Bach's Choral Masterpiece
GOLDMAN, ALBERT
ON MUSIC By Albert Goldman Bach's Choral Masterpieces The genuine but uncritical enthusiasm for the choral music of Bach that one encounters everywhere today is a phenomenon of recent...
...The most impressive attempt was Scherchen's first recording of the Mass, but here too the effect, though more satisfying, was still far from the authentic sound...
...As the traditional center of the Bach world, the Thomanerchor has always maintained a very high level of musical achievement, but it hardly constitutes a living link with the past...
...and many fine performers, well disciplined and musically resourceful, are contributing their talents...
...John Passion (Deutsche Grammophon ARC 3045/7) and the six motets, unaccompanied in deference to tradition (Deutsche Grammophon ARC 3040, 3041...
...Matthew Passion done some time during the War with the combined forces of the Thomanerchor, the Leipzig Gewandhausorchester and such remarkable soloists as Karl Erb, Gerhard Hüsch and Tiana Lemnitz (recently reissued on Electrola 83020/22S), Ramin illuminated the entire range and extent of Bach's religiously inspired choral art...
...These performances are remarkable not only for their great intrinsic beauty but for the singular aid they offer the student of Bach's imagination...
...But, by way of encouragement, I can assure the hardy few who will be tempted to try this difficult music that if they will only listen naively, as at last we all listen to the greatest music, they will experience the rare pleasure of being lifted gently out of our world and into an exquisite palace of art which floats above time like a mansion in paradise...
...contrasts between the indignant or horrorstricken Evangelist and the serenely beatific Christ...
...The obvious place to seek the authentic style for Bach is Bach's own world, in fact his own church and choir school—the Thomaskirche and the Thomasschule in Leipzig...
...This spirit is not to be found in Catholic Vienna, whence have emanated (for commercial reasons) most of the modem recordings...
...Save for the motets, which were always performed as show pieces (a cappella to heighten the display), the performance of Bach's music languished even in Leipzig until the 19th century revival...
...The boy's chorus produces a light, clear texture, a variety of delicate tone colors and a very limited body of sound...
...After Bach's death the sudden change in musical taste which made his sons regard their father as an "old wig" severed the continuity of performance traditions...
...The six motets, which were so admired by Mozart, are of course only for those listeners who have the courage to follow the master in his most extreme flights...
...One of them, a man of great musical attainments, finally succeeded in demonstrating in our day an absolute mastery of the Bach choral idiom comparable to Artur Schnabel's grasp of Beethoven or Wanda Landowska's command of the Bach clavier style...
...The Thomanerchor of Leipzig, a 600-year-old institution for the training of choir boys, comprises some 40 or 50 children 8-15 years of age, carefully selected for vocal capacity and musical ability...
...In the case of Bach's choral works, the authentic spirit is simply the Protestant spirit, or, more accurately, the intense and intellectual Geist of Leipzig Lutheranism...
...The cantata recordings of Ramin's successor Kurt Thomas, a very dry and uninteresting musician, are quite inferior...
...A music which derives its energy from the tensions between melodies moving against each other pointcounter-point must be executed by an instrument different from that employed to project the sonorous masses of the harmonic style...
...In the prewar record catalogue, for example, the immense body of Bach's choral compositions was represented by a mere handful of mediocre performances: a stodgy reading of the ? minor Mass by Albert Coates, a fatuous interpretation of the St...
...Recognizing this principle, a few conductors—notably Hermann Scherchen—have experimented with very small choruses of professional singers...
...He saw the structural and emotional design of the Passion as an incredibly elaborate system of contrasts: contrasts between the chorus as spectator, as actor, as the voice of the congregation...
...in the music of Bach, on the other hand, the muscular energy of volume counts for little compared with the mental energy of perfect clarity...
...ON MUSIC By Albert Goldman Bach's Choral Masterpieces The genuine but uncritical enthusiasm for the choral music of Bach that one encounters everywhere today is a phenomenon of recent origin...
...In his first and greatest recorded performance, a lengthy concert version of the St...
...fortunately, however, he recorded his most important achievements...
...This kind of spiritual communion is greatly facilitated by the general consistency of the cultural milieu in a given place, the performer breathing, so to speak, the same air as the composer...
...Still, living in the same cultural milieu, Thomaskantors of later ages found it easier to get back to the original style...
...After spending a lifetime mastering the problems of the symphonic repertoire, they are compelled to improvise when confronted with the radically different demands of Bach's choral music...
...These contrasting qualities define not the varying styles of the 18th and 19th centuries—the modern chorus is fine for Handel—but rather the difference between Bach's elaborate and archaistic polyphony and the harmonically conditioned style of his own and subsequent periods...
...But efforts to achieve authenticity must go much deeper if they are not to result in mere antiquarianism...
...Bach's chorus, a small chorus of boys, including male sopranos and altos, has been heard only a few times on records...
...Günther Ramin, whose brilliant career was obscured by the dark pall of the War, is now dead...
...Listening to the two kinds of choruses, the difference is immediately apparent...
...it is the same kind of difference that exists between the harpsichord and the modern grand piano...
...Not long ago, three new complete recordings of the St...
...The mixed chorus is thick in texture, chromatic in coloration and overbearingly sonorous unless it is held down, in which case it sounds unnaturally constrained...
...Authenticity begins in music with the adoption of a sound text and the employment of historically appropriate instruments...
...Despite all this enthusiasm, however, the present state of Bach's choral music on records is far from satisfactory...
...nor is it to be sought in England or the United States, Protestant nations but with cultures utterly unlike that of northern Germany...
...For Handel, as for Beethoven, sheer volume of sound is a source of much expressive power...
...After the War, with a chorus not quite the equal of his first, Ramin recorded the St...
...The postwar motet recordings display Ramin's great skill and infallible taste in the execution of Bach's enormously difficult, purely abstract designs for solo chorus...
...To begin with, almost every recording employs a large mixed chorus of mature male and female voices...
...Matthew Passion appeared in a single month, a once unthinkable occurrence...
...contrasts such as those between the various statements of the central chorale, "O Haupt voll Blut and Wunden," sometimes sung confidently, sometimes gravely, and finally, in a sublime moment after the crucifixion, with a mysteriously veiled undertone...
...Ramin realized every one of these multitudinous relations, and projected the very essence of Bach's imagination with an emotional vigor and a probity of musical outline unmatched in my experience...
...The current LP catalog provides an absolute contrast: At one time or another in recent years practically all the cantatas have been recorded (though many were subsequently withdrawn...
...Matthew Passion by, of all people, Serge Koussevitsky, and performances of only two Bach cantatas— two out of a total of almost 200...
...Vital contact must be established between the performer who lives in one age and the composer who lived in another, perhaps far distant...
...record companies such as the Bach Guild are being musicologically conscientious in working hard to assure an authentic text and instrumentation...
...Here, as might be expected, one finds not only the ideal style but also the ideal instrument: a highly trained chorus of boys dedicated exclusively to the production of Bach's choral masterpieces...
...Having mentioned Scherchen, that brilliant eccentric, it is worth noting in passing that one of the major difficulties in the way of a perfect realization of Bach's choral style today is simply the inadequate preparation of most conductors...
...What is more, the public is buying these records in great numbers...
...Regrettably, he did not record even one cantata...
Vol. 45 • March 1962 • No. 5
