J. S. BACH Jonathan Berkahn - Victoria University - Victoria ...

Schumann wrote, ‘as if a dwarf were to appear among giants.’ 2
We should note that the ‘historical’ Bach is not the ‘real’ Bach, nor the
‘transcendental’ Bach simply a fabrication or distortion. The neue Sachlichkeit of the
former emerged partly as a consequence of, partly in reaction to the latter, and is no
more free of ideology than the most extravagantly Romantic transcendentalism. 3
Attempts to excavate contemporary ways of hearing the music of the past are
fascinating projects; but there is no way of apprehending his music ‘as it really was’,
independently of what generations of listeners have thought and said about it. 4 Our
only organ of perception for this music is the reception history that mediates between it
and us. The cultural significance and weight of his oeuvre is a fact, just as much as its
clear indebtedness to his predecessors and contemporaries is a fact. But to bring these
two facts into some sort of relation—to introduce Bach (1) to Bach (2), so to speak—is
surprisingly difficult. Each represents a different kind of discourse: the disciplines of
analysis on the one hand, historical musicology on the other. Sometimes, however,
circumstances conspire to bring them into uncomfortable proximity.
2 Review of Hummel’s 24 Études, op.125 (1834), The musical world of Robert Schumann, tr. and ed.
H. Pleasants (London: Gollancz, 1965), p.25. Schumann was quoting Felix Mendelssohn, and
speaking of C. P. E. Bach, who had ‘inherited lovely talents’ but ‘never approached his father as a
creative musician.’
3 Friedrich Blume’s re-dating of Bach’s cantatas, for example, (which placed most of the Leipzig
cantatas earlier in the period he spent there and therefore implied a growing disenchantment with the
Leipzig establishment and church music in general) was not just abstract tinkering with chronology
but a deliberate attempt to debunk the idealised portrait of ‘Bach...the church musician, the great
cantor, the jongleur de Dieu, and even the fifth Evangelist’ that had been presented by Spitta and
Schweitzer (‘Outlines of a new picture of Bach’, tr. S. Godman, Music & Letters, 44/3 (Jul 1963),
217).
4 Sanguine assumptions about ‘authentic’ performance practice have come into question in recent
years (R. Taruskin, Text and act: essays on music and performance (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1995), and it is now normal to speak, more humbly, of ‘historically informed’ performance: cf
P. Walls, History, imagination, and the performance of music (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2003).
Attempts at what might be called ‘historically informed listening’ include (among many others) M.
E. Bonds, Music as thought: Listening to the symphony in the age of Beethoven (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 2006); S. Eckert, ‘“[...] wherein good taste, order and thoroughness
rule”: Hearing Riepel’s op. 1 violin concertos through Riepel’s theories’, Ad Parnassum 3/5 (April
2005), 23-44; M. Riley, Musical listening in the German Enlightenment: Attention, wonder and
astonishment (Burlington: Ashgate, 2004); R. C. Wegman (ed.), ‘Music as heard: Listeners and
listening in late-medieval and early modern Europe (1300-1600)’, Musical Quarterly 82/3-4 (Fall-
Winter 1998), 427-691, and L. G. Ratner, Classic music: expression, form, and style (New York:
Schirmer, 1980).
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