THE City of London Festival couldn’t book Johann Sebastian Bach to play any gigs this year. He hasn’t been available for some centuries. And anyway, he was never keen on foreign engagements. But the festival has done the next best thing. It has hired Bach’s representative on earth, Ton Koopman, to deliver four concerts of JSB’s greatest masterpieces.
Koopman, a 61-year-old Dutch conductor, organist and harpsichordist, has spent the past ten years recording all of Bach’s 200-odd surviving cantatas with his Amsterdam Baroque Orchestra and Choir. It was not just a herculean musical task — about 6,000 minutes of music — but also an act of bloody-minded determination. Halfway through, Koopman’s record label, Erato, was bought by Warner, which promptly decided that such highfalutin projects didn’t fit its marketing strategy.
“I was not worried at first,” Koopman recalls, “because I thought another record company would finish the project. But nobody had the guts.”
So Koopman did the sums, took a deep breath (and a large bank loan) and started his own record company. He called it Antoine Marchand. “My name — in French,” he explains. The cycle was finished on the “Marchand label” last year. Koopman and his musicians marked the moment with a celebratory concert in (where else?) Bach’s own church, the Thomaskirche in Leipzig.
“The problem with big companies is that they have too many people on their payroll,” he says. “We have just two doing the recording — one is my wife — and two running the label: me and an accountant. I think we will get our investment back. We are planning recordings to 2007 and beyond.”
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More recordings? Is there life beyond Bach? “There’s Buxtehude,” says Koopman. Buxtehude? I know the great Dane has his admirers — but is there much demand for CDs of 17th-century organ music? “Of course Bach is more famous,” Koopman admits. “But Monteverdi was unknown until people started recording his music in the 1950s. And there’s far more than organ music to Buxtehude. There are chamber pieces, cantatas and many sorts of vocal music.”
Koopman, it transpires, is planning to record every note that Buxtehude wrote in time for the 300th anniversary of the composer’s death in 2007. Sounds like another vast project. “Buxtehude’s output is less than half the size of Bach’s,” Koopman says. “So I think we can manage it. But then, I am an optimist.”
One entertaining sideshow to Koopman’s great Bach venture was the long-running spat it provoked between him and the American scholar Joshua Rifkin. In a nutshell, Rifkin thinks that Bach’s choral works should be performed with a single voice on each line, rather than a choir. Koopman vehemently disagrees. He thinks Rifkin fundamentally misunderstands the performing circumstances of Bach’s day.
“Soloists then were not soloists as we now know them, like Pavarotti. They were amateurs and children. And the acoustic of the Thomaskirche isn’t easy. So the idea that they could sing the whole B Minor Mass as solos? Forget it!” Expect a traditional choir, then, when Koopman conducts the work in London next month. But expect an impeccably prepared interpretation, too. Koopman has probably spent longer than anyone on earth pondering exactly what instruments, pitch and tempo Bach wanted.
In London he will also be presenting two hugely problematic Bach masterpieces: the Musical Offering, and the Art of Fugue. The former is a collection of pieces — some of them complex musical puzzles called canons — that Bach wrote after King Frederick of Prussia presented him with a theme and asked him to improvise round it. Bach provided a masterclass in counterpoint, but left open many questions about how it should be performed. “We will spend the summer immersed in these canons,” Koopman says. “By the time we get to London we should be pretty good.”
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The Art of Fugue, in which Bach turns a theme inside-out, back-to-front and upside-down, before weaving all these variants together with a tune derived from the letters of his own name, is even more open-ended, in that the last movement is clearly incomplete. Several musicians have offered “solutions”, but Koopman shuns such impertinences.
“To finish it would mean composing another 220 bars. Who could compose for that long at the level of Bach? It would be madness to try. So I leave out the incomplete movement. Besides, I’m certain that the work is complete. We just haven’t found the ending yet.”
Oh? Does Koopman believe there are Bach manuscripts still undiscovered? “Very possibly,” he says. “You know that in Berlin’s national library there are 60 metres of shelves containing supposedly anonymous music? I have a friend who is working through them. He has done two metres so far, and already discovered all sorts of pieces that are not anonymous; they have just been badly catalogued. So who knows whether there’s another piece of Bach in there. As I said before, I’m an optimist.”