The Patriarchs of Music: Father Bach and Papa Haydn

PROGRAM DESCRIPTION BY IDA HABBESTAD

«A dark, resounding name» , writes the artistic director about the name Abraham. Whether he actually lived, we do not know. Scholars of our time see him just as much as a literary figure, the first life story in the Bible. Abraham personifies the relationship between God and human beings; he reveals God’s demand for obedience in an utterly immense dilemma: the command to sacrifice his own son.

In our time, the image of the father is complicated. The concept of patricide is used in Western music history as a metaphor for young composers rebelling against the previous generation in order to create something new. This program, however, does not dwell on the break, but on the inheritance. For the names Johann Sebastian Bach and Joseph Haydn also resound.

Father Bach was the head of a large and musical family. He is probably the foremost mediator of Protestantism’s view on the festival’s theme. With the Brandenburg Concertos, he refined the concerto form and created small breaks with established power structures. In the Third Concerto, the strings appear three by three in groups. The solid division between soloist and ensemble is blurred. The entire second movement is missing; we are given only a small semicolon – two chords – leading into the work’s final movement. In the Sixth Concerto, the violin is removed, creating a different hierarchy and a different sound.

Papa Haydn is the father of several large-scale forms – of the symphony and the string quartet – and in his piano trios the role of the pianist is far more soloistic than before in the tradition. The violin concerto we hear nods to a link between this evening’s patriarchs: to Bach’s son Carl Philipp Emanuel, and to the Classical clarity he believed was yet to come. A reminder, perhaps, or a hope, when faced with the grand narratives of world history that can seem unchangeable, that something new may also grow in the cracks of the foundations.