Don Satz puzzles over his love for the music of Bach and Mozart, and what
in the music of these people attracts him to them--and indeed the rest of
us to them, too.

Bach and Mozart are two composers that, *of late*, I have begun to relate
because of how their music reflects their *humanity*, or their
personalities, to be less poetic.

Mozart, to me, seems like a troubled spirit.  Superficially superficial, it
often catches you unawares, and you think, Hold everything:oh, yes; I know
how that feels!  Wow, that's pretty deep.  And then, it's gone, dissolved
into more superficial triviality.  Mozart has me constantly wanting to hit
the 'back' button on the CD player.  And you lie in wait the next time, to
get that moment, that little pathetic cadence buried somewhere.

Bach, on the other hand (to borrow a thought from, er, another list member
whose name escapes me for the moment), cannot even imagine flirtation.
It has to be home-base or bust.  He goes the whole hog with a theme (well,
most times,) and you end up believing that it has had every possibility
wrung out of it, and has it crying 'uncle' before Bach lets go of the
stranglehold he has on it.  And I love it.

(Well, the Passacaglia and Fugue in C minor is a counter-example to this.
By the end of the Passacaglia, you're left almost sick with relief that
it's over, and then he hits you with this 7-minute fugue.  And, of course,
the fugue is even more fantastic than the passacaglia.  --I'm paraphrasing
the fellow who writes the liner notes to Walter Kraft's VOX CDs who made
this point, very aptly, I thought.  So there's an example where you thought
--after the first movement--that Bach had wrung everything out of a theme,
and of course, you were wrong.)

But Bach is not a troubled spirit.  At least, his troubles lie far deeper
than we are allowed to see into his soul.  What we *do* see --at least in
my opinion, and I could be wrong-- is his agony over his circumstances.
At least that's how I read it.  And I think I also see an ability to get
into the emotional subtleties of a dramatic situation, be it biblical, or
classical, or allegorical, as in some of the cantatas.  So Bach is using
music to dramatic intent.  Very often it is static emotion, occasionally
it is atransition from one emotion to another, but not the scintillating,
fleeting changes in emotion from moment to moment that Wagner sought to
obtain from his music.  So, for some of us in the 20th century, accustomed
to the frantic pace of prime-time TV, it's a little hard to sit through.
But to the rest of us soap opera fans, it might make a lot of sense.
(I.e., nothing happens for ten minutes, from the dramatic point of view.)
It's funny to think of Bach as a dramatic composer, but really that's what
he's trying to do in the cantatas, and many of the religious works.  It's
the contemplative end of the dramatic spectrum, but it's well inside it.

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