Some might be interested in Stuart Isacoff's musings about WTC, which
appeared in today's Wall Street Journal.
Bach's Infinite Universe
By STUART ISACOFF
February 21, 2006
Robert Schumann advised musicians to treat it as their daily
bread. Beethoven copied it by hand in an attempt to work loose
its secrets. And Goethe, hearing its composer's labors for the
first time, said, "It is as if the eternal harmony were conversing
within itself, as it may have done in the bosom of God just
before the creation of the world." Yet the 1722 manuscript of
the first volume of Johann Sebastian Bach's landmark "The
Well-Tempered Clavier" circulated underground -- like a seditious
manifesto -- for nearly 80 years before finding a publisher. By
the time it did, in 1801, Bach had already been dead for half a
century.
It's not that Bach's work -- 24 preludes and fugues in all the
major and minor keys to be played on a keyboard instrument of
no specified type -- was considered too revolutionary. On the
contrary, his art, as Albert Schweitzer explains in his biography
of the composer, was the culmination of an era: "All the artistic
endeavors, desires, creations, aspirations and errors of his own
and of previous generations are concentrated and worked out to
their conclusion in him." He was of the old guard, soon to be
swept aside by an artistic tide -- the Classical style -- that
valued symmetry, transparency and grace over complexity and
emotional extravagance. When Bach received an appointment in
Leipzig in 1722 (he was third choice for the post), a member of
the town council expressed concern that his music would be too
dramatic. Changing fashions nearly guaranteed that many would
fail to recognize the genius of his individual voice.
Bach himself described his work (book two of "The Well-Tempered
Clavier" followed over 20 years later) with the modest announcement
that it was "for the benefit and use of musical youth desirous
of knowledge as well as those who are already advanced in this
study." There is no hint in this description of the unsurpassed
virtuosity, the stunningly infinite musical universe executed
with an almost inhuman command of beauty and logic that unfolds
in its pages. Melodic strands are taken up in one register of
the instrument, then in another -- tossed back and forth or
staggered so that one entrance interrupts what another has already
begun. Themes are played forward and backward and stood on their
heads in mirror form. And, amazingly, in Bach's hands all of
these individual musical lines blend into the most thrilling
harmonies.
Musical detectives are forever searching for new aspects of the
play of Bach's imagination in this work: claiming, for example,
that number mysticism arising from the name BACH (B3D2, A=3D1,
C=3D3, H=3D8) emerges stealthily in the very first fugue as a
14-note theme. Whether or not all of these discoveries are true,
it's difficult to fault those who make them. As in the music
of Edmund Pfuhl in Thomas Mann's "Buddenbrooks," we find in "The
Well-Tempered Clavier" "technique as an ascetic religion...holy
in and of itself."
The title "The Well-Tempered Clavier" describes music intended
for a tuning that allows every one of a keyboard instrument's
keys to be utilized. For technical reasons, tunings before Bach's
time often rendered some keys too sour to be useful. Whether
Bach wanted something close to what is found on today's modern
pianos is a matter of dispute, however. In his day, tunings
existed that made some keys sound purer than others, giving rise
to the idea that each key had an individual "character." But
Bach's work transcends such narrow considerations and has been
played successfully in all kinds of tunings, and on everything
from the clavichord to the Moog Synthesizer. His art is truly
universal.
Inherent in this composer's music are the qualities cited by
his contemporary, the philosopher Emmanuel Kant, as necessary to
great art -- attributes such as formal completeness and law-like
coherence. Yet, filled as it is with joy and anguish, and marked
by the intangible shadings of a thoroughly human spirit, the end
result is so much more than mere logic.
That's why, over 250 years later, the work still has the power
to inspire. Nobel Prize-winning author J.M. Coetzee has written
about the time when, as a 15-year-old boy in Cape Town, South
Africa, he heard it emanating from a neighbor's house. That
afternoon in his garden, he wrote, "Everything changed." The
philosopher Martin Buber, facing a crisis of faith in his youth,
was considering suicide when, so he later said, he had a sudden
insight into the fragile possibility of a just human existence.
"Bach helped me," he explained.
One might imagine that the solace triggered by Bach's unfailing
mastery arose because it conveyed the sense that a clockmaker
God still ran an orderly universe. Buber obliquely suggests
another explanation in a passage from his philosophical masterpiece,
"I and Thou." The creation of great art, he states, involves
both a sacrifice and a risk. The sacrifice is that of endless
possibility offered up on the altar of form: Like a prophet, the
artist labors to bring down to earth the beauty of eternal,
unseen worlds. The risk arises because true artistic expression
must be uttered by the whole self, with no protective buffer
against the world. In Bach, we perceive the generosity inherent
in both.
Mr. Isacoff is editor of the magazine Piano Today and author of
"Temperament: How Music Became a Battleground for the Great Minds
of Western Civilization."
Larry Sherwood
|