Prelude in E Major, Book II

I will begin with what will be a constant refrain—latent or explicit—behind almost anything I write: Bach is better than I, at everything. A better person, in terms of emotional elevation and seamless integration with intellect; a more intelligent person, in a pure analytical sense; more community-oriented, more selfless, more successful monetarily and societally, and more humble. It is difficult for me, in our narcissistic age, to imagine what it must have been like for him to walk out in public and know just how infinitely more gifted—in almost every conceivable intellectual and emotional aspect—he was than his compatriots, and yet remain humble. I do not have this ability, and I feel my limitations every day. Listening to the Goldberg Variations as I write—an apex of human intellectual, spiritual, and emotional achievement—I will have to venture outside at some point and feel deeply, with every step, despite my resistance to it, that I am surrounded by idiots. This is far from humble, but it is what I feel. How can one venture outside in Friedrichshain on a Friday night, look into people’s eyes—often dull, bored, or superficially connected—and not feel anything different?

I hardly go outside anymore, as all I want to do is compose and sit in silence. One gets lonely, and so I find company—only to be bored by the conversations in a short amount of time. Many of us here have had that feeling: to be sitting, listening intently to another person, only to have an epiphany during the course of the conversation—they do not feel deeply, they do not think deeply, I have projected my inner life onto them—and then to feel disappointment and a deep desire to get away. I know that I am not mad, because I don’t feel this when I listen to Bach, ever. I feel someone immeasurably better than I; it breaks my heart that I cannot speak to him personally, and yet it uplifts me in inexplicable ways that I do speak to him every evening that I can listen to him. I have the gift of music and the knowledge that someone like him existed—transmitting what he felt about God and the world around him in the most intellectually and emotionally coherent of ways. I cannot find any flaws in his work in the way that I can find them in every other composer. I tire of all of them currently, almost immediately—composers that I revere but whom I see as lesser intellects: Beethoven, Fauré, Poulenc, Brahms, Bruckner, Franck, even Mozart, though he is the most intelligent of composers next to Bach. I can only listen to them for a few minutes before switching back to Bach; the structural coherence of their works peters out—the Zusammenhang/—(but not Mozart, for example, in /Symphonies No. 40 and 41). Even Rachmaninoff, whom I adore: the D Major Prelude, heartrendingly deep and beautiful, an homage to missed family, loved family, a deeply redolent Russia—until the A section ends and is merely figurated and repeated. I lose interest then. Contrast this with the Well-Tempered Clavier.

Das Wohltemperierte Clavier. Das Allerhöchste. The E-major Prelude from Book II. I have heard this piece so many times that it is in my blood, such that it generates only disappointment when I walk outside and the deepest desire to be alone in woods that don’t belong to me—because I am not German, or because I am made to feel that I am not by sideways hateful glances; people avoiding me in the street because they think I am Turkish and dangerous, and because they are hateful and small. And because of what I feel—what I continue to feel, alone, composing, listening to Bach—I cannot tolerate it for an instant. Instead, I walk into my heart and mind and someday, in person again, around Central Park when the lights are dimmed and people are indoors because it’s too cold—to have the world to myself and to hear a man speaking to God. A man with the hubris, the extreme hubris, to believe he can—that God is speaking to him. But he is correct. It is not hubris if one is correct, but Good Lord, if one is incorrect! Germany knows this mistake well. The E-major Prelude opens with Bach speaking. God answers, and then the two lines converge in one of the most intimate, rein conversations I have been privileged to hear. How can one go outside and listen to what people are saying in public after that? Bach managed it, and so my limitations next to him become clear.

But it was a different Germany then, perhaps. I am disappointed by the overall quality of German in Berlin. I am reminded of lines by Henri Cole:

I subscribed to the very human temptation we have all subscribed to: the fantasy. As an American, I had a European fantasy—in particular, a German fantasy. I loved German classical music so deeply as a boy that it brought me here. Surely the culture that produced Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, and Bruckner (Austrian, but he composes very Germanically), among others, must be resplendent on average. I hear, repeatedly, that Berlin is not Germany. This is true, to some extent. But I have traveled around Germany, and the wound of the war—and the degradation it wrought—is everywhere. If one is even a little sensitive, one feels it on every corner. Many do not; I am convinced of it. If one is German, I don’t see how they can’t become deeply annoyed, even infuriated, by twenty-year-old Ausländer reveling in the streets, their body language making clear to all that they have no idea about what happened here, emotionally. I do not understand how Germans cope. To produce Bach, Sebald, Schopenhauer, Bernhard (Austrian again, but very Germanic), the magnificent engineering of the parks here—the greatest parks in the world—and the Schwarzwald, while simultaneously producing an infinite monstrosity, banal in its lowness and wickedness, and the consequential humiliation and self-immolation from ever-present guilt. And somehow, I am connected to all of it—even the music I write, and indeed synonymous with it—deeply, deeply indebted to Bach. Bach is everywhere, and so deeply German, while I remain on the outside of it all.

I can’t speak for Germans here, how they cope, or what their day-to-day lives are like. When I look at them in Berlin, many of them seem unhappy. Trapped somehow. The poverty in Berlin, born of trauma and the consequential Einschränken, is immense and something I had not expected. I can, therefore, only speak for myself. All I want to do is learn more of the Well-Tempered Clavier and compose. And whatever happened to me three years ago that resulted in an explosion of Bach and music in my life, I feel because of it the deepest gratitude for the German people and culture, and therefore, somewhat consequentially, a deep sadness for them. My music, ultimately, is to honor Bach, to honor my family and the love I have felt for them and they for me, and to honor myself and the emotional experiences I have had in Germany, Europe, and America—which I love deeply and which is collapsing. I am an optimist by nature because of classical music and how I have felt about it since I was twelve; I would like to focus only on Bach and the good in people, while also addressing tragedy. Because of Bach, I look forward deeply to each day with a gratitude I cannot explain, and which I wish I could put in the souls of other people here who look so unhappy—who look to me as though they do not have this gratitude. It is in large part why I wish to perform my work and to share it with other people. Why should I be the only one who is so lucky? Are they aware such a feeling even exists?

(I have exaggerated slightly to communicate my inner emotional process at moments of extreme elation, to the point where I feel separated from others). Of course, there are others who feel this way today, I know. But they are hard to find. I am always searching for them. (By logic, they exist today because they have existed before. Every great composer has had this feeling; it must be so—I hear it in their music—or I am utterly vain, or both, or going mad. Schubert was transported to sweetness with every few steps he took on a walk in Vienna, stopping at a lodge for a beer or a meal to compose a beautiful song before continuing. Mozart is a constant explosion of wit, brilliance, and joy. Brahms: the deepest feelings of nobility. Bruckner: titanic spirituality.)

Bach felt this way—this gratitude—more than anyone else in history. There is a wonderful video of Rostropovich describing this feeling of “health” in Bach:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pxATkaJFxsk

If there were no other reason to learn the Well-Tempered Clavier—to engage with it deeply—this would more than suffice. This feeling of health is the consequence of understanding, at a personal level, what these pieces represent in terms of inner work: connection with oneself, those around you, nature, and, for Bach, God—what we would perhaps in modern times term Zusammenhang, or the largeness of things: an infinite, coherent structure, benediction, or whatever one would term it on a personal level. But it is indeed personal, and is at the heart of Bach’s art and humility.

One thing I wish I could ask him. I have begun to believe in my music and what is happening to me—so much so that I wanted to share it with you, with music lovers—that it should be written down somewhere, perhaps to be of use to someone else who is composing, or in the arts, or who was detonated from the path. (If only I had had when I was younger, in concrete terms, what Rachmaninoff had felt, or Schubert, or even perhaps a lesser composer). Or especially Bach. He believed thoroughly in his music. How did he know he wasn’t going mad, or wasn’t incredibly self-absorbed? One can answer, “Yes, you perform, and if people clap and cheer and are connected, then that is proof that you are sane.” I think it is a form of insanity to believe one writes beautiful music—so much so that one writes it down painstakingly on paper, learns it, practices it, and puts oneself under repeated stress to play it for the public, and leaves detailed notes so that it survives among music lovers at the very least.

(I distinctly recall the fear I had, about a year back, of not uploading some new pieces of mine online before going out and dying in a bike accident before I could do so. I simply HAD to put out how I felt—my family should know, people should know. How could I die before expressing, in this newest, freshest form, that life is beautiful? I have not shared enough; I don’t have a large enough body of work; I am desperate.) Did the gratitude Bach felt balance his grandiose feelings about his music, and his grandiose feelings about his grandiose feelings—correct, ultimately, as they were? The feeling of service to a higher power? I hear in his music no trace of vanity, no semblance of a bad person. I wanted to share what I feel, and continue to share what I feel, about music with you, as a form of possible judgment against me as well. If I am wrong and steeped in hubris, then I deserve the condemnation of others, even if the thoughts of hubris had gone unexpressed, existing only in the Privatsphäre.

I believe very strongly in my music and can’t abide contemporaries, most of whom I think aren’t composers but rather pyrotechnicians. Every now and again, I will go to a concert, hear a bunch of contemporaries, get annoyed—but they’re from the right families, went to the right schools—then hear one person who is clearly a genius, get extremely excited, prepare to buy a plane ticket to fly and see them, even in Siberia, and then hear that they died recently. Nikolai Kapustin. A shock. Please, listen to his Preludes if you haven’t. A Bach of jazz. Ordinary jazz next to him is basic by comparison. Henri Dutilleux. San Francisco Night, with the text, bitte. He is writing what he feels; he is able to map his emotions to music. Most composers cannot. They cobble from other composers; they use little tricks.

Richard Strauss, Vier Letzte Lieder: II. “September.” Jessye Norman and Kurt Masur. Joy, and an immense love for everything, even in old age, even near the very end. Unending bitterness when confronted with Strauss is an embarrassment, and so I just don’t understand the world.