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New Lights for Dark Paths

Bach Then and Now

Richard Bratby

Dumbarton Oaks

On August 21, 1944, the representatives of the governments of the United States, the Soviet Union, and the United Kingdom met in a leafy suburb of Washington, D.C., to discuss future international co-operation on peace and security—and to establish principles that would be incorporated, the following year, into the founding Charter of the United Nations. The house in which they met was called Dumbarton Oaks: a spacious, brick-built mansion originally constructed in 1801, though since 1920 it had been the home of Mildred and Robert Woods Bliss. The couple were especially proud of their Music Room; as Robert described it, “a delightful medley of Italian Renaissance, French 18th century, Georgian and American.” What better location for conversations about global harmony? A place where cultures and traditions met in a graceful unity, animated by the spirit of the universal language: music.

The idea that the past—especially the musical past—could be a source of spiritual refreshment and rejuvenation would be a recurring theme throughout the 20th century. During the First World War, Maurice Ravel created a tribute to his fallen friends in the graceful forms of the French Baroque: Le Tombeau de Couperin. Igor Stravinsky talked of the delight that he found in the melodies, originally composed (or so he thought) by Pergolesi, that he reworked into his 1920 ballet Pulcinella. To Schoenberg, the idea that this represented an ideal of progress was ridiculous. In the self-penned text of his Three Satires (1926) he didn’t hold back:

But who’s this beating the drum? Why, it’s little Modernsky! He’s had his hair cut in a queue, And it looks quite nice! Like real false hair! Like a peruke! Just like (or so Modernsky likes to think) Just like Papa Bach!

Yet Stravinsky and his friend Paul Hindemith were every bit as committed to their own path forward. The post-1945 French critics who dismissed Stravinsky’s Concerto in E flat for its similarities to Bach were wholly missing the point. Any similarities are entirely intentional. Nadia Boulanger, who in the spring of 1937 had first suggested that the Blisses commission Stravinsky, mentioned early on that Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos would provide a perfect model for a work tailored to their beloved Music Room.

The Craftsman of Köthen

This was a particularly progressive way of thinking about Bach. To appreciate the contrast, consider that in 1909 Gustav Mahler and the New York Philharmonic had performed a “Bach Suite,” compiled by Mahler himself and directed by him from a modified Steinway piano. That high-Romantic style was the prevailing performance tradition; the idea of a pared-down Bach—embodied, for example, in Pablo Casals’s rediscovery of the unaccompanied cello suites or Wanda Landowska’s pioneering harpsichord performances—was still an emerging idea between the two world wars. Bach the clear-eyed master craftsman was an appealing figure to such champions of the Neue Sachlichkeit as the young Paul Hindemith. As Richard Taruskin has pointed out, they saw him as the original creator of Gebrauchsmusik: “music for use”, designed to play an invigorating role in the everyday life of the community.

It is difficult to imagine what Bach—who in 1721 dedicated his Six concerts à plusieurs instruments to the Margrave of Brandenburg with “profound respect and most humble obedience”—would have made of such democratic notions. Nor was he overly concerned with the purity of his own artistic conception. The first Brandenburg Concerto led a piecemeal existence. Its first three movements appeared in a

cantata as early as 1713; the first and third movements would both be recycled (the latter as a chorus) in a pair of cantatas in 1726. As Bach’s career ambitions switched from court to Church, he re-purposed his music with supreme craftmanship and utter pragmatism.

To that extent, Bach can indeed perhaps be seen as a champion of “music for use”—along with almost all of his Baroque contemporaries. More interesting, and certainly more influential, is the sheer inventiveness of this First Brandenburg Concerto. It is the only one of the six to comprise four movements, and from the fanfaring horns of the first movement to the final minuet—which, with its two trio sections and spirited central polonaise, seems almost unable to stop generating new musical ideas—it is positively kaleidoscopic in its sense of color and melody.

So artfully constructed is the concerto that we don’t, at first, notice that the two horns effectively have their own melodic material (some commentators have seen the whole piece as a playful exploration of the contrast between the countryside, realm of the untamed hunting horn, and the civilized bustle of the town). But strip the scoring to its bare elements—two natural horns, three oboes, a bassoon, and a violino piccolo, set in dialogue against a ripieno string ensemble—and we have something not dissimilar to the mixed, chamber-scale ensembles that are now the norm in contemporary music and that first emerged in the early 20th century with such works as Stravinsky’s Ragtime and the eight pieces that Hindemith composed between 1922 and 1927 under the title Kammermusik.

Incidents and Frailties

Hindemith’s attitude to Bach would evolve over time. By the 1930s, faced with the darkening political reality in Germany, and contemplating inner (and later, actual) emigration, Hindemith would come to see Bach as the embodiment of “pure thought, freed from all incidents and frailties.” In 1922, however, aged 26, he was still out to make mischief. To listeners at the Donaueschingen festival on July 31, 1922, everything about the Kammermusik No.1— from its percussion scoring for sand-shaker and side drum, to the third-movement “Quartett” in which one of the four instruments is the glockenspiel, to the siren that interrupts the finale (pointedly entitled “1921”)—suggested a desire to subvert, to poke fun. The last two movements were both encored.

Other audiences were less delighted. A concertgoer in Munich in 1923 recounted that, “…the hall turned into chaos. Whistles blew, boos resounded, chairs flew through the air—a hellish noise filled the large room. Hindemith, meanwhile, had disappeared backstage with the other musicians. As the spectacle reached its height, he reappeared—thoroughly calm—seated himself at the percussion [and] …beat with all his might on the drums, and let the slide whistle howl. The Munich crowd was so taken aback by this unexpected behavior that Hindemith was the victor in an unequal battle.” Fifteen years later, in a letter to his wife, Hindemith recalled “that ancient old Kammermusik of mine with the siren… One wonders why people made such a fuss about his piece at the time. It is not at all badly written, and there is nothing, apart from a few harmonic and melodic teething troubles, to upset innocent souls.” To modern ears, the siren and the hints of foxtrot in the finale seem like postmodern jokes (Hindemith’s 1952 rescoring of the piece, which replaces the original harmonium with an accordion, gives it an even more playful air). It is hard, perhaps, to imagine how the machine-gun percussion and howling siren affected an audience that had lived through near-civil war in Germany in 1918–19, and which stood on the brink of disastrous hyperinflation. No one then can have known that the first Kammermusik would mark the start of Hindemith’s stylistic shift from grotesquerie towards an ever more expressive neo-classicism. But in the bristling, sunlit energy of the first movement, the exuberant virtuoso color of the instrumental writing, the cheerful assimilation of fashionable dance styles (for polacca, read foxtrot) and the haunting, poetic simplicity of the third movement “Quartett” it’s possible to hear why some commentators have hailed Hindemith’s Kammermusik series as 20th-century Brandenburg Concertos.

Sombre

For Saed Haddad—born to Christian parents in Jordan, educated in a seminary in the West Bank, and a student both of philosophy and (with George Benjamin, and later Louis Andriessen, Helmut Lachenmann, and Pascal Dusapin) composition—Bach’s legacy is particularly complex, and a matter of social as well as artistic conscience. “I do not evaluate/relate to a composer according to all his/her output, but according to some of his/her pieces, for quality

varies between pieces (even in the case of J. S. Bach),” he says. “That being said, many pieces of Bach remind me of how humble and fragile our human condition is; something which—I modestly believe—should urge our attentiveness and care in a world where ideologies, politics and commerce (among others) are in permanent race of power and control over mankind. No wonder that the god Bach believed in is the one who descended from its heights in order to become human.”

Haddad’s engagement with the western classical canon—as well as his response to the contemporary world—is shaped, he says, by a sense of “otherness”: “a complex set of spiritual, historical, and felt values that determine the essence and mindset of culture, and which must necessarily be studied in detail before it can be interfered with.” He says that “I regard the work of art as a progressive act which erupts from its backgrounds and transcends them. In this respect, each work of art has its beginning not in itself but in a history of echoes and influential filtered entourages that affected its creation.” In the aftermath of the Arab Spring, Haddad has therefore felt an “ethical responsibility” to address suffering. He describes Sombre, his commissioned work for the Daniel Barenboim Foundation, as “a sort of requiem without words. It evokes mystery, obscurity, night, passion, melancholy, solitude, abyss, and some shades of pale light.” Certainly, it contains elements of mourning: a section is marked “Rituale e funebre,” and Kerstin Schüssler, in the German program notes to tonight’s concert, hears, in the chant-like writing for tuba, a direct allusion to the Tuba mirum, the “last trumpet“ of the Catholic Requiem Mass. But throughout, the 13 instruments make their voices heard—sometimes lamenting in concert, sometimes weaving expressive arabesques and cantilenas. Bach’s example endures: and if the end of this particular work is bleak, Haddad is clear that a work of art is never complete unto itself, but must “shed light upon new paths for other creations to come.”

Bach to the Future

That was certainly the ideal, back in 1937, that inspired Mildred Woods Bliss. She sent Stravinsky a series of photos of Dumbarton Oaks and its grounds (Stravinsky remarked tartly to Samuel Dushkin that a cheque would have been more useful). But as he worked on his Concerto in E flat, far away in Switzerland, where his daughter

Ludmilla was dying of tuberculosis in a sanatorium near Geneva (“the most difficult time of my life”), he recorded: “I played Bach regularly during the composition of the Concerto, and was greatly attracted to the Brandenburg Concertos. Whether or not the first theme of my [first] movement is a conscious borrowing from the third Brandenburg, however, I do not know.”

Now ill himself with the same disease that had just killed his daughter, he was unable to attend the premiere on May 8, 1938: Nadia Boulanger conducted instead. Mildred wrote to Stravinsky, thanking him “very sincerely and warmly for having increased the yield in beauty of Dumbarton Oaks.” But if there’s something especially touching in the buoyant life-assertion of its outer movements, and particularly in what Eric Walter White calls the “intense purity of line” of the central Allegretto, it may be because, like Hindemith before him and Haddad decades later, Stravinsky was finding rather more than just stylistic inspiration in the art of Johann Sebastian Bach.

Wholly different cultures, eras and philosophies intersect to create something timeless and affecting: an 18th-century German kapellmeister shows a path forward, emotional as well as technical, for a Russian, exiled in Switzerland, writing to a commission from a couple of Americans. It would not be the last time that a meeting of cultures, eras, and ideals at Dumbarton Oaks would produce something that transcended time and place.

Richard Bratby lives in Lichfield, UK, and writes about music and opera for The Spectator, Gramophone, BBC Music Magazine, and The Arts Desk. He is the author of Forward: 100 Years of the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra.

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