EPISODE 5
Bach, Shakespeare & the Sins of the Past
with Steven Zohn
general editor, American Bach Society
musicologist, Temple University
Is it possible to separate great art from the flawed men who made it? In this episode of BACH 52, I sit down with Steven Zohn, General Editor of the American Bach Society and Professor of Musicology at Temple University, to talk about Bach, Shakespeare, and what we owe the canon.
Steven and I get into why Bach's music resists becoming a museum piece, the surprising parallels between Bach and Shakespeare as two men who remain fundamentally unknowable to us, and how to teach centuries-old work by canonical white men in a moment that is, rightly, reckoning with the sins of the past. It all lands on the old idiom that gives this episode its name: are we in danger of throwing the baby out with the bathwater?
Stick around after the conversation for the aria, "Ich eile, die Lehren des Lebens zu hören" from Cantata 148, recorded with violinist Katie Hyun and Ruckus Early Music.
ARIA
Ich eile, die Lehren des Lebens zu hören from Bringet dem Herrn Ehre seines Namens, BWV 148
PERFORMERS
Nicholas Phan, tenor
Katie Hyun, violin
with Ruckus Early Music
Doug Balliett, viola da gamba | Clay Zeller-Townson, bassoon | Elliot Figg, harpsichord | Joshua Stauffer, theorbo
SOUND (BWV 148 only): Lolly Lewis | VIDEO: Clubsoda Productions
This episode was filmed in partnership with Noe Music.
This project is a fiscally sponsored project of FRACTURED ATLAS.
To find our more information and to make a TAX-DEDUCTIBLE donation to support the continuation of this project please click the button below
TRANSCRIPT
[00:00:00] STUDENT 1: See, I'm not so sure about this question. I would love for Bach to be popular with this generation. I think it's not
[00:00:08] STUDENT 2: It's a standard. It's the gold standard for every musician. But, uh, it's hard to tell how passionate people would be, or are right now about Bach.
[00:00:21] STUDENT 3: A lot of students are like, "I don't understand why I have to learn other music history."
[00:00:26] And I'm like, "Well, why do you have to learn Bach?" And they're like, "Well, because he's amazing and he's great, and he's like, he's the father of counterpoint." And I'm like, "But why do we say that? Is he the father of counterpoint? And who decided that?" And so I'm always trying to, like, push the undergrads to be a little bit more critical of, like, why they believe certain things about classical music.
[00:00:48] STUDENT 1: I think there's a reason why classical music is still a thing right now, and it will forever be a thing, because they dove so deeply into the human emotions and expressing that in music in such a genuine and real way, that it's, it's gonna be there forever. And I wish people would notice it a little more.
[00:01:10] N PHAN: Hi, my name is Nicholas Phan, and this is Bach 52. For this episode of Bach 52, I had a conversation with General Editor of the American Bach Society and Professor of Musicology at Temple University in Philadelphia, Stephen Zohn. Stephen and I had a wonderful conversation that touched on a variety of topics, including, of course, Bach and his relevance to today.
[00:01:40] But also, we talked about how Bach is a little bit like Shakespeare, and the similarities between the two, and why it's important to continue studying both and teaching both. And also, we talked a little bit about how we are in this current moment looking at the sins of the past, and questioned whether we should throw the baby out with the bathwater.
[00:02:00] I hope you enjoy our conversation, and please be sure to stick around for the aria at the end of today's episode from Cantata one forty-eight.
[00:02:08] S ZOHN: How did you get into this field of Bach and Telemann? I was a flutist as a kid, and both of those composers actually have contributed great works to the flute repertory.
[00:02:20] So I think it was in high school, I started playing the Bach flute sonatas, and I didn't get them. I sort of didn't get Bach. I knew it was hard and everyone loved it, but I just didn't quite get it until I was in college, and then, then I started to get it. And I also was playing music by Telemann and, and enjoyed both.
[00:02:42] My teacher, my flute teacher in college also played baroque flute, which I had scarcely heard of before, and the school had one. So I took it home over summer and just messed around with it. And I started playing this music on that instrument, you know, the instrument that Bach and Telemann wrote for. And suddenly, light bulbs went off and I was like, "I get it now," why they wrote the music they did, the way they wrote it, because it actually works on this instrument.
[00:03:09] It feels natural to play.
[00:03:11] N PHAN: Interesting. What about it is different that feels... I mean, there's obviously the physical sensation of things just being slightly more manageable 'cause it just sort of naturally fits, but is there more?
[00:03:22] S ZOHN: Well, I think just the way that the instrument speaks, you know. It's not, it doesn't want to play the long lines so much, and it doesn't, it doesn't give you as much resistance.
[00:03:32] Mm. You know? So stopping and starting is a lot easier. It's sort of like a race car versus, like, a big Cadillac. You know, the Cadillac is very smooth and comfortable, but it doesn't turn corners very easily.
[00:03:43] MUSIC: Mm.
[00:03:43] S ZOHN: Whereas the older instruments do. And of course the composers knew what they were writing for, and so they wrote accordingly.
[00:03:50] And all of a sudden I sort of understood the kind of rhetorical language of the music a little better. And even just physical things like why it was so low in the register. You know, it's like, well, the older instrument's like that. That's their strength. And so it made a lot of sense to me. And at the same time I was sort of discovering this music as a listener.
[00:04:12] Nicholas Harnoncourt and, and, uh, Gustav Leonhardt were recording their cantatas, all of the Bach cantatas. And I remember, you know, in the... You could go to a record store and every, every so often there would be a new Bach set of I don't know how many cantatas were in there. And lavishly produced. And I was just amazed at how the music sounded.
[00:04:33] Mm. I'd never heard anything like that before. And, uh, listening to that music now, those recordings now, I would think, "Oh my God." "How, how, how come I love that so much?" But it really was something kind of amazing. It just sort of rocked, you know. So I discovered this music, I think, as a player and a listener, um, really as an undergraduate.
[00:04:54] N PHAN: What, from the playing aspect, I mean, led you to wanna kind of dig into the research and the musicol- musicological aspects behind it?
[00:05:01] S ZOHN: Well, I guess I was sort of historically minded. Mm. And I, I also, you know, I took a, the standard music history survey that most undergraduates take, and I was just... That was kind of a life-changing event for me.
[00:05:13] You know, I never knew there was all this music and that people actually studied it. You know, I didn't know that you could do that. I think this combination of, of being a player who gravitated towards 18th century music and, um, having this interest in history, it was sort of a natural thing for me to want to figure out how this music was put together.
[00:05:34] So it really came out of being a listener and a player, and then wanting to study it and figure out how it worked, and why, why these composers wrote music like this, you know. What was the larger context, the social context, the political context? But also the musical context. Mm. Who else was writing music at this time?
[00:05:52] You know, I knew, like, three composers from that time, and who else was writing?
[00:05:57] N PHAN: So who were the three that you knew?
[00:05:59] S ZOHN: Well, sort of Bach and Telemann and Handel, I suppose. Maybe Vivaldi, so let's say four. But you know. But I didn't know any French Baroque music. I didn't know, you know, who came before. It was really whatever my flute teacher put on my stand, that's what I knew.
[00:06:13] So I started listening more and, you know, CDs were introduced around that time, and so there was, like, this new, exciting technology to discover as well.
[00:06:24] N PHAN: It's funny, I had a similar experience because I used to work at Tower Records when I was in college. Oh,
[00:06:28] S ZOHN: yeah.
[00:06:28] N PHAN: And I mean, having all of those CDs at my disposal as an employee, you could just open up anything and pop it in and listen.
[00:06:34] And no one ever came to the classical desk, so I just basically spent my afternoons ... getting paid to listen to music, and it was amazing having that resource. I mean, 'cause you can just ha- being able to listen to things is really opens things up and lifts it off the page.
[00:06:47] S ZOHN: It does, and of course, we have access to music like never before.
[00:06:51] And yet, I wonder if it's really as accessible as when you were working at Tower Records. You can flip through the bins, like you have a physical object. There's something powerful about that, you know. Like going to a library and, you know, every- you can see the online catalog, but you don't have access to the books.
[00:07:07] It's- Right ... there's no substitute to actually... I think you discover things that way that you, you can't when you have to put in some search term.
[00:07:16] N PHAN: Right.
[00:07:17] S ZOHN: If you don't know what to put in, you're not gonna find...
[00:07:19] N PHAN: Right. The algorithm is sort of, like, limiting you in ter- in terms of your journey, whereas, like, you actually are on a true adventure in a-
[00:07:26] S ZOHN: Yeah
[00:07:26] N PHAN: in a real library. Let's go with the, the base question here, you know, that I'm kind of posing of everybody that has no answer. But do you think that the music of Bach is for everybody? And where does that question take you?
[00:07:37] S ZOHN: Well, I don't think there's any music that's for any, any, everybody. People talk a lot about how music is a universal language, but I don't think it is.
[00:07:46] I think it's a series of languages, and we can learn them all.
[00:07:50] MUSIC: Hmm.
[00:07:50] S ZOHN: But we don't, we're not born speaking them. So I think to someone who doesn't know Bach's music, as I didn't when I was in high school, it was a foreign language and a strange one at that. But I was motivated to learn the language, and I think that's what I do when I'm teaching Bach's music.
[00:08:06] I mean, it comes from familiarity. If you're so inclined to learn that language, I think there's a lot for you there potentially. I'd like to think that Bach's music is more accessible than ever. So it's out there to discover if you want to, but it's not going to be for everyone. And I know that even today there are people who come to concerts I play who are not that big a fan of Bach's music, and even sometimes I feel like, "Oh gosh, this aria is way too long."
[00:08:35] You know? It's like too much of a good thing, you know? So as I, when I teach, you know, my official position is I love everything I teach, but you sometimes love things a little more than others, and no music is above reproach, I think.
[00:08:50] N PHAN: Something that fascinates me about Bach's music is, I mean, you know- American Bach Society is one example.
[00:08:55] There are these communities that- Mm ... build around it. And, I mean, in a way it's community music. But it's, I'm so interested to hear about, you know, the community that's, in which he lived, you know? I d- you are, you do a lot of research on Telemann. You were just saying to me before we pressed play on the r- cameras, or record on the cameras, that they were quite close friends.
[00:09:13] I mean- Right ... how was Bach in dialogue with his own community, his musical community in specif- in particular?
[00:09:19] S ZOHN: We would like to know more about that than we do, actually. It's funny, we don't have, for example, many letters by Bach, and most of what we have are things like letters of recommendation-
[00:09:29] MUSIC: Mm ...
[00:09:29] S ZOHN: for a student or, um, writing to the authorities, "I, you know, I need more musicians," that kind of thing that doesn't give us many insights into his personality or, or what he really loved.
[00:09:40] But we do know that he was in contact with various musicians. We, we know that he was, uh, close to Telemann, at least at certain times in, in his life. But he's a bit of a closed book, and that, I, I think makes him mysterious-
[00:09:54] N PHAN: Mm ...
[00:09:54] S ZOHN: in certain ways. And it, and it allows one to write one's own stories about him, you know?
[00:10:00] And I think that's what people have been doing for the last 200-plus years, because he's sort of unknowable.
[00:10:06] N PHAN: Mm.
[00:10:06] S ZOHN: And we have this fabulous music, and we think we know him through the music. But that, that could be a completely distorted view of the actual person. What we do know about him is not always that flattering.
[00:10:18] He seemed to have trouble with authority. He seemed to have had high standards, which is great, but wherever he went he had trouble with authority, and it can't just have been the authorities.
[00:10:28] N PHAN: There's a common denominator there.
[00:10:29] S ZOHN: There's a common denominator, and I think it makes him human, though. He's not, uh, some godlike figure.
[00:10:35] You know, he, he seems to have had a hot temper and been maybe difficult to live with, just like a lot of people we know. The other person I study a lot, Telemann, seems to have been very different. Mm. We have lots of letters by him that show his personality as sort of being generous and warm, and he had a good sense of humor, and one can see why he seems to have known everyone.
[00:10:55] Again, that could be a somewhat of a distortion, because we happen to have more letters of his and, you know, he lived a longer life, and all, all these factors. But yeah, I, I would have a beer with him, for sure. I don't know about Bach. I mean, I'd be... I have questions- Right ... I want to ask. But I don't know if I'd like him, and so I'm glad I can't, because I don't want that bubble burst.
[00:11:14] N PHAN: Right. You know? Be careful of meeting your heroes kind of a thing.
[00:11:17] S ZOHN: That's right.
[00:11:17] N PHAN: Bach is interesting in that way to me because he's a little bit, I mean, as you describe him, I think sort of also about Shakespeare, you know? Mm-hmm. Shakespeare's kind of unknowable. Yeah. Yet he, and he clearly never traveled outside of his little region in England, and yet he's writing things about Venice and Genoa and all these places.
[00:11:33] And there's something about Bach's music, particularly in the cantatas, that is very much- It's very similar. I mean, you were talking earlier about, you know, you only knew the th- three or four composers, but then you've started to, like, you started to learn more about other people who were at the time, like French Baroque people.
[00:11:48] And again, I mean, he, Bach largely stayed in the region he, in which he was born, but he's experimenting with these styles that are Italian, French, English, um, I mean, there are the keyboard suites.
[00:11:59] S ZOHN: Well, as a German composer, that was the German style. They, they refer to it as the mixed taste. And of course, they thought it was better than any other style, right?
[00:12:09] Because you take the best of all the national styles and put them together into something greater. Telemann was, was sort of the poster boy for that style, actually. But they both wrote in sort of international styles, and yet they both had idioms that were particular to them so that you can tell, well, this is Bach writing in the French style.
[00:12:29] This is not a French composer. Mm-hmm.
[00:12:30] MUSIC: And
[00:12:30] S ZOHN: same thing with, with Telemann, because they have a certain sensibility, a certain distance from the style, I think. So that is one appealing thing about it, though, because when Bach writes a concerto, it's, it's got all the verve and the kinetic energy of Vivaldi, but it's also got that nice, solid German counterpoint, you know-
[00:12:49] that we like. Right. Um, so yeah, there's some truth to it that it's greater than the sum of its parts. And that's one reason I think, well, Handel as well to some degree, although we tend to think of him as more purely Italian, but I mean, he sticks fugues in where an Italian wouldn't. You know, he, he grew up in the same environment as Bach.
[00:13:09] Right.
[00:13:10] N PHAN: It's just the difference to me is that Handel actually went to these places, whereas Bach clearly was somehow getting his information from elsewhere, which I find fascinating- Yeah ... was possible at that time.
[00:13:20] S ZOHN: We, we tend to think of the world as being a very small place at that time, but as we learn more, you know, things published in Paris did find their way to Germany.
[00:13:29] Mail coaches, which seem like an incredibly slow and inefficient way of traveling and sending things to one place or another, they actually got around very efficiently. So I think the world was, I think, more open to these people than, than we imagine at our distance. We always like to think, well, you know, we have trains and planes and buses and all these things- Right
[00:13:50] we can get around at, at, uh, a moment's notice. But people who are curious to know what was going on elsewhere had the opportunity to learn. It just might have taken a little longer. So it's hard for us to understand actually all of the influences that, that operated on these people. And yes, Bach did lead a kind of insular life.
[00:14:10] He never left Germany, as many others didn't. Actually, Telemann only left once to go to Paris, and that was when he was almost 60 years old. So, you know, he also didn't travel very much. Handel was an exception, I think, in that regard. But they had access to what was going on. One of Telemann's sort of side hustles was being a correspondent to a court that he had previously worked at, and he was supposed to gather news from all corners of Europe.
[00:14:36] And so he would write to correspondents in various cities. He boasted in their native languages, including English. And so he would, he would sort of create news digests and send it to the court. So he knew what was going on in all these cities. You know, he was keeping up with, with news, including from the Middle East and Far East.
[00:14:56] Huh. You know, there were... He even wrote operas on Middle Eastern subjects, you know. So they had a sense of what was going on outside of their sphere of influence. Maybe not a really well-developed sense, but they were curious and they could gather information.
[00:15:11] N PHAN: I mean, are there other things you want to talk about in, in particular in, in relation to this question and...?
[00:15:16] S ZOHN: Well, I mean, what's one, one thing that's on my mind nowadays is what music do we teach to people? What music do we present in concerts? There are strong impulses to introduce music that has been overlooked by people and performers that have been overlooked in the past, and I think this is all to the good.
[00:15:36] But it does call into question, what do you do with these canonical figures who have always been taught? Do we not teach them? Do we teach them in a different way? How do we make them seem sort of relevant or modern? Relevance is, is a word that's thrown around a lot. And you mentioned Shakespeare. My 13-year-old son is now encountering his first Shakespeare play.
[00:15:58] STUDENT 2: Oh, yeah.
[00:15:58] S ZOHN: And I mean, nothing could be more foreign, right? A 13-year-old in the 21st century to have. The language is strange, you know, even though it's English, and he is now learning that language. He is learning to understand how to, how to, um, parse that, that way of expression-
[00:16:17] MUSIC: Mm-hmm ...
[00:16:18] S ZOHN: that's very different from his.
[00:16:20] And there are a lot of things that he could be studying instead of Shakespeare that's perhaps a little more recent. But I think Shakespeare and Bach and Michelangelo, let, let's say, you know, these figures from the distant past who all happen to be white and male, there is... I think if you dig beneath the surface, there's something universal we can take away from the, from it all.
[00:16:42] I give the example, well, I'm teaching Bach, as I often do, and here I am, I'm a Jewish person living 300 years later. If I had lived in Bach's Leipzig, I wouldn't have lived in Bach's Leipzig because Jews were not allowed to live in that city.
[00:16:55] MUSIC: Right.
[00:16:56] S ZOHN: They could live in Hamburg where Telemann was, but then one of the pastors, Erdmann Neumeister, whose librettos Bach and Telemann set, was virulently antisemitic and even incited riots, antisemitic riots.
[00:17:09] And so how would I have fared at that time, you know? I have every reason to just sort of shun this music as not being of my time and not being of, you know, something I can't relate to, that I don't know how Bach or Telemann would've regarded me. But, but I choose to sort of overlook that, the sins of the past, of which there are many.
[00:17:30] You know, and I think today a lot of people are more aware of the sins of the past. We are taught to recognize and to condemn. But as a historian, I have to then say, "Well, that's fine, but you also need to understand the past. You under- need to understand what motivated these people, right or wrong." And lest we forget that history teaches us that we too will be judged someday.
[00:17:54] And of course, it's easy to look around and say, "Oh yeah, we have some things about our society that aren't very nice, are they?" Is it much better than in the past? That's for the future to judge. So it's one thing to, to recognize the sins of the past, but we need to understand the culture that produced them, and also understand that the culture produced some things that are worth keeping.
[00:18:16] And so that's Bach and Shakespeare and Michelangelo. Those are all things worth keeping, and trying to understand why it is that they've lasted for 300 years. There's some good reasons and bad reasons that they've lasted, of course. But here they are, and ignore them at your own peril, I think. You know, I'm, I'm not a huge Wagner fan.
[00:18:37] Although some Wagner, I listen to it, I, I tear up as soon as I hear it. It's kind of against my better judgment You know? But, but I think, you know, Wagner we know was really not a good guy.
[00:18:49] N PHAN: No.
[00:18:49] S ZOHN: Um, and yet I can't cancel him completely. Because if I do, then I'm depriving myself of a really great esthe- aesthetic experience, and I'm not gonna let his sins deprive me of that experience.
[00:19:04] And so I think you could say that in general of the culture of various past. We need to not throw the baby out with the bathwater and sort of recognize what was good and bad about those cultures, but there was good stuff that we can take away.
[00:19:18] N PHAN: It's funny, as you were talking, that term or that phrase ba- throwing the baby out with the bathwater was very present in my mind.
[00:19:24] Because there's a lot of value there. Nothing is just one thing. It's interesting, though, in this, in this, in the current climate it's very... You know, we're limiting ourselves to what, 140 characters on some social media platform. So there's not a lot of time for nuance, but it's... And so that kind of pushes people into these black, white binaries or these, you know, either/or, as opposed there's no room for yes, and.
[00:19:45] Part of the reason I keep asking this question, like do you think it's for everybody, and getting to this question of relevance, you know? Mm-hmm. What... It's, it's, it's these things that you're talking about, I have these same feelings about it, where there's a lot of value there. And actually being as forced to sit with it teaches me things, and it teaches all of us things.
[00:20:00] Mm-hmm. And some of it's good, some of it's bad, and I think that that's okay. I think that's the point of it, right?
[00:20:08] S ZOHN: Well, I, you know, I personally, when I teach a Bach cantata or a Passion or something, it's like, well, I don't really believe this story. But it's a story, and I can relate to a story. And when Bach, I mean like all composers of the time, deals with sort of universal Affects emotions.
[00:20:24] And so I can recognize a sad piece. Mm-hmm. And I can recognize if it's a good sad piece. You know, does he get it right? Does he capture the emotions in the story? So I can get caught up in that story. And I mean, if you ask most people, "Are you a spiritual person?" They're probably gonna say, "Yes. I'm not religious, but I'm spiritual."
[00:20:42] STUDENT 3: Mm-hmm.
[00:20:42] S ZOHN: And I find Bach's music spiritual. I can relate to it on a human spiritual level, even if his religion is different than mine, if he believes certain things that I don't. But there's an awful lot of overlap there. There are sort of universal truths, just as there are in a Shakespeare play-
[00:21:00] MUSIC: Mm-hmm
[00:21:01] for
[00:21:01] S ZOHN: example, or an image from a thousand years ago that, that strikes a chord. So I would just say give it a try. If you don't like it, fine, because it's like trying food, you know. You gotta try it. That's what you tell your kids, right? If you don't like it, don't have to eat anymore. But have the experience at least.
[00:21:18] N PHAN: That's a great analogy. It's interesting, some of it is also, I mean, this current moment is sort of dusting off these layers of beatification basically- Mm-hmm ... that we've done to these men who have created these things, and they're, you know, they're human beings. And like you say, you may not want to take them out to a beer.
[00:21:36] No. But you can appreciate their work.
[00:21:38] S ZOHN: I, I don't think... I mean, now that we tend not to look at Bach as the fifth evangelist. Well, some people do, but- ... not so much anymore, and realize that, well, he was not a saint, you know? He was a everyday guy who had extraordinary talent and dedication to his craft. I don't think that makes him any less important of a figure.
[00:21:57] In, in some ways I feel a little closer to him, 'cause I, I don't nec- necessarily want to study these people on pedestals. That's not interesting. I wanna know who they were.
[00:22:08] N PHAN: Yeah.
[00:22:09] S ZOHN: But I also wanna know what made them who they are, what... you know, the culture, the kind of music they listened to, you know. How did they get this idea?
[00:22:17] Those are also layers to peel off, I think, that are, that are productive ones.
[00:22:21] N PHAN: Well, I know you have to pick up your child. So thank you so much for sitting down to chat.
[00:22:36] The aria for this episode is taken from Cantata 148, Bring it dem Herrn, Ehre seines Namens, or Bring to the Lord the Glory Due to His Name. The cantata text is all about praising the Lord's name, and the aria is scored for tenor and solo violin, and it's the second movement of the cantata. The text is, "I hasten to hear the teachings of life and joyfully seek the holy house.
[00:23:05] How beautifully the happy sounds call the blessed to the praise of the highest." You'll hear a lot of fast notes in this aria, and it's like the violin and the voice are chasing each other the entire time. You can hear them hurrying. You can hear them being joyful. You can hear them hastening to learn these lessons.
[00:23:23] Hope you enjoy
[00:24:06] MUSIC