This weekend, December 3-5, Nicholas McGegan returns to Powell
Hall for a program of music by JS Bach and his less-famous son CPE
Bach. I talked with McGegan via Zoom on November 18th. Here’s a
somewhat condensed transcript of that conversation. The complete
video interview is available on Chuck’s Culture Channel
on YouTube.
[Preview the music with my commercial-free
Spotify playlist.]
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| L-R: Nicholas McGegan and Chuck Lavazzi |
Chuck Lavazzi (CL): On December 3rd through 5th, you will
be here with the St Louis Symphony Orchestra (SLSO)
performing music by a pair of Bachs. The famous Johann Sebastian
and one of his many musical sons Carl Philipp Emanuel. And since
that's the upcoming event, let's talk a little bit about both of
those guys. And I'd like to start with CPE Bach because he was a
remarkable character and is probably not that well known to a lot
of concertgoers.
Nicholas McGegan (NM): No, he's not. I think if his name
was not Bach he might, in a way, be just as well known. There's no
reason why he should be under his father's shadow, as it were.
He's a wonderful composer in his own right. In terms of the kind
of music he wrote and when he lived, he's kind of between two
periods a little bit. He's not exactly what we think of as Baroque
music, which is what, obviously, Johann Sebastian wrote. And he's
not quite classical. He's an in-betweeny, if you like. Some people
call it Rococo. But that makes it sound like mice in China, that
it's all very pretty and stuff. His music is very daring, full of
surprises. Sometimes very hard-driven. But also full of
Empfindsamkeit is what the Germans call it, sensibility. It
wears its heart on the sleeve, particularly in the slow movements.
CL: The Empfindsamer Stil
NM: Yeah, the sensibility. It's half of the Jane Austen
novel. Without the sense. It's the sensibility. And he was much
admired by Haydn, particularly, and he lived a really a very long
time. He was born in 1714, but he died only four years before
Mozart died, in 1788. So he had a long career. He worked for a
good many years for King Frederick the Great of Prussia in Berlin,
which was very much a full-time job because when the flute playing
king wasn't destroying the Austrians and being rather good at the
art of war, he seems to have been an extremely good flute player.
And he'd certainly played a flute concerto every day of his life
if he could. And so his musicians were kept very busy providing
the flute concertos, making sure that they didn't have any bits he
couldn't play.
CL: Yes, very important . [laughter]
NM: But he must've been really good, and he composed a
little bit, too--maybe corrected by one of his lackeys. But then,
CP Bach took over from his father in law, Georg Philipp Telemann,
as the main Mr. Music Man, if you like, for Hamburg. So he had a
very glittering career. He was famous as a keyboard player, but
also as a theorist. He wrote a wonderful book on how to play the
harpsichord and continuo, playing the harpsichord in the
orchestra. And he also wrote a lot of music which is not performed
today. He wrote many Passions, just like his father wrote the “St.
John Passion” and “St. Matthew Passion.” He had to produce one
every year for 20 years. And they're a lot more modest than-- or
should we just say - let's be honest - a lot shorter than the
Matthew Passion. The Hamburgers maybe were less patient. They only
wanted them to last an hour. But he wrote a lot of those. He wrote
oratorios. The only thing he never wrote-- just like his dad
didn't, he didn't write any opera.
CL: I know he also wrote quite a few symphonies, and we
have a couple of them on the program.
MM: He did indeed. First for strings, then he published
much grander ones with lots of wind instruments. And we're doing
one of each. We're doing one of the string symphonies, which
was written and dedicated to the Baron van Swieten who was the
person who later in life wrote the librettos for Haydn's
“Creation” and “Seasons” and was a great lover of what, in those
days, they referred to as ancient music. In other words, people
like JS Bach. And he was a great friend and supporter of Mozart.
His symphonies are extremely, let's say, wild. The one with winds
is definitely what's called the sturm und drang, storm and stress
style. This is very much away from the sort of comfy elegant music
of some of the earlier part of the 18th century, or the slightly
pre-classical music of his much younger brother, Johann Christian,
who was a great influence on Mozart. This is wild, pushing the
boundaries music-- and virtuoso too. You could tell that decaf had
not been invented.
CL: Well, coffee houses were very popular back then.
NM: Very popular, but it was the real thing. So you
can't get too comfy in his music, and I think that's something
that Haydn learned. Just constantly astonish, leading your
audience up the garden path; give them something they're not
expecting. And it's a terrific style he had. He also is another
wonderful link because he had a number of students on the
keyboard, two of whom were Mendelssohn's great-aunts. One of the
last pieces that CP Bach wrote was a double concerto for
Mendelssohn's great-aunts. And the Bach connection goes,
obviously, from JS Bach through to his son, CP Bach, and to
Wilhelm Friedemann, another of the sons, and then down through the
Levy's and Itzigs, the very wealthy Berlin families who then, in
the early 19th century, had Felix and Fanny, the two famous
Mendelssohns at the beginning of the 19th century. They got the
Bach bug big time, but they got it directly, as it were, through
relatives and from Bach's children.
 |
"Bach Carl Philipp Emanuel 1"
by Franz Conrad Löhr (1735–1812)[1]
Staatliche Museen zu Berlin,
Preußischer Kulturbesitz, Gemäldegalerie, M.589.
Licensed under Public Domain
via Wikimedia Commons |
CL: This brings up something else that I think you
talked about on the SLSO Zoom seminar
Wednesday (November 16), is that Bach's music was really not
well known after his death, and it tended to disappear for quite a
while until it started getting revived by people like Mendelssohn.
NM: Absolutely, I mean, a lot of composers go into that
sort of slump, if you like. Vivaldi's another case. If you'd asked
Beethoven who Vivaldi was, he probably wouldn't have had the first
idea. But Beethoven did know who Bach was because he kept a copy
of the 48 Preludes and Fugues by his bed. And he'd studied that.
But really, the only composer who kept a good deal of popularity
after his death was Handel, but not the operatic Handel, the one
that we know and love as much these days, but the oratorio one.
And so oratorios like Messiah and so on, continued to be
performed, and have continued to be performed up to the present
day. But most composers go out of fashion, and I think you can say
that that happened to JS Bach big time.
CL: In fact, two of the pieces you're going to play in
the second half, the Brandenburg Concertos, just really sat on a
shelf for many years.
NM: They did. And I think one of the reasons for this,
is that JS Bach, relatively speaking, published very little of his
music. It's slightly odd, in the sense that he lived so many years
in Leipzig, which really to some extent still is the center of the
European book trade. The Leipzig book fair is still a big deal,
and it certainly was in Bach's day. If you wanted a book
published, or you wanted to find a book, you went to Leipzig, and
somebody would have a copy. That's where the publishers exhibited
their wares. And so Bach's published works are merely works for
the ages. He published organ preludes, he published French Suites,
German Suites. These are publishing monuments, not terribly
practical. Music that was meant to be played, generally just
circulated in manuscript, and that's what happened to the
Brandenburgs. Now, first of all, let's get the fact that the
Brandenburgs, he didn't write them as Brandenburgs, he wrote them
as concertos for next Thursday, wherever he happened to be. The
earliest one is Brandenburg 1, some of which dates from 1713 when
he was in Weimar. And then he went to the Court of the Prince of
Anhalt-Köthen, who being a Calvinist had no organ in his chapel,
so there was no sacred music to write. But the prince himself
played the viola de gamba, and could even have played in
Brandenburg 6, in fact, there's a gamba part. And so what the
Brandenburgs really is, is a marketing piece.
CL: A resume, in fact.
NM: A resume. One is that if you wanted to publish
anything, or you wanted to get something to look like a finished
piece of music, in those days you'd publish them in half dozens,
occasionally in dozens. So that you have the Twelve Concertos by
Corelli. You have the Six Concertos of Handel, Opus 3. The Twelve
Concertos, Opus 6. So to have six Brandenburgs is sort of the
standard unit, as it were, to show what you mean. He could have
published them, but no one could have played them. They're very,
very, very difficult, and need a very fancy orchestra that most
people couldn't have afforded in those days. But it is, on the
other hand, a resume, as you say. It's his, "This is what I can
do. This is some of the wildest concertos that you'll ever hear."
Put them in a nice book. Write a lovely preface. A very obsequious
preface in French to the Marquess. Dated exactly 300 years ago,
incidentally. It's March the 24th. Happens to be Telemann's
birthday. Very good reasons for playing them, I think, and sent
them off to the marquess who was a close relative of the king of
Prussia, not Frederick the great, but his rather eccentric father
and apparently put them on the shelf. And that was it. He may have
opened the score. He may not have done. He might've received
things like this every couple of weeks. Lots of people would like
to work for a member of the Royal family and they send in their
CV, some saying, "I'm really good as a wine waiter." And some
saying, "Oh, I've written some concertos. You might like them." So
they sat in the library, and they didn't really get opened. They
went through various hands until the middle of the 19th century.
CL: You talked about how someone might've said,
"I'm a great wine waiter." Composers were kind of seen at the time
and musicians just as potential employees, probably not much more
respectable than a wine waiter really.
NM: Yes. I mean, he was the boss. But it was quite
normal, for example, in 18th century England to put out a wish to
have a servant who could be a valet and horn player. There are
even pictures of people pretty much doing that because you want to
have a really good doorbell, you hired two horn players who would
stand. There's even a house in Devon where there are two hooks
beside the door for the two horns so that the servants could rush
down and go, "Toot, toot, toot," when somebody's carriage arrived
to welcome them.
CL: As long as we're talking about these concerti, let's
not fail to mention who's going to be playing them the third
through the fifth. The viola parts are going to be played by Andrew Francois and Beth Guterman Chu.
NM: . Wonderful members of the St. Louis Symphony. And
it's unusual to have concertos for violas. On the other hand,
composers themselves loved playing the viola. Bach loved playing
the viola. We know that. And Mozart loved playing the viola almost
more than the violin. The Sinfonia concertante, for example, he
played the viola. So even though the viola doesn't have much of a
solo repertoire, it loves being in the ensemble. And I'm sure Bach
wrote this for himself to play with a mate because it's definitely
very intimate. It's a musician's piece. You can just imagine this.
It's the smallest of the Brandenburgs, not really designed for a
concert hall at all, more like a drawing room and it's written for
six or seven musicians to have a good time.
 |
"Statue of J.S. Bach in Leipzig" by Zarafa
at the English language Wikipedia.
Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0
via Wikimedia Common |
CL: Yeah. Well, in fact, Beth Guterman Chu was talking
about how, at least in the second movement, it felt like an
intimate conversation among friends.
NM: Oh, sure. And these people, travel wasn't so easy in
the 18th century. So if were at the prince's court, you were there
most of the time. You'd get to know your colleagues and you're
going to get to know them very well until you would want to have
music to play in the little ensemble that he had. Bach only had
about 10 musicians there. So it's known as an orchestra but it's
not what we would think of as an orchestra, more like an expanded
chamber group.
CL: We don't want to also forget Yin Xiong, who is
playing the cello part.
NM: The cello part plays with the violas a lot. The
gambas sort of sit in the background being super sophisticated.
String instruments like the violin, the viola, at lesser extent
the cello, were not regarded as aristocrats' instruments. The
viola de gamba was the aristocratic instrument. It was played by
princes. It was played also by women, the most famous being, I
think her name is Madame Henriette, or possibly Madame Victoire.
One of the daughters of Louis XV played the viola de gamba. And
she has her viola de gamba on a little tuffet, like with muffet
because obviously she's got those dresses they used to wear that
looked as if they would quite like to be a sofa. It's hard to get
a gamba between your knees if that's what you're wearing. But you
could play it on a tuffet. And lots of pieces are dedicated to
her. There was also in England a famous lady called Anna Ford, who
actually played the viola de gamba in public. But the cello was
also an aristocratic instrument later on. And, indeed, three or
four Princes of Wales, including the present one, have at some
time in their lives played the cello. I know that the present one
plays the cello because I was at university at the same time as he
was. And I actually nearly had to conduct him playing the cello
once in an orchestra. Just escaped it. Can you imagine trying to
tell a prince he was flat and wanting to keep your head?
CL: Likely an issue there. So this brings me to another
thing I wanted to talk about. It's not specifically about this
concert. But it's something you brought up yesterday in the call.
The whole soundscape surrounding music of this period has changed.
I mean, the soundscape of our world has changed in general. In
fact, there was an excellent book with that title by R. Murray
Schafer that came out in 1993
[https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/585024.The_Soundscape]
chronicling how the world has gotten increasingly louder over the
past few hundred years. But these were all works intended to be
performed in very small rooms for very small audiences. And there
are issues, I would think, trying to scale them up for, say a
2,500-seat hall, like Powell Symphony Hall.
NM: Yeah. Certainly, things have changed a lot. It's not
only sound, but light has also changed. We've got something called
electricity. I think Paris was the first city to get streetlights,
had about 50 of them. We can imagine everybody else just wandered
around in the dark. We can't imagine that now. Of course, there
were many fewer people. And you simply, in the 18th century,
couldn't light a concert hall that held 2,500 people. You could
light a theatre because you lit the stage. And you lit the
individual boxes. But everything else was-- I should think we
would think of it as pretty dingy.
So concert halls tended to be pretty small. Can you imagine
lighting every single lightbulb individually in Powell Hall, how
long that would take? And a candle burns half an hour, constantly
needing to be changed. So aristocrat's houses had chambers, the
knights' rooms or princes' rooms or ballrooms, but they would hold
relatively small number of people. And the great thing about a
prince's concert is in order for it to be classy, you want to keep
as many people out as you can. You wouldn't want anybody less than
an archduchess actually to be listening. It would lower the tone.
And even if there was only one prince there and he was the guy
paying you, that was enough. You could also be sure that CP Bach
working in Berlin JS Bach in Cothen and the Prince Nikolaus
Esterhazy for Haydn, these were all people who loved music. And a
lot of them played themselves. And so we're talking a very
sophisticated audience who would, should we say, get the
complications of Bach whether they were actually playing it and
had to experience how hard it is to play, or just listening to the
intricacies of it. And being up close and personal to something
like a Brandenburg really helps you hear just how intricate these
pieces are. Orchestra music comes in the later part of the 18th
century, but even then Haydn's concert hall is seven or eight
hundred. That was considered a large space because they couldn't
light anything bigger, and so-- nor could the orchestra see.
So what we think of as a concerto is something like the
Tchaikovsky piano concerto. These, though, were concertos because
they feature a single or a small group of instruments, in these
cases, small groups of instruments, what in the 18th century would
have been called concerti grossi, big concertos rather than just
one solo, like “The Seasons” of Vivaldi and an audience of maybe
25 people sitting round. It's a very different aural experience.
And when you're trying to project that into a space of a couple of
thousands, the size of the coliseum in Rome, if you like, you have
to do them in a slightly different way. In the same way, as if you
were not using a microphone, if you're talking to a small group,
you're talking in one way. If you're talking to two and a half
thousand people, you're talking in a different way. You're
enunciating, you're speaking more slowly, and so on. I've done all
the Brandenburgs in Powell Hall and they worked fine, but it would
be a very different experience. I always wished that the artist
was on stage. Now, funnily enough, the hall where Bach played in
the palace in Cothen still survived. We can see how big it was.
Architecturally, it was altered in the early 19th century. It's
been modernized, but it hasn't been made any bigger. And we don't
even know if that was the room they were actually played in. It
could have been done in a smaller one. I was quite recently in a
palace just north of Berlin, where Frederick the Great lived when
he was a young man. And there is a music room, but it was too
big--35 feet by 35 or something. He had a much smaller room around
the corner where he really liked to play, which is the size of the
average living room.
CL: So as a conductor, are there adjustments you have to
consciously make? Are ways that you have to think differently
about this music because you're performing for such a large group?
NM: Well, one thing you have to do is not to try to
aggrandize it so that you sort of sling it to the back of the
hall. What you want to do is to encourage the audience maybe to
move a couple of inches further towards us, sit on the edge of
their chair, and just get used to the intimacy of the music.
CL: Draw the audience in as they sit, as opposed to
trying to push the music out.
NM: Yeah. Yeah, I think it would be great if everyone
was in theyou first 10 rows, frankly. The harpsichord is the ideal
instrument for a small room. If you had a Bösendorfer or a great
big Steinway on stage trying to play this, it would just drown
everything out. On the other hand, a harpsichord trying to play
the Tchaikovsky piano concerto would be extremely silly. First of
all, you wouldn't have enough notes. You have no dynamics. And
harpsichords are designed for small spaces. So I hope they won't
mic the harpsichord to make it artificially loud because, in vast
places, it needs to be there as part of the sound, but it's not
adding any extra chords or anything like that because Bach's
already fully scored. It’s continuo, so. It adds a bit of pep to
the rhythm as well.
CL: And we have a harpsichordist, Mark Schuldiner. Have
you worked with him before?
NM: Yes. Several times in St Louis, he came down when we
were doing, I think it was the Vivaldi “Gloria,” and he actually
played the organ. But I also know him from Chicago because one of
the things he does besides playing very well-- is he also is an
excellent tuner. And I was doing a concert of 17th Century Jewish
music from Venice. And there was suddenly Mark providing all the
keyboards. So it was great to see him again. So this is the third
time I've worked with him. He's terrific. So that will be great
fun to see him again. It's just a hop, skip, and a jump down from
Chicago with the harpsichord. I don't know if he's bringing his
own harpsichord. We'll find out.
CL: Okay. I think that's mostly what I had on my list of
things to bring up. I do want to say this. I have seen you many
times at Powell Hall and one of the things I always notice, you
don't just walk out on stage, you bound out on stage. I mean at
one point commented on the fact that you ran out on stage, and you
walked up to the podium, and you rubbed your hands together and I
said it was like he was saying, "Oh, this is going to be such
fun."
NM: Well, it's going to be, I hope. I'm not sure I'm
quite the bounder. I don't bound quite as much, but I do a little
bit more than I used to because I had a hip replacement, so I can
bounce a bit more. I'm not quite the Bugs Bunny me going out
there, that that might have been a number of years ago.
I think we should also mention Yin Xiong again. She's going to
be playing this remarkable CP Bach cello concerto. It's an unusual
piece because there aren't that many concertos for the cello
compared to the violin. And CP Bach's ones also are written for
several instruments. He would write a concerto which could be
played on the cello, on the keyboard, or the flute. The music is
essentially the same, he's adapting them perfectly for whichever
instrument it is. So he had to write a flute concerto, of course,
because the king probably paid him to. But then he said, "Well,
why not make it for the cello as well? We've got a mate who plays
the cello, and I'm sure he'd love to have this concerto." And then
he said, "Well, I'm a great keyboard player. I could play it on
the harpsichord." So it gives it a bit more of a shelf life.
I have to say, the one she's playing in A major is my favorite
of the three, very sparkly in the last winter, especially, but
with a very, very deep, sad, miserable, back to that very
sensitive, full of sensibility slow movement, wearing your heart
on your sleeve, which of course, as the 18th century goes on,
becomes increasingly part of the makeup of how people thought. In
Goethe, you've got “The Sorrows of the Young Werther,” which is
all about wearing your skin inside out, and feelings, deep
feelings. And that's very much something, of course, that CP Bach
got from Daddy. The slow movement of Brandenburg 6 is a very deep,
beautiful, quiet piece, but he traded on it. And the slow
movements of nearly all the pieces that we're playing, the CP Bach
pieces, come to that format, and they're really wonderful.
CL: So you can see the seeds of what would eventually
become the century of the Romantic sensibility.
NM: Absolutely. And it's not the sort of music that's
merely elegant. They had beating hearts, and they loved and lost
just as we do.
CL: Yes. We tend to have this artificial image of these
stiffly-posed people in wigs and elaborate gowns, and we, yeah,
forget that they were just as human as the rest of us.
NM: Yeah. And the ones we're thinking of are only the
rich ones. Can you imagine what it'd be like if you're basically
living on the street or making one of those dresses by
candlelight, working through the night, sewing the silk for
something that the queen might wear once.
CL: Yes. It isn't the way it looks in those Hollywood
movies from the '50s, but [laughter]--
NM: Yeah, the scarlet pimpernel is not how it was for
everybody.
CL: Yes. I always say that I'm glad I was not born
before the age of relatively painless dentistry, myself.
NM: Yes. Young, rich, and good teeth is what you needed.
CL: Nic McGegan, thanks for taking some time to talk to
me. Once again, you are going to be conducting music by CPE Bach
and Johann Sebastian Bach, December 3rd through the 5th at Powell
Hall, slso.org for more information. I look forward to seeing you
on stage again because you always, as I alluded to earlier, have
this tremendous joy and enthusiasm for the music. And you know
that that really communicates itself through the audience.
NM: Thank you. I can't wait to come back because I was
supposed to have a concert last February, which is of course just
when the symphony was not performing, so I missed out on my annual
jaunt to St. Louis. But I get to come now, and that's absolutely
terrific. Can't wait. And with a live audience too.
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