Johann Sebastian Bach by Andrew Gant

Author:Andrew Gant [Gant, Andrew]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780281079599
Publisher: SPCK
Published: 2018-09-24T21:00:00+00:00

A reduction of the opening few beats and an extract from bars 9–13 of the opening movement of Brandenburg Concerto no. 5, bwv1050. The ritornello principle: the opening bar-and-a-half reappears in the middle of bar 10, but chopped into small bits with music for the solo instruments in between. The solo passages are also related together, generating a balanced alternation of two different kinds of music across the entire movement.

Performing the Passions brings us closest to this today, and perhaps most of all the part of the Evangelist. The ordered alternation of the different kinds of texts involves listeners and performers alike in the story and a shared response to it. The tenor singing the Evangelist sits and listens as the great choral overtures roll into life, slow and huge, then gets to his feet not to tell a story, but to share it. This is why so many great singers feel drawn to these roles, even though the music is difficult, angular, high, and in a conventional sense vocally unrewarding. The Evangelist hustles in the rapid, almost operatic action involving the impetuous Peter and the guard’s ear, then later marks Peter’s desperate sadness at his moment of self-realization and betrayal. There is nothing quite like it.

Not everyone placed the same importance on a ‘well-regulated church music’. J. A. Ernesti, Bach’s third head at the Thomasschule, seems not to have valued music much. He omitted it completely from his revised curriculum, and would apparently accost any boy he found practising an instrument with the words ‘Do you want to become a beer-fiddler as well?’13 Not for the first time, theological considerations about the role of music became a proxy for wider debates about human nature and behaviour and the organization of society as a whole.

Theology left practical footprints, too. One of the reasons instrumental music features strongly in Bach’s Cöthen years is that Prince Leopold’s court was Calvinist and so had little use for church music.

Maths, canons, puzzles and ciphers fascinated Bach. We can only imagine his earlier conversations with the eclectically talented Mizler, who set out ‘to make of music a scientific or scholarly pursuit . . . based on reading good books, listening to good music, perusal of many scores by good masters, and also on his association with Capellmeister Bach’.14 The last works mine the depths of contrapuntal ingenuity and expression. In the Goldberg Variations, for example, every third variation is a canon at increasingly greater intervals: variation 3 is a canon at the unison, variation 6 at the second, 9 at the third, and so on until variation 30, which instead of being a canon at the tenth is a quodlibet based on a collection of earthy German folksongs about cabbages and turnips, among other things. The Art of Fugue goes further: fugues and canons, all based on a single theme, presented in every conceivable combination, inversion, retrograde and mirror. The last fugue breaks off unfinished in the manuscript. C. P. E. Bach has added the

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