We know so little about him. There is the usual moth-eaten anecdote of the “moonlight manuscript,” the prohibited book of music that the defiant teenage Sebastian, orphaned and living at his older brother’s house, copied note by note in the dark when the house fell silent at night. It’s not bad as far as origin stories go, certainly above average, but not sensational either, and only so well-worn, I feel, because the ledger of juicy biographical detail is so short. Bach’s letters are notoriously dull—a bone-dry archive of to-do lists, instructions, invoices, and complaints against his employers, leading many to speculate (and in some cases declare) that the one unfathomable genius of the High Baroque was something of a bore.
That one famous portrait doesn’t help his case. The wig, the jowls, the double chin, the appropriately furrowed brow… I first saw it in a children’s book on the lives of the great composers (a Christmas gift from my cello teacher), and it was always a page whose jaundiced light I was keen to skip, lest it somehow infect the music I had just begun to love. I think my aversion to the painting had its source less in the odd wish that my heroes be beautiful than in the unpleasant fact that Bach resembled my local priest at the time, Father McGregor—an automaton of a man, perfectly benign, as far as I know, compared to his more sinister colleagues in the broader Church of Rome, but one who abused us all the same with the sheer tedium of his voice, the rote torture of his sermons, his half-dead hunch at the altar. I credit his Sunday performances not only for my mother’s crisis of faith, but also for my annulled attraction to the pageantry of Catholic ritual, which didn’t last very long beyond the first stale wafer.
We do know, however, that Bach’s insubordinate phase lasted well into adulthood. We know that, in his first job as an organist in Arnstadt, he got caught inviting a “strange maiden” to the church loft. We know that, despite his solemn duty to cultivate sobriety and the fear of God in himself and the congregation, he was fond of inserting “strange tones” into the most popular chorales, provoking brief moments of panic in the pews. We know he took a few too many holidays and eventually got the sack.
We also know that, as a cocky pipe-smoking twenty-year-old, Bach got into a brawl with an older student, a bassoonist by the name of Johann Heinrich Geyersbach, who confronted Sebastian one night in the town square. The rumor going round was that Bach had called him a Zippel Fagottist, which, depending on the temperament of the translator, means something like “nanny-goat bassoonist” or “greenhorn bassoonist.” The most literal translation is also the most crude. Zippel is the Thuringian word for onion; Bach’s insult was possibly a three-hundred-year-old fart joke. My favorite of the scholarly suggestions, however, is “prick of a bassoon player.” Cutting, simple, elegantly mean, it points to one of music’s greatest mysteries—why any child, impelled to break the silence of the cosmos and learn an instrument, would plump for the bassoon. All those hours of practice, all that pain, just to imitate the sound of human flatulence. Such a person is either the victim of sadistic parents (a common fate for a musician), or very much chose to be the clown of the orchestra—an endearing quality in most people, in my view, but clearly Geyersbach couldn’t take the joke. In other words, I trust Bach’s judgment of him. Called in to settle the dispute, the local authorities reprimanded the young Sebastian, though not without a commiserating wink: he must learn, they said, to live among the imperfecta.
Having insulted the whole woodwind section, and most likely the horn players too, I should stress that in Bach’s time the cello was itself an unloved instrument. To the snobs of the early eighteenth century, it was not much more than a droning bass, the bassoon of the string family, so to speak. That it would someday transcend the plodding accompanying role to which it was condemned would have been laughable to a Baroque audience, especially the cellists themselves, who probably played two or three other instruments as a professional insurance policy. “Violoncello” quite literally means “small big viola”—not the most glorious name, if you ask me, not exactly destined for greatness. And then there’s the primitive way you play the thing, clasped between your legs, hand around its neck, locked in a long embrace—it’s all a bit uncouth, a bit carnal.
It’s sometimes hard to believe, then, that Bach could have written the suites for the cello at all. It was an eccentric choice for a decidedly uneccentric man, whose genius lies in the supreme perfection of his orthodoxy, not in the rejection of convention and form. Maybe it was a mistake; after all, the original manuscript is lost, and it’s possible that Bach intended it for a different string instrument in the same range—the viola da gamba, perhaps, which was much more popular at the time. One of the more convincing explanations, which Eric Siblin favors in his wonderful book on the suites, is that Bach’s music-loving employer in Köthen, Prince Leopold, was the court’s resident gamba player—an enthusiastic amateur but an amateur all the same, whom Bach was loath to embarrass with difficult work. As a result he reserved his most challenging music for the professionals at his disposal—the violinists and, by default, the cellists.
In my early childhood, my mother, searching for God everywhere, often played recordings of the cello suites to me as I slept, finding in the beauty of the music at least partial answers to the questions that have governed her life, and on occasion moved her to despair. For the most part I have resisted deifying Bach in the same way, but she and I are more alike than we are different, and in the end I emerged from the cradle, as she had hoped, with every Sarabande lodged forever in my inner ear.
It’s strange to say this now, lazy as I am these days in my writing routines, but I can’t remember resisting the draconian practice schedule she imposed on me as a boy, forcing me up before dawn to practice in the dark hours before school. I must have moaned about it, especially in the winter, when it was hard to leave the warmth of my bed, but I can’t recall any serious revolts, at least none that really challenged the nature of the regime. Ultimately I loved the cello from the very start; its authority felt unimpeachable to me. Of all the world’s instruments, I wanted to play the cello because it most resembled the human voice, and though I didn’t realize it at the time, because it most resembled the human body. That primitive and sensual dance, so shameful in one sense, was also what I longed for most—to sway with it as if with an equal partner.
My mother’s favorite movement has always been—unapologetically— the famous Prelude in G major from the first suite. I first learned it in 2002, the year she suffered a sort of nervous breakdown. One day she stuffed my sisters and me in the car, together with our squealing cat Maple, and drove us a thousand miles to the south of France, crushing several hapless mutinies along the way, until she stopped, seemingly at random, in a town outside Toulouse, where we then lived for the next year. I don’t know why we didn’t push on just a little bit further, closer to the sea perhaps, because the place she settled on was impressively dull, not much more than an extended network of dormitories for the Airbus workers, whose offices were nearby. I’ve always suspected that she ran out of petrol with Toulouse in sight and just gave up, depleted, unwilling to drive another yard, having reached the sputtering depths of her mania. It was truly an extraordinary feat, as I like to tease her now, to have driven so far, and for so long, and in such a fever of determination and emancipatory purpose, only to choose such a tedious suburb in which to stage her recovery.
In any case, that’s where we pitched the tent of our lives for a while, and that’s where my mother sought to mend her wounded spirit—in the shadow of the airplane factory. Our father came to see us every other weekend or so; their marriage—never in serious trouble, they like to insist now—slowly recovered. There was plenty of sun, of course, which was all that really mattered to her after four years in London, a city she struggled to love even on its prettiest days, never mind that we lived so close to the soul-battering cacophony of the North Circular Road (the noisiest and most polluted in Britain, according to official surveys), and in my mother’s view one of the seven architectural wonders of the underworld.
In the end there was actually too much sun in France. The following summer a historic heat-wave killed thousands of people across Europe; it rarely dropped below 40°C for weeks on end. My languishing mother, then eight months pregnant with my youngest sister, requested daily performances of the Prelude—a job I took extremely seriously. During her recovery, my growing musical confidence had been one of her few unqualified joys, and I was afraid that a setback in my progress would signal a setback in hers. So I always understood, then, the music’s power to console, its loyalty to us as a source of hope.
In 2013, a year after graduating from university, I spent a threadbare summer playing the cello suites in Budapest. Every morning I lugged my cello to rotating corners of the city—Déak Ferenc Square, the Fisherman’s Bastion, St. Stephen’s Basilica, and so on—where I busked for a few hours.
I was quick to learn that those who approached me while I was playing did so in a distinct spirit of confession. Our conversations assumed an instant, vulnerable intimacy, as though, having performed such elegiac music for them in public, I had laid bare a part of myself usually reserved for old friends, and now they had licence to do the same. It was my turn to listen, even if I couldn’t understand a word they said. For the most part it was the grey and fragile who came to mime the story of their days, which was perhaps the story of their lives—my knee hurts, my back hurts, my heart is on the brink. In the mouths of older men, Hungarian grew softer, more plaintive. The words lost their sharper edges.
It should have made no difference, but I found it even harder to hear the same testimonies of loneliness from young people. One teenager, who looked sixteen at most, told me that he had legally changed his name to cut all ties with his parents. He opened his gleaming passport to the photo page where his new name was inscribed like that of a comic book superhero. “They can’t touch me now. I’m free.” Half an hour later a young woman—probably homeless and definitely high—arrived to say she had just stolen a bunch of bananas from the market. “Do you want one?”
“Keep them,” I said, thanking her.
With nowhere to go she stayed to listen for a while on the stone steps of the basilica. Eventually, with the evening light all but gone, she got up to leave, but not before she unclipped a greenish banana from her bushel and dropped it in my case. She cracked a manic smile and walked away, clutching the remaining fruit to her chest with both hands.
A familiar refrain in the crowded cult of Bach, common even amongst its most casual members, is that his music echoes the voice of God. The cello suites contain the essence of the divine; they achieve, or nearly achieve, union with the absolute. For the cult’s more sceptical wing (still a rather mystical lot, it must be said), it’s the Almighty who comes off worse in the comparison. “Without Bach, God would be a complete second-rate figure,” wrote the brilliant arch-pessimist Emil Cioran. “Bach’s music is the only argument proving the creation of the universe cannot be regarded as a complete failure.”
And yet for a long time after the composer’s death the suites were, for the experts who chanced upon them, indistinguishable from mere practice drills. Technical challenges, cold theoretical etudes, a few exercises to warm up the fingers—that’s all anyone heard in the arpeggios and double stops. Puzzles, not music.
How did time transform Bach from a cold mechanic into the town crier of heaven? I am obsessed by this distinction—the hinterland between the banal and the beautiful. There is no better example of this relationship than the simple and harrowing Sarabande in C minor from the fifth suite. It has no chords, no decoration—each stark note lives alone. And yet, as the movement progresses, one starts to hear the harmony implied in it, a phantom accompaniment, notes growing above and below the melodic line. It is the most distilled and spectral of all Bach’s cello music, a cousin to silence itself. The Sarabande is so unadorned—so saltless—that I would forgive the distracted listener who dismisses it as plain. Played well, however, and to a careful audience, it strikes an ancient nerve, like the first song of the world.
I don’t play it a lot these days, or at least not as much as my favorite of the Sarabandes, the second, in D minor. It’s almost certain that Bach composed it in 1720, beset by grief for his wife Maria Barbara, who succumbed to a sudden sickness while Sebastian was in Bohemia on a rare trip away. It overwhelmed her very quickly; Bach could have had no inkling, on his return home, that his wife was unwell, let alone that she had been buried in his absence. When I listen to the second suite, I hear the story of that bitter arrival—the silence of the house as he walks in, the news on his children’s faces, the shock of pain in its delivery. I hear a man ambushed by the cruelty of God’s caprice; there was simply no time to prepare.
Bach’s faith animates the core of his music. Nietzsche, loathe to praise even the most brilliant slave to religion, went to hear the St. Matthew Passion three times in a single week in 1870, gushing to a friend about his “immeasurable admiration” for the man who wrote it. However, a few years later he complained that in Bach “there is too much crude Christianity, crude Germanism, crude scholasticism… He stands at the threshold of modern European music but he is always looking back towards the Middle Ages.”
Bach couldn’t have been aware that the eternity of his religious world was at an end. The Enlightenment was in full swing in Paris and Edinburgh, but for Bach it was at best an indistinct rumor. The forests of his Thuringian boyhood were still dense with medieval magic, home to trolls and changelings and sighing nymphs. To fall asleep was an everyday risk, and not just for the town’s children; in the dark, all souls were vulnerable to the forest’s nocturnal spirits. Even the long and bloody Reformation had failed to purge these pagan quirks from the countryside’s collective memory. Stalked on one flank by the entire mad roster of German folklore, and disciplined on the other by the drill sergeant that was Martin Luther’s ghost, the region was well inoculated against the power of modern science for generations after its ideas had begun to spread elsewhere in Europe. Bach, who anyway never strayed too far from the hearth of middle Germany, had probably never heard of Isaac Newton and the grand synthesis of his astral laws (published two years after the composer’s birth). It is even less likely that he knew of contemporary thinkers then at work in the Age of Reason, still in its infancy though it was.
Bach is not looking forward or backward but skyward—which is to say, in all directions at once. I understand why Chopin called him an astronomer; it’s as if Bach didn’t compose the suites as much as he discovered them, just as a stargazer discovers order in the vast mess of the firmament. The music’s relationship to mathematics (precisely the “scholasticism” Nietzsche objected to) heightens the suspicion that the suites precede us, that they exist before and beyond us.
Everybody knows the most famous music to come out of Abbey Road. I could make a case, however, that the most important and politically charged music to ever emerge from the studios was Pablo Casals’ 1936 recordings of the first, second, and third cello suites.
At the time, Franco’s armies were bearing down on Madrid; the Germans and Italians were bombing the city from the air. Listen carefully enough, and you can hear Casals’ grief and gathering fury in the blood of the music, moving from defiance to surrender and back again. It is a desperate plea to the great powers of Europe, to God, to Bach himself, to save Spain.
Casals would have been anxious, even in peacetime, at the very idea of recording the suites. The original manuscripts are lost to history, and the surviving facsimiles leave Bach’s intended bowing, tempo, and dynamics a mystery open to the interpretation of the cellist. There are infinite ways to play them—precisely the crux of Casals’ angst. He had practiced the suites for twelve years before mustering the courage to perform them in public; now he was sixty years old, and had been playing them, slightly differently every time, for the better part of five decades. How could he now commit to history a fixed version of the music? Who was he to make such a definitive claim? To subject the suites to the “steel monster” of the microphone was to set down as emblem one mood, one day in the course of a life, a single pixel in a vast image. One might as well pluck a lone star from the galaxy and call it the whole world.
By 1938, Casals was increasingly exasperated with Britain’s and France’s refusal to intervene in the war. “Do not commit the crime of letting the Spanish Republic be murdered,” he implored the public. “If you allow Hitler to win in Spain, you will be the next victims of his madness. The war will spread to all of Europe, to the whole world. Come to the aid of our people.”
No help came. With Barcelona about to fall, Casals fled for good across the Pyrenees, along with half a million refugees. Franco’s fascists made themselves clear: if the great cellist ever returned, they would cut off his arms at the elbow.
In 1750, suffering from painful cataracts, Bach chose to undergo a risky operation. The sloppy surgeon, dubious even by eighteenth-century standards of medicine, was the self-anointed “oculist” Chevalier John Taylor. He performed his signature “couching” procedure, which entailed driving a hooked needle into Bach’s eye and dislocating the lens in an attempt to clear up the clouding—all, of course, without a drop of anaesthetic. (Taylor’s other patented techniques included laxatives and eyedrops of pigeon blood; if a snapped retina didn’t kill you, bird flu or extreme dehydration just might.) The botched operation—if botched is the right word for a con job of such mad ambition—left Bach completely blind, and he died four months later, most likely from the resulting infection. Taylor later attempted the same quackery on Handel—three times—and blinded him too. With two master artists on his resume, not to mention hundreds of less talented victims, Taylor has a convincing claim to be the most destructive charlatan in the long history of European culture.
That Bach and Handel had a mutilator in common is surely one of the strangest details in the history of music, especially since they were born weeks apart in 1785. Much like Hegel and Schopenhauer, the pair had a lopsided rivalry. Handel was the pan-continental superstar, composing operas in Ham-burg and London, where he was af-forded a state funeral at Westminster Abbey. Bach was a respected but thoroughly under-celebrated cantor in provincial Saxony. Later in his life he was better known as “old Bach,” father of his much more famous son, C.P.E. Bach. (When Mozart said, “Bach is the father, we are the children,” he was not referring to Sebastian.) Unlike Hegel and Schopenhauer, however, who taught at the same university and scheduled their lectures at the same time (professional masochism on the latter’s part), the two Baroque masters never met.
I once dreamt that I got shot in the hand. The enemy bullet, from an unknown sniper in an unknown war, went straight through the middle of my left palm. I kept looking through the little hole, pressing my eye to it, the world in the frame of my wound. When it healed I couldn’t play Bach anymore. One day, in my dream, I walked to Blackfriars Bridge and threw my cello into the Thames.
Kasra Lang is a writer from London. His work has appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Roads & Kingdoms, and Zocalo Public Square.
