J.S. Bach: The Circle of Creation
PROGRAMME NOTES
by Alison Mackay
Three themes lie behind the design of J.S.Bach: The Circle of Creation. The concert is a celebration of the genius of
Bach, with a special emphasis on the instrumental music which he created for his family, his students, and his
colleagues. In words and images, the performance also honours the work of the artisans and tradespeople whose
labour and expertise made the performances of Bach’s music possible. Finally, in examining the origins and anatomy
of Bach’s orchestra, we hope to shed light on the inner workings of our own.
The concert is presided over by the immortal brothers Apollo and Mercury, patron gods of Bach’s city of Leipzig.
One of the earliest monuments of Western culture, the Homeric Hymn to Mercury explains how Apollo became the
god of music, and Mercury the god of herds and of artisans. An excerpt from the story begins the concert, describing
how the newborn Mercury killed a tortoise and fashioned from it a glorious musical instrument strung with seven
strings of sheep gut. The photo of a tortoiseshell lyre dating from the fifth century BCE (around the same time as the
story it illustrates) was sent to us by the British Museum, where the lyre was restored after being found in an
excavation in Athens and acquired by the seventh Earl of Elgin, famous for having removed the Elgin Marbles
from the Parthenon.
The building of baroque instruments also began with materials from the natural world — bird feathers for the quills
that pluck harpsichord strings, maple and spruce for the bodies of stringed instruments, boxwood for oboes. Two
millennia after the creation of the ancient lyre, sheep intestines were still used to create strings for Bach’s string
instruments, and brass strings were made by hand for his harpsichords. Eighteenth-century techniques are still used
for the manufacture of historical strings for period instruments today. Because the guild members of early modern
Europe were obliged to guard their trade secrets, modern makers have had to be detectives, using forensic evidence
from scraps of old strings and sources such as Denis Diderot’s eighteenth-century Encyclopédie of the “Sciences,
Arts, and Crafts” to determine the materials and techniques that would have been used for Bach’s instruments.
Our concert features film footage of two pioneers in this field: the harpsichord builder and restorer Malcolm Rose,
who supplies the brass and iron wire for the strings of Tafelmusik’s harpsichord, and the Italian firm of Aquila,
which produces gut strings for the violin family in the northern Italian city of Vicenza. We are deeply grateful to
Malcolm Rose for welcoming our cameraman Mike Grippo into his workshop, and to Jean-Marc St-Pierre of
Productions MAJ in Montreal for permission to use his footage of the Aquila factory originally shot for the
television series How It’s Made. We also warmly thank Paul Lewis and Elizabeth Brown of the Discovery Channel,
and Tafelmusik Board of Directors member Trina McQueen for facilitating our use of the film.
Hoping to reveal the architecture of a string instrument of Bach’s time and the months of work needed for its
construction, we asked the esteemed Toronto luthier, Quentin Playfair, who restores and repairs the Tafelmusik
string instruments, if he would record the entire process of building a new cello. Inspired by the instrument known as
the “Saveuse” cello of 1726, one of the smallest cellos to have emerged from the workshop of Antonio Stradivari,
Quentin began work and allowed photographs to be taken as he bent the ribs, carved the body and scroll, and
inserted the decorative lines of inlay called “purfling” which embellish the edges of a finely made cello. We are
grateful to Quentin and to Sue Dickin, who took the beautiful photographs of the cello over the period of its creation,
and to cellist and teacher Sandra Bohn, the new owner of the instrument, who graciously allowed us to witness its
metamorphosis from rough maple and spruce to vibrant generator of sound waves. Hearing the rich and powerful
sound of the cello when Sandra set the strings into vibration for the first time was an unforgettable thrill.
The concert also highlights the contributions of other distinguished instrument makers whose work has been part of
the orchestra for many years. Stephen Marvin is well known to Tafelmusik audiences through his long association
with the orchestra as a violinist and a maker of fine bows. Atlanta oboe maker Harry Vas Dias, who has a long
association with John Abberger, and the workshop of Guntram and Peter Wolf, who have built bassoons for
Dominic Teresi, are also featured.
A very special contribution has also been made to this concert by Dr. Daniel Geiger, Microscopist and Curator of
Malacology (the study of molluscs) at the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History. Dr. Geiger, the author of
numerous books and scientific articles, has described over one hundred new taxa; nine species and one genus are
named after him. He is also an accomplished amateur player of the viola d’amore, on which he has performed at the
International Viola d’amore Congress with our own celebrated virtuoso of the instrument, Thomas Georgi. Dr.
Geiger has created a set of stunning magnified images of the materials described in the concert, and we are
incredibly grateful for the enthusiasm which he brought to the project, and for his generosity in providing us with so
many magnified views.
The project also owes a debt to several other generous providers of images. Ivars Taurins rendered the beautiful
calligraphy of the bass line of the Goldberg canons in his elegant hand. The University of Iowa Centre for the Book
specializes in the techniques and artistry of historical papermaking. We are grateful to Timothy Barrett, director of
the Centre for the Book, and to filmmaker Avi Michael, creator of the film Chancery Papermaking, for the beautiful
footage of paper being made as it was in the time of Bach. We are also grateful to our friends Kerstin Wiese,
director of the Bach Museum Leipzig, and to Dr. Dettloff Schwerdtfeger, director of the Bach Archiv, Leipzig,
for facilitating meetings with Leipzig scholars and allowing items in the museum to be photographed. And we are
grateful to Production Designer Glenn Davidson for creating the beautiful photographs of musicians’ hands and of
the sheep shown during the famous work now known as “Sheep may safely graze” (Schafe können sicher weiden)
from Bach’s earliest surviving secular cantata, BWV 208.
This cantata was performed after a hunting expedition at the thirty-first birthday party of the Duke of SaxeWeissenfels. In 1725 Bach composed another cantata for the forty-third birthday party of the same duke. The
opening sinfonia of that celebratory work begins our concert and must have been a favourite of Bach, as he used it
again for the beginning Cantata 249, now known as the Easter Oratorio. We have taken his process of recycling
one step further in several adaptations of cantata movements into instrumental works suited to the orchestration of
Tafelmusik. These movements all had their origins in secular cantatas: the serene opening movement of the
Wedding Cantata BWV 202; the first aria of Cantata 42, which is thought to have been a reworking of a lost
birthday serenata composed for the Duke of Anhalt-Cöthen; and the opening chorus of the Ascension Cantata
BWV 11, which was originally a celebratory cantata for the completion of renovations of the St. Thomas Choir
School, which included the Bach family apartments.
The rest of the music on the programme is typical of the works that would have been performed at the regular Friday
night concerts at Zimmerman’s Coffeehouse in the centre of Leipzig. In 1695 the merchants’ guild of Leipzig had
petitioned the town council for “street lanterns that would, as in Vienna and Berlin, burn all night to prevent
incessant nocturnal crime.” On Christmas Eve of 1701, seven hundred oil-fuelled streetlights, 478 made by the local
tinsmiths’ guild after a model in Amsterdam, and 222 from Dresden were installed in the city, making it safe for the
first time for middle-class citizens to walk freely at night, transforming coffeehouses into middle-class venues for
recreation, listening to the newspaper being read aloud, and listening to music.
Bach directed an ensemble that performed on Friday nights at the cafe for which the owner, Georg Zimmerman,
acquired a set of musical instruments. The Orchestral Suites BWV 1066 and 1068, the Third Brandenburg
Concerto, the Trio Sonata BWV 1039, the Goldberg Variations, and the shorter solos for harpsichord, violin, and
cello are typical of music which Bach would have performed with members of his family, university students, and
amateur players of the ensemble known as the Collegium Musicum. Professional player from the Leipzig town
band also participated in these performances: the municipal musicians were given salaries, clothing, music,
instruments, and housing for themselves and their families in the Stadtpfeiffer Gässchen (“City Pipers’ Lane”),
which was also the traditional street for the city’s midwives.
The municipality and its music were supported by a thriving economy based largely on the success of the famous
trade fairs that took place in the city three times a year. Although forbidden permanent residence in the city, Jewish
merchants were encouraged to attend the fairs because of their international connections and business acumen; they
were charged a hefty head tax as they entered the city gates, and a higher than normal excise tax upon leaving, thus
making a huge contribution to the city coffers. (A devastating fire in the warehouses of the eastern city of Brody in
the mid-eighteenth century kept the Jewish merchants from attending the fair, and the city of Leipzig suffered a huge
financial loss.) Max Freudenthal, an early twentieth-century rabbi and scholar who compiled the detailed archival
tax records of all Jewish visitors to the fairs in Bach’s time, has given us a fascinating portrait of commercial travel
from Constantinople, Venice, and Siberia as merchants and their families, cooks, and musicians swelled the
population of the city three times a year. The various communities established temporary prayer houses at the north
end of the city, where Sabbath observance, presided over by the Rabbi of Dessau, included the singing in
cantillation of the text of the beautiful poetry of the Song of Songs. We are grateful to Robert Kinar of the
Tafelmusik Chamber Choir and to Simon Spiro, Senior Cantor, Beth Tzedec Congregation, for their help in the
preparation of this portion of the programme.
In 1746 the Dresden official court painter Elias Gottlob Haussmann painted a portrait of the sixty-one-year-old
Bach holding, as was customary, an emblem of his art. Rather than being pictured with a keyboard, the famous
virtuoso chose instead to hold a small piece of paper with three short lines of music — the first eight notes of the
bass line of the Goldberg Variations with a six-part canon written in code. It was a powerful symbol of Bach’s roles
as composer, performer, and teacher. Like the instrument makers who made his violins and harpsichords, Bach
regarded himself as a craftsman who had inherited much from the guild musicians who were his forebears.
Our concert ends with a reflection on human hands and the thousands of hours it takes to master the use of a violin
bow or a chisel. In the long hours of labour, musicians and artisans are sustained by the beauty of materials, the
artistry of their tools, the guidance of inspiring mentors, or the exhilaration of exploring the art of a great genius. In
June of 2014 the members of Tafelmusik were invited to live in Bach’s city of Leipzig for two weeks as ensemblein-residence at the annual festival that celebrates his legacy. It has been our great privilege to have been able to
explore his world and to prepare for this concert with the mutual support of our colleagues and the generosity of the
builders, photographers, filmmakers, and scholars whose contributions have so enriched the creation of the project. I
would particularly like to acknowledge the hours of work spent by our librarian Charlotte Nediger in preparing the
editions of the music in individual books for each member of the orchestra, and the untold practice time spent by the
performers in preparing to do what no musician in Bach’s orchestra would have dreamt of — playing an entire
concert from memory.
©Alison Mackay 2015
This document is for reference only and is not to be used for house programmes:
tour presenters will be sent programme material specific to their performances.