Johann Sebastian Bach and God

April 21, 2020

For now we see through a glass darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.

1 Corinthians 13:12 KJV

It has been three weeks since I was released from hospital isolation in the first frantic moments of the “Enhanced Community Quarantine” brought about by the Covid 19 pandemic. Upon returning home to a period of self-quarantine in my little house in our family compound, I struggled to recover my personal balance and reorganize my life in face of the new realities confronting us all. While casting about for new activities to occupy my enforced confinement, I came upon an old set of piano books stored in my piano bench which had lain unused since my youth. One of these was a slim volume of preludes by Johann Sebastian Bach. I decided that playing the piano again after almost 50 years might be a profitable way to spend some of the time in confinement. After browsing through some of the books, I found myself drawn to the Bach volume again and again. As I came out of isolation and rejoined my family in the next house, I retrieved still another Bach volume, the incomparable complete edition of the composer’s Preludes and Fugues for the Well-Tempered Clavier. My twice daily playing intensified as I shaped my aging fingers and agitated spirit to produce the intricate lines, fingerings, phrasing and challenging chordal progressions of his work. 

I started to realize that, in the hospital, I had literally lost all my appetites. I clung to reading and eating and listening to music both compulsively but mostly dutifully, as a means of survival. The nature of hospital food made eating an act of will. I forced myself to put food in my mouth out of respect for both my body and the people who had manned the hospital frontlines to bring daily sustenance to me. I read the most banal text messages and answered them compulsively to help me escape the walls of my confinement. I listened to music, especially while praying, to help me sleep, to quiet my jangled nerves and to keep me from losing balance.

At home, as I was nurtured back to health, I suddenly grew ravenous, eager for anything that would satisfy my physical hunger. I ate through everything my children put in my refrigerator. My musical appetite had likewise been roused. Bach’s preludes were, to put it mildly, rich food for a starved and rattled soul. As Holy Week progressed, I found myself scouring the internet to listen again to the composer’s Passions according to St. Matthew and St. John which I had sung in as a member of my mother’s chorus and which had been a landmark in my adolescent life. Hearing them again, remembering how so many of the musicians I had known and loved had been equally moved by these performances, gave me great solace.

While surfing the net for more Bach to listen to, I came upon two rather unusual essays – first, a review by Michael Potemra (2013)[1], literary editor of National Review, of a monumental biography of the composer,  Bach: Music in the Castle of Heaven (2013) written by John Eliot Gardiner, an important contemporary conductor and interpreter of his works;[2] and second, an academic paper in the shape of a psychobiography of the composer by the Clinical Psychologist George E. Attwood first posted on the internet in 2014 and published in 2019, including an interview of the writer about the reception of this work by others and his reflections on these matters.[3] Both dealt with the music of Bach and its ability to convey and affirm the reality of God to his listeners. Reading these pieces roused the academic juices in me and forced my critical mind to function again. I began to think about Bach’s music and figure out why it resonated so vigorously in my being.

The two essays harp on one theme – that the music of Bach is a challenge to the atheist contention that there is no God. They brought to my attention the compelling power of Bach’s music, and its ability to affect even the most cynical listener in the present time. Potemra, literary critic and literary editor of The National Review, cites Gardiner quoting the Hungarian composer György Kurtág who says:

Consciously, I am certainly an atheist, but I do not say it out loud, because if I look at Bach, I cannot be an atheist. Then I have to accept the way he believed. His music never stops praying… My brain rejects it all. But my brain isn’t worth much.[4]

Furthermore Kurtag notes:

how the uncanny works of Bach can reach some people who have become immune to the bullying importunities of intellectual apologists for various forms of religion and irreligion in the public square.[5]

This ability of Bach to communicate the power of God even to those that question or reject the existence of deity is also conveyed in this interview of George Attwood, a clinical psychologist and professor emeritus at Rutgers University by Penelope Starr-Karlin, also a psychoanalyst/psychotherapist:

G.A (quoting a friend, still another psychotherapist): …(she asked me) “Maybe you are looking for your lost faith, George, and you are imagining you might find God again through your explorations of the life of Bach.”

P.S.K.: …“I have to ask you then whether your journey into Bach’s music and life has helped you refind your lost faith?”

G.A.:  I don’t really know.  I can say this: atheism no longer makes any sense to me.  Atheists, in their denial of God, remain engaged with God, even if only in their active effort to negate His existence.   Atheists are believers who have placed a minus-sign in front of their faith.  I have also noticed that in times of great helplessness I find myself praying to God.  For example, when one of my patients attempts suicide and is lying there in the ICU in critical condition, something that has unfortunately happened a number of times, I speak to the Lord and ask for His assistance.  Once the patient survives, if he or she does, I promptly resume my former atheism.  An atheist who turns to the Lord when he is in trouble is not a true atheist.  Maybe there are no true atheists.[6]

Gardiner (2013) has noted, that there is only one recorded statement that may be attributed to Bach, which is that:

…true music…(pursues) as its ultimate and final goal…the honor of God and the recreation of the soul.[7]

Except, therefore, for this one statement, Bach makes his case only through his music.

Intrigued by this situation, I returned to my daily playing of his preludes, this time seeking answers to the question, where exactly is this power to convey God’s spirit and its effects on man’s soul lodged? In what part of the music, especially, does it lie? Why is it sensed even by non-musicologists or quasi-musicologists such as myself?

So I began to play again, this time, focusing more and more of my consciousness on musical form, grounding myself in two brief quarters of graduate school training I had gone through in functional harmony and forms and analysis with Herbert Nanney, organist and educator and Albert Cohen, musicologist and historian of music theory. Prof. Nanney had taught us novices (most of my classmates were undergraduate students; but I too, trained in literary criticism for the most part, was struggling with the theoretical work) to  produce short, chorale length pieces, adding, with each exercise, a different set of chordal progressions and techniques to add to our vocabulary. He would sit at the piano and play each of our works, making comments and suggesting improvements. From time to time, he would bring out a Bach chorale and show us what the master had done with a similar set of chords. I would sit in awe and stagger out of the classroom afterwards, wondering about the kind of mind that could conceive of such complex solutions to such seemingly simple formulae. Dr. Cohen would be the professor in the Advanced Forms and Analysis class which immediately followed. One whole unit was devoted to Bach’s fugues. He would take each line apart, layer by layer, focusing on the bits and pieces that ran through all the parts and commenting on what was going on in each bit. Then he would then put them back together so we could see the whole and admire the creative genius behind it.

All these memories – of the childhood piano lessons filled with dances from the notebooks of Anna Magdalena; of my adolescent forays into the preludes and fugues; of my graduate school exercises in forms and analysis; of the churches and concert halls where I participated in the performances of his great choral works – the passions, chorales, the Magnificat – came back to me as if in a steady stream. And I drank it in, betraying a great thirst for more.  

For now, I cannot pretend to have final answers to the question of why Bach’s music has such power over men. I too, see, “as through a glass darkly.” But for now, it seems to me that the power of Bach’s music lies in its exploration of the possibilities contained in minute elements of sound - motives, themes and subjects, repeated, reconfigured, transformed and transfigured within a confined and limited space and time – in the short bursts of the preludes, in the fugues, in the chorales - so that they unleash a power and awesome majesty that leaves one breathless. In the longer, more complicated works – the great passion choruses, the Magnificat - these motives, phrases, themes are tightly interwoven with others, in layer upon layer of sounds of staggering intensity. The effects of the intense, unstoppable wave upon sonorous wave; each wave, each unit familiar and the same, yet each framed in a slightly different surprising and even shocking combination of tones one from the other; reduce both performer and listener to tears, render us breathless and bring us to our knees. 

Yet ultimately, one is confronted with the finite and limited character of the human condition. For every intricate prelude, every layered fugue, every solidly yet shockingly constructed chorale, every massive chorus has its end. To be sure, the final cadences, the last ritardando phrases and even the bravura cadenzas that precede these endings, are thunderous, breathtaking and befitting the majesty of God. But even Bach with his relentlessness drive, had to come to a close in each of his works, to come up for breath, so to speak - to realize, as we too realize, the frailness of the body and the inability of the mortal mind to sustain the effort and contain the enormity of the vision.  And so, like Job before God, we need to come to understand our own finiteness, our inability to fully comprehend and the limited character of our souls. “Humankind,” as T.S. Eliot succinctly puts it, “cannot bear too much reality.” (Burnt Norton from “Four Quartets”) And so we bow in submission to and adoration of a God that in His great and loving mercy, allows us brief glimpses of this reality through his servant, Johann Sebastian Bach.

[1] Michael Potemra, “Faith, Atheism and J.S. Bach,” Review of John Eliot Gardiner, Bach: Music in the Castle of heaven in the National Review, October 31, 2013

[2] John Eliot Gardiner, Bach: Music in the Castle of Heaven (2013).

[3] George Attwood, “Time, Death, Eternity: Imagining the Soul of Johann Sebastian Bach,” August 2019.

[4] György Kurtag, quoted in Gardiner 

[5] Ibid.

[6] Interview of George Attwood by Penelope Starr-Karlin, 2014.

[7] Christoff Wolff, Johann Sebastian Bach: The Learned Musician, 2000

Links to the music:

“Marta and György Kurtag play Bach Transcriptions by György Kurtag,” on Youtube, 2016.

Johann Sebastian Bach, “The Well-Tempered Clavier Books I and II,” on Spotify, performed by Glenn Gould 2010

Johann Sebastian Bach, “St. Matthew Passion,” Final Chorus, conducted by Dan-Olof Stenlund on Youtube, Malmö Kammarkör, April 12, 2009

Johann Sebastian Bach, “St. John Passion,” conducted by John Eliot Gardiner on Youtube, Monteverdi Choir, English Baroque Soloists, May 8, 2014