EPISODE 13
Theology, Music, and Modern Myths
with Michael Marissen | Bach scholar & author of Bach Against Modernity
Who was Johann Sebastian Bach really?
When we talk about Bach, it’s so easy to slip into big claims — greatest composer ever, universal genius, before and after Bach. And while there’s truth in all of that, this conversation reminded me how much richer the music becomes when we stop trying to make Bach look like us, and instead let him be who he actually was.
In 2023, I had the chance to sit down and chat with Michael Marissen, one of the most thoughtful and probing Bach scholars working today, at the Baldwin Wallace Bach Festival—an annual festival devoted to the music of Bach that takes place at Baldwin Wallace University in Ohio. Michael’s work asks difficult and deeply illuminating questions about Bach’s theology, historical context, and the modern stories we’ve built around his music.
In our conversation, we talk about Bach as a profoundly pre-modern thinker, about why joy and sorrow so often coexist in his music, and about the temptation to turn Bach into a kind of personal hero who conveniently reflects our own values. What I found most refreshing is how generous this perspective is — it doesn’t take anything away from the music. If anything, it helps the music feel deeper, stranger, and more alive.
ARIA
Was unser Gott geschaffen hat from Lob sei und Ehr dem höchsten Gut, BWV 117
PERFORMERS
Nicholas Phan, tenor
Bach Collegium San Diego | Ruben Valenzuela, director
Oboes: Kathryn Montoya, Stephen Bard
Bassoon: Anna Marsh
Violins: Elizabeth Blumenstock, Janet Strauss
Viola: Aaron Westman
Cello: Alex Greenbaum
Bass: Malachai Bandy
Theorbo: Kevin Payne
Organ: Ruben Valenzuela
SOUND (BWV 179 only): Daniel Rumley | VIDEO: Clubsoda Productions
This episode was filmed in partnership with Bach Collegium San Diego.
This project is a fiscally sponsored project of FRACTURED ATLAS.
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TRANSCRIPT
AUDIENCE MEMBER 1
I think all music is influenced by Bach because he's like. He's like the musical great great, great, great, great great grandfather.
AUDIENCE MEMBER 2
I mostly love playing Bach.
AUDIENCE MEMBER 3
The challenges of singing Bach is what drives me because it's just fun.
AUDIENCE MEMBER 4
there's so much to be inspired by and moved by
AUDIENCE MEMBER 1
It's ancient music. It's sanctified music.
AUDIENCE MEMBER 4
there's so much variety in it. I am just taken out by how much there is of it and how many different instruments he created music for,
AUDIENCE MEMBER 1
I was raised a cello player. Okay, so Bach was right there in the beginning,
AUDIENCE MEMBER 2
I played two part inventions, and I don't remember. I was probably 1011 when I started on to it and and more than any other music, I just knew where it was going.
AUDIENCE MEMBER 3
Oh, yeah, all those melismas and octave jumps. It's fun. It's acrobatic. That's what I enjoyed the most.
AUDIENCE MEMBER 2
it just fell into my hands like it was supposed to be there.
AUDIENCE MEMBER 4
I play the violin and it's so much more than the violin. It's everything
AUDIENCE MEMBER 2
the variety and the depth that it's just like I feel it in my bones, so I can't be that different from others. I feel that it's accessible and some way to everyone.
AUDIENCE MEMBER 3
I've done my best to introduce Bach to my three children. And, the eldest, who's now 21, said, thank you, dad, for introducing me to classical music. So I think, yeah, it can be for everyone, even the most reluctant.
N. PHAN
Hi, I'm Nick Phan, and this is Bach 52.
When we talk about Bach, it's so easy to get lost in superlatives. The greatest composer ever. A universal genius. A before and after bar. And sure, there's truth to all of this. But what happens when we examine the mythologies that we've built up around bark and actually let Bach be who he was?
Last year, I had the chance to sit down with bark scholar Michael Marissen at the Baldwin Wallace Bach Institute, which is an annual bark festival that takes place at Baldwin Wallace University in Ohio every year. We sat down in the library of the Riemenschneider Bach Institute and had a fascinating conversation. Michael is known for asking pretty uncomfortable questions about Bach’s theology, the times in which he lived, his historical context, and also about the stories we've built up around Bach’s music.
In this conversation, Michael and I talked about how Bach is really a pre-modern thinker. We also talked about how joy and sorrow and all sorts of seemingly contrasting emotions can live side by side in his music simultaneously. And we also talked about how tempting it is to turn back into some sort of personal hero whose value system conveniently aligns with our own.
Something I found really refreshing about Michael is that this was not a conversation about tearing box music down, or tearing him down as a historical figure, or deconstructing his work. Instead, it was about using a deeper understanding of Bach to enrich our appreciation and our connection to his music.
I hope you enjoyed this conversation and please as always, be sure to stick around for the aria at the end of the episode. Taken from cantata 179.
N. PHAN
Thanks for doing this. I always start this kind of just wondering how people come to Bach’s music, and, you know, you've written so much about as music. I'm really curious to know what exactly it is. And you know, how it came into your life and just sort of the the journey of getting to from that moment until where you are now?
M. MARISSEN
Well, it's an extremely unlikely story. And my spouse is a, writes commercial fiction. And so we know a lot of literary people and they ought to be like, oh, man, you got to write a memoir about this. I really, really don't want to do this. Just the last thing I'll ever do.
N. PHAN
Well, that would be your memoir,
M. MARISSEN
but people find the general arc of it's sort of interesting. And the upshot is, I grew up as an extremely conservative, community of the Dutch immigrants who came to Canada in the late 1940s and early 1950s, and there were extremely strict Dutch Calvinist, basically not the cool Calvinist. The knowledge the Dutch Reformed Church in the Netherlands. mostly farmhands all the way back to the Middle Ages. And if we're very serious people there and good people. But, they had no not only no interest in the arts or education.
Actually, we were extremely, skeptical of it, that the upshot was that you all you really needed until the government made you get more schooling. This was, you know, fourth or fifth grade so that, you know, math well enough to do with money and reading enough to deal with the Bible. And anything beyond that is just going to create trouble. And the church itself had is, a very, very strict church with no paintings, no, statues, no choir, no nothing very bright and, you know, just a long service, very focused on preaching on the word.
And so this is not a likely environment in which to get, exposed to Bach. But there might there was one elderly gentleman in that community must have been very lonely. And he did have a small record collection and and I don't know how many, but fewer than ten, perhaps. But one of them was a box set of coming off and playing with the Bach Organ Works. And a friend of mine that's almost ten years old or so, and they said, this guy said, hey, hey, boys, come over here. Listen to this new play for us. Is that a Passacaglia? And C minor four? And we were just both gobsmacked. And he was like, wow, you know, because we were just not accustomed to listening to music. This is like this repeated bass and harmony pattern over and over again. It's just, it just we were just like our jaws dropped and we said, do you have any more of this? And he said, oh yeah. And so we hung know, we hung out listening to it just above organ works. And I worked in hard manual labor and saved up my money and figured out how to get over to a record store in the town that was 50 miles away.
I said, you know, so I bought, like, I think, the first cut, as many cantatas as I could. On to first let Like Go was, chorister let me about choir doing cuts and go to tidal wave. I just thought, man, even the organ music was great. The cantatas, you know, and so I was, I ended up going to, one of these Dutch Reformed high schools to. And it just happened that the music teacher there, they introduced music, but only singing. Simple sort of choir stuff. And so but he was a virtuoso organist, and so I got to turn pages for him and you could play all the works. And that was just fantastic. but probably the most influential thing on me in my whole career in the bar stuff was discovering the the Leonhart and Harnoncourt cantata series, because it started just as I was a teenager, and I got the one by one all the way to the end.
So that's always high school, college and grad school. That's the time that it took them. To record them was always a big event, you know, in a new box came out with four more cantatas, and they included the scores in there. And I was just like, happened, you know? So I got really good. And, not to carry on about this too much, but I was also discover that I was not very good at manual labor.
I respected the people who were good at it. Okay, I really need to make sure that if there's any possibility that I can get away with not going back into that. So I decided to go to college, and no one went to college in that time anyway. And, so I'm going to go to college. I'm going to study music, and I'm going to study German for the sole function of the German is not to read, go to or to to speak with people in Germany, to be able to understand the cantatas, if they're going by in real time. That was the goal.
N. PHAN
Wow.
M. MARISSEN
I really loved taking these German classes and so on and so forth. So I got to I was really into the music and the I was very devout and so on. So it was, it was a source of esthetic pleasure and so on that that would have been frowned upon, as I say, in that group. But it was also a source of genuine spiritual devotion. So it became very, very much a part of my life. And then I applied to graduate school, went to Brandeis, and they gave a full fellowship. And you study whatever you want. I was, oh my God, they died and gone to heaven and since I thought, this is my one shot, I'm thinking of the Hamilton thing. Now if this is your one shot. So I said, I'm not going to do a dissertation on the chamber music of of being here, you know. So this is the only time I'm probably ever going to be on the it's going to be back in the fields kind of thing. So I'm doing a dissertation on the social and religious designs of Bos Brandenburg and Cheryl's.
N. PHAN
Wow.
M. MARISSEN
And I got a fellowship to, study in Berlin because I joke around a little bit about this. I think the German government feels very guilty, of course, about various things from previous decades. And it's embarrassing. It doesn't look and sound like a terribly Jewish man, but it's just, you know, I get the sense that pretty much anyone from Brandeis who applied for a German research fellowship, they got it.
So I got this wonderful fellowship to study in Berlin. And then and then I spent basically spent the rest of my career till now ruminating about my CD collection and writing about as many things as I got interested in. You know, there's 1200 works, and there I gradually sort of came to sort of want to figure out how all the parts of the repertoire are related to each other, because they tend to get sort of balkanized.
And people say, well, I'm just instrumentalist. So I'm really into the chamber music and, and I don't know what those cantatas and that's seems like a different world. So, you know, that actually is not it seems like a different world, but it's actually the same world. And I try to get a sense of that. And that's not always been successful with it. But that's what some of the books and articles have been about. And then, of course, partly against my work, I dragged into controversial subjects. And, and so the political side of, so I sort of became one of the people who is sort of known for being the guy to talk to. If you want to delve into that more deeply. And I can't help wondering if part of the reason that I got into that so deeply is also because it's sort of in this like confession mode here, but it's sort of it was a way of atoning for the Dutch Calvinist guilt that I felt for enjoying the repertory, so much so that if I could sort of really lean in to the negative side to, then that would sort of balance it somehow and make it all okay… to be to be so devoted to the to the music of Bach. I don’t know if that makes sense.
N.PHAN
no, that makes total sense. I mean, it's, you know, in a way, I, you know, personally, I'm grateful for it. It's, it's being able to view these – Bach get so canonized. Right. And, and sort of put on its pedestal and it's, you know, it's a question that is anathema to so many devotees. And I mean, there's there's a sort of fanatical following around him and his music, which, you know, he's a human being and he lived in time and with all its faults and all the strengths, I'm sure that we have to like, I don't know. To me, it makes it more magical to like, look at the ways in which you're you're sort of examining a is this. It's important
M. MARISSEN
was how did you get into it?
N. PHAN
I got into Bach because I was, you know, I started as a violinist and I wasn't super excited about practicing every day as a child. And but when I remember hearing the concert off for the first time and because, you know, Suzuki, you get to it before and it's the second violin part. And I just thought, oh, that is really cool. I want that was like the first musical goal. I sort of walked myself towards
M. MARISSEN
the concerto in d minor for two violins
N. PHAN
Yeah, exactly. so from there I was, I was hooked and I, you know, I started playing in orchestras around that time and I saw any opportunity to play like Brandenburg and, you know, I was obsessed with Brandenburg three for. Oh, sure. All of my adolescent, you know, I in retrospect, I think that's so quaint. But the last movement, you know, it's just got such amazing, you know, vitality and rhythm. And as a player, you know, it just it's it's a chamber music on steroids. So, you know, I got into it that way. And then I, you know, along the way I wanted to be a singer, because of this childhood fascination with it, I was I started to seek out those opportunities, and then, you know, tenor and so, you know, evangelists naturally come into your life and things evolve. And so that's how I got into it.
M. MARISSEN
Well, I'm very interested that you came at it so profoundly from the concerto to violins, because I think that's one of the greatest pieces of Bach, actually. I often refer to it as sort of one of the, the slow movement in particular. I think it's one of the most beautiful things ever by anybody ever wrote.
N. PHAN
Yeah.
M. MARISSEN
And I don't know if this is your experience of it too, but, you know, it's really only got sort of the two melodic ideas in it that sort of spun out from, what was it, 6 or 7 minutes.
N. PHAN
Right.
M. MARISSEN
And my experience that always have been and I think the people I talked to, they had a similar sort of experience and it goes on forever and never, never, never. And then when it's done, you go, oh, it's done already, I know, how do you do that? Yeah, that is an amazing and I know that is sort of amazing from a musical point of view. And so but I thought I sort of experience that sort of metaphorical. It's sort of like with the way people's lives going is that your life is very, very long. It goes. And, and then it's over too soon.
N. PHAN
Yeah. Right.
M. MARISSEN
And so I think, I speculate on particular Bach’s sort of intuitively to understand sort of fundamental things about human life, even in non vocal music like that.
N. PHAN
Very much. So I mean, that piece in a way is all about time dilation, right? It's amazing how he's able to kind of suspend in time like that. And yet at the same time, it can feel like, you know, you know, time is gone by all.
M. MARISSEN
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
N. PHAN
So, you know, something I'm really fascinated about in your writing is your recent collection of essays Bach Against Modernity and I'd love for you to talk about that. It's just this idea of Bach as sort of a modern figure. You know, I think I've heard a lot of people speak about this, and they sort of look at him as kind of a forward thinking, genius individual. And, you know, I'm very curious to hear your perspectives on this.
M. MARISSEN
Yeah. Well, this that's a very complicated topic. And I tried to make it simpler in the book to some extent, because I don't want to lose readers or, or make it boring or anything like that, but, I sort of come to think that, you know, Bach really is for everyone. I mean, I have no, I have no problem is in the sense that everyone has the right. Sure. To him, you know, thinking hilariously of the life of Brian, you know, one of the characters. And so I like the, the male characters, I would look, I like to have a baby. And I said, well, you can't do it, you know, and they argue about it and, and then I'm the one who says, well, he has the right to have a beard.
So I do really think that everyone has the right to, to, to Bach. But I don't for a second believe that, Bach valued such an idea or that he was doing anything particularly to try to reach out to, to everyone to just a lot of what happens to work.Partly because it just does. Right? It's hard to say, really. Why to but also, I think quite often there are very productive misunderstandings of ways, to and, people have the right to have productive misunderstandings, too. I think I have a problem with it.
The only problem I have, I tried to push this with the students. That has been the 25th year that I was teaching full time.
So it's look, you have the right to your views. You have the right to your politics with all these things, but you don't have the right to make someone your hero who's not your hero. It's very tempting because it looks like it looks like your hero, but the reason why he looks like you here is because you don't actually know enough about him to know what he's actually up to.
And also, apparently this is sort of human failing that we all have to, is that when it's sort of natural to see yourself in things that you like
N. PHAN
Indeed.
M. MARISSEN
and so, you know, the vast majority of books, music really does, you know the work pretty well for everyone who's who wants to and has the right to and so on. You know, every few years someone writes a new biography and there's some really good, good ones out there. And I, you know, I always recommend, particularly if you want to know all the information of. By far the best thing is to read the crystal full biography biographies. This treasure trove of information about is own. If you want a good, really good survey of music in his life, this new biography by David Shulberg is very good, which is much shorter, but no one is quite done yet, and I have some speculations on why they wouldn't do this for practical reasons. But there aren't only practical reasons for this, you know, people have known for it since the 19th century that Bach had very large (for a musician, at least) a very large personal library of, what they usually call theological books now, but they're really sort of Bible commentaries and devotional books, you know, they're in small format, for example, not the big scholarly book. I think that's all. But it's he has it's a larger library that a lot of pastors actually had in the 17th and 18th centuries.
And all the evidence that he read it, read them very good. He quotes them. The one book that survives is, a three volume Bible, that the 17th century theologian Abraham Calov basically printed the entire Lutheran Bible in large script and put in a small script between each of the verses. Whatever his favorite, what he thought was Luther's best comment on that verse. If Luther confident no more than once, and if Luther didn't comment on that verse at all in his voluminous writings, then Calov basically said, this is what he would have said had he got around to commenting on this verse. It's a very in that particular book, that Bach’s own copy of that survives. It's here in the United States. It has tremendous number of underlining and highlighting and marginal comments and so on. And some of those, many of them have nothing to actually do. Probably 90% of them have nothing to do with music. And they're not directly, at least not. But musical, technical or esthetic things that are specific to music. But they have, important for that, of course. And those, annotations sometimes quote from the other books that are in that library. So this is very clear that he's really cared about this stuff and read this stuff carefully. And so to really get a sense of who Bach really was, you would have to really read this stuff carefully and integrate it into the big picture. But people don't want to do that because either they're into.
But frankly, some people are just lazy. It's a lot of work. I mean, I don't particularly and some of these books are not that interesting to read, but a biographer often has to do a lot of grunt work that is not that interesting to get to the big picture.
Once you to really steep yourself in that literature and see how it's actually very profoundly reflected in the not only in the vocal music, but in the instrumental music, then the idea that somehow Bach's a forward thinking philosophy of the enlightenment is absolutely ridiculous, because all of the central things that you learned in college about what the enlightenment means, you know, being concerned with reason over a revelation wherever that issue comes up in the bath, vocal works specifically, or in the writings and or his comments, he takes a harsh view.
Oh, of course you must know this –the fantastic aria in cantata 178, which is a, like, no, I mean to just be quiet or shut up, teeter tottering reason. And, you know, I mean, some of my colleagues said, well, you know, yeah, you just had to do that to please considered some place, but in fact, it is in the depths of his heart. He was really a forward thinking mathematical genius in some sort of world. And I said, no, we know that with this study we know that's not true, because there's these annotations that are in this book. I don't know why this hasn't been sort of figured out before that they're mostly entered in the late 1700s of 1740. So. Well after he's composed the cantatas.
No, it's conceivable that if he had written them all those things in there before you wrote the cantatas, he was just, you know, in case the equivalent of the Stasi and the in the 18th century to come into his apartment and say, we were looking for evidence of what your views are and that provide evidence that he was genuinely interested in these things, even though it wasn't because he really wanted to be a forward thinking and like, missing.
But the fact that there ten, 15 years afterwards when there's no need, you know, and there was some of these folks also say that what these these annotations are now useless to us because they don't help explain how he came to write the canon. But that's backwards, in my view. Is that what they do is they confirmed that what's talked about in the book or is of is something he's genuinely interested in because he's studying the as a, as a person, as a human being in the 1740s when he's not composing guitarists anymore, he's still interested in those issues.
N. PHAN
Well, also, the cantatas are so, you know, part of the reason we're focusing on the cantatas is, I mean, it gives you sort of like a daily it's kind of his daily work or weekly work. And so it kind of gives you a sort of more granular sense of what he was thinking and experimenting with. But also, I mean, there's so, you know, they're experimental. They're places where he's learning things and they're places where it's forming ideas and the idea that they're just musical ideas and not also, you know, sort of philosophical and theological ideas is kind of I mean, I don't know how you could spend five years steeped in the depth of religiosity and not be thinking about those things.
M. MARISSEN
But I'm glad you bring that up, too, because one of the other things that I've been very interested in a lot of my, in my journey, so to speak, is that, you know, we were sort of tied to that. What a composer does is reads this poetry to engage with sort of the general emotional tenor of it is and translates this as unfortunate term, but they find a way of expressing that musically. And so the function of the that is kind of lousy poetry. And who were kidding you? from an aesthetic point of view that the poetry is not very it's not very good, but the ideas in it are important to the community that they're rooting for.
And the idea is that Bach then finds a way to express the emotion that's in that text in an extremely powerful way that is both emotionally and esthetically satisfying. And that's he certainly did that, and there's no question. But where it gets interesting is sometimes there's a discrepancy between the musical settings and the text. And he was always asleep that day, or he doesn't really care about the text, you know, he really, really cares. He really wanted to write something sad here and that it's time for something sad. So, you know, I don't care what the text is. I'm going to write something sad here. But when those in those cases where that sort of thing happens, it's often the sort of this Lutheran sort of thing would be the theology that's behind it often has to do with things, look, or can be the other way around.
My view is a really sad text, but it a happy setting actually, that's more common in books. And so it's like he's not paying attention to what he is, because what he's saying is that know things look bad, but in fact, underneath it, everything is actually be like, I think my favorite example of this is a tenor aria in, cantata 13, minor. So it's a minor train. Yeah. Where it's, it's, you know, it's in D minor with all sorts of chromaticism and, and, just very, very, the aspect of the piece is very, very dark and sad and so on. And it seems like it's in fact just expressing musically what the text is saying. There's so many tears that I can't go, oh, we're done.
But as it happens, it has a sort of recurring bassline, same same pitch in the bass over and over again, parallel thirds and sixth, over and over again in the recorder as well. The bobble, the catch is all over the place and you know, that's a topples from broke up or, you know, to have a repeated bass line with parallel thirds. And so it's a pastoral to so behind the text and behind even the aspect of the musical setting, there's this thing going on that is saying, no, it's not all negative. Despite despite what the music sounds like and despite what the text thing there is a there is a there's something positive and that's a correlative of sort of what Luther said about, making sense out of why Jesus dies on the cross.
He says, when you when you contemplate Jesus on the cross, you're seeing the backside of his glory, which the idea comes from, Moses going up Sinai to get the Torah of the Ten Commandments from God, and he's not allowed to look directly at God. You only think he's like this. He sees you can sentence peripheral vision that there's something very special over there. Because if you behold the glory of God directly, you die. And so Luther really like this idea of things sort of having an element of things being the opposite of what they sound or look like. And that's hard to sort of account for in enlightenment. Scientific. Yeah. This is a very old fashioned, pre-modern sort of way of thinking.
N. PHAN
It's true.
M. MARISSEN
Yeah, sure. That our we were just talking about sensational in a concert and people will enjoy it tremendously. But, you know, without someone coming along to explain this background, which I and also I want to be really clear about, this is always sort of interesting, but you don't really need the well, it's not for me to say what you need or don't need, right. But what I would say is that I have my experience has mostly been that when people are told about these kind of extra things, they like the music even more. It seems even richer, quite apart for whether they actually agree with what's being said. It's like, oh, well, that's really nuanced and interesting. And they have a sort of renewed respect for the depth of it all.
And I think that's all to the good. my motivation isn't to get people to become Lutherans by any means. It's just it's just to understand what your heroes were actually up to.
N. PHAN
Yeah, right. Of course. And sort of get their intention–be clear about their intentions. I mean, it's interesting that the thing you're talking about in terms of like holding this, you know, something that seems sad or horrifying or whatever, but then there's this positivity with that. That aria from the tenor aria from the Saint John Passion immediately comes to mind, where you're talking about like these scars and like with markings on the back of Jesus, but like, there's such beauty. And consider the beauty in there and consider what this means for us. And I mean. That is, like you say, it's not a rational or reasoned way of thinking.
I mean, the other thing that I find interesting about it is that when people argue this, I, I always kind of come back to these musical forms that Bach is hanging on to. I mean, even if you kind of like, it's so fascinating to know about the text to support those because, I mean, I just - that he's examining and these sort of writings that you're talking about in the annotations in the Bible that kind of illuminate this thinking.
I mean, he is clinging to these outmoded ways of making music. I mean, you know, as people move into the enlightenment, people are again, we're looking for reason. So like one 4 or 5 one, like easy harmonic chord progressions that the ear can discern. And my clarity and, you know, Bach is not that Orpheus fugues and, you know, endless counterpoint that almost never resolves.
And–
M. MARISSEN
well, have you ever heard that you Johann Christian BAch violin sonatas? and, I forget which one it is. You know, it was 10 or 18, so it's hilarious. The first the first movement of the first note is in B-flat major is it rips off the theme from the first partita for harpsichord, of course. And so, you know, the Bach is the derivative due to the derivative that is, you know, three measures and five measures instead of two half measures.
It's like an going almost into two flat minor and then fragmented and then upside down. It's like this totally Baroque. Yeah, kind of thing. And then J C Bach takes it and puts in antecedent consequent phrases and sort of enlightens. It's a terrific example of taking this baroque thing, making it enlightened, fixing it,
N. PHAN
“fixing it.” Yeah,
I know that we misuse the term modern. I mean, confuse it with contemporary, but there's something that really fascinates me about your your musings about him is that in a way, I find his stubbornness about looking backwards and sort of insisting on this sort of, you know, pre-modern kind of way of thinking and holding complexity and revelation versus, reason. in a way it is more of our time than it maybe it was 15 years ago.
Right. You know, there's this there is this thing. I was speaking with Jeremy Denk about this on an earlier episode, and he said, you know, I, I think he's really quite current right now because it seems so algorithmic. And that resonated. But also there is this there's this part of, you know, he's asking us to sit with the messiness of life and, you know, have faith that there's something good on the other side. But, you know, we don't know. I mean, part of the thing that's inherent with faith is not knowing. So, I mean, I just wonder if that resonates with you too. It's.
M. MARISSEN
Yeah, I totally because it actually reminds me something else that I, you know, and not that I'm, I'm not an originalist by any means, and I'm not all it's not all history. But I think history is very relevant. But I think that, people often say, why is Bach so well-known and popular and so on, and if indeed he is this pre-modern figure, it doesn't make any sense. I say, well, it's because, you know, we're I and I'm totally in agreement that we take from him what we can use and what we like and so on and so forth, and what people like, especially nowadays, as you just talked about in the last ten, 20 years, especially Americans.
But it's catching on American ways of thinking you're catching on or maybe catching on the right word. And it depends on your point of view. If it's a disease, this or any of the various ways of looking at. But it is spreading for sure. Yeah. And the basic idea is, you know, so for instance, even I'm reading like New York Times and you're talking to various officials where they said they often say, you know, I feel or I believe there's nothing wrong with feeling things and believe me, but you don't statistically be interesting to do a it's worth it to increase the with common people say, I think you know and folks say, well, the reason that the Bach is so appealing is because the emotional power of it is so overwhelming. That's the sort of the main thing. But behind that emotional power is also an unbelievable sort of rigor and excellence. And when you combine those two, the emotional power becomes all the more emotionally powerful. And that's what I think people are mostly focused on, and they try to justify it with talks about math and so on.
But that's another topic.
But the point, the thing that I want to point out is that when one of those annotations or BAch talks about what the purpose of music is, he zeroes in on the temple choir and orchestra in the ancient Temple in Jerusalem. And there it says that at the sound of the trumpets the good not and giving part, it is the grace presence of God which is invisible if summoned from wherever it is, and comes into the smoke that's in the temple, and occupies it there, and it fills the temple with God's grace.
It's the idea and Bach says that, you know, the function of a modern cantata is the equivalent of the sound of the cantata summons the grace of God that then comes down into the believer's heart. And so some people are familiar with that and say, well, there's your proof that it's all emotional because it's the heart is the heart, it's the heart of sorrow doesn't talk about the brain. I say, well, yeah, this is a really good lesson in history, because in Bach's day, the heart was considered to be the locus of the intellect and the emotions is the point. And where do you get that idea from? From the Bible. It's in the Bible. The heart is the locus of the emotions and the intellect. in Bach’s of mind, the function of music is to combine the intellect and the emotions in the service of improving people's lives and so on and so forth, but in this very specific spiritual way. So the beauty of it is that the Bach’s music manages still to do that without you necessarily having to agree with what it is that he thinks your life is supposed to be focused on.
I think that's the, that's the basic idea that one of the reasons that is so well and so on is because, wittingly or unwittingly, is it has to do with that combination of intellect and emotion. And some people overemphasize the intellect and some people overemphasize the emotion. And I think that that very difficult balance is what's sort of about the essence of I mean, there are other composers who are even more emotional. I mean, Handel could reach depths of emotion. I think even Bach couldn't touch. But I also think Bach could reach depths of intellect that Handel couldn't touch.
N. PHAN
Right.
M. MARISSEN
And I'm glad that Bach's not the only composer. My favorite composer, of course, but many of the viewers’, I suppose, favorite composer. But that makes me want to ask you a question, too. I mean, you sing all sorts of different music all over the place in the classical repertory and not classical, but am I wrong to do this series that you're doing that with? This type of series that you're doing is just on Bach. You're not doing it. Planning a series on Haydn or Handel or the Beatles or so. Why? Why do you single out from all the great things that you do so well as your focus for this sort of thing?
N. PHAN
Yeah, I'm singling out Bach because, I mean, there is this assertion, right, that there is sort of before and after Bach in Western classical music and also in general, Western music and, you know, everything. There is a sort of base assumption, and assertion that, you know, certainly it should be unpacked, but in general that we think like, oh, everything in after Bach is in response to him, and particularly in classical music, you know, in the last few years, you know, people, I mean, people have been historically whining about audiences dying forever, and they seem to still be alive.
But, you know, we have that's a lot that's been part of our discourse. And, you know, we we constantly ask ourselves in classical music, is it relevant? And so I feel like by asking this question of Bach, we can more broadly ask it other people. I mean, I don't feel like you can say if we, you know, done Haydn 52 like we would be able to kind of have the same kind of broad reach, right?
And then there's also, you know, I mean, here we are in, in Berea, Ohio, where there is this giant Bach Institute that is formed. I mean, this is just one example of like the number of places that have become, you know, fascinated, obsessed almost with his music.
M. MARISSEN
Not almost, but we’ll come back to that.
N. PHAN
Well, yeah. You know, and, I think that, like, not other other composers don't maybe Wagner comes close, but, you know, again, he doesn't have the same kind of reach that Bach does in terms of like touching everything.
M. MARISSEN
Yeah, I wanted to speak to that for certain, too, because the provenance of books, which isn't the fanaticism, an obsession associated with Bach isn't just music either, which I think is very interesting and sort of reminds me of the three categories that are run into this. The most are both in Shakespeare and the Bible, where there are many, many people have an obsessive, over-the-top interest in the details of each of these things, but they can't necessarily find a way.
They're not necessarily a talented singer like you, or they can play the violin like Sigiswald Kuyken or whatever, or they're not a great scholar like Christoph Waltz, but they want to be able do something right there where we just spend a lot of time with them somehow or other, in addition to the actual listening to it. And, you know, and so I don't think this is true forWagner, but for Bach, every single manuscript has been pored over extremely careful 100 times, but different people in every watermark and every single ink that's been chronologized and I love it.
I mean, I you know, I'm not I'm not saying don't. And I hope people don't get the impression that it's, you know, it's wonderful and fascinating and I'm glad that it takes great skill to be able to do that. And I'm glad that someone's, doing that. But I think that, you know, all of these people together is just a desire to really be around the repertoire as much as possible. And I was very, moved by this in the following, for example, what happened to the Bach Research centers in Germany after World War two, if they were divided between Leipzig and, gutting and this whole working out or what the actual chronology was of all the cantatas, was a huge, huge project that involved doing the kind of work that I'm just describing. And some people say, oh my God, it's so boring. How could they possibly how how could anyone who actually loves Bach do that? Well, it was an it was an act of deep love, on the part of the people who did that.
But also the dark side of it was, coming out of the absolute horror of World War Two, they didn't want to argue about, you know, whether Bach was this, that, or the other thing or whether he was really Lutheran or whether you really love this, this was emotionally safe. This allowed you to spend an enormous amount of time with Bach, and for hours and hours and years and years on end without having to argue about the very nature of interpretation. And so and still be doing something useful sad in a way. But the great beauty is that, you know, that for this really wonderful, useful stuff that you so that all of us scholars in performance begin to take for granted the ferocious work that went into making the noise about let's go, you know.
N. PHAN
Right.
M. MARISSEN
And we just take for granted. You go to the music scene by your sheet music and you start rehearsing. It's like, you know,
N. PHAN
You just get on IMSLP
M. MARISSEN
Yeah, exactly. It's it's just like, so easy, you know? You have no idea. Not you. But I mean, no, no, I mean, I did I took it for granted and I do it now.
N. PHAN
But it's true. I mean, I think about that just in general like students, you know. Yeah. I took a masterclass here yesterday and, you know, saying while you're researching it, it's like, oh my gosh, it's so easy for you. You don't have to go to one of these rooms and sit there, you know, devote time to it. You just go on your computer and that's there.
M. MARISSEN
Yeah. Oh, which is wonderful, which is great.
N. PHAN
Yes. I mean, the information is great.
so, you know, we've kind of touched on the, the, the just general question, but I always kind of like to kind of round out with, you know, the basic question, do you think the music of Bach is for everyone? And what does the question mean to you?
M. MARISSEN
I do definitely think that Bach’s music is, is for everyone who wants, for for sure. And that, you know, it's not owned by,
00:37:44:22 - 00:37:57:12
Unknown
German Lutherans or by Christians in general, or by musicians or by consumers. It's not owned by anybody. It's it really is in that sense, it really is for everybody. but I don't think that as a as alluded to before, I don't think that, Bach would have thought that that was, it was a weird question. he certainly–the historical evidence is overwhelming that that's just not a concept that would have resonated with with him. But it doesn't. Just because it doesn't resonate with him doesn't mean it can't resonate with with us. But I think one of the reasons why it's easier for this kind of art to really be for everyone who wants it is because you don't need the original score for the people to have access to the pieces. It's not like a painting or a sculpture or something, because these extremely difficult ethical issues surrounding whether you know well and people in England, you know, they'll take better care of those statues than the place that they stole them from, right, in the 19th century. But, you know, it's, it's a if art really is if art by nature, by definition, is for everyone.
If you think that, then yes, you can argue that, well, England has the right to keep the stuff that they stole because they're going to take better care of it then. So they say. Yes. And then then Cambodia over to, you know. Yeah. Right. But, from a legal point of view, if you're thinking legally and ethically, legally, you know, there's a very strong argument that that stuff that art belongs to, the art object belongs to this other place. And anyone from England is right to go see it as they want to see it there, but it doesn't belong to them. Right? This so that belonging thing is a tricky is a trickier question in other arts than it is in in music. In a way to come full circle on this. I wouldn't even be sitting before you as a person if it weren't for recordings, because, right, if there were no crime, if there were any cons, they wouldn't be able to afford to go to them.
But there were no concerts of anything, let alone. But, so that's how I got to know my entire first 15 years of getting to know the Bach all through Leonhart and Harnoncourt and Franz Brüggen and those heroes of, early music from the 70s and, and 80s. And so the technology makes it possible for it to be. You were just talking about the kids doing it. Right. Well, I can pull my phone out right now. And if you were wondering about some Aria, I know we can we can play it. We can play right now on it. It's astonishing. I even 25 years ago, that was unheard. Unheard of.
But it's not so much to do with whether the, the music is for everyone or not, but what the whatever your view of the music is. And I always tell students that, look, there are multiple plausible interpretations of a work of art. That's partly, probably what makes it a work of art, right? There are multiple, but they're not. They're not infinite and they're not arbitrary. So they're it is actually impossible to have an interpretation, something that's wrong, intellectually wrong, or even emotionally wrong, I think. Yeah, sometimes. And that's very un-American. Just because you're supposed to feel so you can choose, you can maximal choice. And however you feel about something that's sort of your truth. I say, well, but okay, maybe it's your truth, but the weird definition of truth, you know, because again, as I say, that there's not only one way of looking, but there are a lot of wrong ways of looking at things.
And but the main issue for me here has to do with the question of authority, you know, because the question is like what is your if you baselines are your how is it your emotions that are your authority? Is it when you do historical research and you see what so and you go crazy with the originalist stuff and you're not allowed to think or feel anything except for what is validated.
N. PHAN
Right.
M. MARISSEN
But what it's really interesting to me is when people have extremely modern ideas that are very implausible for which is no problem per se, but they can claim that because this seems so compelling to me, he must have thought that too, and therefore and therefore. And it is dangerous because, you don't have the right to make someone in a way that is super moralistic.
It's almost the kind of, I think one of the Ten Commandments, you know, you must honor your father and your mother, you know, and this and this are those those ancient commandments. Some of them are many of them. They're very profound and very, very good. And they don't they don't mean just literally, you know, the the mother that generated your body and your father to do help you do it.
You know, there's an element, you know, there's interpretations going on of those. It's a work of art to the literal. There are many plausible interpretations and there are many implausible ones. But I think one plausible one is if you should have some respect for people from the past and don't assume that they thought the way the, you did and, in a way, it's actually sort of liberating to realize that you don't have to you're allowed to think what you wanted, and you don't need the authority of, you know, so don't don't waste your energy. Sort of like involving yourselves in things that it could turn out to be. When you find out that there aren't true, then you end up being sure you don't need to be shattered
N. PHAN
Yeah. I mean, I think it's interesting. I mean, what I love about, I mean, honoring your elders does not mean that you agree with them all the time, right?
M. MARISSEN
No, of course not.
N. PHAN
It doesn’t mean we put them on pedestals. It just means that we give them the respect of, you know, you can't like non-consensual. They, like, change the meaning of something that they've done. Yeah. I mean, they're not there to be here. That's not fair to them, especially in the case of Bach. So I mean, I think that that's a really fascinating and interesting concept. And again, it's something that, you know, honoring is, is an invitation to be in dialog with.
M. MARISSEN
Right.
N. PHAN
And I think that that's really important for us to hold, if we choose to put something on it, like at least let’s own that that's what we're doing, right?
M. MARISSEN
No. Exactly. Yeah. Couldn't have put it better myself.
N. PHAN
I'm just reflecting what you said
Do you have anything you want to add
M. MARISSEN
I've always been interested by the audiences of the Leipzig Bach Fest, for example, because it's sort of the pilgrimage, For people, for you. Have you sung there,
N. PHAN
you know, I’ve sung at the Thomas church?=, but I have never been to the Bachfest.
M. MARISSEN
Yeah. I mean, it's amazing. It's people come from all over the world. They're all these, you know, they're fanatical in the ways that we were talking about before. And it is a really beautiful thing to see because you don't see that in Europe so much in here in America, of course, it's wonderful. And these American ensembles of, you know, it's no small chamber choir, 12 people and you see Asians and blacks and whites, you're singing Bach together. It's a it's a beautiful that is that is a wonderful thing. And it's rare to see that in Europe, except for at the Leipzig office, where people from all in the not not just the ethnic and other diversity, but also the musical diversity. But this is an I'm thrilled, by the way, that you can adapt, you know, you will have a klezmer ensemble play the concerto violin tuned. And they have this, actually, there's this amazing.
There's this guy from, Warsaw who played polka versions on his accordion. It's like it's brilliant. And it's just it's just unending.
I think it was Beethoven who said: Der ist kein Bach, er ist ein Meer. He is not a stream, He's an ocean. And, you see very strong confirmation of that sort of idea that, things like the, things like the Leipzig Bachfest. And so it would be I think it would be very interesting if someone wrote a book about sort of all aspects of what's going on there and the history of and how it all hangs together, because, you know, church and state and commerce and so on are all mixed up in ways that, you know, would never happen here.
And it's just it's just a culturally phenomenal thing. And I wonder if that would actually work for anyone. But if that's a that's going to be an interesting question. So but I guess it speaks a little bit to whether the festival sort of seems to project very strongly the notion that Bach is for everyone and, even to get the Germans to use a marketing strategy for their festivals is, We are family? You know, we are family. Yes. But it was the it was the, you know, and that's, you know, some people have this actually kind of beautiful too. is so that was very neat is there is kind of a Bach family and that's, that's a, that's a beautiful thing.
N. PHAN
I certainly felt that all the years I worked with Rilling and like, you know, all the travels I have had it’s kind of interesting where we all get connected. Yeah. Well, I really appreciate you taking the time to do that. It's a great, great pleasure.
N. PHAN
After my conversation with Michael, I kept coming back to this aria from cantata 179, which for me is one of the reasons why I'm asking this question is the music of Bach for everyone? through this project.
The aria is a fantastic piece of music. It's chromatically interesting. It's a joy to sing, but when you get into the words, the text is quite judgmental.
The Bible reading for the Sunday. That cantata 179 was composed for tells the story of the Pharisee and the tax collector. And basically that parable is a compare and contrast of who's a better Christian, the Pharisee who puts on a big, ostentatious display of piety, or the tax collector who just comes in and humbly begs for mercy.
This cantata meditates on this idea of performative Christianity, and in a way, questions the congregation whether or not they're good enough Christians and it just makes me wonder, is something that's so judgmental, really, for everyone? I guess in there, there is the hope that one can try to be like the tax collector and learn to be humble and therefore learn to be a better Christian.
This music is almost gleeful in its depiction of these hypocrites, perhaps that's Bach just trying to show how showy and ostentatious these people are in their displays of piety and observance. But there's something in there also that seems to take a little joy, a little schadenfreude, that these people are perhaps lesser than and cannot enjoy God's mercy at the end of the day?
I don't know, I think that's for the listeners to decide. It's a tension that I sit with and I find fascinating. And it makes me question, is this music really for everyone? Either way, I really enjoy singing it, and I hope you enjoy this performance with Ruben Valenzuela and Bach Collegium San Diego.