Bach: a birthday cantata
By Dan Tucker
Something should be said
about Johann Sebastian Bach, who is 300 years old on Thursday and who
wrote enough music for 3,000 years. He and his music are not easy
subjects to approach, but let us try it this way.
Think what it is like to feel really
good—to have one of those days when everything goes right. Days like
that tend to be unforgettable, and what you remember about them is that
they are not merely happier than most, but more real. For a little while
the world seems to make sense and be all of a piece, and you are where
you belong in it.
Well, that is the music of J. S. Bach.
That’s the way it is all the time. Whatever it is that makes some
moments strangely bright and whole, Bach just keeps doing it; taking
some sounds out of the world of sounds and putting them together so that
they are more real than time.
It doesn’t matter whether it is a tiny
prelude for a beginning student, or a jolly little jig, or a
mind-bending piece of contrapuntal ingenuity like the “Musical
Offering,” or a work of plain godliness like the B Minor Mass. They are
all whole, alive with a self-contained life of their own; they are not
just pieces of music, but ecosystems.
Of course there have been many other great
composers, and they’ve all had this ability in their own way—the strange
knack of turning musical pitches into something that sounds alive, with
its own shape and way of moving. And yet even among the very greatest,
Bach is all by himself. His music taps into something very close to the
heart of life; the mysteries about birth and growth and time that tease
us and do not fit into words.
Listen to a Bach fugue; really
listen. Normally it starts with a fairly simple theme, a few notes that
may not even be a melody but do have a shape. The theme generates
another like it; the interplay of these two gives rise to a third. The
lines keep dividing, twining, sending out shoots, pushing in different
directions. But the first theme is always there somehow; if not in the
notes, in their shape and feel and the way they move. Whatever the piece
becomes, its destiny was written in those first few notes.
What happens to Bach’s tunes, in other
words, is what happens to a cell, or a seed in the ground, or a
fertilized egg. Of all musical geniuses, it’s Bach whose music best
shows the link between “genius” and words like gene and genetic and
generation.
Bach’s own life can be summed up pretty
simply: He kept working. He lived in a lot of different towns—Arnstadt,
Muhlhausen, Weimar, Cothen, Leipzig. When he moved it was to get a
better-paying job—not a small consideration for the father of a family
that reached 20 children.
He composed a staggering amount of music
in his 65 years: masses, motets, concertos, suites, fantasias, chorales
beyond counting, works like “The Well-Tempered Clavier” that speeded up
the evolution of music. And yet in all those places—even Leipzig, where
he was expected to turn out one cantata a week—composing was only part
of the job. He was a church or court organist, a choir director, an
orchestra player ((he rliked to play viola because it kept him “in the
middle of the music”), a music copyist, a part-time Latin instructor, a
school official whose job was to supply local church choirs with
singers.
Always he was a music teacher—the kind who
would obligingly write a whole set of keyboard preludes to show a
student what he meant about fingering. He was pious, thrifty, had a bit
of a temper, was a good husband and father, and may have been the
hardest-working musician who ever lived.
You wonder if Bach ever had time to
realize he was a great composer. Not many of his contemporaries did.
When he died in 1750—blind, but still trying to dictate a
composition—the burgomasters of Leipzig expressed polite regret and a
certain amount of relief. “The school needs a cantor, not another
choirmaster,” said one. His widow, Anna Magdalena, was left in poverty;
she died 10 years later in an almshouse. (Where were the kids?) Bach’s
own grave was destroyed to make room for a street. For 50 years he was
remembered only as a queer, old-fashioned duck who used to write
complicated exercises.
It seems a bare, anticlimactic end, and in
that his life is curiously like his own music. Rather typically, Bach’s
pieces just come to a stop; after all the glorious intertwining
architecture of sound, there’s a simple two-chord resolution, bing-bang,
that’s it, as though he couldn’t be bothered thinking up a more
impressive ending.
But that too makes a kind of sense. If
Bach didn’t usually bother with big, thundering climaxes, it was because
he didn’t think in those terms. For him, existence really was all of a
piece, and endings didn’t matter that much because life does not end;
only its time ends.
His life and his music both prove that.
They are alive now; the time when they were forgotten is itself
forgotten.
Bach’s birthday message to the world is
“Everything’s going to be all right.” The human race will never tire of
hearing it.
(Chicago Tribune, March 21, 1985)
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