Bach in the British Settlement
It was not Japan's Germanophilia, but the British who first brought Bach's music to Japan
In a recent article in Word & World, I mentioned the prominence of German-speaking musicians teaching Bach in Meiji Japan. When I wrote that piece a year ago, I was relying mostly on the dated work of Nobuku Goto and Ryuichi Higuchi. This post serves to augment the lopsided impression.
Goto’s pioneering 1985 article, “Bach’s Music in Japan” (in Japanese, published in Baha no subete, 60–67) was written on the occasion of Bach’s three-hundredth birthday (about which I will have much to say at a later point). She highlights the presence of Germans August Junker and Raphael von Koebel, who participated in some of the earliest public performances of Bach.
Ryuichi’s 1995 revisitation of the theme (“Bach Reception in Japan,” Geijutsugaku Kenkyuu) calls attention to the Austrian Rudolf Dittrich. Perhaps better known as Anton Bruckner’s successor in the Hapsburg court, Dittrich was also one of the first professors at the newly created Tokyo School of Music (now Tokyo University of Fine arts, or Gedai). A demanding teacher, he had students singing parts of Bach’s B-Minor mass as early as 1890. Dittrich’s reminiscences of Japan are though to have inspired Puccini’s Madam Butterfly.
The impression of Japanese works on Bach reception in Japan might lead us to think that the sources for Japan’s Continental musical tendencies were German. Thanks to the recent and thorough work of Thomas Cressy,* the Germanophilic origins of Japan’s Bach-craziness must be discounted. As already described on this site, Bach made landfall in the foreign settlements, not at the music schools. And further, Cressy’s research has failed to turn up any evidence of German sources being discussed at Tokyo School of Music before 1908.
Rather, it was the English-speaking Foreign settlement, more than 50% British and a further 25% American, that was the source of Bach for the Meiji and Taisho Japanese. Bach’s music was known earlier by the “Dutch Scholars,” but when a biography of Bach was printed in the 1890 Ongaku Zaashi, the text was a selection from George T. Ferris’s 1887 Great Musical Composers: German, French, and Italian.
Newspapers report many performances of popular Bach pieces, particularly the famous arrangements by French Romantic composer Charles Gounod, including the Ave Maria. The early and repeated performances by Japanese of these pieces stem directly from their popularity among the musically-minded foreigners. They are the most likely to have been heard, and to have inspired. In consequence, scores were ordered from England, not Germany, and instruments as well, according to the financial records department of the music school.
And when finally, in 1890, the first Japanese performances of Bach are recorded, the audience was not primarily Japanese: it was foreign, mostly British. And as for the famed Dittrich? Like the other foreign instructors, he was required to teach in English.
* Thomas A. Cressy, “Bach in Early Shōwa period Japan (1926-1945): Historiography and Reception,” Transcultural Music History (2021): 183–207.