The ideas here are based on a small amount of data and are undoubtedly well-known in some form to many people (perhaps even anyone who has played a two-part invention!).  However they don’t show up in the usual discussions of Bach, and they certainly don’t seem to have influenced performances on recordings.

I’m been playing some pretty basic Bach—three-part inventions (in D and B flat) and a Well-Tempered Klavier I fugue (in B flat).  What is striking is that all of these pieces are in a very specific form you could call Bach’s sonata form.  I’ll say a little about the specifics in a minute, but the important thing is that it is obvious that Bach wants those pieces to be played in a way that reflects this clear dramatic structure.  No one would ever play Mozart or Beethoven without respecting the dramatic structure those composers have set up, frequently based on their own versions of sonata form.  However for some reason pretty much no one does that with Bach.  Is there a concern about “authentic performance”?  How can it be inauthentic if it is clearly intended?

Bach wrote for a harpsichord, so he didn’t have dynamic variation to use in performance. But that doesn’t mean he couldn’t build drama.  Tempo variation and ornaments were parts of his language, and he undoubtedly used them to the same ends.

Bach’s sonata form is in five sections:

1. Entry of the voices
2. Limited development based on the fugal subject as presented and transitioning to a strong cadence in a new key—as an end to the exposition.
3. Development section proper, with a clear departure point and free use of any pieces or rhythms of the fugal subject or other features of the exposition
4. Recapitulation in the subdominant as a clear contrast with development.  In all three pieces Bach goes to some pains to emphasize the recapitulation event.
5. Transition to the tonic as if anything a bigger event, followed by a short kind of victory lap

All three cited pieces do this exactly.  The fugue even goes one step farther.  Bach actually marks each transition point with a rhythmic figure (four 16^th notes with a break after the first) that occurs nowhere else in the piece. And the chord progressions in the transitions to the subdominant and tonic are such that Bach is practically waving his arms to get our attention.

I think you can make a case more generally that people pay too much attention to the “horizontal” structure of Bach’s music—the intricacies of multi-voice writing—and not enough attention to the “vertical” structure—the musical events created by all the voices acting together.  That overemphasis on the “horizontal” leads to performances where the sole objective seems to be making sure the fugal subject is heard clearly regardless of whatever else is going on.  In the extreme such performances can amount to little more than the same thing played over and over again in different keys—because that’s just about all you can hear. It’s strange that this persists in an era fixated on historically correct performance, since it is patently inauthentic for keyboard!

Another side of the same thing is in the comment you sometimes hear about how amazing it is that that real emotional music emerges out of all that complicated polyphony.  I think that point of view is wrong.  Bach wanted to produce music, and the complicated polyphony was his language to produce it.  He manipulated that language the same way any other artist manipulates his medium of creation.  Bach’s ability to master polyphony is jaw-dropping, but that doesn’t mean he regarded it as the primary objective.  Bach wrote music; an overemphasis on anything else misses the point.

There’s a relevant quote from Beethoven: “I believe that Bach’s works for solo violin are perhaps the greatest example in any art form of a master’s ability to move with freedom and assurance, even in chains.” We spend too much time talking about chains.

Attached is a far from perfect version of the fugue. Hopefully it can still give an indication of what I mean. For comparison, here is a much more polished conventional performance. Note the preoccupation with the fugal subject takes over to the point that Bach’s much-emphasized recapitulation event is actually inaudible.

P.S. I’m now working on the marvelous prelude and fugue in g minor (still book 1). I want to state the conclusion here in stronger terms. I would say that the drama is so central to the music, that it would have formed the basis for performance in Bach’s time. Keyboard instruments couldn’t play loud and soft (except in limited ways) but supple tempos and ornaments were equal to the task and would have been used to full effect. It is impossible to believe that musical performance would not have matched the music.

Today for both harpsichord and piano we have ended up with a worst of worlds. For both instruments there is an orthodoxy of ornaments for ornaments sake that is at odds with any real musical function, and anything beyond minor tempo variation is a romantic perversion of baroque purity. For piano of course dynamics offer all kinds of possibilities, but instead it’s bad form to stray too far from what a harpsichord could do.

In other words we live in an era of the LEAST AUTHENTIC PERFORMANCES imaginable!

It’s hard to think about anything other than politics these days, but sometimes it helps to think about something completely innocuous.

For what it’s worth, I’m going to talk about Mozart operas.  There are reasons to do that.

First of all, the four big Mozart operas (Marriage of Figaro, Don Giovanni, Cosi Fan Tutte, Magic Flute) represent an incredible level of artistic achievement.  They are part of everyone’s cultural patrimony, and anyone who hasn’t had the experience is missing out.   (This version of the Marriage of Figaro is free on YouTube, and this DVD is both good and cheap.)

Next is the fact that opera is an unusual discipline in that different composers have had such different ideas about it, that the results are simply not the same thing.  Opera goes way back as a formalized way to combine music and drama, but the modern notion of a fully-formed musical drama was created by Mozart with the Marriage of Figaro in 1786.  The nineteenth century took that form and ran with it, but in quite a different direction.  While Mozart operas are about people, the nineteenth century went mythic.  With Wagner and even Verdi the characters and spectacle become larger than life, and that became a primary model.  In that sense the four big Mozart operas represent an unsurpassed peak of form.

Those four big operas are about—respectively—rape, murder, love, and religion.  That covers a lot of territory, but there are certain common threads.  The primary one that I want to talk about here is the presentation of the woman’s point of view.   The reason to do this is that generations of male opera producers have frequently lost track of this thread, to the detriment of their productions.   It is an odd fact of the opera business that the fixation on spectacle is such that people don’t seem to look for common threads.  So there can be whole traditions of wrong-headedness!

We’ll start with the Marriage of Figaro.  Why is a “marriage” opera about rape?  Because the plot turns on the so-called “droit de seigneur”, the right of a noble master to get a first night with any female subject who gets married.  That’s one good definition of rape, and the opera is concerned with the efforts of master’s wife and the coming bride to avoid it.  For this opera it’s their game and the several men in the picture mostly just get in the way.  There’s no way to misinterpret this one.  There’s even a minor aria (Act 4 Scene 4) on unequal justice in male-female relations.

However things already get confused with the second opera Don Giovanni.  Don Giovanni is Don Juan, a brave and powerful nobleman who accepts no constraints on his behavior and is infinitely successful in seductions of women.   In the opera he kills the father of one of them and is eventually dragged down to Hell for it. 

Opera productions and criticism tend to focus on the power and heroic amorality of the title role, and you can argue that position by noting the contrasting weakness of the other male characters.  But that’s ignoring most of the opera.   What’s remarkable about this retelling of the Don Juan story is that it spends much more time with the women than the men.  

The Don Juan character is here with all his personal strengths, but at the same time this is also a retelling of the Marriage of Figaro story (exchanging the “droit du seigneur” for power- and class-based seduction), and it’s the women in this opera who have to pick up the pieces.  To see Mozart’s intent you just have to follow the music.  The women are the ones onstage trying with difficulty to live in the world that the male characters have created, and you can even say they’ve all had bad luck with their lovers.   The power relationships are made clear in both words and music for the seduction scenes.   And all of the women have stature; Donna Elvira’s second aria is a particularly remarkable example. She starts as a comic character, and grows until she gets one of the most striking pieces in the opera. Don Giovanni may be dragged down to hell for murder, but the women have to go on.

It is wrong to view this opera as Don Giovanni’s story exclusively.  Despite many productions and much music criticism to the contrary, the women’s stories are equally important.  As examples of the opposite, I’ve seen productions where all three female characters were undercut:  It was not Mozart’s idea that Donna Anna was merely another conquest making a fuss, or that Zerlina was a slut, or that Donna Elvira was flat out ridiculous.  There’s a Metropolitan Opera DVD version where the women’s major arias are treated as about their men! We’ve had centuries of eager male egos producing the opera they wanted; I’ve even read many comments that the point of Don Giovanni is how boring the world is without him.  Sound familiar?

Things get even more complicated with the next opera, Cosi Fan Tutte.  The core of the story is a joke, possibly from an event that really happened.  Two men swear to an older cynic that their (very young) girlfriends will be loyal forever, and he bets them he can break them down.   He sends the men off to an imaginary war and then has them return disguised to woo each other’s girlfriend.  At the end the women succumb, the men unmask, and the cynic proclaims his triumph.   It’s a very dark joke, since the 18^th century consequences for the women would have been disastrous, and the manipulated wooing of the women involves increasingly horrifying violations of ethics and trust.  Unsurprisingly the story is difficult to end, and you can find half a dozen variations of the ending on Amazon.  There are even versions that treat this as a story about sexual awakening—though the sexual manipulation of the women is anything but benign!

Again for Mozart’s intent one again only needs to follow the music. In that there is no question. The two women are more carefully drawn and ultimately more sympathetic than the two men—who are only fitfully in the spotlight—and the cynic is unambigously repugnant.  With the elaborate violations of trust the opera turns the joke upside down: the primary betrayal is of the women by the men.  Such stories are not unique—there’s a lengthy Cosi Fan Tutte story in Don Quixote for example with even more dire consequences. What is unusual here, though, is presenting the story from the women’s point of view. In a manner analogous to what happens in Don Giovanni, Mozart made his opera out of the consequences to the women.

Nonetheless many productions buy the joke.  A recent Boston Lyric Opera production, for example, was most interested in which of the possible lovers the girlfriends would choose! By contrast the most coherent production I’ve even seen was done by the New England Conservatory a few years ago.  The action took place on a resort set named for the cynic: “Hotel Don Alfonso”.  The women did what no one in the eighteenth century could even imagine—get up and leave Hotel Don Alfonzo.

Finally there is Mozart’s last opera “The Magic Flute”.  The plot here is complicated and functions as a kind of initiation story for a society modeled on the 18th century Masonic movement.   Mozart was a Mason and believed in its goal of a rationally-ordered enlightenment society.  However, there were no women Masons, so the Masonic movement itself doesn’t fit with what we’ve been talking about.

The opera both is and isn’t Masonic.  There are plenty of statements of Enlightenment goals.  And the libretto has quite a lot of organizational mumbo-jumbo, including comments from speakers about “being a man” and not listening to “jabbering women.”  But when you follow the music, the mumbo-jumbo gets parodied, and by far the strongest character is a woman (Pamina).  The initial male lead becomes a minor character in the second act and has to be guided through his trials by her. We’re even told at the end that she should be among the ruling elite. It’s hard to find much else in the 18th century to match that.  Mozart was serious about the goals of the Masons, but he didn’t to stick to the party line.

It seems that the Masons weren’t happy about that.  There is a trio late in the second act (where Sarastro drags Tamino away from Pamina and off to war) which makes no sense in its current context.  The only place where it would make sense is near the beginning of the act, where it sets up the rest of the second act as Pamina’s story.  Many current productions actually do the opera that way. (You can see a version like that here.)  It’s clear something happened, and it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that Mozart’s plan for the female lead went beyond what the Masons could take, so they toned it down at the last minute.

What does all of this come down to?  Mozart was certainly not producing feminist propaganda, but he was very systematic about respecting the feminine roles in his operas.  And it is fundamentally wrong not to recognize that consistent thread.  Mozart went to great pains to make you respect his women and understand their problems.

We can only speculate why.  Mozart had lived his life from childhood on the wrong side of the ruling nobility’s class divide, which may or may not have to do with sensitivity to the position of women.  Further the opera world was different—women were of prime importance, and he was satisfying the sopranos who were his stars.  Finally we know that Mozart was influenced by the rediscovery of Shakespeare (in translation) during his time in Vienna, and that was certainly art that respected its characters. 

Perhaps none of that is relevant.  But the thread of concern for women’s issues is undeniable and should be recognized in any performance that wants to do justice to these operas.