April 10: Various Organ Works (Helmut Walcha, organ)
When options are unlimited, the choices make the art.
My professional career began on a Manhattan trading floor two decades ago, in the heart of the dotcom crash. My new colleagues were the recent pioneers of electronic stock trading, and many had made small fortunes during the preceding boom. I was being trained to implement their trading systems, which would hopefully earn me a small fortune of my own.
It wasn’t that simple. These recent millionaires had convinced themselves they were great traders, but many just found themselves in a golden chair while garbage stocks went to the moon. (This is known on the street as ‘confusing your brains with a bull market.’)
In the following years, I watched many stubborn people fail to adapt their trading for different environments. I was a sponge, learning by counterexample how to not blow up. Trading filled my days for the next 17 years.
At every moment, I had to choose whether to buy, sell, hold, or do nothing. I could buy a little position to start, or perhaps a lot. When it started to rise, I’d sell some of it, or sometimes all of it. Or maybe I’d press my luck and buy a little more. Or I’d “load the boat” and buy a ton more. When things went the wrong way and my stocks started tanking, I’d dump them, or double down, or I’d wait and sweat it out, every moment heavy with possibility. Each day I sat on the knife’s edge of financial ruin and a huge payday.
It was thrilling, emotionally taxing, maddening: alternatively ego-soothing and shattering. In all, a completely ludicrous way to make a living.
This infinite set of possibilities about how to act in any moment on a trading desk has an echo in artistic creation. Musical composition is also about free play within a framework of rules, and aiming towards a successful resolution.
A composition that aspires to greatness has to engender in its listeners a feeling of delight in the choices made by the composer. With even a wisp of a melody, there are unlimited development options. A very partial list:
Conventional major happy tune (“Happy Birthday To You,” “Amazing Grace,” “You Send Me”)
Major melody, minor vibes (“For No One,” “I’ll Be Watching You”)
Minor melody, major vibes (“The Sound of Silence”, Dvorak’s “New World Symphony” opening movement)
Knock them over the head with force (“Immigrant Song”, “Ode to Joy”)
Anthemize (“Hey Jude”, “Nessun Dorma”)
Then you can do the same with harmony and rhythm. Music is endless, and that’s why there’s so much greatness to still be created.
Bach in particular challenges his listeners with unique and odd choices in every piece: unconventional chord changes, sudden modulations, withheld resolutions, foreshortened pleasures, major/minor head fakes, and an incredible density of ideas. As we listen centuries later, we can surrender to his art because he’s given us so much good reason to trust him. Our challenge is to try and meet him and his choices wherever he’s trying to take us, even when it’s strange.
Today, I’m continuing my dive into the mid-century recordings of the blind German organist Helmut Walcha. (Part one here.) I remind us that Walcha — incredibly — engaged these works only through hearing others perform them as he simultaneously committed them to memory.
I’m once again drawing on this 2003 collection of Walcha’s recordings from 1947-1952 on Deutche Grammophon. (Links to: Spotify, Apple Music.) This post will cover BWV 550, 551, 552, 562, 564-566, 572, 578, 582, 588-590, 669-671, 676, 678, 680, 682, 684, 686, and 688.
Highlights:
Longtime readers know I’m a sucker for a good pedal tone. In BWV 562, a low C (one of the best notes) is held in the left hand and underpins the lovely introduction. The pedaled note is like the ballerina who slowly turns on pointe, while other dancers move expressively around her.
Here’s the super famous BWV 565 Tocatta in D Minor, including the CCOAT (Crunchiest Chord Of All Time). There are strong moments in this piece, especially with Bach’s sense of creating space inside chaos, but in the context of this collection, I don’t hear the D minor as far superior to the others. They’re all of high quality, with lots of complicated counterpoint, technical challenges, and unique charms.
A fun false ending two minutes before the end:
The Toccata of BWV 564 gets a rollocking finish, and then straight into a lovely complementary adagio:
Walcha goes heavy on the tremolo at the end of the adagio:
In the Fantasia BWV 572, Bach lays into this mid-tempo groove for five minutes and ends the section with a finger in the eye. Not nice!:
Walcha gets the higher voice of the organ to sound a bit like a harmonica in BWV 582:
The Canonza BWV 588 is filled with harmonic surprises. Bach executes this by stepping his melody and internal voices down chromatically:
Listen for the funky bass line in the middle of the BWV 590 Pastoral (0:19 in the clip below):
Walcha is playing on a differnt organ for BWV 669, and it sounds like an Atari electro ray. It’s hard to take this sound seriously:
Maybe the organ builder was aiming for a tone like ‘goose farts on a muggy day’ (BWV 682):
Closing today’s listening, check out Bach maybe inventing polka in BWV 688. The whole piece is worth a close listen — because the opening oom-pah lick is so easy to pick out, it’s a good way to practice listening for how he weaves it into the counterpoint for other voices to comment and complement.
Firstly, 543 has THE ORGELPUNCT in the prelude. THE best bass pedal note that Bach ever wrote. It comes at the wrong beat (obviously on purpose) and it has the wrong bass sustained note (obviously on purpose). It is so different to anything else in north european church music-it reminds a lot of the byzantine church chanting "Ison".
Also you seem to put 582 on the same level as many other compositions in this cd. It is not! It is probably his best organ composition and at the same level as the violin chaconne. (Plus it was played in the Godfather 1). Listen to it by the 1984 version by Ton Koopman: no change of registers through the whole thing. It is all a punch in the face 15 minutes satanic death metal from hell: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dF8R6fyMFos&t=3s
2 of my favorites have made an appearance! (1) 582 C minor; (2) 564 C. That adagio is a short movement in which I hear both peace and sadness. It's also of those rare pieces in classical music that get me every time (+ Prokofiev's violin concerto 2, Mahler's 'Resurrection' finale; amazingly, Bach accomplishes in a few minutes what the latter consummates in over an hour). I really enjoyed 550 G major. 572 G major hooked me right from the amazing intro. The middle of 590 really does sound pastoral, like a rest in a field with a gently blowing breeze; leave it to Bach's genius to accomplish such feat with an organ, which I associate with the religious, stately, or formidable. The 552 Eb 'St Anne' is exuberant and grandiose, everything Eb typically stands for. I see only the prelude to this piece way down the playlist in Spotify. While I don't know why the fugue is omitted, the prelude to me is the really special section (I would walk down the aisle to this), so I am OK with the choice!
I agree with you that 565 D minor isn't superior to Bach's other organ works. Question, do you think Bach really wrote this piece? I've read some people believe it isn't as harmonically advanced as the rest of his works. I don't know enough to say.
PS - Can't wait till we get to 537 C minor & 542 G minor 'The Great'