THE HABIT OF PERFECTION

John Eliot Gardiner

Perfection is achieved, it seems, not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.

— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Terre des Hommes (1939)

Welcome to one of the most epic of all journeys in music: Bach’s setting of the Latin Mass – unprecedented in scale, in majesty and pathos. In a sequence lasting just under two hours it encompasses a kaleidoscopic span of moods and emotions. Opening with four majestic, urgently assertive bars as though chiselled out of granite, Bach presents them to us as a succession of imploring gestures – as graphic as in a colossal altar-tableau by Titian or Rubens. From the downbeat of that first massive B minor chord our expectations are alerted. An immense, solemn fugue now begins to open out, bearing with it a measured sense of prayer. We travel from penitential sorrow to urgent pleas for forgiveness before a dramatic switch to the Gloria in excelsis Deo which erupts in radiant splendour and with an infectious dance-like swagger. Bach achieves both exceptional variety and, paradoxically, a sense of unity in these twin building blocks of his Missa brevis. He traces the vagaries of life’s bumpy passage, the impact of Christ’s time on Earth, and insists on the need for us to be grateful for the blessings of creation. Experiencing those monumental opening bars it is perhaps difficult for us now to hear them as anything other than the harbingers of his complete Mass. Such a strong sense of inexorable unfolding seems to imply an uninterrupted, start-to-finish sequence in the composer’s mind. But the facts, and what we can glean from Bach’s interrupted steps in constructing his great Mass, suggest otherwise. The B minor Mass did not spring complete and fully armed from the imaginative brain of its creator: it required at least sixteen years of gestation and assimilation before it grew into the Missa tota we are performing this evening.

Bach’s first attempt occurred in his fortyninth year, in 1733. Around this time his professional situation as Thomascantor in Leipzig – never secure at the best of times ever since his nomination ten years earlier – had deteriorated still further. The new burgomaster, Jacob Born, having rapped him over the knuckles for not taking his teaching duties at St Thomas’s school seriously, then reported to the town council that the Cantor ‘shows little inclination to work.’ Born tried to have Bach disqualified from continuing in office. For his part Bach was facing what he described as ‘odd authorities with little interest in music.’ Besides a hostile mayor, these included a bevy of nit-picking councillors and fractious clerics jealous of being upstaged and who showed scant understanding or support for Bach’s commitment to providing ‘a well-regulated church music to the glory of God.’ It is hardly surprising that he began to look for a way out from Leipzig.

Just then, a vacancy for organist presented itself in Dresden at the Sophienkirche where he had previously given acclaimed organ recitals. He set his sights on this prestigious opening – not for himself, but for his eldest son Wilhelm Friedemann. With thinly disguised paternal help Friedemann applied and was offered the position, receiving warm commendation from within the Dresden Court Capelle. His father now had a valid excuse to travel to Dresden. Soon after arriving, he presented a petition to the new Elector of Saxony, Friedrich August II, requesting a court title – ‘a Predicate... in your HoffCapelle’ – accompanied by a beautifully written set of parts of his new Missa brevis, comprising the Kyrie and Gloria.

Tracing the varied provenance of the remaining movements of his great Mass and uncovering signs of its having been recycled from earlier church cantatas carries the danger of diminishing Bach’s music to a bundle of influences – to a collection of parts that are less than the whole – whereas it is precisely his ability to transform dissimilar material and weld it into new patterns that is so impressive. Two such contrasted movements as his setting of the Et incarnatus (the last portion to be composed in the year of his death) and the Crucifixus (emanating from a cantata composed thirty-five years earlier) flow from one to the other without any stylistic disparity. Bach’s willingness and courage to strike out on his own, regardless of fashion, is one of the more inspiring features of the B minor Mass. Without this realisation we run the risk of missing the driving force behind it: Bach’s resolve on the one hand to illumine and expound biblical doctrine and on the other to expose and overcome human doubts and tussles of faith. In the process which culminates in a festive celebration of life’s victory over death, he extended the very range of music’s possibilities and through such explorations helps us to make sense of the world in which we live. His art celebrates the fundamental sanctity of life, an awareness of the divine and a transcendent dimension as a true condition of human existence.

His piecing together of the Mass took place during one of the recurring turbulent periods in the history of the German-speaking lands and the music that emerged from his pen could have given solace and inspirative provision for his listeners coping with the fallout of warfare and deprivation. Therein lies one compelling reason for people to return to his great Mass at regular intervals and to drink at its well. Never more so than now. Yet most probably Bach himself never had the satisfaction of experiencing his completed Mass in performance, nor the opportunity to put it to the test as a summation of his compositional skills.

Bach’s B Minor Mass has been central to my development as a musician. If you are a mountaineer, you long to climb the highest mountain in the world – and not just once in a lifetime. Himalayan climbers seem always in search of ways to blaze new trails to test their mountaineering skills beyond the well-worn south col or the northeast ridge routes. It’s much the same for any musician or a conductor eager to have periodic goes at scaling the hazardous challenges of Bach’s magnum opus. Even after living inside this great work for most of my adult life, I still find it as compelling and awe-inspiring as when I conducted it for the first time aged thirty. Simply to contemplate its scale and scope, let alone to be responsible for setting this colossus of a work in motion, can be both exhilarating and overwhelming. Bach’s Mass first registered with me as a ten-yearold when my parents bought a set of LPs – Karajan’s unnerving and intimidating first recording (1950) – and played it again and again. I was twenty when I first heard a live performance. It was given by The

Bach Choir at the Royal Festival Hall: impressive in its sense of grandeur and ritual, I remember feeling it was imbued with a faint whiff of Victorian sanctimony.

My first experience of conducting the Mass came exactly fifty years ago at a BBC Prom in the Royal Albert Hall with a dazzling line-up of soloists including Elly Ameling, Janet Baker, Alexander Young and Thomas Allen – each of them wonderful oratorio singers – seated in front of the orchestra in their evening frocks and tails. Then in the late 1970s I became spellbound by the timbal contrasts of period instruments and how Bach’s often experimental textures could create fruitful admixtures with a tightly knit choir from whom individual soloists could emerge and establish a complicit rapport with obbligato players before retreating back into the ranks. Such an approach led to focussing on Bach’s handling of the text in every one of the Mass’s 27 separate movements – even in those joyous danceimpelled numbers. Then in 1985, the year of Bach’s tercentenary, I was invited by Deutsche Grammophon to plant my feet in the space that the famous Bach interpreter Karl Richter had vacated with his early death four years earlier, he who had recorded all the major choral works for the label. l was uncomfortable with the idea that one could only perform Bach in one of two polarised ways –the old school choral society approach that held sway in Germany and Britain unchallenged from the mid-19th century onwards, or its diametrical opposite – the newly trumpeted minimalist approach that was just then coming into fashion with its one-per-part (or at most two-voices-perpart) apparatus. Both felt foreign to me. We know for example that Bach himself used forty-four of the fifty-five boarders at the Thomasschule for the music for which he was responsible and apportioned them variously between the four churches in Leipzig each Sunday, and how he went to extraordinary lengths to expand his core ensemble for the music he wrote for high feasts and holidays. I couldn’t see why a well-trained chamber choir acting as a multi-voiced story-teller should not achieve a comparable level of transparency and soloistic expression to a single-voiced ensemble while avoiding some of the intractable problems inherent in trying to balance, say, three trumpets and drums against a miniature vocal consort of five singers.

Thirty more years went by before I made a second attempt at scaling the Mass’s heights, this time for our own SDG label. With far more bachian miles on the clock in interpreting the whole gamut of his church music I was fortunate to be able to draw on the collective experience of many of the loyal musicians who had taken part in the Bach Cantata Pilgrimage, that year-long immersion in his complete church cantatas we undertook at the start of the new millennium, some of whom you may recognise playing tonight alongside a new generation of fresh-faced, talented recruits. Prior to this European tour only seven of tonight’s choir had performed the Mass with the Monteverdi Choir, and they are joined by all ten of this year’s handpicked apprentices.

Fifty years since I first conducted it, I am conscious that this of all Bach’s sacred works demands the utmost of its performers – technically, musically and spiritually. It requires an exceptional complicity and reactivity between singers and instrumentalists – one that includes the ability to meld words and notes seamlessly and to bring a springing, dancing vitality to Bach’s joyous dance-propelled numbers. Our rehearsals are always directed at forging a tight-knit ensemble and towards honing our interpretative approach to the music. Despite the Mass’s chequered provenance one is constantly reminded of how miraculously perfect it is, and how our job in this moment is to do justice to Bach’s vision in every way available to us.

To conduct the Mass is to be filled with an overwhelming sense of anticipation and trepidation. From the moment one embarks on that voyage with and through his music one can expect to be exposed to a heightened sense of consciousness –of the fundamental role of music, of its capacity to affect and change one’s life –people’s lives – and of its power to reflect and even to mitigate the way we respond to contemporary events. Then, as you round the corner and enter the final straight of this great adventure and the trumpets sound out one last time to announce the homecoming, you realise that Bach’s final prayer for peace, Dona nobis pacem, is both an invocation –which could hardly be more urgent than it is at this juncture in our history – and a resounding confirmation of its immanence. Yet he was composing at a time when the breakdown of social unity was well advanced, and the old structures of religion were fast being eroded by Enlightenment thinkers. In the breadth of his vision Bach grasped and went on to reveal to us his conception of the universe as a harmonious whole. Interpreting his Mass is all about rediscovering those revelations – the nuggets of truth which he inscribes in each movement. They are indissolubly linked to his personal style – the inner poet hiding in the recesses of his dense counterpoint. About the worst crime you can commit as an interpreter is to allow the music to remain earthbound – for it to plod, in other words. As musicians interpreting Bach’s rapturous music above all we need to dance with our voices and instruments – and to inspire others to dance too. Ultimately Bach’s style is also his vision. Misjudge the style and you miss the vision.