We have already explored the “first” performances of Bach in the International settlement—“a prelude arranged for violin and piano by the wives of the German Club members in the Yokohama Foreign Settlement on 6 November 1869.” Unsurprising given salon music at the time, and the thirst for culture among the expatriate community.
Japanese aficionados soon took up Bach and were performing in concerts by the 1890s, mostly the short instrumental pieces, often the popular arrangements of Gounod. It was not all frivolous pleasure, however. All of this was to aid the nascent Meiji state’s plans for creating a national consciousness. The Tokyo School of Music was founded (and funded) to raise up a generation of national songwriters.
A great deal of the investment in Western music had nationalist, morally uplifting pedagogy as its goal. Military marches were the first Western music to promoted by the Japanese government. But when Isawa Shuji brought his teacher Luther Whiting Mason back from Boston, they created a comprehensive music curriculum for all Japanese schools, modeled musically to a large degree on Christian hymns.
Students of nationalism will be less surprised by this, perhaps, than musical historians. But it helps explain why, when Rudolf Dittrich introduced Bach’s choral music to his students in the 1890s, he did not end up singing Bach’s German words. Remember that Dittrich taught in English; few Japanese knew any German at all, let alone had the ability to enunciate it with their voices.
Crucifixus from Bach’s B-Minor Mass, performed by Phillipe Herreweghe and the Collegium Vocale Ghent.
It is still surprising that the first recorded performance of Bach’s choral music in Japan was in Latin, the Crucifixus from the B-Minor mass (see Isoyama). The language would likely have been much more straightforward for his students to intone than German. And the slow counterpoint shows off Bach’s expressive choral capacity without being overly technical.
To aid their musical interpretation, Dittrich would have had to describe Christ’s suffering on the cross, a totally foreign theological vocabulary. But for the Japanese, the explanation might easily have been comprehensible as is: “Crucified under Pontius Pilate, died, and was buried.” Death and burial are the quintessential duties of religious Buddhism in Japan from the Edo period. Bach’s haunting tune, with its descending sighs and dissonances, marries well with indigenous laments at life’s evanescence.
This 1890 performance was remarkable in itself, but its reprise (also directed by Dittrich) in 1893 by a Tokyo Music School club was even more so. This time the creedal text was replaced by Japanese poetry, the crucifixion transformed into an “A song of ascent of Mount Fuji” (富士登山の歌).
This practice of contrafactum was already common in Japan, established by the above-mentioned by Isawa and Whiting. The educational intent was not merely aesthetic, but heavily moral. As part of the Meiji era’s modernization project, it reified the honorable Japan spirit of the old, updated with Western knowledge, a policy known as “wakon yousai” (和魂洋才 “Spirit of Japan, Knowledge of the West”—itself a reboot of 和魂漢才, “Spirit of Japan, Knowledge of China”).
There is no end of songs about the arch-famous mountain, or climbing it. The railways even compiled their own songs for passengers to sing in the train (or as a promotional aide-mémoire to recall their memorable journeys). Here’s one by Kenki Owada.
右は入海しずかにて(鷲津)
空には富士の雪しろし
左は遠州洋近く(二川)
山なす波ぞ砕けちるOn the right is the calm sea of Iriumi (Washizu)
Fuji’s snow white in the sky
On the left, near the Enshu Ocean (Futagawa)
Waves crashing in the mountains
Here’s a whole collection on YouTube…
But why match climbing Mount Fuji with the Crucifixion? There might be spiritual resonances, too, in a roundabout way. Climbing Mount Fuji, to the figural imagination, might parallel an ascent to the cross, to suffering; and from the top, to descend, as does Bach’s tune, into the grave. But there on the summit, in the depths, from death the soft final chords reassure, by that quiet shift to G-major: the resurrection is to come.
The 1893 performance of the reworked Crucifixus did not go unnoticed. In his study on “The B-Minor Mass and the Japanese People,” Tadashi Isoyama quotes a report found in issue 30 (March 1893) of Ongaku zasshi:
The only piece that was somehow sublime, silencing the audience with the expression of such artistry that it seemed to extend from near at hand to afar, indeed with crowds forming here and there, was Fuji Tozan (Crucifixus).
(I’m still searching for the song’s words; Isoyama’s essay is not readily available. I’ll certainly update you when I lay hold of it.)
The turn that Fuji Tozan represents is at once creative and stifling. Just before the turn of the century, Isawa Shuji, who had done so much to bring Western Music to Japan, determined that enough was enough:
the original founder of the Music Research Committee and thus the modern national music education of Japan, decreed on the front page of the Yomiuri newspaper that Bach’s music is cold, difficult to understand, and dull; this seems to have put a halt to all performances of Bach’s music by Japanese performers over the next year. One year later, on the front page of the same newspaper, he stated that, through “Westernism,” Japanese performers had learned to play the likes of Bach and others; now the task was to use this music and Western harmony to develop the great spiritual musical heritage gifted to them by their ancestors. The influence that Isawa held in music circles was immense and this led to an immediate nationalization of Bach’s music through the appearance and performance of choral music such as Gakutoku, Tamabako and also Usa Shintaku, songs with Japanese nationalist texts applied to Bach’s chorales [from the St. Matthew Passion]. (Cressy 194–95)
Bach’s music was for a time tied to this progressive nationalist project, only to be liberated in the late Meiji and Showa periods by a new generation of fans and enthusiasts.
Sources
Thomas A. Cressy, “Bach in the Early Shōwa-Period Japan (1926–1945). Historiography and Reception,” in Transcultural Music History, ed. Reinhard Strohm, Intercultural Music Studies 24 (Berlin: Verlag für Wissenschaft und Bildung, 2021), link.
Tadashi Isoyama, “The B-Minor Mass and Japanese People: A Problematical Issue of Universality,” in International Symposium Understanding Bach’s B-Minor Mass, ed. Yo Tomita, Elise Crease, and Ian Mills, 2007, 344–51.
———, “The B-Minor Mass and Japanese People: A Problematical Issue of Universality: Errata,” n.d., link