I put together this little collection for my friend and Dharma teacher Sylvia Boorstein, after a series of conversations we had on Bach and the Well-Tempered Clavier.

“You tune the organ the way you please, and I play the organ in the key I please.”

            JS Bach to Gottfried Silbermann, piano and organ builder.

“There is nothing remarkable about it. All you have to do is hit the right key at the right time and the instrument plays itself.”

            JS Bach, replying when complimented upon his organ playing.

“Everything has to be possible.”

            JS Bach, saying that no task is beyond accomplishment, as reported by J.F. Kirnberger, a former pupil.

Writers and Musicians On Bach

“The miracle of Bach has not appeared in any other art…I don’t deny that Bach is a German master, but it is a mistake to try and restrict him with a national label…He is among those geniuses who shine over all nations and all times.”

            Pablo Casals. Conversations with Casals, 1956.

“He taught how to find originality within a established discipline; actually—how to live.”

            Jean Paul Satre. Quoted in Time magazine, December 27, 1968.

The fact that the Matthew Passion, for example, the Hammerklavier Sonata, had had human authors was a source of hope. It was just conceivable that humanity might some day and somehow be made a little more John-Sebastian-like. If there were no Well-Tempered Clavichord [sic], why should one bother even to wish for revolutionary changes?

            Aldous Huxley, Eyeless in Gaza

She played Bach. I do not know the names of the pieces, but I recognized the stiff ceremonial of the frenchified little German courts and the sober, thrifty comfort of the burghers, and the dancing on the village green, the green trees that looked like Christmas trees, and the sunlight on the wide German country, and a tender cosiness; and in my nostrils there was a warm scent of the soil and I was conscious of a sturdy strength that seemed to have its roots deep in mother earth, and of an elemental power that was timeless and had no home in space.

            W. Somerset Maugham, The Alien Corn

Tidbits About Bach

For all his adeptness with instruments, Bach never used them while composing—not even the clavier. “It was never his habit in composing to ask advice of his clavier,” is the quaint way an early biographer named Ernst Ludwig Gerber puts it. He composed in his head, then wrote down what he heard in his mind on paper—and without making too many changes once he did so. Moreover, Forkel says that Bach could never understand why anyone should do otherwise. Composers who did their work not in their minds but at their instrument he dismissed contemptuously in one phrase: Clavier-Ritter, “Knights of the Keyboard.”

            Herbert Kupferberg, Basically Bach, pg. 73

It is not a quality, but rather a consequence of its qualities, that Bach’s melody never grows old. It remains ever fair and young, like Nature, from which it is derived. Everything that Bach took from the prevailing taste of his time (and mixed into his earlier works) is now antiquated; but where, as in his later works, he developed his melodies from the internal sources of the art itself, without any regard to the dictates of fashion, all is as fresh, and as new as if it had been produced by yesterday.

            Johann Nikolaus Forkel: On Johann Sebastian Bach’s Life, Genius, and Works 1802 (translated by A.C.F Kollman 1820) [Note: Forkel was Bach’s first biographer, and his son-in-law.]

The Heart of the Fugue

Somebody once defined a fugue as “a musical composition in which the voices come in one by one while the audience goes out one by one.” It is a description that undoubtedly would have startled Johann Sebastian Bach, the greatest master of the fugue that music has ever known.

            Far from being archaic or austere, the fugue in his day was a relatively new form, a seventeenth-century descendant of the motet, madrigal, and ricercar. While its basic nature was the repetition of the same subject in an overlapping progression, in the hands of an imaginative composer it could undergo intense musical development and to build to powerful climaxes. Bach used fugues as a teaching tool, but he never regarded them as academic or forbidding. To him the fugue, whose name derived from the Latin word for “flight”, could convey drama and majesty, as his Passacaglia and Fugue in C minor and his Toccata in Fugue in D minor, or charm and piquancy as in his “Little” Fugue in G minor.

            Bach enjoyed a fugue as other men enjoy a feast. According to his son Carl Philipp Emanuel, he would listen intently to fugues by other composers, muttering what ought to be happening next and predicting what turn the music would not take. When his surmises proved correct, and the music did what he had forecast, he would nudge Philipp Emanuel—or whoever else was standing near by—with satisfaction.

            George Bernard Shaw, among others, realized the heartfelt quality of Bach’s fugal music when he wrote in 1885 as a young music critic in London: “Sebastian Bach could express in fugue or canon all the emotions that have ever been worthily expressed in music. Some of his fugues will be prized for their tenderness and pathos when many a melting sonata and poignant symphonic poem will be shelved forever.”

            In 1748, two years before he died, Bach apparently decided to write one work that, perhaps more than any other, would represent a distillation of his musical thought. What he intended to call it isn’t known, but it has come down to the present under the name of The Art of the Fugue. It is written on four open staffs, with absolutely no indication o the instruments Bach wished it to be played upon. (Recordings have been made for harpsichord, organ, string quartet, dhamber ensemble, and full orchestra.)

            Bach didn’t live to finish this gigantic work, but he did complete eighteen separate fugues, calling each a “Contrapunctus,” on the same theme or a variant. This was no pedantic exercise for him, for within the discipline of the contrapuntal form he let his fancy run free. He even included several astonishing “mirror” fugues—that is, with the separate voices presented first in their original form and then ivnrted as in a reflected image. In the final, unfinished fugue, No. 19, he incorporated his own name, the notes B-A-C-H. (In German usage, our note B is written as H, while our B-flat is written as B.) Apparently Bach died just as he was working out the fugue in his own name.

            Ever since, composers have tried to achieve completions of the B-A-C-H fugue, and some have also written fugues of their own on the subject. Among those who have attempted fugues or other music on the notes B-A-C-H have been Bach’s son Johann Christian Bach, his favorite St. Thomas’s pupil Johann Ludwig Krebs, Ludwig van Beethoven, Robert Schumann, Franz Liszt, Ferruccio Busoni, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, Vincent d’Incy, Arnold Schoenberg, Anton Webern, Humphrey Searle, Krzysztof Penderecki….Is it too much to think that at this very moment still another composer, yet unknown, is accepting the challenge?

            Herbert Kupferberg, Basically Bach, pgs. 105-107