In the most recent issue of the Guitar Foundation of America’s Soundboard Magazine (which isn’t available online) there is an article that has some real twaddle in it. The kind of thing that sounds impressive and passes for analytical insight, but is essentially meaningless.
Discussing the different issues surrounding historically informed interpretation of the music of Bach the author states the following:
We cannot fully understand the ideas of Bach or his contemporaries, because we, as modern listeners and performers, operate from a fundamentally different historical vantage point—one shaped by centuries of evolving musical interpretation.
Which is—obvious? How everything in the world works? And presupposes that there is some ultimate understanding of Bach that apparently his contemporaries could understand since they were of the same vantage point. Despite the fact that Bach’s music was generally unliked (even if respected) in his own day and distinctly unfashionable.
Does 200 years of performing, editing, recording, analyzing, and interpreting the music of Bach give us a lesser or greater understanding of the music? It took an interpreter like Pablo Casals to bring the Bach cello suites to broader attention. He quite literally found the music there that everyone else had ignored. Why was he able to do this? Probably because he (as an inheritor of the romantic tradition of interpretation) took it upon himself to interpret the music using his own taste and acculturation as a guide. And he had immaculate taste. Though clearly of their time, his interpretations are still vivid and arresting. The rich product of nearly fifty years of practice, performance, and contemplation.
(An historical sidenote: his first recording session occurred at Abbey Road Studios, a few decades before it would become the recording home of the Beatles. Casals (born in 1876) disliked recording and could only be convinced to do so because his political commitment to democracy and against fascism meant he refused to concertize in his native Spain, Germany, Italy, or Russia, effectively putting his European concert schedule on hold in the 1930s. More notes here. I can’t recommend Paul Elie’s Reinventing Bach enough if this interests you).
Very little scholarship (particularly manuscript scholarship) had been done when Casals discovered the suites in a secondhand store. He developed an interpretation from the version of the score he had, and he found deep riches there. Did Anna Magdalena (Bach’s second wife and the presumed recipient of the suites) understand this music more than Casals? A fascinating and unanswerable question. Her cello playing—like every note of music ever played before recording technology, and the vast majority of them since—is lost to history. There is a very real possibility that Bach would have liked her playing more than Casals, but we would prefer Casals (or Rostropovich or Maisky or Ma or whoever you like). There is very little doubt that our modern masters play at a technical level unthinkable to Bach in his time. (In her defense, A.M. had a lot of kids to raise).
Later in the article he quotes a paper that gives a symbolic analysis of the fugue from BWV 997 (it concerns the elements in the first ten seconds of this recording). According to one person, this music apparently means the following:
- Five diatonic notes: symbolic of human perfection
- Saltus duriusculus / descending seventh: representing the Fall of Adam
- Five chromatic notes [in the higher voice]: signifying pain and suffering after the Fall
- Quotation of the chorale theme Nun komm, der Heiden Heiland, evoking the salvific act of Christ
- Resolution through a descending fifth: symbolizing Divine Grace [also one of the most formulaic of all cadence gestures]
I haven’t read the paper this comes from so I can’t answer if there is any documentary evidence from Bach that this is the case or if it is just a hunch by the writer. (I’ve read other symbolic analyses like this before and they are usually based on hunches). I’m also not categorically opposed to these kinds of interpretations, as long as they are presented as interpretive and not as an absolute musical truth. Some performers find this kind of representation very helpful. I get a good shiver from a saltus duriusculus just as much as the next guy. But absent some kind of evidence, or the greatest clue of all—lyrics, we can’t read Bach’s mind on what he intended. Especially not down to this level of granular meaning.
The author of the article can’t take that reasonable approach though. He comments, “for the performer, awareness of these rhetorical and symbolic dimensions is essential to an expressive and historically informed interpretation.”
This is so obviously not true I’m amazed it passed editorial. I’ve played this piece in utter ignorance of this possible symbolism and I daresay it was expressive. In fact, I wrote a substantial analysis of the form of this piece (it’s a da capo fugue, quite unusual) and brought many insights from that to bear on my performance. Alas, the fact that this all happened before the above was proposed means that my performance was helplessly inexpressive.