Buy this CdFifteen years ago, I was seated on a train to Brussels with my violin at my side and Bach in my head. After arriving at the Gare du Midi, I continued on to the conservatory, where I was to meet Philipp Hirschhorn for a rather unusual lesson. Foolish as I was at the age of twenty, I had decided to play him the complete Sonatas and Partitas. There we were in the famous Brussels conservatory concert hall, the atmosphere permeated with the souls of the great musicians who had performed there. I stood alone on stage, a soloist surrounded by an imaginary orchestra consisting only of the chairs and music stands that had been set up for the concert that would take place that evening. Philipp Hirschhorn sat in one of the velvet seats, part of a phantom audience.
When I finished the Adagio of the first Sonata, he stood up and began to give me his verdict. To his astonishment, I replied that I intended to play all the sonatas and suites, and that I didn’t want to hear his remarks until I had finished. He gave me a quizzical look and sat back down. After the second Sonata, we left the hall for some lunch. At the end of the meal, since he hadn’t said anything about my playing, I tried to start a conversation about the mystery of Bach’s music. I told him that I felt like an ignoramus held aloft by his own unconsciousness. After a long silence, Hirschhorn asked me to look at the plants decorating the restaurant.‘How many shades of green do you see?’
‘ I don’t know, millions, just one . . .’
‘Are all the leaves the same? Are they parallel?’
‘I don’t know, they’re all different, but they look similar on the same plant;
they look parallel, but they aren’t really. Why do you ask?’
‘Well, Bach is the same, you see . . .’
‘Oh?’
After another long silence, realising how perplexed I was, he added, ‘You see, with proportions – like those of a leaf, a flower, a tree – there is always symmetry, but it is never exact…and the colours are like G minor, like E major, like G minor in E major and E major in G minor . . .’
We crossed the street again and I began our second session with the second Partita and the Chaconne. A few hours later, with a mixture of pride at having got to the end of the task I’d set myself and an uncomfortable feeling of having forced him to listen to me for a whole day, I prepared to say goodbye and return to the station when he said one last thing, which has echoed in my memory every since: ‘Bach is like us, he suffers, he cries out . . . that’s what the violin alone is . . . it’s alone, do you understand?’
A few years later, still sustained by a blend of unconsciousness and a headlong quest to understand the meaning of life, I decided to record these works in concert. Hervé Corre, my agent, gave me free rein, and I have to admit that it was a moment of madness I haven’t lived to regret. I had actually never played the complete cycle in concert before, and the live recording I made bears witness to what could be termed the virtues of unconsciousness . . . I knew when I made that recording that many unanswered questions remained, but that I had my whole life in front of me to delve into the complexity of the music and the secrets of Bach’s language in order, one day, to approach these works differently. That first recording was like a message in a bottle that I myself found. I never listened to it again, apart from an excerpt one recent evening. A music-loving restaurateur friend played me a few versions of the finale of the second Sonata, and I recognised them all, except my own! A long journey of initiation intervened between that recording and this one, a journey that was characterised by a variety of musical experiences. Combined, they allowed the young violinist that I was to mature, and the budding musician to ceaselessly question the mysteries of proportion and colour. The most striking events of my last few years as a musician have been working with living composers on the premieres of new works, playing the complete Beethoven string quartets, and a tour of India during which I played the Sonatas and Partitas across that country.
My exchanges with the composers Viktor Kissine and Brice Pauset allowed me to go beyond the performer’s point of view and to enter into that of musical language, leaving instrumental considerations behind and delving into musical structure, Bach’s rhetoric, and the well-known subjects of proportion and harmonic relationships in the music. Brice Pauset’s explanations made me more sensitive to ornamentation, the temperaments used in old music, and the natural accents of dances.
As far as temperament is concerned, I decided to use a tuning system based on the interval of the third for this recording. The violin was tuned in perfect fifths, and these fifths were divided into perfect thirds, resulting in consonant (or in-tune) thirds, fourths, fifths, sixths and octaves, and strongly dissonant augmented fourths, diminished fifths and sevenths. The sound of the instrument is much freer when this system is used, and the relationship among the notes is basically harmonic. This tuning is unlike both the equal temperament used to tune pianos and the Pythagorean system with its raised sharps and lowered flats often used by violinists for concertos, in order to heighten the expressivity of the melodic line. As the range of Bach’s Sonatas and Partitas extends over no more than three octaves, it was not necessary to temper the tuning more than usual. This gave rise to the tuning based on perfect fifths, which is unlike that used when a violinist plays string quartets or sonatas with a piano. I tried to play in a wohltemperiert way – literally well-tempered – in keeping with the instrument and the key signatures. Different keys resulted in different musical colours: B minor sounds dark, C major is serene, and E major is sunny, while G minor is slightly tense. A minor gives an impression of calm, cold light, and D minor is full and complete sounding. These may not be exactly the tonal colours Bach wanted, however, because of the slightly tempered tuning system based on perfect fifths.
Viktor Kissine taught me about the art of proportion in phrases, the mystical mathematics of this music, and its basis in rhetoric. Bach’s musical phrases, like the leaves on a tree, are always asymmetrical, with expressive accents also intervening against the established order. What is more, movements that appear to have a single melodic line are in fact always polyphonic, and the
patterns of the notes on the score indicate the expression with which they should be played. These patterns are often also religious symbols, which Kissine taught me to read.
And finally, my research on rhetoric led to a completely unexpected experience last summer. I was scheduled to play the second Partita in Finland, in a little wooden church bathed in the light of the midnight sun. After a long day of rehearsals typical of Scandinavian festivals, the Finnish guitarist Timo Korhonen was scheduled to give the first part of the concert, performing Bach’s third Sonata in C, which includes the great fugue. I was exhausted, and thought I would just turn up to play my portion of the concert. But I arrived at the beginning of the evening, and since there wasn’t a dressing room, I was condemned to listening to half an hour of Bach on the guitar . . . which turned out to be sublime! Korhonen played exactly as I would have liked to have done myself, everything was clear, evident . . . Since he couldn’t sustain the chords on the guitar, he did what harpsichordists do, creating expressivity through the timing of the notes and silences. His performance was a perfect illustration of my intuitions about the expressive force that could result from the blending of rhythmic and harmonic structures. His subtle way of arpeggiating the chords in order to bring out the different voices, especially in the fugue, was staggering. He used an unsteady beat to highlight the phrases’ rhetorical accents, and the music seemed to unfold naturally. At the end of the concert, to his great surprise, I asked him if he would be willing to share the fruits of his research with me. The days that followed were extremely busy what with rehearsals and concerts, plus the hours we spent together poring over the scores and unlocking the emotion in Bach’s music. This encounter was a decisive one for me, as it brought to a conclusion my liberation from certain reflexes that I had accumulated over the years as a player.
The question of which instrument to use is of primary importance today, particularly after all the experimentation that has taken place within the early music movement. Period instruments, gut strings, baroque bows, a different positioning of the bridge . . . what should one use? My fellow quartet members were patient enough to put up with my experiments with gut strings when we performed the complete Beethoven string quartets over a week at the Festival des Arcs. I had strung my violin with gut and overspun gut strings. The sound was very beautiful, very subtle . . . but the instrument constantly went out of tune, when the strings were not breaking due to the difference of humidity in the mountains. And when by some miracle the strings were in tune, I played out of tune! What to do? I had also borrowed a baroque bow to work on chords and get to grips with the articulation, which became self-apparent with this type of bow. The result was interesting, but the sound was not ideal… what I really needed was a different violin, set up in baroque way. But there was no question of exchanging my Stradivarius for another violin! This recording, therefore, is a transcription of Bach’s sonatas and partitas, played on a 1710 Stradivarius with a modern setup, metal strings and a François-Xavier Tourte bow made in the early 19th century and generously loaned for the occasion by my friend Hans Peter Hoffman.
Working on Beethoven’s quartets was a process that offered the perfect preparation for approaching Bach’s works which, because of their complexity, are often reminiscent of a quartet written for solo violin. The organic strength of Beethoven’s quartets and their implacable construction (which cannot be ignored without completely missing the point of these works) provided a valuable mental training ground before proceeding to Bach’s magic mountain.
The final part of my initiatory journey was spiritual, and occurred in India. A few years ago I gave concerts across that country with Bach and my violin. India and its culture provided an unexpected mirror for me in that the audiences, while experiencing a type of music with which they were totally unfamiliar, listened to the concerts with undivided attention. I felt that Bach’s music came completely into its own in these special circumstances. After concerts in certain
cities I had the opportunity to meet carnatic musicians. Carnatic music seemed to me to closely resemble that of Bach, not in terms of its use, which follows other rules, but in terms of its character, which is at once quotidian and mystical. Based on the use of a multiplicity of modes, carnatic music does not undergo harmonic development; instead, melodic inflexion and rhythmic
complexity provide the musical narrative. This extraordinarily refined traditional sacred music is transmitted from one generation to the next, and successive performers each add their own colours and intensity to the blend. Unlike notated western music, which has undergone various revolutions, the language of carnatic music has remained the same and is a veritable callig-
raphy of the spirit whose meaning is bound up with its very existence. Man, it is felt, lives in an un-changing universe he should not seek to dominate, existing rather as a link in a chain of being that goes beyond his comprehension. This music, like Bach’s, is a celebration of life and a difficult exercise for the body and mind that brings together the cardinal points of life and death.
Although ‘Bach cries out’, he made his peace with the world through music. He used it to describe the world, and his ‘string theory’ resolved the ontological gap between the infinitely small and the infinitely large: he speaks to us of the timeless moment of the eternal beginning. God, mankind, nature, simplicity rather than complexity, and life above all. It is the contour of the world under the shining stars.
David Grimal
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