How I got into Bach, finally

If you are a piano student, or have ever learned the piano for more than three months, you’ve probably played Bach.

Maybe it’s the Minuet in G (which, by the way, was not actually written by Bach, but by a guy called Christian Petzold *shock*), or maybe it’s a two-part invention, or even a prelude and fugue (now we’re getting into the big boys).

But at some point during that long arduous journey of learning the piano, you’ve probably thought these three words:

“I hate Bach.”

And it’s probably not your fault. Your teacher probably told you Bach is good for your fingers (as if his preludes are calcium alternatives!), or that you must start with 20 mins of Bach everyday before moving on to the “fun” things.

Or maybe every single piano competition ever requires a Bach prelude and fugue, and it’s in every single exam syllabus.

Everywhere you look is Bach.

Then you turn to the oldies, the legends, the weathered virtuosos, the grand masters, or even your average classical music lover, and what do they all say?

“Bach is the greatest.”

These great artists all started off playing Bach Sinfonias and Two-part Inventions. Yes, maybe they were child prodigies and could memorize the entire Well-Tempered Clavier (the book which compiles Bach’s prelude and fugues for keyboard) by the time they were 8, but alas, they had to start somewhere.

So what happens in between those two extremes? How do you go from thinking Bach is just a boring composer of exercises to worshipping every note he writes? And is there a transition, or does it happen overnight?

Let me share with you a personal experience, the story of how I came to appreciate Bach, until I finally started learning some of them, and the greatest lesson I received from the Baroque maestro.

If loving Bach equates to maturity, then I would say puberty came quite late for me.

I started off as a kid who hated Bach. His was boring, voicing every line in his contrapuntal music was an annoying task that never bore much fruit for the labour that was put in, and the absence of musical directions made it hard for a child like to me to know what to do with the notes. Playing Liszt or Chopin was much more exciting.

Back (Bach) then, my knowledge of Bach’s piano music was limited to the three-part inventions and the more famous Prelude and Fugues. Back then, everything Bach did, to me, seemed very standardized. If you play a three-part invention, you have to identify all three voices; if you play a fugue, you have to identify the subject, the countersubject, and locate the bridge or sequence sections. They all end on a perfect cadence. Clinical. Nothing radical about it.

While I was doing my undergraduate studies in english literature, the music analysis class stimulated my interest in fugues. I learned that fugues aren’t just a concoction of the same melodic material played in different keys. Bach varied his fugal subjects in many different ways. There is the stretto fugue, the double fugue, the counter-fugue etc. It became fun to see how Bach varied his subjects in many ways. It’s a bit like solving a Rubik’s cube. There are many ways to get to the same solution. The more you explore, the more you realize how intricate the mechanism is in just one fugue (I have this meme that really illustrates this point, let me show you). That was when I also started noticing how each fugue in the Well-Tempered Clavier has its own distinct character. I tried out a few of them in my spare time and performed some at lunchtime concerts. That was fun.

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Edward Said once said that fugal music should be seen as the presentation of an idea as it unravels within the mind of a rational subject, ‘elaborated’ as it proceeds rather than ‘simply presented’. For me, that was what made Bach’s music so interesting to listen to. You see how the music is being worked out and developed; it’s not presented to you like an already finished masterpiece. The more closely you listen, the more you realize how closely tied each phrase–down to each note–is.

I started listening to Bach’s music more during lockdown. I ventured out of my comfort zone and started listening to his larger-scale works. Toccatas, the chromatic fantasy and fugues, the partitas…I was hooked by the partitas. I have never imagined Bach’s music to be that exciting! But the partitas were very exciting indeed. Their rhythms were catchy, the melodies were so beautiful, and the fast movements were exciting and dazzlingly virtuosic! Most important of all, each of his six partitas were so distinct from the other. No. 5 is very bright and energetic; No. 2 is filled with passion; No. 4 is beautiful and sublime; No. 6 is a study in epic tragedy.

Of course, all of them comprise the material found in the more basic two-part inventions and prelude and fugues, but in his larger works, Bach really shows how to use all these techniques (counterpoint, sequencing etc.) as instruments of conveying grand emotions, and my god, the end-result is really something so incredible that his music merits a lifetime’s study.

Perhaps, as I get older, and start appreciating the small things in life, I will start to savour the beauty of Bach’s smaller-scale works more–as much as I know how perfect and beautiful the first prelude in Book I of the WTC is, right now I cannot imagine spending hours on that little piece until I’ve achieved perfection. Alas, being youthful and ambitious and constantly in search of passion (I know, I’m still young, oh stop it, you), I’ve come to the realization that Bach’s music has much of that. It is bubbling with energy, perhaps just as much as Liszt and Rachmaninoff.

There’s something in Bach’s music for everyone.

And the most wonderful thing is, everyone plays Bach differently. Andras Schiff may choose to show the nimbleness of the Praembulum of the G major partita, while Igor Levit might plough through it with ferocious energy. Murray Perahia may choose to use the pedal to highlight some hidden melodic line, while Glenn Gould might retain a mechanical approach and “let the music do its work”. All these interpretations are great, subject to the listener’s own preference.

I remember my teacher once said: “As long as you know what you’re doing, you can do almost anything with Bach.”

That is something I really want to talk about, but I notice I’ve been rambling on for a while, and I don’t want to take up to much of your precious time, so I’ll save this topic for my next post.

Let me know in the comments how you got into Bach’s music. After all, everyone has their own Bachstory, right? Which pieces by Bach do you love best?

Stay tuned!