It’s important to say up front that I’m not a fan of a recording concept that takes longer to explain–and is far more tedious in its detail–than the musical performance itself. But the best-seller charts, and thus the people, have spoken loud and clear regarding this recording known as Morimur. It’s an unqualified hit; and it probably stands to win some kind of industry recognition for its originality, its effective marketing, or even for its unquestionably gorgeous performances and top-notch sound. However, the main purpose of this recording is not performance but rather the illumination of what University of Düsseldorf professor Helga Thoene believes are “coded references” in the form of chorale melodies hidden in Bach’s solo violin sonatas and partitas (only the D minor partita is included here). It would take feature-length space to explain Thoene’s theories, which she arrived at by applying principles of gematria (assigning numbers to letters of the alphabet) to the notes in Bach’s score, and taking the process further by finding patterns of numbers in Bach’s rhythmic notation; but suffice it to say that while on the surface her numbers seem to add up, the explanations for their derivation are uncomfortably speculative.
The liner notes, which travel to nearly absurd lengths to provide a rationale for the existence of secret codes in Bach, go out on too many shaky limbs to convince me that in this case–in which Thoene most profoundly argues that the famous Chaconne is actually “an epitaph in music” for Bach’s wife, Maria Barbara–Bach really was engaged in some kind of cabalistic exercise. You have to be cautious when an argument is accompanied by so many hopeful–not proven–assertions: “. . . this may be a reference to the realm of heaven”; “we may assume . . .”; “there is reason to believe”; “the two sonatas in the minor mode probably relate to Christ’s earthly existence”; “The death of Maria Barbara must have given Bach the immediate impetus to compose . . .” We are variously led from the meaning of “morimur”, the “middle line in the Trinitarian formula” that refers to death in Christ, to flimsy connections between Bach’s Baroque consciousness and the “secret nature” of the composer’s use of numerological symbolism.
Although the tricks Thoene employs to ascertain the presence not only of chorale melodies but of references to death and resurrection may be clever, or the methods of “decryption” she uses to determine other aspects of Bach’s mysterious “clandestine language” may be fascinating, who knows what another equally resolute analyst could find in the same works using similar techniques? Yes, by virtue of its major mode, the C major sonata may in fact “point to heaven”, but it just as likely could be in C major because Bach thought it was a nice key. And when you start playing around with numbers, well, you can make a lot of interesting things happen. I’m simply not convinced by such calculations as we’re offered here–that if this letter equals this number and we add these letters together, we get the sum (37) of the letters of Christ’s monogram (XP) as well as the number of notes it takes to spell out the hidden cantus firmus “Christ lag in Todesbanden” in the opening bars of the Chaconne. What, for heaven’s sake, is this supposed to be telling us?
Indeed, the question is, for all the documentary support and meticulously analyzed, vigorously argued evidence presented by Thoene and others, how does this project measure in terms of enlightening or enhancing our appreciation of Bach’s work? My conclusion, which has nothing to do with the first-rate musicians and performances on this recording, is that it fails on the most fundamental level: the crowning performance of the Chaconne (the second of two on the disc), in which the violin is accompanied by four voices singing various snippets of the supposedly “hidden” chorale melodies, may “prove” Thoene’s assertions, but as music it’s an illegitimate hodge-podge. What we’re presented is merely an exercise that makes no sense as a musical work–and because there’s no proof that Bach ever composed hidden melodies into the piece, why should we care? If you want to hear the work as Bach intended, there are many fine performances available; this one, in which Christoph Poppen’s solid rendition of the complete D minor partita on Baroque violin is broken up by the Hilliard Ensemble’s (beautifully sung) insertions of various chorales between movements remains a curiosity that owes its success to a crowd of credulous consumers and whose validity depends on who’s crunching the numbers.
