Keyboard virtuoso Mahan Esfahani has been engaging the music of J.S. Bach for years, recording the French Suites and Anna Magdalena Bach Notebooks for Hyperion Records.
“Bach and I are having a conversation,” Esfahani said of his musical studies. “Generally, he wins! And once in a while, I get a word in edgewise.”
Esfahani’s latest release on Hyperion features Book One of Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier, going through all the major and minor keys on his primary instrument, the harpsichord.
“Playing the whole thing through is really an indescribable experience,” said Esfahani.
In the conversation below (and in the audio player on this page), Esfahani goes deep on the history of Bach’s music, and just where the idea of the Well-Tempered Clavier came from.
[This interview has been edited for clarity and length.]
Nathan Cone: I think most listeners, when they hear "well-tempered," if they're not real familiar with the technical aspects of what that is, they think, oh, that has something to do with pets! But what does Well-Tempered mean, musically?
Mahan Esfahani: I'm actually really glad you brought that up, because… that's fine if it has to do with pets! [Laughs] I'm fine with that. What I find super inexcusable is that there are books that have been published in the last like, ten or fifteen years, which have said that the entire history of the piano was to come up with equal temperament, which is the only proper way of tuning instruments. And I don't mind calling him out on it, Stuart Isacoff wrote an absolutely stupid book where he argued this, and it's like there's no historic evidence! There's no musical evidence for it. And the truth is that up until the 20th century, people knew about equal temperament. Now, what do I mean by that? That means that all 12 tones, right? You've got C, C sharp, D, D, sharp, all the way through the scale. It means that they would have the equal distribution of like tensions between intervals, right? So like, the fifths would sound the same, the thirds would sound the same. Now to the lay person, this is like, well, who cares, right? Oh no, it matters very much. Because going back to the Middle Ages, and certainly back to the ancient Greeks and the Romans, intervals [and] keys were important. They had their own colors. You know, to the Greeks, certain scales, certain colors of tones were war… some were loving, some inspired good feelings, bad feelings, whatever have you. And you know, certainly in Bach’s time, there's a concern with, how can we divide the 12 tones of the scale so that they they're all equally usable? And that's a topic that would take a whole show to discuss, but each key has its own special character. And certainly in the 17th century, Bach’s predecessors, they are using terms like “diversity of keys.” They liked variety in the 17th and 18th centuries. I always say to students, in the baroque period… you know how people say “more is less?” In the baroque period, “more is more!” They like variety. They like different colors. This was a very colorful culture and so well temperament to Bach… means that they each sound well, but different and so what Bach is really doing here is that he's saying, I've written something expressive… And I think that this was music written with an ear toward maximum expressivity.
Cone: You talk about the expressiveness of it, and you referenced good feelings and bad feelings earlier. And I like how in your liner notes, you talk about how different generations think of Bach in a different way, from a mathematic Bach, to Bach’s historical importance. And then, even now today, drama in relating the keyboard music of Bach with a narrative thrust. Can you go into that a little bit?
Esfahani: Yeah. I was looking at a book that I bought last year, which was about Franz Liszt’s master classes in Weimar toward the end of the 19th century, when he was very old. And you know, when you look at the way that Liszt and his contemporaries taught, they taught according to narrative. Now, if you came to a great master like Liszt or Beethoven, Czerny, Salieri, sort of these great teachers, you know, the assumption was that you had figured out the technical side of things, right, so that you came to these great masters for interpretation and the interpretative art was taught as a narrative in this period. Now what's amazing about the Well-Tempered Clavier is that it fits into what Bach’s students have told us… to do technical and expressive work at the same time, right? So, like, when we say “exercises,” that sounds dry. No, I think exercises are this amazing, liberating thing, actually, for Bach, that we use music to develop our hands, you know, we develop our minds. We develop our musculature and like the physical apparatus of what it means to be a musician. But also that we develop our minds in terms of seeing a narrative that's off, you know, that's off the page, right? Don’t forget that in the 18th century, the technique of playing, being expressive, being a composer, probably building and tuning, the instruments are all the same discipline, right? All the builders are musicians in the 18th century. And this exists in many non-western cultures, Chinese culture, certainly in the Middle East, you know, a lot of musicians build their own instruments, and so, you know, Bach is, is posing a challenge. I think that covers that wide range of what it meant to be a musician of the 18th century. You know, compared to musicians, even an average student of Bach, someone like me, I'm only a player, they wouldn't have even considered musician, right? If I were a serious composer and I could also build an instrument, then I'd be considered musician by his standards. And so I think the Well-Tempered Clavier is a very precious document we have of a world of thinking about music that no longer really exists.
Cone: There was an element of improvisation that went into the performance and composition back at that time...
Esfahani: Certainly, and of course, when we say improvisation, let's just be clear here. You and I speaking... I mean, that's improvisation, right? We've read a certain amount of literature in our lives, and we've heard other people speak and so we are improvising. It's not like we're just throwing out random words, right? And I think we have often a sense in music, that improvisation just means no here or no there. You know, sort of free form. What we know of 17th and 18th century improvisation is that they were improvising fugues, right? That's like, unthinkable to us today. But in a culture where paper is expensive, you can improvise basically anything, and so improvisation and composition are the same discipline. Funny enough, I actually think that we are coming back to that now. If you look at living composer, someone like George Lewis in New York, don't forget, George came out of the Fluxus movement, right? He was a great improviser. It's George's great strengths as an improviser that have made him a great composer. And if people think it's far-fetched to compare Fluxus and Well-Tempered Clavier, they haven't thought hard enough because it because it's actually, it's very much part and parcel, I think of the same discipline.
Cone: I have a quick technical question about the album itself. How does one choose a harpsichord to perform these pieces? I mean, I only know piano. But with harpsichords you've got these doubles, you've got singles, etc. So how do you choose the instrument that you're going to play for this?
Esfahani: That's a great question. First of all, there is no standard harpsichord, right? There's national traditions of harpsichord building, much as there's national traditions of food or painting or anything else. And so we have a sense of what instruments were like in that part of the German-speaking
If I were to make decisions in my life based on the decisions of the kind of people who came up with Spotify, I would be a very unhappy person.Mahan Esfahani
world, at the time of Bach, certainly at the time of composition of the first book of the Well-Tempered Clavier. Now there's a side of me that says, that's very important, right? And that's the kind of instrument that I chose, is an instrument that may have been known by Bach. It's from a builder who was from Thuring, and which is the region where Bach was born. Although this is a copy of a historic instrument that I played… provocatively, I would say, in a sense, it does not matter, right? It matters in that ultimately, the instrument reflects the sort of sounds that Bach and his contemporaries would have had in mind within that area in in Germany, right?
Another part of me, however, says I don't care. The use of period instruments, for me is not for a sort of moral academic property, which I couldn't care less about. It's what could the instrument of the period tell me about what Bach was hearing, and once I know or have a sense of what Bach was hearing. How can I have a discussion with that? What I've always felt about my performances of Bach music, certainly all the recordings I've done, as you know, this is one of many recordings I've done for Hyperion of Bach music, and I'm going through all of Bach's keyboard music is it's an ultimately discursive style, right? Bach and I are having a conversation. Generally, he wins! And once in a while, I get a I get a word in edgewise. And I think that's really what we're doing. And you know, if you want to reproduce a reconstruction of what Bach may have done, which often will err on the side of, if we don't know something, then we don't say anything interpretively. That's great. And you can go listen to other recordings. But for me, it's that we have a set, we have a set of known variables, historic variables. But also, we've had all this reception history since the composition of the Well-Tempered Clavier. We've had generations of people trained on the Well-Tempered Clavier. We've had all these great pianists who played the Well-Tempered Clavier. We've had, you know, Bartok and Busoni and Richter and Feinberg and like the whole Russian school. Do I, as a harpsichordist, have to say I just completely ignore that because I play the harpsichord? No, and if there are people who think that I should do that as a harpsichordist, guess what? There's a bunch of recordings you can go listen to. Yeah, have at it.
Cone: In your liner notes, you have a bold request in there, in this day and age, to listen to the Well-Tempered Clavier as one great big piece rather than an assortment of smaller movements. But you know, the way we listen to things nowadays, in the world of Spotify and CDs for that matter, where you get tracks… everything is not that way. So are you kind of romantic in that aspect of the listening experience? Or how do you feel about going against the tide and in a world of Spotify and CD track skipping.
Esfahani: You know, if I were to make decisions in my life based on the decisions of the kind of people who came up with Spotify, I would be a very unhappy person. Having said that, I mean, you know, you'll still get something out of it, even listening to one or two tracks. I would recommend, nonetheless, listening to, like the prelude and a fugue together, right? Like so within one key. Or maybe you can listen to C major and C minor, you know? Or you could listen to A flat major and G sharp minor. Those are sort of paired, okay, that I would get. But you know, the full experience, I say to listen, listen to it as one work. Because the experience that I get sitting there for two hours and playing the whole thing through is really an indescribable experience, and it can only be understood viscerally. And I think ultimately, you know whether you and I are talking about music or we're writing about music, if it doesn't relate to the visceral experience, we're not really talking about music. We're just talking around music. And I think I'd like to spend my time talking about it.
