The World According to Bach
Programme Notes written for The Cambridge Summer Festival
In Central Europe during the first days of the New Year the sunlight just creeps above the horizon to shed a few dreary rays on the bitter cold. Prague 1983, still in the grip of state socialism, was a great beauty thrown to the hounds of poverty and pollution. Not far from the capital city is Nelahozeves, the birthplace of Antonin Dvorak. When we arrived the museum, which is in the house where Dvorak was born, was already closed. That did not deter our host who tossed pebbles at the window and cajoled the curators into opening the museum just for us. “Success comes to those who dare,” he said. The house was anything but spectacular – Dvorak’s father was a butcher and was appalled that his son did not plan to follow his trade – but the ambience and the peculiar circumstances of our visit transformed my relationship to the great Czech master. In some fashion I had been a guest in his house and hence he was no longer an abstract figure from music history.
That experience was the genesis for this piece. You, the theatregoer, are invited to spend an evening at home with Philipp Emanuel Bach in Hamburg. Imagine the residence of a very well-to-do merchant at the end of the 18th century. The house is well decorated with Chinese porcelain, French furniture and over 150 portraits of great musicians and composers.
Johann Sebastian Bach’s life has been exhaustively researched but the nets, though they have trawled long and deeply, have brought up precious little that is either deeply revealing or particularly interesting to the non-specialist. Naturally, the most dramatic stories are contained within this play, but I chose them perhaps more for their theatrical interest than for character revelation. Much of what exists is due to the wanton haphazardness of fate and the church’s documentary compulsion. Scholars, enthralled by Bach’s staggering genius, have taken the few and random breadcrumbs that have fallen from the banquet table and subjected them to intense scrutiny. This exercise always contains the danger of degenerating into our childhood game of incinerating ants on a hot summer day with a magnifying glass.
The central conceit of The World According to Bach is that Philipp Emanuel struggled, Hamlet like, with the ghost of his father’s genius. Did he in fact? Well, we simply don’t know. The letters of Philipp Emanuel are about as exciting and revealing as the correspondence of an accountancy firm. What he ultimately thought of his father’s works in relationship to his own is something we can only speculate about, for the most part. He received superb musical preparation from his father but his own compositions show little direct interest in the contrapuntal intricacies favoured by his father. He was, fortunately, a very good steward of his father’s works, unlike his wastrel older brother Wilhelm Friedemann who sold off his precious inheritance to fend off encroaching poverty and perhaps to support his penchant for the bottle. For Philipp Emanuel’s stewardship we must be profoundly grateful. There are very good reasons to believe that a treasure trove of instrumental works, which interest us much more today than the cantatas, were consumed in flames when the castle at Köthen burned.
In the works of J.S. Bach there is a kind of universality and a robustness that survives bad performances. They can be successfully rearranged for all kinds of instrumental combinations including marimbas, saxophone quartets and koto orchestras. He was, I believe, creating universal states of the mind, body, emotions and soul: he would have called them affects. Philipp Emanuel’s oeuvre is more personal and depends much more on the quality and sensitivity of the performer. The music lives or dies according to the performance.
This play is set roughly at the time of the American Revolution, 1776 or so. Philipp Emanuel was a very successful composer and far better known at that time than his father. Beethoven recommended his Essay on the True Art of playing the Clavier highly and his praise was in no way unusual. At that time musical fashion played a role more akin to popular fashion today, albeit less rapid. Near the end of the play, Philipp Emanuel calls his father a genius, a Newton. This notion of genius was probably relatively new and does not fully flower until the Romantic age. It is unlikely that J.S. Bach thought of himself as a genius, certainly not as we do today. He came out of a tradition of musical craft that demanded a constant supply of new works for specific occasions. For example, he wrote 60 cantatas a year for the first five years of his Leipzig tenure. The ‘mere’ task of performing a cantata a week is still a daunting one to professional musicians. But in the end it is hard to believe that Bach was unaware of the qualitative gulf the separated his works from the rest of the field.
There does not seem to be any effective way to portray the creative process itself on stage or screen. One is left to such devices as the vigorous plume twirling employed by Joseph Fiennes in Shakespeare in Love. The artist himself is almost never able to articulate the process and perhaps John Cage (also attributed to Elvis Costello) got it right. “Writing about music is like dancing about architecture.” What I have attempted to do in The World According to Bach is to suggest issues that might have preoccupied the two Bachs. I would suggest that the attitudes of a great artist are what we can most profitably study. The attitude that J.S. Bach must have taken was that he would master all aspect of music including melody, harmony, counterpoint, and form and would hate any manifestation of mediocrity or incompetence. He used this mastery to explore the musical universe and the universe of the human condition. He set and matched standards higher than anyone else in the history of music.
