BACH & friends is a two-hour documentary about Johann Sebastian Bach produced last year by Michael Lawrence Films. While it has not attracted mass distribution, it has enjoyed a series of “specialty” screenings. I first became aware of it in San Francisco when it received its West Coast premiere presentation at the Sundance Kabuki Cinemas in conjunction with a (sold out) fund-raising event for San Francisco Classical Voice. Next month it will be screened as part of the Baroque Music Festival in Fredonia, New York (on June 4) and as part of the Oregon Bach Festival in Eugene, Oregon (on June 25, as well as July 2 and 3). The film may also be purchased on DVD from a Web page on the Web site for Michael Lawrence Films.
At the bottom of the DVD box, one finds this text:
World-class musicians reflect on the power and genius of Bach’s music and perform his greatest masterpieces.
Like much of the text uttered in the course of the film, this is one of those half-truths that almost defies you to figure out which half holds the valid parts. There are certainly some prestigious names among the extensive list of contributors to this project:
Joshua Bell, Bobby McFerrin, Philip Glass, Béla Fleck, Hilary Hahn, the Emerson String Quartet (but only Eugene Drucker speaks), Edgar Meyer, Manuel Barrueco, Chris Thile, Simone Dinnerstein, Jake Shimabukuro, Ward Swingle (both speaking and seen rehearsing his Swingle Singers), John Bayless, Matt Haimovitz, Peter Schickele, Richard Stoltzman, Zuill Bailey, Sid Meier, João Carlos Martins, Felix Hell, Mike Hawley, Uri Caine, Tim page, Charles J. Limb, Hilda Huang, Anatoly Larkin, John Q. Walker, Harlan Brothers, Andrew Talle, and Christoph Wolff
They speak with various levels of authority; and, while we have every reason to believe that they all speak from the heart, there are major problems of incoherence and downright inaccuracy. We are thus left with something more serious than a celebrity roast and less depressing than a funeral.
Most problematic is this tendency to fall back on words like “power” and “genius” when one cannot find anything better to say. It is all very well and good to attempt hagiography. However, Mauricio Kagel already did that with his Sankt-Bach-Passion; and in that case the result was music that could be performed and thereby introduce a new generation of listening experiences. What is missing in all of the testimonials is any sense that Bach was just a working musician who happened to do his jobs very well. Saying this in no way diminishes his merits, and it reminds us that all that matters today is that there are other working musicians who do their jobs very well and that some of them have elected to play Bach as one of those jobs.
Almost as problematic, however, is that final phrase, which carries the implication that, in the course of two hours, the viewer will experience the “greatest masterpieces” that Bach composed. I thus found it a bit frustrating that, except for an extended improvisation on a chorale prelude, all of the music performed was secular and instrumental. Except for his period of service as Kapellmeister for Leopold, Prince of Anhalt-Köthen (1717–23), whose Calvinism took a dim view of elaborate music in the church, Bach was always heavily involved with sacred music. Now, by way of a disclaimer, I should admit that I was heavily influenced by Albert Schweitzer’s biography of Bach and its thesis that just about every aspect of Bach’s composition (grammatical, logical, rhetorical) can only be understood through the techniques he engaged to relate his music to the sacred texts being set in the course of his day-to-day church work. Those techniques could then be extrapolated to his secular efforts. As a result I have a natural preference for his sacred music, particularly the works for choral resources.
On the other hand I also have considerable suspicion towards any rank-ordering efforts. I could care less what counts as “masterpiece” and what does not, let alone the effort of mere language to justify using that word in the first place. All that matters is the music and how we come to listen to it. There are no shortage of performances on this DVD that offer listening experiences sure to expand the individual’s personal understanding of Bach. The good news is that these performances have been collected in complete and uninterrupted form on a second DVD in the box. Once the words have been stripped away, all those friends can finally express far more genuine appreciation of this composer that so appeals to all of them.
Comments