Foot in the Grave
Fantastic cellist Ṧtrt Zmrzlina (as he is called in Bohemia, I’m sure you know him from the picture) told me a story that is typical, not only for today’s intellectual climate, but for the human condition tout court, with its biases, unobserved elephants in the room and all that sort of shortcomings. Every culture has its hangups, and examples such as this one will help us see the particular fallacies we believe in. Generally accepted opinions are extremely suggestive: everyone says so, it must be so. That is how we allow an 18-year old boy, for instance, to die for our country but not to have alcohol. That’s also why today it is so hard for instance to question today’s almost universally shared opinion that ‘a government helps the economy by pumping money in it’, while that doesn’t make logical sense: government money is already taken from the economy, the government produces nothing by itself - so the money the government pumps into the economy is money taken from the richest, strongest part of the economy to save its weakest parts (why subsidizing something that doesn’t need support?), so the weak parts can continue to be weak and the stronger parts cannot grow. I am not making a statement about whether a government should or should not bail anyone out, or in how far the economy should be the dictator of a society, I’m only questioning the widespread belief that such actions actually help the economy. Every culture incorporates such basic inconsistencies, as I have pointed out elsewhere, for instance that while it was absolutely unacceptable around 1700 to have women on stage, castrating little boys so they would be mature sopranos as grown men, was considered “appropriate”. Or why burning a man at the stake for opposing the Trinity could be a “good thing”.
So my friend Ṧtrt (or Hans Amerbach, as Holbein calls him) was playing a Bach cantata with a European conductor, maybe on an American festival, I don’t know. The cantata was about death, it might have been Ich Stehe Mit Einem Fuß im Grabe, “I’m standing with one foot in the grave”, and the music was joyful, perhaps even happy, as the gorgeous oboe theme in that cantata’s symphonia certainly is. The conductor tried to make it as sad as he or she could, because the text was sad. Then my friend Ármín, as he calls himself sometimes after his hero, suggested that, for the devout Christian Johann Sebastian Bach was, death might actually be the greatest joy possible, because it meant being united with Christ. The conductor ignored the suggestion, did not know what to do with it.
This conductor made two colossal mistakes, one obvious one, but another one even bigger that most musicians may not immediately recognize.
The first colossal blunder of this conductor
First of course the complete lack of understanding of Christianity, so commonly seen in today’s artistic circles, where faith is often dismissed as for “the uneducated”. I believe the Christian view is perhaps the most beautiful and valuable view on life ever expressed, so yes, when a Christian talks, no matter how often I disagree with the particulars, I listen. The aggravating factor here however is that for a historical performance specialist, ignoring Bach’s Christianity is about the most unhistorical approach one could take to this composer and the world he lived in. It’s like ignoring the Declaration of Independence in a study about Jefferson. It’s like ignoring the cello in the life of Casals, painting in Picasso, Le Sacre in Stravinsky. It’s like English without Shakespeare, or vice versa*. It’s Tolkien without the Lord of Rings, Wagner without the his Rings, a proposal in America without at least one of those. It’s like ignoring the moon in the life of Neil, the trumpet in the life of Louis and the Tour de France in the life of Lance Armstrong. It’s Johann Strauss without the waltzes, Richard Strauss without Zarathustra and Levi Strauss without denim. It’s like a history of aviation, architecture or American history without Wilbur, Orville, Frank Lloyd and Bill o’ (W)right(s); it’s the South Pole without Amundson, a north Pole without an idea, Sergey Bubka without a pole; it is a Prairie Home without Companion, a Prairie Home Companion without Lake Wobegon, and Lake Wobegon without Karl Krebsbach. It’s communism, roses and lipstick without the color red; snow, bird poop and the American wedding dress without white; a Catholic cardinal, Deep and Alice Walker without the color purple. It’s the Cavs without LeBron, the Patriots without Tom, the 400 m. hurdles without Edwin Moses; it’s an Irish man’s life without Scotch, a woman’s without chocolate and shoes, or Tom Frattare’s without Half Price Books and sports; it’s Donald Trump without tweeting, it’s a man without his … it’s the Browns without the color of … but you get my drift. Ignoring Bach’s Christianity is as detrimental to a good portrayal as ignoring his music.
It reminds me of a leading baroque violinist, specialist in historical performance, who, as legend has it, refused to play a concert by candle light. It would ruin his intonation.
Elsewhere I have an article I wrote about the intellectual lacunas of an overspecialized academia (=> Lingerie, which is not about lingerie). A philosophy professor once corrected my pronunciation of Tao with Dao - little did she know that with my Dutch accent, I was pretty close to the Mandarin pronunciation, while “dao” was way off (the -d is not supposed to be pronounced voiced in pinyin). Why had she never learned that? Twenty minutes of “Pinyin 101” would have done the job. How many musicologists know that the “Margrave of Brandenburg” Bach sent his Brandenburg concertos to was just a rather insignificant member of a lesser branch of the Hohenzollern family without any political authority in Brandenburg whatsoever (=> Margrave)? Why do people persist in believing that Casals’ performances of Bach’s suites have any authority about how that music was intended to be played? (=> authenticity in Compositions and Ideas)
The second colossal blunder of this conductor (how I love writing this article!)
But the second mistake, though much less well understood, is worse. It is a confusion about the task of a performing musician. As almost everyone on the world of historical performance, this conductor - who is not someone I worked with a lot - thought that as a musician, one should perform the text when there is one. How often have I not been assured that before everything else, we have to sing and play the text! - No, we do NOT! That’s the composer’s job. The composer shapes the music to the text, the performer performs the music he wrote. For a singer, this may be a little more complicated, as in certain respects the words, the color of the vowels, the consonants, make part of the music. All right then, as far as this is the case, the text, as part of the music, must be taken into consideration, though only as far as sound is concerned. It is also true that music is often less unambiguous than words - though the words in the very example mentioned here already show two irreconcilable textual interpretations! - so by studying the text, we might find indications about how the music should be understood. But as an independent vehicle for expression, the text should only be expressed after and through the music, as, again, it is the composer’s job to make the two meet. Unfortunately, that is not what I see happening in my experience: many, if not most conductors declare themselves slaves to the text, then find in the music ways to illuminate the text, putting the music in a semantic straightjacket. This is probably also because those conductors don’t really know how to let the music speak, they don’t fathom the surprising complexities of great music like Bach’s, so they inflict their own pedestrian ideas on the music, subjecting the music to their bag of tricks. In order to avoid too many accents, for instance, they lighten up the second half of the beat regardless of what the thematic material calls for.
A good example of that can be found in the beginning of what we call Brandy 3, where the stresses are already indicated by the notes, and where the Gs on the first and third beats, encircled in the example below, form a sentence, alternated with comments as if in parentheses embodied by the lower notes. I am not saying that this is the only way this music should be played, I don’t pretend to be Bach , and for all I know maybe Bach might have done something substantially different; but this interpretation comes from the actual notes, the rhythms, from this particular musical context, not from a mere blind enforcement of measurement. It identifies the musical elements that are actually there, instead of subjecting the material to a property pertaining to every piece in a 4/4 or alle breve time signature.
This orchestral tutti from Brandy 3** shows more examples of sameness, that horror we try to avoid like the plague to the detriment of musical rhetoric. If we were to insert the hypothetical and hopefully somewhat hilarious text on the tune played by the violins as seen on Bach's manuscript below - note the orderliness of the handwriting! - we would lay the stresses thus: Antoinette, that’s the girl, Antoinette, that’s her name, Antoinette, is the one who doesn’t have a Maserati, doesn’t have a Lamborghini, doesn’t even have a Chevy,*** - so a rhetorical performance would relate the “Antoinettes” to each other, while also relating the that’s the girl, that’s her name, is the one to both the Antoinettes and to each other. Downplaying the second half of bar would deprive the phrase of its rhetorical coherence. The words doesn’t have a then are repeated thrice in the next part, followed by the specifics (which are automobiles, at least the first two), as the next example shows, where they are indicated by the stars. Unfortunately, in most orchestras I play in, that rhetoric is botched by an even crescendo - which has nothing whatsoever to do with the rhetorical baroque and is entirely 19th century melodic thinking, yet I see it happen all the time in Baroque performances, specially in North America - an even crescendo, I say, where the connection between the three d-c#-d elements is lost in favor of an idea that has been installed in us at an early age by the exponents of the Puccini melodic idiom that classical music has embraced since 1900.
Please do not think I have contempt for this conductor as a musician. I’m only taking issue with the idea in question. If good musicians in leadership positions like this director - and almost all musicians qualify in this - are capable of such gross misconceptions about rhetoric, such violations of the score, the rhythms, the pitches, such ignorance of the essentials of rhetoric, imagine what they can do with a text that speaks to them, regardless of how it is set….
Bach would of course never have set his music in this way with one syllable per note note. The text serves to show the musical grammar of a baroque tune. Rhetorical music has its own grammar that is an imitation, but not identical to semantic grammar, and the task of the composer is to find a musical tune or motive of which the grammar matches the grammar of the words - matches, but not completely overlaps, or we would have something merely academic. Elsewhere I’m sure I will talk about playing football with Peyton Manning in a hut somewhere in Omaha, set on a Bach tune, but here I think I can suffice with a random example from Handel’s Messiah. The number before the Amen has as text Blessing and honor & glory & power be unto him - Here the musical grammar matches the text in the stressed beat at the first honor, and the notes leading up to it, honor glory and power have matching musical stresses. Him is on the throne of the phrase. But melodically, the nine repeated d’’s in bar 1 and 2 rather suggest a flight inspector who urges his parachute jumping students to, well, jump: Aaaaaa…hahand Go! Go! Go! Go! Go! Go! Go! Go! Go! to the ground, like bricks…). Most music directors I worked with (though emphatically not Sigiswald Kuijken) would, because of the words, have us play the accents indicated, though it needs to be emphasized that they are stresses not accents. However, I adamantly hold that if the instrumentalists outline the musical grammar, and the singers sing the semantic grammar, the overall texture will be the richer for it, AND the text will come out better. Especially, and before all others, in Bach. The players would then put some weight on the first of the high d’’s, gently though, then play the other as comes, without deliberation, then the last d’’ on the first Him can be a long articulation and the second stress, from which the rest follows. Of course, if you make an even crescendo on the related notes, you have brought Puccini back in again.
Another example of this division of labor is the first Kyrie in the B minor Mass. It would be pretty wacko to ask singers to follow the articulation the bass instruments like cellos, basses and bassoons naturally play here, while it would be as foolish to ask us to play this with the legato of a vocal line; again, if each group keeps to its characteristics, the mix will be much more enjoyable than the boring artificial homogeneity of, say a communist society. The words give the outline: the first three notes form of course a group, so a possible stress on the second beat, imaginable though with another text, say Is discussing motherhood (Kyrie in the notes examples) would not do here. But within that framework, everyone minds his own business and everything is woven together. Of course I couldn’t resist completing the alternative text outlining the musical grammar. Good thing I never became a song writer…
Finally one other example from the Hohe Messe, as we call this great piece in the former Holy Roman Empire: the Gratias in the Gloria. This theme recurs in the last movement, the Dona Nobis Pacem, part of the Agnus Dei. The musical stress is represented by the red stars (the color blue was not available), with the middle one probably the highest point. Bach places NObis and the culmination of GRAtias on the first, the fullness of Agimus and PAcem on the second and TIbi and PAcem on the last; that’s how it’s done. The dividing line between Gratias and Agimus does not apply to the Dona Nobis****. I have always found it pointless to articulate the same melodic line differently on two occasions because of a different text. Instead, if the instruments just play the musical line and the singers articulate the text accordingly from there, a richer much more organic result is reached. As already said.
This is however explicitly against what I hear from almost every historical performance teacher and conductor. I believe that is from a wrongly and superficially imposed professionalism. Text is something tangible, and text awareness is a less complicated skill that’s easier to acquire. Just like some conductors show exaggerated awareness of acoustics, another tangible skill that can be owned - the really great ones probably don’t talk much about it.
The big hangup of our post-modern period is an irrational emphasis on technical and technological perfection. Every note must line up with the soloist, while it is known that even in the 19th century the right hand of a concert pianist “didn’t know what the left was doing”. Real flawlessness bores me to death. Just like most music in the Baroque era was supposed to be improvised, the accompanist of a solo would provide the rhythm on which the soloist would then float, which gives a much greater freedom to the texture, a freedom our ancestors, in spite of the hierarchy and the rules they had, undoubtedly enjoyed. If you listen to Aretha Franklin singing, there is hardly a beat even remotely together, and I am adamant that such would also have existed in the baroque and classical eras. Compare that to the daily practice in almost all baroque circles to interrupt the accompaniment when the singer breathes in the middle of passages where the instruments are playing eight or sixteenth notes; something that musically makes absolutely no sense, yet it is done almost everywhere to every baroque aria.
Think of the string players’ vibrato on every note, something that never existed before 1900; and of the ridiculous and even fascist idea that orchestra members shouldn’t show their emotions but play like machines (equating human beings to machines is a fascist idea, and I suddenly become aware of the concurrence between the great diabolical totalitarian systems in the period 1914 - 1950 and the rise of the machines and conveyer-belt industries). Elsewhere I quote Simon Rattle laying the link to musicians forbidden to show their emotions in an orchestra and audiences no longer coming to concerts.
Great composers knew what they were doing. If Bach sounds joyful, it is meant to be joyful and we need to bring that joy out to the listeners. If the text is that I want to bury Jesus myself, then we need to find the intense joy in that particular aria in the St. Matthew in that text, not impose our often extremely superficial hangups on the music. We are all musicians. Do we really miss the creativity to imagine Bach believing, with all his heart, in that great Yes! of Teurer Heiland in the St. John, and to appreciate the greatness of that idea? If I have the gift of prophecy, Paul writes, and can fathom all the mysteries and all knowledge (…) but I do not have love, I am nothing. Love isn’t easy. It puts up a fight. It asks us to extend our boundaries. And that’s scary.
I remember once returning to the locker room after a St. John in Holland, probably Naarden*****, no, it was in Utrecht, Vredenburg; I hate the locker room, you just played your heart out, only to return to the stupid small talk when packing up, but what else can you say? Someone muttered Was its Wahrheit, (“what is truth?”) from the St. John we just played, and I remember thinking: is that all you get out of this life-altering masterwork? Has our culture really watered down to Pilate’s politically correct, practical relativism? If even those that search for musical truth****** end up administrating a toolbox of generally applied bromides to no matter what specific musical measures, what is one to be done? Welcome to the world of Salieri…
Footnotes:
* Another possible Far Side Cartoon: “Welcome, Willem Sjeekspier, this is you room, where everybody speaks Dutch…”
** Brandy 3 = Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto no. 3 in G major, BWV 1048 - about the inordinately boring way of naming classical pieces another time.
*** This liturgy continues with “thát is becáuse this brunètte, daughter of a baronèt, who can dance the minuèt in her little kitchenette while baking bread and really trying_in spite of all her tears and swèat, never could get wèt, so her driving teacher mèt with another girl …” (Bachs verborgene Quellen BMW X:45 p. 3289)
**** The Violist’s Prayer, Dona Nobis Tacet, is derived from this text.
***** In Naarden I once had a had a haircut during intermission in one of Bach’s passions.
****** I was once told, after a Q and A session, that I should not say that I am looking for musical truth when asked why I am in historical performance, because it sounds arrogant
Illustrations:
1. Portrait of Ṧtrt (b. 1987) by Hans Holbein who will never be called the Elder, anachronistically painted by foreshadowing inspiration in 1621 under the name of Hans Amerbach.
2. Portrait of Elisabeth de Beauharnais, by Largillière, Nicolas de (1656 - 1746), from1701. Grenoble. Musée des Beaux Arts - This is of course an equally foreshadowing picture of Julianne Moore.
3. Beginning of Brandy 3, from Bach’s hand.
4. Marie Marguérite de Bontemps (1668 - 1701), possimpibly by Nicolas de Largillière.
5. Elisabeth Charlotte d’Orléans, Duches de Lorraine (1676-1744), at a hunt, by Jean Baptiste Martin.
Carousel:
This article doesn’t have a carousel. It doesn’t have a casserole either. It has one picture: Whalers off a Rocky coast, by Abraham Storck, 1688, in the Maritime Museum in Rotterdam. This picture, with some of the ones above, have a cryptic relevance to the article.
