Sometime in the first few months of 2025, Christian Tetzlaff announced that he would no longer be touring in the United States, as he avoids performing under authoritarian regimes. I heartily endorsed his position on a political level and greatly admired him for taking it. On the other hand, it represented something of a personal loss for me, as I have come to depend on hearing his live performances as often as possible.
So it was with enormous delight and anticipation that I attended his solo performance last Sunday at the Pierre Boulez Saal in Berlin, Tetzlaff’s home town. I had heard somewhere that he was using this occasion to celebrate his own sixtieth birthday, which took place a few days before the concert. And what he chose, for this celebratory occasion, were four out of the six Bach sonatas and partitas for solo violin.
I have twice heard Christian Tetzlaff do the whole set of six in New York. With intermissions, the entire performance takes over three hours, so he usually divides it up into two concert-length sections, with a short meal break in between. The entire experience is incomparably thrilling and moving. I have also listened to the six pieces on my streaming devices (I am doing so now as I write), but that is not at all the same, for reasons I will go into in a minute.
Even when the marvelous Sonata #1 in G Minor and Partita #1 in B Minor have to be cut out for length reasons, as happened in the Boulez Saal concert, what remains is still a transcendent experience. And because I have heard this amazing performance repeatedly, it has become something of a madeleine for me. That is, sitting there last Sunday, listening to the opening sections of the Sonata #2 in A Minor, I was reminded of the last time I heard Tetzlaff playing those exact notes, when I attended the most recent New York performance with my friend Joe, who has died since then. So the sadness that is somehow inherent in these pieces, even at their most Allegro, was strengthened by my memories of hearing them in those circumstances—just as the depth of my gratitude and excitement is strengthened, every time, by the flood of past and present emotions they bring out.
This time was special, though, because I was hearing and seeing Christian Tetzlaff in the wonderfully intimate setting of the Pierre Boulez Saal. In this oval-shaped chamber music hall, the highly attentive audience members (there is no more silent crowd during a performance, and no more enthusiastic one afterward) surround the players, who routinely perform facing one way before the intermission and the other way after. This meant that for the whole first half, when Tetzlaff was looking away from me, I could only see his shrugging back, his bending knees, his pointing toes, and his other endearingly klezmerish mannerisms. But when he turned toward me in the second half, I saw that I had not previously missed having him “face to face,” as it were, because the Tetzlaff who performed those Bach pieces was not looking outward. His eyes, when they were open at all, wore a glazed, veiled look, as if he couldn’t see what was in front of him. His whole effort, his whole thought process (but thought cannot be separated from hand and arm, in this case: music at this level is surely a physical as well as a mental skill), was bent on looking inward at the music he held there.
I love the solo sonatas, but I think I love the partitas even more—perhaps because they are slightly more complicated, or maybe just because they poignantly signal the ending of each pair. This time, as Tetzlaff moved through the last sections of the Partita #3 in E Major—the Menuets I and II, the Bourrée, and finally the closing Gigue—I realized something I have understood before but get to discover anew in each performance. Tetzlaff in recordings is a wonderful musician, able to supply pleasure to his listeners worldwide. But Tetzlaff in person is something else. When he is playing the solo Bach pieces there in front of us, all sense of musicianship or interpretation disappears, and what we are left with is Bach itself, Bach incarnate, as if the music were coming to us direct from the composer’s brain, with no intermediary barriers of time or space or personality. This is the great gift Tetzlaff is able to give us, and it makes me feel more alive every time I receive it.