July 17: The Well-Tempered Clavier (Book 1); Pierre Hantaï, harpsichord
Happenstance and personal taste, or "Why be that way, Glenn?"
Bach’s two monumental collections of preludes and fugues in the Well-Tempered Clavier each contain twenty-four pieces, encompassing academic exercises, blazing showstoppers, and heartbreakers. While they may not match the self-contained journey of the Goldberg Variations, each book stands as a masterpiece of profound exploration.
After encountering Bach through Segovia’s guitar recital in my late teens, I was hungry to hear more. This was more logistically complicated in the ‘90s on a college budget, so I bargain hunted through the mail-order BMG music catalog. I checked off the boxes next to Glenn Gould’s Goldbergs and WTC’s and waited a month for my CD’s to arrive. Gould’s were the default recordings on offer, and they became my entrée into the keyboard works of Bach by happenstance.
The compositions were dense and life affirming, and from my first listen seemed to justify years of study. I loved the music, but it took me years to grasp the peculiarity of Gould’s performances.
Like, this style choice in the F# major prelude is a legitimate one from a major artist, but it’s really weird:
It’s like encountering the Star Spangled Banner via Jimi Hendrix’s performance at Woodstock. Inspiring, but you wouldn’t understand that you were pretty far afield until you heard some Super Bowl halftime shows.
Sensing something was amiss, I bought another recording a dozen years later, and it couldn’t have been more different. If Gould is an upended pouch of Pop Rocks, Fellner is a Stanley thermos of CBD tea. Where Gould lobs sandpaper-dry, hyper-articulate barrages of notes without any mush or squish, Till Fellner almost pets the piano, a day at the spa, everything’s smooth and solid, Brancusi for the ears. (I’ll feature Gould for my write-up of WTC Book II.)
Here’s Fellner on the same prelude:
Once unlimited streaming arrived, I got to hear all sorts of brilliant, clunky, graceful, and stiff takes on these pieces. I found myself gravitating (as usual) to the eccentric Russian genius Sviatoslav Richter1.
Here’s Richter, extra pretty:
These recordings are all brilliant and unique, but I feel inspired to feature on Year of Bach a recording I heard for the first time a few weeks ago (!) on harpsichord (!!).
Hello, Pierre Hantaï.2 (YouTube; Apple Music; not on Spotify in the USA, sorry; BWV 846-857.)
A captivating, rhythmically thrilling performance from beginning to end. I listened to it for the first time with earbuds, walking through midtown Manhattan. I found my hands shaping sounds and conducting on the street. (One of the few summer perks of NYC is that the blanket of humidity turns everyone nuts and no one pays odd behavior any bother.) The harpsichord was cranking life between my ears, an ersatz soundtrack to the sensory overload of Manhattan street life.
Pierre keeps the tempos up and his trills tight. Lots of brio, but no bravura. The intense compositional material never becomes overbearing. This interpretation has shown me that the WTC’s darkness can be left implied.
Check out the famous C Minor Prelude performed by Year of Bach hero Vikingur Olafsson; a sense of urgent foreboding here:
Hantaï’s intense power exudes darkness in its own way (and note the different temperament):
Incroyable. Huzzah, Pierre.
This is another one of those pieces where it feels silly pulling highlights — it’s a highlight of Western Civilization. (You don’t look at either the chair or the bed in Van Gogh’s yellow bedroom.) But I know you don’t have all day, here are some choice bits:
The Prelude in C Major couldn’t be more famous.3 Pierre, as an artist must, assures us that we’re in good hands. He sometimes holds on to the first notes of the repeated phrases; we’re left intrigued, because it’s a take, not a shtick.
Great little misdirection at the end of the C# Major Fugue (0:05):
We’re raining three’s in the D Minor prelude:
Killer chord midway through the Eb Minor prelude (0:21):
The E Minor Fugue starts with a guy dancing with his back up to a wall:
Hands trading trills in the F Major prelude:
The G Major prelude is big big big:
The fluid playing in the G Minor prelude is remarkable:
The fugues get increasingly complex as we move through the cycle. The G# Minor is heavy, with an excerpt from the score:
We’re fully in the thicket by the A Minor fugue, brains and hands working overtime. Hantaï builds up to a big rest towards the end which feels like the exhalation before the end of the entire work. (Love that big tied A bass note.) (Score starts at 0:21)
But wait, there’s (eight!) more… direct from the drama of the A Minor fugue, we get the B Flat Major show-off prelude:
(The C Major prelude that kicks us off feels like it should end about 3/4 of the way through it; Hantaï, by my read, is making a parallel from that deke to the whole composition in his dramatic reading of the A Minor Fugue at about the same 3/4 point of the cycle.)
And we finally end in B Minor, a big deep fugue that leaves me wanting more, even after two hours:
As an epilogue, I’m appending the C Major Prelude as performed by my son Eli (age 11) for his spring piano recital. Very proud of my boy:
Here’s 10,000 words from Errol Morris on Richter’s habit of keeping a plastic lobster as a companion/totem.
He looks like my friend Anatoly, yeah?:
Did anyone else shut off the movie “Tar” after the ‘brilliant’ conductor gave a fatuous interpretation of this piece?
These are so foundational it's hard to choose a single interpretation. I'm still a real piano fan when it comes to these pieces, regardless of the fact that they were written for harpsichord. I think of it this way: Beethoven somehow composed not for the relatively flimsy pianos he had at his disposal, but for the concert grand we have today, with all 50,000 pounds of tension against that metal harp - it just hadn't been developed yet. These pieces are also rewarding to those of us (and we are multitudes) who will never be able to play them up to tempo - the sheer pleasure of working your way through them is enough.
I had a similar experience with trying to find a version of WTC (I happened to find Ashkenazy's in a record store). It's funny though how your 'first' version of a work like this influences how you hear everyone else's.
These days I think harpsichord makes more sense in many of these pieces - as great as the various textures from Gould vs Fellner vs Richter are, there's something about the sheer sound and density of the harpsichord that's totally different and it is technically what Bach wrote them for...I went to a Mahan Esfahani recital recently and it kind of opened my ears to how these composers wrote for *harpsichord* in the same sense that (to use your example) Jimi Hendrix wrote for *feedback-laden electric guitar*.
ps. re: footnote 3, I kind of thought that was part of the point of that scene, she's acting like she's this total Godess of music who has figured it all out and deserves to be able to boss everyone else's interpretations about...but is she really?