Art of the Fugue is iTunes Classical Chart-topper
Jan Swafford in Slate discusses the new solo piano recording by Pierre-Laurent Aimard of Bach’s Art of the Fugue (Read Wikipedia):
“It’s as if you told a physicist that Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity was topping the best-seller list. It’s not supposed to happen. This is because the 14 fugues and four canons that make up The Art of Fugue constitute one of the most esoteric musical works ever written.”Buy: ArkivMusic
Jan Swafford in Slate discusses the new solo piano recording by Pierre-Laurent Aimard of Bach’s Art of the Fugue (
):
It’s as if you told a physicist that Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity was topping the best-seller list. It’s not supposed to happen. This is because the 14 fugues and four canons that make up The Art of Fugue constitute one of the most esoteric musical works ever written. Each fugue bears the severe title Contrapunctus followed by a number, and there is no indication of what instruments are supposed to play them. Every piece is in D minor; all are based on the same melodic theme. It’s as if Bach intended the AOF as a theoretical treatise, to be read and studied rather than performed, to demonstrate some of the more arcane things you can do with the idea of a fugue.
Along the way, in an effort to convey why he considers the album an “unlikely” success, Swafford offers a pretty usable definition of what a fugue actually is, complete with audio examples as he then provides a tour of the piece.
Swafford even compares the Aimard performance with the decades-old, scat-sung version by the Swingle Singers, to which he confesses a nostalgic attachment.
The Aimard recording doesn’t seem to be on Rhapsody, but the Glenn Gould recording is.
Do We Know Johann Sebastian Bach?
An interesting article:
Harold Fromm doesn’t think we see Bach as a man, a personality.
Bach is in the very chemistry of Western musical blood, like red cells, white cells, and platelets in our material plasma.
But if Bach is The Father, why hasn’t he fired the popular imagination? We have soppy movies about Mozart and Beethoven as well as proliferating biographies for the intelligent general reader, but nothing really comparable for Bach. … We have fairly localizable “feelings” about Mozart because the personal letters producing those feelings are voluminous. We learn about Wolfgang as a circus freak driven by father Leopold, about the Mozart family’s obsession with “shit,” about Wolfgang’s castigation of Constanze for exposing her ankles, not to mention purported mysteries surrounding the uncompleted Requiem, perfect grist for the mills of pop culture. For Beethoven, again, many autograph materials providing insights into his “spiritual development” (to use the subtitle of an early biography) and his medical problems, his patrons, his financial independence, his nephew, his deafness, his “immortal beloved.” But what is the feel we get from Bach? In fact, who is this seemingly generic father and why has he failed to solidify as part of our cultural ethos? When we hear “Mozart” or “Beethoven,” we think of a person behind the music. When we hear “Bach,” we think of music only.
So Bach is the father, but one of those distant fathers like the ones from the Greatest Generation. We do not have for Bach the kind of immense, first person record comparable to the correspondence of Mozart, Beethoven, etc. The fact that Bach left behind nothing but boring administrative documents is the stereotype hilariously sent up in the Bach Portait by “P.D.Q. Bach” — it’s just like Copland’s Lincoln Portait, except the stentorian narration features Bach’s financial correspondence instead of Carl Sandburg’s poetry about Lincoln. And what we do have from contemporaries such as Bach’s children and students, “is not totally trusted by scholars.”
It would be cool to really get into how much a biographer goes about painting a picture of the person under these circumstances, but after this setup, the article has no choice but to give up and start discussing the major classes of Bach’s works, particularly the dramatic text setting of certain cantatas.
Update
on 2008-04-02 06:00 by John Gibbons
Johann Sebastian Bach: Life and Work
by Martin Geck
Buy Book Online:
J.S. Bach: A Life in Music
by Peter Williams
Buy Book Online:
Johann Sebastian Bach: The Learned Musician
by Christoph Wolff
By Bach Or Not By Bach: That's (Not) The Question
The first session of my fall Bach class will feature three works whose authorship has been disputed. The “Capriccio on the Departure of a Beloved Brother”, the Toccata and Fugue in d minor, BWV 565, and Cantata Nr. 150, “For You, O Lord, I Long” have all provoked questions of authenticity. I personally think all three are by Bach, and it appears there is now a consensus in the case of the capriccio.
All three are excellent pieces-the capriccio is full of playful charm, the toccata is superbly dramatic (although the fugue is relatively mediocre), and the cantata was good enough to inspire the passacaglia bass of Brahms’ Fourth Symphony.
Lovers of classical music anecdotes want all the pieces to be by Bach, because of the fun of speculating on the “stranger maiden”; a soprano who may have sung the soprano solo and subsequently became Bach’s first wife, Maria Barbara, as well as the presence of the “nanny-goat bassoonist”; the cantata features a downright virtuoso bassoon part. And how about Bach’s weepy sadness at his brother’s departure (the piece is part of a sonata-story telling tradition that includes Kuhnau’s “Biblical” sonatas as well as Beethoven’s “Les Adieux” sonata). And how about the Phantom of the Opera? His scary music can’t be by some unknown predecessor or colleague of the great Bach!
I don’t think internal musical evidence will resolve these pieces’s authorship. Bach wrote, performed, and transcribed so much music that proprietory authorship wasn’t considered in the same way back then as it is today. Some scholars doubt Bach’s BWV 565 and 150, because there are some apparent technical lapses. But there are technical lapses in works we are sure are by Bach, as well. And Bach was a great assimilator of diverse styles in his youth. He was insatiably interested in just about all serious styles.
Scholars know relatively little for sure about Bach’s life. But the interesting thing about the many pieces of disputed authorship in Bach’s oeuvre is the light it sheds on how personal authorship was perceived in Bach’s time. How different from the Romantic and Modern eras, where there is a veritable cult of the “individual genius”. It is refreshing to read of the collegial relationships that existed between musicians in Bach’s time; Buxtehude, Reinken, Handel, Telemann all played roles in Bach’s development, and Bach’s own extended family provides a musical culture of its own.
A New (Old) Approach to Bach
The last time I taught a Bach class there were raised eyebrows when I used recordings of the major choral works conducted by Furtwangler (Matthew Passion), Klemperer (Matthew Passion as well) and Karajan (b minor mass). There may even have been a few smirks. Why did I use these recordings? Am I so out of touch?
I used them because they are better than the recordings by Harnoncourt and Gardiner.
I’m not saying that the original instruments and an informed scholarly attitude toward this repertory hasn’t done a great deal for Bach, if it has done less for Berlioz or Brahms. I keep a library of both old and new Bach recordings, and I carefully read the books and essays written by Harnoncourt and Norrington, for instance, and have profitted a great deal from their ideas. And although there is some truth to the notion that the period instrument boom was a gimmick to sell new cds of old works for commercial purposes, on the whole it was a sincere and possibly necessary attempt at a corrective of old performance modes. But the romantic and subjective interpretations mentioned above do greater justice to Bach’s intent, which was to make spiritually sublime music.
Like an obedient little boy I used recordings of these works by Harnoncourt and Jon Eliot Gardiner in all my previous Bach classes. This fall I’ll probably use a mixture of different recordings (both big romantic approaches as well as period instrument versions) for the orchestral and choral works (the keyboard works I’ll attempt to play myself, for the most part).
I refuse to be intimidated by the early music crowd. Harnoncourt, et al. reveal more about the late twentieth century than they do about the eighteenth century. And old instruments don’t need to be used…they are simply not as good as modern instruments. And play Bach’s keyboard music on the piano, for heaven’s sake, where the player can control articulation and dynamics, and by all means use the pedal!