Lecture on Bach, Meyerbeer and the Jews: From Secular Priests to the Reform of Reform

This episode is a lecture delivered at the Historisches Seminar at the Ludwig Maximillian University in Munich. It is preceded by an introduction and two musical works:

1. Gloria: Cum Sancto Spiritu (1926) Berlin Philharmonic Chrous, conducted by Siegfried Ochs
2. Bist du Bei Mir, sung by contralto, Paula Salomon-Lindberg, believed to be recorded after 1933, accompanied by Rudolf Schwarz on the piano. (He survived the Holocaust and went on to become the conductor of the Birmingham City Orchestra where he mentored a young Simon Rattle.

As Glen Gould once observed, Bach had “little impact in his own time,” and certainly not outside of his native region of provincial Saxony. When speaking of Bach therefore, one must inevitably grapple with the phenomenon of revival. It was Adoph Marx who referred to Bach as a “temple long shut down.” It is a point of musical historical fact, that much of Bach’s oeuvre, from the passions to the cantatas, entered widespread circulation only belatedly, decades after the composer’s own lifetime and only due to the efforts of others. Conspicuous amongst these others were German Jews, specifically based in Berlin.

Felix Mendelssohn’s 1829 Berlin “premiere” of the St. Matthew Passion at the Sing-Akademie looms particularly large in legend. For some it formed the basis not only of the specific German cultural attachment to music, but even the establishment of music as having a distinctly public ethical function.

I would like to make use of the intellectual brace offered by the Marxist-Messianist cultural critic,Walter Benjamin, namely his notion of “secular priesthood.” Benjamin himself embodied this concept as did the activists to be discussed here. He advised that poets and artists of the productivity obsessed bourgeois epoch, as first developed in 19th Century Paris, had to grapple with a new conception of work distinct from the feudal idea of leisure formerly linked to such creative endeavors. Benjamin held that those most comfortable in their own skin as artists were those who most closely resembled “secular priests.” He sought to draw a contrast to modern artists who rushed into mass entertainment, the avant garde or who cultivated a proletarian ethos aimed at the most unfortunate. Within this analysis, the activists of “care for Bach” fit in neatly: modern without being avant garde, collectivist while not proletarian, edifying rather than distracting. Devotion to Bach provided a cultural highway to navigate around distinctly modern and potentially hazardous turn-offs.

Furthermore, it has almost become a platitude to suggest that the oeuvre of Bach is amongst the best proofs for the existence of an omniscient deity. In this sense, Bach functions in ways distinct from all other composers. This has become something of a stand-alone discourse and subject in the English-speaking world. To name one example, the biologist Lewis Thomas, in response to questions about which music be aboard the Voyager space craft, suggested that sending the complete works of Bach to extraterrestrials would be “boasting.” The figures here were ahead of their time in illustrating an attraction to Bach based on the power of persuasive belief itself, not one specifically or exclusively Christian. Belief itself is especially pertinent in the German Jewish context where the hope for integration and ultimately even survival itself required an inordinate amount of belief in one’s external reality, one that was tragically in the end misplaced.