Bach: Chromatic Fantasia and Fugue in D minor,                                        Phil Grant, piano

Below is an excerpt  from Cabeza and the Meaning of Wilderness: An Exploration of Nature, and Mind which discusses this work:

30

THE FINAL FUGUE II

                 And even in our sleep, the pain that does not forget falls drop by drop upon       

            the heart until, against our will, comes wisdom by the awful grace of God above.

                —Aeschylus, Agamemnon

Schubert understood ITs “intentness and entire relentlessness.” In the last move­ment of the B-flat Sonata where I wrote “an almost terrifying intensity of passion, not the passion of wanting but the passion of Being,” IT is there, utterly intent, to­tally relentless. Beethoven understood ITs “intentness and entire relentlessness,” and expressed it in especially the first two movements of the Ninth Symphony. And Bach, too, had no choice but to understand.

      Writes son Carl (C.P.E. Bach) in his father’s obituary:

After thirteen years of blissful married life with his first wife [Maria Bar­bara], the misfortune overtook him, in the year 1720, upon his return to Cöthen from a journey with his Prince to Carlsbad, of finding her dead and buried, although he had left her hale and hearty on his departure. The news that she had been ill and died reached him only when he en­tered his own house.

      One of Bach’s most remarkable works was composed at this time and many schol­ars consider it a memorial to Maria Barbara: the final movement of the Partita No. 2 for Solo Violin. The Chaconne . . . in D minor. Extraordinary is the only word possible. What Bach elicits from a single stringed instrument is unparalleled in mu­sic. You’d swear four instruments were performing. But what’s most remarkable is the depth of emotion: even my father, a normally reserved and emotionally re­strained man, commented on how deeply it moved him, after I gave it to my parents for Christmas. There are three sections to the music. First: unmitigated grief slowly raised to the nth degree. Then an interlude: a memory of how joyous it had been. And finally: absolute and total despair. . . .

      There is music of reproductive success . . . and music of spirituality. Virtu­ally all popular music is the former; just listen to the words. There are a few excep­tions: some George Harrison songs (my first girlfriend, Melinda, was very upset when I told her that “It’s Been a Long, Long, Long Time” on the White Album—“How could I ever have lost you, when I loved you”—was really referring to the IT, the Whole); possibly James Taylor’s “Fire and Rain” about a friend who killed her­self (and every time I hear it, at the supermarket or the dentist’s office, it makes me think of Nell); and perhaps Crystal Gayle’s “Midnight in the Desert” . . . “searching for the truth.” My research on this topic is limited to what I hear at Wegmans, Fly­ing J truck-stops, and twiddling the dial to stay awake at 3 a.m. crossing Iowa, so I might be leaving out a few.

      Ultimately I have to classify the Chaconne as the music of reproductive suc­cess, or rather reproductive failure, and for that reason I listen to it infre­quently—but when I do I need lots of Kleenex; just replaying it in my mind to write this has made me weep. But another work from that time, slightly later, is different. The Chro­matic Fantasia and Fugue . . . again, in D minor. The Fantasia: up and down the keyboard Bach rants and raves. Previously unheard of, undreamt of har­monic modulations. Crashing chords and cascades of notes not unlike Schubert in places. But in the end it fades away and, as with the first movement of the Beethoven Sonata No. 32, the very self that wants like nothing on earth to regain those “years of bliss­ful married life” . . . dies away. And arising as a phoenix from the ashes—the Fugue. This is the very first fugue I attempted to play. Relentlessly and ruthlessly the theme climbs chromatically, intent, 100%, on ITs own Ends. Oblivious, 100%, to Bach suf­fering. Because . . . as Bach shows he understands, there really is no Bach. Only, ONLY . . . IT.

      And what are those ends? Huang Po says, “Begin to reason about it and you imme­diately fall into error.” The quantum world that is the ground of our being is 100% unreasonable. All the Woman of the Lightning could say was that she helped God “turn,” obviously knowing this was a pathetically inadequate metaphor. Still, I can say from my own experience that these Ends are of infinite importance com­pared with our own concerns, and include IT knowing ITself . . . through us. We, whose lives are not our own . . . but ITs Own. (If you don’t believe me, if you think your life is your own, then please advise me where you were one hundred years ago, how you got here, where you’ll be in another hundred and . . . how you can even read, understand, and ponder this sentence.) Words fail but music, the very greatest music, the “higher revelation than all wisdom and philosophy” music . . . does not.

      Bach remarried, seemingly happily, though biographer Klaus Eidam calls Maria Barbara “the love of his life,” surely never forgotten. In fact I am convinced he re­membered her dearly in his St. John Passion. The St. Matthew is by far the more famous and highly acclaimed. As mentioned in “Guru III,”  I frequently listened to it when I was about nineteen or twenty: virtually always the part leading up to and including Christ’s betrayal. This is, as far as Christianity is concerned, the original, the prototypical “dark night of the soul.” Christ perceives everything that will hap­pen, and three times prays during that long night, as all his “ardent” disciples fall fast asleep, “My Father, if it be possible, may this cup pass from me.” But. Always there follows the “But not as I will, rather as You will.” Then Judas arrives with “a great multitude bearing swords and staves,” and what was to me the most moving part: a soprano and alto singing a duet: “They bind him! They take him away!”

      Having been raised in the Unitarian Church, this was my first real exposure to the Passion, and I identified with Christ greatly. I too felt bound and taken. I too longed for release from my suffering.

      But the St. John goes farther. Much farther. First, the final chorus “Rest well be­loved, sweetly sleeping,” and the following chorale “Oh Lord, when comes that final day . . . what joy ’twill be to gaze upon His Holy face . . .” are deeply stir­ring and almost terrifyingly sad, and were my mother’s favorite parts. Only after I read about Maria Barbara fifteen years or so ago in two biographies did it hit me. That last cho­rus and chorale—Bach wasn’t thinking of Christ . . . but of his beloved first wife! If only to gaze . . . upon her holy face. . . .

      Interestingly, while the dialogue of both Passions comes from the Bible, in the case of the St. John no one knows who wrote the words for the choruses, cho­rales, and arias. Some even suggest Bach himself wrote them. And it happens that the opening chorus is of an entirely different character from the rest. The words include “Show us, through your Passion [of dying on the cross] that you, for endless time, are the true Son of God.”

      This is Bach at his greatest, his most infinitely and eternally profound. There is an instrumental opening to the piece: a simple figure in the bass keeps re­peating, over and over and over, and this undercurrent continues throughout the movement, rising and falling in a rhythmic intensity that brings to my mind the image of the vast ocean of Eternity, lapping at the shores of Time. And above the undercurrent enter oboes and flutes in such a mysterious intertwining that it is as if the very Truth ITself were about to be revealed. Then the chorus: Show us, Show us, Show us, over and over and over, Show us . . . through your Passion, Show us . . . through your suffering . . . Show us . . . that you are the true son of God.

      I can’t help believing Bach himself wrote the words and knew very well that while he had written the final chorus and chorale for Maria Barbara and for the hu­man Bach who longed for her . . . that the opening chorus was for the inhuman, the eternal Bach. That the human Bach, for Truth to be revealed, must suffer just as Christ did on the cross . . . and, and turn, die . . . so that the inhuman, eternal Bach could be resurrected.

      The intervening years brought much fine music, but only the Kyrie and Dona Nobis Pacem of the B minor Mass reached the level of the St. John. But then. . . .