Johann Sebastian Bach. An introduction in nine pieces.

The Music

The Words

Hello everyone. Welcome to another episode of the ‘Classical For Everyone’ Podcast… five hundred years of incredible music. My name is Peter Cudlipp and back in 2023 I started a radio show called ‘Classical For Everyone’ and now, with this podcast… I’m after a bigger audience. If you enjoy any music at all then I’m convinced you can enjoy classical music. All you need are ears. No expertise is necessary.

And if you’ve ever been curious about classical music… or explored it for a while once upon a time… or just quietly wondered what all the fuss was about… then this is the podcast is for you. Because there’s a lot of music out there each episode has something of a theme. And for today it is… music by one particular composer. If perhaps like me you have ever been puzzled as to why once you scratch the surface of classical music the name Johann Sebastian Bach seems to just keep turning up… I hope the next hour might offer some clues. Because this episode is all Johann Sebastian Bach.

Along the way I will try to give you a little context and showcase something of the variety of musical forms and instrumentations that Bach worked in. It will be a pretty fragmentary as I try to cram a fair bit in… but I hope that by the end of the show you might have a sense of why Bach, who was, let’s face it, born in 1685 in what is now Germany, is thought of today as a figure of such stature. Let’s get to some music.

First up is the beginning of the third of his set of six Brandenburg Concertos. The term ‘concerto’ in Bach’s time was used for a composition that contrasted a small group of solo instruments with a larger ensemble. Now if you have ever agonised over an application for a new job… in the old days with a hard copy resume… or in this golden digital age… uploading your life to a poorly designed third-party portal; spare a thought for a young composer in the early 1700s trying to get a job at the court of a local prince. The concertos got the name ‘Brandenburg’ because Bach sent them, apparently unsolicited, to the ruler of the province of Brandenburg in what is now north-eastern Germany. And as far as anyone knows they were not performed there and Bach certainly didn’t get a job. But, very fortunately, we got the music. Here is the English Concert directed by Trevor Pinnock with the beginning third of Johann Sebastian Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos.

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That was English Concert directed by Trevor Pinnock with the third of Johann Sebastian Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos. In his day Bach wrote a lot of music that could be thought of as teaching exercises… especially for keyboard players. Two sets of them he called ‘The Well-Tempered Clavier’. What does that mean? Putting it as simply as I can… ‘tempering’ is a term for how you tune the separate strings of a keyboard instrument so that when different notes are plated together they make a pleasing sound… and in the early 1700s the term ‘clavier’ covered any and all keyboards which were at the time basically variations of the organ or the harpsichord. Now these sets of teaching exercises have gone on to have something of an amazing afterlife. I just checked one of the popular music apps and there are hundreds of recordings available. And the reason for that is perhaps part of the answer to the overall ‘Why Bach?’ question I asked at the beginning of this episode. Somehow Bach managed to make these ‘exercises’… into works that are an extraordinary mix of beauty and delicacy. Here is the pianist Maurizio Pollini with just the first two.

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That was the pianist Maurizio Pollini playing the first pair of pieces from J S Bach’s ‘The Well-Tempered Clavier’. I hope you are enjoying this episode of Classical For Everyone featuring the music of Johann Sebastian Bach.

For most of Bach’s life he was employed to write religious music… music to inspire and support the faith of the congregations of the various churches where he was based. And also it must be said… to express his own deep Lutheran beliefs. He wrote for whatever combinations of instrumentalists and singers his employers could be persuaded to provide and of the very small amount of his correspondence that survives… a lot of it is Bach fighting with town councils over things like… can’t you get me some people who can actually sing? Depending on the occasion and frequently linked to the years’ religious calendar of services Bach would write works of different scale. Sitting somewhere in the middle were the oratorios. These were works for solo singers, choir and orchestra. Here is just the final section  of the one known as the Ascension Oratorio. It is about four minutes long and German text translates to ‘When  Shall It Happen?’… the faithful looking forward to seeing the risen Christ in his glory. Here are the soloists Nancy Argenta (Soprano) Michael Chance (Countertenor) Anthony Rolfe Johnson (Tenor) Stephen Varcoe (Baritone); The Monteverdi Choir, the English Baroque Soloists, all conducted by John Eliot Gardiner.

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That was the final section of J S Bach’s Ascension Oratorio performed by the soloists Nancy Argenta (Soprano) Michael Chance (Countertenor) Anthony Rolfe Johnson (Tenor) Stephen Varcoe (Baritone); The Monteverdi Choir, the English Baroque Soloists, all conducted by John Eliot Gardiner. A quick little side note. You’ll notice that I am pretty frequently referring to Bach by his full name or at least by the letters of his first and second name. Why? Well, of Bach’s nine children who reached adulthood from his two marriages, four of them became composers and much of their music is still played. So, apologies for being a little pedantic but I figure it is good for you to know which Bach is the focus of today’s show… it’s the Johann Sebastian one.

Ok. Some more music. In his lifetime Bach was not the towering figure he has become today but he did have a contemporary reputation as an extraordinary organist and composer of music for the organ. He was so well regarded that when a town was building a new one (a pretty considerable expense) they would petition Bach to advise them and/or audition their new instrument. So here is just a small taste of Johann Sebastian Bach’s music for the organ. And because Bach wrote just so much music I am going to give you the full name of this piece and its catalogue number. It is the Prelude in A minor… the catalogue number is BWV 543. It is about three minutes long and is played here by Wolfgang Rübsam. I think for some listeners the idea of solo organ music may not exactly be their idea of a good time. But I guess all I can say is give it a try… it’s pretty damn good.

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That was Johann Sebastain Bach’s Prelude in A minor… It was played by Wolfgang Rübsam. I mentioned earlier that during his lifetime Bach was best known as an organ virtuoso. After his death in 1750 what little reputation he had faded and whilst his works were studied by the next generations of composers he had pretty much disappeared from the public view. Then in 1829 the composer Felix Mendelssohn revived Bach’s St Matthew’s Passion and this was one of the critical events that brought Bach back into the mainstream. The Passions were considerably larger undertakings than the Oratorios and this one calls for solo voices, two choirs and two orchestras. And depending on which version is performed it is close to three hours long. Here is just the first section where the two choirs sing ‘Come Daughters of Zion, Help Me Lament.’ Here are The Monteverdi Choir and the English Baroque Soloists, conducted by John Eliot Gardiner. Johann Sebastian Bach’s ‘St Matthew’s Passion’.

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That was The Monteverdi Choir and the English Baroque Soloists, conducted by John Eliot Gardiner performing the first section Johann Sebastian Bach’s ‘St Matthew’s Passion’.

For a composer who dropped off the musical radar for close to a hundred years after his death you might be surprised at the number of pieces I’m playing today that are actually now very regularly performed and recorded. I’ve played you some concertos, a bit of keyboard music and a couple of samples of choral music but if there is a genre of Bach’s music that is the most adored by his fans then it is perhaps his music for solo string instruments… particularly the violin and the cello. Maybe it is because in our secular world today there is little overt religious content or agenda in the music we listen to. Or perhaps it is because players measure themselves against these extraordinarily demanding and yet utterly beautiful pieces. Here is Itzak Perlman playing the final section of Bach’s 1^st Sonata for solo violin. It is about three and a half minutes long.

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That was Itzak Perlman playing the final section of Bach’s 1^st Sonata for solo violin. I’ve talked about Masses and about Oratorios but by far the most church music that Bach wrote was in the form of Cantatas. The term comes from the Italian verb ‘cantare’… which means ‘to sing’ and for Bach it was the term he used to describe a multi-part work for generally soloists, a small choir and a small group of instruments with a duration of about twenty minutes. And this was the heart of Bach’s compositional output. His employers in many instances required a new one of these from Bach for each weekly church service. Over two hundred have survived. No one really knows how many he wrote. But it is an incredible collection of music. Here is a small sample. They are generally known by the first line of whatever particular text Bach was setting to music. And this one is ‘Ich hatte viel Bekümmernis’ which roughly translates as ‘I had much grief’. This is the first three sections performed by the soloist Monika Frimmer with the Bach Collegium Japan conducted by Masaaki Suzuki.

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That was the first three sections of Johann Sebastian Bach’s Cantata ‘ I had much grief’ or ‘Ich hatte viel Bekümmernis’  performed by the soloist Monika Frimmer with the Bach Collegium Japan conducted by Masaaki Suzuki.

Ok. So in 1741,  Bach published a work for harpsichord and on the title page the description was as follows…“Keyboard exercise, consisting of a song with diverse variations for harpsichord with two manuals. Composed for connoisseurs, for the refreshment of their spirits, by Johann Sebastian Bach.” The piece has ended up with a simpler name but I’ll tell you that after I’ve played you the beginning… what Bach calls ‘the song’. Here is a couple of minutes of harpsichord played by Christophe Rousset.

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That was Christophe Rousset playing the opening of what is now known as ‘The Goldberg Variations’ for more than likely entirely fictional reasons which I won’t get into now but I am going to use this piece to illustrate another important aspect of Bach’s music. In his day composers very rarely if ever added instructions to their manuscript or completed scores instructing players how to perform their music. There was no... 'just a bit faster here’, ‘get suddenly louder’ or ‘like you’re going for a nice walk’… So performers have been free to bring their at times quite personal interpretations to Bach’s music without being beaten up (too much) by critics, audiences and musicologists. So in 1981 the Canadian pianist Glenn Gould was able to take the piece I just played and do this with it…

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The rest of the Goldberg Variations goes for over an hour of incredibly beautiful and inventive keyboard music and there are plenty of extraordinary recording out there but that one from 1981 by Glenn Gould is pretty special.

Ok. One more piece left for this episode of ‘Classical For Everyone’ dedicated to the music of Johann Sebastian Bach. As well as writing concertos where groups of several soloists interacted with larger ensembles, like the Brandenburg Concerto I played at the beginning of the show; Bach also wrote in what was would eventually become the dominant form of the concerto where only one or two solo instruments would be accompanied by a larger ensemble. His Concerto for Two Violins and Orchestra is a great early example of this type of composition and here is a favourite performance of mine. Richard Tognetti and Helena Rathbone playing the solo violins with the Australian Chamber Orchestra. This is the conclusion of Johann Sebastian Bach’s Concerto for Two Violins and Orchestra.

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That was Richard Tognetti and Helena Rathbone playing the solo violins with the Australian Chamber Orchestra in the final section of J. S. Bach’s Concerto for Two Violins and Orchestra. My name is Peter Cudlipp and you have been listening to the ‘Classical for Everyone’ Podcast. If you would like to listen to past episodes or get details of the music I’ve played please head to the website classicalforeveryone.net. That address again is classicalforeveryone.net. There you will also find some mini-episodes that address some of what I want to call the vexing questions for a listener new to Classical Music like… ‘Are conductors actually important?’; ‘Why does the word ‘sonata’ keep turning up?’ and ‘Why is almost everything in Italian?’.

I hope you have enjoyed this episode of ‘Classical For Everyone’. If you want to make sure you don’t miss the shows as they are released then please Subscribe or Follow wherever you get your podcasts. That would also mean the search algorithms will smile more benignly on the show and it might reach a few more people. For that I would be very grateful. And if you want to get in touch then you can email… info@classicalforeveryone.net. Thanks for your time and I look forward to playing you some more incredible music on the next ‘Classical For Everyone’.

This podcast is made with Audacity Software for editing, Wikipedia for Research, Claude for Artificial Intelligence and Apple, Sennheiser, Sony, Rode and Logitech for hardware… The music played is licensed through AMCOS / APRA. Classical For Everyone is a production of Mending Wall Studios and began life on Radio 2BBB in Bellingen NSW, Australia thanks to the late, great Mr Jeffrey Sanders. The producers do not receive any gifts or support of any kind from any organisation or individual mentioned in the show. But, never say never. And finally the music playing under these credits is Maurizio Pollini playing another pair of pieces from Johann Sebastian Bach’s ‘The Well-Tempered Clavier’.

End.