February 15: Organ Works (BWV 531-534, 536-544); Helmut Walcha, organ
On maintaining absurd levels of discipline
“I'm not one who makes believe / I know that leaves are green” - Stevie Wonder, “Visions”
I had a health scare last summer and found myself in an ER with a nurse saying to me, “I have to administer this test to see if you’re going to lose sight in your right eye.” Since I had gone to the ER thinking I had a brain tumor, I instinctively and instantly bargained to mentally accept the loss of half my sight. In those first seconds of processing, I thought, “Driving will be hard, I’ll have to turn my head much more than usual, but it’ll be okay.” (It all turned out fine, I was so lucky.) But I get uneasy even contemplating the idea of fully losing my sight (or hearing).
The German organist Helmut Walcha lost his sight in his youth as a result of a botched smallpox vaccination.1 He did not let his blindness impede his musicianship. Over the course of his life he learned the complete works of Bach for organ and recorded them from memory. He refused to learn Braille; he’d have people come to his house and play each line of each keyboard part individually, which he’d retain and mentally assemble.
From an essay on Walcha:
Because of his blindness, his approach to learning music was to memorize each part, bar by bar, and then put it together with the next part. With instant recall he could play any part, soprano, alto, tenor or bass, from any bar in any of Bach’s organ works. He taught this approach to his students, who he might ask to play two parts of four part piece, leave out the third and sing the fourth, to develop their knowledge of the individual parts that made up the music, and to emphasize that knowledge of the music was at the centre of a good performance.2
What kind of wizardry is this? It’s superhuman, except it was just a regular human named Helmut.
There have been amazing blind pianists (Art Tatum, Marcus Roberts, Ray Charles, Stevie Wonder, George Shearing, Lennie Tristano) and guitarists (Blind Lemon Jefferson, Rev. Gary Davis, Blind Blake) and composers (Joaquin Rodrigo), but to my knowledge, none of them learned so much through-composed music as Walcha. He put to memory incredibly dense contrapuntal works and then performed them with artistry. I am in awe of these absurd levels of discipline.
And the records are good! Walcha has a warm tone and strong sense of rhythm and pacing. I’ll put aside further discussions of his vision, and dig right into the performances from this massive 2003 collection of recordings from 1947-1952 on Deutche Grammophon. (Links to: Spotify, Apple Music.) There’s nearly 12 hours of music here, and I’ll be discussing chunks of about two hours per post. The first set includes preludes and fugues and a few toccatas.
These organ pieces are challenging to excerpt — the compositions don’t really have many spaces to cut cleanly. I’ll do my best! Here are some highlights:
BWV 531 doesn’t start on the downbeat, kicking off with a stutter step. We don’t really get feel for the rhythmic center until way later.
That strange opening phrase comes back underneath some right hand flourishes, and then gets recapitulated and spun around at the end of this clip:
There’s a little interlude in BWV 533 that’s spooky and unsettling:
The first 30 seconds of BWV 534, feel like they could lead anywhere. Where are you taking us, J.S.?:
I also really liked this moment from BWV 534 when Bach lays down a pedal tone, tosses up a little phrase and limbo’s it down lower and lower before climbing back up.
Walcha plays with beautiful sensitivity in the middle of BWV 536, when Bach takes the piece into a high register:
The gentle and sweet opening to BWV 537:
The fugue of BWV 539 I recognized as an adaptation of one of the Violin Sonatas (which I first learned when that piece was adapted by Segovia for classical guitar):
BWV 540 is a long one — over 15 minutes — and features another great intro with a pedal tone:
The whole prelude of BWV 542 aims at a colossal chord at the six minute mark; these are the final moments leading to the climax:
BWV 543 starts in a mysterious and quiet way — if you slow it down you can almost hear a foreshadowing of Radiohead’s harmonic language:
There is such dense counterpoint with three and four interweaving voices towards the end of BWV 544, all very intense and brainy:
Here’s a little more on Walcha from a student’s recollection:
Walcha was a warm person with a radiant expression of happiness and complete fulfillment. He loved people and was a stimulating conversationalist. He was well informed on a wide variety of subjects. The mind and spirit were forever active and creative. He had wonderful sense of humor, a disarming smile, and laugh I’ll always remember.3
What a remarkable and courageous triumph over adversity.
But I’m going to close with a gigantic asterisk about Walcha’s lifetime: he was born in 1907 and died in 1991, living mostly in Frankfurt. That means he was 26 when Hitler rose to power and 38 when the war ended. The recollections I found online read like this one, which glosses over some pretty (insert adjectival swear word) crucial context:
When Walcha came to Frankfurt he soon realized that there was very little Bach performed in any context and he immediately gave thought to remedying that situation. In 1939 he began a series of FREE concerts in which the complete Bach works were performed at least 5 times in addition to countless other writings including the 12 Handel organ concertos. He evidently gave rather brief oral program notes at the beginning, but the audience was so interested in what he had to say theoretically, formally, theologically, musically, that these concerts became real lecture recitals. They continued for 20 years. There were at least 150 concerts. As a result of his generosity in enhancing the cultural life of the city in such a profound way over such a long period of time the city of Frankfurt in gratitude later gave a new organ to the Church of the Three Kings.4
The silence is deafening. Was he a party member? Did he wear armbands during the early days of these concerts? If so, was he cool with it? I haven’t found anything further; the paper of record had nothing of the matter to say in an obituary. Walcha shouldn’t be defined because of where and when he was born, but I think we can’t just gloss over this either.
More Walcha later this month. And thanks to Andrew Ousley for recommending him to me.
I’m just reporting what I’ve read online — I’m not a vaccine skeptic, and this is a just a humble music blog. Thanks for reading.
https://fuguestatefilms.co.uk/product/art-of-fugue/
https://pipedreams.publicradio.org/articles/biographies/walcha_helmut.shtml
Ibid.