Notes — Masaaki Suzuki on Interpreting Bach

Notes on Masaaki Suzuki in conversation with Tyler Cowen — Conversations with Tyler (https://conversationswithtyler.com/episodes/masaaki-suzuki/), 21 February 2024 (recorded 18 October 2023).

Four questions [Adler frame]

Q1 — What is it about as a whole? A working conductor and organist’s account of a lifetime spent interpreting Johann Sebastian Bach — from a childhood encounter with Karl Richter’s B Minor Mass through founding the Bach Collegium Japan and recording the complete Bach cantata cycle. Cowen moves from the specific (what was innovative in the St John’s Passion) outward to interpretive method (translation, historically informed organ restoration), biography (training in Amsterdam under Ton Koopman), religion (Calvinism conducting Lutheran music, Christianity’s fraught history in Japan), and finally to Suzuki’s working philosophy of production and memory.

Q2 — How is it argued? Almost entirely from first-hand practice rather than musicological theory. Suzuki answers nearly every question by reaching for a specific rehearsal, recording, or personal memory — the Groningen organ’s restoration history, a particular colleague’s death during a Messiah session — rather than a general claim defended abstractly. He is candid about the limits of his own expertise, repeatedly disclaiming theological or historical authority (‘I’m no theologian, I’m no historian’) even while offering a considered view.

Q3 — Is it true, in whole or part? On matters within his direct experience — the mechanics of Bach performance, his own biography, the Bach Collegium Japan’s practice — Suzuki is a credible first-hand source. His characterisation of Calvin as culturally permissive is a real interpretive position within Reformation scholarship rather than a fringe claim, though it is offered as his own reading, not a scholarly consensus. [?] His account of hidden Christianity in the Kishū region is explicitly hedged (‘I can’t tell too much about that because I don’t know exactly’) and should be read as secondhand and impressionistic. The historical claims about Bach’s Köthen years and Mendelssohn’s St Matthew Passion revival are consistent with standard Bach biography.

Q4 — What of it? A rare first-person account of historically informed performance from inside the practice — what restoring an organ, translating a cantata libretto, or choosing which version of a work to record actually involves as interpretive labour, not just technical craft. It also gives the wiki its first substantial treatment of Christianity’s history in Japan and of Calvinism as a live interpretive lens on Lutheran sacred music, alongside a transferable account of sustained, fascination-driven productivity across a fifty-five-year career.

Glossary

Turba — the crowd or ‘mass of people’ role a chorus plays in a passion setting, shouting lines attributed to the crowd at Christ’s trial; in Bach’s St John’s Passion the same choir also carries the chorale, so it holds two functions at once. [§ The St John’s Passion and what Bach changed]

Oratorio passion — a passion setting developed beyond plain liturgical Bible recitation into a dramatic musical work with distinct roles, arias, and choruses; the form Bach inherited and then, in Suzuki’s telling, decisively intensified in the St John’s Passion. [§ The St John’s Passion and what Bach changed]

General grace (Calvinist doctrine) — the idea, which Suzuki attributes to Calvin, that God’s grace extends to worldly cultural and creative activity, not only to church life — Suzuki’s basis for reconciling his Calvinism with a career devoted to Lutheran sacred music. [§ Calvinism, Lutheranism, and interpreting sacred music]

Historically informed restoration — restoring a historic instrument toward its original character rather than toward the taste of a later era; Suzuki contrasts the nineteenth century’s ‘Romanticised’ rebuilds of old organs with twentieth-century restorations, like Jürgen Ahrend’s work on the Groningen Schnitger organ, that recover earlier voicing and mechanism. [§ Organs, restoration, and the sound world of Bach]

Hidden Christianity (Kakure Kirishitan) — Japanese Christian communities that survived the seventeenth-century suppression of Christianity by fusing Christian and Buddhist practice, such as funerals that follow Buddhist ritual while priests privately murmur a disavowal; Suzuki cites the musicologist Tatsuo Minagawa’s research on communities in the Kishū area. [§ Bach in Japan — translation, audiences, and hidden Christians]

Key claims by section

The St John’s Passion and what Bach changed [§ The St John’s Passion and what Bach changed]

Passion settings before Bach derived from plain Bible-reading in the liturgy; even in Bach’s own Leipzig years, Johann Walter’s passion — effectively one sustained chord under continuous recitation — was still performed in Holy Week.
Bach’s St John’s Passion was a dramatic oratorio passion, and Suzuki believes it was ‘a really shocking experience for everyone’ on first hearing.
The choir performs two functions at once: the turba (crowd) and the chorale.
Suzuki treats the work today as sacred concert music rather than liturgy — Bach Collegium Japan performs it in concert, not church service, aiming for the best possible sound and text and leaving reception to the individual listener.

Calvinism, Lutheranism, and interpreting sacred music [§ Calvinism, Lutheranism, and interpreting sacred music]

Suzuki is Calvinist by background but has devoted his career to Lutheran sacred music; he does not see a contradiction.
He credits Calvin with affirming ‘the value of the activity and culture of this world’, against the common view that Calvin was hostile to music and culture — Calvin restricted congregational singing in church to psalms but supported cultural work (psalm publications, arrangements) outside it.
This ‘general grace’ framing lets Suzuki evaluate any worldly cultural work, Lutheran cantata included, on its own terms.
Bach’s Köthen years (a Calvinist court) closed off Lutheran church cantatas to him, which Suzuki reads as the reason Bach produced mainly instrumental and secular works there and, later, moved to Leipzig for a fuller Lutheran outlet.

From Karl Richter to Amsterdam — becoming a Baroque musician [§ From Karl Richter to Amsterdam — becoming a Baroque musician]

Suzuki’s first Bach encounter was Karl Richter’s B Minor Mass recording, aged twelve, on new stereo headphones — he was most captivated by the trumpet playing (Adolf Scherbaum), since he himself played trumpet in a brass band.
Revisiting the Richter recording as an adult, he finds it ‘not acceptable at all’ by current standards — ‘machine-like’ — though he credits it as exciting and appropriate for its own time; he applies the same historically relative judgement to a slow, romantic Mengelberg St Matthew Passion.
His route into early music ran through the organ: a Belgian priest-teacher in Osaka told him there were no good organs in Japan and steered him into composition study instead.
A lesson with harpsichordist Motoko Nabeshima (a student of Gustav Leonhardt) led to an introduction to Ton Koopman; a single Koopman concert on Suzuki’s first day in Amsterdam convinced him to relocate there.
He became a conductor almost incidentally, leading cantata performances from the harpsichord as Bach himself did, refined by blunt feedback from his brother; he now treats organ, harpsichord, and conducting as facets of one integrated musical idea.

Bach in Japan — translation, audiences, and hidden Christians [§ Bach in Japan — translation, audiences, and hidden Christians]

Suzuki does not think Japanese musicians understand Bach differently in kind, but Japan’s near-total absence of Christian background means the sacred texts require active explanation that is now taken for granted in Europe.
He personally translated twenty to thirty cantatas into Japanese, treating translation as substantive interpretive work — ‘no one in this world reads the original language’ of the biblical sources either — before handing the task to a colleague.
Bach Collegium Japan’s annual Holy Week St Matthew Passion, performed for two decades in Kobe to 5,000–6,000 attenders, vastly outstrips Japan’s small Christian population (commonly cited near one per cent, versus 40–50 per cent in Korea).
Japan had a ‘Christian century’ before 1639, including Japanese boy missionaries who reached Portugal; suppression afterward left only syncretic ‘hidden Christianity’ (e.g. in the Kishū area), which Suzuki describes cautiously and with explicit uncertainty [?].
Kobe, Suzuki’s home city, was one of the treaty ports (with Yokohama) important to Japan’s post-1868 reopening and early Christian presence.
American audiences are more outwardly excitable than Japanese ones, who are often well-informed but culturally restrained; Beethoven’s Ninth remains an outsized national event in December, with mass sing-alongs exceeding 10,000 participants.

Organs, restoration, and the sound world of Bach [§ Organs, restoration, and the sound world of Bach]

Suzuki’s favourite organ is the Schnitger instrument at the Martinikerk, Groningen, valued as much for its restoration — by Jürgen Ahrend, back toward original character — as for its original build.
Many historic organs were ‘Romanticised’ in the nineteenth century to match contemporary taste, then re-restored in the twentieth toward seventeenth/eighteenth-century character; how an organ is restored, Suzuki argues, is itself a key interpretive decision.
Bach’s own organ music was written for instruments with a specific ‘stringy’, overtone-rich character particular to Saxony and Thuringia; no single surviving organ can play his complete organ output, because his composition consistently ‘surpasses’ any given instrument.
Japanese organ students at top European conservatories have declined in number (Korean numbers have risen), partly because Japanese musicians can now build careers at home; Suzuki still regards time in Europe as close to essential for a European-repertoire musician.

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

Suzuki denies pursuing productivity deliberately: fascination with Bach’s music, not strategy, drives his output.
He rarely revisits old recordings; a second recording of a work (e.g. the St Matthew Passion, a decade after the first) is not a correction of the first but a new milestone reflecting the ensemble’s accumulated understanding.
He listens to other artists’ recordings of standard repertoire (e.g. Handel’s Messiah) sparingly, wary of overinfluence, and treats recording sessions as memory-laden lived events, recalling colleagues’ bereavements coinciding with sessions.
Sixty-seven at the time of the conversation and fifty-five years into listening to Bach, Suzuki says he cannot judge Bach’s music ‘from the outside’ because he lives inside it; he still finds Bach genuinely mysterious — unresolved puzzles like the unfinished Art of Fugue — and holds that deeper study can paradoxically increase the sense of distance.
Suggested entry points for newcomers: Cantata 140 (Wachet auf), Cantata 8 (Liebster Gott), and Cantata 102 (for its double fugue).
On Glenn Gould’s idiosyncratic Bach interpretations, Suzuki is admiring of the piano recordings (hearing them as a natural extension of harpsichord- and organ-style articulation) but less convinced by Gould’s own organ playing.