Europe Needs Help

The following is my brief discussion of "The Silence Before Bach", a Spanish surrealist film about nothing but featuring prominently the music of perhaps my favorite composer, Johann Sebastian Bach.

***

First, here are the reactions of two friends and me upon the conclusion of the film:

Isaac: I need a domestic beer.

Angela (to me): You are not allowed to pick a movie ever again.

Me: Europe needs help.  (turns to Isaac) A domestic beer? Like a Budweiser Tall Boy, in a can?

Isaac: In a can, yes.

Angela: You wanted to see that just so you could watch a woman in a man's dress shirt, which was actually a robe, play a cello?  There's a website for that, you know....

Me: I had no idea.  I just wanted to hear the music.  I should have simply stayed home and listed to The Hilliard Ensemble and Till Fellner and spared myself the movie.  But the girl was kinda hot, you have to admit.  And the seeing-eye dog was funny.

Angela: I liked the dog.

***

I was skeptical going in, and my fears were affirmed.  The title itself implies the thesis of the film, one that is repeated so often as to be nearly dogmatic, at least when one first begins to learn the history of Western music.  Popular wisdom, this film included, would have us believe that nothing happened before J.S. Bach.

The film opens with the camera rolling slowly through a maze of white rooms in silence, only to be encroached upon at last by a musical droid in the form of a seemingly self-propelled player piano, which is playing a selection from the Goldberg Variations.  And thus we learn that, out of nowhere, J.S. Bach was there to break the silence and to bring color into the world.

As a performer of ancient music, I can most assuredly say that weird, lovely, and complex things were happening musically long before Bach came along.  In no way should this be seen as detracting from his genius or from his influence; it simply is the truth, and Bach himself would say the same.  

One of the most noxious parts of the film is a scene of the aforementioned nearly naked cello player's (much older) lover visiting a bookshop and discussing Bach with the shopkeeper.  At one point, the shopkeeper remarks, "Without Bach, God would be third-rate."

At this point the falsehood of the film became simply too much to bear; presumably the filmmaker is of the fashionable atheistic mindset so popular among the European intelligentsia.  He is presented with a dilemma, however, when making a film about the music of one of the most devoutly Christian composers of all time.  He can't come out and call Bach a fool for believing in God, because the genius of Bach is too well-known, too obvious, that to criticize Bach for his belief would be to lie.  So, instead, we are referred to a God so small and wretched as to require Bach to elevate Him in grandeur; Bach's work, in a sense, could be viewed from this perspective in the same way one might view an especially elaborate model railroad or doll house: spectacular, but a bit esoteric, such that one might remark, "he must have a lot of time on his hands."

I suspect Bach would disagree.  I imagine, in fact, that he would have said (perhaps during his 400 km long journey on foot to meet Buxtehude), "Without Him, I would be third-rate."  That same journey, made when he was still a young man, testifies to the sounds that filled the Earth when Bach was alive.  If the world were truly silent, he would not have set out at all. 

As I noted above, I perform ancient music; I sing contrapuntal sacred polyphonic music by such composers as Josquin Des Pres, Thomas Tallis, William Byrd, Pierluigi da Palestrina, Orlando de Lassus, Tomas Luis de Victoria, and Johannes Ockeghem.  Most people have heard very little of those composers, and yet, when they hear the music for the first time, they are struck by the beauty and intricacy of it.

J.S. Bach is one of the bridges between us and that world; for it was Bach who took the old music to new heights and refined it in the process, making it his and bestowing it, in turn, upon us.  Listen to Josquin or the other great Renaissance masters and you'll hear The Art of Fugue and The Well-Tempered Clavier in there, waiting to come out.  And then along came Bach, who brought it out, and in the process made the rafters of Heaven ring.