Westminster Abbey
Bach-Schoenberg,
arr. Gowers: Prelude in
E-flat major, BWV 552
Wagner,
arr. Edwin Lamare: Tannhäuser: ‘Lied an den Abendstern’
Liszt,
arr. Louis Falk: Liebesträume, no.3, S 541
Strauss,
arr. Gowers: Feuersnot: ‘Zwischenspiel/Liebesszene’
Theodor Adorno’s challenge to ‘authenticke’
colonisation of Bach’s music, a furious denunciation of the 1950 bicentenary
reconstructionism he rightly saw mirroring that of the Federal Republic of
Germany, remains
in many respects unanswerable. Alas, as with so many things, being
unanswerable does not necessarily translate into worldly acceptance. (‘Take
back control’, anyone?) Bach still needs defending from his Liebhaber (devotees); or rather they
need offending. Anyone with an ear
and a mind knows the truth of this claim from another of Adorno’s essays, Tradition: ‘The difference
between what is past and what is present … is not absolute. One can only
understand Schoenberg if one understands Bach; one can only understand Bach if
one understands Schoenberg.’ Alas, the musical world, like the world at large,
is not always in the hands of those with ears and minds. In a modernist age, we
need modernist Bach – which can take all manner of forms, certainly not to be
restricted a priori. It is literalism
that kills. Adorno thus commended Schoenberg’s Bach orchestrations along with
Webern’s orchestration of the six-part Ricercare from the Musical Offering and Fritz Stiedry’s realization of the Art of Fugue
as paragons of fidelity through infidelity to Bach’s music. The music was
rethought rather than consigned to the researches of ‘philologists with no
compositional ability,’ who would merely apportion the parts between individual
instruments or groups of instruments. Modernist Bach takes its cue from Bach’s
music, in that the ‘contradiction between music and sound-material,’ especially
that between the Baroque organ and the ‘infinitely articulated structure,’ is
acted upon, developed, brought into the open rather than falsely reconciled. In
the final sentence of his Bach essay, Adorno put it like this: modernist ‘composition
… calls his music by name in producing it anew’.
How wonderful, then, to hear a further turn of the dialectical screw in
the opening piece of this recital from Richard Gowers on the organ of
Westminster Abbey. Having studied Schoenberg’s orchestration of Bach’s St Anne Prelude and Fugue, Gowers
attempted – with great success – to return, with interest, some of those
fruitful contradictions to the organ. That ‘wondrous machine’ and its operator
not only made music – sometimes easier said than done – but offered a stance
that was critical, in the best sense, towards both Bach and Schoenberg, and
indeed towards so many of our present occupations. A myriad of registration changes
– fifty different sound combinations, I am told – worked in furtherance of
that, but so did the organist’s structural command in a more conventional
sense.
The Liszt and Wagner arrangements that followed were more conventional,
I suppose: arrangements rather than transcriptions, should that distinction mean anything at all. (I am not entirely sure that it does, definition always
ultimately failing.) Nevertheless, they were nicely shaped, with registration
that was ‘appropriate’ in a nineteenth-century sense, without ever merely
sounding conventional. Wolfram’s song certainly had one look to the heavens,
almost as if one might hear the star of which he told us. Liszt’s Liebesträume initially sounded, I thought, slightly
unsuited to its new habitat – not unlike some of Liszt’s ‘own’ organ transcriptions
of his piano works. (I use inverted commas, since it is often far from clear
how much he did and how much someone else did. His
relationship with the instrument remains, however, not only fascinating but
fruitful.) Filigree writing worked better than it had any right to; whether
this were the doing of the arranger, the organist, or bother, I am not sure.
Both, I suspect. And finally, Gowers’s own organ transcription (or arrangement?)
from Strauss’s Feuersnot offered a
rare treat indeed. For such a master of orchestration – the only composer who would
have dared update Berlioz’s treatise, let alone succeeded in doing so – to translate
so beautifully, even magnificently, into very different washes of sound in so
very different an acoustic was quite a thing indeed. Bach’s is not the only
music we honour in producing it anew.
