Taruskin the Iconoclast

Taruskin’s silhouette has loomed over my budding musicologist’s subconscious ever since a lazy Saturday some years ago when I read his work Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions on a whim. I was obsessed with Les Noces at the time, and his interaction with Stravinsky’s musical sources and the poetry of Kireevsky opened a new world to me—such depth, such insight, so much I would have never been able to figure out on my own by reading the score and fumbling through measure after tautly entwined measure of subcritical Cyrillic. My next encounter with the Taruskin phenomenon was his lambasting of another favorite composer of mine, John Adams, in the perpetual fallout from The Death of Klinghoffer.

So in reading his review of the Teldec recordings, I felt the shade of his specter once again—part of me wanted to recoil from his assertions about the reality of Bach’s visions, while another part of me wanted to devour every word on the page in much the same way one can eat an entire bag of potato chips trying to recover the initial shock of the salt and grease hitting the palate. The challenge from Taruskin’s approach to reviewing this particular set of recordings arises not from his frank language about the gritty polemics of Bach’s settings of Luther, but rather the very fact that he’s said something contrary to public opinion.

At my alma mater, there hangs a chintzy calligraphic sampler on a beloved professor’s wall that asserts, “Bach gave us God’s beauty.” And beautiful Bach’s music is indeed; we listen to the Credo from the B minor Mass and we cannot help but be transfixed by the throbs of transcendent beauty: the supple, poignant G major resignation of the Crucifixus becomes the subdominant of a burst of life—“insupportable, implacable, life!” in the words of Baudelaire—as the Et Resurrexit Tertia Die bursts out of the Paschal predawn glow. Surely this is Bach at his most beautiful. That said, Taruskin’s critique is not that people find Bach’s music beautiful, they find it beautiful for the wrong reason, that is, for the “perfection” thereof.

Taruskin appropriately pointed out modern music appreciation’s fetishizing of the raw materials of music, those things that can only be written on the page, to such a point that “when pressed to a logical extreme, some have even attempted to deny the reality of musical expressivity…all music stands or falls as distinguished entertainment” (309). To this point in the article, undoubtedly most people have been silently nodding their heads in agreement, until the next paragraph when Taruskin lets them have it by stating a simple assertion that stands in complete dissonance to the public’s view of Bach as the master formalist: “How utterly irrelevant this whole esthetic is to the Bach of the cantatas” (310)!

Ah, the refreshing power of cognitive dissonance. Even as I read it, I found myself scratching my head, but I immediately understood what Taruskin was going for: people have been reducing Bach to something comfortable and containable. To think that the educated masses that suckled on the Notebook for Anna Magdalena Bach could possibly misunderstand one of their idols! But this is the genius of Taruskin’s criticism: he points out something that has been left ignored for centuries, and when viewed in light of the cultural baggage surrounding the Bachian Cult in the West, it looks frightening in comparison. But the point is not that Bach is suddenly no longer the sun-encircled Apollonian deity the Western bourgeoisie has made him out to be; Bach simply has more layers than people care to acknowledge.