Music: Although few composers enjoy such immense prestige and presence in the afterlife of European musical culture as Bach, the environment of ideas and social practice from which his music emerged can seem as remote to many people as a Hohenzollern armchair, writes Harry White.
Bach and the Meanings of Counterpoint offers, among much else, a close reading of this environment. David Yearsley has immersed himself in the literature of theology, alchemy, musical polemics and political history in order to recover, with compelling precision and skill, the status and significance of musical craft as a central preoccupation of German intellectual life throughout the first half of the 18th century. The result is a book which successfully challenges many assumptions about the significance of counterpoint - the art of combining melodic or rhythmic strands which contrast with each other in a composite musical texture - in Bach's late works, pre-eminently the widely-held belief that in these works the composer disengaged himself from any consideration other than the abstract configurations of counterpoint itself.
The magnitude of Bach's compositional achievement to one side - it laid the foundation for that hegemony in musical affairs which Germany was to enjoy throughout the 19th century - it is easy to understand how this belief gained ground. Bach's late works, among them the incomplete Art of Fugue and the Musical Offering, tend to confirm an exhaustive interest in the combinatorial art of pure counterpoint, almost to the exclusion of anything else. By nature and design, Bach's musical imagination far exceeded the structural and expressive norms of those genres which he tested almost to breaking point, and the architectural scale and internal proportions of his major works (the Mass in B minor is a good example) so far transcended conventional expectations that not a few of his contemporaries were alienated by the sheer complexity of his musical utterances. In 1738, Bach's former student, Johann Adolf Scheibe, condemned the composer's "excess of art", because it led him "from the natural to the artificial, and from the lofty to the sombre . . . one admires the onerous labour and uncommon effort - which, however, are vainly employed, since they conflict with reason". Much more in this vein was to follow.
Bach and the Meanings of Counterpoint traces, with great patience and erudition, the history of musical ideas which produced this climate of rational disdain for the mysteries of counterpoint, precisely at the time when Bach was most deeply preoccupied with them. Each of the six chapters therein ('Vor deinen Thron tret ich and the art of dying'; 'The alchemy of Bach's canons'; 'Bach's taste for pork or canary'; 'The autocratic regimes of A Musical Offering'; 'Bach the machine'; 'Physiognomies of Bach's counterpoint') begins with a painstaking reconstruction of those vital intersections between music and its neighbouring spheres of interest in order to read the late works of Bach as a stringent expression of and commentary upon those ideas which determined the "world view" of North Germany in the first half of the 18th century. In order, these preoccupations can be summarized here as death, alchemy, the rhetoric of contrapuntal discourse, the musical expression of political absolutism, the obsession with mechanistic modes of perception and reproduction, and the projection of contrapuntal artifice as a symbol of German purity, integrity and artistic pre-eminence.
In regard to the last of these - a projection which clearly adumbrates the extensive literature on Bach during the Nazi era (brilliantly and cogently summarized by Yearsley), the author of this book poignantly observes: "Still, I cannot deny that my own attempt at a kind of historicist criticism of A \ Musical Offering is haunted by the dark readings of the 1930s".
In brief, Yearsley reads the Musical Offering not as the servile production of contrapuntal fawning upon Frederick the Great ( a conventional gloss), but as an explicit discourse of absolutist power. In this enterprise, he is not far from the Nazi musicologist Alfred Burgartz, who enthusiastically claimed that "Bach's fugues and Frederick's battle plans are spiritually united". Something for the music-loving Führer, no doubt. Yearsley himself concludes that "it took the singlemindedness, detachment, submissiveness and genius of Bach to produce this apotheosis [i.e. the Musical Offering] of the Prussian monarchy". The author does not flinch from the political implications of such a reading, and he fortifies this assertion - as throughout the book - with an incisive scrutiny of the music itself. (There are virtuoso readings, among other works, not only of the Musical Offering, but of the F major "Duetto" BWV 803 and of some of the canons from the Art of Fugue).
Some of Yearsley's interim conclusions interfere with and unbalance the broad argument of the book in general. To suggest that the canons in the Art of Fugue represent "a counterfeit of 'real' music, an imposture of a 'real composer', compelling in its manifest arbitrariness, sublime awkwardness and nearly perpetual energy" is to force the issue of mechanical reproduction at the expense of Bach's businesslike adherence to the norms of his own (public and private) social behaviour. To postmodernise the composer in this way does not do much for the underlying historicism of the book in general.
In a verbally-dominated culture such as our own, and at a time when Ireland's reception of Bach, Beethoven and the Boys (to say nothing of contemporary Irish music) is at best equivocal, the appearance of this book invites us to reconsider the function and meaning of music when it is at the centre (and not on the margins) of cultural ferment. If the sole Bach legacy were simply the music itself, it would not be necessary to ask, as did the brilliant musicologist Kofi Agawu in 1996, "why not let classical music die, and with it the oppressive culture that has supported it for centuries?" Prussian cruelty and Lutheran mysticism may seem very far removed from the innocent enjoyment of a Bach fugue. This book shows, nevertheless, that nothing of great German music is entirely innocent of such abstractions. On the contrary, this reading of Bach's counterpoint as a fulcrum of German thought shows how intimately and powerfully music and social practice act upon each other.
Harry White is Professor of Music at UCD and President of the Society for Musicology in Ireland. He is a contributor to the Oxford Companion to J.S. Bach (Oxford University Press, 1999)
Bach and the Meanings of Counterpoint By David Yearsley Cambridge University Press, 257pp. £45