Back to Bach (1)

Tastes change.  One day we prefer apricot jam to strawberry, or decide to move away from London.  But it is the tiny aesthetic shifts which prove more profoundly worrying.  It is as if the cherished cultural edifice we construct within us is so weighty and finely poised that even minute movements can bring it crashing down.  So it is that we greet with mingled pride and horror the realisation that we now turn to Dante's Paradiso more than to his Inferno, or that we have learnt to love the austere intricacy of Bach's chorale preludes in preference to the grander organ works.  For as we adopt these finer, more mature tastes, we must acknowledge the root of the change: that we too are different - we are older.

Youth is to blame.  It will prefer the obvious, the loud, the brash and the exciting.  It has little time for subtlety.  In the case of the Bach chorales, the competition from Bach himself is perhaps a little unfair.  The mightiest of the preludes and fugues are the baroque equivalent of heavy metal.  The full organ emerges as the eighteenth century's answer to over-amped guitars with feedback.  The compositional tricks of relentless extended sequences and gut-churning pedal points speak straight to the blood.  Against them, the minimalist filigree of the chorale meditations are about as effective as a haiku in answer to screamed football slogans.

There are also social factors which contribute to this early misguided antipathy.  For many schoolchildren, Bach chorales and their multifarious cousins conjure up too vividly the trips to the local church, the eternal pointless ritual, the hard wooden seats, the queasy smell of polish and incense.  Played on a quavering late-Victorian organ by a nervous and unmusical sixth-former, the delicate tracery woven by Bach around the strong Lutheran lines emerge with all the grace and lucidity of a dropped skein of wool.  What now seems timeless, then seemed endless.

Not all of this is a trick of jaded memory.  Bach did not go out of his way in these works to strive to be accessible.  We know very little about when the chorale preludes were composed, for whom and for what use.  Like other works by Bach such as The Musical Offering and The Art of Fugue they seem to have been deeply personal creations with only tenuous links to the external world; like those works, they are for that reason among the greatest he ever created.  They had to be: he was writing for an audience of the two severest judges imaginable - himself, and God.

This explains the almost painful density of musical thought.  The brevity of the pieces was not a limitation, but an attraction.  As so often, Bach had to create his own challenges to which he could rise.  Not content with creating masterpieces on an almost Webernian scale, he piled on further difficulties by constructing some as fugues and double fugues.  Still too easy, he then made each work not just a musical meditation on the original chorale, but often an illumination and exegesis of the text as well.

Those with the same iron faith as Bach can doubtless make the requisite leap to meet his musical theology halfway.  For the rest of us, as we grope towards an understanding through his other works, reaching an accommodation is simply a painful matter of time.
 
(7.2.87)

See also Moody Sonnets – Bach, And Chopin’s Hands

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