‘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
