First of all, the interesting thing about his biography is in an inversely proportional relationship with the value of his work. Historians have, true, so meticulously and systematically investigated Bach’s life that today all the circumstances of his manuscripts, dates of his concert performances, trajectories of his movements, the amount of his earnings, his illnesses, favorite meals, and so on, are known with great certainty. But when we try to organize this wealth of information into some life story, we always see in the end a biography that seems borrowed from an accountant.
Furthermore, what can be said about the specific place of any Bach composition in relation to the totality of his work, when it is known that there was neither development nor maturation in the mastery of this creator, and when it is known that in his opus The Ninth Symphony could have peacefully come before the First. Just as Bach’s creative journey shows no progress or deviation, his grandiose work lacks any rise or fall in creative value. If certain Bach compositions were more famous than others at one point in time, it is likely that in the next historical period the others will take their place, as the concept of fame includes the principle of exclusion and history continuously corrects old injustices with new ones.
But the problem with Bach is not only that his monotonous life and uniform mastery lack contradictions that would provoke our literary imagination. The greater problem is that Bach, on one hand, seeks and calls for our words through his private silence. When listening to Bach, we instinctively feel that through his enchanting polyphony he is thinking; he thinks deeply, deeper and more far-reaching than anyone who has ever thought through music, and we instinctively strive to understand this thought and translate it. in their own language, the language of concepts. Of course, after a few strong but muted words, unable to find words in our vocabulary to describe the content of his fugue, we regularly give up on interpretation. Because Bach, unlike most other composers, does not speak about things that are well-known in our spiritual experience and for which we have already established our own expressions. Bach does not speak about love sorrows or the virtue of patriotism, nor about social injustice or the beauty of nature. In his musical statement, there is a meaning that only a few philosophers, mystics, or perhaps mathematicians could express with their words, or those who have managed at least once to unravel the cosmic darkness and glimpse the full light of the great interconnectedness of all causes and consequences, the multiple connection of laws and spirit, life and death, space and time. Bach’s music encompasses the entirety of the world: heavens and earth, stars and humans, it has placed itself at the very center of everything that exists, it is the place from which one can contemplate the ultimate harmony. You know all the secrets of cosmogony, and above all the secret of abolishing time. Bach’s fugue is actually a triumph over the time of contrapuntal imitation, which intertwines multiple times without one being the main one, making every musical thought simultaneously at its beginning and its end, and it is its own center; thus, from all points of counterpoint, the perfection and fullness of the composition is visible, just as in every view of the universe, all its times with all those million light-years converge into one single spatial moment of the present.
Of course, it would not be right to attribute all the credits to Bach for becoming – Bach. Many masters of the Baroque era glimpsed, and even surpassed, his intellectual achievements.
Namely, it was a time when music itself completed its own development, a time when, finally, the prophecy of the ancient sages that musical activity on Earth would coincide with ideal music, the harmony of the spheres, and that a musical work would once become a mirror of the entire universe, came true. of Irish order, Pythagorean mathematical harmony. It was a time when composers lived in a terrestrial paradise of music, and their organ pipes were like telescopes, solely directed towards the sky, listening to the laws of sublime harmony. Bach stood out from other listeners of celestial voices only in that he served his task more devotedly, suppressed his biography more than others, and faithfully recorded the messages received from the timeless and immeasurable.
But as in the biblical Eden, where a forbidden fruit awaited man on the tree of knowledge, so in this earthly paradise, one prohibition was planted: man was not allowed to appropriate music, to make it an instrument of his passions. Deathly danger threatened music if it identified itself with human destiny.
It is a historical irony that it was Bach’s sons who violated the prohibition: they became famous in their time as heralds of a new era, and that’s how music started. In the works of the Viennese classics, it She continued to speak about the ideal man, in Romanticism, art tonally portrayed the man as he is, and with late Romanticism, the story begins of what he should not be like. In our time, music has completely distorted itself through the corruption of man, emptying itself through his alienation, and through his lack of communication – it has become meaningless.
Old Johann Sebastian remained the last man of the musical paradise and the last giant without a biography. Those who performed took on the burden of dramatic destinies, becoming geniuses and titans, Prometheus and Sisyphus.
The great cantor sensed all of this as he contemplatively walked around the forbidden tree, and the proof of these intuitions is exactly the record you are holding in your hand right now. Bach had never looked down from the sky at things around him and within him so frequently. And he had never been as sad as he was in these Six Sonatas for Violin and Harpsichord.