Electronic Library of Scientific Literature - © Academic Electronic Press
No. 4 / 2000
The message of artistic perfection and profound spirituality emanating from the music of Johann Sebastian Bach, a message that was highlighted by the composer’s anniversary in the year 2000 throughout the whole world, made its impact in a series of events in Slovakia. The musicological conference organized by the Slovak Musicological Association in connection with other institutions within the Bratislava Music Festival (5–6 October 2000) was such an event. This issue of Slovenská hudba brings a selection of papers presented at the conference; this collection documents the magnitude of Bach’s influence, the power and freshness of Bach’s message nurtured within the Slovak musical culture. The speakers included, apart from musicologists, composers and performers.
Bach’s name and his work soon became a symbol of unshakeable and timeless values that guarantee the continuity of the great European cultural tradition. The extent, to which his art crossed the boundaries of historic styles and became more and more universal, has been much discussed on a theoretical level. As Ingeborg Šišková pointed out (The Work of Johann Sebastian Bach from the Viewpoint of Classical Musicology), Bach composed in an era of shifting tastes, in which music, with its structural qualities and expressive potential, gave the impulse to search for ties between man and nature, and in which art was supposed to be a model of those ties. Bach’s importance and endurance of his music were challenged even during his lifetime. Johann Adolph Scheibe, the representative of the emerging style galant and of the early Classical style, criticized in the magazine Der Critische Musicus the complexity and “opaqueness” of Bach’s polyphonic music, opposing it to the natural melody. On the other side, Johann Abraham Birnbaum, lawyer and philosopher, said that the natural quality is in no contradiction to the perfection, which he saw in Bach’s works and which can be documented by analysis. After the 1750 obituary, Bach’s greatness was increasingly recognized throughout the 18th century. His legacy crossed the boundaries of music and became the source of philosophical reflection oriented towards the meaning of man’s endeavour and its spiritual dimension. A comparison of utterances by leading 20th-century philosophers (coming from different backgrounds) – Ludwig Wittgenstein, Ernst Bloch, Martin Heidegger, Hans-Georg Gadamer, and Theodor W. Adorno – reveals a unity in their assessment of Bach’s position in the hierarchy of values, a position that transcends every level and speaks to man in the depth of his psyche (Miloslav Blahynka, Reflection of Johann Sebastian Bach in 20th-Century Philosophy). In the last decades, Bach’s music served also as a part of musico-therapy, helping to overcome psychological crises and to find peace, unity and harmony. A number of composers associated Bach’s music with faith, artistic truth, dialogue with God in the pantheistic sense, and with questions of conscience. These associations inspired meditation and inner protest, as documented by Jarmila Doubravová (J. S. Bach, Musico-Therapy, and Meditation) on some examples from Czech music (Janáček, Suk). However, today’s dialogue with Bach’s legacy is often marked by superficial pathos, a flirt of sorts with the name of the great German composer with no attempt to study the value of his music. Bach as a petrified symbol, research into Bach as an idealized historic personality – all this prevents us to see his human dimension, his open, transcendental message (Jevgeni Irshai, En attendant Bach – Waiting for Bach).
The manner in which Bach’s art penetrated into the music culture on the territory of Slovakia bears witness to the qualities and limits of its development. Bach’s music was during his lifetime practically unknown here, which is in strong contrast to the situation a century before, when our musicians were relatively quick to discover the music of Bach’s predecessors, German composers Schütz, Scheidt, and Schein, and when they also drew inspiration from these composers in their own work. In the Spiš (Zips) region with a considerable German presence, the musical practice of the 18th century was abandoning music for voice and instruments or purely instrumental music in favour of church hymns; this was a result of the Counter Reformation. According to Marta Hulková (Music in Protestant Churches in Spiš during the First Half of the 18th Century), the practice of music making in churches in towns throughout Spiš tried to keep up with the developments, even if the conditions were not conducive to the dissemination of more sophisticated contemporary music. In the 19th century, we can find clear evidence of interest in Bach’s music, e. g. in the Bratislava Kirchenmusikverein, and also in the emerging concert activity of the city. This interest was supported by the recognition of Bach’s music as an inevitable part of music training and by subscriptions for Bach editions. There is stronger evidence (Jana Lengová, Johann Sebastian Bach and 19th-Century Slovakia) that Bach served as an inspiration among Protestant musicians (Štefan Fajnor; cantatas of the Sibiu period by Ján Levoslav Bella). With continuing process of professionalization of composition in Slovakia, the importance of Bach grew, especially among church cantors (Mikuláš Moyzes’ instinctive attraction to Bach), later in the works of Frico Kafenda and Alexander Albrecht. Bach’s music created the backdrop for the academic paradigm of technical and artistic perfection, embodied in the composition school of Alexander Moyzes, and for the notions of timeless values, spiritual greatness, and continuity of European musical tradition. The works of Slovak composers written during the last decades (Eugen Suchoň, Roman Berger, Miro Bázlik, Juraj Beneš, Vladimír Godár, etc.) display a multitude of reactions to the great legacy of Bach (Ľubomír Chalupka, The Work of Johann Sebastian Bach as an Inspiration in 20th-Century Slovak Music). Bach’s multidimensional music left an impact not only in the so-called serious music, but also sparked off many adaptations and transformations in modern pop music, in jazz, and in rock of the late 20th century. Nuances of improvisation, rhythmic and timbral modifications of elements of Bach’s music (Yvetta Kajanová, Contemporary Reception of Johann Sebastian Bach) became permanent features of techniques that were to overcome the worshiped sensuality of the sound and to facilitate (e. g. the “third stream” initiative) the crossover between pop and classical music. The younger generation of Slovak composers also has an innovative approach to Bach. Daniel Matej’s contribution sheds light on the initiative of the 11th International Festival Evenings of New Music, which distanced itself from the clichés of paying homage to Bach and highlighted the space that Bach’s music offers for decomposition, collage, recycling or electro-acoustic transformation.
After theoretical and historiographical assessments of Bach’s legacy, we can move on to individual examples of that legacy’s impact on composition and to the interpretation of specific observations by Slovak musicians on particular issues of this legacy. A great work of art inspires new interpretations again and again. Igor Vajda, the co-author of the Eugen Suchoň monograph, reveals the layers of a striking spiritual confession and of the composer’s dialogue with the European musical tradition in Suchoň’s Symphonic Fantasy on BACH for Strings, Percussion and Organ. Mário Sedlár, a young musician, characterizes this work in terms of its demands on the performer, points out its conceptual uniqueness, and places it among important 20th-century works for organ.
Bach’s legacy not only constantly inspires new works, but it also questions the overall musical taste, superficial or distorted analysis, and the petrified tradition. Vladimír Rusó, musician and composer, used comparative analysis to point out that Little Preludes and Fughettas are in fact not easy-to-play educational works, but rather pieces displaying Bach’s compositional perfection and artistic imagination comparable with The Well-Tempered Clavier (the “fughettas” are in fact fully developed fugues), with the same sensitive choice of keys. Ivan Valenta, editor and composer, presented his own publishing project – The Anna Magdalena Notebook – as an exercise book of improvized figured bass. The project is interesting also because it introduces for the first time in our context the full original of this work; in the past, due to ideological limitations, it had been published without the chorale variations and hymns. Ferdinand Klinda (On Registration of Bach’s Organ Works), an expert and a musician from Slovakia, presented purely technological problems of performing on the organ, which are however also connected with various stages of the Bach revival and of the quest for the ultimate interpretation of his music. There are two basic options: one is to embrace contemporary technology of organ construction and to provide the music with modern sound, the other is to respect the extensive research into early music techniques and organological research. There is a third way too; it lies in practising restraint in dealing with sound. Klinda points out that, interpreting Bach, regardless of the three approaches mentioned above, means respecting his organ style, the sound disposition of Baroque instruments, as well as the logic of the piece. Karol Medňanský’s contribution (Viola da gamba in the Works of Johann Sebastian Bach) deals also with true and unbiased interpretation of Bach. By characterizing Bach’s works for viola da gamba, Medňanský stresses the composer’s sophisticated treatment of sound, which is sometimes lost when the period instrument is replaced by violoncello. This paper closes the collection of Slovak insights into the master’s work that inspires humbleness, admiration, joy, that conveys timeless values, and that is full of dimensions still to be discovered.
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