Counterpoint: A memoir of Bach and mourning

Counterpoint: A Memoir of Bach and Mourning

Philip Kennicott (W. W. Norton and Company, 2020)

 

       In Counterpoint, Philip Kennicott gives us an extended disquisition on a project that can never be finished: mastering J. S. Bach's 'Goldberg' variations on the piano. It's an epic, Mount-Everest-sized project, to be able to play it competently, in the first place, and further, to memorize it. He decided to tackle the work after his mother died, when he was in his forties. He'd been a pianist from the age of four, but never a very good student. His mother, a frustrated violinist, started him on lessons, and music complicated their relationship throughout his childhood. "This wasn't about resurrecting the long-discarded fantasy of being a great pianist. Rather it seemed a way to test life again, to press upon it and see what was still vital."

 

         The Goldberg Variations comprise thirty-two linked pieces, beginning and ending with the same aria. The thirty pieces in the middle fall into groups of three, every third one a fugue, with successively more distance between the voices. They are linked by a common thirty-two bar bass line. (That's unusually long - eight bars is more usual, and four is not uncommon.) This is only to scratch the surface of what could be known and studied, of course: with Bach there are always wheels within wheels, and smaller wheels still. 

 

        Then there are the performance options: Bach specified the harpsichord, giving directions for one or two manuals; the piano is certainly more common for today's performance spaces, and living rooms, but it can make fingering exceptionally challenging. Classical guitarists play a version, giving back the plucked quality the piano takes away. There are string ensemble versions, as well; my favorite version, by Bernard Labadie, adds a string orchestra to a harpsichord and a theorbo. (I highly commend Emmanuel Music's performance, as long as it's available -  

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=onbc0XNcMgI )

 

       It's certainly something you could study for a lifetime, but Kennicott is really talking about remaking himself into someone who could do this. He's fighting a lifetime of bad practice habits and unsound techniques. He procrastinates, or he rushes, or he gets distracted. Hours on the piano bench, as it turns out, don't actually matter as much as the engagement between the hands and the mind. "I have spent decades returning to the piano, struggling to find the concentration and peace of mind necessary to move a piece forward, and never, in all those many attempts, scattered through every chapter of my life, have I managed to find more than a few quarters of an hour when I was actually in control of the music."

 

       The more his early teachers tried to make him slow down and concentrate, the less he was able to. His mother's unpredictable violence was certainly no help; he took up music with her support, but it doesn't bring them any closer to a warm, loving relationship; she saw it as something she has lost to him. He found himself bound to use music, her only gift to him, as the vehicle for escaping her orbit. "Had she been merely cruel and capricious, I might have hated her. But all along I saw also the woundedness of her life."

 

        Late in the book, Kennicott visits his most important teacher, back in Schenectady. It's not a lesson, because the two are now friends, but he plays the first ten variations for the man, who is as respectful and careful in his response as ever. "Good teachers are necessarily interested in something that parents all too often find terrifying, the freedom of the younger person. Only after a student has left the teacher and lived for a time in freedom can the teacher judge the success of the relationship." By the same token, Kennicott now has a better sense of what the teacher was trying to free him to do: to trust himself, to forgive himself, and to move forward. That's a lifetime project, and a worthy one.