Word: bache
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While long-nosed Wanda Landowska was giving brilliant, vigorous, scholarly performances of C. P. E. Bach in Toronto last week (see col. 2), Leopold Stokowski was busy in Manhattan with Johann Sebastian Bach's tremendous St. Matthew Passion. He turned it into a weird theatrical spectacle that reminded Bach scholars of the audience reaction to the first performance in Leipzig's Thomaskirche in 1729. At that time a scandalized old lady rose to her feet and exclaimed: "God help us! It's surely an opera comedy...
With his accustomed showmanship, Stokowski glamorized the great sacred composition. He cut Bach's music to slightly over half its length, reorchestrated many passages of Bach counterpoint, peopled the Metropolitan Opera stage with a bevy of hooded mimes, who prowled about a collection of ramps and platforms like Ku Klux Klansmen at a Konklave. The Saviour was represented by a vertical shaft of light whose symbolic feet were symbolically dried by the hair of Maria Magdalena (Lillian Gish...
Concertgoers, long familiar with Stokowski's ponderous schmalzing of Bach, were not unduly surprised. But New York Times Critic Olin Downes had had enough. Said he: ". . . More could have been heard had it not been for the extremely lachrymose and dilatory tempi, and the unblushing sentimentalism in interpretation, which almost uniformly prevailed, so that the B-Minor aria with the violin solo sounded like the Méditation from Thaïs. . . . Bach's music . . . stood up surprisingly well under the handicap...
...most laymen, and many a concertgoer, the name Bach refers to Johann Sebastian Bach, who left behind him a musical reputation second only to that of Ludwig van Beethoven. But Johann Sebastian was only one of many talented Bachs who furnished Germany with music for seven generations. Himself the culmination of a long line of Bachs, the great Johann Sebastian begot 20 children, three of whom became composers of world renown: Wilhelm Friedemann Bach, Johann Christian Bach and Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach...
...frayed and yellow manuscripts were written in a beautiful 18th-Century hand, and each bore the name of Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach. Koldofsky bought the manuscripts and started a six-year search through musical libraries. He found that the manuscripts were not in C. P. E.'s own handwriting. Seven turned out to be copies of concertos by C. P. E. already listed or known to exist in European collections. The other seven, so far as Koldofsky has been able to discover, are new to the musical world. Since all the scripts are in the same handwriting...