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Carry Me Bach
By William F. Buckley, Jr.
In conjunction with our special report on pleasure, we asked three famed writers to reflect on the pastime that gives them the greatest joy
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Do I have a passion? Yes! That—"a passion"—is exactly what I feel when I hear it. I am talking about a stretch of music. You get it at the end of the Fifth Brandenburg Concerto of Johann Sebastian Bach: the cadenza, "an extended virtuosic section for the soloist toward the end of a concerto."
It must have aroused passion in the people who first heard it, one part of Bach's courtly offering of six concertos written for Margrave Christian Ludwig of Brandenburg and lavishly presented to him in manuscript—but never mind all that, just turn on the Fifth Concerto in D Major and wait a bit, seven or eight minutes.
It bounces in happily, the harpsichord just demurely there, making its dutiful way as just one of many instruments (though there isn't any brass, just strings and woodwinds), and if you know what's coming you sit and wait breathlessly for it to happen.
It is probably the first fully written-out (rather than improvised) cadenza in the history of music and, over 275 years later, still the most exciting. The harpsichordist (or pianist) is rattling along like a good soldier when suddenly he begins to take off. Up and down the scale, the harmonies subtly changing. A flute and a violin are still there, but their role diminishes and. . . the keyboard player is on his own! Sixty-five bars of music, with gradual changes of harmony and speed—demisemiquaver, the musicologists call a note that sounds for one-thirty-secondth of a full beat—but wait! Then Bach changes the rhythm into thirds, so in the same mini-second you get not ta-da ta-da ta-da, but ta-da-da ta-da-da ta-da-da. And then, the rest of the orchestra comes back in and, in humble deference to the titanic passage just performed on the keyboard, does a routine ending, just nine measures and the movement is over. This is the beauty for which I confess nothing less than a passion.
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