So it was just announced that Michael Maul’s contract to lead the Bachfest has been extended for another five years. I had an in-depth interview with him and hope to be able to post it soon.
Omnipresent at the festival, Maul is an accomplished music scholar. Energetic and outgoing, he’s anything but the shy bookworm type. Watching him react at a concert is to see music resonating in body and mind. As though he knows every note in every work by Bach. Which he probably does.
He writes the articles in some of the program brochures at the Bachfest, which ended a couple of days ago with a performance of the B Minor Mass. Another not-just-any author who turns up in the brochures is Peter Wollny, director of the Bach Archive, the world’s heartbeat of Bach scholarship. And another familiar name and face at the festival, Christoph Wolff marks his 85th birthday this year. The musicologist and Harvard professor was a primary force in shaping the Bachfest Leipzig when it emerged in its current and much enhanced form a quarter of a century ago.
So beyond playing an advisory role, it’s the scholars who shape the event. The result is anything but academic, though there’s some of that too, in the form of lectures.
Watch out, he may trip over your foot
Beginning this season, the story of Bach’s life is told by Bach himself. You sit in a room with about thirty other people facing the famous portrait of the composer on the wall. Put on the augmented reality glasses, and a harpsichord appears in the center of the room. The portrait swirls with energy, and out of it steps Bach himself.
Slightly grumpy because he’s not allowed to smoke his pipe here, he tells us about being orphaned at age ten and surreptitiously copying music his guardian older brother hadn’t permitted him to see. About walking 200 miles to Lübeck to hear the great Dietrich Buxtehude. About his first jobs, being slapped in prison, or returning from a trip to find that his beloved wife had unexpectedly died. And the rest of his remarkable life, down to the 27 last years in Leipzig, including numbing disputes with his employers, the city officials.
It’s utterly charming to hear Bach talk, interrupted by doses of snuff tobacco taken and very lively finger work at the harpsichord. The time traveler finishes his narrative with that famous statement of relative humility (a characteristic Bach was not particularly known for): Anyone can achieve what I did if he works hard enough.
The presentation was so realistic that each time the holographic Bach walked around the harpsichord, someone sitting at the end of the row pulled their foot back so he wouldn’t trip over it.
Cultural phenomena through the lens of AR are still a rarity, but I think what we saw here this year augurs things to come.
Cellar, drama, Singspiel
In 1765, a young Johann Wolfgang von Goethe moved to Leipzig to study law at the university. The world was not enriched by another lawyer though, but by Germany’s probably most accomplished man of letters.
Legend has it that a painting on the wall of a local wine cellar stirred the student’s interest in the ancient story of Faust, the man who sells his soul to the devil. That place, Auerbach’s Cellar – later immortalized in Goethe’s drama „Faust“ – celebrates its 500th anniversary this year. That’s right: a restaurant dating back to 1525. Tourists love that kind of thing.
What does that have to do with Bach? Nothing, in terms of biography. But no Bach lover would be satisfied with that: The music is so universal that Bach has something to do with everything. So this year the half-millennium of the local landmark was celebrated with excerpts from Goethe’s Faust, part one, in Auerbach’s Cellar, interspersed with Bach’s music.
Seemingly in every German’s DNA, the drama deals with nothing less than the nature of life and the universe. Bach’s music can be equally profound. But the result here was a Singspiel both serious and entertaining: about sixty minutes of spoken word interspersed with an equal amount of instrumental and vocal musical commentary following a multi-course meal.
A long round of applause for the musicians and the actors (Burghart Klaußner as Faust, Frank Arnold as Mephisto and Lea Ruckpaul as Gretchen) – and for Michael Maul, who made the excerpts from the play and the music selections.
Capacity crowds
It’s not difficult to fill Auerbach’s Cellar, but in fact most of the venues I visited in my week at the Bachfest were filled to the brink, from the 500 seats of the Gewandhaus chamber music hall to the over 1400 in the Nicolaikirche or nearly 1500 in the Thomaskirche. That also goes for the lectures and panels in the Blue Salon, with 200 seats. With about forty percent of visitors coming from abroad, the festival makes every effort to be linguistically inclusive, in publications and simultaneous translation into English.
As you might guess by now, I feel that the Bachfest is doing something right. You get the sense that they strive for something worthy of the greatest composer the world has ever known.
Exceptions and norms
A festival is supposed an extraordinary event, a time-limited escape from the everyday routine. In my radio years, I went to dozens of music festivals, getting the recordings, doing interviews, and hosting and producing about 750 DW Festival Concerts over three decades. I’ve seen every kind, big and small, each with its own organization, program philosophy and marketing strategy.
What happens though when the exception becomes the norm? Doesn’t that cancel it out, per definition?
That paradox led to a rather long pause in my music journalistic activity. But it’s no accident that I started this blog with the Bachfest.
Apart from the intake of musical nourishment, it was nice to be in an environment where time slows down, and sometimes, during the music, stops. Where despite a hectic schedule, calm prevails. Where a week spent could easily have been more.
More of the exceptional has been announced for this fall: Bach’s complete organ works played around the clock over the course of a couple of days by Thomas-organist Johannes Lang.
And at the festival in June 2026, Bach’s Top 50 cantatas performed as a hit parade, in the reverse order of popularity, as well as a large part of the Clavier-Übung and The Art of the Fugue. The exception is the norm but remains exceptional. Which is also one way to describe the music of Johann Sebastian Bach.
Be it in the first row or through the media, I’ll be listening, and watching.
