Helmut Schmidt's Address for the Opening of the 1999 Leipzig Bach Festival

Ladies and Gentlemen, Dear Citizens of Leipzig:

In the days of the German Democratic Republic and Erich Honecker I visited your city three times. All three visits made a very strong impression on me and my wife. The last took place in the first week of November, in the fall of 1989. We were here in Leipzig with Manfred Stolpe only two days and the night between, yet we could sense very clearly the dangerous electricity in the air. We even had to consider the possibility that it would come to blows. A few days later the Wall fell without bloodshed, however, and we were overjoyed.

Our Leipzig visit took place just three days before the fall of the Wall, and it came to pass because the Bonn government under Chancellor Kohl, following my recommendation, had commissioned the Leipzig painter Berhard Heisig to paint a portrait of me. During this time we not only became acquainted with Mr. Heisig and his wife Gudrun Brüne but also with Kurt Masur, to whom the citizens of Leipzig owe so much. Since then all three have become our good friends.

But the most important visit took place a long time before this—in fact, more than a quarter of a century ago. It occurred in a period in which it was ticklish for a West German politician to make a trip to the GDR—more difficult, in truth, than making a trip to Moscow. But the Leipzig Fair offered me the opportunity—I was at that time Finance Minister in Bonn—to visit your city. By chance it happened that on an evening when I had nothing else scheduled there was to be a Bach cantata performance here in the St. Thomas Church. We telephoned the church office to see if we could be admitted unobtrusively. They told us to come two minutes before the start and the pastor would wait for us at the side entrance. And so it happened: the pastor led my wife and me to our seats in the choir of the church—the church was as full as it is this evening—and we were barely in our places when the music began. As we glanced somewhat furtively and inconspicuously around the church, our eyes fell on a single long-stemmed rose, which lay on the floor before us. More precisely scrutinized, the rose lay on a grave plate that was embedded in the floor—an unadorned grave plate that bore the name and dates of Johann Sebastian Bach.

At that moment I was gripped by an inner emotion and excitement that can hardly be described. This experience—of having Bach's music in my ears, and his church and his name before my eyes—made me deeply aware of all that I owed to Bach's music during the course of my life. To be on a visit to the GDR was exciting enough in itself. But now came the encounter with one of the greatest minds that our society has ever produced. Seldom have I felt more deeply what it can mean to be a part of this society. And seldom have I ever sensed more clearly the happiness that can flow from music.

Naturally as we departed from Leipzig at that time several citizens slipped us notes, including requests for relatives who sat in prison, and in fact we were eventually able to help a few with the assistance of the East Berlin Counsel Wolfgang Vogel-that is, we were able to purchase their freedom. And naturally this experience further strengthened the pleasant recollection of my very first visit to Leipzig, but most of all of the evening here in the St. Thomas Church, filled with Bach's music and his gravestone before my eyes. Mayor Tiefensee mentioned a little while ago that Bach once wrote that music is for "the restoration of the spirit." That is, in my opinion, the right way to say it. "Restoration" can probably be expressed best in modern language as "refreshment." Today Bach would probably express himself by saying that music serves to renew the soul.

But of course each of us needs instruction in order to learn how to listen to music. So it is with speech and reading, for which we also initially need instruction. In my childhood I was very fortunate, for thanks to my mother and my very music-friendly school I learned to listen to music at a relatively early age. My mother, as a young woman living in the time before World War, sang in a church choir. And thus it was completely natural that her brothers and sisters and cousins often gathered around the piano in our home to sing four-part music. And one of my uncles, who was a music teacher at a primary school, was, so to speak, the leader of this very modest family chorus. And once or twice this uncle-it must have been 1930 or 1931—played for us the Goldberg Variations. To me, a twelve- or thirteen-year old, this seemed the absolute epitome of polyphonic music. And when I listen again and again, as an eighty year-old, to Glenn Gould's interpretation of the Goldberg Variations with the help of a CD, they strike me once again as simply the absolute epitome of music.

In those early days my uncle gave me a reprint of Anna Magdalena Bach's Music Book, and I was able to play many of the pieces that it contained. Others, such as the Partita in E Minor, were much too difficult. But in the Music Book there was also an aria in G major, and that I could play. Only decades later did I comprehend that the aria from my childhood and the theme of the Goldberg Variations were one and the same.

I must confess that I always found the purity, the clarity, and the order of Baroque polyphonic music more attractive than everything Classical and Romantic. Pachelbel, Buxtehude, Telemann, Vivaldi, Purcell, and Handel—these were my composers. Above all, however, Bach. The more lucid the work, the better it struck my ear. We also sang in school, among other things naturally modern pieces, the brash songs of Brecht and Weill, but also Hindemith, for instance, who came to mind just now, as we listened to the two Bach motets. Hindemith spoke of Bach—let me quote him: ”This is, therefore, the worthiest, what we have inherited with Bach’s music: the vision of the ultimate possible perfection of mankind and the recognition of the path that leads to it, the inescapable, conscious mustering of the obligatory knowledge that in the end must emerge from the necessity of achieving this perfection.”

Paul Hindemith’s pronouncement on Bach was uttered a half century ago—more than that, in fact. And Hindemith had worked lifelong as a musician and composer, and he possessed all the credentials that one needs to speak about Bach. I, on the other hand, am only a dilettante: I am not a musician, or a music critic, or a music historian, and therefore it is with a certain degree of license that I am included in the present program as a festival speaker or linked with the festival address. Closer to the truth, I am above all a lifelong friend of music, one of those for whom Johann Sebastian’s music—namely because of that ”restoration of the soul”—has become a necessity of life.

Now one should not misunderstand those often-quoted words of Bach, for before them go other words of his, namely these: ”The purpose of all music should be none other than the praising of God.” And then it continues: ”and the restoration of the soul.” It seems to me that things probably went too far in the first direction, or at least a step too far, when Bach was called the Fifth Evangelist. It seems to me, however, that the accomplishments of the St. Thomas Cantor were fully in step with the Lutheran beliefs of his time, in an unshakable knowledge of faith. He was little affected by the Enlightenment and by Rationalism; rather, he was a man bound by faith.

”Religio” means, in German, translated literally, ”to tie back.” Bach was a man ”tied back” in faith, a man ”tied down”—that is, firmly rooted—in faith. He did not wish to be a preacher, and certainly not an evangelist. Instead, he served God through his music, and he served mankind, too, without inner doubts about the preordained order of things. And therefore he frequently placed at the close of a newly composed piece the three words ”Soli Deo Gloria,” and often—at the end of his handwritten manuscript of the St. Matthew Passion, for instance—he shortened this to four letters, S.D.Gl.—Soli Deo Gloria.

Moreover, anyone who looks at one of Bach’s music manuscripts—and there is indeed a very large number of facsimiles—sees writing that is clear, well-ordered, and uncommonly vigorous. Anyone who looks at these music manuscripts will recognize that this devout man was at the same time very well aware of his own station. He was a robust, self-confident man. He repeatedly defended his rights and his claims. He argued with the Duke in Weimar, and for that the Duke locked him up for several weeks. And of course he also contested issues with the Leipzig Town Council—it probably had to be this way once and awhile. And occasionally he took rather unauthorized vacations to hear other musicians—organists above all—in other towns, without having secured proper leave.

But then he also paid homage to this city of Leipzig in several of his so-called secular cantatas. One of them bears the title ”Erwählte Pleißenstadt”—”Chosen City on the Pleisse” (In truth, I have never seen the Pleisse, even though I have been here many times since my GDR visits; I believe you must have hidden it.)

In the course of his life Bach composed a great deal from professional obligation. Included would be, for instance, the innumerable church cantatas, more than 200 of which remain extant (although originally there were probably more than 300). He also had to compose works for his students. Many of his pieces were written as duty, not recreation. However, when a work such as the Two-Part Inventions, written for his students, is for all that spectacularly musical, then it demonstrates how seriously this man took his responsibilities.

Bach strove for the highest accomplishment, for the highest perfection in his music, whether in the Art of Fugue, whether in the Well-Tempered Clavier, or whether in the St. Matthew Passion. If indeed one of us today were to say that in reality Bach strove only for self-fulfillment, I am certain that he not only would not have understood the phrase, but also that he would not have accepted its very meaning. For Bach was one who faced the existing order with a certain humility. He did not seek to create something colossal—as did Richard Wagner or Arnold Schönberg at a later point—although it seems to me that his music was progressive and forward looking. On the one hand, he built on everything that came before. He drew inspiration and models from Poland, from England, from France (he admired Rameau), from Italy (we think of Vivaldi).

But at the same time he pointed to the future. Mozart said of him, word for word: ”Bach is the father, we are the children. If any of us is able to do something right, he learned it from him.” And Beethoven and Brahms and Wagner—each of them in his own way honored Bach with the highest praise. And I myself have heard similar things from Herbert von Karajan, or from the American Leonard Bernstein.

I believe that Bach, together with Handel, created a new standard, from which European music developed further. At the same time, one must admit that just as Handel’s Messiah or orchestral works transport us today, so, as ever, do Bach’s B-Minor Mass or his Italian Concerto or his Orchestral Suites or his Brandenburg Concertos. We today, ten generations—a quarter of a millennium—later, we still hear his music with the greatest enjoyment and with such complete understanding, that it seems to belong to our own era. And this music tolerates without injury almost every kind of arrangement, from Busoni to Leopold Stokowski, and from Jacques Loussier to the Swingle Singers. And I believe it will remain thus for a long time, so that Johann Sebastian therefore is not simply history, but also our present, and, in my opinion, he is also the future that lies before us.

At the same time he is also an important part of our Germany past. No society in the world can manage without an historical identity. And today if some Germans wish to present German history as nothing more than a chain of failures and omissions and misdeeds, then our present can be viewed with the same one-sided flagellation, and even the future of our society, too. For such an interpretation of history can become a self-fulfilling prophecy. It can beget new catastrophes, and thus the future can be lost.

It is true that German history has long shadows, but in no way is that synonymous with an ongoing darkness. There is also much light and lustre. And the respect that German music culture has earned throughout the world allows us to be somewhat proud—proud to contribute to the great cultural unity of Europe, to the musical continuum of Europe, to which Bach also belonged, to the continuum, in which Bach acted as a fulfilling and transforming agent. We can be proud that we belong to this cultural continuum of European society and have contributed to it. All in all, I believe that this pride is legitimate as long as we do not stress and claim exclusive possession of Bach, or of other great musical figures. Music is a transnational phenomenon, and Johann Sebastian is a part of the common European musical language, which extends from Palestrina to Prokofiev or Shostakovich, or from Verdi to Gustav Mahler. All this is one in the unique web and mosaic of human history.

In conclusion, dear ladies and gentlemen, one must worry—given the inundation of television and clamor in our children’s lives—that the line could lead precipitously into indifference, into numbness towards music. Life without music—that by all means could be the fate of a generation that risks being drowned in a sea of noise, or in a ”meaningless hubbub,” as Johann Sebastian Bach once put it. We need instead, I believe, to look to the preservation of our musical culture, or to express it more clearly, to look to the perpetual renewal of the musical culture of the present generation. Let us thus take care that in our homes, and in our schools, there will be singing. Not only in church, but also in church, let there be singing, and music making, so that the youth of today can learn the true joy of music.

I thank you for your attention.

Helmut Schmidt on 12 May 1999