Composers: Secure in the Universe

Johann Sebastian Bach seemed to have no understanding of his own greatness. Year after year, he turned out his glorious cantatas and Passions like a baker hurrying over the breakfast rolls. He considered the music that flowed from his pen for 50 years to be a collection of testimonials to honest craftsmanship—some of it better than others, but all of it composed, as he humbly wrote in the dedication of the Musical Offering, "as well as I possibly could."

He gave little thought to the preservation of his works, and the scores he left behind contain few indications of the tempo, dynamics or phrasing he intended. As a result, every participant in the current flowering of appreciation for Bach is his own final authority on interpretation. The varieties of approach that were heard last week in the annual Christmas celebration of Bach's music gave proof of the continuing depth of the argument.

Bach's modern interpreters have brought to his varied music all the resources of modern instrumentation—and all the scholarly weight of a new musicology that insists on a strictly paleontological presentation. One side, mainly distinguished by the presence of Eugene Ormandy, plays Bach with a flourish and sensuality better saved for Wagner; the other side, which at its extreme is manned by cliques of musical pedants who play in ensembles with names like Pro Arta Antarctica, believes Bach must never be played away from the harpsichord and organ. In the artistic center of the interpretive storm are a number of impeccably good pianists who play Bach's music better than it has been played since Mendelssohn resurrected the St. Matthew Passion in 1829. The best of these are Rosalyn Tureck and Glenn Gould.

Spiritual Momentum. In performance, Tureck, 49, is rigorously severe. She strides to the piano and sits down to play with imposing authority and total concentration. Last week, in her annual Philharmonic Hall performance of the Goldberg Variations, she played without intermission or breaks for applause for 83 minutes—and when she stood at last, the cheers that greeted her seemed like shouts from the heart.

She had perfectly captured the spiritual momentum of Bach's music.

For all her severity, Tureck's playing is Victorian in its embellishments when compared with Gould's quiet intimacy with Bach. Because Gould, 31, is convinced that the bigness of modern concert halls is a harmful anachronism for music designed for parlors, he gives his deepest efforts to his recordings. With a piano on which the stroke of each key has been shortened a fraction of an inch to make its action more like that of a harpsichord, Gould works tirelessly at recording sessions, positioning the microphone so close to the piano that his constant contrapuntal humming sometimes comes through on the records. His recording of the Goldberg Variations in 1956 kindled his career; since then, his concert career has been made mainly notorious for flashes of eccentricity (playing in mittens, endlessly fiddling with the piano stool), while his recording career has been little short of genius.