Museum Music or Living Art?

“I don’t like the word authenticity. Because it is dangerous. I’m not interested in museum music. I don’t intend to take my audience on a guided tour through Bach’s oeuvre.” – Nikolaus Harnoncourt

Both Richard Taruskin, eminent scholar and Nikolaus Harnoncourt, renowned conductor believe Bach’s music forcefully preaches a relevant message for today. Harnoncourt’s viewpoint, formed over decades of study and performing, is preserved in his mammoth discography while Taruskin’s is preserved in his record review, “Facing Up, Finally, to Bach’s Dark Vision.” Neither man views this music as merely a museum piece, but an actual relevant and living work of art.

As I see it, Taruskin’s review is more of a vehicle to continue his assault on a movement he considers invalid than it is to deliver an assessment of a collection of records. As such, his arguments are forceful and convincing. It must be noted that his career has been characterized by an undercurrent of questioning the veracity of modernism. In the 1980’s, when he challenged the philosophical underpinnings of the “early music” movement, he characterized period instrument specialists as having more to do with the dehumanizing aesthetic of modernism than with history. In his review of the Bach cantatas, Taruskin again links the early music movement with modernism when he argues,

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. 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.

At first glance, Harnoncourt would seem to share this view. On his personal website, Harnoncourt writes:

We as musicians – and indeed all artists – have to administer a powerful, a holy language. We have to do everything in our power to keep it from getting lost in the maelstrom of materialism. There is not much time left, if it is not already too late because the exclusive focus on thought and the language of reason, of logic, and the fascination we experience with the progress of science and our civilisation, increasingly alienate us from the essence of human life. It is probably no coincidence that this alienation goes hand in hand with the obliteration of religiousness: Technocracy, materialism and prosperity do not need religion; they don’t know religion, not even morality. Art is not a nice extra – it is the umbilical cord which connects us to the Divine, it guarantees our being human.

Harnoncourt foresees grave consequences from the decadent prosperity of materialistic age and argues that art is the vital conduit which connects us to the solution.

As synonymous as these two views seem on the surface, it is important to delineate one key difference. Taruskin is leveling an attack on the “early music” movement and their publication for failing to follow the recordings to the end. He is furthering his ongoing attack on modernity, which he deems to be dehumanizing. Harnoncourt, however is not leveling an attack on modernism. Furthermore, he does not claim that it is inherently dehumanizing. Rather, he argues that the exclusive focus on science, reason, and logic creates an imbalance which alienates us from the essence of human life. In this sense, Harnoncourt is not so rash in his assertions.

(It is humorous to note, that Taruskin’s chief weapons of choice in his assault on early music and modernity are logic and reason.)

After another reading, another inconsistency lies beneath the surface. Taruskin writes, “Anyone exposed to Bach’s full range…knows that the hearty, genial, lyrical Bach of the concert hall is not the essential Bach.” He assumes that anyone exposed to Bach’s full range would draw the same conclusion as he. He builds a false dilemma by asserting that we have to choose between the half dozen concert works and the works that he dubs, “essential Bach.” This, however, is not true for two reasons. First, the half dozen concert works, in my mind, could hardly be described as “hearty, genial, lyrical.” Try to listen to the six Brandenburg’s consecutively in one evening. Try performing them all at once. It requires the same intensity of intellectual engagement as listening to the Pacifica Quartet perform the complete Carter quartets in one evening. It certainly seems to me that he is building a weak argument on the other side so that he can knock it over with his deft pen. Second, while the core of Bach’s output may be the cantatas, one can hardly overlook the Well Tempered Clavier, Art of the Fugue, Solo Violin Sonatas and Partitas, Musical Offering, etc. In the case of the Musical Offering, I can hardly think of a work more fitting of Enlightenment ideals, yet Mr. Taruskin describes Bach as being “violently anti-Enlightenment.” I would argue that Mr. Taruskin, in this review fails to view Bach’s work in its totality.

My final point of disagreement with Mr. Taruskin is his assertion that historically informed performances are merely a product of modernity and are ultimately dehumanized prettifications of Bach. If you spend time with early music specialists of the “historically informed” movement, you find a remarkable amount of agreement from those who Mr. Taruskin attacks. In fact, they share the same goal but he is unwilling to listen. For instance, Harnoncourt writes, “Because wherever the goal is authenticity, historic correctness, you can see that it’s absolutely impossible. You can forget it. It has no real message. If the goal is to transport the contents of the music and the emotional importance of this music for the audience of today, then I love to be part of it.” In his liner notes for his Brahms Symphony cycle, Gardiner writes, “The idea that we can somehow reconstruct the ‘real’ and ‘original’ Brahms is, of course, a chimera. When all is said and done, our main interest is what Brahms can sound like in our day: what his music is has to say to us now.”

Nigel Kennedy recently played an all Bach concert and in his program notes, he accused period performance specialists of pushing Bach into “a rarefied and effete ghetto.” Perhaps, Mr. Taruskin would agree. However, the true genius of Bach is that it can be remarkably compelling with Klemperer or Herreweghe conducting St. Matthew’s Passion. Whether it is Suzuki, Rilling, Gardiner, or Harnoncourt conducting the cantatas, they still preach forcibly enough to make one squirm in their seat just as much as Jonathan Edward’s Sinners in the Hands of An Angry God.

In an interview in the New York Times from November 10, 1996, Harnoncourt concluded, “My goal is to make music in the best possible way. I follow what I feel and with a good cushion of source studies. But then I forget the sources, and just do it. Maybe I’m wrong. But it could be that I’m right.” Mr. Taruskin may very well agree with Maestro Harnoncourt on the point that these are not works which are museum pieces. We may not need a guided tour through Bach’s oeuvre, but we can certainly appreciate varied and differing performances of the works. Only then will Bach’s genius be realized.