Wacky Bachy

And so to Leipzig..... (Bach to the Beginnings)

On May 30^th, 1723, Johann Sebastian Bach, aged 38, took up his post as Thomaskantor at the morning service in St Nicholas’ Church.  He and his family had been in Leipzig for a week. He conducted musicians and choir in a new Cantata, Die Elenden sollen essen, (The Poor shall eat), BWV 75.

 

Over the next four years he composed around 150 new cantatas as well as The St John Passion and The St Matthew Passion. He was extraordinarily productive, whether you like it (his work) or not.

Petra Flemming - Basketmaker, 1979

 

I claim profound ignorance of almost everything, but, having visited Bach’s birthplace and other towns associated with him in 2015 (please see https://www.richardpgibbs.org/2015/06/j-s-bach-funky-genius.html for more of this) I felt the need to follow him to the grave (which is kind of inevitable in itself.....)

 

My ignorance is well-tempered, however, as I have been practising the Eighth Prelude from the 48 Ps & Fs since The Beatles came out with A Hard Day’s Night (and I still can’t play it (Bach) properly).  But it does mean I have some idea of how many sharps and flats JSB could get on a page. 

 

And Leipzig was his apogee, perhaps. Gone were the days when he drunkenly fought a Zippel Fagottist(bassoonist) who hit him with a stick (Arnstadt, 1705) or when he would trek to Lübeck to see Dietrich Buxtehude play the organ (or was it to woo the master’s tochter?) No this was a serious and mature musician with his second wife, various children and four wagonloads of household goods.....

Petra Flemming - Basketmaker's Wife, 1979

 

He got the job in Leipzig because Telemann turned it down – not everyone can say that. His responsibilities included the musical education of the boys in the Thomasschule; music in all four principal churches of Leipzig, under their clergy; and the musical aspects of the municipal celebrations, under the town council. His contract stipulated that his behaviour should preserve the good order in the churches and that the music should not last too long.

 

Cantata 75 lasts about 35 minutes, in two parts, so almost broke his contract, but it was met, according to the press, mit guten applausus.

 

Cantata 75 was the third piece performed at the Opening Concert of the tercentenary celebration of Bach’s arrival in Leipzig, and I was privileged to have a seat in the ThomasKirche to hear it. It was exciting, and uplifting, despite the simple fact that I didn’t really understand a word (I am a little rusty on the Gospel text, Luke 16: vv19-31, about poor Lazarus and the rich man, though I recall the Fairfield Four singing about him at the Ryman Auditorium).  

 

The church has changed a great deal in the years since Bach strutted his stuff here, but there is a certain sense of continuum.  I sit next to a couple from the city of Bielefeld, a city of 334,000 residents, dating back to the 9^thcentury, which owes its fame to a joke made in 1994 when a student posted a message denying its existence, a joke that Mrs Merkel picked up in 2012.  The ribaldry went so far that in 2019 the city offered €1m to anyone who could prove that it didn’t exist.....  Of course there was no proof that my new friends were really from Bielefeld.....

 

Sorry..... Where was I?

 

The following night I attended a second concert, this time in the Nikolaikirche, another of Bach’s main churches, but again much changed since the early eighteenth century.  This concert, under the direction of Hans-Christoph Rademann, was a more user-friendly evening that the Opening Show.  There was simultaneous translation of the explanatory notes and the music was all Bach.  I heard voices encouraging me not to fear death – death is not negative (Mein Tod ist nur ein Schlaf....)  I heard the pizzicato passing of time; the wavering of the orchestra at the beginning of BWV 48 which suggests waves of water, and uncertainty; and the oboe in BWV 60 mimicking a hen and chickens as Bach reminds us of the protective power of nature.....

 

It was a marvellous concert, though I recently read something that Eugen d’Albert (a member of the Bach Geselschaft) wrote in 1906:  There are those who can sit and listen to Bach’s cantatas for two hours at a stretch and say they enjoy it and do not grow tired of it.  They are either incorrigible pedants or unmitigated dissemblers.....

 

Perhaps I am nothing but a shallow fraud. Bernard Levin said (in 1975) I know that Bach was one of the greatest geniuses ever to adorn the human race, and that he wrote some of the most sublime music in all history.  But he leaves me, literally cold.... 

But Nina Simone said, Bach made me dedicate my life to music....  

Ulrich Hachulla - First Day of Retirement, 1976/77

 

I don’t know.  It’s all a bit beyond me, perhaps. I came to Leipzig to hear Bach where his music was first performed, and I have done that.  Tick.  But I really should have gone Bach to the Beginning and heard just one cantata as part of a Sunday service.  That, perhaps, would have been genug.....

 

Anyway, the serious stuff over, a Litre of Pils in the Augustiner am Markt revives the parts that were wilting a little in the heat, and then there’s Lang Lang (郎朗) playing Bach’s Greatest Hits behind a high hoarding in the Market Square....  Such open-air recitals are normally free to the good citizens of Leipzig (and beyond) but Lily LangLang charged the city so much that they had to pass on the expense.  What would Johann have thought of that?  (And he don’t even play the Klavier).

 

Anyway, since I was here, like a proper tourist, there are sights to see.  First up, the Bach Museum.  OK.  Yeah.  A bench and some kind of organ manual (manual organ?)  Some things that go ding.  A few pics of yesteryear and a window that give a view of a statue. My advice, if you can take it, is go to Eisenach if you want the real thing....

 

Next, the Bayerischer Bahnhof, first opened in 1842 and closed in 2001.  It is Germany’s oldest preserved railway station, but now only rises above the S-Bahn Mitteldeutschland system.  However, you can forget that, for today the Bayerischer Bahnhof is famous for its hospitality and culinary delights – and it is known as the home of Gose, a beer specialty from Leipzig which was brought to Saxony-Anhalt in the year 1738. {Originally Gose comes from Goslar, a small town in Lower Saxony... and so on (oooh, that makes me thirsty!)}

Joachim Kratsch - In Memory Of, 1973

 

And then, the ugliest construction that side of Slough, the Völkerschlachtdenkmal (Monument to the Battle of the Nations), a 300,000 ton, 91 metre high, granite monstrosity dreamed up by poet Ernst Moritz Arndt in 1814 to honour the fallen in the one decisive victory over Napoleon on German soil.  600,000 soldiers from 20 countries took part and 100,000 were killed or wounded.  For good measure, typhus broke out in Leipzig after the skirmish, and a further 10% of the local population succumbed.  100 years after the event, the monument was completed.  Over 100 years after that, it is still there.....

I am offered a separate diversion by the Leipzig Tourist People - a boat trip on the extensive canal system.  Why not?  And so, for almost an hour and a half I could have been in Birmingham -  factories turned into apartments, crumbling houses in overgrown gardens, thick green waters swirling past - except for the extraordinary abundance of all sorts in canoes and similar craft, paddling gently towards oblivion with the distinctive aroma of wacky baccy floating in the air..... 

 

What else?  I sense you may be tiring of Leipzig and its charms?  But one more delight is to be found in the MdbK.  Say that again?  The Museum der Bildenden Künste, which is, to put it mildly, a rocking fine museyroom, sensitively organised over several floors, with art and artists arranged by theme or school, from Lucas Cranach the Elder through Caspar Friederich to Max Beckmann and artists of the Leipzig School.

Norbert Wagenbrett - Girl on the Street, 1987

 

Which takes us, almost inevitably, to the Gedenkstätte Museum in der Runden Ecke (the Round Corner), primarily an exhibition about the Stasi, the former secret police in East Germany, (one time employer of Vladimir Putin) as Leipzig’s history is inextricably confused by the GDR period during which everyone spied on everyone else.  For forty years, the Socialist Unity Party of Germany infiltrated society with suspicion and physical and mental violence.  Until 1989 this building housed the Leipzig District Administration for State Security.  This secret service apparatus penetrated into the most private aspects of people’s lives, sowed mistrust among neighbours, and violated the most elementary human rights.  Almost every aspect of freedom was suppressed, from friendship to art, music to thought.

 

Definitely worth a visit (though, of course, for purely historical reasons - these things couldn't happen today....).

 

To reflect on this, I drink more Gose beer in Gosenschenke Ohne Bedenken, (which could translate as Unscrupulous Beer Hall, but which might more generously be Beerhall Without Hesitation....) a fair walk north of the centre.  Here the skinhead barman anticipates retirement (in two years) when he will decamp to Chang Mai (Thailand) where (with no sense of irony) he intends to shed the problems of immigration which he sees as having ruined Germany (he quotes knife crime as one of the biggest problems).  His beer is good.  Not sure about his vision.

Otto Thielicke - Refugees, 1948

 

And to finish, some Allasch (a caraway liqueur, peculiar to Leipzig) in the First Whiskey Bar, where celebration goes on late into the night with other Bach enthusiasts due to the resignation of one Alexander de Pfeffel Johnson....

 

As I wander off into the night, I think of Bach again.  All this modern stuff.  If, I muse, Johann Sebastian Bach were alive today..... 

.....He would be turning in his grave.

 

Boom, Boom!

Leipziger Straßenmagazin KiPPE 
(The Leipzig Big Issue)

The poor shall eat.....

Gerhart Kurt Muller - Foreman, 1971/72

Bach to the Future

Three Beers for Bach!*

 

If I said this was all about Bach – I would be lying.  And if I said this was all about beer – I would also be lying.  And, in this day and age, who would want to be a liar?  I just cannot imagine why anyone would want to tell untruths.  Little, white, lies – maybe.  But wholly untruthful statements?  There just is no place for such in public life......

 

Anyway, I won’t lie to you.  I have just got back from Germany, and one of the reasons that I made this perilous journey, tunnelling 75 metres under La Manche (or, to give it is proper title, The European Channel) at nearly 300 kilometres per hour, was to celebrate the tercentenary of Johann Sebastian Bach’s move to Leipzig, a small town in (East) Germany.

 

I will also let you into a small truth.  I like beer.  (And wine, I might add, and other drinks, and food – but they are, perhaps, other stories.....)

 

And, in some ways, Beer and Bach go well together. For example, though precious little is known about Bach’s personal life (apart, perhaps, from the lives and deaths of his twenty children) it is recorded that when he moved to Weimar, in July 1708, he was to receive 150 florins in cash, eighteen bushels of grain (presumably for bread), twelve bushels of barley (presumably for beer), four cords of wood (to cook and make beer with as well as to keep warm) and thirty pails of beer (to be going on with.....). 

[Incidentally, to put this into some kind of historical perspective, this was the same year that the Jesuits were expelled from Holland and Charles XII invaded Ukraine....]

 

But I digress.  I have in my hand a piece of paper, a letter from Emily Potzger (Incoming) who represents the Leipzig Tourismus and Marketing GmbH.  Dear Mr Gibbs, she writes, It is a pleasure to welcome you to Leipzig – the city about which Gotthold Ephraim Lessing said: “I come to Leipzig, to a place where one can see the whole world in miniature.”  

[I should probably explain that Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, (born Jan. 22, 1729, Kamenz, Upper Lusatia, Saxony [Germany]—died Feb. 15, 1781, Braunschweig, Brunswick [Germany]), was a German dramatist, critic, and writer on philosophy and aesthetics.  Which, I guess, explains a lot.....]

 

Dear Mr Gibbs, she concludes, we wish you wonderful and eventful days in Leipzig.....

 

Who could resist such openness and charm?  

 

But (and, as you would expect, there is often a but) this was the focus of my visit, something that I had wished for for many years (probably since visiting Eisenach, Bach’s birthplace, and Weimar some years ago) but which had been rendered impractical by the pandemic (among other minor inconveniences.....). So it wasn’t just to Lovely Leipzig that I lurched.  No. First I yearned to have a look at Lorsch.

 

Aha!  (You cry.) Und was ist das? Well, I am surprised you are not better informed, as the World Heritage Site Lorsch Abbey is property of the Verwaltung der Staatlichen Schlösser un Gärten Hessen.  Founded in 764, built on an ice-age sand dune, and consecrated in 774 in the presence of King Charlemagne, this is a site worth a detour (though, as the trains from Bensheim weren’t running, a charabanc was needed for the second leg, even though the bus driver, a person not exactly born in Germany, did not speak German – nor English.... Ho hum.) And the Karolingerstadt (Carolingian Town – keep up) is pretty cute too, with its ancient, half-timbered houses and historic town hall, not to mention its Museum of Tobacco Production and the Culture of Smoking (tobacco used to be the main crop here).  It’s a far cry from North Norfolk, and a beer and a sausage salad in the market square rounded off a fine day out in the sun.

 

I was staying in Darmstadt, which can be explained by my unredacted WhatsApp messages, should this be necessary. Darmstadt holds the official title City of Science (German: Wissenschaftsstadt) which is about as meaningful as City of Culture.....  {Darmstadtium is a chemical element with the symbol Ds and atomic number 110. It is an extremely radioactive synthetic element. The most stable known isotope, darmstadtium-281, has a half-life of approximately 12.7 seconds. Darmstadtium was first created in 1994 by the GSI Helmholtz Centre for Heavy Ion Research in the city of Darmstadt, Germany, after which it was named.}  

You get my drift?  

 

Anyway, Darmstadt is also blessed with the Waldspirale (Forest Spiral) built in the late 1990s, a residential complex by Austrian Friedensreich Hundertwasser. As an almost surreal building, bearing a resemblance to the work of Antoni Gaudí, it is internationally famous for its almost absolute rejection of rectangular forms, down to every window having a different shape. (It also absolutely rejects the possibility of photographing it, but more of Hundertwasser later.....). 

So this is a photograph of something else.....

 

Not content with such fame, Darmstadt also hosts the UNESCO World Heritage Site Mathildenhöhe, with the Hochzeitsturm (Wedding tower) by Joseph Maria Olbrich, and a Russian Chapel built by Jugendstil architects who had settled in Darmstadt (German Art Nouveau is commonly known by its German name, Jugendstil. The name is taken from the artistic journal, Die Jugend, which was published in Munich and which espoused the new artistic movement.)

 

All this culture aside, the centre of Darmstadt, the Marktplatz, is home to the Darmstädter Ratskeller Hausbrauerei, a craft brewery located in the Old City Hall, which was built in 1598.  Here 0.4 litres of Ratsbräu Premium hell (nach Pilsner Art) will cost you €4,10, and to clothe such excess you could have a pair of fried sausages with bread for €8.90.....

 

Aaaacchhh.....

Sooo.....

And so to Fulda.

 

Which a man who says he has ridden from the German Sea (AKA The North Sea) on a Vespa claims is the Bees Knees – a phrase I think may be missing an R and a D?

 

But I will spare you the continuation, for the moment.  

Ernulf is Ernulf, and should you wish to follow my trail of confusion, then the next episode will thrill you with its mix of Baroque and Roll, and we shall approach the Bachanalian excitement of Leaping Leipzig...... 

*****

* In case you were wondering, this article is approximately 1,000 words, which is pretty much the same as what Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson will spew out on a weekly basis for the Maily Dail for a piffling £1m p.a.

Chicken Feed! 

 

 

Prost und alles Gute

Bis zum nächsten Mal

J S Bach - Travels in Former East Germany - 3

Breaking Bach

As often happens, I am confused.  I am muddling up my Heisenbergs with my Eisenachs, which doesn't help my principles of uncertainty. Add to this my Arnstadts, Ohrdrufs, Erfuts, Gothas and Weimars, and I am in a state of Thuringia, to say the least.

It's all the fault of one Veit Bach, a white bread maker (though veit is not white; it probably derives from a German word for wood, and it has been confused with the Latin for life, vita) who lived somewhere in Germany between 1550 and 1619 and begat a Johannes Hans Bach (1580 - 1626) who started begetting so many other Bachs, including some JSBs and JCBs et al that the surname soon became synonymous with all organists and eventually all jobbing musicians within earshot of the Thuringian Forest....

[Incidentally, in German bach means a stream, though in Welsh it is a term of endearment and in English it can refer either to a bachelor, or to a batch....  Veit Bach certainly caused a stream of Bachs (or perhaps a batch?)] 

It was an extensive family. Johann Sebastian Bach, born in the same year as Handel and Scarlatti (as well as John Gay, Daniel Gottlieb Messerschmidt and Dominikus Zimmermann, who later ran the coffee bar in Leipzig where Bach performed regularly, and who may, perhaps, have been an ancestor of Bob Dylan....) was the 8th child of his parents, and he would have 20 children by his two wives. By the time he was fifteen, when his mother and father died, there were 22 "famous" Bachs operating in central Germany. Subsequently six of his sons became well-known in their own rights.....

A cast of J S Bach's skull

Of the eighty-three Bachs who are listed as being related to Johann Sebastian between 1550 and 1870, fifty of them were named Johann.... And these numbers do not include (the ten or so of) his children who never grew tall enough to reach organ pedals.....

So what was so special about this family?

Johann Ambrosius Bach (1645 - 1695 - JS's father), whose father was a musician, was born in Erfut, where he was initially employed as a violinist.  He then moved to Eisenach, where he became court trumpeter and director of the town musicians.  His twin brother Johann Christoph, became a town musician in Arnstadt.....

Johann Ambrosius had eight children, four of whom became musicians.

In memory of the members of the Bach family who died in Eisenach

So what was so special about Johann Sebastian?

In his lifetime, which was comparatively long and productive for those times, he was not recognised as a great composer, although he was continuously employed as an organist, teacher, Cantor, Kapellmeister, and Royal Court Composer to Augustus III. He was famous enough, however, for Beethoven, apparently, to call him The immortal God of harmony in 1801 and for Goethe to say, in 1827, that His works are an invaluable national patrimony with which no other nation has anything to be compared.....

J S Bach at the Georgenkirche, Esienach

  

It was not until Felix Mendelssohn produced the St Matthew Passion in 1829 that publication and performance of Bach's works really took off, though he had been admired and played by the cognoscenti in the years since his death, particularly due to the offices of his sons.

In fact, surprisingly little is known about J S Bach, beyond his music and his progeny.  He was born in a house like the one pictured above, which is now the Bachhaus Eisenach, the first and largest museum dedicated to him (in operation since 1907).  The actual house he was born in has long since disappeared, but in wandering round sleepy Eisenach at night, it is not difficult to imagine the sound of a spinet crashing from an upstairs window.....

Just outside the town is the Wartburg, one of the most famous (so they say) medieval castles in Germany. Bach must have known it, though its musical connections are more with Wagner (who tripped by in 1842) as it was the site of the legendary twelfth century singing contest that inspired Tannhäuser und der Sängerkrieg auf Wartburg (Tannhäuser and the Singers' Contest at Wartburg Castle).

The castle was also famed for sheltering Martin Luther, who took refuge here in 1521 to translate the New Testament.

Martin Luther addresses the masses in Eisenach

Martin Luther and J S Bach actually attended the same school in Eisenach (though not at the same time). This was the Latin School (Lateinschule) that was housed in the old Dominican cloister; Luther later described it as Purgatory.

Initially Bach did not do very well here, for example he was ranked 47 out of 81 in the fifth class in 1693, and his attendance record was very poor, with 96 registered sessions absent, (data that no doubt Aufstadt would have scowled at, leading to Special Measures.....)

The Tower of the Wartburg

In 1695 he was 23rd of 45 in the fourth class, and had been absent for 103 sessions, but both his mother and his father had very recently died, and so after Easter he went, with his brother Johann Jacob, to live with his elder brother Johann Cristoph, in Ohrdruf, where, in July, he joined the Lyceum.....

It could be said that from then on the young Bach never looked back.....

In 1700 he was a choral scholar at St Michael's School, Lüneburg, where he broke his voice, or his voice broke.... So, in 1702 he was (briefly) wandering round Hamburg, and in 1703, after temporary employment in Weimar, he was appointed organist in Arnstadt.

The (reconstructed) 1703 Wender Organ in the Johann Sebastian Bach Church in Arnstadt

It is curious, perhaps, that there is so little known about Bach. He was not a great letter writer, nor diarist, so there is a limited paper trail (in comparison, say, to Mozart, who wrote lots of letters - scattered with a plethora of profanities), allowing us to dwell on personal details of his life. But one incident was recorded, which gives some insight into his personality, and that is of an altercation, in 1705, with bassoonist Johann Heinrich Geyersbach, who he called a Zippel Fagottist! (Nanny-goat bassoonist!) before drawing his sword to defend himself from the other's schtick.... The brawl was broken up, but Bach had not endeared himself.....

Die Liebfrauenkirche (The Church of our Lady), Arnstadt

Though it is difficult to 'know' Johann Sebastian Bach, he must have been a remarkable man. In November 1705 he is said to have taken four weeks leave of absence and to have walked to Lübeck, about 400 kms, (250 miles) (and back, three months later...) to see and hear the highly influential organist Dieterich Buxtehude at the Marienkirche (whose daughter, perhaps, Bach had considered as a possible partner, as had Handel.....)

Remarkable timing, as Buxtehude died only months after Bach got home.  (The daughter remained unmarried.)

Musical demonstrations in the Bacchhaus, Eisenach

In Breaking Bad, which has nothing to do with Bach, a terminally ill chemistry teacher becomes an expert at manufacturing the illegal drug crystal methamphetamine, and adopts the name Heisenberg....  

Werner Heisenberg was a brilliant German physicist (and professor at Leipzig University) who is famous for his uncertainty principle, which tells us that there is a fuzziness in nature, a fundamental limit to what we can know about the behaviour of quantum particles and, therefore, the smallest scales of nature..... [Alok Jha, The Guardian, November 10th, 2013]

Johann Seb Bach was a numbers man.  Taking A = 1, B = 2, etc, then BACH adds up to 14, and J S BACH = 41, the mirror image of 14.  So? The number 14 is one of several significant numbers in Bach's later works, so a chorale of debate has fluttered around this for centuries (perhaps also because Mozart was also very clever with his numbers?) though the word of the day is caution.

The last piece that Bach wrote was his (incomplete) Art of Fugue, and the third subject of the 14th fugue is based on motif B A C H (where B = B flat and H = B natural in German notation).  There is no way I am breaking the Bach code, but it is intriguing to marvel at what could have been going on in the darkening world of JSB in his final years.

I lack certainty.  It is one of my principles.  If I knew what Bach was doing there would be little left to know.  I didn't enjoy Breaking Bad and don't understand Heisenberg, but something tenuous, and strangely beautiful, links the miraculous crystals manufactured by Walter White in New Mexico to the ingenious crystalline fugues of J S Bach; something perhaps links the twentieth century professor of Leipzig University to the eighteenth century Cantor of the St Thomas Church and School of Leipzig?  And perhaps the link is the limit of what we, ordinary people, can know, perhaps especially when confronted with the extraordinary achievements of exceptional human beings.....

Telemann - much bigger in his time than J S Bach

J S Bach lived in Protestant Germany all his life, and his career took him from Arnstadt to Weimar to Leipzig, where he died at the age of 65 in 1750 (having suffered bungled cataract operations from the same English doctor that attempted similar torture on Handel).  One obituary notice called him Our Bach, and said that he was the greatest organ and clavier player that ever lived.  His genius as a composer (of almost every musical form in existence except for opera, and for every instrument) was not appreciated until almost a century after his death, but now he is recognised as one of the greatest musicians ever.

The Bachhaus Eisenach

The Bachhaus Eisenach celebrates the life and work of J S Bach. Musical presentations are given, using original keyboard instruments from his time (28 baroque instruments are on display here, though the museum possesses more than 400). Attached to the fifteenth century house is a stunning new centre, with bubble chairs for visitors to listen to recordings, exhibits showing how we see Bach and what we know about Bach, and a walk-in diorama showing videos of performances of key works, including a rehearsal of Tönet, ihr Pauken! Erschallet, Trompeten! BWV 214 by the Thomanerchor, in the Old Town Hall, Leipzig in 2006.

As Nicholas Kenyon says (in the Faber Pocket Guide to Bach) Let's face it, Bach can be daunting. He does not give up his secrets easily. He is one of the most mysterious of Western composers.....  But, at the risk of exercising my naivety, the music that Bach produced, whether played on period instruments, sung in parish churches, or jazzed up by Jacques Loussier, or whatever, can soothe, stir, shake or simply satisfy something in the soul like little else.

At the risk of over-stretching my naivety, Bach rocks, and Bach rolls. From Sunday mornings reading the paper to Angela Hewitt playing Das Wohltemperirte Clavier; to hearing Adrian Davis conduct a choir of friends singing Ach Herr, laß dein lieb from the St John Passion at my father's Memorial Service, soprano eyes glistening with gestus; to driving south in heavy traffic with Murray Perahia unravelling the Goldberg Variations.....  There is a Bach for all times and for all people.....

In 1981 Glenn Gould performed the Contrapunctus XIV from Art of Fugue for Bruno Monsaingeon's Glenn Gould Plays Bach.  Gould was worried: It's the most difficult thing I've ever approached.....  I've got several versions - one which would sound like a pavane and another one like a gigue, all very different in tempi and phrasing and articulation and so on....  The piece breaks off at the end of bar 239 with an eighth-note D above middle C.  At this point Gould snatches up his arm as though suffering from an electric shock.  Columbia's sleeve notes from Bach/Glenn Gould: The Art of Fugue go on, The picture freezes, and the arm remains suspended in the air, now and evermore.....

I am confused.  Breaking Bad means to raise hell, or to go wild, break laws, take control..... The key effects of crystal methamphetamine include feeling very exhilarated, alert and awake.  Somewhere there is a connection with the muttering digital exertions of Glenn Gould. 

I am uncertain, but I suspect that Johann Sebastian Bach was, essentially, a very precise, controlled man, though at the same time his ability to extemporise on a subject, taking musical instruments to their limits, suggests exhilaration and extreme alertness.   And control is not the right word.  There's some kind of divine auto-pilot at work.....

There is something about Bach that doesn't add up.  I catch him staring, a little dangerously, from a shop window in Weimar, his wigged head blank in contrast to the coloured clothes on the headless mannequins beside him.  There's an element of funk about him, that aloof ability to do whatever he liked.  

Funky Genius.