2023-07-22 14:32:50
You could of course write this story about father and son again. So in the mid 1740s she would be playing. It would be about an old man – at 56 you were quite old at the time – and a boy who – he was around thirty – wasn’t really that young anymore. How they are gathered in a room in Berlin at the Preussenhof.
The old man at the harpsichord, the new notes on the desk from the boy standing behind him. Six sonatas dedicated to a student, the newly inaugurated Elector Carl Eugen von Württemberg. Created between 1742 and 1744.
They are beautifully printed. They should also sell well. Composers began not only to be salaried suppliers of ornaments to European courts, but also to become independent music entrepreneurs. But that’s just by the way.
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They are both called Bach. Carl Philipp Emanuel the young, court harpsichordist to the great Friedrich, Johann Sebastian the old, in Leipzig church service for twenty years. The old man had just presented the second season of The Well-Tempered Clavier and the Goldberg Variations, he was bringing an epoch to an end, and he knew it. What the boy (among other things) opened with his sonatas he could only guess.
The story has been written quite often. And it will continue to be written. Last year by Daniil Trifonov in his Bach family album The Art of Life, in which works by Johann Christian, Carl Philipp Emanuel and Johann Christoph Bach are a bit like the cute salad garnish for the Art of Fugue of the old man from St. Thomas Church.
Coming soon to the collection of Bach arrangements by Albrecht Mayer, principal oboist of the Berlin Philharmonic. Just recently in the rather fine text by British music critic and writer Paul Griffith for the booklet of Keith Jarrett’s recording precisely those Württemberg sonatas.
Keith Jarrett plays Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach
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The son, who was more important than his father for half a century, up to the edge of romanticism, which he, one of the central liberators of subjectivity in music from the contrapuntal shackles that were put on it for the higher glory of God, this story did not help the son much. And neither does the factory. Like almost all the rest of the piano pioneer’s work, the Württemberg Sonatas have remained a marginal phenomenon in the classical repertoire.
The reason for the ossification of this repertoire is that bridge-builders always find it difficult to get into the risk-avoiding canon of the works of those composers who – like Mozart – would never have written, could never have written without bridge-builders like Carl Philipp Emanuel or Johann Christian as they did.
In the case of Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, it was also because pianists liked to shove the sonatas of the court harpsichord player over to the harpsichord players as if they had nothing to do with them. He had recorded Keith Jarrett, the Goldberg Variations and both volumes of the Well-Tempered Clavier on the harpsichord at the height of his classical phase, and knew the harpsichord variants of Carl Philipp Emanuel’s six sonatas, carefully divided into minor and major.
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He thought there had to be more. And in 1994 (the year he recorded Shostakovich’s 24 Preludes and Fugues) at New Jersey’s Cavelight Studios, he sat down at the grand piano with the Württembergian on the console, in front of the relentless microphones of Manfred Eicher’s ECM label.
The fact that the recording is only being released now, three decades later and years after Jarrett’s career ended due to illness, is at least as puzzling as it is wonderful. ECM doesn’t even begin to explain why the recording was held back for so long and fuels the suspicion that the publication of Jarrett’s classic legacy during his lifetime began with Carl Philipp Emanuel.
Which, on the one hand, is downright melancholic, on the other hand, in view of what you can immerse yourself in on the two CDs in an hour and a half, is downright hopeful. Who knows what else is stored in the ECM sound archive.
order and chaos
The cover of the Württembergische (catalog of works Wq49) shows a highway in an almost Cormac McCarthy wasteland. The asphalt stretches straight and black towards the horizon on the left. Sparse and wild, the landscape on the right is preparing to take back the road.
Order and chaos in dialogue, civilization and licentiousness, tamedness and relaxation – one could hardly have imagined a better illustration for what happens and plays in the six pieces, which are just over 15 minutes long and with which Keith Jarrett plays.
They probably got along pretty well. Both melancholic. Both radical liberators of the musical self through the legacy of music history. Jarrett is – like Carl Philipp Emanuel, his brother in spirit – a master of the gradual elaboration of the musical idea from the empty phrase. From just-just-like-somehow-being-played.
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Something emerges from the counterpoint of the old. Fugues layer until everything is black and sad, and then everything becomes free.
Whoever can hear, of course, hears between the lines, the movements, the motifs, the almost Cat Stevens-like father-son conflict between the old striker-and-dranger that Johann Sebastian used to be and the young one, who perhaps didn’t really want to be Carl Philipp Emanuel because he was concerned with the naturalness of expression, with the emotional integration of everyone involved – the composer, the pianist and the person listening.
And that he perhaps hears more Rameau than Johann Sebastian from the background noise and more of the 19th century than the old man would have liked, that a smile curled on the son’s lips when the old man on the harpsichord in Berlin did not really understand what lay in front of him in sonata form.
Not a trained bird
Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach wrote, “You have to play from the soul, and not like a trained bird.” There is not a trace of trained birds in Keith Jarrett’s musical mini-series.
It is almost humble in its precision, it is as clear as a mountain lake through which musical thoughts swim like shimmering fish. And it is so beautiful that it can only be recommended as a vademecum to all those currently wounded by reality.
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