The great British conductor and musicologist scholar John Eliot Gardiner spent several years writing a portrait of Johann Sebastian Bach,
Music in the Sky Castle
(Cliff, translation by Luis Gago), almost a thousand pages dedicated to the genius of Eisenach.
At the beginning of his essay he remembers a phrase by Albert Einstein: "This is what I have to say about the work composed by Bach: listen to it, interpret it, love it, venerate it and shut your mouth."
Gardiner himself later writes: "Just listen to a single Christmas cantata to experience the festive euphoria and exhilaration of unprecedented music, beyond the reach of any other composer."
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Johann Sebastian Bach, the composer who captivated the world
333 reasons to love Bach
The idea that Bach (1685-1750) occupies a unique space among the great composers is shared by many musicians and is clearly reflected in the immense number of recordings of his works, in the role that his scores occupy in the study plans. of the conservatories and in the versions that transfer their compositions to other types of music, such as jazz; but also in specialized radio. For years, both the Spanish Radio Clásica, from Radio Nacional, and the French France Musique (both public stations) have maintained two programs entirely dedicated to the Baroque composer:
La hora de Bach
,
which is broadcast on Saturdays at 11.00, and
Le Bach du dimanche
,
which airs on Sundays from 07:00 to 09:00. Both are available on
podcast
. In the case of the Spanish program, it also remains the most listened to and downloaded from the station.
“Bach is a composer of a depth, a solidity and a complexity with an appearance of simplicity like there has been no other”, explains Sergio Pagán, expert in early music and director and presenter of
La hora de Bach
since the program was born in 2015, first within the special summer programming and then as a weekly space.
“It is perfect, from the smallest works to the largest: it is like classical constructions, like a Greek sculpture, you cannot put on or take off anything.
There are also many very good recordings of his work and it is very well cataloged ”, continues Pagan in reference to the famous BWV (
Bach-Werke-Verzeichnis
, the catalog of Bach's works in German).
Listen to the programs
'Bach's hour'
'Le Bach du dimanche'
"Why not Mozart?", Responds Corinne Schneider, director and presenter of
Le Bach du dimanche,
which has been broadcast since 2017, when asked if there is another musician to whom a weekly program could be dedicated without being repetitive.
“To celebrate the 250th anniversary of the birth of Beethoven, France Musique dedicated a daily one-hour program to his music from Monday to Friday throughout 2020. But it is true that Bach's repertoire is so wide that a single year is not enough to hear it all ”.
At the beginning of the 2000s, Radio Clásica already broadcast a program dedicated only to Bach's cantatas, directed by the great musicologist Daniel Vega Cernuda, the greatest Spanish expert on the composer and author of
Bach.
Complete repertoire of vocal music
(Chair).
Johann Sebastian Bach.
Neither of them remembers a case similar to that of Bach, capable of enduring week after week a diverse and varied program, which is gaining followers as the years go by. Both Schneider and Pagán are very proud of having managed to practically not repeat cantatas, the compositions for the Lutheran Mass, which they offer religiously (pun intended) in each program. “If I have repeated any, it has been by mistake or trying to make them in different versions. At most I will have repeated six or seven and there are still a lot left ”, Pagan explains. Schneider points out: “During the first three seasons I was able to emit a new cantata every Sunday, also following the liturgical calendar to be as much in tune as possible with the circumstances of the composition and performance. About 200 religious cantatas have reached us.This year we are already starting to repeat, but of course I offer a new interpretation every time! ”.
"Bach is a unique case," says Italian violinist and conductor Fabio Biondi, one of the great interpreters of baroque music, promoter of the Europa Galante ensemble, which plays with period instruments. “No wonder they have been on the air for years. Bach is dazzling. It has something that you can sometimes find in Mozart, in Beethoven: it is not burdened by any kind of routine, it is a global, fundamental, imperturbable, infinite message. When you read about his life, you realize that he had problems with the orchestra, he was always asking for more musicians, but all that does not appear in his compositions. They are works created for the future, universal ”, continues Biondi, who has just recorded for an album that will be released in September in Naïve for the
Sonatas and Partitas for solo violin
(BWV 1001-1006),
considered the Everest of the baroque violin.
Autograph manuscript of the beginning of Prelude no.
8 of the second book of 'The well-tempered harpsichord' by Johann Sebastian BachBritish Library
Fans of these shows are getting used to names that appear again and again - Masaaki Suzuki's Bach Collegium of Japan, Marie Claire Alain's organ performances, the Collegium Vocale Gent, Philippe Herreweghe, Benjamin Alard, Gustav Leonhardt, Nikolaus Harnoncourt, Gardiner himself or Biondi–, but they also discover new gems, such as the Sonata for organ number 4 BWV528 performed by the Icelandic pianist Vikingur Olafsson. Naturally, after a few broadcasts, listeners move like a fish in water in the infinite BWV catalog, which now exceeds 1,200 entries. The latest edition of the complete works of Bach, which came out in 2018 on the occasion of its 333 anniversary, called precisely
Bach 333
, includes 222 CDs with 280 hours of music.
"What makes Bach inexhaustible is not so much because he is timeless, but rather that he is timeless," explains Luis Gago, music critic for EL PAÍS, violinist and expert on the work of Bach, about whom he wrote a small book for Alianza Editorial . “It has been appropriated by all musical genres and it always works. With Beethoven, Monteverdi, Mozart… it would be a catastrophe. His music has an element of abstraction and timelessness, that is why it is so universal ”. Regarding the success of the radio programs, Gago remembers what the great pianist András Schiff said in January before starting a recital entirely dedicated to the composer in London: “You don't have to ask me why I should make a program dedicated monographically to Bach, because over and over again I say that by far the greatest composer who has ever lived is Johann Sebastian Bach.It is something that does not need to be demonstrated ”. Bach does not need explanations, as faithful listeners of
Bach's hour
and
Bach's
Le dimanche
.
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