Stranger Shores

by J. M. Coetzee

  The other (and broadly unsympathetic) way of understanding Eliot is the socio-cultural one I outlined a moment ago: of treating his efforts as the essentially magical enterprise of a man trying to redefine the world around himself – America, Europe – rather than confronting the reality of his not-so-grand position as a man whose narrowly academic, Eurocentric education had prepared him for little else but life as a mandarin in one of the New England ivory towers.

  II

  I would like to interrogate these alternative readings – the transcendental-poetic and the socio-cultural – further, and bring them closer to our own times, following an autobiographical path that may be methodologically reckless but has the virtue of dramatising the issue.

  One Sunday afternoon in the summer of 1955, when I was fifteen years old, I was mooning around our back garden in the suburbs of Cape Town, wondering what to do, boredom being the main problem of existence in those days, when from the house next door I heard music. As long as the music lasted, I was frozen, I dared not breathe. I was being spoken to by the music as music had never spoken to me before.

  What I was listening to was a recording of Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier, played on the harpsichord. I learned this title only some time later, when I had become more familiar with what, at the age of fifteen, I knew only – in a somewhat suspicious and even hostile teenage manner – as ‘classical music’. The house next door had a transient student population; the student who was playing the Bach record must have moved out soon afterwards, or lost his/her taste for Bach, for I heard no more, though I listened intently.

  I do not come from a musical family. There was no musical instruction offered at the schools I went to, nor would I have taken it if it had been offered: in the colonies classical music was sissy. I could identify Khatchaturian’s ‘Sabre Dance’, the overture to Rossini’s William Tell, Rimsky-Korsakov’s ‘Flight of the Bumble-Bee’ – that was the level of my knowledge. At home we had no musical instrument, no record player. There was plenty of the blander American popular music on the radio (George Melachrino and his Silver Strings), but it made no great impact on me.

  What I am describing is middle-class musical culture of the age of Eisenhower, as it was to be found in the ex-British colonies, colonies that were rapidly becoming cultural provinces of the United States. The so-called classical component of that musical culture may have been European in origin, but it was Europe mediated and in a sense orchestrated by the Boston Pops.

  And then the afternoon in the garden, and the music of Bach, after which everything changed. A moment of revelation which I will not call Eliotic – that would insult the moments of revelation celebrated in Eliot’s poetry – but of the greatest significance in my life nevertheless: for the first time I was undergoing the impact of the classic.

  In Bach nothing is obscure, no single step is so miraculous as to surpass imitation. Yet when the chain of sounds is realised in time, the building process ceases at a certain moment to be the mere linking of units; the units cohere as a higher-order object in a way that I can only describe by analogy as the incarnation of ideas of exposition, complication and resolution that are more general than music. Bach thinks in music. Music thinks itself in Bach.

  The revelation in the garden was a key event in my formation. Now I wish to interrogate that moment again, using as a framework both what I have been saying about Eliot – specifically, using Eliot the provincial as a pattern and figure of myself – and, in a more sceptical way, invoking the kinds of question that are asked about culture and cultural ideals by contemporary cultural analysis.

  The question I put to myself, somewhat crudely, is this: is there some non-vacuous sense in which I can say that the spirit of Bach was speaking to me across the ages, across the seas, putting before me certain ideals; or was what was really going on at that moment that I was symbolically electing high European culture, and command of the codes of that culture, as a route that would take me out of my class position in white South African society and ultimately out of what I must have felt, in terms however obscure or mystified, as an historical dead end – a road that would culminate (again symbolically) with me on a platform in Europe addressing a cosmopolitan audience on Bach, T. S. Eliot and the question of the classic? In other words, was the experience what I understood it to be – a disinterested and in a sense impersonal aesthetic experience – or was it really the masked expression of a material interest?

  This is a question of a kind which one would be deluded to think one could answer about oneself. But that does not mean it should not be asked; and asking it means asking it properly, in terms that are as clear and as full as possible. As part of the enterprise of asking the question clearly, let me therefore ask what I might mean when I talk of being spoken to by the classic across the ages.

  In two of the three senses, Bach is a classic of music. Sense one: the classic is that which is not time-bound, which retains meaning for succeeding ages, which ‘lives’. Sense two: a proportion of Bach’s music belongs to what are loosely called ‘the classics’, the part of the European musical canon that is still widely played, if not particularly often or before particularly large audiences. The third sense, the sense that Bach does not satisfy, is that he does not belong to the revival of so-called classical values in European art starting in the second quarter of the eighteenth century.

  Bach was not only too old, too old-fashioned, for the neoclassical movement: his intellectual affiliations and his whole musical orientation were towards a world that was in the process of passing from sight. In the popular and somewhat romanticised account, Bach, obscure enough in his own day and particularly in his later years, dropped entirely out of public consciousness after his death, and was resurrected only some eighty years later, mainly through the enthusiasm of Felix Mendelssohn. For several generations, in this popular account, Bach was hardly a classic at all: not only was he not neoclassical, but he spoke to no one across those generations. His music was not published, it was rarely played. He was part of music history, he was a name in a footnote in a book, that was all.11

  It is this unclassical history of misunderstanding, obscurity and silence, which if not exactly history as truth is history as one of the overlays of the historical record, that I wish to emphasise, since it calls into doubt facile notions of the classic as the timeless, as that which unproblematically speaks across all boundaries. Bach the classic was historically constituted, as I will remind you, constituted by identifiable historical forces and within a specific historical context. Only once we have acknowledged this point are we in a position to ask the more difficult questions: what, if any, are the limits to that historical relativisation of the classic? What, if anything, is left of the classic after the classic has been historicised, which may still claim to speak across the ages?

  In 1737, in the middle of the third and last phase of his professional life, Bach was the subject of an article in a leading musical journal. The article was by a one-time student of Bach’s named Johann Adolf Scheibe. In it, Scheibe attacked Bach’s music as ‘turgid and sophisticated’ rather than ‘simple and natural’, as merely ‘sombre’ when it meant to be ‘lofty’, and generally as marred by signs of ‘labour and . . . effort’.12

  As much as it was an attack by youth upon age, Scheibe’s article was a manifesto for a new kind of music based on Enlightenment values of feeling and reason, dismissive of the intellectual heritage (scholastic) and the musical heritage (polyphonic) behind Bach’s music. In valuing melody above counterpoint, unity, simplicity, clarity and decorum above architectonic complexity, and feeling above intellect, Scheibe speaks for the blossoming modern age, and in effect makes Bach, and with Bach the whole polyphonic tradition, into the last gasp of the dead Middle Ages.

  Scheibe’s stance may be polemical, but when we remember that Haydn was only a child of five in 1737 and Mozart not yet born, we must recognise that his sense of where history was going was accurate.13 Scheibe’s verdict was the verdict
of the age. By his last years Bach was a man of yesterday. What reputation he had was based on what he had written before he was forty.

  All in all, then, it is not so much the case that Bach’s music was forgotten after his death as that it did not find a place in public awareness during his lifetime. So if Bach before the Bach revival was a classic, he was not only an invisible classic but a dumb classic. He was marks on paper; he had no presence in society. He was not only not canonical, he was not public.

  How, then, did Bach come into his own?

  Not, it must be said, via the quality of the music pure and simple, or at least not via the quality of that music until it was appropriately packaged and presented. The name and the music of Bach had first to become part of a cause, the cause of German nationalism rising in reaction to Napoleon, and of the concomitant Protestant revival. The figure of Bach became one of the instruments through which German nationalism and Protestantism were promoted; reciprocally, in the name of Germany and Protestantism Bach was promoted as a classic; the whole enterprise being aided by the Romantic swing against rationalism, and by enthusiasm for music as the one art privileged to speak directly from soul to soul.

  The first book on Bach, published in 1802, tells much of the story. It was entitled The Life, Art and Works of J. S. Bach: For Patriotic Admirers of Genuine Musical Art. In his introduction the author writes, ‘This great man . . . was a German. Be proud of him, German fatherland . . . His works are an invaluable national patrimony with which no other nation has anything to be compared.’14 We find the same emphasis on the Germanness and even the Nordicness of Bach in later tributes. The figure and the music of Bach became part of the construction of Germany and even of the so-called Germanic race.

  The turning-point from obscurity to fame came with the oft-described performances of the St Matthew Passion in Berlin in 1829, directed by Mendelssohn. But it would be naive to say that in these performances Bach returned to history on his own terms. Mendelssohn arranged Bach’s score not only in the light of the larger orchestral and choral forces at his command, but also in the light of what had been going down well recently with Berlin audiences, audiences that had responded rapturously to the romantic nationalism of Weber’s Der Freischütz. It was Berlin that called for repeat performances of the St Matthew Passion. In Königsberg, Kant’s city and still a centre of rationalism, by contrast, the St Matthew Passion flopped and the music was criticised as ‘out-of-date rubbish’.15

  I am not criticising Mendelssohn’s performances for not being ‘the real Bach’. The point I make is a simple and limited one: the Berlin performances, and indeed the whole Bach revival, were powerfully historical in ways that were largely invisible to the moving spirits behind them. Furthermore, one thing we can be certain of about our own understanding and performance of Bach, even – and perhaps even particularly – when our intentions are of the purest, the most puristic, is that they are historically conditioned in ways invisible to us. And the same holds for the opinions about history and historical conditioning that I am expressing at this moment.

  By saying this I do not mean to fall back into a helpless kind of relativism. The Romantic Bach was partly the product of men and women responding to unfamiliar music with a stunned overwhelmedness analogous to what I myself experienced in South Africa in 1955, and partly the product of a tide of communal feeling that found in Bach a vehicle for its own expression. Many strands of that feeling – its aesthetic emotionalism, its nationalistic fervour – are gone with the wind, and we no longer weave them into our performances of Bach. Scholarship since Mendelssohn’s day has given us a different Bach, enabling us to see features of Bach invisible to the revivalist generation, for instance, the sophisticated Lutheran scholasticism within whose ambit he worked.

  Such recognitions constitute a real advance in historical understanding. Historical understanding is understanding of the past as a shaping force upon the present. Insofar as that shaping force is tangibly felt upon our lives, historical understanding is part of the present. Our historical being is part of our present. It is that part of our present – namely the part that belongs to history – that we cannot fully understand, since it requires us to understand ourselves not only as objects of historical forces but as subjects of our own historical self-understanding.

  It is in the context of paradox and impossibility I have been outlining that I ask myself the question: am I far away enough from 1955, in time and in identity, to begin to understand my first relation to the classic – which is a relation to Bach – in an historical way? And what does it mean to say that I was being spoken to by a classic in 1955 when the self which is asking the questions acknowledges that the classic – to say nothing of the self – is historically constituted? As Bach for Mendelssohn’s 1829 Berlin audience was an occasion to embody and, in memory and reperformance, to express aspirations, feelings, self-validations which we can identify, diagnose, give names to, place, even foresee the consequences of, what was Bach in South Africa in 1955, and in particular what was the nomination of Bach as the classic, the occasion for? If the notion of the classic as the timeless is undermined by a fully historical account of Bach-reception, then is the moment in the garden – the kind of moment that Eliot experienced, no doubt more mystically and more intensely, and turned into some of his greatest poetry – undermined as well? Is being spoken to across the ages a notion that we can entertain today only in bad faith?

  To answer this question, to which I aspire to give the answer No, and therefore to see what can be rescued of the idea of the classic, let me return to the story of Bach, to the half of the story not yet told.

  III

  A simple question. If Bach was so obscure a composer, how did Mendelssohn know his music?

  If we follow closely the fortunes of Bach’s music after his death, attending not to the reputation of the composer but to actual performance, it begins to emerge that, though obscure, Bach was not quite as forgotten as the revivalist history would lead us to believe. Twenty years after his death, there was a circle of musicians in Berlin regularly performing his instrumental music in private, as a kind of esoteric recreation. The Austrian ambassador to Prussia was for years a member of this circle and on his departure took Bach scores back to Vienna, where he held performances of Bach in his home. Mozart was part of his circle; Mozart made his own copies and studied the Art of Fugue closely. Haydn was also in the circle.

  Thus a certain limited Bach tradition, which was not a Bach revival simply because continuity with Bach’s own time was never broken, existed in Berlin and branched to Vienna, among professional musicians and serious amateurs, though it did not express itself in public performance.

  As for the choral music, a fair amount of it was known to professionals like C.F. Zelter, director of the Berlin Singakademie. Zelter was a friend of Mendelssohn’s father. It was at the Singakademie that the young Felix Mendelssohn first came across the choral music, and, against the general unco-operativeness of Zelter, who regarded the Passions as unperformable and of specialist interest only, had his own copy of the St Matthew Passion made and plunged into the business of adapting it for performance.

  I say of specialist (or professional) interest only. This is the point where parallels between literature and music, the literary classics and the musical classics, begin to break down, and where the institutions and practice of music emerge as perhaps healthier than the institutions and practice of literature. For the musical profession has ways of keeping what it values alive that are qualitatively different from the ways in which the institutions of literature keep submerged but valued writers alive.

  Because becoming a musician, whether executant or creative, not only in the Western tradition but in other major traditions of the world, entails long training and apprenticeship, because the nature of the training entails repeated performance for the ears of others and minute listening and practical criticism, together with memorisation, because a range of kinds of performance has become
institutionalised, from playing for one’s teacher to playing for one’s class to varieties of public performance – for all these reasons, it is possible to keep music alive and indeed vital within professional circles while it is not part of public awareness, even among educated people.

  If there is anything that gives one confidence in the classic status of Bach, it is the testing process he has been through within the profession. Not only did this provincial religious mystic outlast the Enlightenment turn toward rationality and the metropolis, but he also survived what turned out to have been a kiss of death, namely, being promoted during the nineteenth-century revival as a great son of the German soil. And today, every time a beginner stumbles through the first prelude of the ‘Forty-Eight’, Bach is being tested again, within the profession. Dare I suggest that the classic in music is what emerges intact from this process of day-by-day testing?

  The criterion of testing and survival is not just a minimal, pragmatic, Horatian standard (Horace says, in effect, that if a work is still around a hundred years after it was written, it must be a classic). It is a criterion that expresses a certain confidence in the tradition of testing, and a confidence that professionals will not devote labour and attention, generation after generation, to sustaining pieces of music whose life-functions have terminated.

  It is this confidence that enables me to return to the autobiographical moment at the centre of this lecture, and to the alternative analyses I proposed of it, with a little more optimism. About my response to Bach in 1955, I asked whether it was truly a response to some inherent quality in the music rather than a symbolic election on my part of European high culture as a way out of a social and historical dead end. It is of the essence of this sceptical questioning that the term Bach should stand simply as a counter for European high culture, that Bach or Bach should have no value in himself or itself – that the notion of ‘value in itself’ should in fact be the object of sceptical interrogation.