ZHU Xiao Mei, what does The Well-Tempered Clavier represent for you ?



Like any musician, I would say : a bible. But at the same time a bible which is often more admired than loved, more revered than listened to, and which finally is not very often played in concert and remains little-known to the general listener. Except the famous first prelude of the first book, of course !



And why is that, in your opinion ?



The public generally thinks that it’s an intellectual, unapproachable work. And it has to be said that commentators have often gone out of their way to present it like that. For my part, I think it’s a work that can just as well be approached differently, through its human side. It’s so rich, so profound, so lofty in its inspiration, and so full of feeling. Yes, feeling - that can never be overemphasised. The fact that it is so rigorously constructed doesn’t mean it is ‘mathematical’, as I’ve sometimes heard it said. The Well-Tempered Clavier is a work for all, intended for every kind of audience.



You call it a bible. Hans von Bülow said it was the Old Testament of music. So is The Well-Tempered Clavier a ’religious’ work ?



I don’t think Bach’s music in general can be boiled down to religion alone. It is even more universal than that. The Chinese venerate Bach, perhaps more than any other composer. Yet the very idea of religion is not familiar to them.

To say that is not to deny the intense spirituality of this music ; on the contrary. Bach never writes a note too many, he never expresses a petty feeling. He always looks upwards.



When did you first encounter The Well-Tempered Clavier ?



Like almost everyone else, I played the easiest pieces by Bach when I was a little girl. I really began to work on The Well-Tempered Clavier  at the Peking Conservatory, which I entered when I was ten. My teacher made me study a lot of preludes and fugues. I remember I used to wait until the end of the day before tackling them. I was young, and it was an unconscious reaction, but once I played this music, I couldn’t move on to anything else ! I felt so happy ! Then, as you know, Western classical music was prohibited in China from 1964 onwards. During the early years of the Cultural Revolution, I no longer played Bach.



Didn’t you miss him ?



Not at all ! Like all my friends at the Conservatory, I thought it was much better to make the revolution !



How did you come back to this music again?



I was sent for ‘re-education’ to a camp on the borders of Inner Mongolia, where I spent more than five years. It was there, in the back of beyond, that I gradually came to realise that I couldn’t live without music. I found sympathetic helpers who secretly sent me some scores. One of the very few which got through to me was the first book of The Well-Tempered Clavier. In order to share it with my companions, I copied the entire volume out in a little notebook, which incidentally I have always kept with me since then. You cannot imagine what that score meant

to me, and the care with which I wrote it out, trying all the while not to get caught. Much later I discovered that Bach himself had also spent a good deal of time copying music, his own but also other people’s ! I was very touched by that.



But you were able to play the piano in Mongolia ?



For my last years there, yes. I had managed to get my piano shipped from Peking. Western classical music was still forbidden. I played Bach while passing it off as official Chinese music.



Why Bach ?



Because it was cold !



Can you be a bit more explicit ?



I used to play in a little room in the camp that was absolutely freezing. The inside temperature rarely rose above zero. It was quite literally an ordeal to get my fingers warm. So I went back to a piece of advice that my teacher at the Peking Conservatory had given to me, which I hadn’t understood at the time. The best way to warm up your fingers, he told me, was to practice the Fugues from Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier, especially the slower ones, and try to bring out each voice in the polyphonic texture as clearly as possible. So I did as he had suggested. In particular, I played again an again the fourth and twenty-second Fugues of the first book, which are the only two Fugues in five voices in that volume. Playing these pieces obliges the hand to respect a form of immobilism and the fingers to perform feats of control, suppleness and independence. A sort of t’ai chi ch’uan, action without action ! The effect was tremendous. The more I practiced them, the better I felt. It was incredible. As if the spirit of this music were heating my hands.

At the same time, I realised the extent to which this music, more than any other, had the capacity to give me fresh heart, to make me happy. Even more, perhaps, it gave me the impression of regaining the dignity we were denied in the camp.

And it was then that I truly began to understand the power of Bach’s music. Since that time it has become my daily bread, and I have constantly tried to share with the public the joy it brings me.



Why do you regard this music as joyful, when it is so often thought of as austere and ​

intimidating ?



It’s impossible to give a complete or a very precise answer to that question. But it seems to me that its continuity is one element that may explain its effect. There are no breaks in this music. It possesses the beauty of flowing water. Of course it has its beginnings and ends of phrases, its sequences and its breathing spaces, like a great poem, but Bach’s way of composing, his incredible skill in counterpoint, result in a perpetual overlapping of lines, even at the most prominent articulations of the discourse. His music never stops ; the voices answer each other, one moves into the background, another dominates, the end is a beginning, the beginning an ending…



I have the feeling you are referring to Taoism ?



If you like. There is a force associated with continuity, quite simply the life force. This philosophy pervades the works of Lao-Tseu, the great Chinese philosopher who lies at the origin of Taoism. Lao-Tseu and Bach are geniuses who agree on so many points !

On further thought, another thing that makes this music joyful is its nobility. It draws you upwards. It is the music of Good. And to approach Good brings happiness.



What are the challenges that The Well-Tempered Clavier sets its interpreters ?



It’s a work of very great technical difficulty. The layman often thinks that the music of Liszt, for example, is very hard to play. In reality, it is written in a very pianistic manner - it falls under the fingers. That’s not the case in The Well-Tempered Clavier. The fingers must be perfectly autonomous. Left hand and right hand are treated in exactly the same way. And if you miss out just one note, the whole thing falls apart !

I also think that if you play this work on the piano, you should try to achieve the widest possible range of colours. That necessitates extremely meticulous work on the pedals. You have to develop a genuine touch with your feet ! The ideal situation would be to play the work barefoot !
The public doesn’t always realise all this. In the end, perhaps it’s the most virtuosic music of all that generates no effects, no spectacle : that is part of its greatness. Lao-Tseu, whom we mentioned earlier, said : ‘Great music produces hardly any sound.’ One might paraphrase him by saying : ‘Great virtuosity offers hardly any spectacle.’



But I imagine this technical aspect isn’t the biggest challenge posed by performance of The Well-Tempered Clavier…



No, of course not. The hardest thing to do is to ‘get the work across.’ You know, I believe one should not play for oneself, but in order to share with the audience. That is the conviction to witch my life has led me. The public helps me enormously in my understanding of the work and in my interpretative choices. When, as I play, I suddenly sense the silence and the concentration mounting in the hall, I say to myself that my goal is in sight, and that what I do may perhaps have some meaning.



So, from that point of view, what do you see as the essential prerequisites for playing The Well-Tempered Clavier ?



First of all I’d like to say what, in my view, should be avoided : one must not be mannered or, at the opposite extreme, be austere. That really is what I don’t want.

What I do want is more difficult to put into words. Although I’ve been playing Bach for decades now, I continue to seek. But, to try to answer the question, I would say that one has be able to sing and dance.

To sing means to avoid playing note by note, to maintain a breath of phrasing, to carry each phrase as you would a candle that you don’t want to go out on a windy night. Take the theme of the second fugue, in C minor. It’s a splendid melody. It must be played ‘on the breath’, as a singer would perform it : the bar-line must disappear. And of course that must be the case at each entry of the subject. I could multiply such examples.

I also think you have to be able to dance. Dance implies rhythm. And also the choice of the right tempo : you can’t dance to music whose tempo is too slow or too fast. The idea of dance brings me to that of energy. All of Bach’s music conveys a fabulous energy. An energy that has nothing in common with agitation, obviously. A vital energy.



Can you give us an example where you think the idea of dance is particularly present ?



In Fugue no. 12 in F minor. In Prelude no. 18 in G sharp minor. In that Prelude you really get the impression of a popular celebration - and, I would dare to add, a pretty boozy one, even if that gets me into trouble with some people ! Here too the examples could be multiplied.



Listening to you, one has the impression that, finally, this work is one of the most approachable in the repertoire !



That would be going a bit too far. Some pieces, were initially very problematical for me as well. I couldn’t get into them, they spoke to me less than the others, I didn’t feel the same love for them, as can sometimes happen in people’s personal lives.



Can you give us some examples ?



The seventh Prelude, in E flat major, an innocent three-part invention, very youthful, very simple, not at all the work of an old sage. It took me very long time to get to the heart of this piece, as was also the case with the thirteenth Fugue in F sharp major and the seventeenth in A flat major. So it’s only to be expected that the same is true for the public. They are also pieces which are intrinsically complex…



… such as Fugue no.14 in F sharp minor.



Yes, absolutely. It is a tipple Fugue…



Can you explain what a triple Fugue is ?



It is a Fugue which has three different subjects. At the start, the first subject enters several times, then fades from view. A second subject, then a third subject appear ; they too enter several times. After this the subject enter in various combinations until we finally hear all three together in the very last bars. Naturally it requires a great deal of concentration to hear all of this. But let’s just imagine in passing what would happen in real life if three people all spoke at the same time : the result would be dreadful cacophony. In Bach, it is the opposite : supreme harmony.



I guess you would also classify Fugue no. 22 in B flat minor among the difficult pieces.



Yes, it’s one of the most imposing Fugues in the whole of The Well-Tempered Clavier. The subject and the countersubject both appear not only in their initial form but also in imitation by contrary motion (to explain that in simple terms, it’s as if you see the musical theme in a mirror). The result is an enormous variety of combinations right up to the final stretto.



How can a newcomer to this piece get his or her bearings ?



It is a Fugue of mineral density. It’s like being confronted with a mountain. Faced with such power, such tension, you cannot remain indifferent. You can love it, or else run away. This Fugue also raises the question of the structure of the set. I have often been tempted to end with it when performing the second book. After it, it’s hard to play what follows.



Why did you begin by recording the second book of The Well-Tempered Clavier ?



For various reasons, it has always been rather overshadowed by the first book. There’s no point in establishing a hierarchy between the two books, but the way the second has been treated is quite unfair. It deserves the limelight just as much as the first.



What advice would you give a novice approaching The Well-Tempered Clavier for the first time ?



To take his or her time. We live in a world where everything moves so fast that we no longer have the time to listen, to look, to admire. Yet one needs time to discover things of beauty.
After that, one needs to be in a receptive frame of mind. If you want to see the bottom of a lake, the surface has to be smooth and calm. The smoother it is, the deeper you can see. The same is true of the mind : the calmer and more detached it is, the more deeply it can penetrate.



Finally, I would advice anyone getting to know the music to listen in small sections, in units of six Preludes and Fugues, or starting with the most accessible, which for me are the Preludes and Fugues in C major, C minor, C sharp major, D minor, F minor, and G major. (that is, nos. 1, 2, 3, 6, 12, and 15.

And I would quote a Chinese proverb : Dushu baipian, qiyi zijian.



Which means ?



(laughter) ‘when you read something a hundred times, the meaning becomes clear spontaneously.’



  Interviewer : Michel Mollard

  Translation : Charles Johnston