The Significance of Bach

We now come to the second of the previously discussed methods of dealing with the music of Bach today, the "historical-authentic" approach to performance. Allow me to go into this approach quite thoroughly, since it raises fundamental questions and has received very great popularity in recent years. I am critical of the "historical-authentic" approach to interpretation, and I would like to explain the general reasons for my opinion. Even if one could succeed in precisely reconstructing the original sound of Bach's music, this would represent but one side of the Bach performance situation. The listener, the person for whose ears, feelings, and intellect this music was intended, is not reconstructable. We hear, feel, and think differently today. A modern performance that reconstructs Bach's original sound does not reach us in the situation that the creator of the music assumed it would. Bach made music with the forces that were available to him for the people of his time. In order for us to recreate this performance situation, we must perform with the forces available to us today for the people of our time. This is because it is not this or that concept of sound that is of importance, but rather the strength of the message, the meaning of the music for which the sound is the vehicle of communication. The goal should not be to make us hear differently, but rather, to make us learn to understand better. Permit me to develop these broad ideas in further detail. Taking as his basis the surviving sources, the score, and/or the parts used in Bach's performances, there are three principal levels on which the interpreting musician can influence the conversion from music on paper to music in sound. The elements of this influence are performance forces, dynamics, and articulation. On the subject of performance forces, let us first look at the vocal ensemble.

Bach wrote his music for a boy choir. For church music in Bach's time and place, there was nothing but boy choirs, but there were very many of them. Today such choirs are quite rare. Ignoring for the moment the fact that a demand for the recreation of the original sound would reject the legitimacy of the use of 99 percent of our current (mixed) choirs for the presentation of Bach's music, we must realize that even our modem boy choirs are not "original." Bach's boys reached puberty between fifteen and seventeen years of age, whereas our boys today experience the vocal change between eleven and thirteen. It is certain that the vocal sound of Bach's sopranos and altos was utterly different-"older" sounding-than that of our boys; it is just as certain that their longer training and experience made them more secure musically and more capable of expression.

This latter point seems to me to be of special importance regarding the question of who should sing the solo vocal parts. "Clarity" and "purity" are certainly important principles for the presentation of Bach's recitatives and arias, but are "virginity" and "the innocence of youth" as well? The texts that are dealt with in these movements belong to the complex of Christian beliefs. Is our attempt at belief a childlike belief? Certainly, there are Bach texts that can be stated by a child. But do not movements such as "Dissolve Away, My Heart, in Floods of Tears" from the St. John Passion, or "Have Mercy, My God, for My Tears' Sake" from the St. Matthew Passion, or the Agnus Dei from the Mass in B Minor presuppose the experience of an adult who knows the limitations of her abilities from having lived them? In these cases, Bach wanted to move and unsettle his listener. Do we want to turn over to a child the responsibility for bringing these unsettling messages into our own lives? The era of mulier tacet in ecclesia, of women being banned from participation in worship services, is gone. Are we supposed to remain anachronistic in this one regard?

Next Page

1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19