Johann Sebastian Bach

German composer and organist (1685–1750), of the late Baroque; among the most influential composers in the Western tradition. Bach worked as a church musician and court Kapellmeister — most famously at Köthen and then for nearly three decades at the Thomaskirche in Leipzig — producing a vast body of sacred and instrumental music: the Passions, the cantatas, the Mass in B minor, the Well-Tempered Clavier, the organ works, and the unfinished Art of Fugue.

Bach’s reputation as a supreme contrapuntalist and as the wellspring of later Western music is here refracted through a performer’s eyes. The conductor Masaaki Suzuki, who has recorded the complete sacred cantatas with Bach Collegium Japan, treats Bach less as a museum monument than as a living theological and interpretive problem: how to render, on period instruments and to modern (and often non-Christian) audiences, music whose form and feeling are inseparable from its Lutheran faith.

In the wiki

• Masaaki Suzuki on Interpreting Bach — a first-hand interpreter’s account: the formal innovation of the St John Passion, the Köthen and Leipzig periods, Bach’s organ writing ‘surpassing’ the instruments of his own time, and the unfinished Art of Fugue. Suzuki discusses translating a devout Lutheran repertoire for Japanese audiences, the place of Calvinism and Lutheran practice in the music, and why interpretation is itself a kind of translation.

See also

• Masaaki Suzuki — the conductor who discussed interpreting him with Tyler Cowen