Secure in the Universe

Johann Sebastian Bach seemed to have no understanding of his own greatness. Year after year, he turned out his glorious cantatas and Passions like a baker hurrying over the breakfast rolls. He considered the music that flowed from his pen for 50 years to be a collection of testimonials to honest craftsmanship--some of it better than others, but all of it composed, as he humbly wrote in the dedication of the Musical Offering, "as well as I possibly could."

He gave little thought to the preservation of his works, and the scores he left behind contain few indications of the tempo, dynamics or phrasing he intended. As a result, every participant in the current flowering of appreciation for Bach is his own final authority on interpretation. The varieties of approach that were heard last week in the annual Christmas celebration of Bach's music gave proof of the continuing depth of the argument.

Bach's modern interpreters have brought to his varied music all the resources of modern instrumentation--and all the scholarly weight of a new musicology that insists on a strictly paleontological presentation. One side, mainly distinguished by the presence of Eugene Ormandy, plays Bach with a flourish and sensuality better saved for Wagner; the other side, which at its extreme is manned by cliques of musical pedants who play in ensembles with names like Pro Arta Antarctica, believes Bach must never be played away from the harpsichord and organ. In the artistic center of the interpretive storm are a number of impeccably good pianists who play Bach's music better than it has been played since Mendelssohn resurrected the St. Matthew Passion in 1829. The best of these are Rosalyn Tureck and Glenn Gould.

Spiritual Momentum. In performance, Tureck, 49, is rigorously severe. She strides to the piano and sits down to play with imposing authority and total concentration. Last week, in her annual Philharmonic Hall performance of the Goldberg Variations, she played without intermission or breaks for applause for 83 minutes--and when she stood at last, the cheers that greeted her seemed like shouts from the heart.

She had perfectly captured the spiritual momentum of Bach's music.

For all her severity, Tureck's playing is Victorian in its embellishments when compared with Gould's quiet intimacy with Bach. Because Gould, 31, is convinced that the bigness of modern concert halls is a harmful anachronism for music designed for parlors, he gives his deepest efforts to his recordings. With a piano on which the stroke of each key has been shortened a fraction of an inch to make its action more like that of a harpsichord, Gould works tirelessly at recording sessions, positioning the microphone so close to the piano that his constant contrapuntal humming sometimes comes through on the records. His recording of the Goldberg Variations in 1956 kindled his career; since then, his concert career has been made mainly notorious for flashes of eccentricity (playing in mittens, endlessly fiddling with the piano stool), while his recording career has been little short of genius.

Although Tureck's music is dynamically richer than Gould's, Gould seems the more passionate player--and that is his great virtue. There is a grace and good humor to all his recordings that make them seem like captured improvisations--personal, inspired, free. Such creative excitement is something few pianists can achieve, but in Gould it is so strong that even his humming seems interesting instead of intrusive.

To Say Large Things. It was an intrusion of passion that lifted Bach's work above that of hundreds of other North German cantors of his day. Bach was born in Eisenach, a town in the Thuringian forest of Germany, dominated by the medieval castle of the Wartburg, where Luther translated the Bible into German. Orphaned in 1695 when he was only nine, he spent his youth as a choirboy, violinist and organist. By the time he arrived in Weimar in his mid-20s, he was already an outstanding organist, and during his years there he developed into the finest organist of his time. In Weimar he wrote some of his most glorious music: the "Great" Preludes and Fugues in A Minor and C Minor, the C Major and F Major Toccatas and Fugues. Required by his contract as concertmaster to Duke Wilhelm Ernst to turn out "one new piece monthly," he produced 19 cantatas in three years, a deadline-crowding achievement that attuned him to his tenure in Leipzig, where he composed something like 265 cantatas in 21 years.

In Weimar Bach found an artistic guide in the music of Vivaldi. For nine years he studiously copied Vivaldi violin concertos and arranged them for organ and clavier. He also wrote fugues based on themes by lesser Italian composers--Corelli, Legrenzi, Albinoni--and gained a fresh sense of line--the ability to say large things with an economy and clarity that his baroque predecessors had never been able to achieve.

Bach's rhythmic notions and his adventuresome ear for melody seem amazingly modern to today's musicians, but in his own time he was considered hopelessly demode. He was the last great voice of concerted polyphonic music, a style that had lasted since the early 17th century. The very forms Bach favored--the fugue, the church cantata, the motet--were outmoded even as he worked on them. "Old Wig," one son called him, and Bach in his later years sadly agreed. "My art," he said, "has become old-fashioned."

Reverie of Wonder. The modern estimate of Bach's creations is that they quite simply made the practice of music more perfect than it had ever been before, or has been since. "You have only to hit the right notes at the right time and the instrument plays itself," Bach told his students of the organ, giving a rare expression to the credo of simplicity that makes his music now seem blindingly pure. Through his work there runs a thread of such subtlety and daring, such piety, passion and genius that the musical world stands before it--as Mendelssohn once did--in a "reverie of wonder." The final questions on the interpretation of such music, as Gould, for one, is quick to agree, are better addressed to clergymen than pianists. In an Age of Anxiety, Bach's music is a voice of reassurance, the art of a man eminently secure in the universe.

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