On Said's Bach--and Mine

On reading the first Bach article in Music at the Limits (I also read the second, but it wasn't really about Bach), I was continually, almost violently, struck: This man is not reviewing a book--he is reviewing a theologian. For to Said, Bach is worthy of worship in the profoundest sense. To be worthy of the master, then, Christoph Wolff's huge biography must not be mere history. The only thing that will do is Myth. Myths of this kind are the world-explaining beliefs both overarching and at the core of every activity we hold dear. By their very nature, Myths cannot be proven. Geometry, historical documentation, legal precedents, the scientific method--no method under the sun can provide the answers to such deep questions. Has the universe always been the way it is? Does anything exist that cannot be sensed? What is the relationship between religion and art? These are questions that everyone answers at one level or another. For Said, though, Bach is "in solitary eminence" even among the "small number of composers, mostly German and Austrian, of the 18th and 19th centuries" in whose music "perfection . . . occurs with a frequency unimaginable in painting (except perhaps for Raphael) or literature." My horridly cobbled sentence does little justice to the grandeur that Said's musical canon and the glory that is Said's Bach.

In a phrase that may well have provided the entire volume's title, this Bach is "traditional, yet constantly pushing at the limits of what was acceptable." This balance is what Said yearns for in Mozart and Haydn, what he praises in Beethoven, and at the heart of his interpretation of Bach's work. Late works such as the B Minor Mass, The Art of Fugue, and the Goldberg Variations prove Bach's "cosmic ambition"--"not just a servile adulation of God and his work, but also an unconscious desire to rival it" (285). Bach's actual religious views are "pious-seeming," "almost tiresome," "ostensibl[e]," probably because they stand in the way of this construct. Wolff's biography is faulty because it does not attempt to sketch anything like it. Wolff does tell who might have shown up to Bach's wedding. But who cares? Said prefers Maynard Solomon's imaginative Mozart and Beethoven biographies. "Give me something to hang my hat on," he seems to say.

I nearly included, in the last paragraph's first sentence, "and that seems to describe its author as well as it does its subject." Now I'm convinced I should have included it. After reading four Said articles (including "Bach for the Masses": interestingly, this article overlaps in two major ways with this one; it reiterates both that Bach's polyphonic genius is "unequalled before or since--and that Lawrence Dreyfus has a great book on the subject), "traditional, yet constantly pushing at the limits of what was acceptable" describes Said's writing style and what I can tell about the man himself. Said's most enjoyable sentences are exactly that. His "additive" sentences can become rivers-over-levees that sweep down into an ocean. Here, on the difficulty of achieving virtuosity:

The science of sound-production, the rigours of the well-tempered harmonic system, the formalities of composition, the physical disciplines of learning how to play and then perform an instrument (or to sing an aria or lied)--all these require years of practice and study, epscially in the perfecting of mind-ear-hand (or voice) co-ordination and the ability to deploy it unerringly, without hesitation, that lies at the heart of virtuoso performing. (279)

Said is performing as virtuosically as those he describes, his sentence showing both the endurance and the facility that literacy demands just as well as concertizing does.
Or, in interrupted style, on composition as literal creation:

In Doktor Faustus, Thomas Mann speaks of Adrien Leverkuhn's (and his father's) inclination to 'speculate the elements' (die elementa spekulierin)--that ultimately dangerous pursuit of dabbling not just in nature's oddities (inanimate crystals that behave like animate forms for instance) but in alchemy, necromancy, and magic, arts not urelated to music, which put the speculator in the position of creator. (286)

This speculation is what Said castigates Wolff for not having done. From the sentence above, this is what he believes Bach has done. In turn, this is what he is doing to Bach--and even admits to doing, calling his vision of Bach's cosmic ambition "a really imaginative aesthetic construction of Bach" done "speculatively" (284).

As I read the above, I am again struck: perhaps this is also what I am doing to Said. For what is any human work but a creation? And what is nearer to human nature than the desire to rival God? Along with Said, I believe that Bach after 1735 did have a purpose for his entire oeuvre. I'm just not searching for cosmic reality in it. Perhaps I'm afraid my own "piety and expressions of humility before God" might also be only a "way of keeping something else darker--more exuberant, more hubristic, verging on the blasphemous--at bay." As I look into my own heart, how can I shout him down? On the other hand, I see no disconnect between "unappeased creative energy" and "devoutness" (288-89). A deeply wrought combination of both is my goal for my own musical life.

If only I could be sure it was Bach's too.