What Bach's music means to me

[摘要] Bach has been, and will always be, part of my life. It is something like a personal oxygen. I grew up in a musical household, in which Bach was always being played; my mother would be practising preludes and fugues, and my father would be practising some of the music for solo violin. As a child, I would fumble through the Bach pieces in the elementary piano books. At school, in the choir, I sang in the B minor Mass, with that huge striding Sanctus sending us out into the evening, shouting its theme. As a student, I met others with the same enthusiasms. We would play through the Brandenburgs with gramophone backing; we tried the Double Concerto on two flutes, just to be part of that wonderful music. We worked our way through the cantata ‘Actus Tragicus’. We played trio sonatas, and the sonata for two flutes. We heard the great baroque ensembles of the day, like the Stuttgart Chamber Players; we heard the cantata concerts of the London Bach Society, and I fell passionately in love with the Chaconne from the D minor partita. With colossal impertinence, I transcribed it for a motley of instruments that my friends played; I heard my attempt once, and immediately threw a year's work in the dustbin. Later, my uncle played the Chaconne to me. He had been a pupil of Leopold Auer at the St Petersburg Conservatoire, in a class which produced such virtuosi as Elman, Heifetz, Milstein, Zimbalist and so many others. All students entering the examination for the Gold Medal were expected to be able to play all the Bach unaccompanied sonatas and partitas from memory and, at the examination, Auer would select which one a candidate had to play by sticking a pin in a list. My uncle had to play the D major partita, and won the Medal. I have never forgotten that evening when, old and frail — and with just the two of us present — he played the Chaconne with the intensity almost of a prayer.

[学科分类] 卫生学