Pianists call Bach’s Das Wohltemperierte Clavier their “bible”. Or should we assume that this music actually includes a coded message on salvation history Bach ardently believed in? The presentation at the National Forum of Music of an unusual project by Natalya Pasichnyk and the Calmus Ensemble may provide an answer.
Every concert featuring Bach’s preludes and fugues is a musical celebration, even if only locally. Yet the Swedish Ukrainian pianist Natalya Pasichnyk’s project Rethinking the Well-Tempered Clavier is much more. Her keyboard album released in 2024 features a vocal ensemble, who accompany the artist (rather than the other way around), singing poetic and biblical texts. These texts are drawn from Bach’s cantatas and oratorios, as well as from Protestant chorales. As Pasichnyk explains, the final form of the narrative was intended to be not just a simple Gospel story, but her personal “treatise” on the meaning of life for each of us.
The pianist was inspired by the theory of the Ukrainian musicologist of Polish descent, Bolesław Jaworski, who argued that the intricacies of each prelude and each fugue from Bach’s legendary series were based on the melodic-harmonic framework of a Lutheran chorale. The piano pieces would therefore have their own theological significance. Channelling this way of thinking and searching for these meanings, Pasiecznik arranged forty-eight fragments into eight “chapters”, covering topics such as Christmas and Pentecost. “If Bach’s faith created this music, I hope this music too can give birth to faith – a faith that we need more than ever in our times,” is how Pasiecznik explains her extraordinary undertaking.