What I Owe to Bach

One photo I very much wish I still had shows me, age about 19, leaning out of the living room window of the little bungalow we lived in at the time, holding cradled in my left arm the Archiv box containing the three vinyl records of the Mass in B minor by J. S. Bach. It was a handsome box resembling white canvas with blue lettering. The sleeve containing the very same performance in the Bach Masterworks box is not nearly as nice:

The significance of the photo, I realize many years later, is that the discovery of Bach was, for me, a turning point in my life. It wasn't just Bach, of course, but in the fullness of time it becomes clear that the music of Bach is a kind of still point in the turning world to slightly misquote T. S. Eliot. Eliot, along with Hiroshige, Haydn, Homer, Rilke and some others, also played a role, but Bach is really the central figure. To this very day I try to play Bach every morning.

I once speculated to a friend that there are not very many people in the classical music world (with the exception of managers and record company executives of course) who are, to some degree, sociopaths. The reason I gave is that early in every classical musician's career he or she finds him or herself alone in a small practice room with their instrument, a chair and a music stand. Sitting on the music stand is the score of a piece by J. S. Bach that you have to come to terms with, i.e. learn how to play. It won't be easy and will take many hours of selfless dedication that a sociopath is simply not capable of. There is no-one else to blame if you can't get it right and no mercy if you fail. The only reward is an aesthetic one or, perhaps, a word of encouragement from your teacher.

I remember chatting with a cellist once, remarking to him that I had been playing (in guitar transcription) the Cello Suite No. 1 by Bach for a year or so and still occasionally had a memory lapse in the allemande. He simply said, "I played that suite for ten years before it sounded good." Around that same time I was sharing a concert with a very fine violinist. His solo piece in the concert was the Chaconne from the Partita No. 2 in D minor. As I was planning out the program I asked him how much time his performance would take. His answer: "thirteen minutes and forty-three seconds." You realize how complete his mastery of the piece was to be that certain? And, believe me, he was!

Bach, often voted the finest of all classical composers, is a kind of musical pinnacle that musicians, even those who are not classical, esteem without the usual caveats. He is buried in the Thomaskirke in Leipzig by the altar and fresh roses are placed there regularly (they were there when I visited the church in the 90s). Outside is a statue of Bach with the pockets of his coat turned out--perhaps that is to indicate he never made very much money from his music. At his death he was known as a fairly obscure Saxon organist. Three of his sons became important composers in their own right. A few other composers knew of his music which spread through hand-copied manuscripts. Beethoven owned a copy of the Well-Tempered Clavier excerpts from which he played in salon concerts as a young man in Vienna. Mozart, in his travels, heard some motets by Bach in a concert in, I think it was, Leipzig. At the end he leapt up and exclaimed, "now that is music we can learn from!"

What Bach came to be for me, a young man in a small town in Canada in the early 70s, was a bridge, a path, from the narrow horizons of the world I grew up in, to the wider horizons of history, art and meaning. In other words, he took me out of my petty self and surroundings and made me aware of the universe.

There is something almost cosmic about the music of Bach and it is not due to its supposed complexity. Bach touches and evokes a kind of fundamental being that underlies all of humanity. His music awakens something unnameable and inexpressible in words. When I was young it seemed I ran into Bach almost everywhere. On CBC television Sunday afternoons would appear Glenn Gould, at the pinnacle of his career, playing a few preludes and fugues. An amateur classical guitarist, the first one I ever met, averred that the only music really worth playing on guitar was Bach. And then there was that handsome box from Archiv (a label of Deutsche Gramophon).

Let's just listen to some pieces that I encountered for the first time in my youth. First, the Chaconne from the D minor partita, on guitar and then on violin. This is a performance by John Williams on guitar:

This is Jascha Heifetz on violin:

From the Mass in B minor, here are the last two movements, the Agnus Dei and Dona nobis pacem in a 1969 performance by Karl Richter and the same performers that made that recording for Archiv:

Many, many years later I discovered The Art of Fugue, but that is a story for another day...

For some odd reason, I am reminded of two quotes from Aristotle. The first is from the Metaphysics and, since digging it out would take too long, I am simply going to try and remember it:

Things are not good because we are attracted to them, rather, we are attracted to them because they are good.

And the beginning of the Nichomachean Ethics:

 Every art and every inquiry, and similarly every action and pursuit, is thought to aim at some good; and for this reason the good has rightly been declared to be that at which all things aim. [from The Basic Works of Aristotle, ed. Richard McKeon, p. 935]