Second Shade of Grey—Bach Transcriptions for Piano

The second shade of grey takes us to the father, or perhaps mother, of it all, Johann Sebastian Bach. And it takes us, specifically, to his lyric, or song-like side.

It’s a good way to know Bach, to start to understand him. Because yes, he can be the most cerebral, the most theoretical of composers; he’s a composer that every mathematician loves. But make no mistake about it, he’s also a composer who is surprisingly song-like, who can just deliver up a beautiful melody, something you’ll sing all day.

He was also a guy who was a church musician, so he knew how to serve up, and then dress up, a simple hymn. But let’s go back.

He was born in 1685 in Eisenach, a town in Germany, into a family of musicians. His father was director of the musicians in the town, all his uncles were professional musicians. One of them, Johann Cristoph Bach, took Bach in at age ten when his father died (his mother had died eight months earlier), and introduced him to the organ. Bach then attended the St. Michael’s School in Lüneburg, graduated, and then obtained a position as a court musician in the chapel of Duke Ernst of Weimar. He did that for a few years, grew a bit dissatisfied and decided to take a hike.

Literally—he walked 250 miles to go see one of the finest composers of the day, Dieterich Buxtehude in the northern town of Lübeck. Right, that went well enough, and Bach might have been Buxtehude’s successor, but there was a little catch: he had to marry Buxtehude’s daughter—it was a bit like a fairy tale, or at any rate a package deal.

So Bach, presumably again by foot, married his second cousin, and hoofed it to Mülhausen, where he spent a couple of years. In 1708, Bach returned to Weimar, where he began a long career of composing, as well as directing the musicians of the ducal court. He next moved to Köthen, where his employer is a Calvinist; here Bach would write most of his secular compositions. Finally, in 1723, he was appointed director of music in two important churches in Leipzig, which had an important university.

Bach stayed in Leipzig all his life, and progressively went blind. He had an eye surgery that was completely unsuccessful, came down with pneumonia, and died in 1750.

Bach was prolific in two senses; biologically, he had two wives and twenty children, several of whom became important composers in their own right; musically, he wrote 300 cantatas, 2 passions, 2 oratorios, orchestral suites, 6 Brandenburg concerti, and a huge amount of keyboard music.

In fact, the only thing he didn’t do was compose an opera, as Handel, his exact contemporary, would do. Nor did he, like Handel, travel extensively, either to Italy or to London. Though well known in his lifetime, he wasn’t not particularly celebrated as a composer, but instead as an organist. The fame came later, when Mendelssohn, most conspicuously, champions Bach’s compositions.

Right—that’s the man. What about the music?

Well, here James chooses a lovely song, written by the Italian composer Alessandro Marcello. Originally, it was part of Marcello’s oboe concerto—Bach freely borrows it, and transcribes it for piano. Have a listen:

Transcriptions were popular in the 19^th century—everyone had a piano, everyone wanted to take a nice choral or orchestral piece and play it at home, in the evening, on the piano. And so lots of Bach’s best tunes got transcribed. And Bach himself borrowed liberally from his fellow composer, as they did from him. Here’s another famous song, Bist du bei Mir, which Bach lifted from the composer, Gottfried Heinrich Stölzel:



Bist du bei Mir, in fact, is song expressing the melancholy sentiment: “if you are with me, I will go gladly to my death; oh, what a pleasant end it would be, for your hands to be the last things my faithful eyes were to see, as they close my lids to rest….” Or words to that effect. And as you can hear, it’s a knockout.



There’s more, much more, and it’s all well worth exploring. I will, more fully, in my other blog, Words on Musick. But it’s a beautiful spring day, in New York City. All of the flowering tree—the crab apples, the cherry trees, the redbud—are in full bloom. Time to turn from sonic loveliness to visual delight!
But I send you one last clip—a piano transcription of “Sheep may Safely Graze.”

On Singers and Performers

Confession—the news is so bad I’ve turned to music to get me through the day. So I devote half an hour to reading about North Korea, Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan—oh, and let’s not forget those politicians pondering the seriously hard question of whether any lunatic (literally) should be able to buy a gun—and then I take a walk. Or rather, it’s “then we take a walk.” This week, Ralph Vaughan Williams joined me, and excellent company he was. He told me, which I didn’t know, that he had volunteered for World War I when he was 41—well past the age when he was compelled to. And he had served time as an ambulance carrier in the fields. Then he came home and saw the whole thing happening all over again, fifteen years later. He didn’t go, of course, to the Second World War, but he wrote a bitter, very dissonant symphony—completely unlike his usual stuff—about it. Years later, he said, “I don’t know if I like it, but I meant it.”

Second confession—Vaughan Williams died in 1958.

Or not. The music is going strong, there is a Vaughan Williams Society promoting his work, and if his words were resonating in my mind, on the morning trot, well—is he really dead? And so to the greater glory of Vaughan Williams, I wrote a post about him, and put it in a new blog, Words on Musick. (Sorry for the affectation—that “musick” business—but somebody had already got to “music”). The next day I got into Cecilia Bartoli singing all those wonderful arias written for castrati—the ones only a manic singer on cocaine can sing. They’re fun, they’re (mostly) more a romp than music, but who cares? There’s a place for Mozart, a place for Broschi.

Right, so that lead me into the world of the soprano, and I wasted an hour which I cheerfully have watching a BBC documentary on castrati—the singers who had parts removed to preserve their voices. And I discovered two or three remarkable singers. There’s Radu Marian, a guy from Moldavia who for medical reasons never entered puberty (though I noted today that he sports a mustache—don’t know what that’s about….) Anyway, Radu has a clean, high voice—fully soprano, very pure, and yes, I mean it when I say high. He could break glass.

Another singer, as well, Michael Maniaci, who like Radu never entered puberty—they’re both astonishing singers. Right, so it felt that the world needed to hear me weigh in on this, so I wrote about that.

It’s unfortunate, how easily just doing something three days in a row becomes a habit. What to write about today?

Well, there is the intemperance of commentary on YouTube; has anyone noticed it besides me? Or is it that musicians—I’m skating quite close to the truth, here, just to mix a metaphor—are an irritable, irascible bunch? Anyway, the YouTubians / YouTubists / YouTubers / nothing-satisfies-the computer-these-days are going at each other with sabers over the question of Simone Kermes. Here is one of the more temperate remarks—I fear to introduce the more incendiary to the Gentle Readers of this blog:

Whatever she's taken, I think I want some too! She has such a gorgeous voice but the coloratura just isn't accurate at ALL from the word go although she has way better technique than Bartoli (it's hard to do it properly!) All this drunk-auntie-at-a-wedding dancing, what is all that about? It is so vulgar I actually sort of love it. Quite frankly the best Rodelinda in the world (IMO) doesn't need to "prove" she can sing this (or not). 8/10 for singing, 10/10 for chutzpah!

This from the hugely talented and universally acclaimed…La Prima Ragazza.

I think you get my point. One of the reasons nobody listens to classical music much is that regular people have been snobbed out of it. Yeah, in the movies, classical music is OK. But actually go to a concert, with all the formality, the protocol, the anxiety of when you’re supposed to clap…. And what if you don’t like the music?

Well, Kermes gets called by Mosart200657 “The Operatic Lady Gaga,” so I decided to check her out. And here she is, romping her way through Come Nave in mezzo all’onde.

Well, as always, I’m mixed about it all. I think Ian Bostridge said it best: pop music is now the mainstream; if you really want to be counterculture, listen to Mozart. And isn’t it hypocritical to keep viewing popular music as somehow the underdog?

And why does Simone Kermes have to emulate Lady Gaga? Why does she have to sell herself—isn’t the voice and the music enough?

That said, I’m not so sure that I can comfortably pan her. If she wants to romp around on-stage, why not? Yes, it’s all a bit campy, it may also distract from the aria, but it’s another point of view, it’s something to see. My only problem with it is that Kermes will never out-gaga Gaga.

When are we going to admit the truth?

She easily out-sings her.