Bach for the future (Part 1)

On Good Friday, 1727 - 273 years ago yesterday - Bach's masterpiece St Matthew Passion was performed for the first time. That the good burghers of Leipzig were not overly impressed by its beauty and magnificence should not be a surprise. Bach never did please the authorities and always worried about money. He was a most unlikely rebel: a self-taught genius possessing passion, practicality and a lot of fight when it came to his music. How else could he have managed to make technical perfection so human and so appealing?

Even at its most complex, his music is uplifting; it has warmth and layers of meaning. Whether for concerti, solo instrument or voice, it stirs the soul and while it can move you to tears, its inherent movement also makes you want to dance - Bach and his music, the dance of God. Ever the good Lutheran, he loved his God and his music. But for all its joy, he was tested.

Exasperation best describes Bach's prevailing experience during his 27-year tenure as cantor of the once-great, but by his arrival in 1723, haphazardly managed Thomasschule, where church music would take over. Prior to Leipzig he had two stints at the Weimar court, neither happy, with a marginally more satisfying, though brief time at the court of the music-loving Prince Leopold in Cothen. In life, Bach was extraordinarily under-appreciated, constantly battling with petty-minded court, school, church and civic authorities. In middle age he was faced with an even more undermining crisis - music lost its relevance in the school. It became a sideline rather than a central activity. More than once he threw his hands in the air and, not surprisingly, had little interest in disciplining the boys.

While Bach's place as the greatest composer of all time is beyond dispute, at his death in 1750, little fuss was made. Indeed, his original grave in the Johanniskirche, where his body remained for 200 years, was not even marked. He had continued working in the last year of his life, despite failing sight and poor health, living in poverty, with three of Bach's daughters, one by his first wife. In 1800, the editor of a Leipzig music magazine called on readers to come to the financial assistance of Bach's youngest child who had survived all her siblings and was the only one of his children to live on into the 19th century.

It was not until Mendelssohn initiated a revival, by conducting a performance of the St Matthew Passion, in Berlin in 1829, that Johann Sebastian Bach began to be recognised as the supreme musical genius he most obviously was. If there is a single human achievement to counter mankind's flair for destruction, it must be his music, created in an 18th-century world in which the plague was still a killer.

The legacy is awesome and diverse, all the more so considering Bach was dead at 65. Where to begin? The seductively rich, expressive Cello Suites? The Mass in B Minor? The Brandenburg Concertos, with their variety of instrumental colour? Or the Passacaglia and Fugue in C Minor, which showcases the often overlooked majestic musicality of the organ, for which Bach wrote more than 250 pieces? The Magnificat? The Italian Concerto? The Orchestral Suite in B Minor which is effectively a flute concerto? Or the agonisingly lovely St Matthew Passion alto aria Erbame dich, mein Gott? Or The Goldberg Variations, of which there are more than 50 current recordings? Any one of the heartbreakingly beautiful violin sonatas and partitas? Take your pick. Bach's violin music is wonderful; the ciaccona, the final movement from Partita No 2, with its slow triple-time dance is a tapestry of variations on a theme - Bach the supreme improviser at his finest.

This was a composer who excelled in every form, while working full-time as a performer, teacher and instrument consultant. Traditionalist and improvisational genius, Bach did not so much break the rules of composition as make them - or appear to make them and, while deferring to convention, he was also an innovator, daring and exacting.

Scored for a double choir and orchestra, the scale of the St Matthew Passion leaves no doubts as to its creator's ambitions. Drawing on a wealth of weekly cantata experience, as well as his highly personal St John Passion three years earlier, Bach the religious composer brought a powerful thoughtfulness to his epic which is concerned with humanity as well as the solemn task of retelling a famous story.

Alongside the beauty of its musical harmony, an atmosphere of lyric contemplation is skilfully evoked. The evangelist is the storyteller; his narrative provides the backdrop for a drama which is acted out by a cast of characters including the mob at its most ignorant, brutal, vengeful and, so vital to Bach, its most human. The range of mood shifts - the doubts, curiosity and regret expressed through the blend of arias and chorales is remarkable. It is a huge work which also possesses an intriguing intimacy.

As the Russian violinist Viktoria Mullova, who has recorded the violin concertos, partitas and sonatas for violin and piano, replied when I interviewed her: "Without Bach there is nothing, everyone who has followed has had to look towards him. I love Bach, he is the complete composer." English virtuoso Nigel Kennedy is equally emphatic. "He is the master of harmony, you play the music with love and respect."

This year's global Bachfest to mark the 250th anniversary of his death is certainly keeping recording companies and musicians busy. Russian cellist Mischa Maisky, having re-recorded the Cello Suites he first recorded in 1986, is touring the world marking the anniversary and, as he says in an interview in Gramophone magazine: "People ask me if I play modern music and I say, yes, I play Bach." He also sees Bach as a romantic: "When people accuse me of playing Bach romantically, I take it as a compliment." Japanese pianist Mitsuko Uchida has often been quoted as saying that only on her 70th birthday would she play "The 48" (the preludes and fugues of The Well Tempered Klavier): "They are so complicated. And if you think that Schoenberg, or any 20th-century music is complicated . . .! I am a closet Bach player," but no doubt in time she will come out.