“Bach today?”
Gérard Ter Borch, The Concert, about 1675, Germany, Berlin, Gemäldegalerie (SMPK) © BPK, Berlin, Dist. RMN / Jörg P. Ander.
The burghers of Leipzig went to St. Thomas for the Sunday service, to hear the divine word highlighted by music that reiterated Lutheran chorales, and that they would not hear again. Total continuity for music that serves only as means of passage and is ceaselessly reworked, not to create an oeuvre (much less an author's oeuvre), but to bring the listener to the divine word: there cannot be a stronger break with the modern model of creation and authorship through which we now read Bach, as a creator of unique dimensions “into” which we enter through fragments, to be initiated into the source of all music, “music itself.” Recordings and broadcast media replace church and pew, and where the faithful used to sing their faith, stars perform repertoire that they repeat a thousand times. Between them and us, the twin settings of appreciation are exactly reversed. We choose, compare, collect works and performances after having taken a survey of music by means of The Well-Tempered Clavier, under the benevolent gaze of a composer who is the subject of scholarly editions, popular collections, a huge catalog of recordings and countless hagiographies. The master of music has himself become the object of our musical taste. None of these characteristics belong to Bach’s time. Who still “understands” the bandages around the body of Christ represented by the violin melismas in the Cantata 4, “Christ lag in Todesbanden”? The very fact that we listen to Bach as music, while the faithful of his time heard the Gospel, stands in the way of our understanding.8 In contrast, current research shines a laser beam on the scores of the cantatas, in search of errors, pentimenti, corrections. What is the real point of this quest? A search for an original, which did not exist at the time? A curious operation. If one thinks of the short-circuit of temporalities that this represents, it is more a symptom than a method. A century from now, anthropologists will surely chuckle.
Bach is nevertheless interesting, because no one better embodies the idea of authority than he, who was not an author! Loving Bach does not involve a taste for exoticism, an attraction to the strangeness of an unknown world, as can be the case for medieval or oriental music. He is, on the contrary, at the heart of this regime that is not his. How better to sense the paradoxes of our continuous reappropriation of the past than in focusing on this figure who offers us two diametrically opposite faces? For the huge majority of musicians who have followed him, Bach has become, according to a cliché that comes automatically to their lips, the “father of music.” He is the absolute reference, a sort of original matrix to which radically different styles and aesthetics can trace their heritage. This place apart is just as much a part of the history of “Bach today” as the effort to restore his music to a less anachronistic form. He is at the center of a world of music that entirely revolves around the creator, a regime he himself rejected in dismay when he recognized it in his sons. To put it another way, the composer of classical music that Bach never was has nonetheless become the leading composer of classical music. The least of his scores is analyzed by bands of musicologists, studied by generations of students, interpreted widely, published and sold in a thousand different media. In the meantime, thanks to published editions and recordings, we have learned to listen to music as a repertoire, a “line” at our disposal, going from A to Z. That is what it is, the regime of the author. It is pointless to understand our eternal return to Bach as the sign of a greater fidelity, effacing, as if by magic, the history that has made him our contemporary. On the contrary, nothing better demonstrates or emphasizes the position of author into which we place him than this very modern concern for playing him in his contemporary style; it is the unique peculiarity of our taste that we, amateurs of the twentieth century, search for our origins through Bach, for whom it is only the music of a creator that counts. We do not return to his time, nor to his method of production. Like the rich Americans who carried the Cloisters across the Atlantic, we want to import everything of his, including the furniture of his music, so that he will be even more ours.