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By Root 1700 0

me for a real loop. Of course there is room in this world for many ways to perform any work of music, and of course there was something interesting about these singers’ speed and slickness, and the way that they executed ultrarapid trills flawlessly — it was impressive in much the same way as the engineering details of a beautiful sports car are impressive — but for me it had nothing to do with the meaning of the music. That meaning was contemplative and cosmic, not frilly and show-offy. I am tolerant of many diverse ways of playing pieces of music, but I also have my limits and this went considerably beyond them. It made me long to hear the slightly flawed, very mortal, and reflective profundity of Albert Schweitzer at his little village organ in Günsbach, but that was not in the cards that evening. It was a classic case of sacred versus profane, and it remains vivid in my memory.

Only in preparing this chapter did I come across some writings by Schweitzer himself that strangely echo (if echoes can precede their causes!) my great troubledness that evening in Rovereto. Here is what he wrote, almost one hundred years earlier, about performances of Bach in that era:

Many performers have been performing Bach for years without experiencing for themselves the deepening that Bach is capable of bringing out in any true artist. Most of our singers are far too caught up in technique to sing Bach correctly. Only a very small number of them can reproduce the spirit of his music; the rest of them are incapable of penetrating into the Master’s spiritual world. They do not feel what Bach is trying to say, and therefore cannot transmit it to anyone else. Worst of all, they consider themselves to be outstanding Bach interpreters, and have no awareness of what it is that they lack. Sometimes one has to wonder how listeners who attend such superficial performances are able to detect even the slightest sign of the depth of Bach’s music.

Those who understand the situation today will not consider these comments to be exaggeratedly pessimistic. Our enchantment with Bach is undergoing a crisis. The danger is that our love for Bach’s music will become superficial and that too much vanity and smugness will be mixed in with it. Our era’s lamentable trend towards imitation comes out also in the way that we take Bach over, which is all too visible these days. We act as if we wanted to praise Bach, but in truth we only praise ourselves. We act as if we had rediscovered him, understood him, and performed him as no one has ever done before. A bit less noise, a bit less “Bach dogmatism”, a bit more ability, a bit more humility, a bit more tranquility, a bit more devotion… Only thus will Bach be more honored in spirit and in truth than he has been before.

There is little I can add to this trenchant criticism of superficiality taking itself for depth; I will simply say that running across it comforted me, even though I did so several years after the Rovereto event, as it made me know that I am not alone in my lamentation. Schweitzer was the most humble and self-effacing of people, and so his remarks have to be taken as nothing other than an honest reaction to a deplorable trend that was already clear a century ago and that seems only to be increasing today.

Alle Grashüpfer Müssen Sterben

What, some readers may be asking themselves, does any of this have to do with “I” or consciousness or souls? My response would be, “What could have more to do with consciousness or souls than merging oneself with the combined spirituality of Albert Schweitzer and J. S. Bach?”

The other night, in order to refresh my musty memories of Schweitzer playing Bach organ music (which I listened to hundreds of times in my teen-age years and my twenties), I pulled all four of the old vinyl records off my shelf and put them on in succession. I began with the prelude and fugue in A major (BWV 536, nicknamed by Schweitzer the “walking fugue”) and went through many others, winding up with my very favorite, the beatific prelude and fugue in G major (BWV 541), and then as a