Without Bach, God Would be Third-Rate 4 comments

By Peggy Rosenthal

I’ve just had the rare experience of viewing Die Stille Vor Bach (The Silence Before Bach), the 2007 film by Spanish filmmaker Pere Portabella. And, alas, the experience is destined to remain rare: Portabella won’t allow VHS or DVD transfers of any of his works. So we can catch this extraordinary new film—cinematic meditative essay, really—only in the occasional art theater that will show it.

Richard Brody’s New Yorker review captures some of what makes this film extraordinary. Portabella, writes Brody, “brings Bach’s music to life with a mysterious, magnificent blend of drama, documentary, and quasi-surrealist whimsy. Beginning with a scene of a player piano rattling off the Goldberg Variations while rolling through a bright, bare loft, Portabella tickles the senses with a series of skits while a great and serious notion emerges: the construction of modern Europe on the basis of classical music.” Manohla Dargis, in The New York Times, adds the insight that the film is constructed contrapuntally, as Bach’s music was, “unfold[ing] note against note, scene against scene.”

What these reviewers in the secular press don’t mention, however, is the film’s subtext: that brilliant art made from and for faith can carry a culture through the centuries—and carry that culture back to God.

“Carrying” is a major visual metaphor in the film. We get multiple images of transport: a truck speeding down the highway, a tourist boat churning over Germany’s waterways, subway trains hurling through the dark underground. These images from contemporary life “carry” Bach’s music in various inventive ways, from the truck driver playing Bach on his harmonica to the subway car that fills before our eyes with young-adult cellists in jeans, all playing Bach in unison.

Contemporary vignettes are intercut with scenes of Bach at his job in St. Thomas Kirche or at home with his family. These scenes are coded (as Roland Barthes would have put it) as “the genius at work.” Hearing his young son run from teasing his sister to tap out the C Major Prelude from Bach’s own “Well-tempered Clavier” on the family harpsichord, Bach leaves his breakfast to sit by the boy and counsel him affectionately: “If you’re an honest person, your music will be full of beauty.” And then he demonstrates for his son what beautiful music is: how to let one’s spirit flow from the heart into one’s hands to bring the music to life.

Indeed, the film shows, often whimsically, how Bach’s music brings everything to life. A horse’s gait moves to its rhythms. It brings life even to inanimate objects: the player-piano not only plays by itself but twirls to its own music; organ pipes through which Bach’s music is pouring are shot by the camera to look like glorious architectural steeples.

Dialogue is scarce in this film. But in one contemporary scene, a bookseller says passionately to his customer, “God would be diminished without Bach. Without Bach, God would be third-rate.” The audience in my theater giggled; yes, it’s a comical comment. Yet it touches on the film’s subtext: there is something real about art carrying faith. And in another contemporary scene, the current cantor at St. Thomas in Leipzig (that is, Bach’s latest successor at the job) tells visiting musicians about his boys’ choir, whom we hear singing transcendently from “Jesu, Meine Freude.” The boys tend to come from secular families, the cantor says, “but after working with the religious texts, most ask to be baptized.”

For the film viewer who recalls that Leipzig is located in what was East Germany during the Communist era, this comment is particularly about Bach’s music redeeming the religious suppression of that period. But for Western contemporary culture in general, is there not a spiritual death that great music might spark into life?

This is the sort of question that all of The Silence Before Bach silently asks. Manohla Dargis almost senses the question when she ends her New York Times review: “Like the music it celebrates, this is a film made in glory of the world.” Almost.

And I have a final, more mundane question for readers. My quotes of lines from the film are from memory. Since I can’t check them on DVD, would anyone who has seen the film please give me the accurate quotes if I’ve mis-remembered them?