I wrote recently of “Wabi-sabi Bach,” suggesting that the concept from Japanese aesthetics may explain the composer’s appeal in Japan. Well, just yesterday at a Bach concert in Shizuoka’s Aoi concert hall, I had the delightful opportunity to hear a similar allusion.
My colleague Takumi Kato is helping organist Mari Ohki put together a program to perform all of Bach’s organ works. Last year’s inaugural (of a projected fourteen) concert featured Bach’s “Greatest Hits.” Toccata and Fugue in D-minor, etc. This year’s concert gave us a more biographical, genetic view of Bach by featuring his earliest works “from his teens and early twenties.” (More on this coming soon in a separate post!)
Kato-sensei began his pre-concert talk by reminding the audience that Bach did not think of himself as an “artist” in our modern sense of the word; not “inspired,” but a hardworking craftsman. Instead, Kato insisted, it is best to think of Bach as an artisan. Indeed, according to Bartel:
While the Italians [of the 17th century] highlighted “heavenly inspiration” … and argued that a composer must be a born composer, the Germans emphasized the teachable and learnable skill of composition. In his Musica Poetica, Andreas Herbst wrote: “Just as a builder or carpenter leaves a house or other building to posterity, so too and in like manner can a musicus poeticus or composer bequeath to following generations a musical composition which he constructed with great diligence, toil, and industry, thereby ensuring the abiding remembrance or his name.” In accounting for his musical accomplishments, J. S. Bach commented, “I had to work hard; anyone who is as industrious can achieve the same level.” Bach’s comment was not made simply out of bashful modesty but rather reflects the conviction that the craft of musical composition can indeed be learnt. That which was captured instinctively in the south was analytically unraveled, terminologically objectified, and systematically taught in the north.1
This is old hat to the Bach crowd. But Kato went on to make a more localized illustration, one that the gathered crowd of Japanese amateurs and aficionados needed to hear.
In the 17th and 18th centuries in Germany, being a musician was skilled labor. Like a funeral home arranges the flowers [ikebana 生け花], or the [Buddhist] monk helps out, etc. Just like a funeral needs flowers, the Christian funeral of [Bach’s] day required music.
The aesthetic comparison is actually quite profound. From the musical passion of Luther himself forward, the Lutheran tradition reflected profoundly on the meaning of musical forms. Luther’s contemporary (perhaps colleague), the humanist Nicolaus Listentius, invented the term musica poetica,2 which by the time of Bach had become in a certain sense codified. Bach “constructed” his pieces from sets of musical rhetorical figures, each with their own significance and intended emotional effect.
Just as for Bach there was a musical language, for the ikebanist there is a “flower language” (花言葉 hanakotoba). Chrysanthemum means truth, daisy means faith, hibiscus means gentle. There are matters of proportion and scale as well: even numbers are avoided to prevent unnatural symmetries; odd numbers are preferred. Of course, in Japan, these meanings marry with the general way in which the outward things reflect the inner Buddhist truths.
This edition of Mari Ohki’s series featured Bach’s early chorales, many of them selected from the Neumeister Collection. Some of these have the character of exercises; others are early attempts of the newly working Bach, particularly as he prepared for funerals.
Indeed, Kato took the subtle comparison to funerals even further, pointing out that these were far from stable times for the young Bach. His mother died when he was ten; his father less than a year later, leaving him in the care of his older brother, Johann Christoph. When Johann Sebastian started composing in earnest at the age of 15,
His parents has been dead only five years. How would the young Bach have felt while composing and arranging for funerals, remembering the sadness of his parents’ recent death?
In the concert program, Kato expounded:
I have chosen songs from the “Neumeister Chorale Collection” especially treating church funerals. If Bach was a teenager and was composing funeral music, I’m sure he would have remembered his parents who died a few years earlier. This funeral music I feel gets us closer to Bach’s thoughts at this time [of sporadic records].
Several times I looked around me during the concert, and many were the softly closed eyes and folded hands, as if in prayer. Or contemplation. I suppose the percentage of Christians in the audience was higher than the Japanese average of one percent. But I do not imagine all the pious reverence came from the baptized.
During the intermission I spoke to the woman next to me. She was a longtime fan of Bach’s organ music, having listened to it as a child at home. Her parents were Christian; presumably she is not, or seemed to distance herself from it. And yet when I explained that these preludes were based on hymn texts, she wanted to know where she could find the rest of the words.
We were talking about BWV 1113, based on Gottfried Vopelius’s funeral chorale, “Ich hab’ mein Sach Gott heimgestellt.” Bach’s counterpoint skillfully interweaves the devastating melancholy of death with a robust and hopeful solidity of faith. “For in Christianity, death is sad, from the earthly point of view,” I told her, “but there is also solid hope in the resurrection, that our future is with God. That’s why the music has those two feelings, mixed. It comes from this theology.”
Funeral flowers are a big thing everywhere, but especially so in Japan. Unlike in Christianity where the lily especially is the symbol of the resurrection, in Buddhism they evoke the sense of life’s fleetingness.
Christians here have taken up this practice, with an added and fitting twist. As the living say their last farewells to the dead, they ransack the carefully arranged flowers and place them in the open casket. When the process is done, flowers have completely covered the corpse.
As the flower-arranger’s work is buried with the dead, so the strains of the musician float into the ether to disappear. And yet both have made life—and death—more solid, beautiful, and somehow tolerably enduring. Bach, the flower arranger, adorns death with the hope of resurrection.
Dietrich Bartel, Musica Poetica: Musical-Rhetorical Figures in German Baroque Music (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997), 64.
Vincent P. Benitez, “Musical-Rhetorical Figures in the Orgelbüchlein of J. S. Bach,” Bach 18, no. 1 (1987): 3. See also Bartel, 19–20.