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Bach at Easter: take nothing for granted

A 74-year-old recording of the St Matthew Passion may seem
completely foreign to our ears, but if we believe in the power of
Bach's music to communicate across the centuries and across the
globe, we have to accept that it can survive a vast kaleidoscope of
interpretations.

Henry Waddington as Christ in St Matthew Passion at Gly ndebourne in 2 007 . Photograph: Tristram
Kenton

Bach equals Easter. There's an irresistible cultural historical connection between the
two, as churches and concert halls around the world will resound with Bach's Passions
and choral masterpieces this weekend. (Not least tonight, when the BBC Singers perform
and broadcast a version of the lost St Mark Passion at St George's Bristol; meanwhile,
the Royal Albert Hall is gearing up for John Eliot Gardiner's Bach Marathon on Monday,

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whose performance of the B Minor Mass will be the climax of Radio 3's month-long
Baroque Spring.)

Thanks to harpsichordist Mahan Esfahani earlier this week – whose earthy and ecstatic
performance of the Goldberg Variations on Wednesday can be listened to here until 3
April, the performance begins eight minutes in – I experienced a shock of the old and the
new, a minor revelation about how the performance practice of baroque music,
especially Bach, has changed over the last few decades. Mahan played me this: Wilhelm
Mengelberg's performance of the St Matthew Passion from 2 April 1939 at the
Concertgebouw in Amsterdam. As Mahan said, if we think we know how Bach goes,
thanks to the insights and excitements of the early music movement, and that
Norrington, Hogwood, Reinhard Goebel et al have sorted out all the problems for us, we
need to think again. (You can, incidentally, listen to that triumvirate of early music
maestri on Music Matters on Saturday.) How can we pretend to understand what Bach
might have done three centuries ago, Esfahani said, if we can't take seriously what
Mengelberg was doing 74 years ago? And that's the point: when you hear the opening of
Mengelberg's performance, your first reaction, as a well-trained baroquophile, may well
be laughter. It's too slow! That portamento in the strings! The changes of speed – he
gets even slower and can't help mucking about with the phrasing! The ludicrously large
choir and orchestra! Wrong, wrong, wrong!

It's a comparable reaction, I would suggest, to how some critics thought of the early
music revolution in the 1970s and 1980s (as Robert Layton quipped in Gramophone:
"We need a revival of period strings as much as we need a revival of period dentistry").
Which is not to suggest that one is "right" and the other "wrong": it's exactly that kind of
thinking that is the problem. Listen again to Mengelberg's performance. Its sincerity, the
ebb and flow of its phrasing, the sound of the choir – as if a whole people were bearing
witness to the Passion, and were themselves part of the story – amounts to the
revelation of a different Bach from the one we're used to hearing today. It's historically
"authentic" in the sense that this is music making that consecrates the moment of its
creation, and is part of a tradition of Bach playing that may seem completely foreign to
our ears but which belongs utterly to its time.

Now, you don't have to like it (and there are some truly jaw-dropping shifts of tempo
within even single phrases of the arias), but I think you do have to respect its integrity
and intensity. No less than any other conductor or group of musicians, Mengelberg and
his players and singers are trying to make each moment count, trying to realise the
searing expressive power of this music within the frame of their understanding of the
piece – and they do so with a wider range of articulation and musical insight than many
other performers have done since, period instruments or no period instruments.

If we truly believe in the power of Bach's music to communicate across the centuries and

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across the globe, we have to accept that it can survive a vast kaleidoscope of
interpretations. That means being open to the continuing illumination of historical
research and experimentation, but it also means being alive to the ways that his music
has been played and heard in the past, and accepting the myriad other meanings that
previous generations of performers have found in his music. For more shocks of the old,
listen to Oistrakh's magnificently subtle, supple concertos, or Klemperer's granite-hewn
Mass in B Minor. There are limits though: where Oistrakh, Mengelberg and Klemperer
find, in their own ways, a truly Bachian range of expression and experience, Karajan
seems to smother Bach in a Wagnerian ooze. The signal lesson of the early music
movement is not to take anything for granted in how we think about, play and listen to
this music – and that applies to the early music movement itself. The Matthew Passion
is irreducible to any single performance, but at the very least, it is about Mengelberg and
Gardiner, about Klemperer and Harnoncourt – and dozens, hundreds, of others.

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