Reinventing Bach

  • Paul Elie
Farrar, Straus and Giroux: 2012 496 pp. £19.99, $30 9780374281076 | ISBN: 978-0-3742-8107-6

Paul Elie reveres the music of J. S. Bach and loves some recordings in particular, such as Glenn Gould's 1955 rendition of the Goldberg Variations. In Reinventing Bach Elie sets out to show how technologies — especially developments in recording — have been central to the twentieth century's experience of “the Master's” music.

The book's conceit is that the composer of the Two- and Three-Part Inventions was in some sense an inventor, and so peculiarly attuned to being reinvented — through the recording technologies of the past 100 years or so. And, as Elie shows, the power that recording offered, of enabling repeated listening, also accelerated the rediscovery of Bach by generations of musicians.

Canadian pianist Glenn Gould recorded Bach's Goldberg Variations twice, in 1955 and 1981. Credit: G. PARKS//TIME LIFE PICTURES/GETTY

Each chapter takes a key recording, dwelling to different degrees on the technology used — disc, tape or digital. The chapters are arranged in roughly chronological order and range from takes by Albert Schweitzer and Leopold Stokowski on the famous Toccata and Fugue in D Minor to Gould's two recordings of the Goldberg Variations and beyond. Alongside this, Elie threads a biography of Bach, period-setting snapshots of cultural events and an accumulating cast of Bach performers and recording artistes.

Throughout, Elie describes the music, not with the technical terminology of the conservatoire, but with metaphor and simile. His characterization of the Toccata and Fugue in D Minor, for instance, reads: “the pipes ring out once, twice, a third time. Then with a long, low swallow the organ fills with sound, which spreads toward the ends of the instrument and settles, pooling there.” What he doesn't do, however, is meet the promise in the publisher's blurb to give us “a nuanced and intelligent examination of the technology” that has made the reinvention of Bach possible.

The pipes ring out once, twice, a third time. Then, with a long, low swallow the organ fills with sound.

Elie draws on a wide range of published literature, and is insightful about the interplay between technological change and the development of both individual technique and the market for classical music. For example, he describes how Gould's recordings of the Goldberg Variations were polished as the pianist, holed up at a country retreat, repeatedly recorded and listened back to his own performances of the 30 variations on the recently invented tape recorder. Elie also nicely depicts how the historically informed performance scene was stimulated by the arrival of the CD: the clarity of digital recording gave period-music specialists an opportunity to provide newly 'authentic' performances.

But the descriptions of technologies are less sure. Magnetic recording tape does not use silver oxides, as the book has it, but iron oxides. Elie also writes that Schweitzer recorded on cylinders, yet EMI always used discs. His description of a 1905 Victrola gramophone as having a needle converting movements to electrical impulses reads oddly. This is an entirely acoustic device in which even the motor is clockwork; there were no electrical gramophones before the 1920s.

The book would also be stronger for a deeper and more integrated account of musical instruments. The hybrid instrument given to Schweitzer by the Paris Bach Society when he went as a missionary to Africa — enabling him to play in tropical conditions — is described merely as having “the features of a piano and an organ: two manuals, strings and hammers, pedals. The inside of it was lined with zinc to ward off moisture in the tropics”. (This amazing-sounding machine can be seen in the Maison Albert Schweitzer, the organist's former home, in Alsace, France.) Similarly, Bach's possible involvement in the development of a new instrument called the Lautenwerck, a kind of keyboard-actuated lute, is glossed over in two brief paragraphs — a loss, given the emphasis on Bach as inventor.

In the end, Reinventing Bach reads best as a sincere and compelling account of the author's love of Bach's recorded oeuvre. The passion shines through even though the technology is more marginal than promised. And you may find yourself compelled to rummage through your CD shelves for the works — as I did — revisiting Bach in his multifarious reinventions.