The mystery of the 48

Schumann called them the Old Testament of music.  For the rest of us they remain one of those immutable monuments like the pyramids or Stonehenge: it is impossible to imagine a world in which they did not exist.  So we tend to forget that once The Well-tempered Clavier was an idea which just came to Bach.  Before that point there was nothing.

Accepting that, the formal perfection of them, the undeniable fact of their physical existence on the page makes it hard for us to imagine them coming into being.  We imagine them being born entire, Athena-like, from their creator's pen.

But it did not happen like that. Instead, we have to try and imagine Bach eating his breakfast, scolding his children, sitting wherever, creating this music.  One day he sat down and wrote a fugue or a prelude; then another; and then another.  What seems to have an ineluctability about it for us, for him was a task, intermittently pleasant perhaps, but gradually weighing upon him as he waded deeper and deeper into his self-imposed grand design.

How did he proceed? Presumably not by starting in C major and finishing in B minor.  There must have been periods when the major keys flowed from him, followed by the odd minor key work.  Did the preludes suggest themselves before or after the fugues?  Was he consciously trying out all the possibilities, rigorously working through the gamut of compositional techniques?  It seems clear that this lies at the heart of The Art of Fugue, that most personal testament to a lifelong dedication to an intricate, sometimes hermetic art.  Even The Musical Offering has this same systematic feel, though its initial inspiration was partly as the ultimate in occasional music.  It is true that the 48 were published as a set of exercises, but they go so far beyond mere pedagogy that schoolmasterly neatness will not do for an explanation.  Particularly since Bach chose to produce two sets following the same plan.

The truth is, we shall never know.  Bach belongs to an age which predates that of Artist as Man or Woman of Destiny, possessed of a Mission which informs their every act.  This Romantic notion began with Beethoven, though there are inklings of it in Mozart.  It reached its fullest expression in Wagner, who saw himself as the culmination of Western art; a Shakespeare of words, a Beethoven of music.  As such, his many letters and essays explain endlessly, and are all written for the same audience: Posterity. 

We have no such help with Bach.  He belonged to an era which regarded musicians, especially church musicians, as artisans - highly skilled, but not qualitatively different from carpenters or cobblers.  All of Bach's writings are therefore highly formalised communications; they have little of the personal because he would have considered it presumptuous for someone of his station.  Because of our ignorance we tend to endow Bach and other earlier musicians with a kind of Olympian inscrutability.  At least this means we concentrate on the music not the musician; but it does mean that miracles like the 48 remain a perfect and total mystery.

(10.10.86)

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

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