The Montreal Bach Festival opens on Friday with a distinguished guest: conductor Reinhard Goebel, discoverer and beacon of baroque interpretation for 45 years. He will perform, with the excellent pianist Schaghajegh Nosrati, works by Johann Christian and Johann Christoph Friedrich Bach. The chef is inexhaustible about this family, whose works he has explored, but also the history.
“The Bach family is incredibly interesting to us Germans. England took Handel from us and Austria, Mozart, so imagine! Johann Sebastian Bach is an integrator,” says the musician with an amused air, who we can guess is being facetious.
“We all think there are four sons of Bach,” he continues. But between them, there are two other characters. A son from Bach’s first union, with his cousin Maria Barbara, Gottfried Bernhard, who freed himself from Bach’s guardianship and who died at age 24, as well as a son from the 1second union, with Anna Magdalena, Gottfried Heinrich, born in 1724, who was disabled and died at an early age. Bach therefore had a total of six sons. »
The braggart and the whiner
Reinhard Goebel reflected with relish on their differences. “Imagine that Wilhelm Friedemann was born in 1710 and Johann Christian, 25 years later! Also imagine Father Bach as a hand. So you can really see the children as fingers: they all go in different directions and come off the hand. »
Reinhard Goebel also defined each person’s character. “Wilhelm Friedemann, the first, was brazen and arrogant. Blondie, he was considered the prodigy son of a gifted man. Carl Philipp Emanuel is the typical second son, in the shadow of the first, short, chubby, squinty, with dark hair and left-handed, so much so that his father immediately gave up teaching him the violin. Johann Christoph Friedrich was a whiner, tired from birth, and Johann Christian, the youngest, had nothing more to do with all that. »
The music of these sons is also very individual. “We recognize Wilhelm Friedemann by the fact that he never manages to conclude anything; Carl Philipp Emanuel always wrote “Why doesn’t anyone think I’m good?” ; Johann Christoph Friedrich whined and Johann Christian ended up sprinkling it all with wit and elegance. This is my life being around this family and trying to understand where they come from and where they are going. »
Reinhard Goebel is building up an archive with everything he can glean about the composers of this family. In the case of Johann Christian, he comes up against the lack of printed editions. “I then have to reconstruct the scores myself. But almost everything from Johann Christian’s production is preserved. There are early works, when he was 18 to 20 years old, which are lost, but this is probably not decisive. On the other hand, the majority of Johann Christoph Friedrich’s work is lost. The question is: is it serious? For example, an oboe concerto is missing. But for Beethoven too, an oboe concerto and a cello concerto disappeared. But we have plenty to do. »
Dire need
The conductor laments the fact that despite the richness of the repertoire, he is quite isolated in his interests. “The overwhelming majority of performers prefer to rehash the music of Jean-Sébastien. Few performers approach this music, although observing Johann Christian from Mozart’s perspective is fascinating. But for me, it’s not just about playing the music and saying, “Oh, that almost sounds like Mozart!” We have to unravel the relationships between the characters, know when they met, what happened around them, what they wrote about each other. »
“I need this occupation, this music,” concludes Reinhard Goebel. I’ve always been like that: I’m attracted to unknown works of art. Not by things that I have known since my youth, but by works that I must appropriate. My artistic thoughts are different from mainstream. »
The Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, which asked Goebel to take care of its baroque series, risks seeing its cage shaken. “Johann Christian, who died in 1782, entered the classical period,” says the chef. Towards the end, he no longer wrote music for strings, but he composed for the so-called “galante” formation, with at least two oboes and two horns, while the other brothers always composed for strings. » Johann Christian is completely absent from the repertoires of symphony orchestras, which base their repertoire on Mozart.
When Reinhard Goebel was asked why more is not known about Johann Christoph Friedrich (1732-1795), he said: “Do you know where Bückeburg is? »Having a post in this town located 50 kilometers from Hanover was a first-class burial. “You don’t influence anyone in Bückeburg. In Bückeburg, people slept and woke up once a year, probably on 1er January to celebrate the new year. After 30 years, the princes had to say to him: “Mr Bach, do you know that people in the world are now composing very different music?” And there, Johann Christoph Friedrich had to update himself and he composed his last symphonies. And his last symphonies are, in essence, what his younger brother, Johann Christian, put into the hands of Mozart and, through Mozart, this music came back to Johann Christoph Friedrich who then began to imitate Mozart and Haydn. It’s almost tragic! »
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In summary, Johann Christoph Friedrich did not move, did not develop, did not have disciples. “The fate of the family is the father’s overflowing genius which meant that one could not be his student,” judges Goebel. We couldn’t surpass him, and so we had to do something else, like Carl Philipp Emanuel. But he didn’t have any students either, because his type of art too was already dead. The only transmissible art was that of Johann Christian, quite simply because he had nothing of his father. When people asked him: “Are you the son of this great Bach of keyboard works?” he replied with a laugh: “Yes, but I can’t play them!” »
For Reinhard Goebel, this virtual absence of connection was the luck of Johann Christian (1735-1782). “He was 15 when his father died and he didn’t have much of Jean-Sébastien, who was probably, during his last five or ten years, a bitter and tired misanthrope. Johann Christian grew up on the streets. And what were we doing in the street? We sang melodies with the students not by Bach, but by Hasse. »
The transfusion of music and knowledge from Johann Christian Bach to Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart is well deciphered by the letters of Leopold Mozart. “In 1764, Leopold, who had been ill for two months in London, left his son with Johann Christian Bach and Abel. Leopold was very clever. He knew his limits and knew that, if he wanted a career for his son, he would have to build relationships with important people who would show him the path to follow. Johann Christian, who obviously spoke German, had been to Naples, to Milan, and we notice that these are exactly the stops that we then find in the Mozart circuit. In fact, Leopold had staged everything to organize a musical tutelage of his son by Johann Christian. »
In Montreal on Friday, Reinhard Goebel will lead the Symphony in G minor for two oboes, two horns, bassoon and strings, no 6 op. 6 and the Piano Concerto in E flat majorwritten by Johann Christian in 1770 and 1774. These scores will be juxtaposed with two works by Johann Christoph Friedrich: a Concerto Grosso in E flat major for piano, 2 oboes, 2 horns, bassoon and strings from 1792 and a Symphony in B flat major of September 1794, completed a few months before his death.