Bach has quite a hoard of virtues. The rectitude is almost annoying: selflessness married to reason married to imagination married to lawfulness married to craft. Bach is a mirror to everything we would like to be; he is almost too good to be true, to be believed. But we believe in Bach on the evidence of the notes themselves. Having invoked fact, law, and logic, I think the larger and more precise term, the umbrella term, to sum up Bach’s mystique is truth. There is a lot of talk of truth and truthiness these days””the death of truth, a post-truth era, and a proliferation of fact checkers debasing the currency in which they pretend to trade. But in Bach’s case we are talking about a certain kind of truth, a necessary truth, even a divine truth, something unarguable. Bach allows us to deny our suspicion that music may be a tissue of lies, a sensory decadence. You cannot wander far into Bach discussion without the invocation of the divine, even in connection with his secular works: cue Beethoven’s “Well-Tempered Bible,” Lipatti’s remark that Bach was “one of the ”˜chosen instruments of God himself,’” and Goethe’s observation that it is “as if the eternal harmony were communing with itself, as might have happened in God’s bosom shortly before the creation of the world.” Combine the feeling of divinity with the experience of Bach’s logic and system and you have an intoxicating combination, as if the Bible made perfect sense.
Closely following upon the invocation of God is the invocation of virtue: Bach is music’s claim to morality. Perhaps this last step is the most dangerous. It is a lot for music to bear, this conflation with truth, not to mention virtue. Arguments about Bach become proxy arguments about purity and authenticity. For some reason, people love to tell the story of Wanda Landowska saying to Pablo Casals, “You play Bach your way, and I’ll play him his way.” A memorable boast (and insult), but underneath it you can feel Bach’s truth getting carved up, subjected to territorial disputes. The certitude of Bach’s command of tones seems, like a virus, to infect some artists who play him.
The idolizing of Bach will continue, and not without reason; but true lovers of music and, especially, song know that Handel is the composer after God’s own heart.
#1, Karl Barth and I would beg to differ with your preference for Handel (much as I love his music too). Barth once opined that when the angels are singing God’s praises in heaven they use Bach, but when they’re just having fun on their own they use Mozart. Who can say? But perhaps all classical music lovers can at least agree with Mozart’s own assessment of his great predecessor, for speaking on behalf of composers everywhere, Mozart once said about Bach: “[i]He is the father of us all.[/i]”
Recently I was visiting the home of a very musical friend and I found in their home a delightful plaque with a marvelous tribute to great composers that came from a German opera house. It went like this:
“[i]Bach gave us God’s Word.
Mozart gave us God’s laughter.
Beethoven gave us God’s fire.
God gave us music, that we might pray without words.[/i]”
David Handy+