By Uwe Siemon–Netto
(lecture Costa Mesa, CA, Oct. 27, 2006)
Now that I am seventy, it is time for me to file my job application for the Hereafter. When I am dead I want to become an organist. There must be plenty of good teachers up there, and they will have a whole eternity to teach this cack-handed idiot the keyboard basics.
You see, it has been the one great frustration of my life that my hands are musically useless. In fact, after 50 years in journalism, I still can’t type with ten fingers. When I was briefly a member of the Thomanerchor in Leipzig in 1946, Karl Richter was one of our organ instructors. He just told me: You are hopeless. It seems every Japanese is more competent in this field than I. But that’s for later when I get to Bach’s huge success in their country.
At this point I would like to posit one theory, which I can of course not prove empirically: Johann Sebastian Bach is a divine spook. He is God’s most effective agent of influence in godless societies. When I was a child in Nazi Germany, it was Bach who sustained my family spiritually, regardless of how unfaithful to the Gospel some preachers might have been.
Of course I have had the good fortune to grow up in Leipzig, Bach’s city – and Wagner’s. The Nazis were heavily into Wagner; they never cared for Bach because his Gospel was incompatible with theirs. So to Bach oratorios, cantatas and motets in the Thomaskirche I went with my parents and grandparents from the age of five until this church – Bach’s church – was severely damaged in an air raid and the Thomanerchor, his boys’ choir was evacuated. And even then, even when we ourselves were bombed out, Bach’s music was played and sung in house concerts in my grandmother’s apartment.
Then the Russians came. Again to us Lutheran Christians, Bach’s music proved to be a bulwark against the godless Communist ideology that followed the godless Nazi ideology. At the time the persecution of Christians reached its peak in 1953 I illegally crossed the border from West Germany, where I was in boarding school, to East Germany where my mother and grandmother still lived, in order to spend Christmas with them.
On New Year’s Eve we went to the Thomaskirche for a midnight service. After the benediction, Günther Ramin, the Thomaskantor, suddenly sat down at the organ to improvise on the Bach chorale Lord Christ he is my being to whose melody Lutherans in Germany usually sing the wonderful hymn, Abide, O dearest Jesus Among Us With Thy Grace.
When Ramin got to the second part of the first stanza he suddenly let the instrument roar, sending shudders down the spine of every worshiper in this sanctuary, I am sure, because we all knew how the first verse continued:
That Satan may not harm us
Nor we to sin give place.
All of use knew the language of music then, especially the language of Bach; all of us were familiar with our hymns. Once again, as so often in the past, the Gospel according to Johann Sebastian Bach gave us strength.
The same happened again in one of the most godless moments in Leipzig just after its graceful Gothic university church containing Bach’s favorite organ was blown up on orders of the Communist party leader Walter Ulbricht. A few days after this barbaric event, the International Bach Festival was held in Leipzig’s Congress Center. Suddenly it seemed as if invisible hands unrolled from the balcony a banner before the eyes of visitors from all over the world. The banner was yellow. It showed the contours of the murdered church, the dates of its birth – 1240 – und its death: 1968, and the words, Wir fordern Wiederaufbau (We demand reconstruction).
The students responsible for this action were later jailed; a leftwing theology student from West Germany had betrayed them to the Communist regime. But their message was out and spread to all parts of East Germany. Some leaders of the Christian protest groups that in 1989 brought down the Berlin Wall and eventually the entire Soviet empire believe that this event marked the birth of their movement.
In the mid-1970s I interviewed several boys from the Thomanerchor, the choir once led by Johann Sebastian Bach. Many of those children came from atheistic homes. "Is it possible to sing Bach without faith?" I asked them. "Probably not," they replied, "but we do have faith. Bach has worked as a missionary among all of us."
In other words, the Swedish theologian and Lutheran archbishop Nathan Söderblom (1866–1931), was right when he called Bach’s music "the fifth Gospel." And this brings me in a roundabout way to the topic that will be the main focus of my presentation today.
More than 250 years after his death Bach is now playing a key role in evangelizing Japan, arguably the most godless country in the developed world today.
Let me illustrate this with the story of the way Bach’s most abstract composition, The Art of the Fugue, brought a Japanese agnostic to faith.
This was Bach’s last major work. But when he died on July 28, 1750, after two botched eye operations performed by a quack from England, The Art of the Fugue, remained incomplete. It culminates in a quadruple contrapunctus bearing his musical signature, for the contrapunctus is formed from the letters b–a–c–h (in German musical terminology b–natural is called "h").
Just as you might expect the final section of Fugue 19 to begin, the music stops eerily. The blind man no longer had the strength to pull together its various themes to a perfect ending. Instead he dictated to his son–in–law a powerful last chorale—Vor deinen Thron tret’ ich hiermit (Before thy throne I come herewith)—and then he departed.
The Art of the Fugue is perhaps Bach’s intellectually most challenging work. Yet its pristine grace led Arthur Peacocke, the English theologian and biologist, to aver that the Holy Spirit himself had written it, using Bach’s hand. Now this quality of Bach’s music provides Christianity with a curious inroad to a group of people who in the past had resisted evangelization more effectively than any other: Japan’s elite.
Masashi Masuda, from Hokkaido, Japan’s northernmost island, told me how Glenn Gould’s interpretation of Bach’s Goldberg Variations had first aroused his interest in Christianity. "There was something about that music that prompted me to probe deeper and deeper into its spiritual origins," he said. Masuda is now a Jesuit priest and a lecturer in Systematic Theology at Tokyo’s Sophia University.
Lutheran theologian Yoshikazu Tokuzen, for many years president of his country’s National Christian Council (NCC), echoed Peacocke: "Bach is a vehicle of the Holy Spirit." As evidence Tokuzen cited an astonishing statistic. Although less than 1 percent of the 127 million Japanese belong to a Christian denomination, another 8 to 10 percent sympathize with this "foreign" religion. Tokuzen explained: "Most of those sympathizers are part of the elite, and many have had their first contact with Christianity through the music of Johann Sebastian Bach."
When I was last in Japan, I had a lovely young interpreter by the name of Azusa. She always carried a CD with was a recording of Bach’s cantata Vergnügte Ruh’, beliebte Seelenlust (Contented rest, beloved soul's desire), in her handbag. This cantata’s lyrics explain that God’s real name is love. "This has taught me what these two words mean to Christians," she explained, "and I like it so much that I play this record whenever I can."
Azusa was still not a Christian convert when I last met her. But she said she recognized Christianity’s beauty as a phenomenon going far beyond cultural aesthetics. In this she typified perhaps millions of highly educated Japanese who resist taking the leap of faith—or admitting to it—although they are painfully aware of what Tokuzen calls the "spiritual void" into which their society has slipped.
Two–thirds of all Japanese profess no religion. However, of this vast majority, 70 percent deem religion important for society, according to a national survey. “Buddhism and Shintoism, Japan’s traditional faiths, have long lost their credibility," German Lutheran theologian Martin Repp told me. Repp is the deputy director of the National Christian Council’s Center for the Study of Japanese Religions in Kyoto.
"Today their roles are only ceremonial, and most of their temples are mere tourist attractions." "Churches could pick up the slack if they were not so self–absorbed, especially the mainline Protestant denominations, to which most Christians in Japan belong," Repp continued. "Most wealthy congregations are only thinking of themselves and give little money to missions; meanwhile, international mission societies are curtailing their budgets for Japan."
Kummi Tamai, a successful American–trained evangelical pastor, called most of his colleagues lazy evangelizers. He chided them for not providing a challenge to the young who, according to Repp, feel hopelessly alienated from their parents’ generation.
"In their frenetic pursuit of production, speculation, and consumption," Repp said, "the older Japanese have provided their offspring exclusively with materialistic values. But the youngsters are yearning for something more. The result is an enormous gap between the generations; they are no longer able to communicate with one another."
The ensuing spiritual crisis manifests itself in many ways. No other country in the developed world keeps as many palm readers busy. None produces as much pornography; nearly half the world’s smut is made in Japan—and openly consumed in trains and subways.
Japan has one of the world’s highest suicide rates. An average of 32,000 Japanese, chiefly young males, kill themselves every year. The rate now stands at 26 suicides per 100,000 people, more than twice as many as in the United States.
According to opinion polls, 60 percent of the population admit to being afraid every day. Most fear bringing shame on their families, teachers, or superiors by failing at work or in school. "What people need in this situation is hope in the Christian sense of the word, but hope is an alien idea here," said the renowned organist Masaaki Suzuki, founder and conductor of the Bach Collegium Japan.
He has an astonishing pilgrimage behind him. Having trained under the Dutch organist Ton Koopman, Suzuki became the driving force behind the "Bach boom" that has been sweeping Japan during for the last two decades, in other words, during a period when many Japanese had become aware of their spiritual impoverishment.
"Our language does not even have an appropriate word for hope," Suzuki told me. "We either use ibo, meaning desire, or nozomi, which describes something unattainable."
After every one of the Bach Collegium’s performances Suzuki is crowded on the podium by non–Christian members of the audience who wish to talk to him about topics that are normally taboo in Japanese society—death, for example. "And then they inevitably ask me to explain to them what ‘hope’ means to Christians."
Suzuki calls himself a missionary, using by the way precisely the same words as Georg Christoph Biller, Leipzig’s current Thomaskantor and Bach’s sixteenth successor in that position. "I am spreading Bach’s message, which is a biblical one," Suzuki said.
A member of the Reformed Church, Suzuki makes sure his musicians, mostly non–Christians, get that point. During rehearsals he teaches them Scripture. "It is impossible to say how many of my performers and listeners will ultimately become Christians," Suzuki said. He believes, however, that Bach has already converted tens of thousands of Japanese to the Christian faith.
Since he assembled his Bach Collegium 15 years ago, hundreds of other Bach choirs have popped up around that island nation. Suzuki is even responsible for introducing the German word Kantate (cantata) into the Japanese vocabulary; it is currently a highly fashionable term.
Suzuki’s concerts are always sold out. Every Good Friday more than two thousand Bach enthusiasts pay 600 and more dollars each for a ticket to his ensemble’s performance of the St. Matthew Passion. "It is very moving to watch this enormous crowd follow the Japanese translation of the German lyrics word for word," Professor Tokuzen said. "Where else in the world do you find non–Christians so engrossed in biblical texts?"
Japan’s Bach boom does, however, have one baffling aspect: how is it possible that melodies and rhythms from eighteenth–century Germany should please people of an entirely alien culture thousands of miles to the east? I certainly can’t say the same thing about traditional Japanese music. I find it interesting to listen to – but only for a while. So how come we have evidently a musical one-way street from West to East here?
Tokyo musicologists have come up with an astonishing answer: Bach’s appeal to today’s Japanese is directly linked to a Spaniard’s first attempt to evangelize their ancestors 450 years ago. In August 1549 the Spanish Jesuit Francis Xaviér (1506–1552) became the first Christian missionary to land in Japan. In the decades that followed, the Jesuit and Franciscan fathers baptized 20 percent of its population, including members of princely families.
It soon became fashionable to promenade around Nagasaki carrying rosaries. But in 1587 the shogun Hideyoshi expelled all missionaries, and a murderous persecution of all Christians followed. Believers were crucified, burned at the stake, tortured to death, or hanged upside–down over cesspools to intensify their suffering. Curiously, few Japanese are aware of this, just as they are unaware that their delight in Western music is inseparably linked to the one bright spot in this particularly sinister part of their history.
Western music managed to survive the persecution. The Jesuits had introduced Gregorian chant to Japan and built organs from bamboo pipes. They trained Japanese children so well in handling the Queen of Instruments that in the 1560s three princely Wunderkinder from Nippon were competent enough to be sent to Europe to play the organ before illustrious audiences, including in the Vatican.
By the time Christianity was totally outlawed in Japan in the early seventeenth century, elements of Gregorian chant had infiltrated Japan’s traditional folk music. That influence sensitized the Japanese to appreciate Western melodies and harmonies. And this influence remained strong enough to help Johann Sebastian Bach’s music sweep across the island nation more than four centuries later.
"What makes Bach so successful among the Japanese?" I asked Tesuo O’Hara, editor of Bach’s Collected works published by Sogakukan, a Tokyo company on the 250th anniversary of the Bach’s death in 2000.
O’Hara, described himself as one of Christianity’s sympathizers, though not a believer. He replied, "Bach gives us hope when we are afraid; he gives us courage when we despair; he comforts us when we are tired; he makes us pray when we are sad; and he makes us sing when we are full of joy."
Perhaps Bach, transcending cultural barriers, has converted more Japanese than any of us dares to imagine, which might be one reason why you see so many Japanese in Western orchestras all over the world. This could also be the reason why Japanese scholars, of all people, travel to Leipzig for what seem rather exotic research projects such as the influence of the early 18th-century Lutheran weekday lectionary in Saxony on Bach’s cantata work.
This then fits with my own observations as a child in two other, Western variations of godlessness: In times of the greatest distress, Bach is an evident messenger of ibo or nozomiI or just plain hope anywhere in the world.Which supports my contention that Bach is countercultural – a divine spook in a world that presumes to do away with God.
Recent Comments