Music - Messing about with Bach is no bad thing, argues Dermot Clinch
The coup de theatre at the end of a recent staged version of Johann Sebastian Bach's St John Passion at the London Coliseum was when a snowy white lamb was brought on stage. What a laugh. The lamb went "baa", then "baa" again, loudly, just as the work's last great chorus lapsed into silence. Did the Lutheran congregation at the Nikolaikirche in Leipzig on Good Friday, 1724, hearing the work's first performance, have such fun? It seems unlikely.
Bach died 250 years ago. We think of him as the greatest composer in the history of western music, but do not like this to preclude our messing about with him. In fact, on the whole, we like it to encourage us. In the interval of his poetically charged performance of Bach's Goldberg Variations on Radio 3, Murray Perahia spoke about why he plays Bach on the piano. Because he is a pianist, he said. Because messing about with Bach, he seemed to suggest, is in some sense what playing Bach is about. The piano is better at expressing nuance than the harpsichord, and Bach's music "is not without nuance". Messing about with Bach on the piano seemed a good idea.
Ways of performing music change, so the composer changes, too. The most significant of all performances of Bach were those by Felix Mendelssohn in the 19th century. A newly released CD gives an insight. The Romantic composer, we learn, substituted hooting clarinets where Bach had asked for piping oboes. He asked for emotional choral swelling where Bach had demanded cool restraint. He cut the number of arias by two-thirds because he had, well, a prejudice against Bach's arias.
The recording of the St Matthew Passion reconstructs Mendelssohn's Leipzig performance of 1841; it has been re-released at a decent price and is a very moving document. It is good to hear Bach not in some nebulous, "authentic" version as he may or may not have directed it, but as we know, fairly certainly, Mendelssohn did direct it (because the score, with his light and respectful pencil markings, is in the Bodleian Library in Oxford).
The CD reconstructs an event when the public reputation of the greatest of composers was established beyond doubt, nearly a century after his death. The work of a devout Lutheran Saxon rationalist was refracted through the imagination of a Romantic atheist Jew. Lucky Mendels-sohn's grandmother to possess Bach's autograph manuscript. Lucky Mendelssohn to be given it for Christmas.
Bach's elegant, inked notes were realised by Mendelssohn in performances across Germany. But what of other works, such as the one he never finished, the most perfect of all his masterpieces, supposedly the most perfect of all works in the western canon, which he supposedly never intended for performance at all? Did Bach really not intend the Art of Fugue to be heard? The answer seems important, and in Rinaldo Alessandrini's ebullient, cheeky recording of the work, the Opus 111 label provides a witty answer. The humane treatment of the Art of Fugue is suggested in the title of Alessandrini's accompanying essay: "The Art of Fugue: music to listen to."
If Mendelssohn or Alessandrini or Deborah Warner, the director responsible for the St John Passion at the English National Opera, decided not to perform, not to intervene, not to shape old art according to modern prejudice, Bach would be nowhere. So Bach never asked for arias to be cut from his Passions or for live lambs. So what?
Bach never came to London, never saw a CD player, recording studio, concert hall or Steinway grand. We don't let it stop us. We do what we can. We let slip the lambs of war.
Bach: St Matthew Passion (Leipzig 1841 version), directed by Christoph Spering (2 CDs), and Bach: the Art of Fugue, directed by Rinaldo Alessandrini (1 CD) are on the Opus 111 label
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