The One and Only J.S. Bach? Not So Fast . . .

Robert De Niro, in a flawless pink sports coat, walks to his Town Car in the hot Las Vegas desert sun. He gets in, turns on the ignition, and the automobile bursts into a spectacular fireball. Loud music accompanies the dapper gambler as he is apparently projected through flames to other worlds, and it accompanies us into the title sequence of “Casino.”

For three hours Martin Scorsese’s 1995 film will be filled with a soundtrack of almost nonstop rock ‘n’ roll and Vegas-style tunes. Frankie Avalon will make a walk-on appearance. But “Casino” begins and ends with the final chorus from what is regularly hailed as the most profound work in all of music, the “St. Matthew” Passion, Bach’s enormously powerful slow saraband of affliction, a supreme contemplation of man’s fate.

And that music has an extraordinary effect, framing the film in spiritual grandeur. The final “St. Matthew” chorus turns the tribulations of common hoods and hookers into the stuff of epic tragedy. Even on the visceral level, a Vegas car bombing Bachified becomes truly apocalyptic. Bach improves everything he touches, and these days he touches quite a lot.

Friday is the 250th anniversary of Bach’s death. The classical music business treats big, round-number anniversaries of births and deaths as pretty much equivalent. And because Bach is Bach and because this anniversary coincides with the year 2000, it is likely to be the biggest classical music anniversary that any of us will live to experience. Indeed, the celebration has long begun.

It kicked off last August with the most ambitious recording project in history, a release of the complete works of J.S. Bach, some 1,200 pieces on 153 CDs packaged in cardboard cubes that fit into a small suitcase. It continues in a thousand ways.

The indefatigable John Eliot Gardiner, for instance, is spending his year touring churches throughout Europe performing all of Bach’s nearly 200 surviving sacred cantatas on the liturgical days for which they were composed. At a time when the international recording industry is depressed, there are two new cantata projects (each around 80 CDs) in the works, one in Germany and one in Japan. Bach books, Bach CD-ROMs, Bach bluegrass, Bach candies and coffee mugs are all part of Bach here, there and everywhere in 2000. Yes, Esa-Pekka Salonen and the Los Angeles Philharmonic have their Bach CD on the way as well.

Yet despite this bullish Bach industry, there are glaring shortages. You may find Bach exercises in most living-room piano benches, but you won’t hear Bach played all that often in most concert halls or by most of the world’s major musicians. That the Los Angeles Philharmonic has programmed Bach’s “St. Matthew” Passion for next Easter is a newsworthy exception, and it still doesn’t change the fact that the vast majority of Bach performances, large and small, are out of the way or exceptional. The best place to find a concentration of Bach is at the special festivals, such as the annual summer ones in Carmel and Eugene, Ore. Otherwise Bach tends to be relegated to the province of specialists, students, amateurs and irreverent non-classical musicians.

So on the one hand, Bach is revered as the greatest composer who ever lived, and the most universal (at least before the Beatles). His music is suitable for every occasion and adaptable to just about any style that has been created in the 250 years since his death; it is as technically advanced, elegant and deep as music gets; it is beloved the world over. Yet on the other hand, it is safe to say that of all the great composers, Bach may be the least well-known by the majority of music lovers and musicians. How many people, for instance, have a working knowledge of the cantatas or organ music? Bach is a big subject, and this, in fact, is the first time in history that the full scope of Bach’s genius is finally becoming widely accessible.

In 1950, the 200th anniversary of Bach’s death was such a nonevent that five years later, when Glenn Gould made his spectacular recording debut with the “Goldberg” Variations, his success was double. Listeners were not only astonished by this charismatic, eccentric and technically amazing young Canadian pianist, but also by music that many of them didn’t know. Even by the early 1980s, Morton Feldman, the American avant-garde composer of transcendentally slow music and a great lover of Bach, could complain that Bach was only played in churches. “What’s da deal?” he said, exaggerating his thick Brooklyn accent. “If I wanna hear a ‘Brandenburg’ Concheerto, do I haveta convoit?”

That combination of fame and obscurity goes back to the composer’s time. In the first half of the 18th century, when Bach was a working musician employed at various courts and churches in Germany, public concerts were not yet institutionalized. For a period, he wrote music suitable for public entertainment--the typical venue for the “Brandenburg” Concertos, the orchestral suites and the concertos for keyboard or violin were coffeehouses and taverns--and those works have been consistently performed through most of the 20th century. But most of his keyboard music is for a large church organ at one extreme, or at the other extreme, it’s home music for harpsichord or clavichord, written for instruction or for the individual player with perhaps an auditor or two sitting next to the performer.

In Leipzig, Germany, where Bach served as a Lutheran church composer, one of his tasks was to supply a new cantata every Sunday on a relevant passage from the Scripture for the week’s service, producing five new yearly cycles. In his later years, Bach became an almost purely theoretical musician; works like his “Musical Offering” and “Art of the Fugue” were to be admired as much for the compositional elegance and ingenuity as for the way they sounded.

Though highly respected for his compositional skills and for his formidable improvisation as an organist, Bach was also viewed by his contemporaries as counterpoint-besotted and unnecessarily complex. He was the end of a line. With his death in 1750, his music ceased to be played and the Baroque era was over.

The next generations of composers, Mozart and Beethoven among them, knew Bach mainly from scores. Mendelssohn and Schumann attempted a revival more than 80 years after Bach’s death, but it only partially took (it was the fashion at the time to turn harpsichords like the ones Bach played into desks). It was not until the 100th anniversary of Bach’s death that an effort was made to publish his complete works, and the project took nearly half a century to realize.

But by the beginning of the 20th century, when the scores finally did become available, the Baroque period was ancient history, and Bach’s music seemed in desperate need of updating. Mahler made his own orchestral versions of the suites. Schoenberg, Stravinsky and Elgar did their own Bach arranging. Walt Disney chose Bach to open “Fantasia,” but in Leopold Stokowski’s orchestra transcription of the organ D-Minor Toccata and Fugue.

The intimidation factor is also part of the Bach equation. It is simply impossible to consider Bach and his accomplishment and not be overwhelmed. No artist has ever created so much of substance. Bach the structural genius is evident in the vast array of keyboard works, which include the 48 preludes and fugues of “The Well-Tempered Clavier,” the “Goldberg” Variations, the inventions and suites and partitas, the many magisterial works for organ, the solo instrumental pieces and Bach’s most elaborate contrapuntal exercise, “The Art of the Fugue.” Bach the spiritual genius gave us the astonishing passions according to St. Matthew and St. John, as well as the B-Minor Mass that culminated his career. The sacred cantatas alone--which range from mini-dramas that Peter Sellars has staged to essays on the human condition--penetrate the emotions to an encyclopedic degree unequaled in artistic form.

While the quantity, majesty and depth of this output--to say nothing of the technical difficulties in mastering the performance of it--regularly freeze awe-struck professional musicians, the universality and malleability of the music have the opposite effect of drawing in just about everybody else. Your Aunt Marge wouldn’t hesitate to play a simple version of the famous melody of “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring” on her Hammond organ; a simple tune Bach jotted down in the notebooks for his wife, Anna Magdalena, was turned into a teeny-bop anthem in the 1950s.

The secret may be that Bach produces so much with so little. A subject for a fugue can seem like a musical genome. The musical line unfolds, expands, entwines with other lines like it or complementary to it, it reproduces, and ultimately generates a musical organism that appears to have a life and a soul. And like living organisms, these musical life forms come in all sizes, shapes and varieties. In his cult book “Godel, Escher, Bach,” Douglas Hofstadter spins what he calls a “metaphorical fugue” on how the intricacies of Bach’s music explain the way we understand the ultimate structures of mathematics.

Like an essential characteristic of natural order, the implications in Bach’s music, then, can seem infinite. Three years ago, Yo-Yo Ma, reconsidering the solo cello suites, collaborated in suite projects with a garden designer, an 18th century visionary architect (through film), a postmodern choreographer, an independent filmmaker, a Kabuki actor and an ice dance team, in the theory that there is no end to the places Bach can lead you and no end to the uses of his music for artists--all artists.

*

Ma perches on an important branch in the Bach performing tradition--the cult of personality, which has kept the composer in the public’s eye even during the fallow years of Bach performance. For the high-profile virtuoso, taking up the challenge of a composer who terrified other pros could be good box office. Moreover, Bach didn’t spell out the expressive details of the solo keyboard, violin and cello music, so that when the likes of a Gould, Heifetz, Menuhin or Casals came along to champion it, these distinctive players made it sound like a reflection of themselves. But that in turn could increase the music’s intimidation factor: Gould, for instance, may have had a great deal to do with the modern interest in Bach, but the sheer force of his eccentric charisma also deterred other pianists.

And it is a reaction to that cult of personality that provided the other major contributor to how we hear, and why we get to hear Bach today. Taking umbrage at the stars’ use of the composer for personal expression, academics interested in Bach as a historical subject began promoting the performance of his music using 18th century instruments in a manner they supposed represented its original sound. When the “Brandenburg” Concertos were heard colored by piquant timbres of recorders, harpsichords, wooden flutes, natural value horns and gut-strung violins and cellos, the music seemed new again. And just as important, period-practice specialists became the ones eager to perform and record all that neglected Bach, especially the cantatas.

But with the bottomless Bach, there are always more variations on the theme--even when it comes to how he has been rediscovered. At the same time that Gould and period players were popularizing Bach for their respective audiences with their contradictory approaches, others were simply popularizing Bach, period. The French jazz pianist Jacques Loussier became an underground sensation when he played Bach with his trio in the ‘50s, and Bach became as fashionable at beatnik coffeehouses as it was in university music departments. In the late ‘60s, the Swingle Singers made vocal versions of Bach suitable for that era’s pop fans. For today’s world-music sophisticates, clarinetist Richard Stoltzman has gathered some world musicians for “WorldBeat Bach,” in which the master’s melodies are easily translated into sambas, tangos, flamenco and various other dance and jazz styles. Bach takes a beat, any beat, with no problem at all.

But then Bach can also be counted on to supply composers with a little raw material. Music history is heaped with Bach-inspired music, and it can be exceptionally successful, such as the “Bachiana Brasileiras” of Villa-Lobos. The current year has gotten composers thinking about Bach’s passions. The International Bach Academy in Stuttgart, Germany, has commissioned four new ones on the Bach model from Tan Dun, Sofia Gubaidulina, Oswoldo Golijov and Wolfgang Rihm. As an example of the multicultural interest in Bach, Tan’s contribution will include a Beijing opera troupe, the American country fiddler Mark O’Connor, the Bang on a Can cellist Maya Beiser and the academy’s Bach choir. John Adams’ next big piece, “El Nin~o,” is also passion-like, although it will have an original text when it is premiered in Paris in December and repeated by the San Francisco Symphony in January.

Indeed, given the ubiquity of his reach, it may not be such a bad thing that Bach in his purest form does not always suit the concert hall conventions. It means that Bach can be with us but still not suffer the damaging overexposure that, say, Beethoven and Brahms have. And it means that the great gift of the Bach year is that with comprehensive Bach resources now readily at hand, there is no end in sight to the excitement of discovery.

As Scorsese clearly realized when he blew up De Niro with Bach. What a way to go.

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Bach Consumer Guide

RECORDINGS

Bach 2000 (Teldec). All of Bach on CD, utilizing period instruments in generally very fine performances. Also available as individual sets.

St. Matthew Passion (Harmonia Mundi). A superb new recording led by Philippe Herreweghe that features the otherworldly British baritone Ian Bostridge as the Evangelist, and includes an outstanding CD-ROM that explores Bach’s world and the inner workings of the passion.

Cantata No. 170 (Amadeus). A newly remastered recording from 1965 of Bach’s solo alto cantata sung with a rapt depth of feeling by Maureen Forrester.

Sonatas and Partitas (Channel Classics). A new period instrument recording by the British violinist Rachel Podger, full of fabulous brio.

Requiem After J.S. Bach (Black Box). Joseph James’ (the middle names of a two-composer collective) curious adaptation of Bach’s keyboard music to fit the text of the standard requiem mass, creating a postmodern Bach collage.

WorldBeat Bach (BMG Classics). Clarinetist Richard Stoltzman’s upbeat world-music tour of Bach, mostly irresistible.

Glenn Gould Plays Bach: The Original Jacket Collection (Sony Classical). Experience Gould’s Bach as collectors did with his first 12 recordings transferred to CD in duplicates of the original albums and sounding the best they ever have.

Bach: Fazil Say (Atlantic). A controversial young Turkish pianist with striking, offbeat notions about Bach’s keyboard, some of which are exciting, some pretentious, none dull.

Complete Cantatas Vol. 9 (Erato). The latest three-disc installment in Ton Koopman’s consistently excellent cycle.

Jacques Loussier Trio: Goldberg Variations (Telarc). The French pianist who began the Bach jazz fad in the ‘50s is back with a snappy, but relatively tame, update of one of Bach’s greatest hits.

Bach Jazz (MDG). The Thomas Gabriel Trio, led by a German pianist, cuts loose with real power on the First Keyboard Concerto and the Second Partita.

Lute Suites (Delos). A transcription for eight-string guitar in performances by Paul Galbraith full of poetic beauty.

BOOKS

Johann Sebastian Bach: The Learned Musician (Norton). One of the world’s leading Bach authorities, Christoph Wolff, takes a detailed look at Bach’s life, applying modern scholarship as well as his own encyclopedic knowledge of the composer, in an elegantly written and nontechnical biography essential for enthusiast or expert.

The New Bach Reader (Norton). A revised and expanded edition of the classic work that provides an endlessly compelling glimpse of Bach and his times through documents by the composer and his contemporaries.

Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (Basic Books). A 20th-anniversary edition of Douglas Hofstadter’s impressively quixotic and inventive examination of Bach as a solver of eternal mysteries.

WEB SITE

https://www.bachdigital.org. A joint project by IBM and the Berlin State Library, which goes online Wednesday and will contain, within a couple of years, digitized scores of Bach’s complete works.