A day at the Oxford Lieder Festival: Bach Revived

Phoenix Piano Trio performing Schumann at the Weston Library, Oxford Lieder Festival - photo Tom Herring

This year's Oxford Lieder Festival is focusing on Robert Schumann, performing his complete songs and much else besides. Threaded through the day's events on 21 October 2016, was the theme of Bach Revived looking at the Bach revival led by Mendelssohn and which had a big influence on Schumann. As part of my day at the festival (see my reviews of the daytime concerts and Juliane Banse's evening recital) I heard lectures from Robert Quinney on Mendelssohn and Schumann's use of Bachian counterpoint, Hannah French on the revival of the St Matthew Passion, and Richard Wigmore on the influence of Bach in Schumann's songs, plus a short recital from soprano Turiya Haudenhuyse, and the Phoenix Piano Trio (violinist Jonathan Stone, cellist Christian Elliot, pianist Sholto Kynoch).

Robert Quinney lecturing at New College Chapel, Oxford Lieder Festival
photo Tom Herring

Robert Quinney started things off with a fascinating lecture on how Mendelssohn and Schumann studied and were influenced by Bach's counterpoint. Quinney pointed out that, contrary to the popular narrative of Bach's music being ignored between his death and the early 19th century revival, Bach never really went away and that Mozart heard one of Bach's motets in Leipzig and Samuel Wesley was a great proponent. But Bach's music was not much appreciated, yet something changed in the early 19th century.

Mendelssohn had counterpoint lessons when young and he both played Bach's music on the organ and composed using techniques learned from Bach's music, writing two sets of preludes and fugues (Op.35 and Op.37) which use Bach as a model. And in the 1840s as music director of the cathedral in Berlin, Mendelssohn wrote a significant amount of music for the choir again inspired by Bach's models (two of which were to be included in Evensong at New College the following day).

Schumann's engagement with Bach was more private, he studied the Well-Tempered Clavier in 1830, and then in 1845 made an intense study of Bach's counterpoint and the fruits of this were the canonic studies for pedal piano, and the six fugues for organ on the name Bach. Quinney pointed out that in Schumann's songs there is a very strong authorial presence; in Dichterliebe every song is ended by the piano. And Quinney felt that it was this sense of authorial presence which Schumann appreciated in Bach's music. Bach's mature fugues involve a complicated web of interrelationships, Quinney likened them to a novel (a form that was just developing at the time), so that by the end we hear the subject differently because of the events along the way. And it is this subjectivity which we find in Schumann's fugues.