Books, Arts & Manners: Ah, Baroque!

FOR SOME years there has been a great vogue for the Baroque, although some of the critical comment has resembled that wonderful M*A*S*H routine in which Radar sighs, “Ah, Bach!” Until Monteverdi, it was the accepted wisdom that music had reached its pinnacle, that it had become the ars perfecta, to be followed only by more of the same. Monteverdi created a revolution in technique, structure, and idiom. It is not stretching it to say he was the father of modern music, at a level perhaps with Beethoven, Berlioz, and Stravinsky. Before him was Palestrina, and after him Bach. Yet Bach could never have been Bach had he not been a product of the Monteverdian innovations which not only expanded the boundaries of music but also brought it a new depth of emotion and sensibility.

The Baroque, or Bach, revival began with Mendelssohn, but over many decades it has led to the rediscovery of Vivaldi, a composer almost as prolific as Bach, and others. In recent years, this revival has been spurred by the “early instruments” movement, which has given us a closer approximation of what music sounded like from the sixteenth century forward. (This has also given us aperçus on Haydn and Mozart, and opened up through the recordings of Paul Badura-Skoda many of the once “impossible” pages of the last Beethoven piano sonatas.) Yet “Baroque” is far from homogeneous. Palestrina moves along more or less on one level of meaning and involvement, and Bach never attained the musical depths and heights of Monteverdi. If this is heresy, so be it.

RT

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Ralph de Toledano

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FOR SOME years there has been a great vogue for the Baroque, although some of the critical comment has resembled that wonderful M*A*S*H routine in which Radar sighs, “Ah, Bach!” Until Monteverdi, it was the accepted wisdom that music had reached its pinnacle, that it had become the ars perfecta, to be followed only by more of the same. Monteverdi created a revolution in technique, structure, and idiom. It is not stretching it to say he was the father of modern music, at a level perhaps with Beethoven, Berlioz, and Stravinsky. Before him was Palestrina, and after him Bach. Yet Bach could never have been Bach had he not been a product of the Monteverdian innovations which not only expanded the boundaries of music but also brought it a new depth of emotion and sensibility.

The Baroque, or Bach, revival began with Mendelssohn, but over many decades it has led to the rediscovery of Vivaldi, a composer almost as prolific as Bach, and others. In recent years, this revival has been spurred by the “early instruments” movement, which has given us a closer approximation of what music sounded like from the sixteenth century forward. (This has also given us aperçus on Haydn and Mozart, and opened up through the recordings of Paul Badura-Skoda many of the once “impossible” pages of the last Beethoven piano sonatas.) Yet “Baroque” is far from homogeneous. Palestrina moves along more or less on one level of meaning and involvement, and Bach never attained the musical depths and heights of Monteverdi. If this is heresy, so be it.