Breathing new life into Bach

Bach biographer Christoph Wolff explains his special relationship with the composer, as he conducts his work in Dublin, writes Eileen Battersby

Musicologist Christoph Wolff pauses for a moment, attempting to remember when he first became interested in the music of JS Bach. He smiles helpfully and replies, "I've been aware of him for such a long time; since I was a boy, maybe seven years old, singing in a choir. For me, there has always been Bach, he is at the heart of my tradition and at the heart of all music."

For the third consecutive year, Wolff, the renowned biographer of Bach, has come to Dublin as a guest conductor to begin the eighth year of the Orchestra of St Cecilia's Complete Bach Church Cantata series. Some 200 of the beautiful and dramatic cantatas Bach composed as part of his duties as cantor at the church of St Thomas in Leipzig survive and form a remarkable body of work tracing the cycles of the church year.

The concerts, of which there will have been 60 when the project is finally completed in March 2010, are being performed over 10 years in six-week instalments, in St Ann's Church on Dawson Street, Dublin. St Ann's provides an authentic period setting which delights Wolff. "This church was completed in 1723, the year of Bach's arrival in Leipzig", and the date from which these cantatas begin. Both the atmosphere and the fact that St Ann's remains an active serving church make it ideal. There is even an element of theatre. The choir and orchestra perform from the altar, the soloists rise as if members of the congregation and, when singing, turn to face their fellow worshippers.

These cantatas were originally sung as part of a church service, but as Wolff points out, by the time Bach arrived in Leipzig, the opera was bankrupt and so the citizens had begun to see their church music in an entertainment as well as a spiritual context. It was in Leipzig that Bach, having already composed wonderful chamber music and instrumental works such as the Brandenburg concertos and various orchestral suites, was able to concentrate on his choral music, culminating in the great Passion settings.

For the opening concert on January 20th, St Ann's filled quickly. There was an element of excitement, of anticipation. The audience is increasingly aware of having become part of something special. Many of the people here have been following the proposed 10-year project devised by Lindsay Armstrong, artistic director of Orchestra of St Cecilia and oboist; some are taking pride in not having missed a concert.

Wolff conducted cantatas 17, 27, 78 and 138, composed for the 14th, 15th and 16th Sundays after Trinity; the music is glorious, although the texts are sombre on the theme of sickness and death. Wolff's conducting style is understated, unobtrusive; no one could accuse him of theatricality.

"All the cantatas are fantastic," he says. "The words are important, but with Bach the music is the language and it is the language of the heart. Bach was devout, a good Lutheran, he loved his God and he also loved his fellow man. There is always his abiding humanity."

Bach's enduring appeal is that all musicians relate to him, be they classical or jazz or folk. "No matter how different the music, even looking at different classical musicians, no matter how different, they all look to Bach. He is the musician's musician." Central to Bach's genius is his flair for improvisation, the art of making music. "I think it is this improvisational quality that most appeals to musicians.

"Beethoven loved him although he knew relatively little of his music, aside from The Well-Tempered Clavier, whereas Brahms, coming so much later, had the benefit of the complete Bach works."

Bach's musical career seems to have been preordained. There was no struggle. He belonged to the seventh generation of a family of musicians. "He always understood it, in a practical way as well. He knew how instruments were made. For him, the organ was an exciting thing; a most sophisticated, mechanical instrument. It could do anything, make such wonderful sounds. The child Bach became fascinated with this instrument. He knew how it was made and he knew how to fix it."

Wolff regrets that the organ, so important in Bach's day and into the 19th century as well, no longer enjoys its former role, despite its vast repertoire. It had taken no less than the evolution of the modern orchestra, an entire collective of instruments, to challenge and supplant the organ, such was its dominance.

Wolff is an organist. "I played many instruments, but the organ is my main one." It was also Bach's and he composed a vast body of work for it.

Wolff was always interested in music. He is the son of a professor of theology father and an organist mother, and is the eldest of seven children, "a good Lutheran family - but I am not a church goer". Born in the Rhineland in 1940, he laughs when asked if he is he a Rhinelander or a German. "That's a tricky question, but I would have to say I am a Rhinelander first and a German second."

It is a typically German comment, and Wolff points out that Bach also referred to himself as a citizen of Eisenach. Wolff left Germany in 1968, first for Toronto and then to New York in 1970 to lecture at Columbia University. After six years there, he joined the music department at Harvard and is currently the Adams professor of music - a chair founded by the family of John Adams, the second president of the United States. He also serves as the director of the Bach-Archiv in Leipzig, across the street from St Thomas's church. The archive was founded in 1950, to mark the 200th anniversary of Bach's death.

One of Wolff's three daughters, "the middle one" is a professional cellist; the eldest is married to a conductor, while the youngest is involved in publishing. Probably the major international authority on Bach, Wolff is obviously a scholar and an academic, yet is never pedantic.

His conversation is relaxed and rich in insight, and generous in detail, if also precise - he seems more like a mathematician. Many experts give the impression that they not only know everything about his subject, they have actually become that subject. But not Wolff. He is calm, gracious and the polite side of enthusiastic. Not quite Old World, not quite formal; despite having spent the past 40 years in North America he is still very German, although he has acquired the habit of saying "these old guys" and "all this stuff".

Is he obsessed with Bach? Wolff laughs, as amused by the abstract concept of obsession as he is of the idea of him being obsessed. "No, I'm not obsessed - but I am fascinated by the history of music of Bach's, Beethoven's - I think it tells us so much about life, art, history, thought." One immediately begins to envy his students. This balance and perspective shapes Bach: The Learned Musician, Wolff's outstanding biography of the composer which was published in 2000, marking the 250th anniversary of his death, and has since been translated into eight languages.

"I wrote it in English," he says, "but the German translation was so bad, I said to my publishers, 'I can't allow you to publish this, German is my native language, please, and let me fix it'." So he "fixed" the book. "I couldn't rewrite it in German as it would have been a different book." In less than 500 pages, Wolff evokes a living, breathing, blunt and direct man, without ever becoming intrusive. How long was he working on it?

"Not that long. It was not my idea to write it." When Wolff was initially approached to write the biography, he declined. "Such a big subject, too tricky.

"I had written the Bach entry for the New Grove Dictionary of Music and from this I was asked to do the biography. Having said no, I then began to think about it." And changed his mind.

It is a lively narrative, Wolff displays a rare ease with the material. How does he see Bach, this man he never met yet knows so well? "I think he was a gregarious fellow, and also, a serious man who thought deeply. Yes, I like him very much."

Some 15 years before the publication of Bach: The Learned Musician, Wolff had already astonished the world of Baroque music by authenticating a number of previously unknown Bach chorale preludes. The Neumeister Chorales, announced to the world in 1985, was both an exciting discovery and proved an original way of celebrating the 300th anniversary of Bach's birth.

For Wolff, it was the final stage in what had been an intriguing investigation. "I wasn't the first one to see the manuscript, it had been known to be in the library at Yale, part of a large collection. Others had already looked at it." The Neumeister manuscript had already been catalogued.

Neumeister was a teacher and organist, and had been a pupil of Georg Andreas Sorge (1703-78), a composer and friend of Bach's. Both Sorge and Bach were members of the same learned music society in Leipzig. Neumeister apparently copied out a number of works by various composers and dedicated the manuscript to Christian Heinrich Rinck, a well-known collector who had been taught by one of Bach's last students, JC Kittel. Rinck was a friend of Mendelssohn, who had been a great champion of Bach. By dedicating the manuscript to Rinck, Neumeister had obviously been hoping Rinck would buy it for his collection. He did.

Wolff's approach to the discovery of the Bach pieces was systematic. He had known the manuscript was in Yale and spent time studying it. How it had come to be in Yale in the first place is interesting. An American, Lowell Mason, had travelled to Europe and met Rinck. They kept in contact. When Rinck died in about 1854, Mason, then director of one of the oldest music societies in the US, purchased Rinck's collection of several hundred manuscripts. Mason was to become the first professor of music at Yale. Some time during the 1870s, Mason formally presented his papers and the entire Rinck collection (including the Neumeister manuscript) to the Yale library.

How the manuscript got to Yale is one thing, how the trail led back to Bach is another. Wolff researched Neumeister and arrived at Sorge and Kittel. Then he dug deeper. The conclusive evidence was there in the notational style - it was old- fashioned and obviously pre-1710 because of the absence of the cancellation of the sharp. Of the 80 or so works copied in the collection, Wolff confirmed that 38 pieces - 33 of which were previously unknown - were early organ works by Bach. Hence the Neumeister Chorales, authenticated by Wolff in late 1984, but, he says, "kept for the 300th birthday celebration in 1985".

About 40 per cent of the students at Harvard are not American, yet, Wolff points out, between 80 and 90 per cent of his music students are American. "The Americans revere him [ Bach], yes, and are also curious. They want to know about this man who composed the wonderful music - the biography was written for an American audience."

There is also the fact that although we tend to see Bach living in a remote place, working as a church organist, there is his awareness of the musical trends across Europe, particularly in Italy and France. "This is a feature of German music at that time. As you know there was no 'nation state' until the late 19th century. German composers created this 'vermischte geschack' or mixed style, drawing on elements of all traditions and musical trends or fashions."

Bach wrote for all instruments, and included the human voice among those instruments. "In this he was could be very demanding; Andreas Scholl is right - Handel was more accommodating in that he tended to write for specific singers." As if on cue, Handel enters the conversation albeit in the form of an oboe concerto in F major unexpectedly soaring across the hotel lobby, where the interview is taking place. "Bach regarded the human voice as another instrument." Bach and Handel were contemporaries who never met and who led very different lives.

There is the public aspect to Handel - the impresario who spent more than 30 years in London. Yet Bach also knew something about court life from his stints at Weimar and Cöthen, prior to moving to Leipzig.

Ironically the cantatas composed for church services have become part of the international music scene, as evident from recent performance and recording projects undertaken by John Eliot Gardiner, Ton Koopman and Masaaki Suzuki - each of whom Wolff admires. Does Wolff enjoy performing? He shrugs and smiles. "I play the organ, I conduct, I do some performances with my students. But I teach history of music, I am a bit of a detective."

Performances by the Orchestra of St Cecilia, accompanied by invited soloists and choirs, of Complete Church Cantatas: 8th series continues on Sunday at St Ann's Church, Dawson Street at 3.30pm. Tel: 01-6621683. Bach: The Learned Musician (2000) by Christoph Wolff is published by Oxford, with a paperback version out this year