Composer not so very suite …
The cult of JS Bach’s solo cello works highlights a misguided modern tendency to deify the composer, argues
How does one fall out of love with a piece of music? Not just any music but a classical work variously described as a “Baroque masterpiece”, “mesmerising” and “closest to the absolute and perfection”?
Known, but not particularly admired, in the 19th century, Johann Sebastian Bach’s unaccompanied cello suites were only launched as concert pieces by the “father of the solo cello” Pablo Casals in the 1920s, after he chanced on a yellowing manuscript in a dusty music shop in Barcelona, Spain.
Then, in a kind of musical earthquake, came Casals’s recording of all six suites in Paris in 1936, at the height of the Spanish Civil War.
Since then, they have exploded into universal playing and listening awareness. Every cellist worth his salt, from Mstislav Rostropovich to Paul Tortelier, from Yo-yo Ma to Steven Isserlis, feels bound to put them on disc in a kind of grand statement.
Youtube teems with live performances, all heard in a reverential silence, as if in a cathedral.
They can be purchased in a blizzard of other transformations — as histories, analyses and explorations, “experiments in musical intelligence”, scores and study books, and in arrangements for piano, guitar, mandolin, viola, double bass and alto recorder.
But are they really so sublime? It is perhaps no accident that Bach’s autographed manuscript has never been found. Is the simple explanation perhaps that he did not have a very high opinion of the suites as art and did not feel the need to stamp his authorship on them?
Unaccompanied cello works are very rare in the literature, suggesting they do not comfortably lend themselves to solo performance.
Bach has been followed by the merest handful of composers, including Benjamin Britten and Zoltan Kodaly, in works that do not often make the concert stage.
It has even been argued that the real hand behind Bach’s solo cello works is that of his second wife, Anna Magdalena, who is credited with copying the manuscript of the composition now in general use.
One does not have to be a musical sexist to find the idea of Anna Magdalena’s authorship unlikely. She was musically gifted, but as a vocalist, not as a player of string instruments.
Experts point out that her copy of the suites is marred by mistakes, particularly in relation to bowing technique.
I first heard the suites in my thirties and enjoyed them but, over time, increasingly gave them a miss. That is in marked contrast with my consumption of the rest of Bach’s output, especially his imperishable organ works.
What got me listening again, for the first time in many years, was reading the book The Cello Suites by Eric Siblin, a Canadian rock music critic who became an ardent convert to Bach’s solo cello work and set out to trace its history.
Several things struck me on a renewed listening. The first was that as a baritone instrument, the cello is ill-suited to the clatter of staccato semi-quavers that the suites typically elicit as a Baroque composition.
It is at its most expressive as, in the hands of Brahms and Mendelssohn, for example, a romantic voice given to long, sonorous, often melancholic, phrasing.
If the typical sonority of the violin is the human cry, for the cello it is the deep, extended sob, “les sanglots longs”, of Paul Verlaine’s poetry.
In some of the slower dance movements of Bach’s suites, one feels this. The sarabande is a drawn-out courtly dance which, especially in the minor key Suite No 2 and Suite No 5, is given soulful treatment.
But repeated sequences of clipped notes are the norm in the 36 movements, and if one listens even to one suite from beginning to end, it starts to fret on the nerves.
A further irritant is the grating effect of chordal playing on the unaccompanied cello, known as “double stopping”. It is this that George Bernard Shaw was apparently referring to when he said he would as soon listen to “a bee buzzing at the bottom of a stone jug”.
Siblin tries to argue that each suite has its own artistic theme and coherence. But except perhaps in the D minor suite — where the key imparts an overall tragic feeling that Siblin links to the death of Bach’s first wife, Maria Barbara — this is hard to sustain.
Each suite consists of a prelude followed by five formalised dances, and as each of the latter has its own mood, there is no overarching structure to create an emotional gestalt.
According to Siblin, the final D major suite is about “transcendence”, which presumably means heightened religious feeling.
In fact, the two closing movements are perky secular court dances, a gavotte and a gigue.
Siblin makes a rattling yarn out of the many unresolved mysteries surrounding the suites. One of the biggest hangs over whether they were intended, or all intended, for the cello and, if so, why Bach scored the sixth for a five-stringed instrument (the cello has four strings).
There is some speculation that the sixth might have been written for a now-extinct instrument called the violoncello piccolo, which instead of being bowed between the knees, was played across the shoulders, like a guitar.
This raises the further question of whether the six suites were conceived as an artistic whole or composed at different times, perhaps for different purposes, and later cobbled together in a single edition.
When a practical need arose, Bach often cannibalised his own work. In fact, he cribbed the fifth suite, in C minor, and repurposed it for the lute — suggesting a functional outlook that viewed the suites as useful vehicles rather than high art.
Far more temperamental, ambitious and refractory than is often realised, Bach was not the German mystic, “dead to the world”, as per Albert Schweitzer’s pen-portrait —although he came closer to this kind of exalted abstraction in his last works, such as the Great Eighteen (Organ) Chorale Preludes and The Art of Fugue.
There was a broad, almost medieval, streak of the practical craftsman and court servant in his make-up, highlighted by his forelock-tugging deference to King Frederick the Great of Prussia and The Musical Of fering he sent the monarch on a royal theme.
Players, critics and listeners now swoon over the suites — in fact, it is hard to find a word said against them. But there is another way of seeing them that I would argue approximates more closely to their essential character.
The Parsee-english composer Kaikhosru Sorabji suggests they are the emotionally parched carapace of a work. Siblin quotes him as describing them as “nightmares, gripping, dry, rattling skeletons of compositions, bloodless, fleshless, staring anatomies”.
A music lecturer at Wits University once remarked to me that “Beethoven composed some bad music … so did Bach. Actually, in Bach’s case, not bad, just dull.”
As some of the 200 surviving church cantatas from his time as Leipzig Kapellmeister bear out, not everything he wrote was at the same level of inspiration.
It’s possible that the 19th century understood the six cello suites better than we do now, in the wake of the Casals revolution and almost a century of uninterrupted praise-singing.
In a word, it is that they were études — short, challenging technical exercises for solo instruments played to improve bowing or fingering skills or to display virtuosity.
Many such academic studies were written by composers, including Claude Debussy and Frederic Chopin, mainly as a method of teaching piano.
The fact is that the long eclipse of Bach’s music after his death has been followed by a torrent of almost uncritical adulation.
In a sour aside quoted by Siblin, the French composer Hector Berlioz captured this, complaining that he was “bewildered by the reverence” with which listeners approached a messy live performance of the St Matthew Passion.
“They believe in Bach; they worship him. It never for a moment occurs to them that his divinity could be questioned. God is God, and Bach is Bach.”
The Cello Suites: JS Bach, Pablo Casals and the Search of a Baroque Masterpiece is published by Harvill Secker ($11.89).