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Bach without Fear

  Tobias

More than 250 years after Johann Sebastian Bach’s death, amid all the
belated tributes and the new discoveries, the great master can still arouse
a controversy or two. For this we can all be profoundly grateful, since it
gives us cause to stop and think about his music and the manner in which we
perform it.

The use of original instruments, or something approaching them, has been
around for a good deal of the last century. Wanda Landowska and Arnold
Dolmetsch played Bach on the harpsichord and clavichord at the dawn of the
20th century; and gradually over the decades more and more period
instruments came to be used. By the 1970s, original-instrument St. Matthew
Passions became possible, both on recordings and in the concert hall. This
trend went hand-in-hand with a more general interest in the music of the
past, including the Renaissance and medieval repertoire.

Along the way, the growing trend toward historically-informed performance
encountered a fair amount of criticism, even ridicule, of the supposed gray
musicologists and scruffy viola da gambists who were thought to have led
this movement. But it must be remembered that many of the early pioneers
were composers who drew inspiration from their researches into the past. It
was Brahms who edited François Couperin, Webern who studied Heinrich Isaac,
and Hindemith who founded the Collegium Musicum at Yale.

In the last 30 years, period-instrument orchestras have become ubiquitous,
first in Europe and then in North America and Australia. Before these
orchestras came on the scene, as I can personally testify, Baroque music was
often not very well played. Many conductors never gave much thought to
stylistic matters: Style, for them, was much the same for music of all
periods, rather as with cheap gloves where one size supposedly fit all. If
something on the page appeared too peculiar, the normal answer was to adapt
the music’s performance to a more modern taste. One can see the same process
at work in movies of fifty years ago: Gene Kelly seems a very modern
musketeer as he “swashbuckles” his way though 17th-century France unable to
pronounce Richelieu!

This non-historical approach provoked a strong reaction among the
original-instrument brigade. As a result, they became almost obsessed with
style, obsessed with the quest for the Holy Grail of Correctness that would
purify Bach performance from the sins of the negligent. Some of their
writings seem rather priggish today, and most of us who work with period
instruments have long ago stopped tilting at these windmills because now
there are so many more interesting and important things to do.
Period-instrument players have become much more concerned with giving
emotional performances of great technical excellence. Gone, I trust, are the
days when a recording carried a Cordon Bleu across its cover saying “played
on original instruments” like some kind of USDA stamp of musical
wholesomeness, i.e., “This Performance Will be Good for You and Contains
Only Marginal Traces of Romanticism.”

to be continued

by Nicolas McGegan

Homepage: Nicolas McGegan

Article © 2005 by Nicholas McGegan. Adapted from an article that first
appeared in the September/October 2000 issue of SYMPHONY, the magazine of the American Symphony Orchestra League. Thanks to Yolanda Carden of FSB Associates.