Bach is undoubtedly one of the most enduringly popular composers of the entire classical music canon.
The German composer’s oeuvre has been performed thousands of times all around the globe, and recorded umpteen times by many orchestras and solo artists over the past couple of centuries.
Works like the Brandenburg Concertos, The Goldberg Variations, and The Well-Tempered Clavier have been doing constant brisk business across wide swaths of the world.
Here, too, we have celebrated Bach’s contribution to the aural and emotional quality of our lives with frequent renditions of his charts.
Bach’s body of work has also been prominently championed at the annual Bach Festival, which started in 2016 under the aegis of the Jerusalem Baroque Orchestra (JBO) and its founder, composer and harpsichord player David Shemer.
The Bach Festival returns
The ninth edition takes place March 17-24, opening at the YMCA in Jerusalem (March 17, 7 p.m.) before moving on to Rehovot, Haifa, and Tel Aviv. The cross-country spread is anchored by the JBO and Shemer, with more than a little help from abroad. It is a joint venture between the JBO and Bachhaus Eisenach – The Bach House Eisenach in English – located in the titular German town.
Johann Sebastian Bach was born in Eisenach, although not in the building that today houses the museum. In fact, for some years Bach was believed to have arrived on terra firma there until it was discovered that his father, Johann Ambrosius Bach, had paid taxes from 1674 until his death in 1695 for a different building in the town.
The house was saved from demolition by the New Bach Society in 1905, and, two years later, the world’s first museum devoted to JS Bach was opened with a grand ceremony, naturally, including several musical slots.
The Bachhaus Eisenach has supported the annual Bach Festival since its founding, with thematic exhibitions. Mind you, this time around the visual part of the festival proceedings will be on the modest side.
“The exhibition is very small, and that has entirely to do with the public funding, which is in a mess in Germany at the moment,” said Bachhaus Eisenach director Jörg Hansen in a call from Berlin. “Prices are rising, but the funding remains as if nothing has changed.”
Considering that state investment in culture in general in this country is microscopic compared with Germany, from here that sounds a little like crying wolf. Funding discrepancies notwithstanding, Hansen’s dismay at the worsening state of affairs over at his end of the atlas was duly noted.
But hope springs eternal, and the director is looking forward to an upturn in the festival display next year. “I guess there will be a very large exhibition next year, for the 10th festival,” he chuckled.
This edition may not be numerically significant, but Shemer and the JBO have gone for one of Bach’s best-known works, the Christmas Oratorio, as the festival linchpin. Today, it is widely performed and universally loved.
However, it seems that was not always the case. “In the exhibition, I put a bit of water in the wine,” Hansen laughed. “We don’t know a lot about the Christmas Oratorio. We know it was put together from various secular cantatas that Bach had written earlier. It was performed once, and we don’t have evidence that it was a success or that it was repeated.”
That may sound surprising, given the work’s enduring high public profile. It took a while, but the oratorio eventually hit the big time. “It is a 20th-century phenomenon that the Christmas Oratorio has begun to be an essential part, at least in Germany, of every Christmas celebration.” In fact, not only in Germany and not only in “the festive season.”
The oratorio may have initially been a slow burner, but the composer eventually made it big and has remained at the forefront of classical music concert programming ever since. “There are so many people trying to explain that phenomenon [of Bach’s continued popularity],” Hansen observed.
“It is a success story since 1829, when Mendelssohn first performed [St.] Matthew’s Passion in Berlin.” It is also a tale of sustained popularity that leapfrogs cultural and geographical borders. “The biggest Bach festival in the world today is in Malaysia. It’s a phenomenon.”
It is possible that Bach was a little sidetracked when he got down to crafting the oratorio. “Bach, at the time, was working very hard to get the title of court composer,” Hansen expounded.
“He had written all these secular cantatas for members of the ruling family. It was not until 1736, after the first performance of the Christmas Oratorio, that he got the title. That made him immune to criticism in Leipzig. It was important for him, for his position.”
Irrespective of distractions, Hansen feels that Bach did a good job. “What I like about the Christmas Oratorio is that we hear this pomp for the royal family and also the very sweet numbers he wrote for the [11th birthday of] handicapped Prince Friedrich Christian, who used a wheelchair.”
The director said there may have been a little irony in there, too. “Bach wrote a cantata about the deeds of Hercules for the handicapped prince! The nicest pieces, like “Bereite dich, Zionn” (Prepare Yourself, Zion), and “Schlafe, mein Liebster” (Sleep, My Love) – they are all from the Hercules cantata. Today, nobody knows who the prince was, but maybe he was made immortal by this immortal music.”
Bach may have gotten his wires somewhat crossed to begin with, trying to juggle artistic exploration and lofty job prospects, and somewhat pandering to the taste of the royals he was so desperate to please in order to further his career prospects, but his music has done pretty well since then.
His works have also lent themselves to numerous renditions of various ilks, including by jazz artists. “Three years ago we had an exhibition on the Well-Tempered Clavier in Jerusalem, and we also brought Jacques Loussier’s jazz version of it,” Hansen recalled.
Pianist Loussier made a name for himself across the world for his jazz readings of iconic Bach works. “Bach’s music is timeless,” he added.
Admiration for the German composer’s oeuvre has also been ongoing for a very long time, and Hansen and the Bachhaus Eisenach have been doing their bit to sustain that.
“The museum has roots in the old Bach Society that was founded in 1850 by Robert Schumann, and Johannes Brahms was a member. The society named itself the New Bach Society in 1900 and decided to have the museum,” Hansen explained.
The museum has proven to be quite a draw. “It gets around 50,000 visitors a year,” Hansen noted. For the director, it is not just about attracting the public to the Eisenach institution. He likes to spread the good, uplifting word as far and wide as possible.
“I love doing exhibitions elsewhere, like here in Berlin. Once you realize that music makes people happy, and explaining music makes them a little bit more happy, you appreciate the value of exhibitions. I spend all the money other people spend on advertising to put on external exhibitions.”
Hansen is, unsurprisingly, a firm believer in the power of culture, and music in particular. He feels that it is even more pertinent in the current global political climate, especially after the pandemic shenanigans, which appear, to a large extent, to have faded from public memory despite emerging learned reports of ongoing collateral damage from that most trying of times.
Not to mention the seemingly unbreakable cycle of violence in these parts. “Corona taught us a lesson – which is, don’t let international cooperation stop if you can help it.”
Given the anti-Israel political and socio-political sentiments that continue to rear their ugly heads worldwide, that is a particularly salient and sensitive point.
“Whatever happens, if it is still possible we must continue because once those connections are cut off, it is so difficult to get to know new people, and you have to make contacts all over again,” he said.
Hansen provided palpable evidence of that from close quarters. “We [at the Bachhaus Eisenach] have this with the Berlin Cathedral. The cooperation between us has been sleeping for five years because of corona, when they decided to do extensive renovations of the cathedral.
“Everyone has changed [at the cathedral]. I have the plans of the cathedral; I know every wall there, but I don’t know the people there anymore, and they don’t know us.”
Interpersonal relations, he believes, are crucial to ongoing, robust, mutually rewarding cultural links. That means skirting around extraneous minefields. “Let’s take the lesson from corona, ignore the politics as much as possible, and just continue with the cooperation. Once it’s gone, it’s very hard to reestablish it.”
O, for a better, more human and humane world. O, for a world devoid of vested financial and/or political interests, especially in the cultural domain, which purportedly proffers the public the fruits of artistic labors; a world where creative individuals and groups strive to produce something lofty, fueled by a burning desire to follow one’s ideas and forge ahead to their unadulterated culmination.
Bach certainly did that, despite the aforementioned political maneuvers in which he engaged to secure his financial future, and notwithstanding his recycling of previously crafted material and their incorporation in the Christmas Oratorio.
At the end of the day, it is down to putting bums on seats. An artist can produce the most sublime works, but if no one sees, hears, or responds to them, they will dissipate into thin air. Bach may have struggled early in his career, but his ongoing legacy 275 years after his death is a testament to the brilliance of his writing and, no less important, his ability to communicate with his peers and the ordinary man and woman on the street.
Added to that, Bach’s capacity for reimagining earlier scores and masterfully maneuvering and improvising – he has been called “the first jazz musician” – facilitated the creation of the crowd-pleasing Christmas Oratorio, which should put a spring in the step of audiences here next week.
For tickets and more information: https://jbo.co.il/festivals/
