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SUNDAY SPECTATOR
August 18, 2002
Organ music
I know little or nothing about music as I am about to reveal. "But I know what I like as grandfather used to say. I had the good luck the other day to lay down a reckless amount of money and obtain a box with 12 CDs containing all the organ works by Johann Sebastian Bach, played by the late Helmut Walcha on the Great Organ of St. Laurenskerk at Alkmaar in the Netherlands, and on the Silbermann Organ in the Church of Saint-Pierre-le-Jeune at Strasbourg -- all nicely remastered using the latest recording technology. To my mind, Helmut Walcha (who retired a generation ago, and died in 1991 at the age of 83), is the incomparable Bach keyboard artist, an ideal interpreter of the intentions and even the voice of Bach, speaking without words. Walcha was blind from childhood, he had to learn the entire repertoire by ear and then by heart to play it -- a vast quantity of music, decades of painstaking, disciplined work, helped first by a devoted mother, later by a devoted wife. Uniquely among the many talented organists, he came to the music from the inside. The blind have often the gift of second sight" the ability to see what the sighted cannot; and in this case Walcha could actually "see" the music all distractions to it taken out of his way. He presented it with a lucidity that seems almost superhuman. I first bought some of these Walcha recordings as LPs when a teenager hardly then appreciating them as I do now. Yet it was in listening to Walcha's playing of a certain Bach prelude that I experienced a musical awakening more than three decades ago that freed me from the thrall of rock-n-roll. Bach's Prelude and Fuge in A minor (BWV 543) has ever since seemed to me the music at the very centre of the world -- not the "music of the spheres" but of this sphere this earth. The Prelude is like the lighting of the candles in the darkness at the end of the Easter vigil beginning with just the one candle and the priests huddled round; with the first flicker of the light upon a human priestly face; and then the flame licking candle to candle pew by pew till it has filled the whole church. The Fuge that follows this is like the cross of Jesus suddenly come alive the sap rising through its desiccated branches the leaves forming and unfurling the forest spreading and arching like the interior of some vast Gothic cathedral in aisle upon aisle rising to the clerestories and converging upon the altar with its bread and wine. Once when I was walking in the wilderness of northern Algonquin I had the experience of that Fuge the sound of it rising in my memory as if present to my ears and the most exalted feeling of the noble forest risen around me the springets reaching upwards and spreading protective arms to filter the pure rays of the sun; the trees suspended in "their balanced attitude like dancers their arms like dancers" (Bernard Spencer's phrase). It is as if it was given to Bach not to see but in some kind to hear the nature within nature the rhythm in the sap rising in the trees; and to transcribe this in the whistling of air commanded by the keys and rising in the pipes of a mighty organ. My first glimpse of Bach was in the person of my aunt Mildred Holmes the organist for 60 years in Calvin United Church at New Waterford Cape Breton -- that frail town on its ocean promontory kissed in the grit of coal. She was practising a chorale as I entered the empty church -- utterly unaware that she was watched. This large chaste woman in her hitched-back floral-pattern dress her face turned to heaven and her legs pumping the pedals in Dionysiac abandon. I startled her. She had startled me. It was she who told me that Bach is -- after Matthew Mark Luke and John -- the Fifth Gospel. This was the one heterodox idea she ever entertained. As Gospel it is vast; to get a purchase only on the vocal part of the repertoire the hundreds of complex cantatas and motets and oratorios and the greater and lesser masses could be the work of a life and yet so much of Bach's work went missing in manuscript. Every surviving part of it turned to Christ however and even in the heart of the most secular of his cantatas -- a hunting conceit for some petty German princeling -- what do we find but the immortal aria Sheep may safely graze . Bach's awareness of an apostolate is conveyed in his music he is in the business of saving souls and he "has saved more lives than all the social workers". (It was a social worker who said this to me speaking of Mozart; but it applies even more signally to Bach.) "His music expresses the life-wish and it is heard and it lifts up people who have fallen." In Bach's own words: "The ultimate end and aim of thoroughbass should only be the glorification of God and the recreation of the mind. Where these are not kept in view there can be no real music -- only infernal jingling and bellowing." This is quoted in some liner notes to his recordings of the English Suites by the great very much living pianist Murray Perahia; who himself writes as he plays and as Bach composed not dithering but going straight to the theme. Mr. Perahia explains how Bach's is an art of counterpoint resolved in harmony and "the resulting chord progressions are not awkward haphazard strumming but rather a coherent musical flow". Or to put it another way: transcendental revelations resolved in worldly serenity. Or else: a river in paradise. We are incidentally now living in a musical age of "infernal jingling and bellowing" and I do not doubt Bach states correctly why this must be. It is possible for music to stretch a long way into "secular" life without losing the thread that still connects it through "the labyrinth of the world" to God in the centre of all things. But it is also possible to sever this thread and then we lose our way in the maze. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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