Evening in the Palace of Reason Page 26
Before the bicentennial year was out, the Marxist critic Theodor Adorno wrote an inflamed rebuttal charging Hindemith with trying to make Bach into “a composer for organ festivals in well-preserved Baroque towns.” He did not say so, but Adorno was speaking in defense of works like Anton Webern’s orchestral version of the six-part ricercar from the Musical Offering (1935), a gorgeous if somewhat eccentric arrangement that was a breakthrough in making each of the contrapuntal voices come alive, in making some of the work’s most challenging ideas audible. In a letter to a colleague Webern wrote that he had wanted to liberate the ricercar from the narrow compass of the keyboard, to score it “the way I feel it.… Isn’t the point to awaken what is still sleeping in the secrecy of Bach’s abstract rendering?” Adorno certainly thought so. Bach’s heritage, he argued, “falls to the act of composing, which remains faithful to him by being unfaithful, and identifies that heritage’s content by recreating it for itself.”
No one was wrong in this debate: Adorno was correct in observing that the most ingenious use of Bach’s musical legacy was made by composers like Webern, and his teacher Schoenberg, who also wrote an encomium to Bach in 1950, calling him only half in jest “the first twelve-tone composer.”* And the surpassingly beautiful recordings of the complete cantatas by Nikolaus Harnoncourt and Gustav Leonhardt, completed by the 250th anniversary of his death in the year 2000, more than vindicated the musical vitality of “authentic” performance.
Ultimately, though, in the tide of history, the only direction available is forward. Even Harnoncourt and Leonhardt would not claim that a modern audience can hear Bach as he was heard in the eighteenth century. Just as Bach influenced all the music and history that came after him, all that music and history changed him, or changed at least how his music could be heard. For this reason and others, no matter how “original” the instruments or groupings of choristers, however “authentic” a performance strives to be, Bach can never again be heard as his contemporary audiences heard him. On the other hand, his music can speak to new audiences in ways that neither the eighteenth-century parishioners of St. Thomas’s Church nor even the composer himself could ever have imagined.
THE MODERN WORLD isa creature of both the Enlightenment and Romanticism but completely the offspring of neither. The Enlightenment, which set out to rid the world of its superstitious credulity, still usefully instructs us to find and tear down veils of illusion wherever they exist, to be just to one another, and to keep studying; even if empiricism could not find a perfect order hidden in the universe, after all, it took us to the moon. The Romantics, who came to the rescue when trust in reason failed, suggest that we embrace the world, imperfect as it may be, that we listen to the stirrings of the unconscious and remember that, whether we wish to be or not, we are the creators of our lives and our world. Yet these two postures stand opposed, one warning of the danger that the light of reason can blind us to a deeper kind of illumination, the other pointing out what can happen, what has happened, when we entrust ourselves to myth.
There being no settled agreement between them, the tension continues between reason and faith, ratio and sensus, Frederick and Bach. In this struggle, Frederick usually seems to have the upper hand. The world of the early twenty-first century has no trouble knowing Frederick: that mocking, not-really-self-effacing skepticism, the head-fake toward principle during a headlong rush toward the glamour of deeds. His mask and his loneliness are all too familiar. Bach is more of a stranger, a refugee from “God’s time” displaced to a world where religion can be limited to a building and a day of the week, or dispensed with altogether. The chasm that opened with the Enlightenment between the secular and the sacred has grown only wider, to the point of making a commonplace of what would have been unthinkable for Bach: a sense of the world as something unremittingly solid and factual, La Mettrie’s self-winding, spring-loaded machine. Modern history has shown what such objectification can do—without it, how could there have been concentration camps?—but the history of ideas has, at least so far, provided no clinching argument against it.
The beauty of music, of course, what sets it apart from virtually every other human endeavor, is that it does not need the language of ideas; it requires no explanation and offers none, as much as it may say. Perhaps that is why music coming from a world where the invisible was palpable, where great cosmic forces played their part everywhere and every day, could so deeply move audiences so far from Bach’s time. Whether in the thrilling exuberance of his polyphonic Credo or in the single voice of an unaccompanied cello, in works extravagantly expressive and as intimate as a whisper, Bach’s music makes no argument that the world is more than a ticking clock, yet somehow manages to leave no doubt of it.
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* Actually, though Bach’s manuscripts were not well kept, particularly by Friedemann, this version of events, especially given the Romantics’ infatuation with scorned geniuses, seems too good to be true. More likely Zelter inherited the manuscript from one of Bach’s former students, with whom he had made it his business to keep in touch.
* The twelve-tone or serial method of composition developed by Schoenberg and his disciples of the Second Viennese School utilized many of die contrapuntal devices Bach used, such as inversion, retrograde motion, augmentation, diminution, etc. Schoenberg also made the point that, unlike sixteenth-century counterpoint, which used the seven notes of the common diatonic scale, Bach used all twelve notes of the chromatic scale.
P. S. Ideas Interviews & Features…
About the Author
* * *
A Passion for Thought: Louise Tucker talks to James Gaines
Life at a Glance
A Writing Life
Top Ten Books About Back
About the Book
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How I Came to Write This Book by James Gaines
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
A Passion for Thought
Louise Tucker talks to James Gaines
How long have you lived in Paris and how did you end up here?
We’ve been here for three years. When I left Time Inc, having lived and worked in New York for thirty years, we moved to Boulder, Colorado, partly because my wife is a skier, partly because we have little kids, and partly because of the mountains. But we missed the life of a large city and, since we didn’t want to go back to New York, we settled on Paris. Italy felt too much like retirement and London, at that time, was a lot more expensive than Paris, though there is not quite as much difference now.
How do you find living in France, as a citizen of a country that is often disliked by the French?
Well, during the Iraq war I stayed in a lot! The thing that was most striking during that period was that many French people who knew I was American wanted me to know that Chirac did not speak for all the French. I never got the opposite but then I was working very hard at the time. On the other hand, my American friends kept asking,‘Why are you living in that terrible country? They can’t stand us!’ It was as if I was being disloyal for living in Paris.
What do you miss about America?
Friends mainly, and being able to speak English all the time. For someone who cares a lot about words, it’s difficult to be anything less than fluent, and my French is far from that. And things are easier in America, though not always. At least people there think the customer is always right … it’s very different here!
And what do you love about Paris?
It’s beautiful, so incredibly beautiful, the food is so wonderful – the food at the markets, the food in the restaurants, the bread – the life in general is just … wonderful. Living inside history is also stimulating. In the States there isn’t any. It’s not our fault, we’re young. I’m living in the places that I’m writing about in my next book, and in a sense I feel the history I’m writing every day.
You’ve been a journalist and an editor, now a writer: what did you want to be when you grew up?
I actually wanted to be a magazine editor. I remember telling my father when I was eleven that I could edit Life magazine and he looked at me as if I was crazy.
How did you know what an editor was at eleven?
I have no idea. It wasn’t from my parents. My father was a cash-register repairman who rose through the ranks to become a corporat honcho and my mother stayed at home to raise us.
What did you like about magazine editing when you finally got there?
Being an editor was a slog but being the editor – which is what I really wanted – is a bit like being an orchestra conductor. You don’t write any stories, you don’t take any pictures but you bring out a little flute here and a little cello there and try to present the face and spirit of the publication in a way that is consonant with its mission and the expectations of the audience and in a way that tries to make a difference in the world.
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‘I remember telling my father when I was eleven that I could edit Life magazine and he looked at me as if I was crazy.’
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And did you ever miss the writing once you were the editor?
No. I didn’t miss magazine writing, but I did miss book writing. I wrote Wit’s End in 1977 and I know that that book will be read long after I’m gone, but the issues of Time magazine that I edited will never be thought of as individual entities again. They stop being that after the week they’re on sale, and that’s the idea. If they aren’t an expression of the moment they were published, they aren’t doing their job.
What was your route to the editorship?
I was a writer at Newsweek, at Saturday Review and at People. I started in the editorial ranks at People and finally wound up as the editor, then became the editor of Life and then the editor of Time, which is kind of a natural progression.
The competition between fathers and sons is one of the themes in Bach’s Musical Offering: were you ever spurred on by such competition yourself?
Absolutely. I am a second son. There are real advantages to that because the expectations are not nearly as high. Sometimes you can resent the fact that they are not as high, or wonder why, but on the other hand, my parents told me I could be whatever I wanted to be that would make me happy, and they told my brother that he was going to be a doctor. Period.
And is he a doctor?
Of course. He had to be.
When did you start learning the piano?
When I was eight. That’s when I discovered another great thing about having an older brother: they spur you on. My brother has perfect pitch and can improvise really well, but I knew I could play classical music better than he could, I just knew it, and I think that kept me going sometimes. When you’re a kid, practising can seem like the last thing you need to do, and I think the competition kept me at it. Not that he competed, really. He still improvises better than I do, and I still play Bach better than he does.
The book is a masterly musical education for those who know little about music: have you had such an education yourself?
I studied hard in high school and was admitted to the music school at the University of Michigan, but I realized almost instantly that I was not good enough to become a performing pianist, and I didn’t think I would be a good teacher, so I transferred into liberal arts and majored in English. I kept taking piano lessons all through college and even for a couple of years after, but I would never try to pass myself off as a musicologist. I learned most of what I know about Bach doing research for the book.
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‘Being an editor was a slog but being the editor is a bit like being an orchestra conductor.’
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At the beginning of the book you describe what music is for Bach and for Frederick. What is it for you?
It’s a means of expression, as writing is, it’s consolation when things are going badly and it’s a great intellectual and physical challenge. Whatever the activity there’s something pretty terrific about finally doing something that you didn’t think you could do. In music it’s all about practising and more practising until that wonderful moment when you hear yourself doing it! There’s also the ego appeal of performance, though I must say my nerves and fear of mistakes were always stronger than that, probably because I didn’t practise enough. Music is certainly not calming. I know people who listen to music when they work or when they want to go to sleep, but it wakes me up. The last thing I would do on an insomniac night is listen to music.
Childhood is described as an ‘unprivileged state’ for Bach and was certainly such for Frederick: what were the privileges of your childhood?
Just that I was treated as a child. As with all children in our culture, there was a period when I was not expected to do anything, when I was expected not to be able to do anything. There really wasn’t that period for them.
The defining moment of Frederick’s life is Katte’s execution and his own captivity; for Bach it is the death of his first wife. You write of their tragedies with great empathy: have you yourself experienced such a defining moment that has subsequently informed your life or your books?
Not like that, no. But the ending of the book reminded me of one defining experience. It was the very last thing I wrote; I had the entire book written and I could not think how to finish it. Eventually I wrote about the two contrasting views of the world that Bach and Frederick represent: a world that can’t be quite explained by reason, a world where things are fundamentally mysterious, and the world Frederick lived in, which was all cause and effect, a machine, what I called at the end of the book a world of something unremittingly solid’. When I was proofreading the book I came across that phrase ‘unremittingly solid’ and suddenly thought, uh-oh, I think I’ve read that somewhere. Of course this is a nightmare for a non-fiction book: how was I ever going to find a two-word phrase in my library or my notes? If I couldn’t, I would have to take it out and for a variety of reasons I really did not want to.
A couple of days later I realized that I had written that phrase thirty-five years before, when I had just left college and was trying to figure out what to do with my life. I had decided by that time that I wasn’t good enough to be a pianist, and though I wrote poetry and short stories I felt I wasn’t good enough to write fiction either, so I decided I would go into journalism because I’d done a bit of it in college and knew I was good at explicative, declaratory prose. I was writing a short story at the time which was autobiographical – all my stories were autobiographical then, which proves I was right to become a journalist – and I wrote a hyper-dramatic paragraph about a young man standing at a fork in the road, remembering a time when he lived in a world of great, overwhelming passion but now saw that that was gone, and he was left alone in a heartbreaking world of unrelenting solids I said ‘unrelenting solids’ there and ‘unremittingly solid’ in the book, but that is where the phrase came from. Realizing that was a relief, of course, but it also reminded me that the question this book is about – which kind of world do we live in? – is one that I’ve been wrestling with all my adult life and one I have yet to resolve. That was my fork in the road, when I decided I was going to be a journalist and not an artist.
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‘Music is a means of expression, as writing is, it’s consolation when things are going badly and it’s a great intellectual and physical challenge.’
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If, as you frequently write, ‘what is greatest about Bach’s work is literally impossible to talk about’, what inspired you to start the impossible in writing this book?
The challenge of writing it, of writing about music. It is really hard to do, and it’s rarely done well. One inspiration for me was Ian McEwan’s book Amsterdam, in which he writes really well about music because he writes in brief, suggestive phrases that the mind fills in, a bit like the invitation of radio narrative to create details that are not in the text. In
any case I wanted to try it because I have an understanding of music and an understanding of readers, so I thought I had a shot at bringing it off.
Did you have any particular audience in mind, whether the enthusiast or the expert?
I thought about my colleagues at People, Time and Life, people who were not musical but who were good readers and would understand anything I could properly explain.
How long did it take you to write and research the book?
It took about three years, about two years’ research and one year of writing, though I was sometimes doing both at the same time.
How has writing this book affected your relationship with Bach’s music?
Before I wrote the book I approached him as an artefact, both as a person and as a composer. There are some fussy ideas about the ‘proper’ way to play Bach; I’m not quite sure why he attracts a pedantic crowd, but he does. Anyway, once I decided who he was for me, I still felt the need to be rigorous about understanding his scores but not slavish to what’s thought to be proper, because he’s so unlike that himself. He tore up other people’s scores. He would take the scores of Lully or Buxtehude and deconstruct them to try and reach the core of what they were doing, and then put them back together in his own way. He was destroying to create in a way. In any case, I now feel more liberated to play him as I will, worrying whether he would approve of course, but not whether others would.