The transcendent works of J.S. Bach

The transcendent works of J.S. Bach The composer’s genius provided a base forgenerations of musicians who followed. BY ANDREA FOWLER Kansas City Star Johann Sebastian Bach has often been referred to as the greatest composer who ever lived. Scholars have revealed him as a man inspired by his contemporaries and constantly striving to find new means of expression in his music. During his lifetime, Bach (1685-1750) earned almost legendary status as a keyboard virtuoso. He worked primarily as a church musician, composing works for church services and celebrations for the dignitaries who employed him. The art of improvisation was vital to a successful career as a keyboardist in the 17th and 18th centuries, and Bach’s skills — not only at the keyboard, but on violin and viola as well — undoubtedly had a profound impact on his compositions. Good musicians routinely created parts as they performed. By the end of the 18th century, Bach’s accomplishments as a composer had earned him the historical musical position that he retains to this day. His musical language is distinctive and incredibly varied. Bach synthesized his own style and innovations with those of his contemporaries and predecessors in a way that inspired and informed future generations of composers. The idea of improvisation and elaboration, for example, is a vital part of the jazz tradition of the 20th century. And many concert musicians incorporate a daily ritual of playing one of Bach’s preludes and fugues, said Cynthia Siebert, artistic director and president of the Friends of Chamber Music. “I think a lot of people are unaware of how central a role Bach plays in the life of many musicians, including many who never play Bach publicly,” Siebert said. “It is well understood by the professional teaching community that if one can play a prelude and fugue respectably, you’re likely to play a lot of composers’ works well.” Bach’s compositional output is unprecedented. Musicologists and biographers have called it “encyclopedic,” containing compositions in almost every form of his day except opera. The Bach Festival performances by Konstantin Lifschitz which began this weekend, illustrate the magnitude of influence that Bach wielded upon centuries of musicians. That so much of Bach’s music survives is remarkable in itself, since he wrote primarily for himself and his family, students and church ensembles and not for the public at large. This can partly be credited to his children’s efforts to account for all his compositions so soon after his death in 1750. The first biographical account of Bach’s life was published in 1802, spawning a Bach revival that was continued by Mendelssohn during the Romantic era and by musicologists today. Among the many musical highlights in the festival, two works stand above the rest. The Goldberg Variations, to be performed Saturday at the Kauffman Center, were completed in 1741-2. According to records of his compositions, Bach did not compose many works in the variation form, and those that exist are primarily from his early body of work, drawing a sharp contrast with the much later Goldberg Variations. The variations exhibit some influence by Domenico Scarlatti and are transcendent in terms of performing technique. The large-scale cyclical layout incorporates a series of canons within the separate variations, and each canon ascends up the scale. The composition is built atop a bass pattern of 32 bars, first presented in the aria and then subjected to free and canonic elaboration in a wide variety of ways. The unprecedented conception of the Goldberg Variations laid the groundwork for Bach’s last keyboard works: the “Musical Offering” and “The Art of the Fugue.” A fugue is a musical composition made up of multiple voices, based on at least one thematic idea that is subjected to a series of complex developments in each voice, building up to a climactic ending. Bach’s work on “The Art of the Fugue” (to be performed Feb. 19 at White Recital Hall) was accomplished in two stages — from roughly 1740 to about 1745, and then (in connection with preparing the work for publication) in about 1748-50. In the first stage, the academic intention in the conception of the work appears clearly: beginning with simpler fugues, progressing through “counter-fugues,” double fugues and triple fugues, with interpolated canons, and culminating in a mirror fugue. The work explores an intensive single theme, concerning only the fugue itself, through a series of compositions churned out of a single principal composition or theme. This technique incorporates both forward- and backward-looking styles, marking the culmination of Bach’s activity as a keyboard composer and the goal of his art and musical thinking coming together in a single composition. The history of musical composition, performance and academic study is based almost entirely on the work of master composers. That Bach’s contributions should be so transcendent alongside those of Mozart, Haydn and Beethoven is quite an achievement. Even more impressive is that these dominant composers intensively studied Bach, who was composing long before Mozart and Beethoven were born. It is a sign of genius that contemporary musicians, even those who break the confines of the classical tradition, continue to hold Bach’s music and compositional techniques in the same high regard.