Friday night: Bach and the glory of God

The Bach pieces have gone well these last two Sundays. This week, Trinity Sunday, is the larger part of it, with the E Flat “St. Anne” Prelude and Fugue, the large settings of the Kyrie/Christe/Kyrie from the Clavierubung, plus a reprise of the gentle second setting of Komm, heiliger Geist for a memorial service tomorrow morning (plus, I think, Vor deinen Thron tret' ich for the postlude. It is an unusual service, and I am not yet sure what to do to conclude it. The final hymn is at the piano, so I might improvise a postlude instead of playing Bach. My normal funeral postlude is the St. Anne Fugue, but in this case it doesn't seem quite right).

Today held almost six hours of practice on these things, running well into the evening; I just finished a little while ago. I am worn out.

I mentioned the biography of Bach by Malcolm Boyd in the essay on May 18. He notes that Bach scholarship since the 1970's has tended to put Bach's motivations in a different light. No longer do the modern scholars think that he sought in any particular way to glorify God by what he was doing; he worked in churches for much of his life, but it was simply a way to make a living. His true motivation, so they say, was Music.

I think that this says more about modern scholarship than it does about Bach.

One always learns from the great composers. This fortnight of Bach has taught me some specifically musical lessons, but they are probably less important than the spiritual lesson. As I worked my way through the Kyrie/Christe/Kyrie this evening – three hours of it – the lesson was the one summarized in the Westminster Catechism of the Puritans:

Q. What is the chief end of man?
A. Man's chief end is to glorify God, and to enjoy him for ever.

Insofar as one can gather anything about a composer from his music, it seems clear to me that Bach wrote these three pieces, and the entire Third Part of the Clavierubung from which all of this Sunday's organ music is to come, with no other end than the glory of the undivided Trinity: Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. That is what is left for the organist as well, once the dross is burned out.

Or it should be thus. Some months ago, I heard a performance of the E Flat Prelude and Fugue that seemed to have a different motivation behind it: virtuosity, and the glorification of the performer. The player was a graduate student, and perhaps he will grow into this music in a few decades. Or not; I am not sure one can play these things if one insists on coming at them from a thoroughly secular perspective.

Is it a waste of time to spend all this time playing Bach? Perhaps.
But it is the reason I exist.