Davitt Moroney discusses his upcoming concerts at Cal Performances

Photo courtesy of the artist

On October 24 and 25, Davitt Moroney, world-renowned harpsichordist and Professor of Music at UC Berkeley, will perform Bach's complete Well Tempered Clavier in three concerts at Hertz Hall, presented by Cal Performances. This week, I spoke with Moroney about his upcoming recitals and the challenges and rewards of performing the collection in a single weekend.

Q: You have a long-standing relationship with the Well Tempered Clavier, having recorded the entire collection for Harmonia Mundi in 1988 and undoubtedly having played many of the pieces since you were a child. How did you decide to present the entire collection in a single weekend? Is this your first time doing so?

A: Bach wrote these pieces over his whole professional life. He finished the first volume of 24 preludes with their 24 fugues in 1722, when he was 37, and the second set some twenty years later when he was in his late fifties. These works have also accompanied me throughout my life as a performer. I am now 58, and the first time I played one of these WTC pieces was when I was 14, in 1965 (the year I started playing the piano). I first played the complete series of 96 pieces in concert in 1989, when I was invited to do so over a weekend, in the south of France (in Avignon). I had recorded the whole set the previous year, so the question was not so much playing the individual pieces as preparing physically for the marathon of playing within 24 hours both books, containing 96 pieces. Since then I have played the complete cycle many times, as well as abbreviated sets of either 12 or 24 preludes and fugues, although I had not done so since the "Bach year" 2000 (the 250th anniversary of his death), so I felt it was now time to climb this mountain again. When Robert Cole of Cal Performances suggested programming it, I was delighted. The whole set is a particular challenge, for the player and for the listener. Concentrating on five hours of complex music requires a certain kind of stamina.

Q: What do you feel that an audience gains from listening in sequence to the set?

A: The Well Tempered Clavier is one of the most significant and loved of all collections of keyboard music. In the nineteenth century it was known as the "Old Testament" of music (Beethoven's 32 piano sonatas being the "New Testament"). There are certain moments in the history of any art form when great intellectual ideas and brilliant technical styles crystallize into an exceptionally significant work that is marked by extraordinary imagination and that defines an epoch. Brunelleschi's dome for the cathedral in Florence; Michelangelo's frescoes for the Sistine Chapel; Newton's Principia; Austen's Pride and Prejudice; Darwin's Origin of the Species. The Well Tempered Clavier is one of these extraordinary artistic and intellectual achievements. I have no hesitation in seeing it as one of the highest points of Western Civilization.

Bach marathons are special and I do them quite often, whether it's the complete WTC, the complete French Suites, or the complete Art of Fugue. I do them because I have found that audiences like them too. They usually appreciate the unusual effort it takes the performer to make possible such a rare experience. Such musical marathons offer a strong sense of our having completed a remarkable journey together and in no work is the sense of journey more profound than in the Well Tempered Clavier; musically, it's a round-the-world trip. This is because of the gentle yet inexorable progression in each of the two books through all the 24 major and minor keys of the Western harmonic tradition, starting from C major. When we reach the end of the final B minor fugue, we know that C major is just round the corner and that we've completed the exploration. The long journey is perhaps tiring, but uniquely rich; and it's good to be home with the sense of "I did it!" The audience feels this very strongly.

But there's something else. One early writer about Bach noted in 1802 that his melodies seem to be marked with such a strong personality that they cry out to the world "I am Bach"! Bach's language is certainly complex, and sometimes strange. Yet it is intensely compelling and deeply emotional. Many people have a deep-seated understanding that this music is not only beautiful but also important within the history of Western music. The marathon of experiencing the complete set allows people time to settle into Bach's language and become fully relaxed with it; they then start noticing the enormous variety there is, and end up understanding Bach's language in a deeper way. Everyone's attention and concentration comes and goes during the cycle; that's fine. I encourage anyone who owns scores of these two volumes to bring them to the concerts. We'll leave the lights up so you can follow the music.

Q: Will you be performing on a single harpsichord or switching instruments during the concerts?

A: If the complete cycle were performed by more than one player, listeners could not avoid comparing them. Similarly, changing instruments would draw attention to the instrument rather than to the music, inviting comparisons that would deflect away from Bach's work. By having the cycle played by a single performer, and by using a single magnificent harpsichord (built by John Phillips of Berkeley -- one of the world's finest builders), I hope that listeners can, paradoxically, temporarily forget about both the performer and the instrument itself. A good "instrument" is, after all, only a precision tool -- as is the performer. However, I am not naive about this; the instrument and performer are uniquely important to the live concert event because if either were not up to the task, the five-hour marathon would soon become intolerable, even stretched over three concerts.

When player and instrument are in good harmony together, they can become somewhat more "transparent", allowing the music to shine through more strongly. This is rather like a good magnifying glass: it is important for seeing something closely, yet its purpose is to help you see an object, not to draw attention to itself. If you were all the time exclaiming "Oh, what a nice magnifying glass!", rather than appreciating what you were looking at, it would be a rather strange tribute to the lens, whose essential purpose is to be seen through, not to be simply seen. Of course, if the glass is not good, the image is blurred, and the same is true for performers. My aim is for the instrument and my playing to bring the music into as sharp a focus as possible. Naturally, I identify the focus in a personal way, as a result of having lived with this music for so long. It's a focus that I have personally chosen as the performer, after a great deal of reflection; and I am responsible for it but during the performance I hope people can listen through me and through the harpsichord, rather than to us. This is not some kind of false modesty. I think I am doing my job as a performer best when I don't draw too much attention to myself, and don't fetishize my role as a player. But of course that is also when my personal contribution is, I believe, at its strongest and clearest.

Q: You've had something of a dual career, as both a performer and a music historian. it must be deeply satisfying to have had professional success as both a scholar and keyboardist, but I can imagine it's challenging at times as well. Tell us about your career so far.

A: Yes, and now being a Professor at UC Berkeley is an intensely satisfying third career. I had wonderful teachers when I was a student, and am happy to give something back to the future generations. It has certainly been challenging to combine performance, scholarship, and teaching. But in the end, unless we are masochistic, we all try and do with our lives what we most want to do, and then we put up with whatever it takes to achieve our dreams.

I don't see these three professional activities as in any way separate. They are just different facets of my single, unified desire to communicate music, by performing it, engaging in research about it, and teaching it. It's all part of the same process of communication. Teaching classes is a performative act, often done on stage in front of an "audience", and as a performer I do that all the time. But committed concert performance is also a pedagogical act, helping people appreciate live music; a good performance shows the audience something about the piece they had not noticed (and could never get from a CD or an MP3 download), and that is a kind teaching. And when the teaching and performing are quietly supported by the fullness of a scholarly tradition there can be a certain solidity that is reassuring; when they are also enriched by the newest and latest scholarly ideas, the music can more easily be presented as if it were constantly new, and freshly composed, and that helps audiences listen to it in a fresh way.

Bach wrote much of his music (especially in the WTC) in what is called "triple invertible counterpoint", where three melodic ideas are treated together in counterpoint rather like a juggler having dynamic fun with three different objects. It is hard to write, but once you've mastered it, the musical richness it provides is very exciting. The apparently dry "technique" produces music that bubbles from the basic ideas like water bubbles from a fountain. For me, it is a source of intense musical pleasure. And my career is in some ways in "triple invertible counterpoint": each of the three strands -- performing, scholarship, and teaching -- has always been equally important. What holds it all together, the glue, is the strong harmony created by their combination. Many piano teachers, I feel, completely miss the point about Bach's fugues when they tell their students to "bring out the theme"; this is like someone telling me to "bring out the theme" in my career by concentrating on only one aspect of my musical life. The three need each other, and coexist in symbiosis. I find this contrapuntal way of living richly satisfying. Is that why I like counterpoint, and why I like Bach's music?

Q: Do you have any other exciting projects on the horizon?

A: There are always projects, big and small! Among my exciting projects at the moment are some new courses I want to teach at Berkeley. I always learn a lot when I teach, thanks to the participation of the students, who ask new questions, or ask old questions in new ways.

On the scholarly front, I am finishing a new edition of Bach's "Goldberg Variations" for a publisher in London, and an edition of perhaps the most famous book ever written on harpsichord playing, L'Art de toucher le Clavecin (1716), written by the great French baroque composer Francois Couperin (1668-1733). I also have several research articles to finish, including one relating to French women song writers in the years 1670-1740; this repertoire turns out to be much larger than I imagined, with over 150 published songs by women, and much of it is still unknown.

On the performing front, just last week I recorded a new CD (for the Plectra recording company, that specializes in early music on original instruments) of music by Couperin; it's the third of what will be a series of ten CDs comprising his complete harpsichord works (over 250 pieces). By the time that cycle (another marathon) is finished I'll have made over 70 commercial CDs, so I am beginning to feel that maybe I don't "need" to make any more. But some new project always comes along.

For 2010, I am also preparing another Californian performance of a major work from Renaissance Florence that I rediscovered while on sabbatical in 2005; it was composed in 1566 but had been lost since 1724. I finally tracked down the only surviving copy in Paris, after 18 years of sleuthing. It's a setting by the great Renaissance master Alessandro Striggio of the Catholic Mass (Kyrie, Gloria, Credo, etc.) in 40 real parts. This means there are five double choirs (each eight-part choir is made up of a double set of Soprano, Alto, Tenor and Bass lines). The closing movement is in 60 parts, the most extravagant piece of polyphony ever written in the history of Western music. I conducted the first performance in 2007 in London's Royal Albert Hall (the critic of the London Times said the last movement was like a giant musical jacuzzi!), and conducted two performances at the Berkeley Early Music Festival in June 2008. But Bay Area audiences will get another chance to hear this amazing music.