Interview, Bart Van Reyn on CPE Bach's Die Auferstehung

Completed in 1774 and depicting the Ascension and Resurrection of Christ, CPE Bach's Die Auferstehung und Himmelfahrt Jesu was a work particularly dear to its composer's heart - in the hope that it would 'bring me much honour even after my death and much profit to lovers of the art', he invested an unusual amount of time in the score and took financial responsibility for its publication by Breitkopf in 1787.

CPE Bach's aspirations regarding the piece's longevity have only been partially realised, as it's received only a handful of recordings to date - but a new account from Belgian conductor Bart Van Reyn and Il Gardellino (released earlier this year on Passacaille) should win it many new fans, capturing the score's imaginative orchestration and often near-operatic dramatic power quite marvellously. I met up with Bart in-between rehearsals in Brussels last month to discuss the work's early performance-history (including a 1788 concert in Vienna with one great composer conducting and two more in the audience), its pivotal role in the evolution of the oratorio as a genre, and how its genesis was shaped by a childhood spent 'inhaling some of the greatest music ever written'...

How did this piece come onto your radar?

I got know it a long time ago, then it appeared that it hadn’t been recorded that often and it's now thirty years since Philippe Herreweghe's recording, so I thought 'Why not?!'. The very first performance took place privately in 1774, and then in 1778 there was the public premiere at the concert-hall in Hamburg. We think Haydn and Beethoven must’ve heard it in 1788, when Mozart conducted three performances in Vienna; CPE Bach had recently died and the piece had only just been published, and it was probably a combination of those two factors which made Gottfried von Swieten get behind the piece and start promoting it. Imagine that: Mozart at the zenith of his musical life conducting, and Haydn and Beethoven in the audience!

I don't think I've come across anything from the Classical period that’s so difficult to conduct, because there are some very sharp angles: every two bars there's a completely different texture, and in that respect it's quite similar to Idomeneo. I'd say there's some pretty clear overlap there, and that same element also grows into what Haydn did in parts of Die Schöpfung.

There's also a rather wonderful anecdote about Haydn going into a bookstore in Vienna asking for a good book on music theory and rhetoric; they recommended CPE Bach's Essay on the True Art of Playing Keyboard Instruments, and he was absolutely thrilled with it. So there’s definitely a direct influence, and my feeling is that after reading that book and hearing that performance in 1788 Haydn thought 'Yeah, that’s it! Let’s take the oratorio into another space!'.

So is there a sense of CPE Bach having one eye on the past and the other on the future in this piece?

Die Auferstehung is very much a transitional work: the counterpoint is still there in the choruses (especially at the end of the piece where it's used to emphasise the greatness of the Lord), but on the other hand he'd dispensed with chorales completely. I don’t think CPE Bach can take all the credit for reforming the oratorio as a genre, because Telemann had already started doing that in Hamburg in the 1730s, and Graun of course also took it in new directions. CPE essentially surfed on those waves, but created something extraordinary in the process – I have to say that none of the Telemann oratorios give me tingles in the way that Die Auferstehung does! Maybe I’m lazy, but life’s too short to spend time dusting off this or that piece out of a sense of duty rather than excitement: so often you dig something up only to discover that it’s been neglected for a good reason!

I also think that today we've rather lost sight of the fact that a huge number of works during this period were very much conceived as one-offs - the idea that you'd compose something for a specific occasion and then just chuck it away afterwards is kind of alien to us now, but that happened on a regular basis back then. That's partly why JS Bach recycled music from some of his cantatas for the Missae Breves and the B minor Mass: he felt that his cantatas were going to evaporate unless he incorporated the material into something that might have more chance of being reperformed.

With CPE Bach, I find that the quality of the concertos and symphonies is top-notch, but his other big oratorio Die Israeliten in der Wüste is pretty mediocre. And he knew that himself, which I think is why he worked for such a long time on Die Auferstehung and really fine-tuned it – the quality is much higher than his other sacred choral works. With this oratorio he realised 'OK, this might be not as popular as Graun's Der Tod Jesu, but I hope that it has an afterlife long after I die'.

The other obvious point of comparison is of course JS Bach's Passions - do you think that CPE drew inspiration from his father's achievements here, or is there an element of him consciously trying to move away from them in terms of structure and expression?

I don't think you can really overestimate the influence of his father. CPE Bach got the genes of the best musician ever, and he was educated by him: the Bach children had to work hard at home, and there wasn’t a minute spare! He went to the Thomasschule and sang all the cantatas, all the Passions – he was one of the boys in Bach’s choir and he played in the Collegium Musicum on Fridays in Café Zimmermann.

He spent his childhood inhaling some of the greatest music ever written, and I think that’s partly why what he did with Die Auferstehung jumps far above what Telemann did in dozens of oratorios. And just like his father, who never ventured further than Lübeck, CPE didn’t like to travel – he went to Groningen and that was it! That's a stark contrast to Handel and Haydn, who zipped around all over the place: JS and CPE Bach were essentially homebodies, but somehow they still had this innate understanding of the world.

One of the major differences from his father's Passions is that he and his librettist paraphrase the narrative: there's no Evangelist. It’s not about telling the story any more, because he expects the audience to know all of that already – it’s about individual emotional reactions to it. In his Essay on the True Art of Playing Keyboard Instruments he writes that ‘The performer should be extremely moved by his own playing otherwise he can’t ever move his audience’. That's quite a different mindset from his father's, I think, and quite ahead of its time. (I say 'ahead of its time', but perhaps we have a tendency today to try and compartmentalise music-history into neat blocks of Baroque, Classical, Romanticism etc when in reality things are much more fluid...).

Anyway, he's dispensed with the Evangelist and the chorales, so what’s extra? First and foremost, the moody overture, which I think sounds highly modern. When I look at this music it’s almost what we would today describe as atonal: there's this sense of searching in the dark, and when the first chorus starts there’s a sudden moment of Aufklärung ('enlightenment') as you emerge out of the darkness into D major. (Again, you can draw parallels with what Haydn went on to do in Die Schöpfung...).

What else is new? He keeps the aria, although only one of them uses the da capo structure. And the instrumentation is slightly different: rather than using violin, oboe, or flute solos, he goes for the bassoon and trumpet – he wasn't the first person to do that, of course, but the way he treats the bassoon here is just extraordinary.

What are the highlights from the score for you?

Certainly the duet 'Vater deiner schwachen Kinder', which is beautiful but also nicely phlegmatic. The soprano aria 'Wie bang hat dich mein Lied beweint!' is also interesting, because you hear pre-echoes of Pamina, and I think there’s a direct link with Mozart having conducted it two years before he wrote Die Zauberflöte - it must have stayed around in his head. And in the last bass aria 'Ihr Tore Gottes' you really feel the fire starting...On our recording we literally put the brass in stereo for that – horns and trumpets are doubled, so I thought it would be fun to put one horn and one trumpet on each side!

They might not be so immediately appealing for the audience, but for me some of the recitatives are among the finest passages in the work: the second half opens with one that's about eight minutes long, and tells the entire passion story in a nutshell.

At the beginning of our conversation you mentioned Philippe Herreweghe's recording - did the two of you ever have any direct contact?

Herreweghe didn’t actually teach, but I witnessed so many of his rehearsals and I learned a lot from him: focusing on text, getting deep into the rhetoric of the music and then crystallising it until it's really clear. I think that the music profits from that process of degreasing everything and getting to the essence. But I’m quite a different character, I'd say: not least because I like opera a lot as well!