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A German Master Seen Through French Lenses By TAMAR HALPERIN
Johann Sebastian Bach is commonly thought of nowadays as a quintessential representative of German culture. This view, however, is to some extent the result of a myth that was created with the rise of nationalism in the 19th century. In his recent lecture at Juilliard, titled "Bach and the French," Davitt Moroney introduced several lesser-known facts and anecdotes about Bach, which presented the great German master in a more cosmopolitan light—exploring in particular the relationship between Bach, the French school of keyboard playing, and the French language.
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| Davitt Moroney, who gave a lecture and master class in February, at the harpsichord. (Photo by Lisa Yelon) |
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The Juilliard community and its flourishing harpsichord department (which currently consists of four students) was delighted to host Davitt Moroney on February 8 and 9. Moroney is one of those rare musicians who are equally active and successful as both a scholar and a performer. He was born in England, where he studied organ, harpsichord, and clavichord. For many years he was based in Paris, working as a freelance recitalist; since 2001 he has been a professor of music at the University of California in Berkeley. He has made more than 50 recordings (including two of Bach's Art of the Fugue, and the complete keyboard works of William Byrd), and prepared the scholarly edition of the complete works of Louis Couperin and Louis Marchand. Mr. Moroney's lecture gracefully balanced an abundance of fascinating facts and ideas (pronounced in the most refined English accent) with a delightful collection of pieces (played on the harpsichord in the most refined French manner).In the 17th and 18th centuries, Paris was considered Le centre du Bon—"the center of the good," particularly with regard to keyboard playing. Unlike most composers of his generation, Bach never visited Paris, but there is evidence that he was familiar with both the French language and the French musical manner. For example, Bach used many French words in his letters, and the title page of the "Brandenburg" Concertos is entirely in French. His C-Minor Passacaglia for organ is based on an earlier piece by French composer André Raison, and the flute sonatas were all written for the French flute virtuoso Bufardin. A copy of a rondeau by François Couperin appears in Anna Magdalena Bach's notebook, and French influence can be found in many of Bach's cantatas, and orchestral and keyboard works (such as French overtures, gavottes, menuets and passepieds). A Franco-German "summit" took place in Dresden in 1717, when Bach met with an older French composer, Louis Marchand, for a keyboard contest. Despite Bach's decisive victory (the defeated Marchand never showed up for the second day of the contest), we learn from Bach's son, Carl Philip Emanuel, that his father indeed admired Marchand's harpsichord technique and compositional style. Mr. Moroney performed two courantes from Marchand's D-Minor Harpsichord Suite, and one could trace some resemblance between these pieces and the French courantes in Bach's partitas. We also learned that Bach taught his student Heinrich Nikolaus Gerber to ornament and play in the French style.But what exactly is the French style? In his treatise L'art de toucher le Clavecin, published in 1716, François Couperin defines it as "the ability to give the harpsichord a soul." Said Moroney: "For some people the harpsichord always seems less expressive than the piano—but it is only so in the same way that a black-and-white photo is less expressive than a color photo. Clearly Couperin and Bach did not find the harpsichord unexpressive, since they would not have otherwise written so much of their music for this instrument."
In Moroney's harpsichord master class, given the day after his lecture, the French style was explored in further detail. Moroney's main work with both Alexandra Snyder (who played three pieces in C minor by Louis Couperin) and with me (playing Forberger's Tombeau fait à Paris sur La Mort de Mr. Blancheroche) had to do with the correct position of the body and the hands, as described in Rameau's treatise Sur la Mécanique des Doigts, published in 1724. Moroney advised us to avoid unnecessary movement of the arm and to keep the hands as close to the keyboard as possible. "Anything that is not necessary is too much," he said. "Make sure you play notes inégales," Moroney told Tomoko Nakayama, who gave a beautiful performance of the Pasacaille d'Armid by Lully (arranged by d'Anglebert). Notes inégales refers to the French Baroque tradition of slightly "swinging" eighth notes that are notated equally, so that the note on the beat is slightly longer than its companion. In L'Art de Toucher le Clavecin, François Couperin draws attention to the link between music and language: "There are faults in our way of writing music, which correspond to the way in which we (the French) write our language. The fact is we write a thing differently from the way in which we execute it, and it is this which causes foreigners to play our music less well than we play theirs … for instance, we dot several consecutive quavers in diatonic succession, and yet we write them as equal. Our custom has enslaved us and we hold fast to it." (The translation is by Mevanwy Roberts.)The living tradition that somewhat resembles the "lost art" of notes inégales is the performance of jazz rhythms. "Perhaps we need to set French Baroque academies in New Orleans, or ask great jazz players to teach us French Baroque music," said Moroney, who added, "Teaching performers today to play notes inégales and the fiddly French ornaments may seem less important than teaching them to speak French, to understand the linguistic aspects of French musical discourse and to digest, above all, how verbal rhetoric has its counterpart in music."To conclude his lecture, Mr. Moroney performed two pieces that bear an uncanny resemblance: La Couperin by François Couperin (published in 1730), and an allemande from a rather neglected French Suite in A Minor by Bach, written in 1720. To make the resemblance even more apparent, Moroney performed Bach's allemande in the French manner, employing the "inégales" principle. "I do so not because I believe this is what Bach did," explained Moroney, "but simply because, for us today, seeing and hearing Bach's music in this way can reveal it in a new light. It can reveal a deep potential for a different kind of melancholic gracefulness that otherwise is easy to miss."Tamar Halperin is a doctoral candidate in harpsichord.
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