Bach wrote the music of heaven on earth

HEATH LEES marks, to the minute, the 250th anniversary of the death of Johann Sebastian Bach.

Two hundred and fifty years ago on Friday, July 28, at 8.45 pm, Johann Sebastian Bach, schoolteacher and organist in the small German town of Leipzig, lay back on his bed, closed his almost blind eyes and departed this life in a generally peaceful fashion.

According to some, the angelic choir in heaven was already greeting him with the most beautiful music in its repertoire - all composed by Bach himself.

More than any other composer, Bach turns humans into angels and makes the world feel like heaven itself. Musicians everywhere admit that he was the greatest composer ever.

"If they don't, they are not musicians," the famous French cellist Paul Tortelier once said.

Nasa scientists used to joke that they hadn't put Bach's music into the space capsule sent out to greet other life forms because they thought it would seem like boasting.

What is it about Bach that allows him to define for so many the spirit of music itself?

Much of it is in the way he combined the most complicated musical patterns with the most moving experience. Yet behind the notes something tells you that it's more than just sound-effects at work.

The music has a mysterious sense of depth, and its networks of patterns and harmonies haunt your memory long after the last chords have faded away.

No one could mix and mingle musical shapes more cunningly than Bach, yet his consummate skill is always disguised; what you hear is only music - as affecting as it is intriguing.

Bach's sense of religious mystery is another part of his appeal. He thought of himself as a tiny part of a vast plan but he gave meaning to his life through the symbols of the Christian faith.

At the opening of the St Matthew Passion, to paint a picture in sound of Christ struggling up the hill to Golgotha, Bach wrote a melody - probably without thinking about it - that constantly stumbles two or three steps up, only to fall back one or two steps, while the bass notes keep tugging at the tune, full of pain and effort.

He even set this opening crucifixion scene in the key of E minor, which has one sharp on the musical stave. In German, "sharp" is "kreuz," the same word as for "cross," and so Bach had made his point even before the first note sounded.

Bach's greatness has also to do with the huge amount of music that he wrote, most of it for poorly paid commissions from nobles, or for the weekly round of church services that demanded cantatas, chorales and organ pieces every week.

Thankfully, Bach spent some time at court as well, so his output is not all churchlike but includes dance music, entertainment music and solo instrumental music.

Even the little teaching pieces that he scribbled down quickly as exercises have become masterworks.

A musical Midas, everything Bach touched seemed to turn to gold. Except, that is, for the church council with whom he had many battles. When he wrote the divine St Matthew Passion and performed it with extra singers and musicians, they merely scolded him for music that was "too long and operatic."

No one remembers the nitpicking church councillors nowadays but everyone knows about Bach. Indeed, the celebrations around the world this Friday will be of a size and number to beat all of classical music's anniversaries so far.

At Bach's own church of St Thomas in Leipzig, they have even built a new organ, just like the one their immortal cantor wanted for so long but never had. The performances there will be special, of course, but everywhere else around the world, performances of Bach's music are scheduled non-stop for 24 hours.

As part of the New Zealand celebrations, Concert FM has swept aside its normal programmes to broadcast only Bach's music and Bach-related programmes. Alongside classic and historic performances there'll be Bach tributes, pilgrimages, documentaries and versions of Bach through the ages from the wonderful to the wacky.

In the evening there's a direct broadcast of a Bach concert from Wellington, while the final programme before midnight is a live relay of the monumental Mass in B Minor from St Patrick's Cathedral, Melbourne.

And watch for the 4 pm interview with Rita Paczian of the Auckland Bach Cantata Society. Paczian will have just stepped off the plane from Germany, where she and dozens of other New Zealanders have been performing Bach repertoire, along with some New Zealand items, in all the places Bach knew and lived in.

It may sound like carrying coals to Newcastle but it's a genuine tribute from a country at the farthest edge of the New World, and it will have played a real part in the celebration of a human, self-effacing composer whose music has become not just global but universal.