It’s a phenomenon I first noticed a few years back when
sitting in on some student recitals where the students themselves had written
out the programme details. Suddenly the
catalogue numbers for Bach works started being listed as BMW. The practice has now become frighteningly widespread,
with several regional variations; the other day I came across a recital
programme written by a Filipino student (presumably a devout Catholic) which
described a Bach piece as being BVM. (I wonder what the Lutheran Bach would have made of being associated with the Blessed Virgin Mary?)
It started, certainly in my experience, with Chinese
students in Hong Kong and Malaysia. They
are a group of youngsters who tend to see the acquisition of a German-made
high-spec automobile as the ultimate symbol of success. (More fool them. From my 43 years of driving around the world in
cars, buses and commercial vehicles, I have seen so many BMWs involved in horrendous
accidents, burnt up on the side of a road or sitting forlornly waiting for the
rescue truck, that I would never get into one out of choice. It may be that the cars are inherently
dangerous or that the drivers who prefer them lack the imagination to drive
safely – or most likely, a combination of both – and a good friend of mine in
Singapore who foolishly possesses one tells me that, while it is horrendously
expensive to maintain, the real hurt to the pocket comes from the fines he incurs
whenever he drives up to Kuala Lumpur. A
Singaporean-registered BMW is, of course, an open invitation for Malaysian
police to stop and demand cash payments from its driver, but since my friend
proudly sets his cruise control to 150 kph as soon as he has passed the toll
barrier at the start of the North-South Highway and refuses even to turn it off
when he passes through the restricted speed area around Melaka, he brings many
of these fines on himself. I admit my
choice of cars is hardly inspiring – either Volvo (boring) or Jeep (unreliable),
but at least I feel safe in them and never incur the unwarranted green-eyed
wrath of other motorists.) But I
digress.
Probably subconsciously, those Chinese students seem to
associate the fact the musical world now reveres Bach as an almost God-like figure
striding colossus-like across the panoply of musical history with the kind of
material greed which is the hallmark of those in today’s rather shallower
society who have earned popular acclaim.
I suspect that they imagine that, had such things as BMWs been around in
his day (and I’m not sure many of they don’t actually think they were) Bach would
certainly have driven one; a “Bach’s Musician Wheels” to paraphrase the usual mnemonic
for BMW which, political correctness has now rendered us unable to utter in
western society (even if it still seems the preferred motorised wheels for drug
dealers of African and Caribbean descent in the slums of major cities).
When I first started taking music seriously, I wrote to
Lucian Nethsingha, then organist of St Michael’s College Tenbury Wells (of sad
memory – the establishment long having been closed down in the early days of
the demise of Anglican choral foundations) to ask him about a voluntary he had
played after a broadcast of choral evensong.
He replied in a delightful postcard, his writing looking as if it had
been written above a ruler, suggesting that he was delighted that I had enjoyed
it and it was Bach’s “Fantasia in G, S.572”.
The “S” fascinated me and when I discovered it was short for Wolfgang
Schmeider, the man who had drawn up the original Bach Werke-Verzeichnis in 1950,
I understood what it was all about. For
several years after that I continued to describe Bach works with the catalogue
suffix “S” until I realised nobody else did.
Perhaps had we carried on with this, Chinese students might now see Bach
as an altogether different (and for my money, better) German limousine.
Of course this is all nonsense, because even if he had been
alive today Bach would never have had a BMW.
For all his proud German-ness, he would not have been a man to squander
money on pointless exhibitionist displays of lavish automobile possession. A humble Trabant or, more likely bearing in
mind his large family, a more spacious Wartburg would have been his thing. (Remember the Wartburg? A school friend had one and when he came to
sell it through the columns of the local paper he highlighted its principal
selling point as a “built-in smoke screen”!) Bach was not a traveller and
needed no car other than one to get him around Leipzig when he had to juggle
the various duties at the university and at the various churches to which he
was attached. If a man would happily
walk the 250 miles from Arnstadt to Lübeck just to hear Buxtehude play the
organ and then walk all the way back again when staying would have involved
marrying Buxtehude’s ugly daughter, he certainly was made of more potent stuff
than the wimps and self-regarding salesmen who aspire to the ranks of BMW
owners today. A Wartburg would have managed
that journey well enough, provided, of course, there were no steep hills along
the way. (My school friend often had to turn his round and go up one the once notorious
hill between Basingstoke and Farnham in reverse, gleefully smiling at the truck
drivers who sailed past him in their 32-ton artics without a care in the
world.)
But if you think all this ridiculous talk of Bach and cars
is just so much silliness directed at a long-dead composer with a reputation for
arch-seriousness and deep religious intensity, it might be good to remember two
things about Bach. Firstly, he spent
time in prison for an ill-fated prank on an employer, and secondly, shortly
after his arrival in Leipzig he penned two of the most ridiculous and downright
silly Cantatas known to man (or at least until Joseph Horovitz came up with his amazing,
but sadly long-forgotten, Horrortorio). I have just reviewed the recordings of the “Academic
Cantatas” made as part of Bis’s Bach cantata cycle directed by Masaaki Suzuki and
have to say this is a side of Bach I had not realised existed. Up to now I thought his idea of a belly laugh
was referring to his pupil Johann Ludwig Krebs as “The best crayfish [krebs] in the stream [bach]”, but when I hear the stunning
Roderick Williams (has ever a singer received so much exposure on disc yet
never failed to exceed all expectations?) do his impersonation of the appallingly
pompous King Aeolus keeping all the winds locked up for the summer,
and the wind players of the Bach Collegium Japan having a ball straining at the
leash to be let out into the open, I realise that here is a composer not just
with a huge sense of humour but with a sense of the ridiculous and silly as
strong as any. I would heartily
recommend this new disc to anyone who still believes Bach to be stuffy and
serious.
And I would certainly recommend it to those misguided
students who might like to take note of the BIS editorial team’s rather more
conscientious approach to accuracy.
These two works are properly catalogued as BWV 205 and BWV 207.
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