Don't Polish the Pedestal

Yesterday, I tendered that we are all too keen to defend the creatures we know as composers (but never knew as men and women). Mahler, I maintain, was no saint; neither was Alma Mahler an incurable sinner. Others, like Alma, are easy targets. The music and Nazism minefield, through which many have skipped this year with Wagner, will doubtless be reopened next year as we celebrate Strauss's 150. I have sought to address some of those issues in my piece for the January 2014 issue of Opera Now 'Flirting with History' (about which more details anon).

Reading John Eliot Gardiner's intense book on Bach, Music in the Castle of Heaven, I discovered a well reappraisal of the man:

Ever since Peter Shaffer's play Amadeus (1979), we have gradually got used to the idea of a disassociation (albeit conjectural) between a puerile jokester in a state of arrested development and the 'divine' musician we revere as Mozart. However much his doting admirers genuflect before Richard Wagner as a composer, even they, sooner or later, have to come to terms with the inconvenient evidence that he was an abominable human being. Similarly, we should debunk once and for all the idea that Bach in his personal and professional life was some kind of paragon, the Fifth Evangelist of his 19th-century compatriots, the living embodiment of the intense religious faith and 'real presence' that his music seemed to transmit.

It is a weakness spurred by too much new historicism in our reading of composer's lives and works. I am more guilty of it than anyone. Indeed, being present, presenting a paper at the National Gallery's Study Day for Facing the Modern on 30 November, it was clear that, where structuralism once thrived, new-historicism is now de rigueur. Constantly, particularly in Vienna studies, academics, commentators, people like me, seek to build bridges between disciplines, belying the claim that writing about music is like dancing about architecture, because in Vienna you seem to be able to do those things simultaneously.

What's significant about Gardiner's book on Bach is that it celebrates the lack of context we have of Bach's life – 'the man is all too obviously flawed, disappointingly ordinary and in many ways still invisible to us', he writes in the Preface to Music in the Castle of Heaven – focussing instead on the music. How rare, now, within books published outside university presses, for someone to do that. Of course, Gardiner's name brings certain clout, a Penguin contract and all that entails. Could someone without that name be permitted the same freedoms? I hope so. Moreover, I want to see a return to analysis of the musical text, rather than the biography, as the first port of call. I, for one, would do well to heed that example.

Often, of course, as I found looking at Mahler's Ninth Symphony this summer for the Salzburg Festival, music and biography can be inextricably linked. Rather than relying on the events of Mahler's life, I went back to the score to endorse my reading that the Ninth Symphony is a valedictory work, not necessarily from Mahler personally, but he certainly intended to focus on that theme. If we are brave enough to abandon biographical crutches and think syntactically, we find fragmentation, diminution and evaporation in all levels of that Symphony’s musical construction: a far cry from the cyclical procedures and ‘immense breadth’ of the Eighth Symphony.

It's that kind of focus Gardiner brings to Bach, looking at word painting, the patterns of the Lutheran year and repeated musical tropes – 'with another of those twirling-whirling figures in the woodwind suggestive of a grotesque game of Blind Man's Buff' is how he describes the 'mock coronation' of Christ in the John Passion. You may find fault with his book. It is skewed, too focussed on the religious and not enough on the instrumental music, mirroring Gardiner's own performance history of the works. The cantatas, in particular, dominate, as they must have done Bach's life. Yet while you will certainly miss investigation into the Brandenburg Concertos, the Cello Suites, the 48, it is only because Gardiner maintains such a keen eye on the inner workings of the works with which he is so intimately familiar. Click here to order a copy of Music in the Castle of Heaven.

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