A Sonata by Bach

We continue publishing these guiding commentaries, which are broadcast from Radio Lebanon at half past five every Wednesday evening.

I try at times to return to the kinds of music that explain the essential difference between our music, which we love, and the music of the West — in the hope that, once we grasp this difference fully, we may be able to build upon our sweet, plaintive melodies musical pieces possessing the balance and the composition, the meeting of accompanying voices, and the thought and the lofty, powerful suggestion that that music possesses; and so take the step we must inevitably take, while preserving our own character, which represents most deeply the traits of our psyche, and in which — if we can bring it out in the ideal way — our mental capacity, our spirituality, our virtues, and our beauties will be revealed, if not exactly as they are in reality, then as they can and must be.

In the past I would often choose Western pieces linked to our music by the bond of melody, such as Rimsky-Korsakov's Scheherazade and Verdi's opera Aida. Tonight, however, I have chosen a piece to which no melody or atmosphere binds us; nor does it contain a story or a description of anything. Rather it belongs to the kind of pure music in which the beauty of composition and the accompaniment of voices are displayed. It is Western music at the dawn of its renaissance, as embodied in the genius of its father and founder, Bach, whose life filled the first half of the eighteenth century, and at whose hands Western music took that step we have so long wished for our own music — thanks to the singular power of composition he was granted, not only among voices, but among the similar and contradictory artistic tendencies that set one milieu apart from another and one age apart from another, until he came near to belonging to all the ages and summing up all the styles. He is the classical romantic, the conservative innovator, the bound and liberated one. And no wonder: for to the painter's eye and the poet's mind and soul he joined a sentiment among the tenderest of human sentiments, and a sensibility as fine as sensibility can be, without any of this diminishing his balance, which knew how to master the rules and preserve continuity. The various descriptive states — laughter, clamor, and terror; or winds, waves, clouds, and thunder; or what lies deeper in nature and in the soul — have their fixed symbols with Bach, but they change in the composition, confirming that for which he was famed: that he could build the very richest pieces out of the simple folk melody.

Bach excelled in a particular way at the organ and in composing for it or for instruments resembling it; nevertheless, in observance of the rule of gradual progression in this program, we shall present for him this evening a piece for violin and piano.

In its first part the melody plays upon a single thread, or string, from beginning to end, in waves that are almost equal and parallel in length, shape, rise, and fall; and around that clear melody you hear the fall of the accompanying voices. This makes it easy for us to follow the melody, on the one hand, and helps us, on the other, to understand Bach's importance in composing around the melody and in the multiplicity of voices. And although this method that Bach follows is simple in appearance, it represents in fact the highest ranks of composition. Its second part, which is joined to the first and blended into it, does not differ in its atmosphere in any essential way from the first: in both of them we picture an elegant dandy strutting with a peacock's gait, preening; or a beauty of lovely figure swaying at a village wedding in the graceful kerchief dance, upon balanced, harmonious waves neither too short nor too long. And from another side we can feel that Bach, though he was the boldest of those who slipped free of the rigid traditions of church music, did not deprive us of the stamp of reverence and awe in his music, however varied its subjects.