Glenn Gould’s Interviews on J.S. Bach

The end of a melody is not its goal
Friedrich Nietzsche

Introduction to Widerstehe doch der Sünde, BWV 54
One of the most extraordinary things about history’s most extraordinary musician is the fact that this man’s music, which exert such a magnetic attraction for us today, and against which we tend to measure much of the achievement in the art of music in the last two centuries, that this music had absolutely no effect on either the musicians or the public of his own day. And the strange thing about Bach is that he doesn’t at all fit our conception of the misunderstood genius who was years ahead of his time — he was certainly misunderstood — but not because he was ahead of his time, rather because according to the musical disposition of that day he was generations behind it. Dried-out fugue, like the one I just played, was already becoming as old fashioned in Bach’s time as it would be if one were to sit down and start writing symphonies in the manner of Max Reger today. And Bach, as he grew older, not only made no attempt to reconcile his thought with the temper of his time, but in fact withdrew into what must have seemed to his contemporaries as a maddening nostalgia for the glories of ages past. For Bach, you see, was music’s greatest nonconformist, and one of the supreme examples of that independence of the artistic conscience that stands quite outside of the collective historical process. The age of Bach, speaking in a very general sort of way, was what we can now call the age of reason, or perhaps an age of reason; there have really been quite a lot of them. It was fundamentally an age in which man struggled against fear, against predeterminacy. It was an age in which he asserted, confidently, the wonders of science and of human initiative. It was at times an age of hubris, of defiance for the gods. But at its most poetic, it was still an age in which the wonderful utilities of science and the proud genius of man could coexist with the magical, mystical, fearful rites of belief. And so the art and the poetry and the music of the Baroque, at its best, is touched with this feeling of compromise, this conciliation between the will of man and the inexorable power of fate. But even during the lifetime of Sebastian Bach, this vibrant spiritual compromise, which gave such anguish and purpose and passion to this music, became for other artists of his generation ever more difficult to achieve. And slowly but surely fact and logic, the explainable, and the predictable became the basis of philosophic premise. And by the time of his death, the world was a very different place from that into which he had been born. It was a world which longed to be logical: a world for young man and for young Ideas.

When Bach died, it was not he, but rather his sons who were considered to be the masters of music: masters of a music so very different from that which their father had known. It was named composers like the teenager Joseph Haydn, who were soon to lay the ground for a new musical style, in which all of this scientific optimism, all of this naively logical philosophic thought of their generation would find a counterpart in an art, in which the aim would be not the communication of man with God, but rather of man with man, in which those traits of Sebastian Bach, which parallel music, the realization of the incredible richness and indefinable complexity of the human estate could find no place. It had become an age in which the focus of musical activity had moved from the church to the theater, in which the new art would rationally reflect the rational world, in which it would be required to deal with probabilities, and not to participate in mysteries. This is not to say that the aspiration to transcend the human condition would be forever lost to art. Certainly, it’s the essence of Beethoven’s work, for instance, that we feel him struggling to strike beyond the realization of human potential, but the grandeur of Beethoven resides in the struggle, rather than in the occasional transcendence which he achieves. And it might perhaps never again be possible for us to own more than a glimpse of that inordinate state of ecstasy, which Sebastian Bach never thought to question. And, for a new age, new musical form, the symphony and the sonata were the instrumental forms which this aggressive new humanity built to express itself. These were forms which were based primarily upon the simplification and the clarification of the system of what we call ‘tonal harmony’, and to these forms came a whole new conception of the role of the musical theme. They used the theme not as something which ‘just was’, which permeated every facet of the a work as it did in Bach’s music, but as something unique, something singularly eventful, something belonging to the moment. This was also the age in which the concepts of a clear symmetrical musical architecture became paramount; for Bach’s sons, the theme was essentially an isolated event, related — propelled into a relationship, really — with other themes (other isolated events) by the device of what is called harmonic modulation, by the family ties of one key to another. And these family relationships were the background against which this new musical architecture built its structures. Now, Bach — unlike his sons — wasn’t really searching for concise harmonic definition for the joining relationship of themes. His harmony and his sense of architecture was immensely complex — infinitely richer than that of his sons, really — and fraught with the kind of adventures that hadn’t existed in the musical language since Gesualdo in the 16th century, and which didn’t exist again until Schoenberg in the 20th. And while his sons’ music, with its symmetrical pleasure, it’s measured form, seems to relate somehow to the probabilities of a rational artistic creed, Bach’s music, with all its eternally undulating flow, harmonic motion, with all its vast linear complication, seems to suggest somehow, the suspended, perpetually transient, unknowing condition of man. One doesn’t come to expect great surprises in the music of Bach. One comes accross great moments, indescribable technincal achievements. But one is not led to expect in the course of the work, any moment, any pronouncement, in which the whole work is not involved. In Bach’s music it’s the constancy of event, the continuous line of development, the certainty of motion as we come to expect and to love. Essentially for Bach, art was a means of expressing that state of belief, in which experience could be natively guided, in which only the obstruction and temptation of the world could thwart the immutable totality of existence, in which, however, the necessity to fend against these temptations provoked the drama of human life. It is these temptations and the constant effort which is required to expel, and with which the text of the cantata number 54 is concerned. The title of this cantata, which Russell Oberlin is going to sing with us in a moment or two, Widerstehe doch der Sünde, roughly translates as… stand firm against sin, or something life that, and is very probably by Bach himself. Certainly, its musical realizations — given an intensely urgent and poignant expression — its very opening chord is one of the most striking in all of Bach’s harmonic arsenal. In fact, coming as it does at the beginning of a work, it’s just about unprecedented. And both of the utter movements of this cantata are full of that wonderful and torturous art of intense cross-relation and suspension, which Bach always reserved for those subjects on which he felt most keenly, most deeply.

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Introduction to Brandenburg Concerto No.5, BWV 1050.2
By no means, all of Bach’s writing is as intense, or as arduous as the art of fugue. When he adopts the instrumental principles of the Italian concerto style, he brings through them a certain stability — certain Germanness. They become, in his hands, as vital and as purposeful as that heartiest of the offshoots of the reformation: the German choral.

If that sounds just vaguely familiar, that is not really a choral I played— in fact — that, reduced to its harmonic basis, is the opening of the first theme of the fifth Brandenburg Concerto.

It’s rather remarkable, I think, that even here in this most sophisticated, most Italian of the forms of Bach’s day — the concerto — we find the structural pillars of his writing, that same harmonic purity and clarity of thinking which marks the great sources of German choral writing. By the way, this little gadget on which I just played that fugue is, in case you’re wondering, not exactly a piano, and not exactly a harpsichord, it’s a neurotic piano that thinks it’s a harpsichord, and I’m going to close it now because it’s also too noisy. That same theme, by the way, of the Brandenburg, shows clearly, I think, the great differences in harmonic thinking that existed between Bach and his more progressive colleagues. The theme wanders constantly back and forth, across the key center axis of D major, which is the key of the work, and each time we feel the conclusion coming on, something else happens to delay it. This is the sort of harmonic plan that Bach’s sons wouldn’t have been caught dead adopting. For them, the satisfaction of the musical structure was in getting through the end, in termination, in achieving finality. For Bach, it wasn’t finality that mattered in music. Not really. It was simply the joyous essence of being.