Sabbath delight: Angela Hewitt interviewed on Bach, the Well-Tempered Clavier, and… baby hippos?!

Possibly Canada’s greatest living treasure in the realm of classical music is pianist Angela Hewitt. She has a huge and musically diverse repertoire (her recent recordings of Scarlatti sonatas are quite scrumptious), but is best known for her complete recordings of J. S. Bach’s keyboard works.

Here she is in Hong Kong in late 2018, giving a quite delightful interview to a local music professor for about an hour:

She talks about her background (her father was a British-born organist and choir director at a cathedral in Ottawa, her mother a pianist), about playing Bach on the piano, why she uses Fazioli pianos exclusively now, about her favorite preludes and fugues from the Well-Tempered Clavier (I’m not surprised C#m book 1, Bbm book 1, and F#m book 2 are among them). A few amusing as well as enlightening nuggets:

• Because both Canadian and Bach, a comparison to Glenn Gould is inevitable. But she recalls seeing him on TV as a child, and asking her parents, “who is this kook?” Later on, she decided that, without detracting from Gould’s (staggering) musical talents, her vision of Bach wasn’t his, and that in particular Gould’s tempo choices were too eccentric and counter-intuitive for her taste. (It’s also hard not to notice that she’s as outgoing as Gould was introverted. She even once answered a fan note from yours truly :))
• Her taking ballet lessons as a child helped shape her approach to rhythm in Bach, particularly the degree to which the rhythms of French courtly dances (quite explicit in the French suites, the orchestral suites, and the French Overture) come through in Bach’s preludes. The dance steps required notes inégales, rhythms that are more or less subtly syncopated even when written as equal notes. (Cf. “swing” and “boogie-woogie” in American popular music.)]
• Similarly, being in a choir (her father’s?) since childhood gave her an appreciation of phrasing and articulation that you would not normally acquire from playing Bach on a piano (or other keyboard instrument) in isolation.
• Her realizing during preparing for her then-current Bach concert tour (after a long spell of focusing on other repertoire), “there’s no bulls–t [sic] at all in Bach’s music”. By [bovine scatology], she means redundant notes or passages, “fluff”, “filler”. (As I understand it, a piece by Liszt, for example, will contain quite a bit of ornaments, flash-bang, musical “foley effects” that can be ad-libbed or simplified while still basically retaining the same piece. In contrast, everything in Bach is “just so”.[*])
• How she was taught Bach (starting at age 3) by her parents in the same sequence she recommends for learners now: first the Anna Magdalena Notebook and the Little Preludes, then the Two-Part Inventions, then the Three-Part, then the French Suites, and only then the Well-Tempered Clavier.
• How an important factor in deciding tempi for the preludes is “harmonic tempo” (her interviewer’s term), i.e., the frequency at which chords change. For example, the (in)famous First Prelude in C she takes comparatively fast as it only changes chords one to the bar (and she’d otherwise “be asleep by the time it’s over”), while the Fm prelude with many changes to the bar she plays more slowly and more expressively than many pianists.
• My LOL moment: One of her favorite fugues is the long, ponderous, organ-like A minor from WTC book I, which she calls “my little hippopotamus fugue” [sic]. This is actually a reference to a Victorian musicologist named Ebenezer Prout, who, as a mnemonic device for the required articulation, put all sorts of droll lyrics to the fugue themes. A full list can be found here. For the A minor from Book One, it was : “On a bank of mud in the river Nile, upon a summer morning, a little hippopotamus was eating bread and jam.“

Glenn Gould (whose correspondence is replete with musical jokes) clearly missed that joke, and instead played the fugue at a brisk tempo that is “rushing” for Angela’s taste, but brings out the relentless motorics of the piece. Here (via commenter “riverstun”) https://youtu.be/28pM2Z-2tZw?t=563 Gould discusses how he spliced together the final recording from two takes (out of eight) at the same high tempo, one of which he labeled the articulation as “pompous” and the other as “skittish”.

Sadly I could not find Angela’s performance of the same fugue on YouTube: suffice to say that in my iTunes music library, her recording runs for 5:33, compared to just 3:27 for Gould! (The great Tatiana Nikolayeva’s version, part of a single track with the prelude, I timed at 4:30.)

It is a marvel of the modern age that not only can we pull these contrasting performances up at the touch of a button, but we can even hear the performers explaining their artistic decisions. This is a luxury Bach himself (I nearly wrote Bach Himself, but that would be idolatry) could not have dreamed of in his lifetime, but would have been quite delighted with.

Enjoy!

[*] exceptions that prove the rule are pieces like the 2nd movement of the 3rd Brandenburg, where Bach leaves a space for an improvised keyboard cadenza, or sections of the Chromatic Fantasy where performers are given sequences of chords to arpeggiate to their own taste.

Out with the old, in with the new + Episode 3 update

It is out with the old, and in with the new. Not just the year but arguably the decade! [*] And what better to end and start with than Bach!

“Gone is the old year” (Das alte Jahr vergangen ist), BWV 690 (followed by several other settings of that chorale).

And here is a New Year performance of the cantata, “Singeth unto the L-rd a new song” (Singet den H-rrn ein neues Lied), BWV 190

My best wishes to you all for the secular year 2020!

Now apropos Operation Flash, Episode 3 (which will likely end Book One). Originally it was scheduled for November, but work and life threw some curveballs. So only a few weeks ago, I was able to buckle down and write. Do not worry, it is coming: I got back alpha review comments on about half of it. Episode 3 may be longer than the other two, or I may split it on two.
After release in ebook, the plan is to then also release a paper omnibus edition of episodes 1-3 (or 1-4), which should weigh in around 350-400 pages.

[*] Depending on your POV about whether years ending in zero start or end decades.

Sabbath delight: Tatiana Nikolayeva plays J. S. Bach’s entire Well-Tempered Clavier

I had no idea who this fabulous Russian pianist was until I heard her performance of J. S. Bach’s Art of the Fugue on the Hyperion label — and was blown away by its combination of sensitivity and contrapuntal clarity. I treasure that recording above all others in my collection—if I could only take away one to a deserted island, that would be the one.
Sadly, shortly after that recording, she was felled by a stroke during a concert in San Francisco, and passed away days later, never having regained consciousness.
She had a very broad repertoire, most of it recorded in the former (thank G-d) USSR and (until recently, at least) only available on CDs with doubtful source audio provenance. (Vinyl rips? Analog studio tapes?)
But her first and last love was Bach. After she won the Bach Competition in Leipzig (then in the DDR) in 1950 with her Well-Tempered Clavier performance, the composer Shostakovich was so impressed by her voice-leading ability that he wrote his own 24 Preludes and Fugues, Op. 87 especially for her.

Until recently, all I had heard of her earlier output were lo-fi Youtube rips off vinyl recordings — with lots of hiss and distortion I had great trouble listening past. Now somebody uploaded a high-resolution digitization of the CDs. Below is the video for your enjoyment; I managed to locate a legal download for the source and promptly bought it. [Book I; Book II] You will wish to do the same if you like the recording. (I thought nothing could surpass Glenn Gould’s or Angela Hewitt’s for me, but this is something specia. )
“Perhaps not all musicians believe in G-d, but they all believe in Bach.” (Mauricio Kagel)

J. S. Bach (Tatiana Nikolayeva, piano): WTC Books I & II (complete)

As a bonus, here follows the complete performance by another great Russian pianist, Sviatoslav Richter. Enjoy!

J. S. Bach (Sviatoslav Richter, piano): WTC Books I & II (complete)

Purim/Bach Day/Spring Day post: J. S. Bach, “Peasant Cantata” BWV 212

Happy Purim to all who observe the holiday!

But owing to a calendarial coincidence, 14 Adar II this year coincides with March 21 — both the vernal equinox and the birthday of Johann Sebastian Bach. (Some sources have March 23: that is actually the day he was baptised. I saw the original baptismal register at his birth house in Eisenach.)

Picture of J. S. Bach’s baptismal registration (from the website of the EKD=German Evangelical Lutheran Church). Translation: 4. To Mr. Johann Ambrosius Bach, householder, a son. Godfathers: Sebastian Nagel, householder, and Johann Georg Kochen, forestry official of the principality. Given name: Johann Sebastian

In keeping with the playful spirit of Purim, let’s have one of Bach’s more jocular compositions. The burlesque cantata “Mer hah’n en neue Oberkeet!” BWV 212 —Saxon dialect for “We have a new authority!”—is commonly referred to as the Bauerncantata or Peasant Cantata. It was commissioned and written for the 36th birthday of the Kammerherr (Chamberlain) von Dieskau. The full libretto and its English translation can be read here.

As it happens, the late, great lyrical baritone Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau was a descendant of the selfsame Chamberlain von Dieskau on his mother’s side. Here is his performance of Bach’s Peasant Cantata BWV 212. Enjoy!

What, exactly, is a “correct” classical performance? And how do music editors correct typos? Bach’s Fantasy and Fugue for organ, BWV 542

No, I won’t go into the manifold questions of interpretation here, and on the whole debate pro/con “historically informed” performance. What do you do when there is even no agreement on what the correct notes are?

The other day I heard somebody play Liszt’s piano arrangement of Bach’s Fantasy and Fugue in G minor for organ, BWV 542. The Fantasy happens to be one of my two favorite pieces ever in the entire organ literature (the other being the Passacaglia and Fugue in C minor, BWV 582), so I’m very familiar with its twists and turns.

So I was struck by two “mistakes” that stuck out like sore thumbs:

(1) in one of the solo recitativo bits of the Fantasy, the pianist hit a loud F natural where I’d always played a D (and as the last preceding chord was Bm/D, the F made no harmonic sense to me), and

(2) he played the final chord of the fantasy as G major rather than G minor. (Such a “Picardy third” — ending a minor-key piece on a major triad — was still the norm in Bach’s time, as minor thirds were still considered mildly dissonant. Bach himself, however, would end minor-key preludes in the Well-Tempered Clavier on minor triads to indicate the fugue was still to follow.)

Google Scholar is your friend then, and it turns out not only is there an entire academic journal called Bach, but that a long essay in it had been dedicated to the source provenance and variant readings of exactly this piece.

William H. Bates, “J. S. Bach’s Fantasy and Fugue in G Minor, BWV 542: A Source Study for Organists”, Bach 39(2), 1-88 (2008).

Turns out that no original manuscript has been preserved, but the piece has been transmitted through multiple first- and second-generation manuscript copies by pupils of Bach, their pupils, and by an anonymous copyist at a royal library. [*] What’s more: for the fugue, they appear to derive from at least three different source versions: an original, Bach’s later emendation, and a version transposed to F minor. Dozens of minor discrepancies exist.

For the fantasy, of which appears to have been substantially only one source version, there are “only” three outright variant readings in the notes. Aside from the final chord noted in (2), they are a comparatively trivial change at bar 42 and the one noted in (1):

Thus the mystery is solved. The score I have, a Dover paperback, is a reprint of the BG (Bachgesellschaftedition, or Bach Society Edition, b. above) — which is followed in many classical organ recordings. The Liszt piano arrangement I heard was based on a different source (a. above) — it seems that the source material (c,d) had a oddball “E” (presumed transcription error) which had been editorially corrected in two different ways:

a. consistent with a later occurrence of the phrase in bar 44 (a fourth higher), which is the choice made by the Bärenreiter and Breitkopf & Härtel editions;

b. consistent with the preceding chord (Bm/D), which is the choice made by the Bach Society Edition after 1900 (originally they printed the E).

Also, I learned from this article that the Fantasy and the Fugue appear to have been entirely separate compositions, which (because of their compatible keys) were paired by custom, sometime after Bach’s death. This offers a clue as to the “Picardy third” mystery: as minor thirds were still considered mildly dissonant in Bach’s time, final movements of minor-key works still customarily ended on major triads, though Bach would often end a minor-key prelude on a minor third if there was another movement to follow.

“The lonely lives of classical music scholars”, you say? Maybe that too, but also, for this scientist and amateur musician:

(a) a sobering observation on what exactly constitutes “authenticity” in classical music performance;

(b) an interesting parallel with great literary works from the English Canon hat were only printed after the author had passed away.

 

[*] Unlike for works like Toccata and Fugue in D minor, BWV 565, there is ample internal and external evidence that J. S. Bach was the author of BWV 542.

Saturday delight: Bach’s “Chaconne” on 11-string guitar

I accidentally stumbled on Moran Wasser’s amazing performance of Bach’s Chaconne in D minor, BWV 1004, on an 11-string guitar, embedded below:

What’s the deal with an… 11-string guitar?! Sounds pretty scary, no? Actually, 11-string and 13-string guitars are similar to the Baroque lute in conception:  The top six or seven strings are played like a standard guitar, while the additional bass strings are typically tuned ad hoc to cover the bass notes of the piece, and plucked as open strings with the thumb as a harmonic foundation. I am sure that sympathetic vibration also adds a lot to the body of the sound when these strings are not explicitly struck.

But let’s talk about the piece now. Many instrumental jazz and rock improvisations are based on a repeated “riff” or bass line that forms the foundation. This is, however, not something invented in the modern era. Early Western classical music had a form called a “ground” where exactly the same was done: take, for example, William Byrd’s virginal/harpsichord piece “The Bells” (1580). During the early baroque period, two forms of Western art music evolved with a repeated-riff structure: the Passacaglia and the Chaconne. Significantly, both were originally slow, stately dances in 3/2 rhythm.

It seems nobody is quite sure what is the difference between the two: I remembered it as “in a chaconne, the repeated riff is always in the bass, while in a passacaglia, it can move through all voices” — but it appears this definition was too narrowly based on J. S. Bach’s monumental examples, the Passacaglia and Fugue for Organ in C minor, BWV 582, (about which I have blogged previously), and the Chaconne from the Partita for Solo Violin in D minor, BWV 1004.

This piece, which stretches the capabilities of violin and violinist to the very limit, has numerous times been arranged for other instruments: for piano (by Ferruccio Busoni and by Alexander Siloti), for piano left hand (by Brahms), for organ, and indeed for orchestra (by Leopold Stokowski). It is particularly often performed on guitar (either in Andres Segovia’s arrangement or directly from the original score).

Moran Wasser’s arrangement is transposed one half-step down from the original, i.e., to C# minor: this sounds equivalent to playing it in “baroque tuning” (A=415 Hz) in its original key. Note that he places a capo on the 2nd fret over the seven top strings.

For those who prefer a violin original, here is Hilary Hahn’s performance:

The piano arrangements for two hands both tend toward the flashy, but Siloti’s is to my ears the more musical of the two. Here is a surprisingly powerful recent performance by a young pianist named Tanya Gabrielian:

Enjoy!

 

Writers, which classical composer are you?

Some time ago, Sarah Hoyt wrote a long post at MadGeniusClub on making oneself “write like the wind”.  Somewhat tangentially related, Christopher Nuttall blogged in the same venue about the three types of writer: the “wannabe”, the “amateur”, and the “professional”.

The wannabe was memorably depicted by Albert Camus (in “The Plague”) as a civil servant named Joseph Grand who wants to write a number but has spent ten years looking for the perfect opening sentence. The amateur does get things written and published, but for him, the writing is just a hobby (perhaps even with a therapeutic aspect) and (s)he treats it as such: if he is too tired to write or the creative juices aren’t flowing, then so be it. For the professional, on the other hand, writing is a day job, and bills don’t get paid unless books get written. [A commenter would add a fourth category: the “moonlighting” writer who has a day job to pay the bills, but treats the writing as a second job.]

In a nutshell, the recommendations of both writers boil down to: if you want to make a living from writing, (a) treat it like a job, and make yourself write whether you want to or not, whether you have inspiration or not; (b) make yourself write fast, because the more you write, the better you get at it, and the more there is for people to buy. Especially (b) is a far cry from the romantic fantasy of the writer as an “artiste”-demiurge.

But is there only one path to being a writer? As I see it — if I may use a musical metaphor — it boils down to which composer one wants to be.

At one extreme are the Mozarts and Vivaldis. A snide joke among some classical musicians has it that Vivaldi didn’t write 400+ concertos, but 400+ times the same concerto. Of course this is a cheap shot, but even people who generally love classical music would be hard-pressed to name any Vivaldi composition other than the Four Seasons.

Disparaging comments aside, “The Ginger Priest” did help establish the concerto as a classical music form, which in itself is no mean musical legacy. None other than J. S. Bach  studied his work diligently and transcribed several of his concerti for keyboard instruments. You might say Vivaldi was a kind of E. E. “Doc” Smith among composers.

Mozart was every bit as prolific and crowd-pleasing as Vivaldi—which elicited from the always sharp-tongued Glenn Gould the notorious quip that “Mozart died too late rather than too early”. The main reason so many of Mozart’s compositions did endure (while the likes of Ditters von Dittersdorf have been forgotten) is very simple: Mozart was a transcendent genius. He simply preferred to write lots and in a very accessible idiom, even as he occasionally ventured into ‘learned’ composition for his own pleasure and was very skilled at it. He was perennially short of money, as he enjoyed the good life and had no steady patron—he might have nodded in agreement at Heinlein’s statement that his favorite five words in the English language were ‘pay to the order of’.

At the other extreme stood Maurice Ravel. Nicknamed ‘the Swiss watchmaker’ by colleagues, he was a total perfectionist with a very modest output (after WW I, he averaged about one composition per year). Financially secure as a tenured professor of composition, he had no need to “compose to pay the bills”. In fact, he was as well known as an orchestrator of other people’s music as for his own compositions — Mussorgsky’s Pictures At An Exhibition was originally solo piano music, which Ravel orchestrated. Impervious to others’ opinions but relentlessly self-critical, he quipped to fellow composer Arthur Honegger: “I’ve written only one masterpiece – Boléro. Unfortunately there’s no music in it.”

 

Anton Bruckner was eternally plagued by self-doubts. In response to suggestions and criticism from colleagues, he would endlessly revise his symphonic works  — for example, there are at least five extant versions of the First Symphony — in response to suggestions and criticism from colleagues.

 

The creative struggles of Beethoven in his major works — the symphonies and the 32 piano sonatas, which have been named “the New Testament of solo piano music” — are legend, as evident from the minefields of corrections and erasures in his manuscripts , which drove copyists and score engravers alike crazy.  The resulting financial woes he addressed in part through patronage, but also through a parallel “pay the bills” compositional output written to publisher’s order: folk song arrangements, variation cycles, and “Bagatelles” — short, inventive piano pieces accessible to a somewhat skilled amateur. Yes, even this archetype of the “artiste-demiurge” wrote to pay the bills sometimes! The writer who churns out popular romances or mysteries under one pen name in order to subsidize a more literary output under his/her own name took a page, so to speak, from Beethoven’s playbook.

Liszt is a special case that has no real parallel among fiction writers: a wildly popular concert virtuoso who wrote piano showpieces and arrangements of symphonic works for his own use in performance (making the most of his unique technical skills), then retired to focus on more profound compositions.

And then there was Johann Sebastian Bach. As Mauricio Kagel memorably put it, “Perhaps not all musicians believe in G-d, but all believe in Bach”. A virtuoso on multiple instruments (not just keyboards), with an intellect that probably exceeded even Mozart’s, Bach was a scholar as much as an artist, and had an active interest in the practical side of instrument design. His work ethos struck an interesting balance.

In Bach’s days, one couldn’t live strictly off composing: Bach’s principal income streams were as a church organist (legendary in his day), a court musician, and eventually as the musical director and assistant principal of the St.-Thomas high school in Leipzig. (He generated secondary income streams from music all his married life, as an organ building consultant, as a reseller of Silbermann’s early pianofortes, and the like.) As part of his duties in Leipzig, for several years he wrote a fresh cantata every week [!], many of which have sadly been lost (though over 200 have been preserved). He was thus every bit capable of churning out works on demand on a tight production schedule. (To be sure,he routinely recycled material, and levels of thematic borrowing that nowadays would be considered plagiarism were accepted in his day.)

At the same time, at the works that mattered most to him, he worked slowly and painstakingly — the first autograph MS for The Art Of The Fugue, for instance, dates from 1741, while the final fugue was still unfinished at Bach’s death nine years later. Most unlike Beethoven, few erasures are evident in Bach’s manuscripts until his eyes started faltering near the end of his life: he would write the whole composition in his head and at the keyboard, then put it down on paper when it met his exacting standards of quality. Fairly little of his music was published during his lifetime, primarily cycles of keyboard works. Bach studied music of other composers with great attention and mined it for forms as well as themes (to which he applied his never-surpassed mastery of counterpoint), but was essentially indifferent to public acclaim or fashion: while he took his musical duties seriously, the very notion of writing to fit the popular fashion of the day was alien to him. At the end of the day, this devout Lutheran with an impressive collection of theological books wrote his major works S. D. G. (soli Dei gloria, for the glory of G-d alone), as he was wont to write on his manuscripts.

Coming back to Sarah’s “Write Like The Wind” post. She mentions that endless revising and agonizing about language will not be noticed by one’s readers. Like with so many things in life, the ‘law of diminishing returns’  — just like a $20m Stradivarius obviously will not sound 1000x better than a violin custom-built by a luthier for, say, $20K. Sure, there is a reader segment (yours truly included) that enjoys exquisitely crafted prose for its own sake. However, beyond a certain point one is better off finishing up and moving on to the next work. One would like to believe that there is a golden mean between assembly-line hack work on the one hand, and toxic perfectionism on the other hand.

 

Happy J. S. Bach Day!

Today, the first day of spring and (roughly) the vernal equinox, J. S. Bach would have been 326 if he still were alive. His body is gone, but his music lives on forever. “Bach is the beginning and end of all music” (Max Reger; more quotes about Bach here).

Bach was an avid experimenter with the musical technology of his day, and I’m sure he’d appreciate modern synthesizers. Below are two performance of one of his organ fugues (in G major, BWV 577, nicknamed “the jig” as it is in a jig/gigue rhythm): one on a conventional pipe organ, another on a battery of synthesizers.

Enjoy!