Bach and Handel At the Wall

By Michael Walsh

The Germans are really strange people. With their profound thoughts and ideas, which they seek everywhere and project into everything, they make life harder for themselves than they should.

--Goethe

At Checkpoint Charlie, the hideous maw of the Berlin Wall gapes briefly, affording a narrow passage into the divided German soul. On its Western side, a sea of sensuous color rushes down the Kurfurstendamm, past the ruins of the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church, and spends itself violently but impotently in a scatological orgy of graffiti against the cold barrier. On the Eastern side, a pall hangs over the city, reflected in the rigorously functional, regimented gray apartment blocks that line the streets. Propelled by the engine of the postwar Wirtschaftswunder, the capitalist Federal Republic of Germany is a sporty blond racing along the autobahns in a glittering Mercedes-Benz. The Communist German Democratic Republic, bumping down potholed roads in proletarian Wartburgs and Russian-built Ladas, is her homely sister, a war bride locked in a loveless marriage with a former neighbor.

Yet this occupied land, where remainders of German defeat, shame and partition are visible everywhere, is finding cultural solace and renewed pride in its heroes and native sons. In 1983, on the 500th anniversary of his birth, East Germany celebrated Martin Luther. Today, in their tercentenary year, it praises George Frideric Handel and Johann Sebastian Bach, the two greatest composers of the Baroque. Here, where the lives and paths of such men as Luther, Handel, Bach, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Richard Wagner intersect, the glory, unity and tragedy of German history are a living memory.

Linked forever by a happy accident that saw them born within a month of each other in cities only 80 miles apart, Bach and Handel make an odd couple. Handel, whose 300th birthday was last month, was the son of a Halle barber- surgeon who wanted his boy to study law. A well-traveled cosmopolitan, he settled in London, anglicized his name from Handel, and became the dominant operatic and oratorio composer of his day. When he died, a bachelor at 74, he was buried with great ceremony in Poet's Corner at Westminster Abbey. By contrast, Bach, whose birthday falls this week, came from a long line of musicians and spent almost his entire life in what is now East Germany in the often contentious service of pompous princelings and severe Lutheran rectors. He married twice, fathered 20 children, and died far more renowned for his keyboard playing than for his mostly unpublished cantatas, Masses, sonatas and concertos.

Modern history has drastically reversed the judgment that earlier generations made of the two composers. A poll taken in the mid-18th century would undoubtedly have found Handel the more admired, especially in England, where his German-accented ghost smothered native British music for more than a century. Bach was considered an outdated figure working in a dying contrapuntal medium of four-part harmony and abstruse fugues. "The old wig" his son Johann Christian is said to have called him.

Today Handel's 41 operas, once so fashionable, are infrequently performed. This is due to changing tastes and the disappearance of the singers for whom many of his major roles were written: the castrati, the surgically altered male sopranos whose vocal power, awesome breath control and dazzling technique stunned audiences from the Sistine Chapel to Covent Garden. Of his 24 oratorios in English, only the redoubtable Messiah is a concerthall staple, and his best-loved instrumental works are such occasional pieces as the Water Music. Oddly, for one who used to loom so large, Handel awaits popular rediscovery.

Bach's music, however, has steadily grown in stature. It has even gone into space aboard Voyager 1 and 2 as an example of the best that human culture has to offer. Yet the contemporary image of Bach is, in its own way, as myopic as that of previous eras. We tend to perceive the cantor of St. Thomas' Church in Leipzig as, above all, an unsmiling, devout Lutheran, who erected cathedrals in sound dedicated to the glory of God. Bach's music, we think, is great because it is good for us. But to consider Bach only as a kind of musical chaplain takes no account of the music that has been lost: at least 100 cantatas, many of them secular, as well as a considerable quantity of instrumental music. Like the Venus de Milo, Bach's legacy is a torso that has been taken to stand for the entire work.

Perhaps a reason is that so little physical evidence survives to humanize the man. East Germany has a plethora of preserved Luther sites--Eisleben contains the house in which Luther was born and also the one in which he died--and Handel's birthplace, a solid two-story house, still stands not far from his rather smug statue in Halle's central marketplace.

But Bach's memorabilia are largely confined to his scores, letters and other documents. There is only one authenticated portrait of the man, and his birthplace on the Lutherstrasse in the hilly Thuringian mining town of Eisenach was destroyed long ago. In Weimar, the cultivated city of Goethe and Schiller, where Bach spent almost a month in jail for the crime of wanting to change jobs, there is only a plaque to mark the spot on which the family home stood. In Cothen, where Bach worked for the music-loving Prince Leopold from 1717 to 1723, producing among other masterworks the Brandenburg Concertos, the exact identity of Bach's home is uncertain. And in Leipzig, the Saxon center of commerce and learning, where Bach spent the last 27 years of his life, the school in which Bach lived and taught was torn down in 1902.

Today in Eisenach, a benevolent bewigged stone figure beams down from a pedestal, quill in hand and manuscript paper at the ready; beyond it, high on a hill in the distance, sits the Wartburg Castle, where Luther, in disguise, completed his translation of the New Testament while hiding out from Catholic wrath and Wagner set his opera Tannhauser. In Leipzig, a sterner Bach is memorialized outside the Thomaskirche by both a full-length statue and, not far from the church, a bust dedicated by Felix Mendelssohn. Genius pays homage to even greater genius: it was the romantic Mendelssohn, a Christianized Jew, who in 1829 revived Bach's greatest religious work, the towering St. Matthew Passion, and in so doing unwittingly canonized him.

"And this man, the greatest musical poet and the greatest musical orator that ever existed, and probably ever will exist, was a German. Let his country be proud of him; let it be proud, but at the same time, be worthy of him!"

--Johann Nikolaus Forkel in J.S. Bach's Life, Art and Works. For Patriotic Admirers of True Musical Art

Outside Weimar, near a large Soviet military base, the former Nazi concentration camp of Buchenwald lies on the slopes of the Ettersberg, a desolate memorial to the more than 50,000 prisoners of war, Jews, Slavs, gypsies, political dissidents and other "undesirables" who died there. Two shrunken heads are on display in a glass case, along with a tiny lampshade made of human skin. Vintage loudspeakers, crudely wired to the SS barracks, are silent today, but more than 40 years ago they crackled with symphonic music.

How is it possible that the country of Bach, Handel and Goethe could also be the country of Himmler and Eichmann? It is a question that has vexed the world for decades. Perhaps a better question is: What other country could it have been? The Germans have long been able to hold two opposing ideas in mind and remain untroubled by their mutual exclusivity. Only in Germany could Weimar and Buchenwald coexist, each denying the other's nature. "I wish and ask that our rulers who have Jewish subjects exercise a sharp mercy toward these wretched people," wrote Luther in 1543. "They must act like a good physician who, when gangrene has set in, proceeds without mercy to cut, saw and burn flesh, veins, bone and marrow." His harsh prescription was an unwitting forecast of the horror that was to come.

The German contradiction is also embodied by Wagner, who wrote the noxious anti-Semitic essay Jewry in Music, yet who also allowed Hermann Levi to conduct the premiere of the Christian epic Parsifal at Bayreuth. Faust, the national symbol, might be speaking for both Luther and Wagner when he says at the beginning of Goethe's play, "With keen endeavor I have studied philosophy, jurisprudence and medicine, and even, alas, theology. And yet here I stand, a poor fool no wiser than I was before!"

LET HIS COUNTRY BE PROUD OF HIM! Forkel's patriotic exhortation is inscribed on a plaque attached to the wall of Prince Leopold's castle in Cothen. But someone standing in the run-down Cothen castle courtyard--part of the building is used as a state prison today--would be hard pressed to imagine how Bach could have been inspired by his surroundings. The Saxon plain is as flat as Kansas, its tiny villages grim studies in brown and gray; the ferocious reforming spirits of Lutheranism and Communism have done their work well. Similarly, it is hard to reconcile Luther's tiny deathbed in Eisleben with our outsize sense of the man's historical stature and accomplishments. And only in Germany would there be a chart in the room where Luther died of a heart attack that enumerates his physical complaints and describes a cure he took for one ailment that included the crucial ingredient of horse manure.

In Germany, myth and reality intertwine: the real Faust was Luther's contemporary, and Goethe set one of his play's scenes in the Auerbachs Keller in Leipzig. Today the ancient tavern is guarded by statues of Faust and Mephisto, and the latter is seen casting a spell over a group of Leipzigers. "Loose the bonds of illusion from their eyes!" Mephisto says as he releases them. "Remember how the devil joked." They are words too often unheeded, as modern history testifies.

Bach, as vital a man as there ever was, has inevitably become part of that myth: in the Thomaskirche, his stained-glass window is near Luther's. In East Germany, as in most of the world, he has overshadowed his countryman Handel, who had the effrontery to defect to the West before it was politically necessary. And there Bach is praised for giving "artistic expression to the people's aspirations and endeavors for peace." But he is impervious to political manipulation, as Luther and Wagner are not. He was not seduced by the devil, who tempted so many others to forswear a basic tenet of humanity long before the Wall made the spiritual division of the German soul visible.

Goethe, near the end of his life, exhorted his countrymen, "Oh, that at long last you had the courage for once to yield yourselves to your impressions . . . to let yourselves be elevated, yes, to let yourselves be taught and inspired and encouraged for something great; only do not always think that everything is vain if it is not some abstract thought or idea!" The triumph of Bach was that he did just that. His imposing musical structures touch the heart directly; Bach was, after all, a musician, not a philosopher or theologian. The sad part is that, even now, so many refuse to believe it, and see only the wig instead of the man.