Michael Maul: "There has never been so much Bach music performed as now"

The musicologist Michael Maul (Leipzig, 1978) caused a sensation among his international colleagues and among the good connoisseurs of German baroque music when, at a very young age, he published in 2012 a reference study on the Thomasschule of his hometown and on the various Singers who they were at its head from the 13th to the 19th century, the most famous of whom is undoubtedly Johann Sebastian Bach, who held the position between 1723 and 1750. This same year he published a magnificent biography of the composer in the form of a succession of images arranged chronologically and accompanied by short but substantial texts.

Radiating knowledge and enthusiasm in equal parts, Maul has been at the helm of the Leipzig Bach Festival since 2018,

.

The 96th edition opens this Thursday and, in the midst of the final preparations and a drizzle of the still inevitable changes and cancellations as a result of the pandemic, it has agreed to respond in writing in German to questions from EL PAÍS, which will also cover the first concerts of the festival, with over a hundred acts scheduled until June 19.

The entity in charge of organizing the festival is the Neue Bach-Gesellschaft, the New Bach Society created in 1900 after the dissolution of the one originally founded in 1850. The latter was created with the sole objective of publishing all of Bach's works, a large part of which were then still unpublished, while its successor set itself the main goal of disseminating this same music.

What would be, more than a century later, and in a radically different world, the new goals?

“From a global perspective, there has never been as much Bach music performed as now.

For this reason, the visions and objectives proposed by both the Bach Society and the New Bach Society have already been fulfilled in practice.

I myself am a board member of the New Bach Society and we are also asking ourselves the question of what our future mission should be.

I believe that the mission in the 21st century will consist of integrating ourselves into a network.

The goal now is to connect the large number of global activities around Bach, develop synergies, cross borders.

Our Bach Festival this year, under the motto “BACH — We are FAMILY!”, to which we have invited Bach Societies and Bach Choirs from all over the world, such as the Bach Collegium in Barcelona, ​​should provide a platform to achieve this goal. : After all, Leipzig is Bach's Bayreuth, so to speak, that is, the place to which every Bachian yearns to make a pilgrimage at least once in his life.

And the New Bach Society could become perhaps,

if it adopts an international orientation, in a kind of organization that brings together the numerous activities related to Bach.

At the same time, those of us who love his music must always aspire to find compelling ways to pass on our enthusiasm for the composer to future generations.

And this is a task that never ends.

Flowers on Bach's grave in Leipzig's Thomaskirche during a festival concert.Bachfest Leipzig/Gert Mothes

One of the many things that has changed, interpretively speaking, is that it is now relatively common to hear works like the

or the

, without the traditional choir, with a singer per voice, especially after Joshua Rifkin justified with compelling arguments that this could be the way in which Bach himself interpreted them.

As the top expert in the history of the Thomanerchor, Maul is a more than authorized voice to comment on this debate: “Honestly, I am not a dogmatist, neither in favor of Rifkin and his theory of one voice per part, nor in favor of the theory according to which Bach made music in Leipzig with a choir of between 12 and 16 singers.

As a music historian, what I have to say is that, after studying the documents, I have come to the conclusion that there were actually 54 boarding students, aged between 13 and 23, at the Leipzig Thomasschule during the 17th and 17th centuries. eighteenth,

all of whom had to sing simultaneously on Sundays in the services of, originally, the two, and in Bach's time, the four main churches.

At the same time, however, it can be shown that there were always eight privileged boy singers: the one known as "

” (First Cantoría) which, under the direction of the cantor, presented all the musical performances in which money was earned: weddings, large funerals, etc.

I believe that this group was also the core of Bach's choir in the cantatas that were performed on Sundays.

My formula for the dimensions of his choir is therefore 8 + x: and the x varied up or down.

As a music lover, however, I am very glad that today we have so many options to listen to the

or the

: with a great adult choir, with a children's choir, with four or eight top soloists.

Everything can have its charm and its advantages.

Bach, the Saint Thomas Singer, did not have these different options open to him;

he found a tradition that he was forced to work with.

However, the fact that he also performed in Leipzig a whole series of cantatas that he had written in Weimar with the boys from St. Thomas, with the Thomaners, which had been performed in Weimar instead by a small group of adult soloists from the court chapel, shows that he was not a fundamentalist either, but always adapted his interpretive practice to local circumstances”.

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Maul also opines on Bach's supposed legendary character as "supreme singer, as creative servant of the Word of God, as staunch Lutheran" defended by Friedrich Blume as early as 1962: "I believe Bach when he wrote to the Mühlhausen council in 1708 that he considered the 'performance of well-regulated sacred music' to be the true 'ultimate goal' of his life.

When I think of all the inventive musical metaphors that Bach used to convey certain spiritual texts (from the Bible) with sound, I realize that he never uses his art as an end in itself, but always does so to show connections concrete theologies.

His religious music can also be enjoyed, of course, detached from the text and listening to it as absolute music: only this explains, for example,

the enormous enthusiasm shown by the Japanese for the vocal works of Bach.

But I think at the same time that then you can't really become aware of some of the cool effects of his music.

However, I agree with Blume that you certainly don't have to be a believer to recognize the special beauty of Bach's music and art."

High disclosure in the picture biography of Bach published this year by Michael Maul.

Mentioning Gustav Leonhardt's famous incarnation of the composer in Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet's

, Maul is quick to reply that, “as much as I greatly admire Leonhardt as a harpsichordist, I think the Bach seen in the film is somewhat stiff and unflappable.

My image of Bach is different from the famous portrait of Haussmann, which seems to show a rather formal and conformist person.

It could be that Bach is really inaccessible to some people.

But when I hear his

or some of his youthful cantatas or harpsichord works, I see an impetuous, uncompromising musician, with an almost demonic aura.

It's no surprise that when he was working as an organist in Arnstadt at the age of twenty, he ended up getting into a fight with a local high school student who was even older than he was.

And it is impossible that the composer of such works as the

, the incredibly dramatic

or the

was a conformist person!”

Leipzig is the Bayreuth of Bach, the place to which any Bachian yearns to pilgrimage at least once in his life”

Maul also does not shy away from the question of whether he agrees with that supposedly melancholy Bach proposed by Paul Hindemith in a lecture given in Hamburg in 1750: “Hindemith's interpretation of the strange discovery that, comparatively speaking, we have few new works of Bach from the last decade of his life, because a 'melancholy of ability' (to invert the terms of a quote from Nietzsche about Brahms) has descended on him, is very tempting.

But I am somewhat skeptical.

The late Bach is strangely fascinating and, at the same time, a picture full of gaps.

He is fascinating because, as a composer, he moved into the highest spheres of counterpoint;

into a world of extravagant canon art, mirror fugues, triple fugues, etc.

There he was safely very alone,

because there was hardly anyone who could follow him intellectually.

Until today it is practically impossible to listen to a work like

in one sitting and understand all its elaborate polyphonic prodigies, because the truth is that Bach makes enormous demands on his listeners with this music or with the

.

However, we also see that the later Bach continued to show great curiosity for innovative contemporary music: he systematically studies the Latin religious music of Italian composers and of Zelenka, finally completing his stunning

.

He comes into contact with Pergolesi's

, he wants to perform this ultramodern music that expresses Mary's pain in a Protestant religious service.

And so he incorporates a new text into the work: the Latin paraphrase of a text from the Psalms (

,

BWV 1083);

and without hesitation composes a new part for viola.

What a wonderful document of early ecumenism!

But there are also many gaps in the biography of the late Bach.

For example, we can only very selectively trace which works he performed Sunday after Sunday at St. Thomas Church in the last decade of his life.

Based on my research, I have been able to gather a number of pieces of evidence to suggest that her confrontations—which began to escalate as early as 1730—with his superiors in Leipzig over the role of music in the Thomasschule significantly reduced his creative energy as a teacher. church musician.

That's why he focused much more on other musical fields”.

Open-air concert on Leipzig's Market Square, a regular venue for the Bach Festival.Bachfest Leipzig/Gert Mothes

Although Leipzig has eventually become the quintessential Bach city, we know from the composer's letter to his friend Georg Erdmann in 1730 that he wanted to leave and find a different job elsewhere: "It is often said that Bach did not never composed an opera, never converted to Catholicism or never voluntarily left Central Germany.

I'm not so sure about all this.

Very well, his ancestors - musicians too - considered themselves extremely sedentary Thuringians.

I think that if Bach had received a desirable job offer in a German Catholic court, or even in southern Europe, he would have considered it at least long.

All the more so because in 1730 he was completely horrified at the Lipsian authorities, who, as he wrote to Erdmann,

they were 'whimsical and unaffected by music'.

Because, in 1729, the municipal council had suddenly started ordering Bach which boy singers he was to incorporate into his choir.

We have to imagine such a thing: politicians telling Bach who he had to perform his music with!”

The pandemic has also wreaked havoc on the Bach Festival, but Maul tries to learn positive lessons from the restrictions: “During the pandemic we learned what can also be achieved in the virtual space.

On Good Friday 2020 we performed the

with just three musicians in the church of Santo Tomás next to Bach's tomb and we offered it in

to the whole world for free: more than half a million people in 74 countries listened to it at home.

As they sang!

This was a truly exciting replacement for the Bach Festival which had to be completely canceled in 2020 and to which we had invited 50 partly semi-professional Bach choirs from all continents to Leipzig under the motto 'BACH — We are FAMILY!', as well as famous performers.

We have recovered our plans for 2020 now in 2022 and we will do it again in 2024. In 2021 we managed to make the central axis of the Bach Festival that we had designed, the cycle called 'The Messiah of Bach', here in Leipzig, in a hybrid way: with a reduced audience (which was then authorized) in Bach churches and more than six thousand tickets sold for

live.

This meant that anyone who wanted to could be there, regardless of whether or not they could make the pilgrimage to Leipzig.

But the pandemic also taught us what is not possible in virtual space: establishing real closeness and real encounters.

That's why it's even more wonderful that this is possible again."

Michael Maul in front of the only reliable portrait of Johann Sebastian Bach that has come down to us, painted by Elias Gottlob Haussmann in 1746 on the occasion of the composer's admission to the Lorenz Mizler Society of Musical Sciences. Bachfest Leipzig/Gert Mothes

Spanish violinist Lina Tur Bonet plays in this edition in three evening sessions: “I have known Lina for years and I admire her beautifully articulated and lively way of playing the violin.

And furthermore, since last spring Lina has become, so to speak, a successor to Bach in Weimar.

There, where Bach was appointed concertmaster of the court orchestra in 1714, she Lina is now professor of baroque violin at the Musikhochschule.

I look forward to collaborating with her in various fields and I am also very happy to have received generous financial support from the Spanish embassy to pay for her performances”.

The Bach Festival also hosts performances in which Bach's music mixes with other genres, such as the three concerts by Lina Tur Bonet, in which she will share the stage with a DJ.

All these extramural deviations from the Baroque have been common currency in the 20th and 21st centuries, which is possible “because Bach's music is universal and timeless.

His

for solo violin or the great

for organ they also work perfectly in Stokowski's arrangements for large symphony orchestra with a Tchaikovsky sound.

Whether blown into a comb or played on electric guitars, Bach's music sounds wonderful precisely because the substance is so powerful.

craves Sting told me once that he used to pick up his guitar in the morning to play a movement from a Bach cello suite.

Bach builds bridges between genres!”

The music of the sons of Bach will also have an important presence in the edition of the Bach Festival that opens today: “The sons of Bach did not have it easy at all to make their way.

Compared to his father's music, his works seem less balanced;

and compared to the works of a Mozart or a Haydn, they sometimes seem unfinished and imperfect.

But this is a distorted image.

If we immerse ourselves in the works of Carl Philipp Emanuel or Johann Christian Bach and accept them as independent, they are simply great music.

This was also the opinion of his contemporaries.

Mozart said of CPE Bach: 'He is the father, we are the children';

and Mozart significantly shaped his

from the works of Johann Christian Bach, the 'London Bach'.

I am also struck by how different and innovative the works of each of Bach's sons are, stylistically speaking.

This is actually a huge compliment to Professor Johann Sebastian Bach.

It's clear that he was able to teach his children a super-solid craft without destroying his creativity.

Bravo!"

The public listens to a concert of the cycle "The Ring of Cantatas" in the Thomaskirche during the Bach Festival 2018.Bachfest Leipzig/Gert Mothes

Michael Maul has starred in the most important discoveries of recent Bachian musicology.

Is it still possible to find some of the works that have not come down to us, but which we know were composed?

“I think that much has been irretrievably lost and there are certainly works by Bach still unknown somewhere.

But I am sure that they are found in places where no one suspects their existence.

This is what the latest great Bachian discoveries have shown.

In 2005, I myself discovered Bach's first unknown vocal work after 80 years in Duchess Anna Amalia's library in Weimar: the aria “

”, BWV 1127. I found it written by Bach on two blank pages of a birthday poem printed for Duke Wilhelm Ernst of Weimar, in whose service the composer worked.

No one had noticed those notes, especially since Bach did not write his name.

I recognized him by his handwriting.

A few weeks later, in the same library, I discovered the oldest Bach music manuscripts known to us: transcriptions of fantastic organ works by his great North German models, Dieterich Buxtehude and Johann Adam Reincken, copied into what is known as new german organ tablature.

Librarians thought it was some kind of secret writing and probably filed the manuscripts in the 'Theological Manuscripts' section, under the heading 'Monastic Literature'.

No musicologist had examined them there before me.

That is why I am sure that important undiscovered Bach sources, such as copies of works by other composers, are still to be found in well-known and well-researched libraries.

Bach must have had a large music library, because he was always very curious about foreign works”.

I don't know of any other composer who is so versatile and so adaptable to any instrument.

Bach builds bridges between genres!”

Is it possible to combine high-level research with the management of the most important festival dedicated to Bach?

“Yes, that was my hope: to be able to combine the work of a festival director with that of a researcher.

But that is difficult, because as head of the Bachfest, I am the artistic director of the festival, the ideologue, the main fundraiser, the person in charge of establishing collaboration networks with other institutions and the face and spokesperson of this great international festival.

I have great creative possibilities that make many envy me.

Through my ideas I come into contact with many people: on the occasion of my cycle 'The Messiah of Bach', which we performed at the Bach Festival in 2021, I was even able to exchange impressions with Benedict XVI, because he is also a declared Bachian.

But there are times when I long for the time when I spent three days a week immersed in the archives in central Germany and could dive deep into the world of Bach without any rush.

It's something I can hardly afford to do now.

Still, I try to continue publishing, teaching at the university and, above all, instilling enthusiasm for Bach's music in people through books, radio programs and

, while making it clear that Bach's music may seem divine, but that he was also a human being, with his strengths and weaknesses."

The church of St. Nicholas, closely associated with the music of Bach, and another regular setting for Lipsi festival concerts. Bachfest Leipzig/Gert Mothes

At another great early music festival, the one in Utrecht, Maul will speak in August about “Johann Sebastian Bach, Frederick the Great and the politics of the

”.

Does this title imply that Bach was a "political" composer?

“That's one of the small research projects that I'm running in parallel at the moment.

I am sure his trip to Potsdam in 1747 and his musical genuflection there before Frederick the Great and later in the

printed were considered a true domestic affront from the point of view of the Saxon court.

After all, we must not forget that Bach had been an honorary member of the Dresden court orchestra since 1736 and that he described himself as 'Saxon Electoral Court Composer'.

And Frederick the Great had been Saxony's Public Enemy Number One since the First Silesian War and the Battle of Kesselsdorf, so Count von Brühl, the Saxon Prime Minister, did not have to be amused by Bach's genuflection to Frederick.

I suspect that Bach secretly hoped that the king would hire him to work in his employ, perhaps offering him a large pension if he moved to Berlin.

But his calculations failed him.

I do not think, however, that Bach was a political man.

His occupation was music and,

In order to achieve his goals in this area, he would sometimes literally try to walk through the wall, no matter what the cost.

He didn't always get away with it, and sometimes he made things unnecessarily difficult for himself.

And I even imagine that to the layman he must have seemed little short of autistic because of his extreme concentration on his art and his seeming reluctance to make any kind of commitment.”

Bach's reception is in a state of permanent flux and it is important to make all of this audible.

With the centenary of the Bach Festival four years away, Maul sets new medium-term goals: "I think we have to manage to offer, above all, a wide cross-section of current Bach performance and reception in the main city in that the composer carried out his activity, incessantly and in an always different way.

I love to think in cycles.

In 2018 it was the 'Ring of Cantatas', with interpretations of what are supposedly the 30 best Bach cantatas, entrusted to the most famous musicians: John Eliot Gardiner, Ton Koopman, Masaaki Suzuki.

This project was followed in 2021 by "Bach's Messiah", the life of Jesus of Nazareth told through 33 Bach cantatas, the three oratorios and the

.

I still have a few more ideas for these kinds of great cyclical concepts, especially in the endlessly beautiful and hitherto largely underused realm of cantatas.

I think the core of Bach's incredible art is really in the cantatas.

At the same time, I think we should break the traditional formats a bit.

We need concerts where artists don't just perform music, but take the audience on a verbal journey of discovery.

I also think Bach's music lends itself very well to being performed in a way that detaches from the original context and performance practice.

The history of Bach's reception is in a state of flux and it is important to make all of this audible."

2023, for now, already has its conceptual axis designed: “Next year, the Bach Festival will be held with the motto 'BACH for the FUTURE'.

We will then celebrate the third centenary of Bach's inauguration as Thomaskantor.

On the one hand, we want to show that at that time Bach composed almost more for the future than for the present, because it is clear that there were many people among his contemporaries who were initially literally overwhelmed by his music.

But we want to future-proof him, so to speak, with a lot of new and also interactive formats, even though his music doesn't really need it.

I repeat: I know of no music that is more timeless and limitless than Bach's.

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