Bach: Music in the Castle of Heaven

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This is a beautifully designed book exploring Johann Sebastian Bach’s life and music, focusing on his vocal works (rather than instrumental). It gave me new appreciation for well known works like the St John Passion, and introduced me to other ones like Actus tragicus. Below are my highlights from the book.

Chapter 1: Under the Cantor’s Gaze

There would seem to be nothing more obvious, more tangible and palpable than the present moment. And yet it eludes us completely. All the sadness of life lies in that fact. In the course of a single second, our sense of sight, of hearing, of smell, register (knowingly or not) a swarm of events and a parade of sensations and ideas passes through our head. Each instant represents a little universe, irrevocably forgotten in the next instant. p. 16

Chapter 2: Germany on the Brink of Enlightenment

It was one of the great avatars of the Enlightenment, Gottfried Leibniz, who famously said, “Music is the hidden arithmetical exercise of a mind unconscious that it is calculating.” p. 49

Chapter 3: The Bach Gene

The theologian John Drury reflects “if one is to think of a central thing about being human, it is the need for a response from some other – a person, or it could be a work of art or music – and the fulfilling joy of getting one. […] This longed for reciprocity (it has an erotic ache to it) seems to be what makes life worth living.” p. 76

Timothy Garton Ash on the subject of how “personal memory is such a slippery customer” quotes one of Nietzsche’s epigrams: “’I did that,’ says my memory. ‘I can’t have done that,’ says my pride and remains adamant. In the end – memory gives way.” Garton Ash continues: “The temptation is always to pick and choose your past, just as it is for nations: […]” p. 79

[Philip Pullman said], “When you are a child your feelings are magnified, because you haven’t any experience with which to compare them.” p. 80

Chapter 4: The Class of ’85

Three musicians of immense future distinction turned eighteen in 1703 – Domenico Scarlatti, Johann Sebastian Bach and the one who later styled himself George Frideric Handel. Born just two years before them was the Frenchman Jean-Philippe Rameau, while the two eldest in this class of six (and the most celebarated in their day), Johann Mattheson and Georg Philipp Telemann, were born in 1681. p. 91

Chapter 5: The Mechanics of Faith

Luther is often said to have asked why the Devil should have all the good tunes. To make sure that he didn’t, Luther and his followers appropriated secular melodies that everyone in the congregation knew, redirecting the candid earthiness and bawdiness of folksongs to the service of faith, for “the whole purpose of harmony is the glory of God,” he claimed; “all other use is but the idle juggling of Satan.” pp. 129–130

Precociously, he seems to have learnt how the colossal force of faith embodied and enacted in music could deprive death of its powers to terrify, as though concurring with Montaigne (whom he certainly never read), “Let us banish the strangeness of death: let us practice it, accustom ourselves to it, never having anything so often present in our minds than death: let us always keep the image of death in our imagination – and in full view.” Luther, too, had insisted, “We should familiarize ourselves with death during our lifetime, inviting death into our presence when it is still at a distance.” pp. 147–148

Religion, he [William James] recognized, “like love, like wrath, like hope, ambition, jealousy, like every other instinctive eagerness and impulse … adds to life and enchantment which is not rationally or logically deductible from anything else.” p. 154

György Kurtág, recently confessed, “Consciously, I am certainly an atheist, but I do not say it out loud, because if I look at Bach, I cannot be an atheist. Then I have to accept the way he believed. His music never stops praying. And how can I get closer if I look at him from the outside? I do not believe in the Gospels in a literal fashion, but a Bach fugue has the Crucifixion in it – as the nails are being driven on. In music, I am always looking for the hammering of the nails … That is a dual vision. My brain rejects it all. But my brain isn’t worth much.” p. 154

These early works show him exploring music’s power to provide aural, sensory comfort for life’s hardships, softening the impact of grief, like new skin over a wound. p. 156

Chapter 6: The Incorrigible Cantor

The strong impression one gets is of a man almost constantly at odds with someone or something. p. 167

When later in life he was asked “how he contrived to become such a master in his art,” Bach generally replied, “I was obliged to be industrious; whoever is equally industrious will succeed equally well.” p. 168

Medieval theologians considered children capable of mortal sin at the age of six or seven […] – the age when fathers were expected to discipline their children. Luther himself said that too much whipping broke a child’s spirit, implying that his parents had almost broken his. The German attitude was that children were beasts to be tamed, an attitude common both at home and school. “’Some teachers are cruel as hangmen,’ he said. ‘I was once beaten fifteen times before noon, without any fault of mine, because I was expected to decline and conjugate although I had not been taught this.’ Yet late in life when a child relative of his stole a trifle, Luther recommended that she be beaten until the blood came.” p. 169

Bach’s church music requires enormous concentration on the part both of performer and the listener: you have to hold the emotion as you play or listen, channeling it, controlling it and letting it loose in the same second. p. 196

Chapter 7: Bach at His Workbench

For him [Bach] invention was an uncovering of possibilities that are already there, rather than something truly original – hence his view that anyone could do as well, provided they were as industrious. God is still the only true creator. p. 209

Certainly no one before Bach (and only a handful of composers since) had used this point of intersection so fruitfully: melody underpinned by rhythm, enriched by counterpoint and coalescing together to create harmony, itself a composite of consonance and dissonance that registers in the listener’s ear. p. 216

If his interpretation of the lectionary differed […] and his own thought pattern suggested and alternative structure, Bach was not always inclined to follow quite so submissively. It is at these moments that he reveals the full extent of his ambitions for music: for it to interpret and find meaning in the world around him. At that point no author or librettist could stop him from using his natural gifts, as Birnbaum describes them, to gain “imaginative insight into the depth of worldly wisdom”. p. 219

The truth is that stylistic impropriety was a badge of Bach’s approach to invention in a culture that was not equipped to deal with its originality. p. 221

“One need only go to Dresden,” he tells the council, “to see how the musicians there are paid by His Royal Majesty. It cannot fail, since the musicians are relieved of all concern for their living, free from chagrin and obliged each to master but a single instrument.” (This sounds like a prototype of the modern orchestra, and, given that this pointed to the breakdown of the very versatility and transferability that was part of Bach’s success, it is rather ironic.) p. 223

The close scrutiny we give to the written notation of his works may distract us from a key component in his creativity: the way performance fed into the very act of composition. […] both player and listener are drawn in and required to complete the creative act. […] it is our imaginative response that completes the creative act […] the listener/viewer has to “work” to constitute the finished article – something relatively new in the age of the Baroque, and not equivalent to mere “decoding”. p. 225

Bach was of course considered supreme as a performer in his lifetime and was celebrated far more as a keyboard virtuoso and for his improvisations than for his compositions, few of which were published or known outside a restricted geographic area; traces of their origins as improvisations are clearly apparent in the earliest of his keyboard fantasias and toccatas. p. 226

The Musical Offering (BWV 1079) is probably the best-known example of Bach rising to a special occasion and drawing on all his inventive and interpretive resources […] Frederick the Great set him an awkward, chromatic theme […] on which to extemporise, first in three, then in six parts. […] In the copy he sent […] Did King Frederick even bother to look at them? Did he realise the initial capitals of Bach’s dedication spelt ricercar(e) […]? […] The ten canons in the Musical Offering are among the most complicated Bach ever wrote. […] One of the most ingenious is the “Canon a 2 per Tonos” […] theoretically it can modulate upwards ad infinitum. This explains Bach’s note in the margin “as the notes ascend, so may the glory to the King.” […] Douglas R. Hofstadter, on the other hand, sees this as the first example of what he calls “Strange Loops”. He traces it’s re-occurrence in the work of […] M. C. Escher […] emphasing a clash between the finite and infinite, and in the mathematics discoveries of Kurt Gödel […] his Incompleteness Theorem. pp. 227–228

Bach knew, as Shakespeare and later John Dryden did, that “a continued gravity keeps the spirit to much bent; must refresh it sometimes, as we bait upon a journey, that we may go on with greater ease.” p. 230

“If you could see Bach … singing with one voice and playing his own parts, but watching over everything and bringing back to the rhythm and the beat, out of their or even forty musicians, the one with a nod, another by talking with his foot, the third with a warning finger, giving the right note to one from the top of his voice, to another from the bottom, and to a third from the middle of it – all alone, in the midst of the greatest din made by all the participants, and although he is executing the most difficult parts himself, noticing at once whenever and wherever a mistake occurs, holding everyone together, taking precautions everywhere, and repairing any unsteadiness, full of rhythm in every part of his body – this one man taking in all these harmonies with his keen ear and emitting with his voice alone the tone of all the voices…” p. 237

Chapter 8: Cantatas or Coffee?

In Bach’s day the arts were still expected to impart some explicit moral, religious or rational meaning. It was not until the second half of the century that aesthetic concepts such as “the Beautiful” and “the Sublime” began to uncouple the artistic from the scientific and the moral. p. 247

It seems that the more chic members of the municipal elite of Leipzig – especially its womenfolk – took pride in arriving anything up to an hour late [to church]. p. 269

Our modern patterns of concert hall listening and of church service decorum inherited from nineteenth-century conventions […] give us a false perspective on the customs of Bach’s Leipzig congregation, for whom neither punctuality nor silent listening was considered de rigueur. p. 272

Chapter 9: Cycles and Seasons

“Rituals are in Time as what the habitation is in Space. For it is good that the flow of time should not appear to us to wear away and disperse us like a handful of sand, but should complete and strengthen us. p. 284

Perhaps it comes as no surprise to find that only one cantata was published during Bach’s lifetime – BWV 71 […] – while at his death the bulk of them were distributed among four of his sons and his widow, but with scores and parts separated. Some cantatas lingered on for a while in the repertoire of his successors, a few were revived in bowdlerised form, many were sold, and an uncountable number disappeared into the recesses of church libraries or were lost for ever. Some were used to light fires. p. 285

The subsequent numbering of the cantatas by BWV prefix was totally random and had nothing to do with the chronology of their composition. p. 332

There has been another whole century of trial and error, fierce debate over the ways to resuscitate [the cantatas] (in or out of liturgy), historical research, critical appraisal of the source material, variably successful attempts to fill the gaps in the threadbare sources, heated arguments over Bach’s original performing forces and practice – and still the cantatas remain on the fringes of many Bach lovers’ knowledge of his oeuvre. p. 332

Chapter 10: First Passion

Heard in close succession, they mirror both reprehensible human patterns of behaviour and our horror-struck response to them, which, as Bach so poignantly reveals, often go hand in hand – one generation of out-and-out victims becoming, with tragic irony, the next generation’s perpetrators of similar atrocities. p. 362

It was his skill in identifying musical means to mirror mathematical images of God or Nature that have Bach’s music it’s extraordinary force, and as a result these patterns and images are registered on our unconscious listening habits in multiple ways. p. 371

Thus the more virulently they denounce him, the more credence his detractors give to his authority and true identity. p. 377

The charge of blasphemy always seems to come from orthodox guardians of faith whenever spiritual or emotional power takes them by surprise. p. 389

[…] and it was only when he had two years left to live that he brought the John Passion back with the original 1724 version restored in all its essentials. p. 392

Chapter 11: His ‘Great Passion’

[…] as John Butt points out, that “one of the best ironies about Bach’s Passions is that their original audiences were far less familiar with the genre than we are; moreover – as is the case with all Bach’s most celebrated music – we might have heard them many more times than did the original performers or even Bach himself.” p. 399

We see him reflected in the eyes and voices of others, most of all in the moving summation “Truly this was the Son of God” (63b) – two of the most emotionally charged bars in all of Bach’s oeuvre, in which the music magnifies Christ’s presence at the very moment of his physical absence/disappearance. p. 428

[…] we can be certain there is no one definitive way if interpreting them [Passions], whether in church, in concert halls or within the secular embrace of the theatre. p. 432

Chapter 12: Collision and Collusion

The point is the effort Bach is concerned to illustrate as part of the music, and then, in blatant contrast, the ease with which, in the B section of the aria, he coasts through a ten-bar solo of ineffable beauty made up entirely of diatonic tones of the natural trumpet without a single accidental: like some gleaming aircraft he emerges from a cloud bank into pure sunlight. Suddenly we are permitted a glorious glimpse of God’s realm, an augury of eternal life, in poignant juxtaposition to the believer’s sense of difficult, incapacity, even, in executing God’s commandments unaided. The device might be a bit drastic, but it is brilliantly effective. It requires the in-built unevenness of the natural trumpet of make its impact, which is simply lost when played on a modern chromatic valved trumpet. This is just a single example of the advantages historical instruments can bring to Bach performances. pp. 451–452

However, we should not condone the tendency of theologically motivated commentators to treat the cantatas as doctrinal dissertations, as opposed to discrete musical compositions, any more than accept the glee with which aggressive atheists try to debunk any theological basis for Bach’s musical exegesis. In the final analysis nothing can gain say or diminish diminish the overwhelming transformative force of Bach’s music, the very quality that makes his cantatas so appealing to Christians and nonbelievers alike. p. 453

Passion in a Bach performance is a rare commodities in today’s climate of antiquarian purity and musicological correctness, but it’s absence jars with the miracle of Bach’s technical expertise, his mastery of structure, harmony and counterpoint, and his having imbued them with such vehemence, meaning and – exactly that – passion. p. 455

Just as many African languages lack distinct words for music and dance, so these two were once considered inseparable in Christian worship, their pagan, Dionysian fusion legitimized by the early church Fathers. p. 473

When Bach is in this mood, you sense that, for all its elegance, its dexterity and its complexity, his music has primitive, pagan roots. This is music to celebrate a festival, the turning-point of the year – life itself. p. 474

By now we have seen that one of Bach’s monumental achievements was to show that music and language together can do things which neither can do separately. But he also proves that music sometimes surpasses language, whether written or spoken, in its capacity to penetrate to the innermost recesses of consciousness and to chip away at people’s prejudices and or sometimes toxic patterns of thinking. p. 477

Chapter 13: The Habit of Perfection

He fully expects the human larynx to be able to function with exactly the same agility as lips pressed to brass tubing or fingers slammed down on wooden finger boards. pp. 490–491

After all, Bach was not a compulsive borrower, like Handel, who famously needed the spark of another composer’s idea in order to fire up his imagination. p. 504

Chapter 14: ‘Old Bach’

A description of what purports to be his intentions for completing The Art of Fugue is included in the Nekrolog […] This cannot possibly be the same as the unfinished Fuga a 3 soggetti, which survives in autograph on paper with a watermark pointing to the very last months of Bach’s life. A note on the reverse by his pupil Agricola tells us that it belongs to another “ground plan”, thus suggesting a completely different project, one destined to remain unfulfilled. p. 551

Ignored for a time, then patchily revived, misrepresented, inflated, re-orchestrated, then in a puritanical overreaction scaled down, diminished and minimalised – there seems to be no end to the ways that Bach’s music can be manipulated to fit with the prevailing Zeitgeist and commercially exploited or used for political ends. p. 556

“There is no music so demanding to realise in sound, and so quick to reveal a lack of understanding or lack of integrity in approaching it.” p. 557

For this is what is so distinctive when we compare Bach’s legacy to that of his forerunners and successors. Monteverdi gives us the full gamut of human passions in music, the first composer to do so; Beethoven tells us what a terrible struggle it is to transcend human frailties and to aspire to the Godhead; and Mozart shows us the kind of music in we might hope to hear in heaven. But it is Bach, making music in the Castle of Heaven, who gives us the voice of God – in human form. He is the one who blazes a trail, showing us how to overcome our imperfections through the perfections of his music: to make divine things human and human things divine. p. 558