Marek Štryncl's Thoughts on Johann Sebastian Bach and his Brandenburg Concertos

About his genius there can be do doubt: we have proof in the tonalities of his music, in the instrumental and poetic imagination, thanks to which still today his works arouse in performers and listeners the feeling of some kind of mystical calm and fulfilment while also inspiring a vast number of studies and theoretical analyses of his works, revealing an ingeniously complicated and elaborate system. At first glance it would seem that such success and the ability to speak to the listener is something relative, dependent on historical factors. After all, Bach's works were in his own time considered for the most part to be old-fashioned. At an organ competition, in which he came up against the likes of Georg Philipp Telemann and Christoph Graupner, he was labelled a fossil and ended up in last place. That certainly didn't happen because of his skill as a performer; the stumbling block proved rather to be his composing. Up until the end of his life his creative work reacted really very little to the changes brought on by "modern" styles.

Paradoxically, it was precisely this that became one of the reasons for the particular fame he has achieved in the 20th century - he always remained true to his craftsmanship, which he had honed to such perfection that it actually needed no theoretical innovation. Such would rather have destroyed or at the very least impaired him. By this I do not mean to say that those composers who were quick to adapt and react to the modern trends of those times were worse or less "intellectual" than Bach. It is just that their genius revealed itself in a different way. The point is simply this-and it may sound a bit surprising: Bach was a somewhat atypical Baroque composer.

If however we make an attempt to put to the text our current and uncritically accepted view that Bach is the best and most typical of Baroque composers, we will find it difficult, in assessing Bach as a composer, to get rid of a problem which his contemporaries also came up against. It is a matter of two conflicting judgements on Bach's art. On the one hand, for example, one of his colleagues, the son of the famous organist Johann Adolf Scheibe, attacked Bach's compositions in 1737 as follows: "A musical composition must be pleasant and caress the ear, and it must at the same time satisfy reason. . . Musicians must think naturally, reasonably and nobly. . . . This great man (J.S. Bach) might have been admired by the whole world, had he been more pleasant and had he not by their excessive complexities and entanglements deprived his compositions of naturalness, had he had not obscured their beauty by excessive affectation."

Scheibe is particularly offended by what we would today call the mathematically constructed ideal of music, where the naturalness of lovely melodies is excessively overshadowed by and subordinated to an affected harmonic-polyphonic system. Moreover, there is in Bach's compositional technique a hidden religious and mathematical system of symbols, which the average listener scarcely notices. As a sincerely devout Christian, Bach saw in God the universal source of all the beauty and perfection present in his music. Furthermore, there is evidence that Bach literally loved mathematics. It is obvious that as a member of the intellectual society of Pythagoreans, who like the ancient Pythagoreans indulged themselves in interpretations of the world based on numbers and their relationships, he wrought his music into a form which was absolutely unparallelled.

On the other hand, two years later, on the topic of Bach's Italian Concerto, Scheibe expresses exorbitant praise: ". . .the great music maestro Bach is virtually the only one who is an absolute master of the piano, and with him we can certainly compete with other nations. He has created an oeuvre here which can boldly stand up to competition with our best composers and which foreigners will attempt in vain to emulate." Of course, if it comes to thinking up some mathematical formula and basing a composition on it, there are still a few people around who can do that today.

The essence of Bach's genius or rather wisdom lies in the fact that he humbly accepted the level of the taste of his period and in particular the concepts of beauty and good, which are today so unjustly deemed passé. Today we would more probably talk about meaningfulness. Today the concept of beauty is understood as a respectable but inadequate aesthetic category. Beauty has become a synonym for pleasantness, pleasingness or even plain old instinct. We shouldn't be surprised then that beauty understood in this way is incapable of explaining why in music too we must also have the expressive means for ugliness, disgust and the verge of despair. The classical concept of beauty excludes none of this. What is pleasant doesn't always have to be exquisite and beautiful. And vice versa, some acts which abound in suffering and pain can be beautiful and good.

It would seem however that beauty along with other qualities has an objective component, thanks to which it ought to be natural that we cherish for the Brandenburg Concertos a different kind of esteem than what we might have for a kitschy garden gnome.

From Bach's behaviour it is evident that he was aware of the high value of his art, in particular when, as we know, it protected him from the waves of decadence. My attempt to rehabilitate the concept of beauty for today's age will provoke certain protests. What about twelve-tone or aleatory music? Those are certainly in conflict with "beauty." But the age of untempered tuning, for example, used almost pure chords and in contrast to them sometimes relatively out-of-tune chords and keys with a view to expressing the moods and meaning of a text. Bach offers a masterful example of how in his time intentionally out-of-tune chords could help create expressive musical variety.

This also holds true for baroque instruments, in particular, the woodwinds and brasses, the foremost qualities of which were that they conserved the ancient-sounding, uneven techniques of tones in aleatory series. Furthermore, it was assumed that over and above these various differences, no performance should fail to tend toward the dance as its raison d'etre. Lightness and a certain distance were to be preferred. Not desperate obstinacy: that too certainly could be found there although not as an interpretive principle but rather as one among many means of expression.

Will Bach's art become valuable and beautiful only when someone happens to deem it so? Amidst the hard work of recording the Brandenburg Concertos, do I not dare admit that I am doing a good and beautiful thing? Will our interpretation become beautiful only when at some later time it happens to arouse in someone else a feeling of pleasure? Maybe it will miss the mark with beauty, but in that case it has missed it from the beginning, and any efforts to change anything in that regard will be hopeless.