Johann Sebastian Bach: Genre-Bender Extraordinaire

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"It's unheard of to combine opera with a rock theme, my dear," Queen's Freddie Mercury told Circus Magazine in 1977. Mercury was referring to the critical reaction to the band's operatic single, 'Bohemian Rhapsody.' The song was slammed by some critics, as Mercury saw it, because "they couldn't put their finger on us."

Such reactions can be found throughout the history of musical innovation. Genre-benders make us uncomfortable.

This was certainly the case with Johann Sebastian Bach. According to the British conductor John Eliot Gardiner, the clergy of Bach's day "didn't want him to compose music that was in any way operatic or theatrical." Why? The churchmen had a general anxiety, Gardiner writes in his book Bach: Music in the Castle of Heaven, "about religion borrowing the clothes of secular theatre." Moreover, the church was threatened by drama insofar as it lifted a religious text beyond church dogma and brought about conversations "between characters, between two voices, between several voices, between an instrument or several instruments and a voice," Gardiner says.

And so one might say of Bach's time, it's unheard of to combine opera with a religious theme, my dear.

And yet, Bach's church cantatas and Passions are full of drama, internalizing and dramatizing "the situation of the individual believer, spectator or hearer." According to Gardiner, the new form of Baroque music-drama that Bach created answers Gottfried Ephraim Scheibel's rhetorical observation: "I do not know why operas alone should have the privilege of squeezing tears from us; why is that not true in the church?"

"With never an opera to his name," Gardiner writes, Bach will be the one to work his way towards uncovering and releasing a dramatic potency in music beyond the reach of any of his peers."

Transcript - One of the curious things that you soon have to come to terms with when you look at the life of Bach is that he never wrote an opera -- and that's a big conundrum. Why didn't he write an opera? Opera was the passport to success. It was the means of earning a good living. It was the really favored genre of the day to make your name in the world. And yet he went away from it. I mean was it because he never really heard any opera? That can't be the case. There were several opportunities in his life when he could have heard opera. Starting from the time when he was an adolescent living in Luneburg not so very far south of Hamburg where there was a flourishing opera house and Handel and Mattheson all performed there.

And Telemann later but was very much involved in it. Was it because he had an allergy towards opera because he thought it was somehow uninteresting as a genre. I mean he talked sometimes disparagingly about those little ditties that they go on performed at the Dresden opera when he says shall we go and hear them to his eldest son. I don't think it's anything to do with that. I think it's to do with something much more profound which is that opera by then -- I'm talking about the early 1720s, 1730s had already, if you like, taken a wrong turning. When you think of how fantastically innovative opera was at its inception back in the 1600s with people like Monteverdi, where it was a type of through composed utterance in musical terms, natural speech rhythms and also closed form dance and the basics of what later became an aria. By the time you get to 1700 just a century later it's already started to fall into two different categories. You have all the action packed into recitative.

Recitative being very fast paced, patter rhythms that tell you the story, the narrative. And then moments of reflection and emotional response to the action in the form of arias, usually da capo arias in the sense that you start with an A section, it goes onto a B section and then you go back to the A section. I'm feeling sad but my heart is grieving. I feel still sadder and so on. I think that Bach, although he took quite a lot of those conventions and turned them on their head, felt that there was something much more profound to be expressed through a different form which we might call mutant opera. It's as though opera has jumped tracks as it were and it becomes a kind of music drama that doesn't require the stage. It doesn't require makeup. It doesn't require wigs. It doesn't require spears and costumes and swords. It simply requires the musicians to deliver in a very, very dramatic but not theatrical way.

Directed / Produced by Jonathan Fowler and Dillon Fitton