To be honest, the birthday boy looks a little bored at the party unfolding around him: a rolled up musical score in one hand and balloons in the other, bobbing on a string in the spring breeze.
Around him, helpers bustle around slicing up and handing out slices from three different birthday cakes. The welcome recipients are school choir boys and girls who’ve just emerged from Leipzig’s St Thomas church after a concert celebrating Johann Sebastian Bach.
It’s his 340th birthday and the composer and musician, watching as a statue from a plinth, is unable to attend in person for obvious reasons. But the music he left behind ensures Bach remains immortal.
Minutes earlier his motet Jesu, meine Freude (Jesus, my Joy) echoed around the vaulted hall of St Thomas’s – where the composer worked and lies buried – to an enchanted Leipzig audience.
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“Bach really means everything to me,” said Angelika, who grew up next to the church, between bites of cake. “You can do anything you like to Bach’s music, it can survive anything.”
Everything, that is, except neglect. In his 65 years Bach composed hundreds of works for the royal courts and churches where he was employed, as well as many more secular concert and orchestra works. His work is cherished today for its musical and technical skill. For many, Bach is the foundation of modern western music.
Yet Bach’s reputation faded fast in the decades after his death in 1750, eclipsed by his own musical children and changing public tastes. It fell to another composer and later Leipzig resident, Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy, to popularise JS Bach’s works again in 1829 after he conducted, for the first time in decades, a public performance of the St Matthew’s Passion.
In nearly two centuries since, Leipzig has stayed true to Bach with a dedicated museum/archive and an international music competition.March 21st, Bach’s birthday, saw the finale of this year’s competition, won by 21-year-old Czech pianist wunderkind Jan Cmejla.
His energetic and electric performance was greeted with huge cheers at Leipzig’s monumental Gewandhaus concert hall. Second prize went to his mellow, fellow Czech pianist Marek Kozak. The third-placed Israeli pianist Mariamna Sherling won over listeners with a lyric approach to Bach that recalled the style of Russian pianist Tatiana Nikolayeva, the first winner of the Leipzig Bach competition in 1950.
Nikolayeva’s rendering of Bach’s Preludes and Fugues – better known as the Well-Tempered Clavier – beguiled fellow Russian and jury head Dimitri Shostakovich so much that the composer, on his return to Moscow, composed his own set of 24 preludes and fugues in Bach’s honour.
In the intervals of this year’s Bach competition finale, older audience members recalled the Shostakovich-Nikolayeva legacy in awed tones. Others remembered their first competition visits in the 1960s, at the height of the cold war, when East German authorities kept a close eye on the music and its outcome.
“I remember a Brazilian pianist one year whose playing ran rings around all the others,” recalled one older man, “yet the Russian guy still won.”
Amid the excitement over the competition and the young musicians, the secret star of the competition was a grand piano with a supple singing tone, built specially for the occasion by the local piano company Blüthner.
Founded in Leipzig in 1853, Blüthner pianos were the favoured instrument of musical giants like Brahms, Wagner, Tchaikovsky, Debussy and Rachmaninoff.
The firm’s current chief, Christian Blüthner, a Leipzig native, jokes that Bach’s music is “practically instilled to us at birth”. Some see Blüthner pianos as a perfect match for a transition under way in Bach performance, noticeable at the competition: away from the recent era of historical accuracy towards a freer style.
“The focus on historical performance practice had its justification, but also its limitations,” said Blüthner. “Transcending these boundaries makes the competition more attractive to a wider range of participants and, at the same time, more diverse for the public.”
There was lots to cheer at this year’s concert: participants from 13 countries worldwide, a top prize of €20,000 and news of a rebirth of sorts. From now on the competition will be held annually on alternating instruments – next year: violin – with the final always on Bach’s birthday: March 21st.
Anyone curious about this year’s winners can watch the recording online or hear them live in June as part of the annual Bach festival.
The Saxon city, an hour by train south of Berlin, may have been the birthplace of composers Richard Wagner and Hanns Eisler. It served as home, too, to Schumann, Mahler, Grieg and Mendelssohn. But for Leipzig locals, Bach is their number one: the birthday gift that keeps on giving.
