Dr. J. Hansen (Eisenach.thueringer-allgemeine.de) |
On a wintry March
16th 2016, I met with Dr. Jörg Hansen, curator of “Bach’s St.
Matthew Passion: brought back by a Jewish boy”, an exhibit showing at the
Jerusalem Theatre and coinciding with the first Bach in Jerusalem Festival. Dr.
Hansen is director of the Bachhaus in Eisenach, Germany.
PH: Dr.
Hansen, how did you come to direct the Bachhaus, Eisenach?
Jörg Hansen:
My university studies were in Philosophy, in Logic actually, but I love Bach’s
music and became involved in the Bach Society. I have been the museum director
since 2005 and it has been a great honour for me.
PH: Would
you like to talk about the material for the exhibit you have brought to Israel?
JH: It was
in 2013 that we managed to acquire the bulk of the material for Mendelssohn’s
performance of the St. Matthew Passion of 1829, the big event of the Bach
Renaissance – the starting point. We acquired 62 of the 158 music books from
which the choir sang. All this material was scattered throughout the world
since being used in 1854 for the first performance of the St. Matthew Passion
in London. It never went back to Germany. Fortunately, Mendelssohn’s score was
acquired by the Bodleian Library (Oxford, UK), but all the other material became
scattered. So, that was something big for us and an exciting project for people
to fund.
PH: Was it
difficult to find?
JH: Well,
one or two years before we acquired it, I had been trying to buy it at
Sotheby’s in London. Eight of these leaflets were on auction, but our grant of
25,000 Euros was not enough to buy them all.
There were some anonymous telephone bidders who almost doubled the
amount. I was very disappointed. Then, a year or two later, we received the
offer to get 62 of the booklets and they are really now almost all there is. So
it is good to have the material in a museum dedicated to J.S.Bach, as it
represents such an important event.
PH: There
are a number of Bach festivals nowadays.
JH: Yes. Actually,
the Bach Festival idea comes from when Bach’s music was known only to musicians
but not to the public. They came into being to promote Bach’s music and initiate
Bach music societies. The Bach Society that owns our museum has been sponsoring
Bach festivals since 1901, mostly in Germany, but also in other European cities
such as Paris, Vienna and Brussels. It also sponsors the Eastern European Bach
Academy. Bach festivals have become quite a tradition.
PH: So now we
are having our first Bach in Jerusalem Festival.
JH: Yes, it
is splendid to have a Bach festival here in Jerusalem and an honour for us to
be a part of it. In November, the Jerusalem Baroque Orchestra asked us to do
this exhibition, as the St. Matthew Passion was to be featured at the Bach in
Jerusalem Festival. We got funding for it from the Free State of Thuringia; it
has been exciting to produce it. And we have all this material coming from the
big events leading up to Mendelssohn’s performance of the St. Matthew. Indeed,
what led up to it comes from a tradition that was essentially that of Jewish
musical families, families such as the Itziks and the Mendelssohns.
PH: Can you
elaborate on this?
JH: Sarah
Itzik Levy (1761-1854) maintained an active musical salon, where she developed what
might be called a “J.S.Bach cult”. Among her early visitors were Mozart and
Haydn; the latter’s early biographer G.A.Greisinger gave her the autograph of Haydn’s
Heiligmesse, which she later passed on to her great nephew Felix Mendelssohn.
An accomplished musician, she had studied harpsichord with Bach’s eldest son
Wilhelm Friedemann Bach. As W.F.Bach’s main student in Berlin, it was Sarah who
actively promoted music of the Bach family.
Sarah Levy’s
sister, Bella Salomon (1749-1824) was taught music by Bach’s student Johann Philipp
Kirnberger. One of the first to recognize the importance of the Bach’s St.
Matthew Passion, (Bach’s keyboard music had been performed regularly since
1802) she sent a copy of the work to her grandson Felix Mendelssohn in 1823. Six
years later he produced the performance. Without that gift to her grandson and
Mendelssohn’s momentous performance, there might not have existed a Bach House
or Bach festivals in Israel or anywhere else.
PH: Can you
tell me about the scores in the glass cabinet?
JH: Yes. I
first saw a handful of them in an exhibition at the Mendelssohn House and was
deeply touched that they still existed. The interesting thing is that they were
copied from the score Bella Salomon, Mendelssohn’s grandmother, had given Felix
when he was just 14 years old (1823). With Bach’s sacred music no longer
performed, she asked the owner of Bach’s own score – a collector from Hamburg
then living in Berlin and whom she had met a number of times – for a copy. So
what we see here is a copy of Bach’s 1736 autograph – the parts used in 1829
and they were the start of Mendelssohn’s almost-obsession with Bach and was the
incentive to performing the work again in 1829, for the first time after Bach’s
death.
PH: Whose
handwriting is this?
JH: That of Mendelssohn’s
fellow students - students of the Singakademie (where it was performed); they
have now almost all been identified. Having been a singer myself, it was so
interesting to see the singers’ personal pencil markings, such as things they
underlined. Changes were made by
Mendelssohn himself for the performance in 1829, such as “corrections” to the
harmony of a chord and inserting the BACH motif, things a 20-year-old would do.
Mendelssohn also decided the chorale “Wenn ich einmal soll scheiden” (When I
once must depart) be sung unaccompanied, as this would make it more dramatic. If
you look here, you will see he has changed Bach’s major chord to a minor chord
to be more effective in this such sorrowful piece. These choral parts were then
taken to Leipzig in 1843, where Mendelssohn performed the St. Matthew Passion,
this time with the St. Thomas Choir. A Bach monument was erected there, still standing
today (unlike the Mendelssohn monument, which was pulled down in 1939). Then,
in 1854, these same parts were taken to London for the first performance of the
St. Matthew Passion there.
PH: Whose picture
do we see here?
JH: This is
a recently-found portrait of Bella Salomon. It is a reproduction. The portrait
itself is tiny and painted on ivory; it was found in a drawer by a cousin of
the current Mendelssohn family. It is a
wonderful painting of Bella. Bella Salomon was a staunch Jewess and disowned
her own son when he converted to Christianity; he had been baptised in a moment
of hasty decision in 1822, then adopting the name of Bartholdy. Felix
Mendelssohn was baptized at age 7 and his parents kept the event secret from Bella
for fear she would cut off relations from him, too. In honour of his
philosopher grandfather, Moses Mendelssohn, Felix did not want to give up the
name of Mendelssohn, despite the fact that his father insisted Felix would
never really be considered a Christian if called Mendelssohn. All this reflects
the difficulties under which Jews were living at the time and the limited
career opportunities available to them as Jews. But Bella Salomon and her
sister did not go along with the idea of conversion: they donated a lot of
money to the Jewish education system. Essentially, the whole Jewish social
system was run by donations from wealthier people of the community.
PH: An interesting
map here.
JH: It is a 1592
map of the world in the form of a clover leaf, with the continents placed
around the city of Jerusalem. It appears in “Travel Book to the Holy Land”, a
book of a number of curious maps like this one. The interesting thing is that
Bach probably had in his own library the old folio format copy of this book of
strange maps. In his private library he also had Flavius Josephus’ “Antiquities
of the Jews” and “Judaism and the Stubborn Unbelief” (which, incidentally makes
reference to Jewish traditions, to the Talmud and Kabbala), later prompting
Nazi musicologist Karl Hasse to stipulate Bach’s “anti-Semitism”, although we
cannot know whether Bach had even read the book. Bach, however, would never
have met a Jew.
PH: And this
building?
JH: It is
the Berlin Singakademie, which saw the famous 1829 re-performance of the St.
Matthew Passion. Bella’s sister was a pianist there for more than 20 years,
where the Mendelssohn family also had social- and professional connections with
Carl Friedrich Zelter, who had taught Felix and Fanny Mendelssohn. Zelter considered Bach’s religious works too
outdated, too priestly for contemporary ears, but he did direct further
performances of the St. Matthew Passion in Germany when Mendelssohn was in
England.
PH: And the
bust of Bach here?
JH: It is of
a correction. There are not many of the original casts left. And here is one of
Mendelssohn.
PH: And the
two video films?
JH: One explains
the St. Matthew Passion, the story of its rediscovery, the way Bach composed
it, how it differs from how the St. John Passion was written: the St. Matthew
lays emphasis on sacrifice and there is commentary throughout, making it a more
poetic work than the St. John.
The other
screen shows a short video dealing with the question of whether Bach’s Passions
are anti-Semitic, a strange question I would say, considering the fact that
Bach would not have ever met a Jew. But
the question has been asked constantly since 1941. This may have been sparked
by Bach’s dramatically operatic moments of fury in these works. However, if you
look at the arias, they impart the message of compassion. The St. Matthew
Passion gives reflexion on individual guilt and salvation.
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