When you think of Worcester in the fall, Johann Sebastian Bach naturally comes to mind. Well, if that’s not the case for you, it will be eventually, thanks to Bachtoberfest. That’s the city’s annual Bach Festival that started last year, and “The Complete Bach”, a project to perform all the works of J.S. Bach over the next 10 years, leading up to the grand finale in 2035, marking 350 years since Bach’s birth.
Chris Shepard, conductor, and Ruth Susan Westheimer, artistic director of Music Worcester, joined GBH’s All Things Considered host Arun Rath to discuss the music and Bach’s legacy. What follows is a lightly edited transcript of their conversation.
Arun Rath: I’m a J.S. Bach fanatic, so I’m super excited about this. I actually, during the pandemic, undertook the project of listening to the complete works in multiple versions. So, for non-fanatics though, I wanna start with a sense of scale because we’re talking roughly 190 hours of music, give or take: sacred cantatas, secular cantatas, motets, chorales, songs, large sacred works like masses and oratorios, and two passions — that’s the full unstaged concert performance of the Passion and Crucifixion of Jesus Christ. On the instrumental side, a huge amount of organ and keyboard works, chamber music, orchestral works, concertos, symphonia, orchestral suites, and I’m leaving stuff out....
Chris Sheppard: When I hear you say all of that, I think, “What have I gotten us into?” It seemed like a pretty simple project until you went and listed all of that stuff. That’s actually a really great, crazy overview of everything that Bach wrote. And by the way, kudos to you, what a terrific project to do during the pandemic.
One of the ideas behind this project, in fact, is to present many different kinds of performances. Over the years, the way that we have performed Bach has changed a great deal. Some people still love those old school performances by people like Glenn Gould, even Leonard Bernstein recorded the “St. Matthew Passion”, for example. Whereas many people, particularly in the Boston area, which is the American mecca for period instruments, really love the music that came out of what is now called the Historically Informed Practice school. And we in Worcester want to represent all of those. It’s an all of the above, whole-tent idea.
And by the way, you’re exactly right about the scope of his works. Because he worked in a church most of his life, particularly in Leipzig, for the last two plus decades, a little more than half of his output is vocal and choral, largely music for the church. And then the other half, as you say, can be divided between the keyboard works, either harpsichord, or now piano sometimes, and organ, and then those wonderful things like the six cello suites for unaccompanied cello that are spectacular, and works like that. And then many concertos, like the Brandenburg Concertos, which we will perform in The Complete Bach. The Sebastians from New York are coming out to present those.
And if there’s anything that’s at the top of the charts for Bach, it is those Brandenburg Concertos. I think not at the top of the chart, except for people in Boston, is that sea of cantatas, about 200 of them. And if you know about Emmanuel Music, that beautiful Episcopal church right in the center of Boston, you would know they’ve been presenting a cantata every Sunday for more than 50 years. In fact, they are part of The Complete Bach and will come and present three of those cantatas.
It is so extraordinary, Arun, really, to think not just that it’s in Worcester, which is a wonderful, up-and-coming, newly vibrant city, but to think that this will be the first time since Bach died in 1750 that all of his works have been performed within a finite amount of time, in the same place. When we started this project, we couldn’t have imagined that that was really the case, but nobody has said otherwise so far.
Rath: That was a question I had for you, because I couldn’t think of, I mean, people have done the complete cantatas in a cycle, but this, my head is spinning just thinking about it.
Shepard: And that is a really great place to start. To figure out who could have done all of them, if they haven’t done all the cantatas, they can’t have done everything. Over the last 30 years, there was First Emmanuel, that I mentioned, in downtown Boston, who has been doing them for 50 years. Around the year 2000, which was the 250th anniversary of Bach’s death, that was really when this idea of doing the complete cantatas in a cycle hit big. And there are several recordings out there, John Eliot Gardiner, for example.
Rath: I saw the end of that, of John Elliott Gardner’s cycle in New York, December 31st, 2000.
Shepard: What did you think of that?
Rath: It was amazing.
Shepard: Yeah, those recordings, and the fact that those recordings are live, so you got to see it in person, and you could feel the palpable excitement of those live performances. But even so, when you take into consideration, okay, who has done all the cantatas, but they also then have to have presented all the organ works. Well, that’s not so impossible.
Paul Jacobs, a professor at Juilliard, has performed all of those from memory. It’s a 24-hour marathon if you want to do it all in one sitting. And you have people like Angela Hewitt, who have performed all of the keyboard works, either on piano or harpsichord. But then you’ve got to be presenting all those chamber works, and The Art of the Fugue, and The Musical Offering, and all of those keyboard concertos. There are quite a lot of them.
And so when you think about it, Arun, I guess it isn’t surprising that this would be the first time. Different labels have presented record sets of all the works under the same label, but of course, they’ve been done by different people, in different places, in different.
Rath: Many people have talked about Bach speaking to us across the centuries, and how, even though this music was written for a very specific time and place, like the church cantatas, which are for very specific dates in the church calendar, but here we are, over 300 years later, and you’re doing them all in Worcester. What is Bach saying to you across the centuries that is making you want to just keep it singing, right here, where we are today?
Shepard: That’s a great question. I should say I was very lucky. I lived in Sydney, Australia, for a dozen years, and I was lucky enough to put together a choir and an orchestra that performed all of the choral cantatas. So, that’s about 142 of those. I was able to get this sense of, yes, the genius, the cerebral genius, and for anybody who loves crossword puzzles, for example, there is a real thrill in figuring out what he’s saying in his music.
And there are all sorts of hidden Easter eggs. For example, the way he writes music going down sometimes represents the angels descending from heaven, and it’s a really lovely sort of thing. Or, on a thornier side, there are certain ways that he would compose to represent the cross and Jesus on the cross, which, to Lutheran theology, is hugely important. Of course, we don’t necessarily these days either encounter a great deal of theology or even go to church, necessarily, so that may not be the way into these works for many people.
But I will tell you something that I think is the secret genius of Bach, and that is not his brain, but it’s his heart. The idea that, in the Baroque period, we had this doctrine, what we now call the Doctrine of Affects, which is just a music theory term that means that when you hear this music, you are meant to feel the emotion that is represented in the music. This is a really important idea, because it’s not that you’re supposed to hear the emotion, you’re supposed to feel the emotion. And no matter how much of a genius Bach is cerebrally, I think his music speaks through the centuries because of the feeling, not the thinking.
