Bach Consort Guanajuato
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by Fredric Dannen

Here is a question all too frequently asked: How could the son of a middle-class glove maker, from a town with a population of about two thousand inhabitants, who never attended a university, become the greatest writer in the English language? Those facts regarding William Shakespeare have given rise to persistent (and frankly idiotic) theories about someone else having written his plays – idiotic because those theories disregard the very nature of genius.

The same sorts of questions could be asked about Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750). Precious little of J.S. Bach's music was published in his lifetime. One remarkable fact distinguishes Bach from every other major Western composer, from the 16th century through the 20th, from Palestrina to Stravinsky: he never lived and worked in a capital city or international musical center, such as Paris, Vienna, London, Rome or Berlin. Instead, Bach toiled away as a hireling in three German towns of scant musical significance at the time, Weimar, Köthen and Leipzig. Because those towns had no opera houses, nor even much in the way of musical budget, Bach was in no position to achieve international fame in his lifetime – unlike, say, George Frideric Handel, born the same year as Bach, who turned out one hit opera after another in London, his adopted home. In the words of pianist and music lecturer Charles Rosen, "The lack of an opera house was a disaster at that time for a composer with any pretensions."

Eric Bosgraaf
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Bach's principal renown, up to the time of his death, was as a keyboard virtuoso, on the organ and harpsichord. (Near the end of his life, Bach was invited to try a relatively new invention – the piano. He did not like it.) In 1717, his final year at Weimar, Bach traveled to Dresden to compete in an arranged keyboard contest against Louis Marchand, the top harpsichordist in France, who performed in the Paris court of King Louis XV. On the morning of the contest, the boastful Marchand, realizing he was in for a humiliating defeat, lost his nerve and fled back to Paris on the first available stagecoach.

Carlos Aransay, conductor
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Music historians date the "Bach Revival" – the long-delayed discovery of the composer's greatness – to March 11, 1829, nearly eighty years after Bach's death. That was the day Felix Mendelssohn conducted a performance of Bach's St. Matthew Passion to a stunned audience in Berlin – and "stunned" is no overstatement. The late James Levine told me, in a 1994 interview, that when he first heard the Passion, he "walked around like a zombie for a week." The only wonder about the Bach Revival is that it took so long.

Along with the St. Matthew Passion, the other choral work by Bach that can produce the same effect of awe and wonder is the Mass in B Minor, completed in 1749, the year before Bach's death. Considering the sublime unity and emotional power of the Mass, one might have supposed that Bach wrote the work in a concentrated outburst of divine inspiration, much the way Handel composed his oratorio Messiah in less than a month in 1741. To the contrary, Bach worked on his Mass on and off for more than a decade and a half, literally in his spare time. The overall unity of the work is all the more remarkable considering that a good portion of it is recycled from Bach's vast output of sacred cantatas, along with other previously composed material.

Eunice Padilla
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The Mass opens with a foreboding five-part fugue, the beginning of a musical journey that will run the gamut of emotion, from despair to ecstasy. The "Crucifixus" movement, for example, which has its origins in a cantata Bach composed in Weimar in 1714, depicts the death and suffering of Christ in a manner that is almost programmatic. The low droning quarter notes in the bass, it has been suggested, represent the hammering of the nails into the cross. The movement is followed immediately by the "Resurrexit," an outburst of joy that goes on for page after page, and recalls the concerto grosso style of Bach's so-called Brandenburg Concertos.

I say "so-called" because Bach dedicated the six concerti grossi to Christian Ludwig, the Marquess of Brandenburg, brother of King Frederick Wilhelm I of Prussia, in hopes that the works might be performed in the Prussian court. As it turned out, the Marquess never paid Bach a cent for the compositions and probably never heard them played. Audiences today can only pity the Marquess for his poor judgment – the concertos, for groups of soloists with orchestra, are among Bach's most popular compositions. No two are alike, except in exuberance and virtuosity. (The perilously high trumpet solo in the Brandenburg Concerto No. 2 in F major inspired Paul McCartney to compose the trumpet solo in "Penny Lane" – and he hired a Bach trumpeter to play it.)

The Brandenburg Concertos and the Mass in B Minor are the works that open (July 3) and close (July 7) this year's Guanajuato Bach Festival. Founded in 2019, the festival is an annual celebration of only the music of J.S. Bach, an event without equal in Mexico. Created by the Institute of Culture of the State of Guanajuato (IEC) at the initiative of maestro Gijsbertus de Graaf, honorary artistic director since its founding, the festival enjoys the support of the IEC, not to mention a devoted audience of music lovers that has embraced the festival through five previous editions.

This year's festival includes the participation of outstanding national and international performers. The members of the Bach Consort Guanajuato, an orchestra created in 2019 specifically for the festival, are artists of high technical and interpretative caliber, entirely dedicated to the vast catalog of works by J.S. Bach. For the Brandenburg Concertos, they will be led by Dutch-born Erik Bosgraaf, who has conducted major orchestras all over the world. In 2011 Bosgraaf received the Nederlandse Muziekprijs, the most important classical music prize in The Netherlands.

The Madrigal Choir of Bellas Artes, Bach Consort Guanajuato, Carlos Aransay, conductor
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The Mass in B Minor will feature the Bach Consort and the Coro de Madrigalistas de Bellas Artes, a choir founded in 1938. The Coro has concertized throughout Mexico and in cities in the United States, Spain and Peru. The conductor for the Mass, Carlos Aransay, has led the London Symphony Orchestra and the national orchestras of Peru and Cuba, among others. As choirmaster, Aransay founded the London Lyric Choir in 2009. He records for EMI Classics and Naxos.

The three in-between concerts are presentations of chamber music featuring exceptional soloists. On July 4, harpsichord virtuoso Raúl Moncada will give a program of some of Bach's best-loved keyboard music, including the French Suite No. 1 in D Minor and the Partita No. 1 in B-flat Major. Over two evenings, on July 5 and 6, Viktoria Horti and harpsichordist Eunice Padilla will perform all six of Bach's Sonatas for Violin and Harpsichord, among the finest works Bach ever wrote, in the assessment of his son Carl Philipp Emanuel, himself a composer.

All concerts are at 8pm except for the Mass, a 1pm Sunday matinee performance. Ticket prices range from 100 to 300 pesos for all reserved seats, and may be purchased at the theater box office (closed Mondays and Tuesdays) or online at www.boletocity.com.

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Fredric Dannen is a journalist and author with a specialty in criminal justice. He has been a staff writer for the New Yorker and Vanity Fair.

In 1990, Hit Men, his book about the American music industry and the influence of organized crime, spent a month on the New York Times bestseller list. The book is #2 on Billboard's list of 100 Greatest Music Books of All Time. One of his Vanity Fair articles prompted the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals to rebuke the U.S. Justice Dept. for fraudulently withholding exculpatory evidence in the case of Cleveland auto worker John Demjanjuk, who was extradited, wrongly convicted, and sentenced to hang in Israel as the Nazi war-criminal “Ivan the Terrible.” He secured the only interview given by Los Angeles police chief Daryl Gates on the heels of the infamous Rodney King beating, and the only interview ever given by crime boss Lorenzo Nichols, the crack kingpin of New York City.

While conducting research for a forthcoming book, Dannen uncovered lost evidence in the case of Calvin Washington, a Texan wrongly convicted of homicide. As the direct result of Dannen’s efforts, Calvin Washington won a full pardon for innocence, the first ever granted by Texas governor Rick Perry under the state’s DNA statute.

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