The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
Does a monster lurk behind Bach’s music?
Revered as a god by fellow composers, the German maestro had a short fuse, a filthy sense of humour – and insatiable appetites
It is, of course, perverse to write a novel about one of the greatest musicians who has ever lived. Johann Sebastian Bach is the voice of God in music; the father figure for all the composers that followed. This Easter, there will be performances of his St Matthew Passion in Birmingham, Cardiff, Edinburgh, London, Sheffield, Amsterdam, Berlin, Budapest, Montreal, Vienna, and in Leipzig, where he was the choirmaster, or cantor, at St Thomas School from 1727 to 1750.
He is one of the top three most requested artists on BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs (along with Mozart and Beethoven). His image is on ties, tote bags, T-shirts, beer mugs, baseball caps and bumper stickers (“Bach off!”). You can buy his figurine in three different types of chocolate, and a badge with him in dark glasses impersonating the Terminator (“I’ll be Bach”).
But what was he like as a living, breathing human being?
The statue outside St Thomas Church in Leipzig shows a pious, austere, respectable old man, a pillar of the community. But who was he before he became the great “Bach”? Could one get behind the religious reputation to imagine a working musician, as earthy as he was sublime, with a rambunctious family around him?
This was the starting point for my new novel, The Great Passion, a project that has obsessed me for the past five years.
It is clear that as well as being a devout Lutheran, Bach was a man of appetite. The two things are not mutually exclusive. A surviving bar bill from 1713 shows that he drank 32 quarts of beer in two weeks – that’s four and a half pints a day.
Then there was sex. He had 20 children. Over the 13-year period from 1722 to 1735, his second wife, Anna Magdalena, gave birth 11 times. There was hardly a time when she was not pregnant. One wonders whether Bach ever left his wife alone.
In 1802, Johann Forkel, his first biographer, talked of how the extended family would meet for a musical evening, start off with a chorale and then the mood would change with improvisation, drolleries and popular songs, some of them positively risqué. There’s an early wedding quodlibet, for example, that is full of double entendres:
A bar bill from 1713 shows he drank four and a half pints a day
Große Hochzeit, große Freude… (Great big wedding, great joy) Große Degen, große Scheide (Large dagger, large scabbard)
Scheide is the standard German term for vagina. The whole song consists of improbably big items – enormous arrows, accommodating quivers, full-size donkeys with huge “tails”, and large maidens holding open “wreaths”. You get the idea.
And it’s not just a male thing. Anna Magdalena Bach enters another wedding doggerel into her musical album of 1725. This argues that however well you protect a henhouse from intrusion, it still needs to have its holes bored – a stanza considered so dubious that no English translation of it was published until 1990.
Bach’s passion extended to his temper. When he was 20, he got into a sword fight with a fellow musician, calling his colleague “a prick of a bassoonist”. There are accounts of him taking off his wig in the middle of rehearsals and
throwing it on the floor in a rage. He could not understand why some pupils were so slow to improve, telling one keyboard player: “It’s not difficult. Just hit the right notes at the right time and the instrument will play itself.”
Like most professional musicians, he complained when he felt he wasn’t being paid enough. In October 1730, he wrote that the post of cantor was not as lucrative as he had hoped. He cited the money obtained from singing and playing at funerals: “When there are more funerals than usual, the fees rise in proportion – but when a healthy wind blows, they fall accordingly... last year I lost more than 100 thaler.” In today’s money, one thaler is around £100. Bach was down £10,000 a year because not enough people had died.
He had little time for bureaucracy and was censured for his haphazard approach to the school timetable, sending in prefects for lessons in Latin and theology that he couldn’t be bothered to teach himself. “Not only did the cantor do nothing, he was not even willing to give any explanation,” one councillor complained.
Like many creative people, Bach was most at home in the rehearsal room and so, in order to understand what he was really like, I needed to leave the archives and go backstage. I had to talk to the musicians.
I sat in on three different productions of the St Matthew Passion: conducted by John Butt in Edinburgh, Gotthold Schwarz in Leipzig and Tom Seligman at Dartington Music School. I saw the violinist Adrian Chandler perform a couple of Bach partitas with astonishing, string-breaking attack. It was heady, virtuoso stuff, but within it there was, it seemed to me, a controlled fury, as if the music had to be wrestled into submission.
I asked if I could attend the dress rehearsal of an opera Adrian was conducting. The cellist and viola player were 10 minutes late and Adrian lost his temper. Didn’t they realise that the first performance was that very night?
“Right, let’s begin,” he said. After four or five bars, he stopped everyone with a shout of “No, no, no” and a wave of his hands. “You’re not TOGETHER. LISTEN. There are three rules. Rule one: watch me. Rule two: watch me. Rule three: watch me. Start again. Ready?”
And in that moment, I thought: “That’s it. That’s what it must have been like.” I know, from working in the theatre, about the tensions involved in rehearsing a production when people turn up late, fall sick
and can’t remember their lines. You are convinced the first performance is going to be a humiliating disaster from which you will never recover.
Rehearsing the St Matthew Passion would have been no different, with Bach furiously determined to prevent a fiasco. He would have been utterly engaged; filled with creative energy, passion, stamina and sheer bloody-mindedness.
Watching musicians at work, I realised the great composer was no longer the cold, imposing man of stone outside a Leipzig church. He had come blazingly alive.
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Saturday 12 March 2022 The Daily Telegraph