Patrick Bade
Johann Sebastian Bach

Patrick Bade - Johann Sebastian Bach

- So was Johann Sebastian Bach the greatest composer who ever lived? I think he’d get my vote. I’m sure there’ll be people who think otherwise and will say so at the end. There’ll be advocates of Beethoven and Mozart, and maybe some bold person will even go for Wagner. And it’ll be very interesting to hear what Dennis has to say about Beethoven on Wednesday. And there’ll be other people who say quite rightly, of course, it’s quite silly to make a a league table out of Bach, Beethoven, Mozart and so on. But of course we love to do things like that. Well, he was born in a small town called Eisenach, where the Wartborg is celebrated in Wagner’s “Tannhauser,” in Thuringia in East Germany in 1685. And in the same year, two other major composers were born, Georg Friedrich Handel, George Frederick Handel, as we call him in England, and Domenico Scarlatti. And not entirely a coincidence. And if you wanted be a very great artist of any kind, you have to be born in the right time and the right place. There’s no point in having the talent of Mozart if you were born in mediaeval, you know, some very obscure place in, you know, Alaska, mediaeval Alaska, you’re not going to be a great composer if you were born there at that time there. And he was born into a family of musicians. It was a dynasty that went right back to the 17th century and it continued after him with three of his sons becoming major composers. And I emphasised this last time talking about South German Baruch, how so many of these artists were born, it was the family business.

It’s really only after Romanticism, you have the idea of art or music being a vocation. I think for a lot of these people, it was just the family business that you went into. So he was very precocious and he had his first job in his teens as an organist in a place called Arnstadt, and he was primarily a keyboard performer. In fact, his very first task in his new job when he was 17, was to try out this organ, which still exists. There are very few organs around that Bach actually played on. But he wasn’t there for very long. He worked for the Duke of Weimar. And then more fruitfully between 1717, 1723, he was working for the very enlightened, Prince Leopold of Anhalt-Kothen, this is who you see here. And this was actually a happy period in Bach’s life. He had his first marriage, which produced seven children, and of course 11 from the second marriage. Is that right or is it, no more, ‘cause it’s 20, 20 children altogether that he had. But so he had good relations with the prince. The Prince was Calvinist. So that meant that there was no need for liturgical music for Bach during this period. He was a court composer. He wrote what was required, what was asked of him. And the Prince was a great music lover and he had a fine orchestra and fine instrumentalist. So it’s in this six years that Bach wrote the vast majority of his concertos and his works for instruments and orchestras. And as an example of that, I’m going to play you the slow movement of the beautiful second violin concerto. In this, again, historic recording with the very young Yehudi Menuhin, with an orchestra conducted by his mentor, George Enescu.

Meltingly beautiful playing from the teenage, Yehudi Menuhin. But this was too good to last really, 'cause the trouble was if you were a court composer, you were of course at the beckon call of your prince. And the Prince married a second time and his new wife was not interested in music, so he began to lose interest, and Bach looked elsewhere. And he decided to apply for a job in Leipzig as the cantor of the Thomaskirche, which you can see in this print on the left side of the image. A cantor, that meant he would be a bit different from a cantor in a synagogue, meant that he was just in charge of all of the liturgical musical activities in the town. He eventually got the job, but actually he wasn’t the first choice. They really wanted Telemann. In fact, they offered it to a couple of composers, who turned it down, before they decided to offer it to Bach. So Bach arrives 1723 and he remains there 'til his death. And his output is simply prodigious. You just think, oh my god, this man had 20 children. I didn’t suppose he saw all that much of them, he wouldn’t have had time. He had to turn out a cantata for every Sunday in the year and supervise all sorts of musical activities. I mean, it’s been reckoned that it would take a normal human being more than a lifetime to even copy out all the work that Bach wrote in this period. Of course, this was a Lutheran church, and this is the church, the Thomaskirche, the Church of St. Thomas. Here it is today restored after its partial destruction in the Second World War. And here is his statue in front of the church.

And here is the interior of the church, which I have visited. But I would love to hear a Bach cantata performed in this church. So as I said there, Lutherans and Lutherans were more, certainly much more welcoming to music than the Calvinists. And the first piece I’m going to play you is from the cantata, “Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott.” So he’s setting both the tune and the words of Martin Luther, but boy does he ever jazz up this simple chorale. This is fighting music. This is militant reformation, militant Protestantism. It’s go out and attack a Catholic. To quote or misquote Woody Allen, It really is music for invading Poland or going over the barricades with a thrilling descant of trumpets over the top of the chorus. I hope you’ve got good big speakers so that you could blast out your neighbours with that music. Oh, there are over or around 200 cantatas surviving by Bach, and it’s reckoned that he wrote at least a hundred more. Many of the manuscripts were carelessly lost by one of his sons. And they seem to me to be collectively the most extraordinary achievement in the whole of the history of Western music. Every possible human emotion is covered in these cantatas. Sometimes people say to me, “What music do you need for your desert island?” Well, modestly, I want the entire works of Bach, and I want the entire works of Offenbach to go with them. When I was a child, somebody said to me, “oh, it’s better to Bach often than to Offenbach.” I remember that stuck in my memory long before I’d actually heard any Offenbach. But I think, you know, with those two composers, you’ve really covered your bases.

But actually I could do with just Bach, because Bach also, he often expresses that kind of almost animalistic joy that is the great attraction of Offenbach’s music. You know, think the can-can, it’s music for joyous outbursts of exuberant dancing. And so my next recording is a rather special one. It’s of a duet from a cantata, number 78, “Jesu, der du meine Seele.” But it’s sung here actually in French. It’s recorded in the 1930s by two delightful French singers who were working at the Opera Comique, so I think they probably sang a lot more Offenbach than they did Bach. But in this particular piece, it really pays off. And it sounds a curiously modern performance of Bach. And if you know historical recordings and modern recordings, you’ll realise that Bach performances, baroque performances have got faster and faster over the year. And this is pretty jaunty, pretty fast. So it’s real toe tapping stuff. And that might be my final choice for my desert island, because it would always put me in a very good mood. But Bach is also capable of expressing the deepest, deepest grief and tragedy, as we will hear in my next piece, which is the canata, “Weinen, Klagen, Sorgen, Zagen.” It’s early in his career, it’s canata number 12. David was asking me recently for musical suggestions for his new play. And for me, this piece, it expresses more than any other work of art that I know, what I feel really about the tragedy of The Holocaust. You know, it’s such an enormous, enormous tragedy that so often paintings, music, films, just can’t deal with it because it’s just beyond expression.

And I think perhaps because the opening section of this chorus, of course it’s written for a Christian context, but there’s nothing in the words here that specify that. You can see weeping, wailing, grieving, fearing, dread, need. And the music expresses all of that so powerfully. So we’ve had militant aggression, we’ve had outbursts of joy, and we’ve had profound grief. And next we are going to be comforted by this beautiful lullaby from the canata number 82, “Ich habe genug,” sung by the wonderful German baritone, Hans Hotter, with a velvety voice that is absolutely perfect for this music. Now I come to the very thorny question of Bach and anti-Semitism, was he anti-Semitic? Well, the honest answer to that is we simply don’t know about his personal views, unlike let’s say Schumann, or Wagner, or Chopin, there are no letters in which there are antisemitic sentiments. I think we can make certain suppositions according to the time and the place that he lived. On your screen you have an image of Jew Suss Oppenheimer, the court Jew who was, there was a show trial, and he was horribly executed with all sorts of completely trumped up, dishonest accusations against him. So that is, this is an image of his execution on the right hand side. Bach would certainly, that would’ve been in the news. He would’ve known all about that. It was 1738, and the following year, 1739, he embarked on a rewriting of one of his two great passions, the “St John Passion.”

And that is, I think, well there are elements in some of the cantatas which could be understood as antisemitic, but it’s probably the text of the “St John Passion” that makes people feel uncomfortable. Do we blame Bach for this? This is Lutheran. Well, as I know that Judy would’ve talked to you, about Luther and the way that antisemitism was deeply embedded in Lutheranism, almost from the first, as you know, Luther initially courted the Jews and was in favour of them. 'cause he thought he was going to convert them to Protestantism. And when they suddenly refused that, of course he turned against them and wrote very ugly antisemitic texts. And certainly Luther would’ve been, Bach rather, would’ve been familiar with all of this. I’m going to play you, the last time I saw “St Matthew Passion,” I must say, it did have me feeling quite uncomfortable. You have these choruses where it says it’s a chorus of Juden, of Jews. And the Juden in “St John Passion” are certainly depicted as a kind of ugly lynch mob out to get Jesus, as in this chorus, which consists of simply one word, crucify, crucify. The Nazis had a lot of problems with the great masterpieces of the German tradition. I mean they, of course, particularly with Mozart and the fact that his librettist was of Jewish origin. So they remade, and actually, of course, Mozart. Another problem for the Nazis was that the familiar German translation of the “Da Ponte” operas was made by a Jewish scholar, so that had to be rejected as well and it had to be retranslated.

When it came to Bach, there were two substantial recordings of the “St Matthew Passion” made under the Nazi regime. There was one under the very distinguished Bach specialist, Gunther Ramin, who was Bach’s successor as cantor in the Thomaskirche, in Leipzig. And the other, conducted by, as you can see here, Professor Bruno Kittel. Now the “St Matthew Passion” is an enormously long work and it was really an undertaking to record it in the days of 78s when you had records that would only last up to four minutes per side. So both these recordings are actually cut with slightly different cuts. But what is very interesting that in both of them, that every mention of the Jews is removed. I mean that’s something really spend a lot of time with a blue pencil going through the score, as I said, to remove any mention of the word Judah. What I would like to say though is that even if in the “St John Passion” the Juden are presented in this rather unsympathetic way, that there are other texts in “St John Passion” and “St Matthew Passion,” and throughout the cantatas that stress the Christian doctrine, that it is not one people that is to blame for the death of Jesus, it’s everybody. It’s all of us, every individual, their sins have caused the need for Jesus to be sacrificed. And you see this, I can show you two images which put across the same point really. One is a Rembrandt, it’s the “Raising of the Cross.” And you can see that Rembrandt shows himself at the foot of the cross, one of the people raising the cross. And on the right-hand side a sculpture by Adam Kraft, which also shows the crucifixion, where he, himself, he’s shown himself, the man with the fur hat and the fuzzy beard, and he’s got a hammer and instruments in his hand that are instruments of crucifixion, as well as I suppose, instruments of the sculptor. And he’s making the same point, that he himself, Rembrandt feels he himself, they are to blame for the death of Jesus.

So although I’m sure many people over the years have blamed the Jews, and that is according to Trudy, the origin of much antisemitism, those people are actually misinterpreting Christian doctrine. Well, on a lighter note, we have next, Bach in a very Rococo mood. He is of course contemporary with all that architecture I was talking about last week, the late Baroque, and the Rococo. And mostly, I mean the sheer grandeur, the power of his work is much closer, you could say, to the Asims, who are Baroque, than it is to the Rococo similar. But I’m going to play your next track from the “Coffee Cantata.” Bach, a small number of secular cantatas. And it’s thought that this one was written for performance in a coffee house. I’m sure you all know the story about how when the siege of Vienna was lifted and the Turks fled very quickly, abandoning their tents that were full of sacks of coffee beans. And it’s always said that the love of the Austrians and South Germans for coffee, very strong coffee, to this day, you get much stronger coffee there than you do in Britain or America, it goes back to those days. And so the craze for coffee really took off big time, the end of the 17th, beginning of the 18th century. And this is a kind of mini opera, which is very, it could be presented, it really is a small one act opera. And this is the heroin, Lieschen, who is completely crazy about coffee, and she thinks that coffee would be sweeter than her lover’s kisses.

The performance practise of Bach has changed enormously in our lifetimes. I mentioned that performances got faster and faster, and there are pluses and minuses to this. Certainly sometimes you listen to old recordings of the “St Matthew Passion” and they sound terribly slow and sludgy to our ears. But there’s also I think, a danger of throwing out the baby with the bath water and losing the gravitas, the tragedy of these pieces. To give you an idea just how much things have changed, the Klemperer recording of “St Matthew Passion,” the first chorus takes over 11 minutes. Whereas a more recent recording by Harnoncourt with this, you know, so-called authentic approach, takes just over six minutes. So barely more than half, but my feeling is that both approaches work. And the big point I want to make here is that Bach’s music is indestructible. I remember being completely transfixed in the Paris underground once by a musician who was playing Bach on a squeeze box, and it sounded absolutely wonderful. Particularly the keyboard works, 'cause they’re not written often. We don’t know actually what particular keyboard instrument the works were written for. Were they written for organ? Were they written for harpsichord? Of course the piano doesn’t, was only really developed shortly after Bach’s death. And there’s a big debate really. Do his keyboard works sound better on piano or do they sound better on a plucked instrument, like a harpsichord? So I’m going to let you judge here, 'cause I’m going to play you the same piece.

First of all, played by Glenn Gould, in a rather steely way I think, on a piano. It’s the, it’s a gigue from the “French Suite No. 5.” So we’re going to hear it first of all on the piano. Now we’re going to hear it on the harpsichord. And this is Zuzana Ruzickova. And I feel a very strong affection for her, partly because first time I ever heard Bach on a harpsichord was on a Superfund recording that I bought at Smith’s in Godalming, High Street, when I would’ve been about 12 or 13, I think. I can still remember I paid five shillings for it. And it was quite, it was such a revelation to me. I loved the sound so much that my great ambition was to acquire a harpsichord or a clavichord. And I made the longest bicycle ride of my life, actually, as a teenager riding all the way from Godalming to Haslemere to the Dolmetsch Factory, 'cause I wanted to see what they were like and how much they would cost, of course way beyond my means at the time. But Zuzana Ruzickova, I mean it’s, of course, a memorable name, isn’t it? And only many, many years later did I realise what a remarkable story she had. She was of Czech/Jewish background. She was a child prodigy, she was going to be a great piano virtuoso. But she was swept up in the Second World War. She was in Theresienstadt, Terezin. She sang in the children’s chorus of Brendibar. She was one of the very, very few children to survive Theresienstadt. And after the war, her hands had been damaged by the hardships in Theresienstadt. Her teacher said, “Well, you know, you can forget her career as a virtuoso pianist.”

And instead, with great determination, she turned to the harpsichord, and in fact she became the first person to record the complete keyboard works of Bach for harpsichord. And that, it’s been, she only died very recently, a couple of years ago, aged nearly 100. And that complete set was reissued and I’m still working my way through it. But here is the piece you’ve just heard with Glenn Gould, but now played on a harpsichord by Zuzana Ruzickova. So it’s less relentless, maybe less brilliant. Well anyway, you can tell me what you think, which you prefer, but I’m going to end with two very off-pieced recordings of Bach, both of which I absolutely adore and I hope you will too. The first is a recording of the famous “Air,” but reorchestrated, reinstrumented by Mahler, and conducted by Mahler’s favourite conductor, Willem Mengelberg, who’s a great Mahler specialist of course, and making it sound absolutely like Mahler. It sounds just like the slow movement of the, the fifth symphony of Mahler with lots and lots of gorgeous rubato, rubato is robbed times, you have hesitations and then speeding up, and the most sumptuous portamento, sliding from one note to the next. This is just to me an absolute feast of a performance. And then we finish with a very different take on Bach. This is the Swingle Singers in the 1960s. It makes me actually feel rather ancient, because I remember these recordings coming out and loving them at the time. Of course they now sound so antique. This is, I suppose, Bach for the era of The Beatles. Well if nothing else I hoped I’ve proved to you that the music of Bach is indestructible.

Q&A and Comments:

Oh, this is Irv Kushner, he’s agreeing with me. I agree with you, Bach is for me, one of the, not just in music, he’s just one of the supreme geniuses.

Oh, more agreement, that’s very nice. The black, no, it’s not behind Bach, it’s in the portrait of the Prince of Anhalt-Kothen, of course it was a fashion statement in the 18th century to have a black servant, especially a very small one that would make you look taller.

I would love, there’s so much of course I should discuss, but Val, you know, I just had to take a very arbitrary selection.

Oboe concerto, I know that nearly all the concertos are written in the curtain period. So I think that’s probably the case. I wish that, yes, I don’t think I was around or probably not in England, I don’t think I heard that when the BBC played the entire works of Bach.

Q: “Did women sing?”

A: They must have done, because there are certainly, in all the cantatas, and the Passions contained parts for women.

Yeah, they’re all recordings. They’re always recordings from my personal collection. I haven’t really worked out the technology of downloading sound stuff from the internet. So it all comes from, so inevitably when people say, “Why do you play this recording and not that one?” It’s just because it’s one that I have and one that I like.

No, Bach did not write the lyrics for his music. He was setting, my good friend Mike in Munich, he finds the cantatas really hard to take because he doesn’t like the sentimental piety of the Lutheran lyrics that Bach set.

This is Richard Alexander, “John Williams music from 'Schindler’s List’ expresses all the emotions evoked by Bach.” I’ll have to listen again to that. Is the orchestra, actually no. A Bach purist would probably have a fit at what I’ve just played to you, ‘cause almost nothing, of course, the first thing I played you was Stowkowski orchestration of the famous “Toccata and Fugue.” And so there’s very little I played you that actually is strictly correct as far as the original orchestration is concerned. Interesting, I mean, I think it was a very daunting thing for a composer to be asked to write music to go with The Holocaust.

And I love the comment on Spielberg, yes, yes. Well actually I must tell you a story where the film, “The Reader,” David Hare was working on that film and he asked me to suggest music for it, and I made selections of various Bach cantatas. They were going to use Bach throughout for the background of that film, but in the end they were, they were going to record performances, actually live performances in a Lutheran church. But it didn’t work out because the film was being filmed in the months leading up to Christmas, when of course the cantatas are all rather cheerful. So if they’d been able to film it with the cantatas leading up to Easter, it would’ve worked a lot better. I did think of, I wanted to play Jacques Loussier, but you know, for time I cut it.

And of course there is the Benny Goodman. I think that’s probably the first time that Bach was jazzed up. That’s right, Judy saying I didn’t play Bach music on, that’s mainly 'cause I don’t have many recordings like that in my collection, because I don’t really like them, but so.

Well yes, she had a long successful, Zuzana, I heard her being interviewed on the radio shortly before she died, very remarkable, amazing woman. If the piano had existed in the time of Bach, very, yeah.

Discuss, I agree with you. I’m sure Bach, if Bach would’ve loved the Moog synthesiser, there are recordings of Bach keyboard music on a Moog, I think Bach would’ve used whatever was available.

Q: This is Shelly saying, “If the French court of Louis XIV is the premier court of the time, where does the best music come from?”

A: Well, impossible question to answer. Louis XIV is actually a bit earlier, you know, he dies in 1715. So there is a bit of an overlap, but Bach comes later. “Mathematical formula of Bach’s piano concertos.” Yes, I’m such a, I never even was allowed to take math 'cause I was so hopeless at maths. So I’m sort of aware of the mathematical side of Bach, but it’s not something I fully understand.

Q: “What was the keyboard piece you played, both piano and harpsichord?”

A: Yes, it’s on your list. It’s “French Suite No. 5”

The gigue in G. Sorry, where is this? Quick comment on the “B minor Mass.” “Many people I know think that it’s greater than the Passions.” And I absolutely recognise it’s greatness. It doesn’t really move me in the way that the Passions, this is a very personal thing, it’s not really a criticism. And I think it’s partly that the text is in Latin, and for instance, the “Weinen, Klagen, Zagen” that I played you, Bach reused it for the the “Lacrimosa” in the “B minor Mass.” But it never moves me in that context in Latin, in the way it does in the cantata in German. But that’s just a completely personal thing.

Oh, well god, I think for those sort of things, Martin, you really need, if you really want an in-depth discussion of the 48 and the Art of Fugue, you probably need a proper musicologist, which I would not pretend to be.

No, I haven’t read that book. I don’t even know about it actually. I’ll check that one out.

Why, yes, sometimes, I mean, of course it can be very exhilarating to have the faster speeds of modern performances, and when you get used to them, sometimes you listen to the older reportings and they seem to drag. But as I said, there is a danger, I think, of losing something very important too. The pathos and the gravitas of the older performances. And I do think you are quite right, that it’s a trend that eventually will be reversed. I don’t think it was a pope. I know it was someone in the Catholic church that proposed that Bach should be declared a Saint.

“P. D. Q. Bach,” I vaguely remember that, but that’s from ages ago, from my youth.

And that seems to be it. Thank you all very, very much. And so I will see you again a week today when I revert to my daytime job as an art historian. Thank you, bye-bye.