Nicholas Kenyon - The Faber Pocket Guide to Bach

Bachs music was nourished by the past and feeds the future.

Friedrich Blume

Who needs Bach? You, me, everybody else, civilisation, and the Jacques Loussier Trio.

Bernard Levin, The Times , 31 July 1975

Lets face it, Bach can be daunting. He does not give up his secrets easily. He is one of the most mysterious of Western composers. Mozart is one of us, a person whose feelings we can recognise; Beethoven asserts our common humanity, and declares our common fate; Handel articulates our basic human emotions, and cuts to the heart, while Wagner extends those primeval emotions on the grandest scale. But with Bach, there is always something more, something veiled. He is the other: his vision and aspiration carries us far beyond ourselves, and we can find his transcendental idealism very difficult to penetrate.

Like all cultural icons, Bach has been made to serve every prevailing ideological tendency: in one view he is the spiritual hero of German music who spent his life writing sacred cantatas to the greater glory of God; in another, the cantankerous artist forever complaining at employers and disgruntled with patrons; in yet another, more recent, he has become the first great entrepreneur of the classical music scene, selling his own goods and services and acting as an agent for published music and pianos around the courts and cities of Germany in the eighteenth-century equivalent of e-commerce. He was even a financial investor: as this book went to press in December 2010, a new discovery of documents revealed that in the 1740s Bach bought shares in a Saxon silver mine.

All great artists have a perpetually fluctuating relationship to posterity, but in Bachs case this is especially so because what we know about his personal life is limited and even the facts we do know have shifted so much in recent years. There is no rich body of correspondence (we have far less than from Mozart or even from Monteverdi). We have plenty of information about which organs he examined, which pupils he recommended, and why he fell out with his superiors, but this does not add up to a rounded picture of his personality. Hence it has been easy for successive generations to impose on Bach their own ideas of his character and motivations.

Perhaps this does not matter at all to the listener who wants to put the essence of Bachs astounding music in his or her pocket. But it provides the context for scholarly work that is far from being complete. The story of Bach is an ever-changing narrative, for there are advances being made all the time and every scholarly step forward requires a reassessment of the balance of Bachs work. Just in the last few years there have been the discovery of the very first autograph manuscripts in Bachs hand, written when he was around fifteen, the identification of a previously unknown aria from Weimar, and the rediscovery of the priceless Old Bach Archive which resurfaced as part of the Sing-Akademie library in Kiev in the Ukraine and has now come back to Berlin. Bachs copy of the Calov Bible with his revealing marginal markings turned up in a barn in Michigan; Gerhard Herz tells the story of an autograph flute part of Cantata 9 being mysteriously found among the rubble on a New York building site in 1971. Cantata libretti from 1727 have recently turned up in St Petersburg. Is there a lost Bach Passion waiting to be found in an organ loft?

There is a vast amount that can now be understood about Bachs political and social background in order to put him in context: Ulrich Siegele has written about Bachs relationship to the complex cultural politics of Leipzig and Saxony, John Butt about his relation to the philosophy of his time, while Robin Leaver is a distinguished recent interpreter of Bachs understanding of Luthers theology and liturgy. Equally, musicians and scholars have explored radically new ways to understand his music: Robert Marshall has tried to disentangle how Bach actually composed, what his scores show about his mental processes; John Butt surveyed all his articulation marks. Particularly suggestive have been Laurence Dreyfuss explorations of Bachs patterns of invention, while a whole strand of analysing and understanding Bachs critical stance towards the musical conventions of his time has been explored by Dreyfus, Michael Marissen and Eric Chafe. Relevant documents are still being turned up as near to home as Leipzig, by sharp-eyed scholars such as Andreas Glckner, Uwe Wolf and Peter Wollny. A recent course at Kings College , London, suggests that

various scholars have begun to challenge [Bachs] transcendent status more seriously, opening up a number of compelling alternative perspectives on the composer and his world. Others, meanwhile, continue to seek new answers to the baffling question of how this provincial cantors music could have become such a dominant force in Western cultural life.

Perhaps most striking, for those of us who are primarily listeners to Bach, has been the revolutionary reinvention of the sounds and textures of his music over the last half-century of historical performance practice, which has reinvigorated our understanding of Bachs genius. From the epoch-making Bach cantata cycle of Nikolaus Harnoncourt and Gustav Leonhardt, which I would unhesitatingly call the most important recording project of my lifetime (others might give this accolade to the Solti Ring cycle), there has flowed a sea-change in our understanding of baroque music in general and Bach in particular. In this context, the still-simmering arguments highlighted by Joshua Rifkin and Andrew Parrott (which will be referred to later), about whether his choral music should be performed with one singer to a part or more, continue to resonate throughout the world of performance. Bach cantata cycles on CD are still being released; John Eliot Gardiners was completed in November 2010.