My first exposure to the complete St. Matthew Passion was in a performance conducted by Otto Klemperer. It was one of the most tedious, dreary, and boring experiences of my life – although I can’t have been much older than 10 at the time. I remember it as painfully slow, morbid, agonisingly monotonous, and seemingly interminable, and it soured my appreciation of the work for decades. A decade later, and a stentorian-voiced lecturer explaining in infinite detail the wonders (which for me remained stubbornly hidden) of this Pillar of Western Civilization only reinforced my sense of the work as overlong, over-gloomy and over-indulgent. And despite having sat through countless performances, performed in many, and reviewed dozens more both live and on record, I still find it almost impossible to listen through without that underlying sense of frustration that Bach is forcing me to while my valuable life away on something which seems so utterly unnecessary. The first time I played continuo in it was a performance conducted by Bill Llewellyn at the Leith Hill Festival. It was monumentally slow, and I recall the orchestral fixer passing me a note after the first few hours had elapsed suggesting that if I slowed things down even more, we would all be in overtime; I did, to the eternal gratitude of the musicians, whose only regret was by the time it had finished, the pubs were all closed. Afterwards Bill came up to me with tears in his eyes and thanked me for so fully entering into his approach to the work, which he had modelled on Vaughan Williams’ annual performance which, to all accounts, was even more low and long-drawn-out than Klemperer’s.
In the past decades, the slow, magisterial, deeply serious style
of performance has been replaced by the lighter touch of the Baroque Brigade;
those enthusiasts for archaic instruments who believe that if you use the hardware
of the 18th century, your performance will automatically be better
and more “authentic”. Yet my heart still
drops when I have to sit through the whole shebang all over again; and while I
dutifully do, I usually regret having done so.
Things changed on Thursday night, however, when it was put
on at the Proms by Jonathan Cohen and his group Arcangelo. I had it on in the car in a live relay, and
while I intended only to listen to a bit before turning over to the news, I
found myself mesmerised and unable to switch it off until the final bars had
died away. I found it tremendously invigorating,
inspiring, dramatic, and totally absorbing; he treated it almost operatically,
with fast, punchy pacing and moments of spine-tingling drama. We all know the story, but it seemed to be
entirely new and fresh in this revelatory performance. Indeed, so much did I enjoy it that last
night I decided to watch it again on television, this time with a glass of
whisky to hand just in case my in-car experience had been the result of a temporarily
altered personality and it turned out to be just as dreary as the rest. It wasn’t. It was even more thrilling and absorbing
second time around; that is until the awful imbeciles in the BBC’s artsankuwchah
department decided to put some mindless bimbo on the screen to tell us how enthusiastic
she was and to share with us her kind-numbingly puerile thoughts on the performance.
(If only television producers realised
that all we want to do is see the performance and are generally capable of forming
our own opinions without the intrusive idiocy of adolescent eye-candy.)
Two things, however, struck me about this performance of the
St Matthew Passion. The first was
that Bach would probably not have recognised a note of it and, secondly, while
it was using old-fashioned looking musical instruments, there was nothing
remotely “authentic” about it. We have
no idea what the work sounded like when it was first performed (that is, if it
was ever performed in its entirely in Bach’s time), but I’m pretty sure Bach
would not have danced around with such elasticity to inspire his musicians as
did Cohen, who sat down and jumped up from his harpsichord with all the energy
of a spring-loaded jack-in-the-box. One
thing’s for sure, at the first performance (presumably in the cold months of
Lent) Bach would not have sweated with the profuseness of Cohen, nor would his soloists
have ended up looking quite so drenched in perspiration. I doubt, too, that they would have dressed in
so random and casual a way, unified only by the colour black. And I cannot imagine the raw drama and sheer
edge-of-the-seat excitement Cohen brought to it in the Royal Albert Hall was
what Bach would have provided his Leipzig congregation 300 years ago. No, this was very much a performance for the
21st century, pandering to our tastes for instant gratification and
our inability to tolerate long periods of musical inactivity. And on those terms it was a fabulous success.
Musicians, critics, and friends whose opinion I highly
value, have suggested that this was a performance which lacked “weight” and “seriousness”
– qualities which Klemperer, Llewellyn and Vaughan Williams provided in
abundance. One suggested it was “breathless”
and another that it was on the verge of being “frantic”. I agree with all of that; but in my case I
take those absences as positives rather than negatives. I think the work benefitted from being given
this kind of racy, punchy, and pseudo-operatic treatment, and it certainly won
me over after some 50 years of indifference.
The question remains, are any of these styles of performance
“correct” or “authentic”. I have a niggling
suspicion that Klemperer et al were closer to the mark than Cohen; I
sense that Bach would have given it weight, ponderous substance, and deadly
seriousness; but I really don’t know. Certainly,
he would not have recognised the immaculate intonation of the strings or the beautifully
moulded tones of the wind players that Arcangelo provided us, and neither would
he have recognised the grossly over-inflated tones of the modern instruments
with which Klemperer worked. Bach’s
singers would have lacked the polish of Cohen’s team (and Stuart Jackson was a
fabulous Evangelist) or the full-bodied rotundity of Klemperer’s (I can’t
remember who they were, but when we did it at Leith Hill, the Evangelist was
the wonderful Ian Partridge), but I suspect the maturity of Klemperer’s team
would have been more akin to what Bach had at his disposal than the youthfulness
of Cohen’s singers. Am I veering towards
the sacrilegious notion that had I heard Bach in person, I would have been
deeply unimpressed?
In short, we have no idea what Bach wanted, expected, or
even had, and while we do know a bit about the hardware available to him, there
is no point in even guessing about the sound created or the way it affected the
hearers at the time. When it comes to
Bach (and most other 18th century composers), an ambition to be “stylistically
correct” is inevitably going to be fruitless.
So why bother? Why not
reinterpret the work as fits the time in which it is being heard and let it
live on into the future to be reinterpreted as future generations think fit? Tradition and authenticity have no place when
it comes to the St Matthew Passion.
