Saint Johann Sebastian

;"Good morning, Bach," says God.
"Good morning, God," says Bach.
Good morning!..
— Alexander Galich, December 1970
;Before God,
everyone is bare.
Pitiful,
bare,
and poor.
In all music,
there is Bach,
In each of us,
there is God.
— Joseph Brodsky, 1958
;I hadn't touched Bach's Fantasia in C minor for nearly a quarter of a century.
;Ever since graduating from the conservatory, I hadn't played for about fifteen years—life simply got in the way of music. Perhaps there is something to be "adjusted" in the conservatory system after all?
;The conservatory, Siberia, a tabloid newspaper, journalism, a Catholic film studio, a clinic registry desk, scuba diving on a tropical island, and finally, music lessons... It’s a trajectory straight out of a Mikhail Zhvanetsky monologue.
;Suddenly, I decided to revisit my favorite piece. After all, I teach piano at a Thai music school. A portrait of Bach hangs right above the piano, and the children constantly ask, "What did this composer actually write?" I thought it would be wonderful to just sit down and play my beloved Fantasia for them.
;But when I printed out the sheet music and sat down to relearn it, despair washed over me. My hands felt completely alien, the keys wouldn't yield, my fingers kept slipping onto neighboring notes, and my past technique had utterly evaporated. No, I can't do this, I thought. Too much water has flowed under the bridge; my train has long since departed. The whole endeavor felt entirely impossible.
;I looked up at Maestro Bach in his white wig, and a strange idea suddenly crossed my mind: why not ask him for help, much like one would ask Santa Claus? The Maestro seemed to look down at me approvingly from his portrait. Apparently, he didn't think I was crazy at all!
;Help me, my Maestro, for we share but one single, sacred love for music!..
;And what do you think happened?
;Suddenly, a profound lightness and comfort returned to my hands; my fingers began to sing. Bach had helped. I would even say that, after a little while, the Fantasia began to sound better than it ever had before—even during my conservatory days.
;That was when I thought: what a remarkably useful practice it is to pray to the composers whose music we perform. They are saints in their own right. By the way, why haven't they been canonized yet?
;"The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth: so is every one that is born of the Spirit."
— John 3:8
;If conversations about saints are not just old wives' tales to you, but at least a matter of religious history, then let us continue.
;A saint, as the dictionary defines it, is a person particularly revered in various religions for their holiness, piety, righteousness, steadfast confession of faith, and intercession before God for humanity.
;People cannot simply appoint someone a saint for good behavior. Holiness is verified only after a person’s death. A special commission of the Vatican Tribunal spends five years gathering evidence of the candidate's intercession and examining instances of their supernatural intervention into reality—so-called "miracles"—even employing non-believing scientists to ensure an objective conclusion. Only then does the Universal Church proclaim the person blessed or a saint.
;However, I cannot recall a single instance where a beatification process was ever initiated for a composer or a musician. Perhaps we should start with Johann Sebastian Bach?
;"All my music belongs to God, and all my abilities are destined for Him."
— Johann Sebastian Bach (1685–1750)
;What do we know about Bach?
;After his parents died, he was raised by his older brother, Christoph—a musician, like everyone in the Bach lineage (at one time in those parts, the name "Bach" was synonymous with "musician").
;Story has it that Christoph owned a manuscript of works by the most celebrated composers of the day: Froberger, Pachelbel, Buxtehude, which he kept locked away in a latticed cabinet.
;Yet, by night, the ten-year-old Johann Sebastian somehow managed to slyly fish the music book out from behind the lattice and secretly copy it for himself by the light of the moon. He did this for six months straight.
;Just as his heroic labor was nearing completion, Johann Christoph caught his younger brother red-handed and confiscated both the original and the copy.
;In tears, the boy cried out:
"If that's how it is, I will write music that is even better myself!"
;And he went on to write roughly 1,000 (!) musical works.
;In his youth, Johann Sebastian was occasionally reprimanded for a lack of piety.
;He was nearly dismissed from his post once for bringing a young woman into the church at night. It was Maria Barbara, his cousin, whom he would soon marry. Bach simply wanted to play the organ for his beloved.
;Incidentally, it is thanks to Bach that women’s voices first resounded in churches; previously, only men and boys were permitted to sing in choirs. The very first woman to sing in a church choir was his wife, Maria Barbara.
;There is another incident that speaks volumes about Johann Sebastian Bach's unparalleled level of performance mastery.
;In 1717, the famous French organist Louis Marchand arrived in Dresden. The two maestros were coaxed into a musical duel. However, on the night before the scheduled contest, Monsieur Marchand quietly fled the city, unwilling to compete against a musician as formidable as Bach.
;From his youth, Johann Sebastian stopped at nothing to experience the work of great musicians. It is said that in order to hear the famous organist and composer Dieterich Buxtehude play, the young Bach walked 300 kilometers on foot from Arnstadt to L;beck. To hear Reincken, he traveled the distance from L;neburg to Hamburg.
;In fact, on his way to Hamburg, a truly mystical event befell the young man. He had run out of money on the road, and his young body was starved for food. Bach stopped outside an inn, fruitlessly trying to scrape together enough pocket change for even the humblest meal. Suddenly, a window flew open, and someone’s hand tossed a few herring heads into a pile of rubbish. Johann Sebastian picked up the food without hesitation and bit into it—only to nearly break a tooth. Hidden inside the herring was a gold ducat. And another in the second, and a third... It was a mirror image of the Gospel miracle of the coin in the fish's mouth experienced by the Apostle Peter! Thus, the miracles began during the Maestro's lifetime.
;Bach worked freely across all genres, except for opera.
;Why no opera? It was simply the way things turned out: he was invited to places that lacked an opera house. He wrote whatever was commissioned. He never wrote for the drawer; his genius obediently followed wherever it was demanded.
;When he was invited to serve as an organist in the churches of Arnstadt, M;hlhausen, and Weimar, his monumental sacred organ masterpieces were born. The years from 1703 to 1717 marked the absolute pinnacle of his organ compositions.
;But when Bach became the court Capellmeister in K;then, where there was no organ, he catered to the Duke's commissions, providing music for festivities and balls. It was here that Bach's instrumental and keyboard music came into the world.
;In K;then, Johann Sebastian endured the death of his deeply loved Maria Barbara, and later married the young singer Anna Magdalena. Bach taught her to play the harpsichord, curated her repertoire, and composed light pieces specifically for her. Furthermore, his children were growing up and becoming his pupils. This explains why so many keyboard works of varying difficulty emerged during this period—pieces upon which all the musicians of the world are still trained today.
;Then, in 1723, Johann Sebastian Bach accepted an invitation to become the Thomaskantor—the musical director—in Leipzig. He led the boys' choir at St. Thomas Church. This is why his 27 years of service in Leipzig yielded so many breathtaking sacred vocal and instrumental works, including the St. John Passion and the St. Matthew Passion. And just a year before his death, in 1749, the now-blind Bach composed the Mass in B minor. (It is remarkable that, as a devout Lutheran, the composer did not hesitate to use the Latin text of the Catholic Mass).
;It is no coincidence that Bach is often called the Fifth Evangelist of Jesus Christ.
;Such was his pious and righteous life, filled with endless labor and familial duties.
;Some historians write that Johann Sebastian Bach lived in squalor his entire life. Personally, I don't think things were quite that bleak. As we can see, his musical talent as both a composer and a performer was always in high demand. Bach earned well and was not extravagant. Granted, his expenses were immense—his family was vast, with the total number of his children reaching twenty-one. Like any musician in the world, Bach earned extra money playing at weddings and funerals.
;Once, when his wife complained about a shortage of money, Johann Sebastian simply threw up his hands:
"My dear, it is all the fault of Leipzig's healthy air. Not enough people are dying, and we, the living, have nothing to live on..."
;Yet despite this, it is said that Bach never accepted money for private lessons.
;What do we know of his temperament? Despite his boundless kindness and simplicity, Bach could occasionally be cantankerous and quick-tempered. Once, during a rehearsal, the second organist of St. Thomas Church made a mistake while playing. Furious, Bach ripped off his wig in exasperation and hurled it at the organist.
;His own children caught their share of his temper as well.
;In the evenings, when the Maestro went to bed, three of his sons—Wilhelm Friedemann, Carl Philipp Emanuel, and Johann Christian—would take turns playing the harpsichord for him. I tell this amusing anecdote to my students every time the topic of harmonic tension and resolution comes up.
;...Emanuel absolutely detested these evening exercises. One night, hearing his father’s long-awaited snoring from the corner of the room, he abandoned the instrument mid-phrase, leaving the music hanging squarely on a dominant chord, and snuck out for a walk. Bach awoke instantly, groped his way to the keyboard, resolved the chord into the tonic, and only then returned to his couch to resume his sleep.
;All three sons later became famous composers in their own right. However, they chose not to develop their father’s polyphonic style; they considered the music of the Baroque era to be hopelessly outdated and became champions of the Classical style instead. The true renaissance and rediscovery of the great Johann Sebastian Bach’s work did not begin until a century after his death.
;Since then, the entire history of music has been divided into two eras: pre-Bach and post-Bach. And there is no composer more modern than Bach.
;Whatever conjectures we may build, it remains a mystery—how did this old German musician, working more than two centuries ago, open up our present day for us? How did he not only outlive, but outpace so many genius composers of the subsequent two centuries? What is the secret behind the longevity and youth of his music?
— Daniil Granin
;Johann Sebastian Bach's son, Carl Philipp Emanuel, recalled of his father:
;"Father would begin working on something new—if there was no service in the cathedral—only after a cup of strong coffee, for the preparation of which he would personally, trusting no one else, grind exactly fifty beans. Invigorated by the coffee, he would smoke two pipes in a row.
;What happened afterward had to be heard, but it was better left unseen. He rarely played back the fragments that flew from his pen, though they filled us with a trembling rapture. Having played them, he would remain dissatisfied, overtaken by either rage or melancholy. He was not to be touched. Sparks literally flew from his clothes, clearly visible in bright light. After these episodes subsided, he confessed to me several times that he had completely lost awareness of himself, that he confused day with night—which is why he would light a candle—because it was not he himself guiding the quill across the paper, but a man standing behind him.
;Though, it was not a man. It was Light. The same Light enveloped Father when he improvised on the harpsichord or organ. I know from Father that when King Frederick the Great bought fifteen harpsichords from the celebrated master Silbermann and, leading him through the palace enfilades, asked him to improvise on each one, the King was struck not only by the playing, but by the light emanating from the master.
;Father told us that in the palace, whenever he touched the keys of yet another clavichord, it became unbearably bright and hot to him; he felt as though the luxury of the halls was shattering into pieces. Upon returning home, he recorded from memory the fantasy he had played for the King and presented it as a gift, with a dedication. Father passed away from a stroke. In his final days, he exhibited eccentricities uncharacteristic of our hardy lineage."
;In the conservatory, all musicology students taking Polyphony are required to submit a fugue. Polyphony is less about pure composition and more about mathematics: themes, countersubjects, retrogrades, inversions, mirror reflections of the subject—a veritable "glass bead game." Each of us theorists composed a technically correct fugue, received our high marks, but these lifeless forms never truly became music. They say even Mozart himself, when trying his hand at the fugue genre, ruined a fair amount of paper.
;Yet Johann Sebastian Bach, according to his contemporaries, effortlessly improvised complex, multi-voiced fugues on the spot. And this was not merely because Bach spent most of his life serving as an organist and playing during Masses.
;To him, the fugue was the language of the universe’s architecture—intimately familiar and well-understood—and calculating a fugue was easy and delightful for Bach. It was his way of glorifying God through absolute order.
;In his polyphonic works, there are virtually no filler passages; everything is infused with love, a longing for the ideal, the highest philosophy, and prayerful contemplation.
;How did he achieve this? It remains a mystery. The wind bloweth where it listeth.
;There was never a formal canonization for Johann Sebastian Bach. But what does that change? We can hear it anyway: this music was created by a holy man, a friend of our God.
;"Bach’s music is the only genuine proof of God’s existence."
— Mikhail Kazinik
;Olga Skvirsкая
Koh Samui, 2016