Evanston: REINVENTING BACH
Evanston: REINVENTING BACH
Paul Elie’s excellent REINVENTING BACH has already cost me $30 and I am only half way through.
I admire many composers, but if I had to pick just one, it would be Johann Sebastian Bach.
Bach is sometimes described as cold, cerebral and mathematical. I have always found him to be warm and passionate. This is a man who fathered twenty children, half of whom survived to adulthood, and wrote a prodigious amount of great music. Perhaps you need to bring passion to find passion. I have twice played Bach’s ‘Little’ Fugue in G Minor off Cape Horn and have ended my own requiem with his Art of the Fugue not once, but three times.
I haven’t made videos because I haven’t wanted to take the time to learn to do them well, and won’t be amateurish; but the thought just occurred that if I ever have GANNET off Cape Horn I should make a video of the Little Fugue in G Minor playing there.
As an aside, I am struck by how the soundtracks on sailing videos are almost invariably of loud rock music. That is the antithesis of what sailing is to me. I mute them.
In this very readable book, Paul Elie provides a biography of Bach paralleled by descriptions of how his music has been ‘reinvented’ by performers who utilized the new technologies of the Twentieth Century.
As I noted in an earlier post, a hundred years ago to hear music you had to be in the presence of a musician. Now we carry hundreds of albums in our pockets.
Paul Elie begins with Albert Schweitzer, who was a renowned Bach scholar and organist as well as world famous jungle physician, making an early recording of the Toccata and Fugue in D Minor in which the sound was etched on wax cylinders at All Hallows By The Tower in London in 1935.
Five years later the church was gutted by a German bomb. Elie’s description is enviably vivid.
Bombs punctured the roof. Explosives tumbled end over end and sprang alight. Flames licked at the stone foundations and tendriled skyward, joining other flames like a chorus of applause. With a snowfall of shattered glass, the Gothic windows were lit up from the inside. The bells, long tied up for the nightly blackouts, were set loose as the ropes burned through, and rang wildly before falling to the ground. The tower stood reverent amid the horror as the great organ, all its lead pipes swelling at once with hot air, screamed with the pain of war and then, the cabinet burning, the pipes melting into air, went silent.
He moves on to describe Pablo Casals making the first recording of all six suites for solo cello. Then Leopold Stokowski and Walt Disney making the film, FANTASIA. And Glenn Gould’s famous 1955 and 1981 recordings of The Goldberg Variations. And that is as far as I’ve gotten in the book, but I don’t have anything else to write about today.
Of these, I already owned the Glenn Gould recordings and, though he himself preferred the second, recorded not long before his death, I like the first.
REINVENTING BACH has caused me to buy the Schweitzer and Casals. There are, of course, some problems with the recordings of both.
The Schweitzer is available as a download from iTunes and I listened to it twice yesterday. On the album I bought, ALBERT SCHWEITZER PLAY J.S. BACH--THE LEGENDARY 1935 AND 1936 HMV RECORDINGS, The Toccata and Fugue performance is not the best I’ve ever heard. The sound is a bit dry and the playing stiff. Something has undoubtedly been lost in the recording process, but more from the Toccata and Fugue than the other tracks on the album, which are livelier. However, I find the album enjoyable beyond just historical interest.
The Casals recordings were made not long after Schweitzer’s, between 1936 and 1939, and are said still to be the performances by which all others are measured. I have not yet heard them because I ordered a CD of a reissue by a Japanese label, Opus Kura, which many consider to provide the best balance between noise reduction and the music. I am very much looking forward to the CD’s arrival.
REINVENTING BACH does not require any special music knowledge--I have none--and has been a pleasure to read. If that is possible, Paul Elie has even enhanced my appreciation of my favorite composer.
I’m reading the Kindle Edition.
----------
A bewildered eye has withdrawn into its burrow and is slowly healing.
Saturday, February 9, 2013