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
[00:00:00] 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
[00:00:09] AUDEINCE MEMBER 2: I mostly love playing
[00:00:10] AUDIENCE MEMBER 3: Bach.
[00:00:11] AUDIENCE MEMBER 1: The challenges of singing Bach is what, what
[00:00:13] AUDIENCE MEMBER 4: drives me, 'cause it's just fun.
[00:00:15] AUDIENCE MEMBER 3: There's so much to be inspired by and moved by.
[00:00:19] AUDIENCE MEMBER 1: It's ancient music. It's sanctified music.
[00:00:22] AUDIENCE MEMBER 3: 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.
[00:00:32] AUDIENCE MEMBER 1: I was raised a cello player. Okay. So Bach was right there in the beginning.
[00:00:37] AUDEINCE MEMBER 2: I played two-part inventions in, I don't remember, I was probably 10, 11 when I started on the two.
[00:00:44] And, and more than any other music, I just knew where it was going.
[00:00:47] AUDIENCE MEMBER 4: Oh, yeah, all those melismas and octave jumps. Yeah, it's fun. It's acrobatic. That's what I enjoyed the most.
[00:00:52] AUDEINCE MEMBER 2: It just fell into my hands like it was supposed to be this. I play the violin, and it's so much more than the violin. It's everything.
[00:01:00] The variety and the depth. It's just like I feel it in my bones, so I can't be that different from others. I feel that there, it's accessible in some way to everyone.
[00:01:11] AUDIENCE MEMBER 4: I've done my best to introduce Bach to my three children, and, um, the eldest, who's now 21, said, "Thank you, Dad, for introducing me to classical music."
[00:01:19] So I think, yeah, it can be for everyone, even the most reluctant.
[00:01:29] N PHAN: Hi, I'm Nick Phan, and this is Bach 52
[00:01:40] When we talk about Bach, it's so easy to get lost in superlatives. The greatest composer ever, a universal genius A before Bach and an after Bach. And sure, there's truth to all of this, but what happens when we examine the mythologies that we've built up around Bach and actually let Bach be who he was?
[00:02:03] Last year, I had the chance to sit down with Bach scholar Michael Marissa at the Baldwin Wallace Bach Institute, which is an annual Bach festival that takes place at Baldwin Wallace University in Ohio every year. We sat down in the library of the Riemann-Schneider Bach Institute and had a fascinating conversation.
[00:02:22] 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.
[00:02:51] And we also talked about how tempting it is to turn Bach 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 Bach's music down or tearing him down as a historical figure or deconstructing his work.
[00:03:10] Instead, it was about using a deeper understanding of Bach to enrich our appreciation and our connection to his music.
[00:03:19] I hope you enjoy this conversation, and please, as always, be sure to stick around for the aria at the end of the episode, taken from Cantata one seventy-nine.
[00:03:27] Thanks for doing this. I always start this kind of just wondering how people come to Bach's music, and I...
[00:03:33] You know, you've written so much about his music. I'm really curious to know what exactly it is that, you know, how it came into your life and just sort of the, you know, the journey of getting to... from that moment until where you are now.
[00:03:45] M MARISSEN: Well, it's an extremely unlikely story, and my spouse is a, um, writes, uh, commercial fiction, and so we know a lot of literary people in New York, and people always say, "Oh, man, you gotta write a memoir about this."
[00:03:58] And we just, we really don't wanna do that. It's just the last thing I'll ever do.
[00:04:01] N PHAN: Well, let this be your memoir.
[00:04:02] M MARISSEN: But people do find the, the general arc of it sort of interesting. And the, the, the upshot is I grew up as an extremely conservative community of e- Dutch immigrants who came to Canada in the late 1940s and early 1950s, and they were extremely strict Dutch Calvinists, basically.
[00:04:18] Not the cool Calvinists. The Du- they're not like the Dutch Reformed Church in the Netherlands. Mostly farmhands all the way back to the Middle Ages, and were very serious people and very, uh, and good people. But, um, they had no, not only no interest in the arts or in education, they actually were extremely, uh, skeptical of it.
[00:04:37] The, the upshot was that you, all you really needed, although the government made you get more schooling, this was you know, fourth or fifth grade so that you know math well enough to deal with money and reading enough to deal with the Bible, and anything beyond that is just gonna create trouble. And the church itself, they had its very, this very strict church with no paintings, no statues, no choir.
[00:05:00] N PHAN: Mm-hmm.
[00:05:01] M MARISSEN: No nothing. Very, very... And, you know, just a long service, very focused on preaching on the, on the word. And so this is not a likely environment in which to get exposed to Bach. But there m- there was one elderly gentleman in that community, must have been very lonely, and he did have a small record collection.
[00:05:17] Well, we know, I don't know how many, but fewer than 10 perhaps. But one of them was a Bach set of Helmut Walcha playing all the Bach organ works. And a friend of mine over, uh, so I don't know, I was 10 years old or so, and they say, uh, th- this guy said, "Hey, hey, hey, boys, come over here and listen to this." And he played for us the Passacaglia in C minor for, and we were just both gobsmacked.
[00:05:37] I mean, it was like, wow. You know, 'cause we were just not accustomed to listening to music, and 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 then we said, "Do you have any more of this?" And he said, "Oh, yeah." And so we hung, you know, we hung out listening to...
[00:05:56] It was the, just the Bach organ works. And then I worked in hard manual labor and saved up my money and figured out how to get over to a record store in a town that was 50 miles away. And I said, you know, so I bought like, I think my first... Got as many cantatas as I could. And so when I was, uh, I think the first one I got was Karl Richter and the Münchner Bach Choir doing Händel and Mendelssohn and Leben, you know, 147.
[00:06:15] I just thought, man, even the organ music was great, but the cantatas, you know. And then so it's ended up going to h- uh, uh, one of these Dutch Reformed high schools too, and it just happened that the music teacher there, they introduced music, but only singing simple Sort of choir stuff and so on. But he was a virtuoso organist, and so I got to turn pages for him, and he could play all the Bach organ works, and that was just fantastic.
[00:06:41] But probably the most influential thing on me in my whole career in the Bach stuff was discovering the, the Lainhart and Harnoncourt cantata series. That, 'cause it started just as I was a teenager.
[00:06:52] N PHAN: Mm-hmm.
[00:06:52] M MARISSEN: And I got them one by one all the way to the end. So that, uh, so it's high school, college, and grad school.
[00:06:57] That's the time that it took them to record. That was always a big event, you know, when a new box came out with four more cantatas, and they included the scores in there, and it, uh, it was just like a happen-
[00:07:08] N PHAN: Wow.
[00:07:08] M MARISSEN: You know, so I got really good... And, and not to carry on about this too much, but I was also discovered that I was not very good at manual labor.
[00:07:15] I respected people who were good at it.
[00:07:17] N PHAN: Okay.
[00:07:18] M MARISSEN: I thought, "I really need to make sure that if, 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 the town that I went. And, and, uh, said, "I'm gonna go to college, and I'm gonna study music, and I'm gonna study German with the sole function of the German is not to read Goethe or to, to speak with people in German.
[00:07:40] It's to be able to understand the cantatas as they're going by in real time." That was the goal.
[00:07:45] N PHAN: Wow.
[00:07:46] M MARISSEN: I really loved taking these German classes- Yeah ... and so on and so forth. So I got... So I was really into the music and the tech. I was very devout and so and so. It was, it was a source of aesthetic pleasure and so on that that would've been frowned upon, as I say, in that group.
[00:07:58] But it was also a source of genuine spiritual devotion, so it became very, very much 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, I died and gone to heaven." And since I thought this is my one shot, you know, thinking of the Hamilton thing, you know, if this is your one shot.
[00:08:18] So I said, "I'm not gonna do a dissertation on the chamber music of Cherubini or whatever," you know. I said, "This is, this is the only time I'm probably ever gonna be able to... It's gonna be back in the fields kinda thing, so I'm doing a dissertation on the social and religious designs of Bach's Brandenburg Concertos."
[00:08:33] N PHAN: Wow.
[00:08:34] M MARISSEN: And I got a fellowship to study in Berlin 'cause I joke around a little bit about this. I think the German government feels very guilty, of course, about various things from previous-
[00:08:44] N PHAN: Indeed ...
[00:08:44] M MARISSEN: decades. And they said, "Morrison, it doesn't, none of it doesn't sound like a terribly Jewish name." But yeah, but just, you know, I get the sense that pretty much anyone from Brandeis who applied for a German research fellowship, they got it.
[00:08:55] 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, uh, ruminating about my CD collection and, and writing about as many things as I got interested in. But, you know, there's 1,200 works, and they're... I gradually sort of came to sort of want to figure out how all the parts of the repertory are related to each other because they tend to get sort of balkanized.
[00:09:22] You know, the people say, "Well, I'm just an instrumentalist, so I'm really into the chamber music and, and I don't know about those cantatas, and that seems like a different world." I say, "You know what? Actually, it's not. It, it seems like a different world, but it's actually the same world." And I tried to get a sense of that, and that's...
[00:09:35] I'm not, not always successful with it, but that's what some of the books and articles have been about. And then, of course, partly against my will, got dragged into controversial subjects. So that, that's on the polemical side of Bach. So I've sort of became one of the people who's sort of known for Being the guy to talk to if you want to delve into that more, more deeply.
[00:09:57] And I can't help wondering if part of the reason that I got into that so deeply is also because the sort of, it's like confession mode here, but it sort of was a way of atoning for the, the Dutch Calvinist guilt that I felt for enjoying the repertory so much. So that if I could sort of really s- l- lean into the negative side too, that that would sort of balance it somehow and make it all okay.
[00:10:19] And to be, to be so devoted to the, to the music of Bach. I don't know if that makes sense, but
[00:10:24] N PHAN: No, that makes total sense. I mean, it's, you know, I, in a way I, you know, personally I'm grateful for it. It's, it's being able to view these... I mean, Bach gets so canonized, right? Yeah. And he's sort of put on this pedestal- Yeah
[00:10:35] and it's, you know, to question it is anathema to so many devotees. And I mean, there's, you know, there's this sort of fanatical following around- Right ... him and his music, which, you know, he was a human being, and he lived in a time- Sure ... and with all its faults and all its strengths. And- Sure ... you know, we have to like, I don't know, to me it makes it more magical to like look at it the ways in which you're, you're sort of examining it 'cause it's, it's important.
[00:10:59] Well, so how did you get into it? I got into Bach because I was, you know, I started as a violinist and when I wasn't super excited about practicing every day- ... as a child. And, but when I remember hearing the Bach Double Concerto for the first time, and 'cause you, you know, in Suzuki you get to it in book four and- Yeah
[00:11:18] 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 worked myself towards. Concerto in D
[00:11:26] M MARISSEN: minor for two
[00:11:27] N PHAN: violins. Yeah, exactly. So from there I was, I was hooked and I, you know, I'd started playing in orchestras around that time and I sought any opportunity to play like Brandenburgs and, you know, I was obsessed with Brandenburg Three for- Oh, sure.
[00:11:40] Yeah, yeah ... all of my adolescence. Yeah, yeah. Which, you know, in retrospect, I think that's so quaint, but the last movement, you know, it's just got such amazing- Right ... you know, vitality and rhythm. And as a player, you know, it just is- Right ... it's, it's chamber music on steroids. So, you know, I got into it that way and then I, you know, along the way I wanted to become a singer and because of this childhood fascination with it, I was- Right
[00:12:00] you know, I started to seek out those opportunities. And then, you know, I'm a tenor and so, you know, evangelists naturally come into your life and things evolve. So that's how I got into it.
[00:12:09] M MARISSEN: Well, I'm very interested that you came at it so profoundly from the Concerto for Two Violins, 'cause I think that's one of the greatest pieces of Bach actually.
[00:12:16] And I often refer to it as sort of one of the, the slow movement in particular I think is one of the most beautiful things ever by anybody.
[00:12:24] N PHAN: Yeah.
[00:12:24] M MARISSEN: And I don't know if this is your experience of it too, but what I f- you know, it's 'cause it's really only got sort of two melodic ideas in it that sort of spun out for, what is it, six or seven minutes?
[00:12:33] N PHAN: Right.
[00:12:36] M MARISSEN: My experience had always had been, and other people I've talked to, they s- have a similar sort of experience, that it, it goes on forever and ever and ever and ever. And then when it's done you go, 'Whoa, it's done already?' I know. How do you do that? You know? That is an amazing, uh, and not only is that sort of amazing from a, um, musical point of view and so on, but I thought I sort of experienced that sort of metaphorical.
[00:12:56] It's sort of like the way people's lives going, is that your life is very, very long. It goes on and on and on, and then it's over too soon.
[00:13:03] N PHAN: Yeah. Right.
[00:13:03] M MARISSEN: And so I think, I don't know, I s- I don't wanna speculate on particular, but Bach seems sort of intuitively to understand sort of fundamental things about human life, even in non-vocal music like that.
[00:13:16] N PHAN: Very much so. Yeah. I mean, that piece in a way is all about time dilation. Right. It's amazing how he's able to kind of suspend time like that, and yet at the same time make it feel like, you know, no time has gone by at all.
[00:13:26] Yeah. Yeah,
[00:13:27] yeah. So you know, something I'm really fascinated about in your writing is, I mean, um, y- your recent collection of ex- essays, Bach Against Modernity, and I'd love for you to talk about that.
[00:13:39] It, 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.
[00:13:56] M MARISSEN: Yeah, well, this that's a very complicated topic, yours, and I tried to make it simpler in the book to some extent, uh, 'cause I don't wanna lose readers or, uh, make it boring or anything like that.
[00:14:08] But I've sort of come to think that, you know, uh, Bach really is for everyone, I think. I mean, I, I have no, I have no problem with that. He is in the sense that everyone has the right-
[00:14:19] N PHAN: Sure ...
[00:14:19] M MARISSEN: uh, to him. Uh, you know, I'm thinking hilariously of the movie Li- Life of Brian, you know, one of the characters says, uh, "I would like to..."
[00:14:26] The male character says, "I would like, I'd like to have a baby," you know? And they say, "Well, you can't have a baby," you know? Right. And they argue about it and so on, and then when finally one of them says, "Well, he has the right to have a baby." You know, he can't have... And so I do really think that everyone has the, the, the right to, to, to Bach.
[00:14:43] 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, uh, to everyone. It just, a lot of it happens to work partly because it just does. Right. It's hard to say really why it does. But also, I think quite often there are very productive misunderstandings of what he's up to, and, um, people have the right to have productive misunderstandings- Sure
[00:15:11] too, I think. I have no problem with that. The only problem I have, and I really tried to push this with the students that I was, in the 25 years that I was teaching full-time, I says, "Look, you have the right to your views, you have the right to your politics, the, all these things, but you don't have the right to make someone your hero who's not your hero."
[00:15:27] N PHAN: Hmm.
[00:15:27] M MARISSEN: It's very tempting 'cause it, it looks, that guy looks like your hero. But the reason why he looks like your hero is 'cause you don't actually know enough about him to know-
[00:15:36] N PHAN: Right ...
[00:15:36] M MARISSEN: what he's actually up to. And also partly this is a sort of human failing that we all have too, is that one, it's sort of natural to see yourself in things that you like.
[00:15:46] N PHAN: Indeed.
[00:15:47] M MARISSEN: And so, you know, and again, the, the vast majority of Bach's music really does, you know, the work pretty well for everyone who's, who wants to and has the right to. And so, you know, every few years someone writes a new Bach biography, and there's some really good, good ones out there, and I, you know, I always recommend, particularly if you wanna know all the information- Mm-hmm
[00:16:06] to, you know, by far the best thing is to read the Christoph
[00:16:10] N PHAN: Wolff- Mm-hmm ...
[00:16:10] M MARISSEN: biography. It's this treasure trove of information about Bach and so on. And if you want a good, really good survey of the music and his life, this new biography by David Schulenberg is very good, which is much shorter. But what no one has quite done yet, and I have some speculations on why they wouldn't do it, there's some practical reasons, but there aren't only practical reasons for this.
[00:16:29] You know, they, people have known for it since the 19th century that Bach had a very large, or 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-
[00:16:45] N PHAN: Mm-hmm
[00:16:45] M MARISSEN: for example, not the big scholarly book thing and so on. But it's, he, he is, it's a larger library than a lot of pastors actually had in the 17th and 18th centuries, and all the evidence is that he read it, read them very carefully. He quotes them. The one book that survives is the, um, um, a three-volume Bible, uh, that the 17th century theologian Abraham Calov basically printed the entire Luther Bible in large script and then put in smaller script between each of the verses, um, whatever his favorite, what he thought was Luther's best comment on that verse, if Luther commented on it more than once.
[00:17:20] And if Luther didn't comment on that verse at all in his voluminous writings, then Calov basically said, "This is what he would've said had he-" Yeah ... "got around to commenting on this verse." It's a very... And that particular book, that, Bach's own copy of that survives. It's here in the United States, and it has tremendous number of underlinings and high- highlightings and marginal comments and so on, that some of those, many of them have nothing, actually probably 90% of them have nothing to do with music And, I mean, not directly at least.
[00:17:48] I mean- Right ... not about musical, technical, or aesthetic things that are specific to music, but they have, um, import for that, of course. And those, uh, annotations sometimes quote from the other books that are in that library. So it's, it's very clear that he really cared about this stuff and read the stuff carefully.
[00:18:06] 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 wanna do that because either they're... I mean, but frankly, some people are just lazy. Right. It's a lot of work. I mean, I don't blame them particularly.
[00:18:22] N PHAN: Right.
[00:18:23] M MARISSEN: And some of these books are, are not that interesting to read. But, but a biographer often has to do a lot of grunt work that's not that interesting to get to the big picture, you know?
[00:18:33] N PHAN: Right.
[00:18:34] M MARISSEN: Once you really steep yourself in that literature and see how it, 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 is a forward-thinking philosophe of the Enlightenment is absolutely ridiculous.
[00:18:51] Because all of the central things that you learn in college about what the Enlightenment means, you know, being concerned with reason over revelation, wherever that issue comes up in the Bach vocal works specifically, or in the, the writings that he, or even in his, his comments, he takes a harsh view. Oh, of course you must know this, that fantastic aria in, uh, Cantata 178 where it says, uh,
[00:19:16] uh, just be quiet or shut up, teetering, tottering reason. And, you know, I mean, some of my colleagues have said, "Well, you know, yeah, he just had to do that to please his conservative employers, but in fact, at, in his, in his depths of his heart, he was really a forward-thinking mathematical genius," and so on and so forth.
[00:19:36] And I said, "No, we know that that's not... We know that's not true because there's these annotations that are in this book-" Uh, I don't know why this hasn't been sort of figured out before, that they're mostly entered in the late 1730s and 1740s, so well after he's composed the cantatas. Now, it's conceivable that if he had written them all those things in there before he wrote the cantatas, he was just, you know, in case the equivalent of the Stasi in the-
[00:19:59] N PHAN: Mm
[00:19:59] M MARISSEN: in the 18th century had come into his apartment and said, "We're looking for evidence of what your views are," and that would provide evidence that he was genuinely interested in these things, uh, even though he wasn't, 'cause he really wanted to be a forward-thinking Enlightenment figure. But the fact that they're 10, 15 years afterwards, when there's no need...
[00:20:15] You know, it, and it, and there's some of these books also say that, "Well, these, these annotations are now useless to us because they don't help explain how he came to write the cantatas." But that's backwards. I mean, my view is that what they do is they confirm that what's talked about in the vocal works of Bach is something he's genuinely interested in because he's studying that as a comp- as a person, as a human being in the 1740s, when he's not composing cantatas anymore.
[00:20:41] He's still interested in those issues. Right.
[00:20:44] N PHAN: Well, and also, I mean, the cantatas are so... You know, part of the reason we're focusing on the cantatas is, I mean, A, it gives you sort of like a daily, or it's kind of his daily work or weekly work. Mm-hmm. And so it kind of gives you a sort of more granular sense of what he was thinking and experimenting with.
[00:20:58] Mm-hmm. But also, I mean, they're so, you know, they're experimental. They're places where he's learning things, and there's places where he'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 that depth of- Okay
[00:21:16] religiosity and not h- be thinking about those things.
[00:21:19] M MARISSEN: Well, I'm glad you bring that up too, 'cause one of the other things I've been very interested in a lot of my, um, in my Bach journey, so to speak, is that Yeah, we were sort of taught too that what a composer does is reads this poetry, figures out what sort of the general emotional tenor of it is-
[00:21:35] N PHAN: Mm-hmm
[00:21:35] M MARISSEN: and translates, this is an unfortunate term, but they find a way of expressing that musically. And so the function of the... And it's kind of lousy poetry. Who are we kidding? You know, from a aesthetic point of view, the poetry's not very, it's not very good, but the ideas in it are important to the community that they're written for.
[00:21:52] And the ideas 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 aesthetically satisfying. And that's, he certainly did that. I mean, there's no question. But where it gets interesting is, is that sometimes there's a discrepancy between the musical setting and the text, and people say, "Oh, he's asleep that day," or he did- does he really care about the text?
[00:22:13] You know, he probably really cares, is he, he really wanted to write something sad here, and he thought, "This is time for something sad." So, um, you know, I don't care what the text says, I'm gonna write something sad here. But when tho- those, in those cases where that sort of thing happens, it's often the sort of this Lutheran sort of thing, uh, be- the, the theology that's behind it is often has to do with thing- things look...
[00:22:33] Uh, or, or it could be the other way around. It'd be a really sad text, but as a happy setting. Right. Actually, that's more common in Bach. And so it's like he's not paying attention to the... But no, he is, 'cause what he's saying is that the, you know, things look bad, but in fact, underneath it, everything's actually gonna be okay.
[00:22:47] In fact, my favorite example of this is a tenor aria in, uh, Cantata 13, uh, Meine Zeit, Meine Tränen. Hmm.
[00:22:53] N PHAN: Yeah.
[00:22:54] M MARISSEN: Um, where it's this, you know, it's in D minor with all sorts of chromaticism, and, and, uh, just very, very, uh, the affect of the piece is very, very dark and, and sad and so on. And it's, it seems like it's, in fact, just expressing musically what the text is saying.
[00:23:10] There are so many tears that I can't count them. Well, we're done. Yeah. But as it happens, it has a sort of recurring bassline, the same, same pitch in the bass over and over again, and parallel thirds and sixths over and over again in the recorder as well. The oboe da caccia is all over the place. And you know, that's a topos from Baroque opera, you know, to have a repeated bassline with parallel thirds or sixths.
[00:23:29] It's a pastoral topos. So behind the text and behind even the affect 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 is saying. There is a, there is a, there's something positive going." And that's a correlative of sort of what Luther said about making sense out of why Jesus dies on the cross.
[00:23:51] He says, "When you, when you contemplate Jesus on the cross, you're seeing the backside of his glory come," which, the, we, the idea comes from, um, Moses going up Sinai to get the Torah, uh, you know, the Ten Commandments from God. And he's not allowed to look directly at God. He only-
[00:24:08] N PHAN: Mm-hmm ...
[00:24:09] M MARISSEN: he's like this. He sort of, he can sense in his peripheral vision that there's something very special over there.
[00:24:13] Because if you behold the glory of God directly, you die And so Luther really liked 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, this is a very old-fashioned, pre-modern sort of way of, of thinking.
[00:24:35] It's true, yeah, it's true that aria we were just talking about, it's, it's sensational in a concert, and people will enjoy it tremendously. But, you know, without someone coming along to explain this background, uh, which I... And also I want to be really clear about that they say, "Oh, well, that's sort of interesting, but you don't really need that."
[00:24:51] Well, it's not for me to say what you need or don't need.
[00:24:54] N PHAN: Right.
[00:24:54] M MARISSEN: But what I would say is that I've, 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 from whether they actually agree with what's being said.
[00:25:07] It's like, "Oh, wow, that's really nuanced and interesting." And this, 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 to, it's just to understand What your heroes are actually up to.
[00:25:25] N PHAN: Yeah. Right. Of course. And to sort of give their intention, be clear about their intentions. I mean, it's interesting that the thing you're talking about in terms of like h- holding this, you know, something that seems sad or, or horrifying or whatever, but then there's this positivity with it. The aria from...
[00:25:39] the tenor aria from the St. John Passion immediately comes to mind, where you're talking about, like, these scars of, and, like, whip markings on the back of Jesus. Right. But, like, there's such beauty, and consider the beauty in there, and consider what this means for us, and-
[00:25:52] M MARISSEN: Right ...
[00:25:52] N PHAN: I mean, that is, like you say, it's not a rational-
[00:25:56] M MARISSEN: Right
[00:25:56] N PHAN: 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 onto. I mean, even if you kind of... Like, it's so fascinating to know about the text to support this, 'cause I mean, I just...
[00:26:11] That he's examining in these sort of writings that you were talking about in the annotations in the Bible that kind of illuminate this think- 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 l- again, we're looking for reason.
[00:26:26] So, like, I, IV, V, I, like easy harmonic chord progressions- Right ... that the ear can discern, and, like, clarity. And- Right ... you know, Bach is not that. Bach is fugues and- Right ... you know, endless counterpoint that almost never resolves. I mean-
[00:26:41] M MARISSEN: Well, have you ever heard the Johann Christian Bach violin sonatas in, uh, forget which opus it is, Opus 10 or 18 or something.
[00:26:48] It's hilarious. The first, the first movement of the first sonata's in B-flat major, and it's the, it rips off the theme from the, uh, first partita for harpsichord of Bach. It goes... And so, you know, the Bach piece, the da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da is, you know, three measures, then five measures, then seven and a half measures.
[00:27:04] It's, it's like in a, going almost into Q flat minor, and then- ... fragments it, and then upside down. It's like this totally Baroques-
[00:27:12] N PHAN: Yeah ...
[00:27:12] M MARISSEN: kind of thing. And, and the J.C. Bach takes it and puts it into antecedent consequent phrases.
[00:27:16] N PHAN: Oh,
[00:27:17] M MARISSEN: gosh. And sort of enlightens- Right ... it's a terrific example of taking this Baroque thing and making it enlightened and-
[00:27:22] N PHAN: Yeah.
[00:27:23] Fixing it.
[00:27:24] M MARISSEN: Fixing it.
[00:27:24] N PHAN: Yeah. I know that we misuse the term m- modern and, and confuse it with contemporary, but there, 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, um, reason, you know.
[00:27:52] Right. In a way, it is more of our time than maybe it was 15 years ago.
[00:27:59] M MARISSEN: Right.
[00:28:00] N PHAN: You know, there's this p- there is this thing y- I was speaking with Jeremy Denk about this on an earlier episode, and he said, you know, "I wa- I think Bach is really quite current right now because it seems so algorithmic." And that resonated, but also there is this, there's this part of him, you know, he's asking us to sit with the messiness of life- Right
[00:28:17] and, you know, have faith that there's something good on the other side. But, you know- Right ... we don't know. I mean, part of the thing that's inherent with faith is not knowing. Right. So I mean, I just wonder if that resonates with you too. It's-
[00:28:29] M MARISSEN: Yeah, totally, because it actually reminds me of something else that I'm, you know, uh...
[00:28:32] I mean, 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- Right ... history is very relevant. But I think that, um, people often say, "Why is Bach so well-known and popular and so on, and, uh, if indeed he is this premodern figure? It doesn't make any sense." I say, "Well, it's because, you know, we're, uh...
[00:28:53] I..." And I'm totally in agreement with it. We take from him what we can use, and what we like, and so on and so forth. And what people like, especially nowadays, I mean, well, as I, uh, as we were just talking about in the last 10, 20 years, especially Americans, but it's catching on American ways of thinking are catching on.
[00:29:11] Or c- maybe catching on isn't the right word. I would say it depends on your point of view. Proliferating. It's, it's a disease that's... or we're you know, there are various ways of looking at it. But it's spreading, for sure.
[00:29:19] N PHAN: Yeah.
[00:29:19] M MARISSEN: And the basic idea is, you know, it's so funny. So those... Even when I'm reading like New York Times, you know, you're talking to various officials who are experts and things, they say, they often say, you know, "I feel," or, "I believe."
[00:29:30] There's nothing wrong with feeling things and believing things.
[00:29:32] N PHAN: Mm-hmm.
[00:29:33] M MARISSEN: But you don't... Statistically, it'd be interesting to do a, you know, a word study, but I think increasingly less common for people to 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.
[00:29:47] 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- Mm-hmm
[00:30:06] I think that's another topic. But the point, the thing that I wanna, uh, point out is that when one of those annotations where Bach talks about what the purpose of music is, he zeroes in on the temple choir and orchestra in the ancient temple of Jerusalem, and there it says that at the sound of the trumpets, the Gnadengegenwart, that is the grace presence of God, which is invisible Is summoned from wherever it is and comes into the smoke that's in the temple, and occupies it there and, and fills the temple with God's grace, is the idea.
[00:30:40] And Bach says that, you know, the, the function of a modern cantata is the equivalent of that. The sound of the cantata summons the grace of God that then comes down into the believer's heart.
[00:30:51] N PHAN: Hmm.
[00:30:52] M MARISSEN: And so s- some people are familiar with that. They say, "Well, there's your proof that it's all emotional, 'cause it's the heart, it's the heart, it's the heart.
[00:30:57] It's the heart, it doesn't talk about the brain, you know?" I say, "Well, y- yeah, but that ... This is a really good lesson in history, because in Bach's day, the, the heart was considered to be the locus of the intellect and the emotions, is the point. And where did he get that idea from? From the Bible. Right. 'Cause in the Bible, the heart is the, the locus of the emotions and the intellect.
[00:31:18] In Bach's own mind, the function of music is to combine the intellect and the emotions in the service of, uh, improving people's lives and so on and so forth, but in this very specific spiritual way. So the beauty of it is that 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.
[00:31:43] I think that's the, that's the basic idea. That one, one of the reasons that Bach is so well-loved and so on is because wit- wittingly or unwittingly, it's, it has to do with that combination of intellect and, and emotion.
[00:31:55] N PHAN: Right.
[00:31:55] M MARISSEN: And some people overemphasize the intellect, and some people overemphasize the emotion.
[00:32:00] And I think that that very difficult balance is what's sort of at the essence of Bach. I mean, there is other composers who are even more emotional. I mean, Handel could reach depths of emotion that I think even Bach couldn't touch. But I'd also think Bach could reach depths of intellect that Handel couldn't touch.
[00:32:17] N PHAN: Right.
[00:32:18] M MARISSEN: And I'm glad that Bach's not the only composer. He's my favorite composer, of course. But many, many of the viewers', I suppose, uh, favorite composer. But that, it makes me want to ask you a question, too. I mean, now you were saying all sorts of different music, all over the place in the classical repertoire and non-classical, but am I wrong?
[00:32:34] Are they, this series that you're doing, the ... or this type of series that you're doing is just on Bach. You're not doing a, planning a series on Haydn, or Handel, or-
[00:32:42] N PHAN: No ...
[00:32:43] M MARISSEN: or The Beatles, or... So why, how, why do you s- single out Bach from all the great things that you do so well as your focus for this sort of thing?
[00:32:53] That's, I'd be interested- I mean- ... to hear about that.
[00:32:54] N PHAN: Yeah, I'm singling out Bach because I mean, there is this assertion, right, that there is sort of before Bach and after Bach in Western classical music, and also in general Western music. Right. And, you know, everything... Th- there is this sort of base assumption that- Right
[00:33:09] an assertion that, you know, certainly should be unpacked. But- Right ... in, in general that we think like, oh, everything in after Bach is in response to him. Mm-hmm. And particularly in classical music, you know, I, in the last few years, you know, it's, people... I mean, people have been historically w- whining about audiences dying forever, and they- Right
[00:33:27] seem to still be alive.
[00:33:28] M MARISSEN: Right.
[00:33:28] N PHAN: Um, but you know, we have, that's a lot, that's a big 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 of other people. I mean, I don't feel like you could s- if we had, you know, done Haydn 52, like we would be able to kind of hit the same kind of broad reach.
[00:33:46] Right. And then there's also, you know, I mean, here we are in, uh, in Berea, Ohio-
[00:33:51] M MARISSEN: Yeah ...
[00:33:51] N PHAN: where there's 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- Right ... fascinated and obsessed almost with his music. And I think I- That's not
[00:34:04] M MARISSEN: almost.
[00:34:04] N PHAN: We'll come back to that. Well, yeah. A- you know, and I think that y- like not other comp- other composers don't, maybe Wagner comes close, but you know, again, he doesn't have the same kind of broad reach that Bach does in terms of like touching everything.
[00:34:19] M MARISSEN: Yeah. I wanted to speak to that for a second too, because the broadness of Bach's reach isn't, the fanaticism and obsession associated with Bach isn't just musical either, which I think is very interesting and sort of reminds me of the, the s- the three categories that I've run into this the most are Bach and Shakespeare and the Bible.
[00:34:35] Mm-hmm. There are many of these people who 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 the talented singer like you, or they can't play the violin like Sigiswald Kuijken, or whatever. Or they're not a great scholar like Christoph Wolf, but they want to be able to do something.
[00:34:55] N PHAN: Right.
[00:34:56] M MARISSEN: They want to just spend a lot of time with him somehow or other in addition to the actual listening to it. And, you know, and so the... I don't think this is true for Wagner. You know, that for Bach, every single manuscript has been pored over extremely careful 100 times by different people. And every watermark and every single ink has been chronologized, and I love it.
[00:35:17] I mean, I, you know, I'm not, I'm not... Please don't, I'm, I hope people don't get the impression that I'm mocking. It's just-
[00:35:21] N PHAN: No ...
[00:35:22] M MARISSEN: it's wonderful info.
[00:35:23] N PHAN: It's fascinating.
[00:35:23] M MARISSEN: And I'm glad that... And there, it, it takes great skill to be able to do that, and I'm glad that someone's, uh, doing that. But I think that what unites all of these people together is just the desire to really be around the repertoire as much as possible.
[00:35:36] And I was very moved by this in that, uh, following, for example, what happened to the Bach research centers in Germany after World War II, 'cause they were divided between Leipzig and-
[00:35:46] N PHAN: Right ...
[00:35:46] M MARISSEN: uh, Göttingen. This whole working out of what the actual chronology was of all the cantatas was a huge, huge project that, that involved doing the kind of work that I'm just describing.
[00:35:56] And some people say, "Oh my God, that's so boring. How could they possibly... How, how could anyone who actually loves Bach do that?" But but I think it was an, it was an act of deep love of Bach on the part of the people who did that. But also, uh, the dark side of it was, uh, coming out of the absolute horror of World War II They didn't wanna argue about, you know, whether Bach was this, that, or the other thing, or whether he was really Lutheran, or whether he really loved this, that, or the other.
[00:36:24] This was emotionally safe.
[00:36:26] AUDIENCE MEMBER 3: Mm.
[00:36:26] M MARISSEN: This allowed you to spend enormous amount of time with Bach in a, for hours and hours and years and years on end without having to argue about the very nature of interpretation.
[00:36:35] AUDIENCE MEMBER 3: Mm-hmm.
[00:36:36] M MARISSEN: And so, and still be doing something useful. It's sad in a way, but the, the great beauty is that even out of that horror, this really wonderful, useful stuff that came out so that all of us scholars and performers can completely take for granted the f- ferocious work that went into making the Neue Bachausgabe, you
[00:36:52] N PHAN: know?
[00:36:52] Right.
[00:36:53] M MARISSEN: And we just take for- you know, you go to the music, say, buy your sheet music and you start rehearsing. Right. It's like, oh, yeah.
[00:36:57] N PHAN: Now you just get on, on IMSLP.
[00:36:58] M MARISSEN: And you j- yeah, exactly. It's, it's, it's just, like, so easy, you know? Yeah. It's like you have no idea. Not you, but I mean people
[00:37:04] N PHAN: in general. No, I know.
[00:37:04] I mean, I, it, e- I take it for granted, and I don't now. Yeah. But it's inter- I mean, I think about that just in general with, like, students and, you know.
[00:37:11] M MARISSEN: Yeah.
[00:37:11] N PHAN: I was teaching a master class here yesterday and, you know, saying, "Well, you're researching." Then I was like, oh my gosh, that's so easy for you. You don't have to go to one of these rooms and sit there and, you know, devote time to it.
[00:37:20] You just get on your computer and press a button and it's there. Right.
[00:37:22] M MARISSEN: Yeah. Which is wonderful. Which is great,
[00:37:25] N PHAN: yes. I mean, information is great. So, you know, we've kind of touched on this, 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?
[00:37:37] M MARISSEN: I, I do definitely think that Bach's music is, is for everyone who wants it.
[00:37:42] N PHAN: Yeah.
[00:37:43] M MARISSEN: Uh, for, for sure, and that, um, you know, it's not owned by German Lutherans or by Christians in general or by musicians or by consumers. It's not owned by anybody. It's, it, it really is... In that sense, it really is for, uh, everybody.
[00:37:59] Uh, but I don't think that, as I was alluding to before, I don't think that Bach would've thought that that was... He would thought that was a weird question. He certainly, the, the historical evidence is overwhelming that that's just not a concept that would've, uh, 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.
[00:38:20] 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 piece. It's not, it's not like a painting or a sculpture or something like this. These extremely difficult ethical issues surrounding whether, you know...
[00:38:38] Well, and people in England, you know, they'll take better care of those statues than the place that they stole them from-
[00:38:42] N PHAN: Right ...
[00:38:43] M MARISSEN: in the 19th century. But, you know, it's a, it's a tough... If art really is, if art by nature, by definition is for everyone- If you think that, then it's, it's... You can argue that, well, England has the right to keep the stuff that they stole because they're gonna take better care of it than, uh, so they say-
[00:39:03] N PHAN: So they say.
[00:39:04] M MARISSEN: than, than, than Cambodia or whatever, you know?
[00:39:06] N PHAN: Yeah, right.
[00:39:08] M MARISSEN: But from a legal point of view, if you're thinking legally and, and ethically, legally, you know, there's a very strong argument that that stuff, that art belongs, that, that the art object belongs to this other place, and anyone from England, United States has a right to go see it if they want to go see it there.
[00:39:24] But it bel- it doesn't belong to them.
[00:39:26] N PHAN: Right.
[00:39:27] M MARISSEN: This, so that, the belonging thing is a tricky, is a trickier question in other arts than it is in, in, uh, music. Um, in a way, to come full circle on this, I wouldn't even be sitting before you as a Bach person if it weren't for recordings, 'cause where I lived, there were no con- I mean, if there were any concerts, I wouldn't be able to afford to go to them.
[00:39:44] But there were no concerts of anything, let alone Bach.
[00:39:47] N PHAN: Mm.
[00:39:48] M MARISSEN: So that's how I got to know m- uh, my entire first 15 years of getting to know the Bach repertoire. It was all through Langhart and Harnoncourt and the Keichans and Frans Bruggen and all those heroes of, uh, early music from the '70s and, and '80s.
[00:40:02] And so the technology makes it possible for it to be... And you were just talking about the kids doing readings.
[00:40:08] N PHAN: Right.
[00:40:08] M MARISSEN: Well, I could pull my phone out right now, and if you were wondering about some aria-
[00:40:12] N PHAN: I know, we could play it for you ... we, we can
[00:40:12] M MARISSEN: play it on, we can play it right now on the... It's astonishing.
[00:40:16] You know, even 25 years ago, there was unheard, you know, un- unheard of. Bach has not so much to do with whether the, the music is for everyone or not, but what the, whatever your view of that music is, and I always told students that, look, there are multiple plausible interpretations of a work of art. That's part what make, partly what makes it a work of art.
[00:40:36] N PHAN: Right.
[00:40:37] M MARISSEN: There are multiple, but they're not, they're not infinite- ... and they're not arbitrary. So there, it is actually possible to have an interpretation of something that's wrong and, and intellectually wrong, and even emotionally wrong, I think-
[00:40:48] N PHAN: Yeah ...
[00:40:49] M MARISSEN: sometimes, and that's very un-American. This, because you're supposed to be able to, you, you can choose, you can maximal choice, and however you feel about something, that's sort of your truth.
[00:40:59] Well, I say, "Well, but okay, maybe it's your truth, but that, that's a weird definition of truth." You know, because again, as I say, there's not only one way of looking, but there are a lot of wrong ways of looking at things. And, but the, the main issue for me here has to do with the question of authority. You know, 'cause the question is like, what, what is your view based on?
[00:41:17] Is, are your, is it your emotions that are your authority? Is it- When you do res- historical research and you see what the, and you go crazy with the originalist stuff and you're not allowed to think or feel anything except for what is validated by-
[00:41:29] N PHAN: Right ...
[00:41:30] M MARISSEN: but what is really interesting to me is when people have extremely modern ideas that are very implausible for, which is no problem per se, but then claim that because this seems so compelling to me, he must have thought that too.
[00:41:43] That's dangerous.
[00:41:43] N PHAN: And
[00:41:44] M MARISSEN: therefore, and therefore, and it is dangerous because you don't have the right to make someone... In a way, it's, I, I don't want to be super moralistic, but this is 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 then there's a, those, those ancient commandments, some of them, or 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- Right
[00:42:09] and your father who helped her do it. You know, there's an element, you know, uh, there's interpretations going on of tho- that's a work of art too, the, the Tor- And, and there are many plausible interpretations and there are many implausible ones. But I think one plausible one is you, you should have some respect for people from the past, and don't assume that they thought the way that you did.
[00:42:29] 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 want to think. You don't need the authority of Bach, you know? So don't, don't waste your energy sort of like involving yourselves in things that could turn out to be, when you find out that they're untrue, then you're k- end up being shattered.
[00:42:49] You don't need to be shattered.
[00:42:51] N PHAN: Yeah, I mean, I think it's, 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. No, of course not. And it does not mean that we put them on pedestals. It just means that we give them the respect of, yeah, you can't like non-consensually like change the meaning of something that they've done.
[00:43:06] Right. You know? I mean, they're not there to debate you. That's not fair to them. Right. Especially in the case of Bach. Right. So I mean, I think that that's a really fascinating and interesting concept. And again, it's something that You know, honoring is a, is an invitation to be in dialogue with.
[00:43:23] M MARISSEN: Right.
[00:43:23] N PHAN: And I think that that's really important for us to hold.
[00:43:28] If w- if we choose to put something on it, like at least let's be, let's own the, that's what we're doing, you know?
[00:43:33] M MARISSEN: Right. No, exactly. I couldn't have put it better myself.
[00:43:37] N PHAN: I'm just reflecting what you say. So yeah.
[00:43:40] M MARISSEN: Do you have anything you wanna add? I've always been interested by the audiences of the Leipzig Bach Fest for example, you know, 'cause it's-
[00:43:45] N PHAN: Mm
[00:43:45] M MARISSEN: sort of the pilgrimage-
[00:43:47] N PHAN: Right ...
[00:43:47] M MARISSEN: for people from all... Have you sung there? You must have. No,
[00:43:49] N PHAN: I mean, I've sung in Leipzig. I've sung at the Thomas Church. I have never- Yeah ... been to the Bach Fest.
[00:43:53] M MARISSEN: Yeah. I mean, it, it's amazing, is people come from all over the world and there are all these, you know, they're fanatical in the ways- Yeah
[00:43:58] that we were talking about before. And it is a really beautiful thing to see 'cause you don't see that in Europe so much. I mean, the, and here in America of course it's wonderful. You have these American ensembles of, you know, you have this nice small chamber choir, 12 people, and you see Asians and Blacks and White, you know, singing Bach together.
[00:44:14] It's a, it's a beautiful... That is a, that is a wonderful thing. And it's rare to see that in Europe except for at the Leipzig Bach Fest where people from all... And they, not, and not just the ethnic and other diversity, but also the musical diversity of it. This is, I'm, I'm thrilled by the way that you can adapt.
[00:44:34] You know, you'll have a Klezmer ensemble play the concerto for violin, two- Right ... and then they had this, oh, last year, this is amazing, these, this guy from, uh, Warsaw who play, who played polka versions on his accordion. It's like, it was brilliant, you know. Yeah. And, uh, it's just, it's just unending. The, I think it was a Beethoven who said, right, that, you know, "Der ist kein Bach, der ist ein Meer."
[00:44:57] I mean, he's not a stream, he's an ocean. Ocean. And, uh, you see very strong confirmation of that sort of idea a- at, at things like the, at, at things like the Leipzig Bach Fest. And so it'd be, I think this, it would be very interesting if someone wrote a, a book about sort of all aspects of what's going on there and the history of it, how it all hangs together.
[00:45:17] 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, a culturally phenomenal thing, and I wonder if that would actually work for anyone but Bach. That's a, that's, that would 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, to get the Germans to use a marketing strategy for their festival is just a, it's a, it's a, "We are family," you know?
[00:45:51] "We are family"- Yeah ... was the, was the, was the... You know, and that's, you know, some people laugh, but that's actually kind of beautiful too in its, in its way. That was very ni- it is, there is kind of a Bach family, and that's, that's a, that's a beautiful thing. I certainly felt that in all the years I worked with Rehling and like,
[00:46:04] N PHAN: you know- Yeah
[00:46:05] all the travels I've had. It's interesting the way we all get connected.
[00:46:07] M MARISSEN: Yeah.
[00:46:09] N PHAN: Well, I really appreciate you taking the time to do this.
[00:46:12] M MARISSEN: And- Oh, great. Great pleasure
[00:46:23] 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.
[00:46:50] 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.
[00:47:16] This cantata meditates on this idea of h- 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.
[00:47:47] The translation of the recitative and aria is, "Christians today are sorely beset. Most Christians in the world are lukewarm and puffed up Pharisees who present themselves as virtuous on the surface, and bow their heads to earth like a reed. Yet, in their heart is planted a proud egotism. Indeed, they enter into God's house and make the usual observances of themselves, yet does this make a true Christian?
[00:48:17] No. Hypocrites can also be observant. The images of false hypocrites can be called the apples of Sodom, which are filled with filth, and on the outside shine beautifully. Hypocrites who are lovely on the surface cannot withstand God's presence." This music is almost gleeful in its depiction of these hypocrites.
[00:48:42] 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.
[00:49:09] 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.
[00:49:30] MUSIC