Music Awaiting a Musician

OK—there are three factors in the video, and curiously, two of the three happened at roughly the same time. So—based purely on alphabetical order—let’s start with Bach first.

‘Easier said than done,’ I think to myself as I look at the screen in front of me. How in Hell do you account for a guy who had genius matched with beaver? Because the sheer amount of what Bach produced is numbing—and guess what? Besides the two passions and the two oratorios and the Well-Tempered Clavier and the Goldberg Variations and the six Brandenburg Concerti, oh, and the don’t-forget-the-200-or-so-cantatas…

Add to this the fact that a lot of music has been lost—according to one scholar, there must have been over 100 cantatas that are unaccounted for. And here’s what Robert Newman said:

Reference is made around the time of Bach’s death to him having composed ‘many’ magnificats. There are several lost Passions. And there is the known loss of at least 15 secular cantatas, many of these written for marriages, civic functions, etc. Though it’s commonly believed these works were somehow scattered amongst Bach’s sons and later lost/destroyed there are enough clues to suggest these works may actually have survived and may one day be rediscovered. Horror stories of music being used to wrap meat, or used by house servants to light fires (as in the case of at least one stage work by Schubert) may not have been the fate of these works.

If memory serves—and it may well not—we may only have 60% of what Bach actually wrote. At any rate, Bach wrote a lot of sacred music, which he had to, being employed by various churches at different times of his life. But by a happy fact—happy at least for cellists—Bach grew tired of his position in Weimar as konzertmeister and wanted to move on. And however much he was a genius, he scored somewhat lower on the scale of emotional intelligence. Here’s Wikipedia:

In 1717, Bach eventually fell out of favour in Weimar and was, according to a translation of the court secretary's report, jailed for almost a month before being unfavourably dismissed: "On November 6, [1717], the quondam concertmaster and organist Bach was confined to the County Judge's place of detention for too stubbornly forcing the issue of his dismissal and finally on December 2 was freed from arrest with notice of his unfavourable discharge."

Somehow this fact never got mentioned in the conservatories I went to….

Right—so Bach landed on his feet and found himself in Köthen, at Prince Leopold’s household. And fortunately, Leopold was a Calvinist, which meant that music was sparingly used in services; Bach therefore had some time to write secular pieces. And it’s from this period that we get the violin sonatas, the cello suites, the orchestra suites, and—best of all—the Brandenburg concerti.

It was a period of flux, when string instruments were shifting from the viols to our modern instruments. And any cellist today knows that intuitively—one of the suites requires retuning the instrument (the A string gets tuned down to a G), and the last suite—which, dammit, is the best—goes into the stratosphere and is a demon to play. So it’s clear: whatever instrument these pieces are meant for, it’s not our modern cello.

In fact, the most recent research indicates that the suites may have been written for a cello da spalla—which, as you can see in the second clip below, was a smaller instrument that was slung abound the neck and played somewhat like a violin.

And now the action shifts considerably south, to Cremona, Italy, where Antonio Stradivari was enjoying his “golden period,” which lasted from 1700 to 1720 or so. And one of the instruments he created was a viola—an instrument slightly larger than a violin, for which there’s shamefully little music.

There are also damn few Stradivarius violas—only ten, in fact, and the other nine are in institutions and are unlikely to come up for sale. (There are, by the way, over 500 Stradivarius violins, so the fact that this viola is going for sale is major news in the rarified world of viola players. And the price—or at least the price that Sotheby’s hopes to get for it?

45 million bucks.

Is it worth it? Well, as you can hear below, it has a glorious sound. And physically, the instrument is in remarkable shape—almost as if the instrument had been delivered yesterday: no cracks, no major repairs, the varnish intact. So if you have minimally 45 million dollars to spare….

So at roughly the same time that Bach was composing his suites, Stradivarius was creating his viola—probably the greatest viola we have. Enter David Aaron Carpenter, a 28-year old violist who is…

…undeniably proficient, technically. But both the viola and the Bach seem to be products to be used for spreading the David Aaron Carpenter brand. The “musicality” seems as learned, as artificial, as forced as the gestures of old-time opera singers.

It could be envy, of course. Look, both Carpenter and the Belgian Sigiswald Kuijken have a command of their instruments that I will never have. They both must have struggled years to attain their proficiency. But why am I left thinking…

…what for?

David Aaron Carpenter plays the Macdonald Viola