bach | Open Source with Christopher Lydon

This Week's Show •

J.S. Bach’s Bitter-Sweet Passion

The music in this episode comes from Boston Baroque’s 2015 performance of the Saint John Passion, conducted by Martin Pearlman. From the great Bach’s hand, two masterpieces of church theater survive. Both tell the trial and crucifixion ...

The music in this episode comes from Boston Baroque’s 2015 performance of the Saint John Passion, conducted by Martin Pearlman.

From the great Bach’s hand, two masterpieces of church theater survive. Both tell the trial and crucifixion of Jesus, one from the gospel of Matthew, the other from the later gospel of John.

This St. John Passion, first performed in 1724, is a “mis-shapen, personal and messy” piece, as one of Boston’s great Bach conductors Craig Smith used to say, in exactly the way the story is mis-shapen, personal and messy. It’s the musical account of a sadistic murder of a young visionary—to the howling mockery of a mob of his fellow Jews. Jesus’s sin was presenting himself as the Son of God. For Christians (like Bach) the death of Jesus becomes the redeeming moment in all of time, God’s sacrifice of his son for the sins of mankind.

But in the telling over the ages and especially after the 20th century, that merciless mob, yelling “crucify him, crucify him” in Bach’s oratorio made St. John Passion unlistenable even for many Bach lovers. This week we’re trying to make sense of a Western masterwork that has not just killer rage at the core, but also group labels on it.

The cast of this universal story is nearly all Jewish: Jesus, Mary, the apostles, the gospel writers, the elders of the temple–all but the viceroy Pontius Pilate are Jews in a Jewish outpost of the Roman empire. But in the text Bach set to music, the crowd mocking Jesus, screaming for his death, is identified–not as “the crowd,” or “the people” but as “the Jews.” And there’s the rub for modern minds.

If the Bach Passion is at all disturbing, is at all problematic, it’s only because the Gospels [themselves] are hugely problematic. It’s because, over centuries, medieval and early modern interpretations of that Gospel text added weight to an anti-Jewish core that couldn’t have been imagined by John when he wrote it… That doesn’t mean that these texts are necessarily tainted forever. The question is, how do you take traditions and evolve them? How do we get our contemporary values in sync without throwing out these traditions that are beautiful?… Deanna Klepper.

Martin Pearlman, who has led the Boston Baroque ensemble for 40 years but never put the St. John Passion on his program until this year, was the instigator of this conversation. It is his performance with the Boston Baroque players and singers (from February 27 and 28 late this winter) that runs throughout our radio hour. Our conversation draws also on the mezzo-soprano Pamela Dellal, who’s sung the great St. John arias and translated its words into English. Robert Marshall at Brandeis, and Deanna Klepper at Boston University are our historians of Bach’s music and the political and religious context of 18th-century Germany.

The ultimate villain of the piece is humanity in general… Everybody was playing a preordained role. [As a young man] I heard ‘the [Jews] shrieking’ and put it in the context of the Holocaust, the Nazis, Goebbels. The German language played a bad role, too. In those days you never heard the German language being spoken unless it sounded like it was being spoken by Nazis, if you go back to the 1960s… I like to think I’m more enlightened about it now. I think, in some sense, it’s something of an exoneration, because the Jews are part of the scenario, but the message being spoken… is a universal message, that we are all part of this crime, this deicide. Am I rationalizing too much? Bob Marshall.

We’re listening not just for the hard feeling in and around this music but for the heart-rending beauty that’s more memorable in the end. The St. John Passion is a monument to eternal sadness and excruciating suffering rendered in musical language what no other language could. What do you hear in the music? Please, leave us a note in the comments.

Explore this timeline to follow the St. John from Bach’s Good Fridays in Leipzig, through controversy and revision, and into the halls of Boston. Image: “The Taking of Christ,” Caravaggio, c. 1602.The Long Road to Jordan Hal

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December 23, 2012

Paul Elie and Donal Fox: Reinventing Bach

Paul Elie, author of Reinventing Bach, is spelling out a wonderfully homey theory about the greatest musician who ever lived. And jazz pianist Donal Fox is demonstrating the idea in real time, on my piano. ...

Paul Elie, author of Reinventing Bach, is spelling out a wonderfully homey theory about the greatest musician who ever lived. And jazz pianist Donal Fox is demonstrating the idea in real time, on my piano. We’re blessed to share it, in praise and thanksgiving, as a Christmas offering from Open Source.

Why, we ask, does Johann Sebastian Bach (1685 – 1750), “the Leonardo of sound,” sit virtually alone and god-like, in so many testimonies, at the peak of all artistic creation? The great clarification here is that Bach left not just a multitude of masterworks; but further that in his notebooks and albums of instruction, in exercises for his children and minimal “inventions” for keyboard students ever after, he made clear he was giving the world a “source code” of music. He composed, in effect, bone-marrow or stem-cell music, ready to be extended into new shapes and sounds, new limbs and organs, new life and insight and delight until the last trumpet sounds.

Much of Paul Elie’s marvelous book recounts the Age of Recording, starting in the 1930s, and the ways it accelerated and compounded the meanings of “reinventing Bach.” Albert Schweitzer made an organ thunderbolt of Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor to wake a dying Europe in 1935. In Hollywood the next year, Leopold Stokowski transcribed the same music from organ to full-orchestra for the opening theme of Walt Disney’s Fantasia. Pablo Casals’ recording of the then unknown Cello Suites in 1939 was called “a Catalan cry of the heart” at the end of the Spanish Civil War. Casals declined to play the Bach Suites in his native Spain — or even in the Kennedy White House — as long as Generalissimo Franco lived and ruled. In much the same spirit the pianist Leon Fleisher decided he could not play “Jesu Joy of Man’s Desiring” or “Sheep May Safely Graze” in George W. Bush’s White House, in fact wouldn’t perform at all. Yo-Yo Ma’s performance from the Cello Suites at Steve Jobs’ funeral reminded everybody of Jobs’ legendary judgment that those pieces and Ma’s playing of them made “the best argument I’ve ever heard for the existence of God, because I don’t really believe a human alone can do this.”

From the Swingle Singers‘ scat versions of Bach instrumental pieces in 1963, more recently Bobby McFerrin’s singing the “Air on a G String,” Savion Glover‘s tap dancing to Bach and the infinite mash-up possbilities, Paul Elie looks forward to almost endless extensions on his catalog of Bach reinventions. And still isn’t the heart of the story in the beginning? That is, in Bach’s own handwritten notebook for his nine-year-old son William Friedemann? It held musical sketches of melodies and implied harmonies, basic exercises in rhythm and counterpoint; but many pages were left blank, as Elie writes, “to be filled with pieces that father and son, teacher and student, would compose together.” The exercise was to discipline fingers and ears, mind and heart, to cope with tension and dissonance, design and surprise, inversions of phrases, the pulse of a bass line, the tempos of life. What Bach is still offering us, as Craig Smith used to say, is “a way to live.”

Podcast • October 27, 2008

J. S. Bach’s “Habit of Perfection”: Andrew Rangell

Andy Rangell at his Well-Tempered Clavier

Waiting the election returns (Obama v. McCain) in November, 2008, we repair to the consolations of J.S. Bach, and in this conversation, to the perfect nest of keyboard masterpieces known collectively as The Well-Tempered Clavier, delivered to the world in two prodigious installments: Book One in 1722, Book Two in 1744. Daniel Barenboim, and others, have dubbed Bach’s WTC the “Old Testament” of piano literature — Beethoven’s 32 sonatas constituting the “New”…! We repair geographically to the studio near Boston of the “quirky, imaginative, intelligent” piano master Andrew Rangell. In 2020 he is sequestered with WTC, Book Two, having recorded Book One in 2007.

I think of Andrew as the Glenn Gould of our time and place. Like so many Bach pianists he grew up with Gould’s great first recording of the Goldberg Variations from 1955, the record that announced the “birth of a legend.” (See the equally famous 1981 re-recording in exquisite video). Like very few others, Andrew Rangell has grown into Gould’s roles as an original writer and performer, in celebrated recordings of Bach’s Goldberg Variations, Partitas, French and English suites, and The Art of Fugue. Also many of the Beethoven sonatas, the complete Chopin Mazurkas, and music of Janacek, Nielsen, Stravinsky, Schoenberg, Enescu, Charles Ives, and many others. Like Gould but for different reasons (a 1991 hand injury) Rangell has largely traded the concert stage for the recording studio and its painstaking and exhilarating techniques of re-creation, both in the recording and editing phases.

I came to Andrew this time to ask what an immersion in the Well-Tempered Clavier does for one’s mind and spirit – this endlessly extended and refined masterwork that, as Andrew says, “encourages mind, fingers and heart, and that never turns anyone away.”

The Well-Tempered, for short, becomes the musical metaphor of the long human course in hearing multiplicities of voices — polyphony is the musical word — and their accents, inflections, their placements and interactions. It also becomes a “semi-religious experience,” says Andrew, the non-believer:

Bach was a man of God in the most overt and simple sense… But there is a fusion in Bach that is just mind-boggling to me. It has to do with the intersection of Man and God — and not at Yale. We’re talking about a composer who seemed to write for his own enrichment and edification and the need to enlarge himself. This was a person who studied deeply and who then produced; and even in his secular music there is a religious aura. There is something in which he is writing to God and he is writing for himself. And then everything else falls into place. It turns out that everything he is writing can stimulate and be used pedagogically. It can show young fingers where to go. It can show young composers how to think; it can clarify things about voice-leading. To study the Well-Tempered is to study the treatise of all time on harmony. Somehow God and human concerns are fused in a very profound way. I speak as a person otherwise irreligious. I consider myself a kind of secularized person. Nonetheless maybe music is a kind of religion and Bach is in a way always the high priest, just because of the richness there. Sometimes these days I quote Glenn Gould who said, “I believe in God — Bach’s God.” Through Saint Glenn, I can go there easily. I feel deeply the man is an ocean. He is fathomless. Over and over again he had, to quote Hopkins, “the habit of perfection.” He is godlike. When I practice Bach I feel, whatever my own struggles, whatever my own difficulties, I am sustained by it. There is no flaw there.

Andrew Rangell in conversation with Chris Lydon, October 21, 2008

Podcast • April 30, 2008

The "Open Source" Composer: David Amram

Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with David Amram (30 minutes, 14 mb mp3) David Amram at Brown’s grand piano We are hanging out at the piano here with the composer and Renaissance man David ...

Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with David Amram (30 minutes, 14 mb mp3)

David Amram at Brown’s grand piano

We are hanging out at the piano here with the composer and Renaissance man David Amram, who has hung with the best — starting with Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker and Jack Kerouac in the 1950’s. Each of those associates, as David observes in this conversation, was an encyclopedia of music in himself. From them he absorbed an ideal he is still practicing: not multi-cultural balancing or eclectic blending but “lovingly trying to learn some of the fundamentals about some of the most beautiful things that touch your heart.” Charlie Parker introduced him to the pentatonic music of Frederick Delius. Dizzy transmitted his taste for Bartok and Stravinsky. Kerouac, David testifies, could improvise well at the piano and had, above all, “a phenomenal ear.” Musicians “were always glad to see him, because we knew that meant at least one person would be listening.”

(l to r) Larry Rivers, Kerouac, Amram, Allen Ginsberg & Gregory Corso (bk to camera)

David Amram is the quiet, almost anonymous listener in many photos with cultural icons — the guy next to Charles Mingus, or Leonard Bernstein, or Machito. David’s the one who didn’t burn out or go away, or change his style much. He is, not least, a fair embodiment of an “open source” ideal — an entirely distinctive voice who’s hard to imagine apart from the conversation that educated and produced him. At Brown, we have been listening to his work for ten days now. His movie scores (The Manchurian Candidate) and his chamber pieces can make a connection with Charles Ives or Dvorak or Alex North, with jazz and Jewish roots music. But it always sounds like David. We were blessed to get him at the keyboard. In an age of copyright madness, he reminds me that music is not something we human beings have, much less own. Music is something people do.

Podcast • November 20, 2007

A Way to Live: Craig Smith’s Bach Project

Craig Smith made glorious music, and wonderful conversation about it, too. For more than 30 years, Craig Smith was soul and spirit, secret hero and standard bearer -- the conscience and great affirmer of Boston's marvelous musical world. And ever a generous "natural" on radio and television with me.

Craig Smith made glorious music, and wonderful conversation about it, too.

For more than 30 years, Craig Smith was soul and spirit, secret hero and standard bearer — the conscience and great affirmer of Boston’s marvelous musical world. And ever a generous “natural” on radio and television with me.

When he was rehearsing a grand production of Bach’s St. Matthew Passion in the late 1990s, I asked him how we might make a call-in radio show of it. He said in so many words: why don’t you just ask me to argue that the St. Matthew Passion is the greatest of all human accomplishments, by one or many. Meaning explicitly: greater than the pyramids at Giza, greater than baseball, greater than The Brothers Karamazov or the United States Constitution. And so we did, for an hour that lives in many listeners’ memories. By the end of the program, he had convinced us all, including a few dissenters who’d thought of suggesting that maybe Bach’s B-minor Mass was a mountaintop even higher.

A few years earlier, for WGBH-TV, we had engaged Craig Smith on his life at the Emmanuel Church in Boston’s Back Bay. I like the title we gave it: “A Way to Live: Craig Smith’s Bach Project,” because it suggests (as many have been saying since Craig’s death last week) that his music was a voluminous account of his whole self. The distinctive beauty of his conducting was that he gave us the whole Bach: the darkness and doubt, and the suffering in the salvation; the “Jesu Joy of Man’s Desiring” but also the heart-rending Cantatas he reset with Peter Sellars for the sublime solo voice of Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, dying on stage: No. 82, “Ich Habe Genug,” and No. 199, “Mein Herz Schwimmt in Blut.”

Craig Smith, the silent conductor, also loved the role of radio explainer and color-commentator. “Don’t worry about anything, Chris,” he said in one of our last outings. “I’ll keep talking.” His specialty (as you will hear in “A Way to Live”) was pinpointing the match of musical devices with turns of meaning in a text. And always his talk became a happy tribute to somebody else’s genius. His piano teacher who became his disciple, Russell Sherman, caught it perfectly. “Everything he touched he cherished, and relished with an incredible tenderness, conviction, and belief,” Sherman said on Craig Smith’s death. “Everything he did, he did with flair, a cherubic smile, and a Mozartean sense of absolute pleasure and happiness in the task itself.”

November 29, 2006

Bach’s Chaconne

Despite what the “recorded” date says above, this show was recorded at 12:30 pm on December 1st, 2006, and was first broadcast on January 1st, 2007. I was excited to see last month that Arnold ...

Despite what the “recorded” date says above, this show was recorded at 12:30 pm on December 1st, 2006, and was first broadcast on January 1st, 2007.

I was excited to see last month that Arnold Steinhardt has a new book out. His first, Indivisible by Four, was a memoir of his life as the first violinist of the Guarneri string quartet, one of the most celebrated ensembles of the last forty years.

But I was thrilled when it turned out that the new book, Violin Dreams, an exploration of violins and violining, is bracketed by his lifelong, ever-increasing, Olympian challenge: the final movement of Bach’s Second Partita for unaccompanied violin. The Chaconne.

“It is hard to imagine a violinist who has passed through Bach’s gravitational field untouched,” Steinhardt wrote. “Bach was first my chore, gradually my interest, and finally my quest.” And if Bach in general was a quest, then the Chaconne, with its simple, yearning melody followed by the genetic pyrotechnics of replication and mutation, was a nearly holy calling. It’s also nearly impossible to play.

Or perhaps it’s truly impossible, forever just out of reach even for the best of the best. On the phone today, Steinhardt mentioned to me that it would have been fantastic to play the full fifteen-minute piece live for us on the show, had he just been given more time to practice… like five or six years. And this is a man who has twice recorded the Chaconne, and has performed his way through the entire solo and chamber music repertoire many times over for more than a half century. But this is also the Chaconne.

Steinhardt puts it this way:

To prepare for [a friend’s funeral] service, I had been practicing the Chaconne every day — fussing over individual phrases, searching for better ways to string them together, and wondering about the very nature of the piece, at its core an old dance form that had been around for centuries. After the many times I had heard and played the Chaconne, I had hoped it would fall relatively easily into place by now, but it appeared to be taunting me. The more I worked, the more I saw; the more I saw, the further away it drifted from my grasp. Perhaps that is in the nature of every masterpiece. But more than that, the Chaconne seemed to exude shadows over its grandeur and artful design. Exactly what was hidden there I could not say, but I would lose myself for long stretches of time exploring the work’s repeating four-bar phrases, which rose and fell and marched solemnly forward in ever-changing patterns.

Arnold Steinhardt, in Violin Dreams

So just what is it about these fourteen or fifteen minutes that they seem to get harder the more you play them? What’s the lure, for the listener or the violinist? Have you ever tried playing it — on the concert stage, or in your bedroom with the door locked? What’s your favorite rendition? (And is it on violin, or one of the myriad other transcriptions? Steinhardt heard a version on marimba.)

The fearless Steinhardt will be bringing his violin, not his marimba, to help illustrate and explicate what he calls “a mighty cathedral — imposing in length, moving and uplifting in spirit, and exquisite in its details.” What are your questions for someone who has scaled the Chaconne’s heights and come back to tell the story?

And a final question: so you’ve never played the Chaconne, or the violin, or the marimba. What forever just-unattainable goal are you pursuing, for the joy and frustration and transcendence of it?

Arnold Steinhardt

First Violinist, Guarneri String Quartet, author of Violin Dreams and Indivisible by Four