The pitch of veneration that JS Bach can inspire is unbounded. For these worshippers, every measure of his music is sacred. Wagner’s description of Bach as “the most stupendous miracle in all music” sums it up well.
Bach is for the soul, for the brain, and even for the body – András Schiff mentioned on Desert Island Discs that “Johann Sebastian Bach is the most important composer to me. I start every day by playing Bach. It’s a cleansing procedure, it’s like taking a bath or a shower.” And the adorable Dudley Moore said much the same thing when Oprah visited him in his house in LA – “I play Bach every morning, it just makes me feel good, I mean I could just be taken away at that very moment, and I just feel terrific hearing what the old fellow wrote…”. In conversation with George Solti he added: “Every day I come down from bed and I play Bach. There’s something about the optimism, the exuberance I think, that people maybe don’t associate with Bach, but actually tickles me, keeps me going, I love it”.
Schumann’s advice to young musicians ran:
“Jouez fréquemment les fugues des bons maîtres, particulièrement celles de JS Bach. Faites votre pain quotidien de son Clavecin bien tempéré. Il fera de vous, à lui seul, un bon musicien” (Liszt’s translation from the German)
“Play often the fugues of the masters, especially JS Bach. Make his Well Tempered Clavier your daily bread. Only he will make you a good musician.”
Maybe we shouldn’t pay too much attention to him. After all, he was the one who fabricated a device for the fingers which ruined his hands!
Detractors often bring up the adjective “mathematical” in relation to Bach – and you even hear it from musicians who should know better. The confusion comes from the fact that Bach, and Baroque music in general, tended to be contrapuntal, rather than say the “melody + underlying harmonies” format. And central to this is the fugue, and this is above all what attracts the accusation. My favourite definition of a fugue: “the voices enter one by one as the members of the audience leave one by one”. “Mathematical” can only really be applied to some of the music he worked on at the end of the ‘40s – the Canonic Variations on “Vom Himmel hoch da komm’ ich her”, the “Art of Fugue” and “Musical Offering” where he enjoyed playing around with the fugal subject in inversion, back to front, playing half or double speed, and overlapping with itself in ‘stretto’. But the fugue appears all the way across musical history and almost every great composer since Bach has used fugues to achieve the most profound and emotional high points of their works – think of Beethoven’s Eroica, Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire and the end of the “sanctus” from the Mozart’s Requiem to mention a few.
I will not attempt here a survey of Bach music (you can buy my book for that) – but it would be difficult not to apply the epithets of ‘supreme’, ‘sublime’ and ‘transcendental’ to anything under discussion. It’s therefore very healthy, I think, to hear from intelligent music lovers who hold the contrary view.
I recently came across the YouTube channel “The Ultimate Classical Music Guide by Dave Hurwitz”. Mr Hurwitz is very entertaining, has an encyclopaedic familiarity with the classic record library and seems to release a new video every few hours. He has discussed Bach now and again, but his video “Music Chat: My Bach Problem” really sums it up well and is worth watching.
Such criticisms are honest and very welcome, but somehow for me does nothing to gainsay that Bach is the GOAT. It’s difficult for us Bach lovers to find the words to express how we feel, so we’re often driven to metaphors. Consider the following one. If Mozart is represented by the foothills of the Himalayas, and Beethoven is Everest itself – representing the summit of human musical profundity and in whose shadow all other mortal composers lie – then JS Bach is the sun!