Radio 3's recent broadcast of Johann Sebastian Bach's entire known output lasted about 10 days and was billed as the longest continuous programme ever broadcast. I thought I would dip into it from time to time, as I had with their similar Beethoven broadcast in the summer. But I found myself listening to longer and longer stretches, often in the car on the way into work (usually it is the Today programme), and I even went to the extent of leaving the radio on in the kitchen so that I would miss fewer seconds of glorious music when I returned home.
At the heart of Bach's output are more than 200 cantatas written for liturgical use. They are music by a man who believed sincerely and wholeheartedly in his Lutheran faith, a man for whom God and Jesus Christ were daily presences in his life. It is curious that I, a Jew, who, to the despair of my mother, am now a firm atheist (of the Dawkins persuasion), am forced temporarily to suspend my disbelief while I listen to a Christian religious work by Bach. One evening I heard Janet Baker sing Cantata No 169 in the old recording conducted by Yehudi Menuhin. It includes the lines:
Gott soll allein mein herze haben;
Ich find in ihm das höchste Gut …
[God all alone my heart shall master, I find in Him the highest good …']
I always shiver when I hear that. Someone observed that Bach's achievement is to make the listener feel what it is to be a believer even though at all other times he or she is a convinced sceptic. That is only part of the truth about him. He was not some pious holy ascetic, but a complex, brilliant and energetic man who suffered terrible grief at the death of his first wife and of several of his children. He quarrelled with his employers, colleagues and rivals, delighted in his instrumental and compositional skill, and seems to have been passionately in love (in a full sexual sense) with his second wife, Anna Magdalena, whom he married when she was 19 and he 35, and who bore the last of their 12 children when he was 57 years old.
All of these aspects of his life are reflected in his music, which is inexhaustible in its technical perfection, emotional power and intellectual strength. I had expected that listening only to Bach's music for a week and a half would become repetitive. Not a bit of it. I was astonished at its variety, exuberance and daring. One would hear perhaps a small group of the Two Part Inventions — slight, but ingenious, student pieces. Then perhaps would be one of the endlessly fascinating solo violin sonatas and partitas, each capable of inspiring different artists to ever more profound feats of interpretation and virtuosity. There is the brilliance of the Brandenburg Concertos, the grandeur of the organ works, the magnificence of the B minor Mass, the intellectual teasing of the Goldberg Variations. And that is just dipping a toe in the ocean.
What does Bach mean to me? If humanity and all our works were to be destroyed but just one thing saved to represent us, I would save the music of Johann Sebastian Bach. Intelligent beings across the galaxy would say of us: ‘they must have been a great and noble race’.
- © British Journal of General Practice, 2006.
