(1) ORGAN RESTORATION, FRANK MENTO; (2) REPORT ON “ALBERT SCHWEITZER AND THE MUSIC OF BACH” BY GEORGE SEAVER
August 14, 2009 © by Susan Burkhalter
(1) I recently received an e-mail from Frank Mento, a BACH.com community member who is an organist playing a Cavaille-Coll in Paris, in which he said
Dear Susan,
(Sent July 20th). I have good news for you ! The organ at Saint-Jean de Montmartre Church http://orgue.free.fr/a18o7.html in Paris, France, where I am organist is finally going to be restored. The City of Paris appointed the organbuilder Yves Fossaert http://orgues-fossaert.com/ to conduct this operation. This project is entirely financed by the City of Paris. Work begins on August 17, 2009, and will last approximately one year.
I hope that this information will interest the blog readers and Internauts.
Best regards,
Frank Mento
(2) This is Part IV of my series on Albert Schweitzer. It is a report on “Chapter 17: Music and the Music of Bach” from the book, “Albert Schweitzer, the Man and his Mind” by George Seaver, published by Harper & Brothers, NY, © 1947. Unless otherwise noted, all the quotes are from George Seaver’s book unless they are attributed to Albert Schweitzer.
Charles M. Widor, teacher and friend of Albert Schweitzer (whom I shall call “A.S.”) asked A.S. to write an essay in French on Bach’s music for the Paris Conservatoire. If you have read my previous 3 blogs on Albert Schweitzer which were posted in February 2009, January 2009, and November 2008, you may recall that Dr. Schweitzer’s native languages were French and German, but not English. While he was writing the essay, A.S. realized that an essay could not adequately cover this topic and decided instead to write a book. He completed the book in 1905. While writing it he was preaching and lecturing in German and found it challenging to write well in both German and French.
The 455-page book won acclaim in both France and Germany. People asked him to provide a German translation of the book. However, he decided it would be too difficult to translate his French into German. He started over to write a new Bach book in German. When completed, this book was 844 pages long! He finished the book in two years while lecturing, studying medicine, preaching, and going on concert tours [he must have been Superman!] The book was published in 1908 and translated into English in 1911 by Ernest Newman. Dr. Schweitzer favored Newman’s translations from German to English over those of other translators.
My intuition tells me, because I do speak German, that no matter how good the translation may be, it would probably be better to read Dr. Schweitzer’s book in the original German or French, as one probably loses something in the translation.
A.S.’s purpose for writing this Bach book was to provide “an explanation of the real nature of Bach’s music and a discussion of the correct method of rendering it,” said George Seaver.
I. Bach’s composing methods; descriptions of his music and comparisons to that of other composers. How his music should be played. The Chorale Preludes and church music, showing the influence of Pachelbel, Bohm, and Buxtehude:
On p. 257 George Seaver tells how Bach wrote his Chorale Preludes: “Schweitzer says that Bach alone, ‘almost before he had ceased to be their apprentice,’ realized that the true Chorale Prelude must bring out the poetry that gives the melody its name, and points out that Bach created no new forms, but that he took the three main formal types: the “motivistic” of Pachelbel; the “coloristic” of Bohm; the “melodic core” of Buxtehude’s free fantasias,–and did what none of them could do, by making something more of them than form, and by infusing them with a spirit that ‘had the secret of making tones speak.’ “
Dr. Schweitzer believed that Bach’s Chorales, Cantatas, and Passions were his greatest works.
George Seaver relates that A.S. marveled at Bach’s talent for reflecting the text in his music, “as in clear running water.” As an example of this, “Schweitzer cites, as one of the most remarkable examples of Bach’s power of declamation, the arioso-like opening recitative of the cantata to Isaiah lv, 10 and 11, “ [“J.S. Bach,” vol. ii, p. 26-28]
A.S. describes the origins of the chorale texts and chorale melodies. He explains how the organ was used for congregational singing after the Reformation. He tracks the “musical evolution” of the cantata, chorale prelude, and the Passion music “before Bach’s time.” He explains how Bach’s church music was influenced by Pachelbel, Bohm, and Buxtehude. Dr. Schweitzer connects the progress of the chorale prelude forms to the development of ideas through history: “The real history of progress in physics, philosophy, and religion, and more especially in psychology, is the history of incomprehensible cessations, of conceptions that were unattainable by a given epoch, in spite of all that happened to lead up to them,–of the thought it did not think, not because it could not, but because there was some mysterious command upon it not to . . .” and George Seaver states that “Bach himself stands in this respect as in others, at the end of an epoch . . .”
Dr. Schweitzer describes Bach’s method of working, saying his composing did not come easily but that his music was created “slowly and with difficulty.” As Dr. Schweitzer explains, “Bach thus worked like the mathematician, who sees the whole of a problem at once and has only to realize it in definite values.”
I must confess that Dr. Schweitzer’s analysis of Bach’s music goes over my head, as I am not an intellectual. However, one description I can understand: “Even to the best musician, at a first hearing a Bach fugue seems chaos. While even to the ordinary musician this chaos becomes clear after repeated hearing when the great lucid lines come out.” A.S. in “J.S. Bach, Vol. I, p. 211-213.
A few things of interest mentioned in Chapter 17 of this book were (1) an opinion on tempo: Dr. Schweitzer felt that Bach is often played too fast, and “organists who imagine that they play Bach ‘interestingly’ by playing it fast betray their incapacity to play him plastically, and so obscure detail and so sacrifice vitality.” G.S., p. 273 (2) As A.S. says on the proper method of playing Bach’s organ music, “within the legato, the separate tones must be grouped into living phrases. This intimate style of phrasing breaks up the stiffness of the organ tone.” [“J.S. Bach,” vol. ii, pp. 311-312] A.S. discusses whether cantatas should be rendered only in a church service, concluding that they may be performed either in a church or concert room.
II. How an epoch culminated in Bach; how his objective art contrasted with that of Wagner and Beethoven:
As A.S. said in “J.S.Bach,” Volume I, pp. 95-96, “He was in fact not the beginning of a new epoch, but the end of an old one, in which the knowledge and the errors of successive centuries found expression for the last time, as if seeking salvation together by genius.” Dr. Schweitzer believed that since Bach stuck to the Italian forms and formulas, this slowed down the progress of German religious music and a more modern art did not occur until the compositions of Richard Wagner. He also remarks on Bach’s musical talent inherited from his family, which “through 3 or 4 generations produced a galaxy of musicians unique in genealogy.”
George Seaver believes that Bach is significant because “his art is wholly objective; it represents ‘pure musical truth.’ “ He also feels that a work of art will be more perfect if the personality of the artist isn’t intruded into the composition and he mentions Shakespeare as an example of this, saying “The soul of Shakespeare remains an enigma.” Mr. Seaver recommends reading an article called “Bach and Shakespeare” in the “Quarterly Review, April 1923”.
Along these lines, A.S. felt that the spirit of his time lived in Bach, and Dr. Schweitzer said that “nothing comes from him; everything merely leads up to him.” When Schweitzer studied some portraits of Bach, he found that the way Bach looked seemed to have nothing to do with the artistic soul within him. He mentions how “Bach fought for his everyday life, but not for the recognition of his art.”
A.S. discusses a different category of artists whose art is not objective but rather subjective, e.g., Richard Wagner. He says “their work is almost independent of the epoch in which they live” and furthermore, “they are a law unto themselves . . . they originate new forms for the expression of their ideas.”
George Seaver says that Schweitzer often compared Bach’s music to that of Beethoven, since the two masters had such different ways of composing: “[Beethoven] experimented with his thoughts . . .With Beethoven the work is developed by means of ‘episodes’ that are independent of the theme. These do not occur in Bach; with him everything that “happens” is simply an emanation from the theme. . . “
A.S. did not believe that Bach’s music was entirely “objective” in that it could suggest pictures and feelings. He disagreed with the musical aestheticists (those same men whom he criticized for knowing little of Bach’s organ chorales) who revolted against the music of Wagner and defined the music of Bach and Mozart as “pure” or “absolute” music. But A.S. believed that Bach was a painter in sound: “. . .All that lies in the text, the emotional and the pictorial, he strives to reproduce in the language of music with the utmost vitality and clearness. . . . He is even more tone-painter than tone-poet. His art is nearer to that of Berlioz than to that of Wagner. If the text speaks of drifting mists, of boisterous winds, of roaring rivers, . . . of leaves falling from the tree, of bells that ring for the dying, of the confident faith that walks with firm steps, or the weak faith that falters insecure, . . . of Satan rising in rebellion, of angels poised on the clouds of heaven,–then one hears and sees all this in his music . . .” [My Life and Thought, p. 82, by Albert Schweitzer]
III. Bach was religious and pietism showed in his works; his feelings towards death:
George Seaver said that “Bach was a deeply and sincerely religious man. . . . sharply opposed both to the pietism on the one hand, and the orthodoxy on the other hand, of his day.” WEBSTER’S DICTIONARY, published in 1978, defines “piety” as “the quality or state of being pious.”, which is “(a) showing reverence for deity and devotion to divine worship; (b) marked by conspicuous display of religion.” However, A.S. declared that “[Bach’s] works exhibit visible traces of pietism; the texts of the cantatas and Passions are strongly influenced by it, as indeed the whole of the religious poetry of the early eighteenth century is. Thus the opponent of pietism invested with his music poetry filled with the breath of pietism, and so made it immortal.” But George Seaver thought that Bach was free from “the element of subjective sentimentalism that clings to pietism.”
Dr. Schweitzer felt that Bach had “a serene longing for death . . .[sometimes] “sorrowful and weary . . . at times a glad serene desire . . .” which was expressed in his music. George Seaver told how A.S. found this longing in Bach’s last composition, a Chorale Prelude from “Art of the Fugue” which he dictated from his death-bed, and G.S. quotes from “J.S. Bach, Vol. I”, p. 224, “the tumult of the world no longer penetrated through the curtained windows, the harmonies of the spheres were already echoing round the dying master.”
In conclusion, here you have an interpretation of the ideas of Dr. Schweitzer on the music of J.S. Bach, through my reading of George Seaver’s book. Mr. Seaver. suggests that we listen to Dr. Schweitzer’s two recordings of Bach’s music on the Columbia Record label. They were done at the Queen’s Hall at All Hallows, Barking, England; and at St. Aurélie, Strasburgh on a restored Silbermann organ. Both of these organs were demolished during World War II. Dr. Schweitzer inspires us with his directive, from his book, “My Life and Thought,” p. 84: “These are the external requirements for the rendering of Bach’s music. But above and beyond them, that music demands of us men and women that we attain a composure and an inwardness that will enable us to raise to life something of the deep spirit that lies hidden within it.”