Means and meanings

Musical Times, Summer 2003 by Williams, Peter

THREE RECENT BOOKS ON BACH suggest different ways to tackle the old conundrum of the critical versus the positivistic. While the German research institutes continue to establish the latter and provide the documents, the facts, the editions, the source-descriptions and the biographies, the former attracts individual authors wishing to interpret, summarise and inform, sometimes for worthy reasons (a genuine creativity, a wish to 'get things clear'), sometimes for less worthy (research assessment exercises, bids for tenure or promotion). The role of publishers' advisers is important in this publish-or-be-demoted world, and I don't see them contributing much to the present volumes.

Curiously, what I am calling 'the critical' is in another sense often quite uncritical: in their ardour to express non-positivistic and (they trust) winsome ideas about the inexhaustible JS Bach, authors may fail both to raise even the most elementary questions about the evidence they are using or lead even the most responsive leader to ask them. In their different ways, each of these books could afford to ask more questions than it does, to be critical in ways imaginative series-editors could usefully recommend.

In the first book, 'instrumental-vocal works' (a German term for the works of JS Bach for choir and orchestra) signals a discussion of the cantatas with respect to ensemble-size, instrumentation, continuo practice, chorale-singing, recitative and such practical details as dynamics, tempo, ornaments, notation and Affekt (called here 'Affect', also not English). Oddly, the given biography is the translator's not the author's, but elsewhere Mr Hochreither speaks of himself as directing cantatas for nearly forty years in the Berlin Gedachtniskirche, and the welcome approach of his book comes from this extensive shop-floor experience. First published in 1983, it includes a little more recent material on choir-size (the theory of one-to-a-part) and continuo practice (the theory of simultaneous harpsichord and organ continuo).

The perceptions of an experienced German Bach-director are bound to be interesting, and I would certainly include the book in a recommended reading list, now and then challenging it (and its translation). The discussions, as they flit from one cantata to another, benefit from a wonderful knowledge of the repertory, and produce useful views on practical issues such as the distinctions between solo and chorus intended but not made clear in the score's notation. Doubtless, the author has a wider experience of the music than many who have written about it, and at times the mass of examples even threatens to confuse the reader. Some evidence is usefully questioned, such as Emanuel's remark that a full-sized stringed keyboard (Flugel) was indispensable to the ensemble, while other evidence is accepted less critically, such as that when a basso part contains all the movements, the double bass plays in them all. (One wants to know more about the part itself first.)

At other times, the literal translation makes it hard to see what Mr Hochreither does think, e.g. whether the bassoon always accompanies oboes. A touch more scepticism (e.g. are the 1738 continuo rules really Bach's?) or evaluation (e.g. are Kirnberger's realisations really a good model?) would have been useful, and there is again a tendency to see evidence as proving something (e.g. that fermatas in a chorale can not mean 'Hold the chord'). An interesting observation is that Bach's choirs are likely to have been more proficient than those today. The usual view is the opposite, implying that he had to put up with very imperfect performances. But Hochreither has a good point here. After all, these choirs were immersed in such music and, compared to earlier and later choirs, knew little else. (In this connection, one might remember the monks of Solesmes and what an amazing unison is achieved by their large, miscellaneous community - until one recalls that they meet for the same kind of music, and little else, eight times a day.)

Hochreither has another fine observation on p.4: 'To be sure, the complete separation of scholarly from practical music education (as found in Germany) has not been entirely beneficial'. You can say that again! - only delete the parenthesis.

FOR THE SECOND BOOK, a group of disparate essays has been collected together, some previously published, to create a thesis around the word 'meanings', which is never quite defined but implies that when Bach writes a fugue or a canon or any kind of explicit counterpoint he is, so to speak, up to something. ('Explicit', because the Bachs and Mozarts of the world think contrapuntally anyway, whether it's a fugue or a minuet.) Particularly late works are looked at with this thesis in mind: the Art of fugue, Musical offering, Canonic variations, the 'Deathbed chorale', the F major Duetto, various individual canons and the Goldberg's Quodlibet. In effect, these are case-studies offering examples of (I quote) the art of dying, alchemy, canary and pork (i.e. the coarse and the refined), Bach the machine (canons can be mechanistic), and physiognomies (i.e. Bach's supposed skull) vis-a-vis his counterpoint and what they each imply.