Bach and The Tuning of the World. Jens Johler

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СКАЧАТЬ is it?’ Bach asked, frightened. ‘What?’

      ‘I don’t know,’ Böhm admitted regretfully, even, as it seemed to Bach, with a hint of despair. ‘If I knew, I’d tell you.’

      This day, Bach felt a dark cloud descending upon him. He attempted to ignore it by focusing on his school homework with twice as much zeal as before; on the rhetorical exercises, mathematical problems, Latin grammar and Greek vocabulary; he used his rare free time to copy sheet music from Italian or French composers, which he borrowed from the library, but nothing could dissipate the black cloud. What is it? he asked himself time and again. What is this mysterious something I don’t have? What can it be?

      He lay awake at night, brooding, and wore himself out thinking about it; when he fell asleep, it was only in order to start up out of gloomy dreams. Once he dreamt he was playing at a family celebration in front of all his relatives, and everybody left the room as he played, one after the other, until he was all alone. He woke up crying.

      Whenever he came to Böhm, he begged him to tell him the truth, however much it might hurt, but Böhm just shook his head. Didn’t he know? Or did he want Bach to discover it for himself?

      It was around this time that Bach’s voice broke. That was all he needed, on top of everything else. From one day to the next, his boy’s soprano voice was gone. Of course, it didn’t really come as a surprise. Sooner or later, everybody was hit by it, and it was long overdue. Erdmann had already mocked him, saying Bach was likely a castrato because at sixteen he was still able to sing the high registers; but now there was an end to this: now he squawked and croaked – Lord have mercy! He couldn’t bear to open his mouth, so he became monosyllabic and aloof, was sharp-tempered with the rest of the students and avoided their society. They imitated Bach’s squawking and croaking, which came easily to them since they had all gone through it themselves, and made him the target of their pranks. They put beetles and creepy-crawlies in his bed, once even, disgustingly, a slow-worm, but all that was nothing compared to the despair he felt at knowing that his playing was missing something – something not even his teacher could identify for him.

      ‘Perhaps,’ Böhm said one day, more to himself than to Bach, ‘perhaps he has still not sufficiently …’ He paused, and flipped absent-mindedly through a stack of sheet music. On this day, the lesson was not given at the church but in Böhm’s red-brick house on Papenstraße.

      Not sufficiently – what? Studied? Practised?

      Böhm hesitated another moment and then said: ‘Lived.’ For a moment, Bach thought he had heard him wrong. What’s that supposed to mean: not lived enough? He had lived sixteen years, that’s all he could come up with. So it was a matter of age?

      ‘Maybe lived isn’t the right word,’ said Böhm. ‘Perhaps I should have said experienced. Or … suffered.’ He stood up, went up to a picture that hung on the wall behind the harpsichord, and straightened it. It was a portrait of the Hamburg organist Adam Reincken, who had been Böhm’s teacher.

      Not suffered enough? Bach had trouble repressing his indignation. He’d lost his favourite brother when he was six! He’d lost his mother when he was nine. He’d lost his father when he was ten. He’d lost his home, his friends, his whole life. All right, he hadn’t been put into an orphanage, not that. His brother Johann Christoph had taken him in and taught him to play the organ. And yes, he’d been given free meals here in Lüneburg. He was one of the best students. He was doing fine, he couldn’t complain and he didn’t complain – but why should that prevent him from becoming a consummate musician? What was he supposed to do? Go hungry? Mortify himself? Get a whip and wander through the country as a flagellant?

       Not suffered enough!

      With a muffled cry of anger, he jumped up and ran away, leaving the house, walking along the Ilmenau river, to Stintmarkt, where he stood still for a moment and watched the hustle and bustle of the fishermen, his eyes blinded with tears, before he started walking again toward Market Square and St Michael’s School.

       Not lived enough!

      It took him three days and three nights to accept that the Master was not to blame. He had only spoken the truth. There was something you could never learn, for all one’s industry and study. When Böhm played, it was not his virtuoso technique that moved and fascinated Bach the most. No, there was something more, something intangible: As if the playing were resonating with more than the sounds and harmonics of the pipes, as if somewhere – but where? – another resonating chamber had opened up.

      He’d been thinking about it, said Böhm as Bach climbed up the three steps to the entrance of Böhm’s house again.

      Bach looked at him expectantly.

      ‘Sit down,’ Böhm said. ‘I’ll tell you about three wise men – a triumvirate. They have made us aware of a magnificent triad, the triad of the music of the cosmos, the music of the heart and the music of the instruments: musica mundana, musica humana, and musica instrumentalis. Are you ready?’

      ‘Yes,’ said Bach. ‘I’m ready.’

      ‘The first was Pythagoras, the great philosopher and mathematician of Greek antiquity, founder of a religious community and the forefather of all our musical knowledge. He not only discovered the mathematical proportions of chords but also their relation to the harmony of the cosmos.’

      The harmony of the cosmos? Bach remembered how Erdmann had told him of Isaac Newton and the law of gravity, and the sudden enthusiasm that had seized him at the time. So gravity ruled over the heavens and on earth – and the same is true for the laws of harmony?

      ‘Absolutely,’ said Böhm. ‘Pythagoras had the inspirational idea that the harmonic relations he had studied on the monochord could also be found in the heavens. In the harmony of the spheres. He discovered that the cosmos sings.’

      ‘The cosmos sings,’ repeated Bach.

      ‘And it is reported that Pythagoras was the only mortal who could hear this music.’

      Böhm paused, went to the harpsichord and, with his right hand, played a strange succession of notes that mainly consisted of fifths. With his left hand, he added a single low note now and then, like a pulse beat or a distant drum that seemed to come closer due to the same repetition, defining more and more the pulse of the listener, touching his innermost soul and transporting him to a different state of mind. To Bach, it almost seemed as if he had been transported to a different time, a different century; and as though he, too, were now able to hear the cosmos sing. Finally, Böhm made the strange melody fade away by striking a high G three times in quick succession and then, after a pause, for a fourth time.

      Bach did not ask whence the melody came. Had it been handed down by Pythagoras? But how could this be possible? Musical notation has only been with us for a couple of hundred years. Nobody knew how music sounded at the time of Pythagoras.

      ‘And the other two men of this triumvirate?’ Bach asked, after they both had remained silent for some time.

      ‘The second,’ Böhm replied, ‘was a Roman patrician called Boethius. He lived a thousand years after Pythagoras, around the year 500 of Our Lord. Boethius wrote a philosophical work with the title De institutione musica, the decisive point of which was the discovery of the three musics I spoke of earlier: musica mundana, musica humana, and musica instrumentalis. Pythagoras had recognized the connection between the music of instruments and the music of the СКАЧАТЬ