THE AESTHETIC OF JOHANN SEBASTIAN BACH

BY

ANDRÉ PIRRO

 

Translated by Joe Armstrong

 

 

      The Aesthetic of Johann Sebastian Bach (L’Esthétique de Jean-Sébastien Bach) by French organist and musicologist, André Pirro, was first published in 1907 by Librairie Fischbacher in Paris and later, in 1986, by by Minkoff Éditions, Geneva (not to be confused with Pirro’s 1906 biography of Bach, which was translated into English by Mervyn Savill in 1957). This English translation is approximately 500 pages, including 614 musical examples and corrections of dates and sources of works that subsequent research has revealed.

 

     The book is essentially about the expressive nature of Bach’s music. It initially focuses intensively on the close relationships between language and music in Bach’s vocal works—a full appreciation of which depends, for the English-speaking reader, upon direct, word-for-word translations of Bach’s German and Latin lyrics, and the bulk of the German-to-English lyric translations have been drawn from Melvin Unger’s Handbook to Bach’s Sacred Cantata Texts. Pirro’s twelve chapters range from describing how Bach forms his motifs in order to express a huge gamut of both secular and religious experiences in life, through an examination of his instrumental accompaniments and his use of orchestration, his interpretation of texts, his compositional forms, how he joins the same compositions to different texts, and to how an understanding of expression in his vocal music can be applied to studying his instrumental music. Only the last two chapters focus primarily on historical and biographical aspects through an examination of Bach’s exposure to early and foreign music and his work’s essentially German character.

 

     Pirro’s book contrasts distinctly with Albert Schweitzer’s presentation of similar material in J. S. Bach (Le Musicien Poète), which was first published in French in 1905 and translated into English in 1911 (Dover). Pirro’s research into the relation between music and text in Bach’s works as a clear illustration of the musical imagery and expression contained in them is much more systematic and penetrating than that of Schweitzer, whose musical examples tend not to include the corresponding texts, or, when they do, they do not include word-for-word English translations of the German in the 1911 English version. Pirro also carefully illustrates a good number of historical precedents by choosing musical examples and writings from the work of 17^th- and 18^th-century composers and writers on music.

 

     Some consider this work to be a rare masterpiece—containing writing of “largeness and elevation” (to quote literary editor Jeffrey Mitchell)—that reaches (carefully) beyond the bounds of most other writings on the essential nature of Western music.