works employ the genres of canon and fugue.

The large-scale structure of every major Bach sacred vocal work is evidence of subtle, elaborate planning to create a religiously and musically powerful expression. For example, the St Matthew Passion, like other works of its kind, illustrated the Passion with Bible text reflected in recitatives, arias, choruses, and chorales, but in crafting this work, Bach created an overall experience that has been found over the intervening centuries to be both musically thrilling and spiritually profound.

Bach published or carefully compiled in manuscript many collections of pieces that explored the range of artistic and technical possibilities inherent in almost every genre of his time except opera. For example, The Well-Tempered Clavier comprises two books, each of which presents a prelude and fugue in every major and minor key, displaying a dizzying variety of structural, contrapuntal and fugal techniques.

Bach’s insistence on the tonal system and contribution to shaping it did not imply he was less at ease with the older modal system and the genres associated with it: more than his contemporaries (who had “moved on” to the tonal system without much exception), Bach often returned to the then-antiquated modi and genres. His Chromatic Fantasia and Fugue, emulating the chromatic fantasia genre as used by earlier composers such as Dowland and Sweelinck in D dorian mode (comparable to D minor in the tonal system), is an example of this.

Another characteristic of Bach’s style is his extensive use of counterpoint, as opposed to the homophony used in his four-part Chorale settings, for example. Bach’s canons, and especially his fugues, are most characteristic of this style, which Bach did not invent but contributed to so fundamentally that he defined it to a large extent. Fugues are as characteristic to Bach’s style as, for instance, the Sonata form is characteristic to the composers of the Classical period.

The librettos, or lyrics, of his vocal compositions played an important role for Bach. He sought collaboration with various text authors for his cantatas and major vocal compositions, possibly writing or adapting such texts himself to make them fit the structure of the composition he was designing when he could not rely on the talents of other text authors. His collaboration with Picander for the St Matthew Passion libretto is best known, but there was a similar process in achieving a multi-layered structure for his St John Passion libretto a few years earlier.

In the 21st century, Bach’s compositions have become available online, for instance at the International Music Score Library Project. High-resolution facsimiles of Bach’s autographs became available at the Bach digital website.

Wikipedia – Johann Sebastian Bach (27 April 2020)

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Christoph Wolff (b. 1940), German musicologist

The incredible diversity of Bachs music, the intellectual breath and the emotional depth is something that really fascinates me.

Child mortality was of course a given, so one would consider any surviving child as a gift of God. And I think one also would accept the death of a child as God given. So I don’t think that was a problem for him except that, you know, the loss of a child – the loss of a beloved person – is always something that makes a tremendous difference. At the same time I think the fact, that for Bach and people of his day, life and death become so closely intertwined – is responsible for the depth and the emotional power of his music.

The fact that he lost his parents at age 10, I think is significant in his upbringing, because it made him independent and independent-minded very early on. He moved after his parents death to his brothers place in Ohrdruf not very far from Eisenach. And grew up under the tutelage of his brother for 5 years. But I think he had his aspirations at that time. To be like his brother – his older brother. And possibly to go beyond what his brother had achieved.

24 HOURS BACH (28 JULY 2000) – 250TH BACH ANNIVERSARY

See a presentation of a Bach autograph score preserved in Copenhagen !