What Does It Mean to Play the ‘Best’ of Bach?

LEIPZIG, Germany — “Bach’s best.” It’s an irresistible concept, but does it mean anything?

Such judgments are always fraught when it comes to artistic creations, even more so where the primary purpose of the works was not artistic but religious. That is the case with Bach’s sacred cantatas, the focus of this year’s Bachfest Leipzig, which ran from June 8 through June 17.

Sheer beauty, whatever that may mean, will take you only so far. Bach’s music in the cantatas, as Richard Taruskin noted in The New York Times almost two decades ago, “was a medium of truth, not beauty.”

“And the truth he served was bitter,” Taruskin continued. “His works persuade us — no, reveal to us — that the world is filth and horror, that humans are helpless, that life is a pain, that reason is a snare.”

So what exactly can “best” mean? The works that seduce our ears most, or the ones that most effectively scare the dickens out of us with visions of fire and brimstone? (The festival seemed to favor pretty and vividly dramatic sounds without immersing itself unduly in blood and gore.)

The distinction matters, because if these works are to gain wider circulation, they should be understood for what they are: music of Bach the musical preacher. And wider circulation is what this Bachfest was seeking for them.

The festival, financed mainly by the city of Leipzig since its founding in 1999, is administered by the Bach Archive here, in the city where Bach lived and worked from 1723 to his death in 1750. The idea of a ring of cantatas, loosely modeled after presentations of Wagner’s “Der Ring des Nibelungen” down the road in Bayreuth, arose from a 2016 discussion between John Eliot Gardiner, the president of the archive, and Michael Maul, then the dramaturge and now the artistic director of the festival.

Maul was looking for a way to elevate Bach’s 200 or so surviving sacred cantatas, in some ways the very heart of his output, to a level of public awareness comparable to that of the Passions (“St. Matthew” and “St. John”) and the Mass in B minor. Gardiner, one of the few living conductors who has performed and recorded all the sacred cantatas, many of them repeatedly, hatched the notion of a ring.

The two enlisted Peter Wollny, the director of the archive, to join them in drawing up lists of the 30, ahem, best. All nominated more than 30, and Maul culled the lists with an eye toward keeping the church calendar as complete possible.

So there was the Ring, which dominated the festival’s opening weekend — astounding, exhilarating, exhausting, a major artistic and audience success. Thirty-three cantatas, some 18 hours of music performed within 48 hours by top-flight interpreters. The list was unquestionably impressive in variety and dramatic range, as fellow completists can attest, especially as brought to life by Gardiner. Bach’s cantatas, exalted as some of them seem, were utilitarian creations. As Thomaskantor, Bach was responsible for music in the city’s major churches, St. Thomas and St. Nicholas. Each week he presented a cantata by himself or by another composer — a “sermon in sound,” as it was often called at the festival — relating to the Gospel text for the particular Sunday.

During his first years in Leipzig, Bach, though busy with teaching and family, usually presented his own works, developing several annual cycles. He often wrote from one week to the next. What that meant, Wollny said, was that Bach typically had to write a cantata in three days — from, say, Sunday afternoon to Wednesday morning — before turning it over to copyists to prepare the parts for rehearsal.

Given such stringent demands, the level of workmanship and imagination in these works is remarkably high. But how to choose one work over another for today’s listeners? (They are already somewhat falsified, as was pointed out by several speakers, by being presented three or four at a time in a concert setting.)

Maul, for his part, backed off the notion of “best” a bit in a conversation after the Ring weekend, allowing that these selections might more properly be called merely personal favorites (on whatever basis).

Christoph Wolff — the dean of Bach scholars, a Harvard research professor and a former president of the Bach Archive — observed the festival closely, and he, too, said he found the notion of “best” slightly embarrassing. But he praised the Ring as “a good way to get a feel of these works as the prime core of Bach’s output.”

In a way, Wolff added, what he called the “randomness” of the selections “makes the point better, in the range of construction, of features, of the tricks Bach uses.

The larger Bachfest returned to earth after the Ring. In the next big event, on June 12, one of the cantata interpreters, Masaaki Suzuki, led his Bach Collegium Japan in Mendelssohn’s great oratorio “Elijah,” at the Gewandhaus, the city’s main concert hall. (Mendelssohn conducted the work’s premiere in Birmingham, England, in 1846, in English; the German version used by Suzuki is called “Elias.”) Mendelssohn, the director of the Gewandhaus Orchestra from 1835 to 1847, was largely responsible for a 19th-century revival of Bach’s music in Germany, spurred by his 1829 performance of the “St. Matthew Passion” in Berlin. He also had a Bach monument, which still stands near St. Thomas, erected in 1843.

Appropriately, Suzuki beefed up his forces for “Elias” — adding American student groups he has worked with, the Yale Voxtet and Juilliard415 — and he showed a fine flair for Mendelssohn’s incandescent style, with excellent work from the expanded chorus and orchestra. The German baritone Christian Immler, also familiar to early-music audiences in New York, gave a game if somewhat underpowered account of the title role.

Then it was back to Bach for the rest of my stay in Leipzig. On June 13, again at the Gewandhaus, Andras Schiff, a consummate Bach pianist, offered an ample program of works he has played often: the “Italian” Concerto, the French Overture in B minor and the “Goldberg” Variations.

You never know entirely what to expect from the impish Schiff, whose stamina is no less amazing than his capacious memory, and he often displays both at the end of a concert with a generous helping of encores. Here he did something different.

Having finished the “Italian” Concerto to the obvious delight of the audience, he took a bow, sat down and, without comment, played the whole 12-minute piece again. The first attempt had been fast and seemed slightly out of control at moments, to be sure, though most other pianists would have proudly accepted such results.

“I repeated the whole ‘Italian’ Concerto because I was not happy with the first performance,” Schiff later explained in an email. “It happens. This is a piece that I can play in my dreams, and it’s very often one of my encores. However, at the beginning of a recital, it’s much harder to get into the spirit, and therefore I wanted to give myself a second chance, like a second serve in tennis.” As he has done so often, Schiff showed complete mastery in the French Overture and “Goldberg” Variations, his concentration and stamina clearly unaffected by the early detour.

On the next evening came the “St. Matthew Passion,” performed in St. Thomas, where Bach led the work’s premiere in 1727. Benoît Haller conducted La Chapelle Rhénane, based in Strasbourg, France. Haller’s forces were obviously well drilled, and several fine moments included the countertenor Paul-Antoine Bénos-Djian’s moving account of the aria “Erbarme dich,” a plea for mercy on behalf of all humanity.

But Haller’s ministrations seemed intrusive at times, nonexistent at others. He tended to gloss over big moments with infuriatingly brisk tempos, and the crunching appoggiatura on the work’s final chord, one of the most eloquent dissonances in all of music history, simply failed to register.

This performance, despite the distinguished setting, served in the end mainly to reaffirm the consistently high quality of the cantata performances over the weekend. So does the Ring have a future?

As much as it may disappoint fellow Ring pilgrims (and those who missed it), Maul has no current plans to repeat the event. He has already settled on other projects, running three years out.

The 2019 program features Bach in a secular vein, as court composer, with works he wrote as organist and concertmaster in Weimar; as Kapellmeister in Cöthen; and while freelancing for the courts of Dresden and Berlin. In 2020, Maul plans to feature Bach societies from around the world.

Not until 2021 will Maul attempt anything as ambitious as the Ring. A concept he is calling Bach’s “Messiah” will trace the course of Jesus’s life and death through major works of Bach in 11 concerts, proceeding from the “Magnificat” and “Christmas Oratorio” to the “St. Matthew Passion” and including some 20 cantatas.

Bach at his unmatchable best? Possibly not, in every case. Still, plenty good enough.