David Hume says somewhere in his philosophical works that you can’t be proud of the Pacific Ocean—the idea being that you need to have some sense of relationship or ownership to warrant pride, and no one can own the Pacific Ocean. I, as a native Californian, have nonetheless insisted on retaining a certain unearned feeling of pride about the Pacific Ocean, and now I find I have the same sense about a few beloved performers whose concerts I’ve been following for years. Christian Tetzlaff’s achievements have nothing at all to do with me: I had no part in giving rise to them, and they would be exactly the same if I did not exist. Yet when I hear Tetzlaff play all six Bach sonatas and partitas for solo violin in one evening, the emotion that wells up in me feels very much like pride.
Perhaps I am just proud of the human race for producing a violinist who can bring so much to these remarkable pieces and, at the same time, render them exactly in Bach’s spirit. Or perhaps I am just pleased with myself for having managed to hear Tetzlaff accomplish this miracle twice, both times in the same place, in the main auditorium of the 92nd Street Y. The first time I heard him do it, about five years ago, I had no idea what was about to take place, so I was stunned both by the performance itself and by my own feelings of transcendence in the face of it. This time I knew better what to expect, but the transcendence still hadn’t gone away. The astonishing thing about Tetzlaff’s achievement, as a physical feat, is that he is able to sustain this unimaginably difficult performance for so long; and yet what happens to you, as you listen, is that time seems to disappear, so that the whole 136 minutes of playing becomes like one “spot of time,” as Wordsworth might have put it.
In last Thursday’s concert, just as in the one I heard in 2009, Tetzlaff played all six pieces in order, by heart: Sonata 1, Partita 1, Sonata 2 (then an extended intermission placed exactly in the middle, so that he could eat cookies to restore his strength and we could rush out for a quick meal), Partita 2, Sonata 3, Partita 3 . And as before, but perhaps in an even subtler way, the six pieces became a single work telling a continuous story. It was a story without a plot and without characters, but it had a great deal of narrative color and enormous shifts of mood, from quiet moments of contemplation, when you almost couldn’t hear the notes (but you always could, every single one), to fast, intense passages that made his fingers fly so quickly you could barely see them. For the first five works, Tetzlaff was relatively solemn, for him. He curled over his instrument, stayed rather still, and often closed his eyes or lowered them to his fingering. (For tunings between movements, he even turned away from us, toward the back of the stage, as if to signal: please ignore, this is private, I am not really here onstage during this part.) But when he got to the sixth piece, the final partita, he relaxed back into his usual lightly dancing, joyous, comfortable self, as if to say: Yes, I’ve done it, here we are at the end, and wasn’t it wonderful? And it was.