My musical Mount Rushmore: Monteverdi, Handel, Mozart, and...

A former boss at my bookstore once asked me which four composers I would carve onto my musical Mount Rushmore. If I recall correctly, his own choices were Bach, Wagner, Mahler, and Duke Ellington. Limiting myself to Western classical music, my choices were Monteverdi, Handel, Mozart (in particular for the greatest opera ever written, Le Nozze di Figaro), and...well, I couldn't quite make up my mind between Bach and Vivaldi.

My hesitation left my boss practically speechless with disbelief. As far as he was concerned, Bach and Vivaldi were hardly in the same musical cosmos. Vivaldi wrote pleasant trifles intended to allow musicians and singers to show off their virtuosity; Bach's music was both structurally complex and emotionally profound. Only my own ignorance could possibly make me hesitate in choosing between them.

Of course, I understood my boss's point of view. Bach is the composer of the suites for solo cello, the sonatas and partitas for solo violin, the Goldberg Variations, the Well-Tempered Clavier, the Brandenburg Concertos, the Musical Offering, the Art of the Fugue, the Passions of St. Matthew and St. John, the B-minor Mass, and several hundred church cantatas such as "Ich habe genug" and "Weinen, klagen, sorgen, zagen"--to name just some of his towering masterworks.

In comparison, Vivaldi is famous for a handful of works, chief among them the concertos that make up Le quattro stagioni. He wrote something like 50 operas and oratorios, but until recently they've languished in obscurity. In sacred music, Vivaldi never wrote a single coherent mass, but rather scattered settings of various liturgical texts. And while he wrote hundreds of concertos for various instruments, his very productivity is used against him (in a way it never is with Bach and his hundreds of cantatas): Stravinsky is said to have remarked that Vivaldi didn't write 500 concertos, but rather the same concerto 500 times.

It would seem to be no contest. And in fact if my house were burning down and I only had time to grab one recording I confess that it would probably be Pablo Casals' performance of Bach's cello suites.

However, I still wasn't certain which of the two composers would make the final cut. My indecision had three sources. One was that while Vivaldi's music is some of the most purely pleasurable I know--rivalling Mozart's--I find the dichotomy between Vivaldi's lightness and Bach's profundity to be a false one. Can you listen to "Et in terra pax homnibus" from Vivaldi's Gloria, or "Cum dederit dilectis suis somnum" from his Nisi Dominus, and not be moved? Or to Bach's "Coffee Cantata" and not be amused? The second is that while Bach is universally acknowledged as a great composer, many of Vivaldi's works--his Gloria (thank you Mark Morris), or Stabat Mater, or sonatas for cello and continuo--felt more like personal discoveries. There wasn't the same weight of received opinion preventing me from experiencing the music with my own ears, mind, and heart. Finally, I occasionally find Bach's Lutheranism as expressed in his cantatas to be frankly forbidding in its rejection of the world and embrace of death. In "Ich habe genug," for example, Bach set the text "Ich freue mich auf meinen Tod; Ach, hätt' er sich schon eingefunden"--"My death delights me; if only it had already come." Somehow I find the lapsed priest who lived in a menage à trois with his favorite soprano and her sister to be more sympathetic.

These thoughts were prompted by reading James R. Gaines' Evening in the Palace of Reason: Bach Meets Frederick the Great in the Age of Enlightenment (New York: HarperCollins, 2005). It's a dual biography of Bach and Frederick the Great of Prussia, who met only once, but momentously, late in Bach's life (A Musical Offering was the result). Gaines portrays the meeting between Frederick and Bach as not only a clash of musical tastes, but as a showdown between reason and faith. To do so he has to caricature Enlightenment thinkers as having blind faith in reason, instead of supremely valuing doubt, skepticism, and empiricism. It's too bad that the book is so shallow, because it deals with a fascinating time when intellectual refugees such as Voltaire, La Mettrie (author of Man, A Machine) and the mathematician Leonhard Euler were welcomed at the Prussian court.

In addition to his superficial summaries of the intellectual currents of the time, Gaines has a prose style (honed by his onetime editorship of People magazine, no doubt) which is apparently intended to be breezy, but which is more often simply grating. On the ruling family of Prussia: "The Hohenzollerns were a funny bunch." On Frederick the Great's grandfather, Frederick I: "[He] was not Great, not even good for much, but...he seems to have been quite taken with himself, in a neurotic sort of way." On the musical differences between Bach and later musicians: "[It] was an argument about what music was to be--serious work by serious people about serious things, or light amusement for connoisseurs." To say that Gluck's or Mozart's operas are merely "light amusement" is to misunderstand them utterly.

Gaines writes of the Bach revival in the 19th century, "As a Romantic figure, Bach was in every way perfect." But in fact many Romantic figures, such as the writer E. T. A. Hoffman, looked instead to the composer of Don Giovanni as their supreme precursor. That doesn't stop Gaines from using Bach as a stick with which to beat the composers from the generation that followed him--in particular, his son C. P. E. Bach, Mozart, and Haydn. But all of those composers deeply admired Bach (even if C. P. E.'s feelings towards his difficult father were understandably mixed).

And Bach admired Vivaldi. The idea that Vivaldi's work lacks substance is refuted by Bach himself: he transcribed nine of Vivaldi's concertos for solo harpsichord or organ, and a tenth for four harpsichords with string accompaniment. Bach's English Suites draw on Vivaldi's concertos for inspiration, and several of his fugues take subjects derived from the solo parts of Vivaldi's concertos. As Michael Talbot puts it in his entry on Vivaldi in Oxford Composer Companions: J. S. Bach (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999): "A great master in his own right, Vivaldi was perhaps the only non-German to leave a strong mark on Bach as a composer."

So the final answer to the question of who will be the fourth composer on my musical Mount Rushmore is that I think I'm going to leave that spot perpetually unfilled. It will be a reminder not to let facile musical judgments prevent me from keeping my ears open.