I don’t get Johann Sebastian Bach. I mean, I get that he was good — no Mozart, sure, but definitely up there in anyone’s top five 18th-century composers. But that’s not enough. Bach must be revered as the One: the supreme and universal musical genius. When John Eliot Gardiner celebrated the millennium by performing Bach’s complete cantatas, it wasn’t a cycle or a series but a ‘pilgrimage’, if you please. (He’s back with more cantatas this weekend at the Barbican.) Playing Bach, we’re told, requires profound selflessness — though if you’ve ever witnessed a solo violinist hijacking an orchestral concert to saw through all 15 tortured minutes of the D minor Chaconne, you might call it something else entirely. No: as The Bluffer’s Guide to Music puts it, there’s only one acceptable response — to adopt a posture of open-mouthed reverence and intone the words ‘Ah… Bach.’
Well, you can say it, but what if you don’t feel it? I’m not alone: the pianist Stephen Hough admitted a few years ago, to gasps of horrified disbelief, that he didn’t feel a deep connection with Bach’s music.
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