April 22, 2025 • 48 mins
What makes Bach’s music move us so deeply, whether we share his beliefs or not? In this episode of Bach Talk, host Ron Klemm and The Bach Society’s Music Director and Conductor A. Dennis Sparger chat with scholar Michael Marissen about how Bach’s faith shaped his powerful compositions. Michael, author of "Bach & God" and "Bach Against Modernity", challenges modern assumptions about the composer. He argues that Bach was fundamentally “pre-modern” in his outlook, with a seamless connection between his music and beliefs. Tune in for a fresh take on the emotional and spiritual depth of Bach’s work.
View the Bach Talk Show Notes here. Learn more about The Bach Society of Saint Louis at bachsociety.org. Bach Talk is a Registered trademark of The Bach Society of Saint Louis.
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Episode Transcript
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(00:00):
This is Bach Talk.
Part of the reason that Bach is so wellfollowed now is that is this is the
profundity of the joy and the profundityof the sorrow in it so that you don't
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even have to know what those areattached to in order to be moved by it.
It's the sound of the happiness of.
Joy that you're, uh, affected by.
And if you happen to have a general ideawhat the words mean and you're a believer,
then that can, that's all even better.
And if you're an, uh, unbeliever and youdon't know what the words mean, um, you
don't care because you just enjoy revelingin the profundity of intellect and fueling
(00:45):
from the sounds of the music itself.
If you are a regular listener tothis podcast, you know that we
love to introduce you to membersof our St. Louis Bach family.
(01:06):
Singers, instrumentalists, guest soloists.
They all play a vital role in ourmission and help tell our story.
Every once in a while.
We like to branch out a bit andget a different perspective.
Today is one of those times.
(01:35):
Hello and welcome to BachTalk. I'm Dennis Sparger,
music director and conductor ofThe Bach Society of Saint Louis.
Michael Marissen is one of theleading Bach scholars of our day.
He is Professor Emeritus of Music atSwarthmore College near Philadelphia.
Dr. Marin holds a BA from CalvinCollege in Grand Rapids, Michigan,
(01:57):
and a PhD from BrandeisUniversity in Massachusetts.
He joined the Swarthmorefaculty in 1989 and since then,
has also been a visiting professor on thegraduate faculties at Princeton and at
the University of Pennsylvania.
Dr. Marissen has taught courseson medieval, renaissance,
(02:18):
Baroque and classical Europeanmusic, and on a number of composers,
including of course, JS Bach. Currently,
Michael is neck deep ina huge project providing
informed, annotated,
historically based translationsinto multiple languages of
all of Bach vocal and choral works.
(02:41):
It's a much more complicated endeavorthan anyone could ever imagine,
and he talks about that and a bunchof other things in the moments ahead.
A few years ago,
I found an article in the New YorkTimes written by Michael Marissen.
It talked about the religion andhidden theology found in of all
(03:01):
things the Brandenburg Concertos.
That piqued my interest,as you can well imagine.
It led me to explore two of his books,
both published by Oxford Press,
"Bach & God" and his mostrecent "Bach Against Modernity".
In both cases, Marissa'sInsight did not disappoint.
(03:24):
I shared all of this with my colleague,Bach talk host and producer Ron Klemm.
Several weeks ago,
Michael graciously agreed to beour guest on this episode of Bach
Talk.
Ron and I spoke with him from hisapartment in the West Village of New York
City.
The idea of your first book,
(03:44):
which is titled "Bach & God",
did you get into any trouble withanybody for not calling it God and
Bach? You've got to get yourpriorities straight. I understand.
Well, funny you should say that becausemore than one person said to me,
and I won't give any names here,
they said they were very gladthat I listed the loser second.
(04:07):
Well, I'm glad you didn't list any names.
Yeah, yeah. I think it's true though,that from a marketing point of view,
"Bach & God" soundsbetter than God and Bach.
But the point is, it's a book about Bach,
the composer and all of theother things that he is.
It's not first of all atheological book, I presume.
(04:28):
No, no.
It's about the ways in which themusic itself sort of projects
religious ideas or reflects themand promotes them and so on.
I was trying to argue against theidea that music is just beautiful
and proportioned, and Imean it's all those things,
but I thought that there was more towhat Bach was up to than what you might
(04:50):
call just the aestheticor just the musical.
And what background do you have that
qualifies you to talk about that?
Tell us a little bit about MichaelMarissen and his upbringing.
Well, I never tired of telling peoplethat I'm not German and I'm not Lutheran,
but I don't think there's anythingwrong with being Lutheran.
I don't think there's anythingwrong with being German.
(05:12):
What turned out to be quitehelpful to me is in my childhood,
I grew up in a relatively conservativeProtestant community that didn't
integrate very well withthe rest of the world,
Dutch immigrants after WorldWar II, and so there was a very,
very strong parochial education and Bible,
not in historical things and so on,but in the content of the Bible.
(05:34):
And so I got a really good sense for,
I had better idea than most of what theBach vocal works, what they're about,
because it's not always transparentwhat those librettos are referring to.
And if you have a strong Protestant Biblebackground, that really helps a lot.
So that was part of it,
but it was very rare for people of mybackground to go to college as one of the
(05:55):
only ones who did. And when Iwas in college, I took German,
not because I wanted to or becauseI wanted to converse in German,
but it was because I wanted to be ableto listen to Bach church cantatas and
understand what they were singingin real time. And that was the goal.
So I have sort of idiosyncratic,
there's basic words inGerman that I don't know,
(06:16):
I'm trying to think of whatthe word for sidewalk is.
It's not coming right to my mind,
but I do know what the wordfor justification by faith is.
I'm sure that comes inhandy in the coffee shop.
Turns out to be quite helpful ifyou do care about what the cantatas
and the other vocal works areactually about. Not everyone does,
(06:39):
but I did and I thought as a scholar Ithought it was very important to know
these things. And so I also readenormous amounts of Brother Martin.
It's really nice that these wonderfuleditions of his complete writings,
and as you know, you wrotehundreds and hundreds of books,
they turned out to be quite valuablefor understanding what's going on in the
Bach vocal work. So that waspart of what the book was about.
(07:00):
But I also went further than that.
I wanted to suggest more generally onethat the instrumental music of Bach is
really not fundamentallydifferent from the vocal music,
just happens to not havewords, but that the,
sort of spiritual and intellectual andemotional orientation of the instrumental
works is very similar. And another veryimportant general point to me was that
(07:21):
both Bach's repertory and Bach personallyreflect a sort of pre-enlightenment
way of thinking,
such that there's a veryskeptical attitude towards reason.
Reason is something you canuse, but you can't depend on it.
And that it's biblical revelation iswhere you decide whether something
is true or not. And
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so that put him very much at odds withwhat was coming to be the case in the
18th century and in Europe where peoplewere starting to value reason much more
highly. But both in the privateBach in the public Bach,
I think the evidence forhis being sympathetic to that is overwhelming that he
wasn't sympathetic to it.
And some people find that idea verycontroversial because it's unwelcome as
(08:08):
far as so-called proof for such a view.
I think the historical proofover is extremely strong.
So that's what the bookis partly about too.
You mentioned that it isintended to be scholarly but not
devotional. What does that mean?
Again, I don't think there's anythingwrong with taking a devotional approach to
something as long as you're upfrontabout it and say that that's what you're
(08:30):
doing. But,
I often been accused of sort of what Iwas saying at the beginning. He said, oh,
you're just a young German Lutheran,so you're defending your guy Bach.
So I said, well,
actually I'm not that young and I'mnot German and I'm not Lutheran.
I wanted to sort of fight against theidea that especially popular these days,
that it seems almost impossible for peopleto believe that you could not have a
(08:53):
specific agenda.
That whatever view you take of Bach issort of your own politics and your own
religion.
And actually my own attitude towardspolitics and religion is quite different
from Bach,
I think would've found him quitedisagreeable to talk to about religion and
politics.
Well, and I'm sure he would'vehad a good argument with you too.
Yeah, yeah. No exactly.
And I've actually been asked if youcould go back in time talk to Bach,
(09:16):
what would you talk about? I said,I don't think I would talk to him.
I would say, oh man, can you pleaseplay for me the Well-Tempered Clavier,
I'd love to hear how you play it.
Yes, exactly.
That would be fantastic.
I'm not so interested in hearing moreabout his views than I already know from
his music and from thedocuments that survived.
Yeah. And our unending search is tryingto find out how he really approached the
(09:39):
music.
But I guess with generalization, Iwould say, for example, as you know,
the Bach had a large personallibrary of devotional
theological books,
and that list was made fortax purposes when he died,
and it ended up being divided up betweenthe spouse and children so that they
(09:59):
could get the money from.
But the only actual physical copy of anyof those books that we know about where
it's is in St. Louis, Missouriat Concordia Seminary Library.
And that 17th centurytheologian Abraham Calov
printed the entire Luther in large printand then in between each of the verses.
(10:20):
Added his commentary.
He scoured through Luther to seewhat Calov's favorite comment on that
verse was. If Luther hadn't saidanything about a particular passage,
then Calov said, more or less,
this is what Luther would've said hadhe got around to commenting on this.
Yes.
The reason I bring this up is anextremely valuable biographical document
because people often complain aboutthe fact that we have so little
(10:43):
documentation of Bach.Unlike Mozart, for example,
we have hundreds of letters and somebiographers complain that we have too much
information about some composers,but there's hardly any about Bach.
It's like two-sentence letters ofrecommendation where he says, yeah,
this guy's a really good singeror a good organist or whatever,
you should hire him. Orit's a complaint to someone,
you promised me that you'dpay me this and keg of beer,
(11:06):
where's my keg of beer thing? Sothere's, there's not much to go on.
But this Bible is really fantasticbecause it contains a large number of
underlinings and it contains a fair numberof marginal comments that are clearly
in Bach's handwriting.
And some physicists inCalifornia determined that the chemical content of the
ink and the underlinings was similar oridentical to the ink and the annotations
(11:29):
of Bach. So it shows that he's a veryclose reader of scripture and very close
reader of Luther. And wherethis is really relevant,
and ironically people saythat it isn't relevant,
is that a lot of the conservative ideasthat are put forth in the vocal works
are also things that similar things areunderlined and commented on the margins
by Bach. And some people say, well,
(11:50):
this is only valuable if that stuffpreceded his actual composing of the
vocal works.
And I take the exact opposite view in"Bach & God" in "Bach Against Modernity"
and say that I know that what the folkswould say if those marginal comments
had proceeded, the would say, oh,
he's just doing due diligence toplease his conservative employers,
but he's really a liberal modernthinker, and so on and so forth secretly.
(12:14):
And so as I said, theexact opposite is true,
the fact that in this publicmusic and in his private musings,
way after he's written the works,
it shows that those private musings thathe really does agree with what it says
in the cantatas.
Consistently.
It's consistently. So that'senormous biographical significance.
And someday,
maybe a Bach biographer will reallyfully examine that in great detail.
(12:37):
I talked a bit about it in connectionwith specific pieces in "Bach and God" and
in "Bach Against Modernity." But I doubtthat I'll ever get around to writing
a full-fledged Bach biography.I don't think I have it in me,
but God bless someone.
Well, you're young,Michael. Sure, you can.
So this concept of Bachwriting to pay the rent,
(12:58):
of Bach being a vocational figure,
it's true, but it'sjust the surface of it.
Is that kind of what I'm getting?
Well, what's the great irony isthat we use the word vocational.
It's sort of disparaging these days,
but vocational comes from theLatin word vocare, to be called.
Bach and his contemporaries were goodLutherans who thought that if you were
(13:20):
following what you were supposedto be doing, that was a calling,
a calling from God.
So I think Bach did think thatwhat he was doing was a calling.
And maybe you said you weren't surethat you knew much German, but it,
it's interesting how the German languageeven nowadays has holdovers from what
Luther brought into it.
Germans nowadays often refer to what wewould call a job. They call it a beruf,
(13:41):
B-E-R-U-F, and beruf,which means to be called.
And it's sort of a semi-dead metaphor now,
but that word came from theidea that it wasn't just a job,
but it was a calling. Anythingthat you do is a calling.
You being a director of The BachSociety of Saint Louis is a calling.
You doing podcasts is a calling, workingas a church musician is a calling.
(14:04):
So there's no doubt in my mindthat Bach thought of his writing
music for the court and for the church,
whether it was liturgicalmusic or secular music,
that it was all part ofa God inspired calling.
There's that Dutch Calvinistreformed background coming through.
No, but that's Luther, too.
Yes, I know. I know. I justwanted to give you a hard time.
(14:24):
We're talking to Dr. Michael Marissen,
who is Professor Emeritusat Swarthmore College,
and of course the author of "Bach & God"and "Bach Against Modernity" and many
other things which we'lltalk about straight ahead,
along with music director Dennis Sparger.I'm Ron Klemm, and this is Bach Talk.
(14:46):
By the way, our guest,
Michael Marissen was talking aboutthe Bach Bible or more accurately
Bach's own copy of AbrahamCalov's Bible commentary
in which Bach wrote numerous notesand corrections in the margins,
revealing much more aboutthe man and his thinking.
These volumes are here in St.
(15:07):
Louis in the special collectionslibrary at Concordia Seminary.
Ron and I have both seen them,
and we want you to know that we havebeen in touch with the curators there and
are planning a special episode onthe Bach Bible in the months ahead.
Meanwhile, next month,
our guest on Bach Talk will bemusic publisher Mark Lawson.
(15:29):
He brings an entirely newperspective to our conversations and
then a very special event,
our June Bach talk episodewill be held in front of a live
audience at the annual Chorus AmericaConference held in downtown St.
Louis and our guest,
internationally renownedmusic director and conductor,
(15:51):
conductor emeritus of the St.Louis Symphony, Leonard Slatkin.
That's an hour you can'tmiss, for the insight,
the stories and the unpredictablelaughter and fun that Maestro Slatkin can
bring. Leonard Slatkin,
live and unscripted comingin June to Bach Talk.
(16:13):
Now,
back to our conversation with authorand Bach scholar Michael Marissen.
We spoke to him from hisapartment in New York City.
Words matter. You are an author.You must live by that mantra,
but words exist in various languages.
So tell us about theproblems that we experience
(16:38):
in terms of understanding what texts mean,
understanding what intentionsare in music and so on,
because of this problem with translation.
Yeah, my colleague,
Daniel Melamed and I are in the middleof a massive project to make historically
informed translations of all the librettosthat Bach set to music and provide
(16:59):
them with theological, linguisticand historical annotations. Because,
to put it bluntly, a number of peoplehave tried to translate them before,
and have done a pretty goodjob. But our feeling was,
as obnoxious as it may sound,that it wasn't quite good enough.
It's no fault of those other folks.
The problem is you really need to havea pretty good knowledge of the Bible,
(17:20):
which many don't have,
and you need to have a sensitivityto the fact that German words from
the 17th and early 18th century thatlooked like they're the same as words that
are used nowadays don'tnecessarily mean the same thing.
That's true in English too.
We constantly run against this thing.Someone will say, oh,
we've got someone in the choir as anative speaker, so we're all covered.
(17:41):
I said, well,
a native speaker actually is going tobe almost the least useful person to
have around because they're going to thinkthat they know what it means already.
And in fact,
they're all the less likely to understandbecause they won't take the time to
really go through it reallyslowly and be careful about it,
not to be abstract about it. Let megive a really simple example. In the St.
John for example,
(18:01):
it says that one of the chorals that'scommenting on the story refers to the
fact that he uses theadverb milde, M-I-L-D-E,
as an adver to describe the way thatJesus is bleeding on the cross. So
in modern German milde means gently.
So when your CD booklets and it saysthat Jesus gently bleeds on the cross,
(18:22):
and it sounds like thatcould be right, but in fact,
it's counter to the very essence of thegospel of John where Jesus dying on the
cross is a great moment of triumph.There's nothing gentle about it.
And so our intuition is as translatorsis that that can't be right.
And so you look inhistorical dictionaries,
and the wonderful thing is that there'ssome central place in Munich that's made
(18:44):
this fantastic website whereyou can search a word and
it'll search all 28historical dictionaries.
Wow. Who needs AI.
No, exactly.
And it's brutal to read because they'llhave a 30-page-single-space thing with
abbreviations explaining what thisword means. But if you dig around,
(19:06):
oh yeah, milde in the 17th centuryis used as a theological term to mean
copious or generous.
Quite the opposite.
And Luther uses the word that way in histranslation of the Hebrew Bible in the
Psalms in some cases. Butwhen you buy a Luther Bible,
now those are updated becauseit's too confusing to people.
So they put some other, or they'llsubstitute a word like that,
(19:30):
which means generous, in order tomake it clearer to later readers.
So we felt it was very important tobe not only sensitive to the Bible,
but specifically sensitive to the Biblein the form that it was in Bach's day.
Yes. And in the way that the wordswere understood in Bach's day.
Sure. Well, I found it fascinatingwhen I was reading "Bach & ,God",
that there were so many examplesof cantata text where you would
(19:53):
not only show the original German,
but then offer translations thatyou would find in half a dozen or
more recordings where theauthor would provide a
translation for us and howdifferent they could be.
Well, yeah. I mean,
sometimes they are legitimatedifferences of opinion or something,
but sometimes they'rejust frankly just wrong.
(20:15):
So it's important, I think,
to at least know what therange of plausible things might
be. But just a few weeks ago,
we were doing one and struck meover the head as we were looking at
the new Bach edition,
and you know how the closing choralesin the original scores of Bach,
(20:35):
often he doesn't bother to providethe text in the closing choral.
He just provides the harmonization.
It's only in the separate performing partsafterwards that the scribe will write
in the words. And forthis particular cantata,
those performing parts are now lost.
So all we have is Bach's score withno text for the final movement.
And so someone had providedone in the 19th century,
and that's the one that's in all therecordings and that's on all the booklets
(20:59):
and so on and so forth. And it saidvery, very straightforward. He said,
you have to earn God's salvation.I go, oh my God, that's not right.
Are you kidding me? Day one incatechism, they hammer into you.
The most significant thing probably inthe entire Lutheran Reformation is that's
not the case. So I thought, whatare people like asleep here?
(21:20):
And so I looked into, oh, of course,
that's what I discovered this hadactually been added in the 19th century.
And so we just said, this can't be right.
There's absolutely no waythat Bach even use this text.
And so we provided it with the properstance from a hymnal in Bach's day.
So my point is that isn't always amatter just of translating correctly.
You have to be really paying attentionto what's in front of you too,
(21:42):
to see whether the thing that you'retranslating is in fact even plausible in
the first place. And so that was aparticularly good example of that.
Obviously,
if you want to sing these in English,
which is we don't do much anymorethanks to supertitles and subtitles,
you have to have some sortof sense of meter and rhyme.
(22:02):
And so this must be where alot of the problems happen.
Yeah,
those are the most severe ones becauseno matter if you're Shakespeare himself,
it's absolutely impossible to translateinto another language where you
maintain the rhythm and the rhyme scheme. It's actually absolutely impossible.
So I'm not saying you shouldn't do it.
(22:23):
We didn't want to do that because we wereconcerned with what it actually meant.
If you care about what itmeans, you won't do that.
But if you want to provide a goodexperience for people where you change the
meaning of it, but at least theyunderstand what they're singing.
I'm not knocking that, but I would saythat's more of a devotional. Again,
there's nothing wrong withbeing devotional, but that's a devotional exercise.
If you want to sing what Bach actuallyset out what he was actually up to,
(22:46):
then I think you just have to do it inGerman and provide a decent translation.
Sure. Let me ask,
are you doing all of this toprovide performing additions
for the marketplace or justto prepare performances?
They're made available for free toperformers, to people teaching classes,
(23:07):
to people making booklets. Weput them on the web as something,
or you can even look at on your phonein a concert with the dark setting and
so on and so forth. But we also provide a,
you can download a Word document that youcan then reformat it into your printed
program if you want.
And we even made a so-calledJSON e-version of it that's
(23:29):
machine-readable.
So we're trying to makeit just as available to as many people as possible for
free. And we've been verydelighted, for example, that,
I dunno if you know this seriesin the Netherlands, All of Bach,
where they're recording all1200 works of Bach on videos,
they've done about four or 500.
Is this the NetherlandsBach Society doing this?
Yeah, exactly.
And they've been using these nowas much whenever they're available.
(23:52):
And if they're not available,then they go to someone else.
So we're very happy about the fact thatfor decades people have been studying
so-called historical performancepractice. What kind of organ did they use?
If you played the note A,
how many times did the air vibrateper second when you do that?
Or how many people were in the choirand should you play with vibrato or not?
(24:13):
And what kind of oboe is this and whatis an oboe da caccia nd so on and so
forth.
And enormous amounts ofhistorical research has been done on that and has been
incorporated into some performances.
But what's been really weak actually,
is the actual contentof the text. So that's,
we're trying to provide that little,or big, I should say, missing piece.
(24:35):
That's the voice of Dr. Michael Marissen,
professor emeritus at Swarthmore College.
He's an author and we're talking to himabout "Bach & God" and a whole lot of
other things along with music directorDennis Sparger of our Bach Society.
I'm Ron Klemm. This is Bach talk.
(25:05):
It must have been almost a year ago thatI found some type of an announcement
about your book "Bach and Modernity",
maybe covered in the New YorkTimes or the Wall Street Journal.
I thought I should get a copy of this.So I ordered one and read through it,
and it was interesting tofind that right off the bat,
you're defining what the threewords mean in "Bach Against
(25:28):
Modernity". Would you liketo say something about that?
Yeah, well, I mean, people havevery strong feelings about Bach.
I hardly need to tell you that.
Sure.
And people don't like being,
don't like their hero to be talked aboutin a way that's different from what
they're accustomed to. I mean,this came up in the first place.
I think it's talked a little bit aboutin the preface that I joke with all my
(25:50):
colleagues,
you suddenly get old when you getinvited to give the keynote address at
conferences. I was asked to do akeynote address at a conference,
a wonderful conference in Massachusettsthat was on Bach and global
modernism and postmodernism andwhatnot. I was going to turn it down.
And then my spouse, a wonderful novelist,she said to me, oh, well and said,
(26:14):
why are you going to turn down?I said, because as you know,
I don't think that Bach isa modern figure. I think he's an anti-modern figure.
I can't justly accept such an invitationto speak there. I don't think.
She said,
why don't you tell them that you'd liketo talk about Bach against modernity?
There you go. See, that's whyour wives are always right.
Which was a brilliant idea. And soI was a little apprehensive about,
(26:38):
but I thought, well, I'll give it a shot.
And they were a little bit taken aback,but that sounds really interesting.
And at the very least, that oughtto generate a lot of discussion.
And so that's what I did. But asyou were starting to allude to that,
all three of those words,
you could have a fist fightabout what exactly they mean?
Yes.
By Bach, do you mean Bach theman, or do you mean his music,
(26:59):
or do you mean both by against, do youmean just in contrast to, or do you mean.
Vehemently opposed?
Vehemently opposed to, andmodernity. What does modernity mean?
That's the hardest one of all, too.
Yeah, well explain that one. Whatdo you mean when you use modernity?
What are you talking about?
Well, I was mostly talkingabout what kinds of things have,
(27:23):
if you took an undergraduate historyclass and they talked about pre-modernity
and modernity, what are the thingsthey most likely would focus on there?
And probably one of the central ones thatwe alluded to at the beginning of our
talking today,
the extent to which you're willingto exalt the use of reason or not.
That's a real, really strongmarker of a modern thinker.
(27:48):
Others involve things like the extentto which you think that humanity is
necessarily perfectable,
but at least whether they really cangenuinely get better or not by applying
themselves to their situations and so on,
which was a kind of optimismthat modern thinkers had.
It seems very much not in evidencein Bach, with a very dim view of,
(28:11):
not quite dim a view of humannature as Calvinists do, but
the Lutherans in Bach's day had a pretty,
the conservative ones had a pretty dimview of human nature. And that makes them
I guess, also I would say pre-modern,
a little bit less clear isthe attitude towards not only
this particularly monarchy, butmore specifically what Germans
(28:33):
called rangordnun, whichis a wonderful phrase,
rangordnun has to do withhierarchies and the idea
is that just to give, onesociety, of course, hierarchical,
we have a king at the topand subjects underneath them,
and then manual labor is beneath them.
And Luther's own view was that itwas foolish to promote equality
(28:56):
among people on earth because inequalitywas a necessary evil in a fallen
world.
And that it's only in the afterlife thatyou're going to have genuine equality,
but if you pursue it too heavily in thepresent world, you're just sewing chaos.
And chaos is really a bad thing.
Pre-modern thinkers tend tohave a much more respect for
(29:18):
social hierarchy, whereas modernthinkers tend to be more skeptical,
although Calvinists are a little bitmore tricky on that because they're
skeptical of monarchy.Whereas the Lutherans were,
Bach was a complete monarchist.
The idea that he would've been in favorof modern equity and quality and so on.
Again, I don't see any evidence of thateither in the vocal works or in his
(29:41):
annotations, in his Bible,and so on and so forth.
Let me turn the page inyour book, so to speak.
One of the things that really struck me,
and this is because as performerswe're concerned about why
our audiences come to hearperformances of Bach or other great
composers, what arethey getting out of it?
(30:04):
And you really bring up thisconcept of comfort and joy that
affects both of Bach lovers whocome for religious or spiritual
enrichment, and those whodon't have any faith at all,
and the words may notaffect them the same way,
but they also get comfort andjoy out of all of this, you
(30:25):
Richard Russo saying, most peopledon't want to be entertained.
They want to be comforted.
That's true. I think that's a veryprofound observation that Russo made,
I think, and I thinkthat does speak to why B
has such a wide range of peoplewho are interested in him nowadays.
It's almost inconceivable to a lot ofpeople why Bach wasn't the first choice
(30:48):
among the Leipzigers when they weretrying to get the director of music of
Leipzig in 1723, butif you're a historian,
you can understand it a little more.
Telemann
was
their
top
choice,
who
is
a
wonderful
composer.
Absolutely
wonderful
composer,
but
part
of the reason that I think that Bach isso well liked nowadays is a combination
of things, because we have differentvalues than people did in Bach's day.
(31:12):
In Bach's day, there was no greatvalue placed on originality.
Bach can't help being original.
He can't help himself.
And as I never tire saying, he has anextremely original voice, so to speak,
a voice in quotation marks, withoutactually, what he has to say though,
however, is not personal to him.
(31:33):
What he's doing with his very individualsounding voice is promoting and
reflecting communal ideas, notpersonal ideas. So Telemann
was very good at these things too,
but Telemann and variousother German composers,
they didn't have quite as powerfulidiosyncratic voices as Bach does and the
(31:56):
depth of emotion with which they setthe music, again, it's wonderful.
I love their music,
but it just doesn't have the depth ofintellect and emotion that Bach does.
And so I think that part of thereason that Bach is so well followed
now is the profundity of the joyand the profundity of the sorrow.
(32:16):
And it's that you don't even have to knowwhat those are attached to in order to
be moved by it.
The sound of the happiness and the soundof the joy that you're affected by.
And if you happen to have a generalidea what the words mean and you're a
believer, then that's all even better.
And if you're an unbeliever andyou don't know what the words mean,
(32:38):
you don't care because you just enjoyreveling in the profundity of intellect
and feeling from thesounds of the music itself.
I would never say thatBach is actually universal,
because I think not everyoneloves him, but he, he's a very,
very strong nichein modern music making.
I think because of the great skill inputting things together in such a way that
(33:00):
intellect is powerful,emotion is powerful,
and they're in a really goodbalance with each other.
Some composers can be more emotionalor more intellectual than Bach,
but they don't have this sort of perfectbalance of those things like he does.
And so much of this, I think has becomeso much more possible in the last, what,
40 or 50 years because of betterperformance practice methods.
(33:22):
I remember as an undergraduate,
listening to Bach wasreally a dull experience.
Everything was slow anddark and very heavy. Yes.
And wow, now it dances.
Yeah,
and it's fantastic that there are fouror five really quite good complete
(33:42):
more or less complete recordingsof all the Bach vocal works.
And I grew up in a fairly,I wasn't super poor,
but it was basically in the low end that
was describing before. I mean,
my family is farm hands all theway back to the Middle ages.
People say to me when I was in graduateschool, oh, you got to go to concerts.
(34:04):
Recordings are no good.
You don't really experience musicunless you experience a lot. Of course,
a live concert is fantastic.I've come to love that.
But there were lots of peoplelike myself when I was younger,
there was no concert to goto. And if there had been one,
we wouldn't have been able toafford it. But with my paper money,
you could buy a LP of GustavLionheart doing the cantatas,
(34:26):
and you could listen to ita hundred times. And I mean,
I got to know the Bach vocal worksmostly from recordings first before it
became wealthy enough as a professor andso on that I actually afford to go to
concerts in London andBerlin and New York.
It's kind of interesting that allthree of us come from rather similar
backgrounds with our families,
(34:46):
and yet still have foundso much joy out of,
dare I say, committing ourlives to the music of Bach.
As I looked at your background,
I found that you spent a littletime at a little place down
the street here calledWashington University in Saint Louis. Indeed. Tell us
about that chapter in your.
(35:07):
Life. Yes. Well,
right after I went to Calvin Collegefor undergraduate from a bachelor's
degree, and then studied for oneyear in St. Louis, really enjoyed it.
Studying with a greatconductor, Nicholas McGegan,
musicologist Laurence Dreyfus,
who's quite a good Bachscholar and several others.
And I would've stayedthere, but as it happened,
(35:31):
nearly the entire music history facultyall left at the end of the year that I
was there.
And so one of them helped me switch toanother school where he thought he was
going to be continuing to teach. It. Turnsout he didn't get that job after all.
But I went to there and I ended upgetting my PhD from Brandeis University in
(35:52):
Boston. But I thoughtSaint Louis was wonderful.
I really enjoyed living thereand would've been very happy if
the faculty had stayed there,then I would've stayed there too.
And the faculty got very much backon its feet a few years later.
But in the meantime, I had to keep going.
(36:21):
I want to make sure we don't spin out oftime without having an opportunity for
you to talk about Soli Deo gloria.
And quite often we're under the impressionthat Bach wrote that at the end of
all of his pieces, and thisis just not quite true.
Right? Well, in fact,
I think the fact that it's not trueis what makes the fact that he did do
(36:43):
it more significant.
Yes. And when?
Yes, exactly, because I wasstunned to read. I mean,
people would say he hardly ever did it,and other people said he always did.
These are things that thereare such things as facts.
These are things that easily check isnot a subjective opinion. You can just,
so I think I was the firstperson in a long time to do this.
(37:04):
I just went through the entire Bachrepertory and just looked at every
single Bach score in his handwriting,
whether it was music by him or becausehe did this also in when he was copying
on other people's scores and made anotation of whether he wrote at the
beginning.
The two things they usually did was atthe very beginning of the upper lefthand
corner of the first pageyou would write J dot J dot,
(37:26):
which was a short form for Jesu Juva,
Jesus help me as I do my vocation.
And then when he's done, he writesSoli Deo gloria, sdg. So glory,
the glory of this belongs to God aloneand not to the composer that very
anti-modern too. Of course.
Yeah. I was just going to addthat. Yes, you're right. Yeah.
(37:47):
If you line these thingsup chronologically,
what you find is that towardsthe beginning of career,
Bach didn't do it all that often, buthe was familiar with the practice.
He knew about it, and he didit very, very infrequently.
And others did this. Itwas not unique to Bach.
By all means.
And I haven't studied in great detailthe frequency with which it's quite
(38:07):
possible that some people who did itwere insincere about it or that you can't
really draw any significant conclusionfrom it. But in Bach's actual practice,
it seemed pretty clear thatthere was a rise and fall to it,
and there was a strong pattern to it.
And the more personal trouble he was in,
the more likely he was to writeJJ at the beginning. And the more
(38:30):
he actually accomplished, the more likelyhe was to write in. Soli Deo gloria
at the end, so I thought I reallysaw this as just one more sort of
marker of the genuineness of Bach'sreligious commitment to the reper.
And this idea that I love, it's aphrase I think I borrowed from Dickens,
(38:51):
probably won't remember it now,but in one of the footnotes,
an article called The LutheranCredo in Bach's Mass in B minor.
Oh, wow. Oh yes, I did read that.
And I made a crack in one of thefootnotes about it. As far as we know,
Bach was never wrapped incontemplations of this future glory.
I think he's thinking aboutFriday or Sunday morning.
(39:12):
He's not thinking about in 2025,
they might be doing 30 of hiscantatas at the Leipzig Bach Fest.
I think he would've been appalled atthe idea that these Bach church cantatas
were being,
here I totally agree with my teacherCal Stapert who said things like,
why don't you write your own cantatas and
why are you doing my stuff?
(39:34):
Talk about the, you alluded to it earlier,
but specifically wherewe see Bach's faith,
his world and life view asit's expressed in solely
instrumental music,
you have already made it pretty clearand put down this idea that Bach'sC
goal was to write purely instrumentalmusic. And so we can get past that.
(39:57):
So where does this showup? How does it show up?
And what's the significance of it?
Yeah. Well, I mean,
I think that some of theseLutheran patterns of thought are
the kinds of thing that cause youto generate similar kinds of music.
So probably the best example,this is the Brandenburg Concertos,
if I can maybe oversimplify a little bit.
(40:20):
The traditional biographical view hasbeen that the absolute apex of Bach's
output, both for us and for him, werepieces like Brandenburg Concertos
and the church cantatas werewritten just to pay the rent.
And the church cantatas,
what the church cantatas essentiallyare Brandenburg Concertos
with unnecessary words added to them.
(40:41):
And my view is exactly the opposite,
which is that the Brandenburg Concertosare essentially like church cantatas,
but they lack words, sothey're harder to read.
And so what I mean by that is that,just use one really simple example,
like in Canata 70 of Bach,
there's a really bizarre scoring thingthat happens where you've got the right
hand and left hand of the organ playingthis twisty chromatic line that if you
(41:04):
were just looking at a score and didn'tknow what instrument was supposed to be
playing, you would never guessthat it was an organ part.
You would assume thatthose are violin parts.
And then below that is a verysimple baseline that's actually
being played in the treble, inthe soprano range by violins.
And so what's happened in this pieceis that the role of the violin,
the role of the organ has switchedplaces so that the organs pretending like
(41:26):
it's a violin wood, and the violins arepretending like the pedals on an organ.
And this is what in Bachday they was called,
or the perverted world,the upside down world.
And the idea was that if you representedthings the opposite of the way that
they were supposed to be,
it would be so striking to you thatwould make you question the necessity
(41:49):
in eternity of this hierarchy that we're,
it's sort of like a Mardi Graswhere servants dress up as
kings and vice versa. You'reallowed to do that for a day,
just as a way of reminding youthat the current situation is one
that's ephemeral and that kind ofLutheran thought is then expressed in the
cantata with that scoring.
(42:10):
And the text actually talks about theword fahart even appears in the German of
that aria. And then similarlyin the Brandenburg concertos,
you have instruments doingexacts like in the sixth
virtuoso violas, the viola,the slag heap of the orchestra.
And it's playing these wickedly virtuothings while the viola de gamba,
(42:33):
which is the most very sophisticatedFrench Barque instrument with highly
virtuous music written for it in the18th century. And it's just going
in the background like violasoften do in music by other people.
And so I see that as asort of instrumental world upside down without words,
but it's basically projecting similarkind of ideas what the cantatas was.
(42:56):
There's a trumpet motive thatappears in about 10 or 15
church cantatas.
It's probably the most significant exampleof it's in this magnificent cantata
75 watch and pray,
pray and watch. You never knowwhen he's going to come back.
Right? Yes.
(43:17):
It's terrifying opening movement wherethat trumpet call is played over and over
and over again,
and all the times in the Bachcantatas taught us when that happens,
the text is talking about what Lutheranscalled the third coming of Christ but,
which all other Protestants called thesecond coming when Jesus comes back and
is going to lead his followers anddestroy the cosmos and make a new
(43:39):
Jerusalem and so on and so forth.
If you look up in trumpetsignals from the 18th century,
the nickname for that tune is,which means get on your horse.
But how does that have todo with anything? Well,
it's because the idea is you're supposedto get on your horse in order to go
into battle.
And so the trumpet call issupposed to be terrifying.
(44:00):
So that sort of evocationof that final battle.
The reason I bring this all up is thatthere's a wonderful orchestra suite Bach
wrote for the Calvinist court where hedidn't have church music for reasons that
we won't dilate on.That's another episode.
But there's a bizarre, withthis wonderful, elegant thing where oboes are going,
(44:22):
you can just imagine the aristocrats withtheir wigs on and their lead paint and
beauty spot making thesegorgeous, but in the background,
the string instruments go
there and there's what thetheologian called the eschaton.
The end times I hear inthis orchestral suite,
(44:45):
people play it really softly becausethey think it doesn't fit with what the
oboes are doing, but there's nothing,
there's no indication in the musicthat you're supposed to play.
You should be able to hearit much more prominently.
It should actually sound like aweird sort of clash. And the point,
and the reason is because it's evokingthe same thing that's being evoked in the
cantatas is the end times.
Sometimes there can bequotations of Lutheran chorales and so on in instrumental
(45:08):
music that will evoke textualcontent. And that's interesting.
But I think the most interesting thingare these more general things like the
world upside down businesswhere it goes beyond specific
words,
but has to do with the actual structureof the music itself as opposed to
quoting either words ormelodies. But I don't know.
(45:31):
I wouldn't say it allsounds the same to me,
but I guess what I'm trying to sayis it doesn't sound to me like the
instrumental music is from a differentworld than the vocal music is from,
from the same world as faras as I can see and hear.
Two sides of the same coin.
Exactly. Exactly.
Well, you have been a real joyto talk to and to get to know
(45:53):
and to surprise and a comfort. Yes.
Thank you so much for spending time withus. Been marvelous. We appreciate it.
Yes, great pleasure.Thank you for having me.
(46:15):
The Bach Society Orchestra playing theopening of Bach's Brandenburg concert
number one from a concert in 2022.
We also heard earlier fromThe Bach Society Chorus from
Organist Philip Rowland.
And pianist and box society accompanist.
Sandra Geary, the recording engineerfor all of these musical samples is Paul
(46:39):
Hennerich.
We want to answer your questions, whetheryou have a question for me, for Ron
Klemm or for any of our past guests.
Take a moment right now tocontact us with your questions.
Just go to bachsociety.org.
And click on Bach Talk.
On that page, there's a simple formthat you can use to ask your question.
(47:01):
Or if you prefer, send us an emaildirectly, bachtalk@bachsociety.org.
We look forward to hearing from you.
And again, as a reminder, next monthour guests on Bach talk will be music
publisher Mark Lawson, and in June.
(47:24):
Leonard Slatkin Live and unscripted asBach Talk will take place in front of
a live audience at the annual ChorusAmerica Conference in downtown St. Louis.
Maestro Slatkin is an internationallyrenowned music director and
conductor with keen musical insight.
He has a lifetime of behind thescenes stories, sure to bring
(47:46):
copious amounts of laughter and fun.
The Bach Society Choruswill perform live as well.
That's Bach Talk Live withLeonard Slatkin, coming in June.
The associate producer ofBach Talk is Scott MacDonald.
Special thanks to our esteemedguest today, author and Bach
(48:07):
scholar, Dr. Michael Marissen.
Additional assistance providedby Benita Walters Fredlund, Keith
Fredlund, Andie Murphy and CarissaMarciniak, along with Ron Klemm.
This is Dennis
Sparger.
Bach Talk is a registered trademarkof The Bach Society of Saint Louis.
This is Bach Talk.
Part of the reason that Bach is so wellfollowed now is that is this is the
profundity of the joy and the profundityof the sorrow in it so that you don't
(00:21):
even have to know what those areattached to in order to be moved by it.
It's the sound of the happiness of.
Joy that you're, uh, affected by.
And if you happen to have a general ideawhat the words mean and you're a believer,
then that can, that's all even better.
And if you're an, uh, unbeliever and youdon't know what the words mean, um, you
don't care because you just enjoy revelingin the profundity of intellect and fueling
(00:45):
from the sounds of the music itself.
If you are a regular listener tothis podcast, you know that we
love to introduce you to membersof our St. Louis Bach family.
(01:06):
Singers, instrumentalists, guest soloists.
They all play a vital role in ourmission and help tell our story.
Every once in a while.
We like to branch out a bit andget a different perspective.
Today is one of those times.
(01:35):
Hello and welcome to BachTalk. I'm Dennis Sparger,
music director and conductor ofThe Bach Society of Saint Louis.
Michael Marissen is one of theleading Bach scholars of our day.
He is Professor Emeritus of Music atSwarthmore College near Philadelphia.
Dr. Marin holds a BA from CalvinCollege in Grand Rapids, Michigan,
(01:57):
and a PhD from BrandeisUniversity in Massachusetts.
He joined the Swarthmorefaculty in 1989 and since then,
has also been a visiting professor on thegraduate faculties at Princeton and at
the University of Pennsylvania.
Dr. Marissen has taught courseson medieval, renaissance,
(02:18):
Baroque and classical Europeanmusic, and on a number of composers,
including of course, JS Bach. Currently,
Michael is neck deep ina huge project providing
informed, annotated,
historically based translationsinto multiple languages of
all of Bach vocal and choral works.
(02:41):
It's a much more complicated endeavorthan anyone could ever imagine,
and he talks about that and a bunchof other things in the moments ahead.
A few years ago,
I found an article in the New YorkTimes written by Michael Marissen.
It talked about the religion andhidden theology found in of all
(03:01):
things the Brandenburg Concertos.
That piqued my interest,as you can well imagine.
It led me to explore two of his books,
both published by Oxford Press,
"Bach & God" and his mostrecent "Bach Against Modernity".
In both cases, Marissa'sInsight did not disappoint.
(03:24):
I shared all of this with my colleague,Bach talk host and producer Ron Klemm.
Several weeks ago,
Michael graciously agreed to beour guest on this episode of Bach
Talk.
Ron and I spoke with him from hisapartment in the West Village of New York
City.
The idea of your first book,
(03:44):
which is titled "Bach & God",
did you get into any trouble withanybody for not calling it God and
Bach? You've got to get yourpriorities straight. I understand.
Well, funny you should say that becausemore than one person said to me,
and I won't give any names here,
they said they were very gladthat I listed the loser second.
(04:07):
Well, I'm glad you didn't list any names.
Yeah, yeah. I think it's true though,that from a marketing point of view,
"Bach & God" soundsbetter than God and Bach.
But the point is, it's a book about Bach,
the composer and all of theother things that he is.
It's not first of all atheological book, I presume.
(04:28):
No, no.
It's about the ways in which themusic itself sort of projects
religious ideas or reflects themand promotes them and so on.
I was trying to argue against theidea that music is just beautiful
and proportioned, and Imean it's all those things,
but I thought that there was more towhat Bach was up to than what you might
(04:50):
call just the aestheticor just the musical.
And what background do you have that
qualifies you to talk about that?
Tell us a little bit about MichaelMarissen and his upbringing.
Well, I never tired of telling peoplethat I'm not German and I'm not Lutheran,
but I don't think there's anythingwrong with being Lutheran.
I don't think there's anythingwrong with being German.
(05:12):
What turned out to be quitehelpful to me is in my childhood,
I grew up in a relatively conservativeProtestant community that didn't
integrate very well withthe rest of the world,
Dutch immigrants after WorldWar II, and so there was a very,
very strong parochial education and Bible,
not in historical things and so on,but in the content of the Bible.
(05:34):
And so I got a really good sense for,
I had better idea than most of what theBach vocal works, what they're about,
because it's not always transparentwhat those librettos are referring to.
And if you have a strong Protestant Biblebackground, that really helps a lot.
So that was part of it,
but it was very rare for people of mybackground to go to college as one of the
(05:55):
only ones who did. And when Iwas in college, I took German,
not because I wanted to or becauseI wanted to converse in German,
but it was because I wanted to be ableto listen to Bach church cantatas and
understand what they were singingin real time. And that was the goal.
So I have sort of idiosyncratic,
there's basic words inGerman that I don't know,
(06:16):
I'm trying to think of whatthe word for sidewalk is.
It's not coming right to my mind,
but I do know what the wordfor justification by faith is.
I'm sure that comes inhandy in the coffee shop.
Turns out to be quite helpful ifyou do care about what the cantatas
and the other vocal works areactually about. Not everyone does,
(06:39):
but I did and I thought as a scholar Ithought it was very important to know
these things. And so I also readenormous amounts of Brother Martin.
It's really nice that these wonderfuleditions of his complete writings,
and as you know, you wrotehundreds and hundreds of books,
they turned out to be quite valuablefor understanding what's going on in the
Bach vocal work. So that waspart of what the book was about.
(07:00):
But I also went further than that.
I wanted to suggest more generally onethat the instrumental music of Bach is
really not fundamentallydifferent from the vocal music,
just happens to not havewords, but that the,
sort of spiritual and intellectual andemotional orientation of the instrumental
works is very similar. And another veryimportant general point to me was that
(07:21):
both Bach's repertory and Bach personallyreflect a sort of pre-enlightenment
way of thinking,
such that there's a veryskeptical attitude towards reason.
Reason is something you canuse, but you can't depend on it.
And that it's biblical revelation iswhere you decide whether something
is true or not. And
(07:44):
so that put him very much at odds withwhat was coming to be the case in the
18th century and in Europe where peoplewere starting to value reason much more
highly. But both in the privateBach in the public Bach,
I think the evidence forhis being sympathetic to that is overwhelming that he
wasn't sympathetic to it.
And some people find that idea verycontroversial because it's unwelcome as
(08:08):
far as so-called proof for such a view.
I think the historical proofover is extremely strong.
So that's what the bookis partly about too.
You mentioned that it isintended to be scholarly but not
devotional. What does that mean?
Again, I don't think there's anythingwrong with taking a devotional approach to
something as long as you're upfrontabout it and say that that's what you're
(08:30):
doing. But,
I often been accused of sort of what Iwas saying at the beginning. He said, oh,
you're just a young German Lutheran,so you're defending your guy Bach.
So I said, well,
actually I'm not that young and I'mnot German and I'm not Lutheran.
I wanted to sort of fight against theidea that especially popular these days,
that it seems almost impossible for peopleto believe that you could not have a
(08:53):
specific agenda.
That whatever view you take of Bach issort of your own politics and your own
religion.
And actually my own attitude towardspolitics and religion is quite different
from Bach,
I think would've found him quitedisagreeable to talk to about religion and
politics.
Well, and I'm sure he would'vehad a good argument with you too.
Yeah, yeah. No exactly.
And I've actually been asked if youcould go back in time talk to Bach,
(09:16):
what would you talk about? I said,I don't think I would talk to him.
I would say, oh man, can you pleaseplay for me the Well-Tempered Clavier,
I'd love to hear how you play it.
Yes, exactly.
That would be fantastic.
I'm not so interested in hearing moreabout his views than I already know from
his music and from thedocuments that survived.
Yeah. And our unending search is tryingto find out how he really approached the
(09:39):
music.
But I guess with generalization, Iwould say, for example, as you know,
the Bach had a large personallibrary of devotional
theological books,
and that list was made fortax purposes when he died,
and it ended up being divided up betweenthe spouse and children so that they
(09:59):
could get the money from.
But the only actual physical copy of anyof those books that we know about where
it's is in St. Louis, Missouriat Concordia Seminary Library.
And that 17th centurytheologian Abraham Calov
printed the entire Luther in large printand then in between each of the verses.
(10:20):
Added his commentary.
He scoured through Luther to seewhat Calov's favorite comment on that
verse was. If Luther hadn't saidanything about a particular passage,
then Calov said, more or less,
this is what Luther would've said hadhe got around to commenting on this.
Yes.
The reason I bring this up is anextremely valuable biographical document
because people often complain aboutthe fact that we have so little
(10:43):
documentation of Bach.Unlike Mozart, for example,
we have hundreds of letters and somebiographers complain that we have too much
information about some composers,but there's hardly any about Bach.
It's like two-sentence letters ofrecommendation where he says, yeah,
this guy's a really good singeror a good organist or whatever,
you should hire him. Orit's a complaint to someone,
you promised me that you'dpay me this and keg of beer,
(11:06):
where's my keg of beer thing? Sothere's, there's not much to go on.
But this Bible is really fantasticbecause it contains a large number of
underlinings and it contains a fair numberof marginal comments that are clearly
in Bach's handwriting.
And some physicists inCalifornia determined that the chemical content of the
ink and the underlinings was similar oridentical to the ink and the annotations
(11:29):
of Bach. So it shows that he's a veryclose reader of scripture and very close
reader of Luther. And wherethis is really relevant,
and ironically people saythat it isn't relevant,
is that a lot of the conservative ideasthat are put forth in the vocal works
are also things that similar things areunderlined and commented on the margins
by Bach. And some people say, well,
(11:50):
this is only valuable if that stuffpreceded his actual composing of the
vocal works.
And I take the exact opposite view in"Bach & God" in "Bach Against Modernity"
and say that I know that what the folkswould say if those marginal comments
had proceeded, the would say, oh,
he's just doing due diligence toplease his conservative employers,
but he's really a liberal modernthinker, and so on and so forth secretly.
(12:14):
And so as I said, theexact opposite is true,
the fact that in this publicmusic and in his private musings,
way after he's written the works,
it shows that those private musings thathe really does agree with what it says
in the cantatas.
Consistently.
It's consistently. So that'senormous biographical significance.
And someday,
maybe a Bach biographer will reallyfully examine that in great detail.
(12:37):
I talked a bit about it in connectionwith specific pieces in "Bach and God" and
in "Bach Against Modernity." But I doubtthat I'll ever get around to writing
a full-fledged Bach biography.I don't think I have it in me,
but God bless someone.
Well, you're young,Michael. Sure, you can.
So this concept of Bachwriting to pay the rent,
(12:58):
of Bach being a vocational figure,
it's true, but it'sjust the surface of it.
Is that kind of what I'm getting?
Well, what's the great irony isthat we use the word vocational.
It's sort of disparaging these days,
but vocational comes from theLatin word vocare, to be called.
Bach and his contemporaries were goodLutherans who thought that if you were
(13:20):
following what you were supposedto be doing, that was a calling,
a calling from God.
So I think Bach did think thatwhat he was doing was a calling.
And maybe you said you weren't surethat you knew much German, but it,
it's interesting how the German languageeven nowadays has holdovers from what
Luther brought into it.
Germans nowadays often refer to what wewould call a job. They call it a beruf,
(13:41):
B-E-R-U-F, and beruf,which means to be called.
And it's sort of a semi-dead metaphor now,
but that word came from theidea that it wasn't just a job,
but it was a calling. Anythingthat you do is a calling.
You being a director of The BachSociety of Saint Louis is a calling.
You doing podcasts is a calling, workingas a church musician is a calling.
(14:04):
So there's no doubt in my mindthat Bach thought of his writing
music for the court and for the church,
whether it was liturgicalmusic or secular music,
that it was all part ofa God inspired calling.
There's that Dutch Calvinistreformed background coming through.
No, but that's Luther, too.
Yes, I know. I know. I justwanted to give you a hard time.
(14:24):
We're talking to Dr. Michael Marissen,
who is Professor Emeritusat Swarthmore College,
and of course the author of "Bach & God"and "Bach Against Modernity" and many
other things which we'lltalk about straight ahead,
along with music director Dennis Sparger.I'm Ron Klemm, and this is Bach Talk.
(14:46):
By the way, our guest,
Michael Marissen was talking aboutthe Bach Bible or more accurately
Bach's own copy of AbrahamCalov's Bible commentary
in which Bach wrote numerous notesand corrections in the margins,
revealing much more aboutthe man and his thinking.
These volumes are here in St.
(15:07):
Louis in the special collectionslibrary at Concordia Seminary.
Ron and I have both seen them,
and we want you to know that we havebeen in touch with the curators there and
are planning a special episode onthe Bach Bible in the months ahead.
Meanwhile, next month,
our guest on Bach Talk will bemusic publisher Mark Lawson.
(15:29):
He brings an entirely newperspective to our conversations and
then a very special event,
our June Bach talk episodewill be held in front of a live
audience at the annual Chorus AmericaConference held in downtown St.
Louis and our guest,
internationally renownedmusic director and conductor,
(15:51):
conductor emeritus of the St.Louis Symphony, Leonard Slatkin.
That's an hour you can'tmiss, for the insight,
the stories and the unpredictablelaughter and fun that Maestro Slatkin can
bring. Leonard Slatkin,
live and unscripted comingin June to Bach Talk.
(16:13):
Now,
back to our conversation with authorand Bach scholar Michael Marissen.
We spoke to him from hisapartment in New York City.
Words matter. You are an author.You must live by that mantra,
but words exist in various languages.
So tell us about theproblems that we experience
(16:38):
in terms of understanding what texts mean,
understanding what intentionsare in music and so on,
because of this problem with translation.
Yeah, my colleague,
Daniel Melamed and I are in the middleof a massive project to make historically
informed translations of all the librettosthat Bach set to music and provide
(16:59):
them with theological, linguisticand historical annotations. Because,
to put it bluntly, a number of peoplehave tried to translate them before,
and have done a pretty goodjob. But our feeling was,
as obnoxious as it may sound,that it wasn't quite good enough.
It's no fault of those other folks.
The problem is you really need to havea pretty good knowledge of the Bible,
(17:20):
which many don't have,
and you need to have a sensitivityto the fact that German words from
the 17th and early 18th century thatlooked like they're the same as words that
are used nowadays don'tnecessarily mean the same thing.
That's true in English too.
We constantly run against this thing.Someone will say, oh,
we've got someone in the choir as anative speaker, so we're all covered.
(17:41):
I said, well,
a native speaker actually is going tobe almost the least useful person to
have around because they're going to thinkthat they know what it means already.
And in fact,
they're all the less likely to understandbecause they won't take the time to
really go through it reallyslowly and be careful about it,
not to be abstract about it. Let megive a really simple example. In the St.
John for example,
(18:01):
it says that one of the chorals that'scommenting on the story refers to the
fact that he uses theadverb milde, M-I-L-D-E,
as an adver to describe the way thatJesus is bleeding on the cross. So
in modern German milde means gently.
So when your CD booklets and it saysthat Jesus gently bleeds on the cross,
(18:22):
and it sounds like thatcould be right, but in fact,
it's counter to the very essence of thegospel of John where Jesus dying on the
cross is a great moment of triumph.There's nothing gentle about it.
And so our intuition is as translatorsis that that can't be right.
And so you look inhistorical dictionaries,
and the wonderful thing is that there'ssome central place in Munich that's made
(18:44):
this fantastic website whereyou can search a word and
it'll search all 28historical dictionaries.
Wow. Who needs AI.
No, exactly.
And it's brutal to read because they'llhave a 30-page-single-space thing with
abbreviations explaining what thisword means. But if you dig around,
(19:06):
oh yeah, milde in the 17th centuryis used as a theological term to mean
copious or generous.
Quite the opposite.
And Luther uses the word that way in histranslation of the Hebrew Bible in the
Psalms in some cases. Butwhen you buy a Luther Bible,
now those are updated becauseit's too confusing to people.
So they put some other, or they'llsubstitute a word like that,
(19:30):
which means generous, in order tomake it clearer to later readers.
So we felt it was very important tobe not only sensitive to the Bible,
but specifically sensitive to the Biblein the form that it was in Bach's day.
Yes. And in the way that the wordswere understood in Bach's day.
Sure. Well, I found it fascinatingwhen I was reading "Bach & ,God",
that there were so many examplesof cantata text where you would
(19:53):
not only show the original German,
but then offer translations thatyou would find in half a dozen or
more recordings where theauthor would provide a
translation for us and howdifferent they could be.
Well, yeah. I mean,
sometimes they are legitimatedifferences of opinion or something,
but sometimes they'rejust frankly just wrong.
(20:15):
So it's important, I think,
to at least know what therange of plausible things might
be. But just a few weeks ago,
we were doing one and struck meover the head as we were looking at
the new Bach edition,
and you know how the closing choralesin the original scores of Bach,
(20:35):
often he doesn't bother to providethe text in the closing choral.
He just provides the harmonization.
It's only in the separate performing partsafterwards that the scribe will write
in the words. And forthis particular cantata,
those performing parts are now lost.
So all we have is Bach's score withno text for the final movement.
And so someone had providedone in the 19th century,
and that's the one that's in all therecordings and that's on all the booklets
(20:59):
and so on and so forth. And it saidvery, very straightforward. He said,
you have to earn God's salvation.I go, oh my God, that's not right.
Are you kidding me? Day one incatechism, they hammer into you.
The most significant thing probably inthe entire Lutheran Reformation is that's
not the case. So I thought, whatare people like asleep here?
(21:20):
And so I looked into, oh, of course,
that's what I discovered this hadactually been added in the 19th century.
And so we just said, this can't be right.
There's absolutely no waythat Bach even use this text.
And so we provided it with the properstance from a hymnal in Bach's day.
So my point is that isn't always amatter just of translating correctly.
You have to be really paying attentionto what's in front of you too,
(21:42):
to see whether the thing that you'retranslating is in fact even plausible in
the first place. And so that was aparticularly good example of that.
Obviously,
if you want to sing these in English,
which is we don't do much anymorethanks to supertitles and subtitles,
you have to have some sortof sense of meter and rhyme.
(22:02):
And so this must be where alot of the problems happen.
Yeah,
those are the most severe ones becauseno matter if you're Shakespeare himself,
it's absolutely impossible to translateinto another language where you
maintain the rhythm and the rhyme scheme. It's actually absolutely impossible.
So I'm not saying you shouldn't do it.
(22:23):
We didn't want to do that because we wereconcerned with what it actually meant.
If you care about what itmeans, you won't do that.
But if you want to provide a goodexperience for people where you change the
meaning of it, but at least theyunderstand what they're singing.
I'm not knocking that, but I would saythat's more of a devotional. Again,
there's nothing wrong withbeing devotional, but that's a devotional exercise.
If you want to sing what Bach actuallyset out what he was actually up to,
(22:46):
then I think you just have to do it inGerman and provide a decent translation.
Sure. Let me ask,
are you doing all of this toprovide performing additions
for the marketplace or justto prepare performances?
They're made available for free toperformers, to people teaching classes,
(23:07):
to people making booklets. Weput them on the web as something,
or you can even look at on your phonein a concert with the dark setting and
so on and so forth. But we also provide a,
you can download a Word document that youcan then reformat it into your printed
program if you want.
And we even made a so-calledJSON e-version of it that's
(23:29):
machine-readable.
So we're trying to makeit just as available to as many people as possible for
free. And we've been verydelighted, for example, that,
I dunno if you know this seriesin the Netherlands, All of Bach,
where they're recording all1200 works of Bach on videos,
they've done about four or 500.
Is this the NetherlandsBach Society doing this?
Yeah, exactly.
And they've been using these nowas much whenever they're available.
(23:52):
And if they're not available,then they go to someone else.
So we're very happy about the fact thatfor decades people have been studying
so-called historical performancepractice. What kind of organ did they use?
If you played the note A,
how many times did the air vibrateper second when you do that?
Or how many people were in the choirand should you play with vibrato or not?
(24:13):
And what kind of oboe is this and whatis an oboe da caccia nd so on and so
forth.
And enormous amounts ofhistorical research has been done on that and has been
incorporated into some performances.
But what's been really weak actually,
is the actual contentof the text. So that's,
we're trying to provide that little,or big, I should say, missing piece.
(24:35):
That's the voice of Dr. Michael Marissen,
professor emeritus at Swarthmore College.
He's an author and we're talking to himabout "Bach & God" and a whole lot of
other things along with music directorDennis Sparger of our Bach Society.
I'm Ron Klemm. This is Bach talk.
(25:05):
It must have been almost a year ago thatI found some type of an announcement
about your book "Bach and Modernity",
maybe covered in the New YorkTimes or the Wall Street Journal.
I thought I should get a copy of this.So I ordered one and read through it,
and it was interesting tofind that right off the bat,
you're defining what the threewords mean in "Bach Against
(25:28):
Modernity". Would you liketo say something about that?
Yeah, well, I mean, people havevery strong feelings about Bach.
I hardly need to tell you that.
Sure.
And people don't like being,
don't like their hero to be talked aboutin a way that's different from what
they're accustomed to. I mean,this came up in the first place.
I think it's talked a little bit aboutin the preface that I joke with all my
(25:50):
colleagues,
you suddenly get old when you getinvited to give the keynote address at
conferences. I was asked to do akeynote address at a conference,
a wonderful conference in Massachusettsthat was on Bach and global
modernism and postmodernism andwhatnot. I was going to turn it down.
And then my spouse, a wonderful novelist,she said to me, oh, well and said,
(26:14):
why are you going to turn down?I said, because as you know,
I don't think that Bach isa modern figure. I think he's an anti-modern figure.
I can't justly accept such an invitationto speak there. I don't think.
She said,
why don't you tell them that you'd liketo talk about Bach against modernity?
There you go. See, that's whyour wives are always right.
Which was a brilliant idea. And soI was a little apprehensive about,
(26:38):
but I thought, well, I'll give it a shot.
And they were a little bit taken aback,but that sounds really interesting.
And at the very least, that oughtto generate a lot of discussion.
And so that's what I did. But asyou were starting to allude to that,
all three of those words,
you could have a fist fightabout what exactly they mean?
Yes.
By Bach, do you mean Bach theman, or do you mean his music,
(26:59):
or do you mean both by against, do youmean just in contrast to, or do you mean.
Vehemently opposed?
Vehemently opposed to, andmodernity. What does modernity mean?
That's the hardest one of all, too.
Yeah, well explain that one. Whatdo you mean when you use modernity?
What are you talking about?
Well, I was mostly talkingabout what kinds of things have,
(27:23):
if you took an undergraduate historyclass and they talked about pre-modernity
and modernity, what are the thingsthey most likely would focus on there?
And probably one of the central ones thatwe alluded to at the beginning of our
talking today,
the extent to which you're willingto exalt the use of reason or not.
That's a real, really strongmarker of a modern thinker.
(27:48):
Others involve things like the extentto which you think that humanity is
necessarily perfectable,
but at least whether they really cangenuinely get better or not by applying
themselves to their situations and so on,
which was a kind of optimismthat modern thinkers had.
It seems very much not in evidencein Bach, with a very dim view of,
(28:11):
not quite dim a view of humannature as Calvinists do, but
the Lutherans in Bach's day had a pretty,
the conservative ones had a pretty dimview of human nature. And that makes them
I guess, also I would say pre-modern,
a little bit less clear isthe attitude towards not only
this particularly monarchy, butmore specifically what Germans
(28:33):
called rangordnun, whichis a wonderful phrase,
rangordnun has to do withhierarchies and the idea
is that just to give, onesociety, of course, hierarchical,
we have a king at the topand subjects underneath them,
and then manual labor is beneath them.
And Luther's own view was that itwas foolish to promote equality
(28:56):
among people on earth because inequalitywas a necessary evil in a fallen
world.
And that it's only in the afterlife thatyou're going to have genuine equality,
but if you pursue it too heavily in thepresent world, you're just sewing chaos.
And chaos is really a bad thing.
Pre-modern thinkers tend tohave a much more respect for
(29:18):
social hierarchy, whereas modernthinkers tend to be more skeptical,
although Calvinists are a little bitmore tricky on that because they're
skeptical of monarchy.Whereas the Lutherans were,
Bach was a complete monarchist.
The idea that he would've been in favorof modern equity and quality and so on.
Again, I don't see any evidence of thateither in the vocal works or in his
(29:41):
annotations, in his Bible,and so on and so forth.
Let me turn the page inyour book, so to speak.
One of the things that really struck me,
and this is because as performerswe're concerned about why
our audiences come to hearperformances of Bach or other great
composers, what arethey getting out of it?
(30:04):
And you really bring up thisconcept of comfort and joy that
affects both of Bach lovers whocome for religious or spiritual
enrichment, and those whodon't have any faith at all,
and the words may notaffect them the same way,
but they also get comfort andjoy out of all of this, you
(30:25):
Richard Russo saying, most peopledon't want to be entertained.
They want to be comforted.
That's true. I think that's a veryprofound observation that Russo made,
I think, and I thinkthat does speak to why B
has such a wide range of peoplewho are interested in him nowadays.
It's almost inconceivable to a lot ofpeople why Bach wasn't the first choice
(30:48):
among the Leipzigers when they weretrying to get the director of music of
Leipzig in 1723, butif you're a historian,
you can understand it a little more.
Telemann
was
their
top
choice,
who
is
a
wonderful
composer.
Absolutely
wonderful
composer,
but
part
of the reason that I think that Bach isso well liked nowadays is a combination
of things, because we have differentvalues than people did in Bach's day.
(31:12):
In Bach's day, there was no greatvalue placed on originality.
Bach can't help being original.
He can't help himself.
And as I never tire saying, he has anextremely original voice, so to speak,
a voice in quotation marks, withoutactually, what he has to say though,
however, is not personal to him.
(31:33):
What he's doing with his very individualsounding voice is promoting and
reflecting communal ideas, notpersonal ideas. So Telemann
was very good at these things too,
but Telemann and variousother German composers,
they didn't have quite as powerfulidiosyncratic voices as Bach does and the
(31:56):
depth of emotion with which they setthe music, again, it's wonderful.
I love their music,
but it just doesn't have the depth ofintellect and emotion that Bach does.
And so I think that part of thereason that Bach is so well followed
now is the profundity of the joyand the profundity of the sorrow.
(32:16):
And it's that you don't even have to knowwhat those are attached to in order to
be moved by it.
The sound of the happiness and the soundof the joy that you're affected by.
And if you happen to have a generalidea what the words mean and you're a
believer, then that's all even better.
And if you're an unbeliever andyou don't know what the words mean,
(32:38):
you don't care because you just enjoyreveling in the profundity of intellect
and feeling from thesounds of the music itself.
I would never say thatBach is actually universal,
because I think not everyoneloves him, but he, he's a very,
very strong nichein modern music making.
I think because of the great skill inputting things together in such a way that
(33:00):
intellect is powerful,emotion is powerful,
and they're in a really goodbalance with each other.
Some composers can be more emotionalor more intellectual than Bach,
but they don't have this sort of perfectbalance of those things like he does.
And so much of this, I think has becomeso much more possible in the last, what,
40 or 50 years because of betterperformance practice methods.
(33:22):
I remember as an undergraduate,
listening to Bach wasreally a dull experience.
Everything was slow anddark and very heavy. Yes.
And wow, now it dances.
Yeah,
and it's fantastic that there are fouror five really quite good complete
(33:42):
more or less complete recordingsof all the Bach vocal works.
And I grew up in a fairly,I wasn't super poor,
but it was basically in the low end that
was describing before. I mean,
my family is farm hands all theway back to the Middle ages.
People say to me when I was in graduateschool, oh, you got to go to concerts.
(34:04):
Recordings are no good.
You don't really experience musicunless you experience a lot. Of course,
a live concert is fantastic.I've come to love that.
But there were lots of peoplelike myself when I was younger,
there was no concert to goto. And if there had been one,
we wouldn't have been able toafford it. But with my paper money,
you could buy a LP of GustavLionheart doing the cantatas,
(34:26):
and you could listen to ita hundred times. And I mean,
I got to know the Bach vocal worksmostly from recordings first before it
became wealthy enough as a professor andso on that I actually afford to go to
concerts in London andBerlin and New York.
It's kind of interesting that allthree of us come from rather similar
backgrounds with our families,
(34:46):
and yet still have foundso much joy out of,
dare I say, committing ourlives to the music of Bach.
As I looked at your background,
I found that you spent a littletime at a little place down
the street here calledWashington University in Saint Louis. Indeed. Tell us
about that chapter in your.
(35:07):
Life. Yes. Well,
right after I went to Calvin Collegefor undergraduate from a bachelor's
degree, and then studied for oneyear in St. Louis, really enjoyed it.
Studying with a greatconductor, Nicholas McGegan,
musicologist Laurence Dreyfus,
who's quite a good Bachscholar and several others.
And I would've stayedthere, but as it happened,
(35:31):
nearly the entire music history facultyall left at the end of the year that I
was there.
And so one of them helped me switch toanother school where he thought he was
going to be continuing to teach. It. Turnsout he didn't get that job after all.
But I went to there and I ended upgetting my PhD from Brandeis University in
(35:52):
Boston. But I thoughtSaint Louis was wonderful.
I really enjoyed living thereand would've been very happy if
the faculty had stayed there,then I would've stayed there too.
And the faculty got very much backon its feet a few years later.
But in the meantime, I had to keep going.
(36:21):
I want to make sure we don't spin out oftime without having an opportunity for
you to talk about Soli Deo gloria.
And quite often we're under the impressionthat Bach wrote that at the end of
all of his pieces, and thisis just not quite true.
Right? Well, in fact,
I think the fact that it's not trueis what makes the fact that he did do
(36:43):
it more significant.
Yes. And when?
Yes, exactly, because I wasstunned to read. I mean,
people would say he hardly ever did it,and other people said he always did.
These are things that thereare such things as facts.
These are things that easily check isnot a subjective opinion. You can just,
so I think I was the firstperson in a long time to do this.
(37:04):
I just went through the entire Bachrepertory and just looked at every
single Bach score in his handwriting,
whether it was music by him or becausehe did this also in when he was copying
on other people's scores and made anotation of whether he wrote at the
beginning.
The two things they usually did was atthe very beginning of the upper lefthand
corner of the first pageyou would write J dot J dot,
(37:26):
which was a short form for Jesu Juva,
Jesus help me as I do my vocation.
And then when he's done, he writesSoli Deo gloria, sdg. So glory,
the glory of this belongs to God aloneand not to the composer that very
anti-modern too. Of course.
Yeah. I was just going to addthat. Yes, you're right. Yeah.
(37:47):
If you line these thingsup chronologically,
what you find is that towardsthe beginning of career,
Bach didn't do it all that often, buthe was familiar with the practice.
He knew about it, and he didit very, very infrequently.
And others did this. Itwas not unique to Bach.
By all means.
And I haven't studied in great detailthe frequency with which it's quite
(38:07):
possible that some people who did itwere insincere about it or that you can't
really draw any significant conclusionfrom it. But in Bach's actual practice,
it seemed pretty clear thatthere was a rise and fall to it,
and there was a strong pattern to it.
And the more personal trouble he was in,
the more likely he was to writeJJ at the beginning. And the more
(38:30):
he actually accomplished, the more likelyhe was to write in. Soli Deo gloria
at the end, so I thought I reallysaw this as just one more sort of
marker of the genuineness of Bach'sreligious commitment to the reper.
And this idea that I love, it's aphrase I think I borrowed from Dickens,
(38:51):
probably won't remember it now,but in one of the footnotes,
an article called The LutheranCredo in Bach's Mass in B minor.
Oh, wow. Oh yes, I did read that.
And I made a crack in one of thefootnotes about it. As far as we know,
Bach was never wrapped incontemplations of this future glory.
I think he's thinking aboutFriday or Sunday morning.
(39:12):
He's not thinking about in 2025,
they might be doing 30 of hiscantatas at the Leipzig Bach Fest.
I think he would've been appalled atthe idea that these Bach church cantatas
were being,
here I totally agree with my teacherCal Stapert who said things like,
why don't you write your own cantatas and
why are you doing my stuff?
(39:34):
Talk about the, you alluded to it earlier,
but specifically wherewe see Bach's faith,
his world and life view asit's expressed in solely
instrumental music,
you have already made it pretty clearand put down this idea that Bach'sC
goal was to write purely instrumentalmusic. And so we can get past that.
(39:57):
So where does this showup? How does it show up?
And what's the significance of it?
Yeah. Well, I mean,
I think that some of theseLutheran patterns of thought are
the kinds of thing that cause youto generate similar kinds of music.
So probably the best example,this is the Brandenburg Concertos,
if I can maybe oversimplify a little bit.
(40:20):
The traditional biographical view hasbeen that the absolute apex of Bach's
output, both for us and for him, werepieces like Brandenburg Concertos
and the church cantatas werewritten just to pay the rent.
And the church cantatas,
what the church cantatas essentiallyare Brandenburg Concertos
with unnecessary words added to them.
(40:41):
And my view is exactly the opposite,
which is that the Brandenburg Concertosare essentially like church cantatas,
but they lack words, sothey're harder to read.
And so what I mean by that is that,just use one really simple example,
like in Canata 70 of Bach,
there's a really bizarre scoring thingthat happens where you've got the right
hand and left hand of the organ playingthis twisty chromatic line that if you
(41:04):
were just looking at a score and didn'tknow what instrument was supposed to be
playing, you would never guessthat it was an organ part.
You would assume thatthose are violin parts.
And then below that is a verysimple baseline that's actually
being played in the treble, inthe soprano range by violins.
And so what's happened in this pieceis that the role of the violin,
the role of the organ has switchedplaces so that the organs pretending like
(41:26):
it's a violin wood, and the violins arepretending like the pedals on an organ.
And this is what in Bachday they was called,
or the perverted world,the upside down world.
And the idea was that if you representedthings the opposite of the way that
they were supposed to be,
it would be so striking to you thatwould make you question the necessity
(41:49):
in eternity of this hierarchy that we're,
it's sort of like a Mardi Graswhere servants dress up as
kings and vice versa. You'reallowed to do that for a day,
just as a way of reminding youthat the current situation is one
that's ephemeral and that kind ofLutheran thought is then expressed in the
cantata with that scoring.
(42:10):
And the text actually talks about theword fahart even appears in the German of
that aria. And then similarlyin the Brandenburg concertos,
you have instruments doingexacts like in the sixth
virtuoso violas, the viola,the slag heap of the orchestra.
And it's playing these wickedly virtuothings while the viola de gamba,
(42:33):
which is the most very sophisticatedFrench Barque instrument with highly
virtuous music written for it in the18th century. And it's just going
in the background like violasoften do in music by other people.
And so I see that as asort of instrumental world upside down without words,
but it's basically projecting similarkind of ideas what the cantatas was.
(42:56):
There's a trumpet motive thatappears in about 10 or 15
church cantatas.
It's probably the most significant exampleof it's in this magnificent cantata
75 watch and pray,
pray and watch. You never knowwhen he's going to come back.
Right? Yes.
(43:17):
It's terrifying opening movement wherethat trumpet call is played over and over
and over again,
and all the times in the Bachcantatas taught us when that happens,
the text is talking about what Lutheranscalled the third coming of Christ but,
which all other Protestants called thesecond coming when Jesus comes back and
is going to lead his followers anddestroy the cosmos and make a new
(43:39):
Jerusalem and so on and so forth.
If you look up in trumpetsignals from the 18th century,
the nickname for that tune is,which means get on your horse.
But how does that have todo with anything? Well,
it's because the idea is you're supposedto get on your horse in order to go
into battle.
And so the trumpet call issupposed to be terrifying.
(44:00):
So that sort of evocationof that final battle.
The reason I bring this all up is thatthere's a wonderful orchestra suite Bach
wrote for the Calvinist court where hedidn't have church music for reasons that
we won't dilate on.That's another episode.
But there's a bizarre, withthis wonderful, elegant thing where oboes are going,
(44:22):
you can just imagine the aristocrats withtheir wigs on and their lead paint and
beauty spot making thesegorgeous, but in the background,
the string instruments go
there and there's what thetheologian called the eschaton.
The end times I hear inthis orchestral suite,
(44:45):
people play it really softly becausethey think it doesn't fit with what the
oboes are doing, but there's nothing,
there's no indication in the musicthat you're supposed to play.
You should be able to hearit much more prominently.
It should actually sound like aweird sort of clash. And the point,
and the reason is because it's evokingthe same thing that's being evoked in the
cantatas is the end times.
Sometimes there can bequotations of Lutheran chorales and so on in instrumental
(45:08):
music that will evoke textualcontent. And that's interesting.
But I think the most interesting thingare these more general things like the
world upside down businesswhere it goes beyond specific
words,
but has to do with the actual structureof the music itself as opposed to
quoting either words ormelodies. But I don't know.
(45:31):
I wouldn't say it allsounds the same to me,
but I guess what I'm trying to sayis it doesn't sound to me like the
instrumental music is from a differentworld than the vocal music is from,
from the same world as faras as I can see and hear.
Two sides of the same coin.
Exactly. Exactly.
Well, you have been a real joyto talk to and to get to know
(45:53):
and to surprise and a comfort. Yes.
Thank you so much for spending time withus. Been marvelous. We appreciate it.
Yes, great pleasure.Thank you for having me.
(46:15):
The Bach Society Orchestra playing theopening of Bach's Brandenburg concert
number one from a concert in 2022.
We also heard earlier fromThe Bach Society Chorus from
Organist Philip Rowland.
And pianist and box society accompanist.
Sandra Geary, the recording engineerfor all of these musical samples is Paul
(46:39):
Hennerich.
We want to answer your questions, whetheryou have a question for me, for Ron
Klemm or for any of our past guests.
Take a moment right now tocontact us with your questions.
Just go to bachsociety.org.
And click on Bach Talk.
On that page, there's a simple formthat you can use to ask your question.
(47:01):
Or if you prefer, send us an emaildirectly, bachtalk@bachsociety.org.
We look forward to hearing from you.
And again, as a reminder, next monthour guests on Bach talk will be music
publisher Mark Lawson, and in June.
(47:24):
Leonard Slatkin Live and unscripted asBach Talk will take place in front of
a live audience at the annual ChorusAmerica Conference in downtown St. Louis.
Maestro Slatkin is an internationallyrenowned music director and
conductor with keen musical insight.
He has a lifetime of behind thescenes stories, sure to bring
(47:46):
copious amounts of laughter and fun.
The Bach Society Choruswill perform live as well.
That's Bach Talk Live withLeonard Slatkin, coming in June.
The associate producer ofBach Talk is Scott MacDonald.
Special thanks to our esteemedguest today, author and Bach
(48:07):
scholar, Dr. Michael Marissen.
Additional assistance providedby Benita Walters Fredlund, Keith
Fredlund, Andie Murphy and CarissaMarciniak, along with Ron Klemm.
This is Dennis
Sparger.
Bach Talk is a registered trademarkof The Bach Society of Saint Louis.
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