Masaaki Suzuki on Interpreting Bach

Masaaki Suzuki, who has recorded the complete sacred and secular cantatas of Johann Sebastian Bach with the Bach Collegium Japan he founded in 1990, talks with Tyler Cowen about what made the St John’s Passion a shock to its first listeners, how his Calvinist upbringing shapes a Lutheran repertoire, why translating Bach’s texts is itself interpretive work, and why a career built on fascination rather than planning has never looked back.

Key ideas

1. The St John’s Passion was a genuine shock. Before Bach, passion settings were close to plain Bible recitation — Johann Walter’s passion, still performed in Bach’s Leipzig, is ‘really only F major chord from the beginning until the end’. Bach’s dramatic oratorio passion, with the choir doubling as both the crowd (turba) and the chorale, broke with that tradition entirely.
2. Calvinism explains his devotion to Lutheran sacred music, rather than sitting oddly beside it. Suzuki reads Calvin, often mischaracterised as hostile to culture, as an early reformer who affirmed ‘the value of the activity and culture of this world’ outside the church under a doctrine of general grace — a frame that lets a Calvinist conduct Lutheran cantatas without contradiction.
3. Translation is interpretation, not a preliminary to it. Suzuki personally translated twenty or thirty cantatas into Japanese before handing the task to a colleague — because working out what a text really means, sentence by sentence, is itself part of understanding how to perform it, in the same way no reader of the Bible today reads the original Hebrew or Greek.
4. The instrument’s own history is part of the interpretation. Suzuki’s favourite organ, the Schnitger instrument at the Martinikerk in Groningen, matters as much for how it was restored — by Jürgen Ahrend, back toward its original character rather than the Romanticised rebuild most historic organs received in the nineteenth century — as for how it was built.
5. Productivity follows fascination, not a plan, and a finished recording is a milestone, not a verdict. Suzuki denies ever trying to be productive — ‘the Bach music is so fascinating, I can’t stop working’ — and treats each recording as one pass among many he would gladly repeat: given thirty more years, he says, he would record the St Matthew Passion again.

Content

The St John’s Passion and what Bach changed

Cowen opens on the 1724 St John’s Passion and asks what, fundamentally, was new. Suzuki traces the passion tradition back to Bible reading in the liturgy — first plain recitation, then recitation on a few tones, gradually developed into oratorio passion. Even so, the Passion of Johann Walter, still performed in Holy Week in Bach’s own time, amounted to little more than a single sustained F major chord under continuous text. Bach’s St John’s Passion was, on that background, ‘a really shocking experience for everyone’. Structurally, the innovation lay partly in the choir’s double role: it plays the turba, the shouting crowd, while simultaneously carrying the chorale — two functions folded into one body of singers. Asked whether he approaches the work theologically, as Christian or Lutheran music, Suzuki is deliberately minimal: Bach Collegium Japan performs it as sacred concert music, not liturgy, doing the sound and the text as well as possible and trusting listeners to receive it ‘according to their situation or thoughts’.

Calvinism, Lutheranism, and interpreting sacred music

Suzuki’s own background is Calvinist, and Cowen presses on whether that shapes his reading of a Lutheran repertoire — the St John’s Passion carries a strong sense of predestination, with Jesus seeming to know what is coming more clearly than elsewhere in the gospels. Suzuki is untroubled by the apparent mismatch. He credits Calvin as one of the first reformers to affirm ‘the value of the activity and culture of this world’, not only of heaven — a corrective, he thinks, to the common view that Calvin was hostile to music and culture. Calvin restricted congregational singing inside church to psalms, but actively supported cultural work outside it, including psalm publications and arrangements, under a broader doctrine of God’s general grace extending to worldly creativity. That doctrine, Suzuki argues, licenses evaluating any cultural work — Lutheran cantata included — on its own terms. The same lens explains Bach’s Köthen years, spent in a Calvinist court where Lutheran church cantatas were closed to him: he wrote instrumental and secular music instead, happily by Suzuki’s account, though probably still hoping for a fuller Lutheran outlet — which is why, Suzuki suggests, he moved on to Leipzig.

From Karl Richter to Amsterdam — becoming a Baroque musician

Suzuki’s Bach encounter began at twelve, hearing Karl Richter’s recording of the B Minor Mass on new stereo headphones from his father — thrilling above all, he admits, for the trumpet playing of Adolf Scherbaum, since Suzuki himself played trumpet in a brass band and ‘repeatedly listened only to the Gloria’. Revisiting the Richter recording decades later, he finds it ‘completely different’ and ‘not acceptable at all’ by his current ears — a ‘machine-like’, modern-in-its-own-way reading he nonetheless credits for its excitement at the time; he treats an older Mengelberg St Matthew Passion, slow and romantic, the same way — right for its era, not for now. His route to early music ran through the organ rather than any conscious choice of ‘the movement’: a Belgian priest teaching organ in Osaka told the teenage Suzuki there were no good organs in Japan and steered him into composition instead. A chance lesson with the harpsichordist Motoko Nabeshima, who had studied with Gustav Leonhardt in Amsterdam, changed his trajectory — she introduced him to her former classmate Ton Koopman, and a single Koopman concert on the day Suzuki arrived in Amsterdam convinced him to stay. Conducting itself was never a deliberate choice: leading cantata performances from the harpsichord, as Bach himself did, and taking blunt feedback from his brother (‘that is not clear’) was how he became a conductor ‘in a really traditional sense’ almost by accident, and he now treats organ, harpsichord, and conducting as facets of a single, easily integrated musical idea — choir conducting, he says, feels exactly like playing a fugue on the organ, ‘only thing, the choir has text’.

Bach in Japan — translation, audiences, and hidden Christians

Japan supplies a recurring counterpoint. Suzuki does not think Japanese musicians understand Bach differently, but the near-total absence of Christian background in Japan means the sacred texts need active explanation in a way they no longer do in Europe, where ‘everything is already taken for granted’. German text is inaccessible without translation, and Suzuki treats translation as substantive interpretive labour, not a mechanical step — he personally translated twenty or thirty cantatas before the workload became too much and a colleague took over, on the reasoning that no reader anywhere reads Bach’s biblical sources in the original languages either. Bach Collegium Japan’s Holy Week St Matthew Passion, performed annually for two decades in the same Kobe venue to 5,000–6,000 attenders, dwarfs Japan’s Christian population (often cited at around one per cent, against 40–50 per cent in Korea) — evidence, Suzuki thinks, that a work’s religious message can land independently of formal belief. He locates his own city, Kobe, in a longer history: a nineteenth-century treaty port alongside Yokohama, and further back one of several centres of the pre-1639 ‘Christian century’, when Japanese boy missionaries carried organ-playing to Portugal before the country’s rulers suppressed Christianity outright. What survived did so only as syncretic ‘hidden Christianity’ in areas like Kishū — funerals that follow Buddhist ritual while priests circle the building murmuring ‘this is not true, this is not true’ — a tradition Suzuki describes carefully, flagging his own limited knowledge of it. On audiences, he finds American listeners more outwardly excitable than Japanese ones, who are often deeply informed but culturally discouraged from visible enthusiasm — while Beethoven’s Ninth remains a genuine national event, with over a hundred December performances and mass sing-alongs drawing crowds above 10,000.

Organs, restoration, and the sound world of Bach

Asked how many organs in the world are good enough to do Bach justice, Suzuki resists a number and instead names a favourite: the Schnitger organ at the Martinikerk in Groningen, prized as much for its restoration as its build. Historic organs were widely ‘Romanticised’ in the nineteenth century to match contemporary taste, then re-restored in the twentieth back toward eighteenth- or seventeenth-century character — a process Suzuki treats as a genuine interpretive act in its own right, singling out the organ builder Jürgen Ahrend’s work on the Groningen instrument. He locates Bach’s organ writing within the specific, ‘stringy’, overtone-rich character of instruments built around Saxony and Thuringia in his lifetime, distinct from northern German, Italian, or French organs — and notes that no single surviving instrument can play the whole of Bach’s organ output, because ‘Bach’s idea of composition is always surpassing the organ situation’. On performers rather than instruments, Suzuki reports a decline in Japanese organ students at the major European conservatories, offset by a rise in Korean students, attributing it partly to the fact that Japanese musicians can now build careers at home without the once-necessary pilgrimage to Europe — though he still regards time in Europe as close to essential for anyone serious about the European tradition. Before he made that pilgrimage himself, he says, he ‘didn’t have any understanding’ of Baroque music at all, only love for the instruments; Ton Koopman’s encyclopaedic, fast-talking knowledge in Amsterdam supplied the framework his ear already wanted.

Recording philosophy — never looking back, and Bach as a lifelong mystery

Suzuki denies any deliberate productivity strategy: ‘I never try to be productive whatsoever… only music is there, nothing else.’ Once a recording is finished he moves straight to the next, rarely revisiting old work except when forced to choose repertoire or make recommendations. Asked about recording the St Matthew Passion twice, roughly a decade apart, he rejects the idea that the second correction the first — each recording is simply a milestone marking how far the ensemble’s technical and interpretive understanding has moved, and he would happily record it again given another thirty years. The same instinct governs how he approaches well-worn repertoire like Handel’s Messiah: he consults other recordings sparingly, wary of overinfluence, and treats each recording session itself as a lived, memory-laden event — he recalls colleagues receiving news of a parent’s death mid-session, and his own mother-in-law dying just as a Messiah recording finished, ‘as if she’d waited for that moment’. Sixty-seven years old at the time of the conversation and fifty-five years into listening to Bach, Suzuki resists any external vantage point on what the music has done to him: ‘I am living inside of Bach’s music, so I can never judge it from the outside… it is not thinkable to live without Bach’s music.’ Bach himself, he adds, remains genuinely mysterious even to a lifelong interpreter — unresolved puzzles like the unfinished Art of Fugue, and a rule that ‘the more you work, the more distant you can get.’ On repertoire for newcomers he suggests Cantata 140 (Wachet auf), Cantata 8 (Liebster Gott, ‘you can really use it as BGM’), and Cantata 102 for its double fugue — and on Glenn Gould’s famously idiosyncratic Bach, he is admiring rather than sceptical, hearing Gould’s articulation choices as a natural conclusion of playing Bach ‘like the harpsichord and organ’, though less convinced by Gould’s own organ recordings than his piano ones.

See also

• Masaaki Suzuki — speaker
• Tyler Cowen — host