One could go on and on with instances in which Bach, through one stratagem or another, draws our ear straight to the movement of the pitches. This element of Bach’s music—the compositional gesture directing us to “just the notes,” as if music were not just notes anyway—gets transferred into the world of Bach interpretation, into the mystique of his devotees. Here is a typical example, from a profile of the fine pianist Angela Hewitt, a Bach specialist, in The New York Times: “... the greatest compliment for Ms. Hewitt came from her father, who after listening to one of her recordings, said: ‘I didn’t hear you. I only heard Bach.’” It is a bit strange for an artist to vanish in her own profile—but this is the clichéd credo of Bach performance. You hear it all the time in Bach lessons and master classes: the student is told not to add anything of himself, to avoid the personal, to stick with the universal, to dissolve into the composer. The personal is an impurity and Bach is distilled water. Purity arrives very early in Elie’s book, on page nine: Bach is “the great exception, a site of purity in our sullied lives.” And later Elie writes a poetic passage about vanishing: “The organist is done away with. So is the church building. So are the limits of space and time, of stamina and attention. The music of Bach is all that is left....”

This is Bach as David Copperfield, making everything disappear. It is powerful and very prevalent, this desire for nothing but Bach pure, this trope of the falling away of all the specific trappings, leaving the universal essence behind. In this respect, we may compare Bach with the other father figure of “classical music”: Beethoven is great, but he is not pure. Beethoven reached toward a tortured purity in the late years, and attained a noble perfection in the middle ones (the “Archduke” Trio); but he himself never vanishes. His music seems hewn out of his will, an assertion of the individual and the artist as hero. Bach, by contrast, self-effaces. He is no hero; it is we who have made an unwilling hero out of him.



ONE GREAT advantage Bach has over Beethoven is counterpoint. Late in life Beethoven obsessed over Bach, working at counterpoint and fugue feverishly—as if to purify himself, to escape from the heroic sonata forms that he had brought to their apex. In a “song without words” by Mendelssohn or a nocturne by Chopin, you usually have the opposite of counterpoint: a melody over repeated chords or a texture of arpeggios—that is, filler, something to make the chords last some time while the melody melodizes. There is a hierarchical distinction between foreground and background, between the prominent main voice and the backup band. But in “true counterpoint” no voice is the lapdog of a melody; each voice lives independently. For us humble listeners, whose lives are filled with filler, this seems like an unattainable miracle: everything counts.

Bach’s insistence on the integrity of every voice (against history, against fashion) is a second form of purity, to set beside his humility. But he is not done being pure, not by a long shot: more than any other composer, Bach represents the triumph of pure logic. He is synonymous with the fugue—the music of proposition, propagation, permutation. And the fugue was hardly the most math-like of his genres. Elie describes the discovery of the “puzzle canons,” based on the “Goldberg” bass, which musicologists scrambled to solve: music as Sudoku. One of Bach’s sons related the story that his father would hear a musical idea and would instantaneously know all the operations that could be carried out on it. Think about it—a musical idea is not a catchy tune, it is something operable; calculations can be performed on it. Like a musical-mathematical savant, Bach would then wait for these things to occur: for the idea to be played backward (retrograde), or upside down (inversion), or twice as slow (augmentation), whatever; and he was gleeful when arcane combinatorial expectations were met. It is a powerful element of the Bach aura: no matter how much you tell yourself that it’s just music, you cannot resist hearing the play of numbers, the cosmic calculus.