The Daily Cartoon and Live Briefing: Sunday, April 20, 2025

Notebook: Not that an excuse is ever needed to listen to Bach compulsively, but the weeks around Easter offer one to play and replay one of his Passions–St. John or St. Matthew, depending on how many hours you have in the day to be knocked about with beauty, the anti-Semitism of the St. John libretto aside: we are, remember, talking about Martin Luther who could be as bigoted about Jews as Dante was about Muslims, though the St. John libretto, inspired by the gospel according to St. John, is as Catholic as it is Lutheran: it squarely blames “die Jüden” for Christ’s death, a libel it took the Catholic church almost two millennia to atone for. “In the Middle Ages, when the Gospel of St John was read from pulpits on Good Friday, synagogues and Jewish businesses would routinely be attacked and vandalized after the service,” an article entitled “What do we do about Bach’s St John Passion” states. Not long ago Palm Coast hosted its State of the City event. Unlike past events, the mayor, Mike Norris, decided to have a blatantly, almost insultingly Christian invocation. He invited a pastor for the honor. It was a very bleak invocation in line with Norris’s carnage-like brief address, as the headline read. In the article, I referred to the invocation as Lutheranly gloomy, which drew an unhappy email from an otherwise supportive leader. The reader took offense to Lutheranism being called “gloomy.” I was surprised. (A line from Walker Percy’s Moviegoer: “As long as I’m getting rich, I feel that all is well. It is my Presbyterian blood.” Is that offensive? “Scratch an Episcopalian and you’re liable to find anything,” Flannery O’Connor wrote. Is that offensive? I find it funny. For that matter, “Why should a moron dressed up as a Methodist preacher get any more respect than a moron behind a plow?” H.L. Mencken asked the question.) The invocation at the State of the City certainly was gloomy to the point of parody, and the pastor, as I found out, happened to be Lutheran, though what surprised me most was that there would be any question about the association of the words “Lutheran” and “gloom.” The two words go together like Romeo and Juliet, Fred Astair and Ginger Rogers, if you prefer, though as gloom goes maybe we should stick to analogies like “Trump and Stephen Miller.” My association is drawn entirely by my soundtrack: Bach’s cantatas accompany a good deal of the writing of stories on FlaglerLive. I don’t find the music gloomy at all. It’s my therapy. But that’s because I don’t pause to translate, let alone read, the lyrics to his arias, which would drive anyone to drink, or suicide: “My sins sicken me like pus in my bones; help me, Jesus, Lamb of God, for I am sinking in deepest slime.” Or: “Here you taste of Jesus’ goodness and look forward, as your reward for faith, to the sweet sleep of death.” Or: “Where, in this vale of woes, may I find refuge for my soul?” Where indeed. That’s what the pastor’s invocation at the Community Center sounded like. Anyway, it’s Easter. Let’s resurrect a bit of that Bach and my favorite interpretation–Karl Richter and the Munich Bach Choir and Orchestra, from years and years ago.

—P.T.

 

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Anyone exposed to Bach’s full range (as now, thanks to these records, one can be) knows that the hearty, genial, lyrical Bach of the concert hall is not the essential Bach. The essential Bach was an avatar of a pre-Enlightened — and when push came to shove, a violently anti-Enlightened — temper. His music was a medium of truth, not beauty. And the truth he served was bitter. His works persuade us — no, reveal to us — that the world is filth and horror, that humans are helpless, that life is pain, that reason is a snare. The sounds Bach combined in church were often anything but agreeable, to recall Dr. Burney’s prescription, for Bach’s purpose there was never just to please. If he pleased, it was only to cajole. When his sounds were agreeable, it was only to point out an escape from worldly woe in heavenly submission. Just as often he aimed to torture the ear: when the world was his subject, he wrote music that for sheer deliberate ugliness has perhaps been approached — by Mahler, possibly, at times — but never equaled. (Did Mahler ever write anything as noisomely discordant as Bach’s portrayal, in the opening chorus of Cantata No. 101, of strife, plague, want and care?) Such music cannot be prettified in performance without essential loss. For with Bach — the essential Bach — there is no “music itself.” His concept of music derived from and inevitably contained The Word, and the word was Luther’s..

–From Richard Taruskin’s “Facing Up, Finally, to Bach’s Dark Vision,” The New York Times, Jan. 27, 1991.

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